Post-World War II, American tried desperately to return to
normal. The problem was, 1940 was ten years ago, before the atomic bomb, secret
Communists teenagers running amok, and science greatly overstepping its bounds.
The artifice of the 1950s can be seen in popular culture, at every level from
newspapers and magazines on up to radio and television. The military-industrial
complex seamlessly transitioned from ammunition to space-age toasters, and
thanks to the G.I. Bill, everyone could afford a house and get cracking on the
business of having a job, having kids, hosting cook outs, and living that
American Dream.
It was all weapons grade baloney, of course. In the midst of
all this prosperity, the threat of encroaching Communism was portrayed as very
real and something to fear. This was the time of the Hollywood Blacklists, the start
of the Cold War, and real-life Cat and Mouse games with Russian spies.
And let’s not forget the emergence of youth culture, too:
rock and roll became big business, thanks to Elvis Presley kicking the door
down for everyone that followed. Teenagers suddenly mattered, and that was
terrifying to the establishment. Why, they’d only recently gotten control of
juvenile delinquency by publicly “encouraging” (by way of televised Senate
Sub-Committee hearings) the comic book companies to self-regulate, thus putting
an end to crime and horror comics, presumably forever.
It’s no wonder that pop culture pushed back. The fifties saw
the rise of counter-culture, the codification of what would become known as Film
Noir, and the popularity of darkly pessimistic novel writing, in particular
hard-boiled crime novels from authors such as Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich,
and James M. Cain.
I don’t think anyone was really buying what America was
selling, but the mindset was one of wanting to conform, to belong, to fit in, even
if you don’t feel like you do. Horror movies moved from the gothic into the
modern age, and made scientists and generals the patsies and the fools who
usually exacerbated, if not outright caused, the monsters to roam free.
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| The original movie poster for Dementia. |
5. Dementia (1955)
A young woman wakes up in a seedy motel room, afraid and
disoriented after a nightmare. She explores the room as if she’s never seen it
before, and then ventures out into the streets of Los Angeles at night, and enters
a seedy underworld of pimps, prostitutes and nightclubs. There is no dialogue;
only eerie music and ambient sound effects, which gives the movie a
phantasmagorical feel. Dreams or memories keep intruding on her journey, along
with assaults, police chases, brutal beatings and murder. Is she the psychotic
killer the newspapers are talking about? Or is she suffering from…Dementia?
One of the most unsettling movies of this or any other
decade, Dementia is a Film Noir fever dream that comes by its cult
reputation earnestly. Shot in black and white on a shoestring budget and
written, produced and directed by John Parker, Dementia is a study in
excess; sweat, paranoia, sexual energy, you name it. The original music score gets
into your head, and the lack of dialogue and the non sequitur scenes all mimic
the sensation of an unsettling nightmare. When it was first released, no one
quite knew what to do with it; they thought it was too experimental, too
avant-guard, so they wrote some voice-over narration to help explain the imagery,
delivered in the movie by (no shit) Ed McMahon. That version of the film was
released as Daughter of Horror.
This movie is a complete and total rejection of the normalcy
of the 1950s; a perverted underworld that no “decent” or “respectable” type
would want to know. Dementia is a peek behind that sideshow tent flap
through the eyes and impressions of our heroine, “the gamin,” which is a
strange word for a naughty street urchin, played by Adrienne Barrett. Her
reactions to what going on around her are mercurial; one minute, she’s afraid
for her life, and the next, she’s laughing cruelly at a beating. She seems
completely disgusted by what’s going on around her, and also tacitly accepting
of it. the men don’t stare so much as they leer, the masculine energy in the
film is an angry, callus bombardment that pushes the young woman along, and
when she finally reacts to it, it’s violent and terrible. There’s a lot of
subtext to unpack, and watching Dementia, it’s fun to speculate what
other auteurs (Polanski? Scorsese? Lynch? Russ Meyer?) watched Dementia
or Daughter of Horror and thought, “Oh, hell, I can do that.”
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| I love this style of poster, which was prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. |
4. The Fly (1958)
It’s a case of murder most strange; André Delambre, a
respected scientist and loving family man, is seemingly murdered by his wife,
who crushed his head and his arm in a mechanical press and now seems touched in
the head. Her brother-in-law, played by Vincent Price, and a police inspector
(not a detective; they are in Canada), try to get to the bottom of the baffling
crime, and she eventually unpacks it for them. Her husband made scientific
history by successfully inventing teleportation technology—excuse me, make
that, “a disintegrator-integrator.” It worked, naturally, but when he tried it
on himself, a common house fly snuck into the cabinet and when he popped out on
the other side, he had the head and left arm of the fly, and the fly had his
head and left arm. What happens next is the kind of dodgy science fiction that
could only come from the 1950s, but what makes The Fly more effective
than other mad-science films of this type is the family tragedy involving the
wife and their young son. It personalizes the struggle in a way that a giant
tarantula in the desert never could.
Based on the short story of the same name by George
Langelaan and starring Vincent Price, this is a classic of the “Science Runs
Amok” genre that was so popular in this decade. The screenplay was (get this)
written by James (Shogun) Clavell, and was successful enough to hatch two
sequels and a remake by David Cronenberg in the 1980s (which also spawned a
sequel). That’s a lot of film hours to squeeze out of a single short story. Price
is memorable in the movie because he’s in the framing sequence, and he even
gets the last word in a kind of modified Greek Chorus, providing the audience
with the final thought, but the whole cast is very strong and they make the
most of the material.
Other the years, the sillier sequels have become conflated
with the original film, and the fly head, a dark and menacing special effect in
the first movie, became larger and sillier in subsequent films. The original
film, however, is creepy and effective and 98% less grotesque than Cronenberg’s
late 1980s sequel. Cronenberg chose to focus on the transformation itself, because
that’s his schtick, but character actor Al Hedison and Patricia Owens focus on
their marriage and Andre’s rapidly dwindling humanity. The special effects give
out at the end, but as an audience member, you get what they were trying to do
and forgive them their transgressions.
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| Another classic poster, complete with monster and cheesecake. |
3. The Fiend Without a Face (1958)
An American air force base, stationed in the Canadian
wilderness, is trying to augment its radar-tracking capabilities using nuclear
power. When one of the locals disappears in the woods, the townsfolk are convinced
that the nuclear power plant is leaking. After all, why else would the cows refuse
to eat? When his body is found, the authorities take one look at the missing
brain and spinal column and declare, “mental vampires.” It’s the only
description that fits, after all. Sure. The locals, though, aren’t having any,
and with tensions ratcheting up, an Air Force Major, with all the tact of Michael
Scott is assigned to the case, and he immediately pivots to the elderly
scientist, professor Walgate, who retired to the village several years ago
after working on a bunch of psychokinetic experiments that led to his nervous collapse.
Major Jeff finds time to flirt with Walgate’s pretty assistant as the body
count piles up and Jeff is nearly killed getting sealed in a tomb. But when the
invisible monsters are finally revealed, all hell breaks loose and everyone has
to band together to survive the night.
That’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? Especially for a movie of
this size and budget but Fiend Without a Face manages to overcome its
limitations by sheer force of will and be effectively creepy in the process. The
screenplay was based on a short story by Amelia Reynolds Long called “The
Thought Monster” that ran in Weird Tales magazine in 1930. The film was
made in Great Britain but set in Canada so they could release it in both the US
and the UK. The producers used up every bit of their budget and threw as much
as they could into the film, and the results are impressive. The sounds of the
invisible fiends attacking are nerve-wracking and the frenzied performances of
the actors really sell the gag when they are invisible. But when the radiation
is cranked up any they become visible, these brain and spine monsters become
stop-motion nightmares and gonzo practical effects. The finished special effects
were deemed so gory that the British censors were outraged and slapped an X
rating on the film. If that doesn’t make you want to see it, I don’t know what
will.
Fiend Without a Face takes equal potshots at the small-town
population and the arrogant military, and throws science under the bus for good
measure. No one has pure motives, except maybe Jeff, the Major that’s doing the
investigation, and those give out as soon as he meets the pretty lab assistant,
Barbara. Thankfully, he keeps the bigger picture in mind when chasing after the
mystery, or the movie might have been called Jeff and Barbara Leave Just When
the Action Heats Up. As it stands, the insanity of the last fifteen minutes
of the movie is a gonzo cinema payoff that must be seen to be appreciated.
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| I think I like the American title better. |
2. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
The first manned rocket into space crashes in a field in the
English countryside. The only living crew member stumbles out of the wreak and
gasps, “help me,” before passing out. He’s brought in for medical treatment,
but no one knows what’s wrong with him. The scientist behind the rocket, Dr. Bernard
Quatermass, observes the mutations taking place within the astronaut and is
eager to solve the mystery so as not to panic the general population. However,
the mutated astronaut breaks free and roams the countryside, absorbing
nutrients (by killing people, of course) and getting more and more monstrous with
each victim. He eventually makes his way to the zoo, where he’s able to gorge
himself fully. Quatermass and his assistant Marsh race to intercept before the
mutant multiplies and destroys civilization as we know it.
A classic of science fiction with an emphasis on atmosphere
and suspense and a liberal sprinkling of cosmic horror. Not as well known as The
Curse of Frankenstein (1957) or The Horror of Dracula (1958), the
Quatermass Xperiment is nevertheless the first horror film from hammer Studios.
While it doesn’t share the thematic elements of the later horror movies, it was
very effective in scaring British (and later, American) audiences with a
downbeat script and a clipped, police procedural-style narrative. The
deliberately misspelled word “experiment” was a lean in to the X-rating the
censors gave the film, which was a heavily and loosely based adaptation of the
television serial of the same name. Science Fiction in Great Britain was
considered kiddie fare, but this movie is definitely not for kids. Well, not
for normal kids.
Quatermass the scientist is brusque, ill-tempered, and
anxious all throughout the movie and as the scientist responsible for the whole
mess, he’s less concerned about contrition and more preoccupied with
containment and clean-up. At the end of the movie, he makes it clear that no
hiccup like an alien space bug is going to keep him from his work. Quatermass
isn’t quite an anti-hero, but he’s easily one of the most irritating assholes
to bear the mantle of scientist in the 1950s. The film was cut for American
audiences and released in a shorter, less satisfying version as The Creeping
Unknown.
Much has been made about the cosmic horror elements in the
movie, and with good reason; the astronaut Carroon mutates into a blog-like
tentacled thing that leaves a slime trail, and the urgency in tracking it down
comes from the idea that it plans to release spores that will infect the rest
of the population and turn them into blobs as well. These sequences work, I
suspect, because the exposition is drier than day-old toast, and also very British,
if you know what I mean, and I think you do. I think it’s the contrast between
the men of science and the monster from the void of space that keeps you
engaged. The zoo sequence is a stand-out scene, raising the tension with effective
camera work and editing. The Quatermass Xperiment is of the best
examples of this type of movie.
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| This poster was for the re-release. The original poster had no artwork; just the title. Cool, but also kinda boring. |
1. The Thing From Another World (1951)
You know the story by now, surely: a group of scientists and
military men discover a thing buried in the Antarctic ice and they blast it
free. It’s a UFO, and there’s something embedded in a block of ice. Naturally
they bring this back to the base, and accidentally thaw the creature out. First
the dogs, and later the people start turning up dead, and the manhunt is on,
with the military men, led by Captain Hendry, trying to destroy it and the scientist,
Dr. Carrington, trying to save it for posterity.
The Thing From Another World is one of the all-time
great movies about paranoia based on a short story about paranoia, and remade
into a modern horror classic about paranoia. John W. Campbell wrote the story, “Who
Goes There?” which was published in August 1938 in Astounding Science
Fiction. Weirdly, a controversy has been fomented about who directed the
film; the credited director, Christian Nyby, or the producer, Howard Hawks.
Anyone who’s ever seen a Howard Hawks movie can answer this with certainty;
either Hawks directed the film and put Nyby’s name on the credits so he would
qualify for admission into the Director’s Guild (the reigning theory), or Nyby
decided to imitate every single aspect of Hawks’ directing style right up to
and including the rapid-fire overlapping dialogue as a gesture of respect to
the man. Yeah, I’m sticking with door number one, personally.
Nick Schanger reviewed the film in 2003 and made this incisive
observation:
An early remark by one military official concerning the burgeoning Soviet presence in the North Pole reinforces the Thing’s allegorical status as communist “other” (one can deduce that Hendry fears the creature not only because it’s emotionless and sexless, but also godless). The conflict between Hendry and Carrington is one between Force and Reason, and represents a debate over whether America should cope with its Soviet adversaries through military confrontation or intellectual and diplomatic study.Granted, the themes in this version of the story aren’t as pointed as John Carpenter’s legendary remake of the movie in 1982, but Schanger’s analysis does hold up. The monster in the story was modified heavily for the movie (played by James Arness) from an outer space doppleganger into a blood-drinking vegetable, and as such, was wisely withheld until the last possible moment.. Only when it’s clear that the being will take over the Earth do they band together to try and stop it. The tag line and the end of the film makes it clear: “Keep watching the skies!” For UFOs. Or Soviet spy planes. You know, whichever.
