 |
The sixties were a decade of extremes. The joys of The
Beatles and the British Invasion, the hipster excess of Frank Sinatra’s Ratpack,
the birth of Marvel Comics, the Space Race, and trippy, free-loving hippies
were opposed and even overshadowed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination,
The Martin Luther King Assassination, the Viet Nam War, and dirty smelly evil hippies.
Historian Mark Kurlansky alleges that 1968 is when things took a turn for the sober
because it is the year that television started showing uncensored and
unfiltered images of the Viet Nam war and other important news from the other side
of the world, and those real-life horrors certainly colored and shaped the
events of subsequent decades.
I don’t think that the decade of the sixties was ground zero
for the birth of pop culture as we know it, but I do think it started to codify
around college campuses and having access to more forms of mass media. Books
were cheap. Comics were everywhere. Nearly everyone could read and most folks
had access to a television. Airlines were flying people from Los Angeles to New
York. Pop art was emerging. The Cult of celebrity was nascent. It was a groovy,
happening time, driven mostly by the ever-mercurial “Youth Market” and it drove
the first tentative wedge between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers.
This decade, then, was the battle ground between
generations, as the protests on college campuses later in the decade would
attest. Things changed, seemingly overnight, and the world became a darker,
more frightening place. It made the Elvis movies and the Beach Romp Teen
Comedies seem more vacuous and out of place, but there were suburbs everywhere
that these movies were playing to packed houses.
In some ways, the decade was also the last hurrah for the American
Dream; the bill of goods that Generation X would inherit bore little
resemblance to what the Greatest Generation or even the Baby Boomers had access
to. The myth of America had been exposed, but it would take a few decades more
to fully die. The horror of the 1960s is largely about exposure, metaphorically
or otherwise and commentary on our collective impressions of the status quo. We
don’t know who the monsters are anymore, and that’s because we are the
monsters.
 |
| This poster is all in pencil! Nutty! |
5. Carnival of Souls (1962)
A young woman survives a serious car crash and, presumably
to make a fresh start, moves to Salt Lake City, Utah, where she gets a job as a
church organist. Her efforts to regain some normalcy are disrupted by the
appearance of a strange, pale man she keeps seeing intruding on her daily life.
Disturbing dreams and visions leave her increasingly rattled. The pale-faced
man continues to plague her and this is putting a damper on her relationships
with the church minister, the guy in her boarding house, and the psychiatrist
trying to help her. She finds herself drawn to an abandoned resort pavilion and
runs to it, looking for answers, and boy, does she find them.
Carnival of Souls is impressionistic and surreal
ghost story that does a lot with very little. The director was a man named Herk
Harvey, who was a producer and director of educational and industrial films.
Carnival of Souls was his only feature length movie, and he made it for a
pittance. Years of no-budget filmmaking allowed Harvey to pull off some cool
technical tricks that would have ballooned the budget, and he made the most of
his three-week shooting schedule by shooting on the fly, asking permission from
local shops and places and filming quickly so as not to disrupt their business.
In this regard, Carnival of Souls doesn’t look like it was made for $33,000,
though it’s hard to put a finger on what it does look like.
One of the most unsettling things about the movie is the
musical score that was written for the organ. The part of Mary is played by
Candace Hilligoss, a classically trained actress who manages to hold attention
throughout the movie. She plays a woman trying to return to normal, only to
find she has crossed a threshold and can’t go back. Some of the shots are
brilliantly executed, and others have that flat, shallow artifice that you see
in, oh, say, industrial and educational films. The ghoul(s) in the movie are
inexpertly made-up, but sufficiently creepy. The whole movie feels like an
extended Twilight Zone episode, and some folks consider it an example of
late Expressionism. I don’t think we need to go that far, but Carnival of
Souls takes the standard ghost story and tells it in a really interesting and
creepy way.
 |
| Brilliant use of limited color here. |
4. The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Vincent Price is a man on a mission. Every day, he begins by
making wooden stakes. Then he gathers supplies and broadcasts on his radio…and
then he waits. They come at night, these
vampires, or maybe they are ghouls, but he just calls them mutants. They come
for him, and he fights back all through the night and then starts over again
the next day. It’s a lonely existence, made better by the appearance of a woman
who does not seem to be infected like the others. Despite his suspicions, he
brings her back to his home, and the true nature of the world is revealed to
the Last Man on Earth.
Price is great as Dr. Robert Morgan, one of the scientists
who was working on the plague before it took over the world, killing his wife
and daughter, who then later came back and attacked him as the undead. He had
to kill them all over again, and he’s been a little nuts ever since. Price is
mostly alone, talking to himself, and he’s acting the hell out of it, so the
movie is highly entertaining. But Ruth, played by Italian actress Franca
Bettoia, is the one who sends him down the rabbit hole and her double-cross is
what triggers the last act, and frenzied chase sequence with more than one “What
the Hell…?” surprise.
This is the best adaptation of the quintessential 1960s
horror novel I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson. That’s not quite damning
with faint praise, but of the three movies to attempt to make a movie out of
the book, this one comes the closest by comparison. That Dr. Morgan is an
unreliable narrator is one of the more interesting twists in the novel, and one
that the filmmakers of all three movies have yet to get right. But in the end, the
status quo has been restored, and its implications are well-executed.
 |
| Some of the all-time best movie posters were made in the 1960s. Stunning. |
3. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are “Baby Jane” and Blanche
Hudson, two elderly sisters with fading careers in show business. The younger
sister, Baby Jane, was a Vaudville star in the mold of Shirley Temple. The older
sister, Blanche, was initially pushed aside as a child to make room for her
famous sister, but found success as an actress as an adult, when,
coincidentally, Baby Jane’s act had fallen out of favor. When a car crash
leaves Blanche paralyzed, it falls to Baby Jane to take care of her, and that’s
when things go off the rails. Betrayal, mental torture, and murder are all part
of Baby Jane’s plan to restart her career, but all Blanche wants to do is
survive. Events pile up and drive the sisters to the brink of psychosis (and
over) and the ending is both perfectly ambiguous and eerily satisfying to
watch.
It’s impossible to watch this movie and separate the
actresses from their charaters. It can’t be done, especially if you know
anything at all about the Davis and Crawford’s legendary feud that ran the length
of both of their careers. These women hated one another, and they do their
level best to out-act each other in this movie. It drives the performances,
sure, and at times they venture into the realm of melodrama, if not outright
camp. But fortunately, the situation of the characters, especially Blanche,
generates a lot of sympathy and all of her efforts to escape Baby Jane’s
clutches are suspenseful and frustrating.
It’s not unfair to point to some of the crime stories of
Frederic Brown and Jim Thompson as part of the inspiration for the story; the
film was an adaptation of the book by crime writer Henry Farrell. The ending in
particular brings to mind the ambiguity of some of Thompson’s or Cornell Woolrich’s
more crazed offerings. But the real enemy here is fame and fortune; Baby Jane
needs it to feel alive and young again, and she will do anything, and I mean
anything, to get it. Equal parts demented character study and psychological
horror, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is an unhinged indictment of
celebrity and its ravages.
 |
| All of the AIP Poe movies had great painted posters. |
2. The Haunted Palace (1963)
In Arkham, Massachusetts, a 17th century warlock named
Joseph Curwen is burned alive on his own front lawn, but not before cursing the
whole town and vowing to return and make them all pay for what they’ve done.
Now it’s more than a hundred years later, and Charles Dexter Ward and his wife
have inherited the old Curwen place and want to fix it up, and they are baffled
by the chilly reception they get from the town when they arrive in Arkham. Many
of the townsfolk also have a strange look about them, a kind of fishy
deformity. The local doctor explains to Charles and his wife, Anne, all about
Curwen and the curse, which the townies blame for all of the birth defects. It’s
all poppycock, of course, but Charles is suddenly less and less himself, mostly
after staring at the large portrait of Curwen in the house. Curwen finally does
take over and makes plans to bring his beloved Hester back to life in the same
way. The villagers get wind of all the warlock-related activity in town and
storm the place, destroying the painting of Curwen and presumably freeing
Charles from the warlock’s influence. Or do they?
Roger Corman was on a creative tear in the early sixties,
producing and directing his best work for American International Pictures. He’d
just finished The Raven, starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, in addition to
Price, who was the marquee draw for these movies. It, too, bore only a passing
resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, so why not take a chance on another adaptation
featuring sorcerers and warlocks? The low budget effects in this movie are
well-done, and manage to make the production seem more grandiose in scale as a
result. Debra Paget plays Anne Ward in her final film roll, and Lon Chaney, Jr.
has a brief but memorable part, as well. Considering the schlock Corman is known
for in his later career, the horror movies from this period are inarguably his
best work.
The Haunted Palace is an oft-overlooked and hard-to-find
cult classic that tries to match up with the Edgar Allan Poe series of films that
Corman directed for AIP. The only real problem is, this ain’t Poe, and never
was. The title of the movie is taken from 8 lines of poetry that they tacked
onto the beginning of the movie. Everything else is liberally adapted from H.P.
Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” made less cosmic and more
demonic, but otherwise was the first and one of the best efforts of adapting
Lovecraft in the 20th century to film. It’s certainly one of the best Corman-directed
Price movies, played straight, and genuinely creepy and weird. Poe fans might
feel cheated, but Lovecraft fans will love it for all that it manages to get
right..
 |
| I had a reproduction of this poster hanging in my room throughout my teenage years. It's a wonder any girl chose to date me. |
1. Psycho (1960)
Marion Crane, a secretary for a real estate company, makes
an impulsive and dangerous decision to make off with a bag of the company’s
money. She white-knuckle drives out of town, intending to meet her fiancée and
marry him and run away together with him to start a new life, presumably as
criminals. Along the way we see her making a ton of rookie mistakes, and we
cringe at all of them. Finally, she pulls into a roadside motel for the night
and rents a room, where she meets Norman Bates, played with sympathy by Anthony
Perkins. After an awkward conversation, we see that Norman is more creepy that
even we thought, but that’s nothing compared to Norman’s mom, who lives in the
big old house behind the motel. Mom doesn’t like the women driving alone, see,
and she decides to do something about it. Something permanent.
Psycho is a masterpiece, if ever there was one. It
might be Hitchcock’s best film. Who doesn’t know about this movie, thanks to
nearly sixty years of popular culture riffing on it? It’s hard to discuss the
movie because if someone hasn’t seen it, you don’t want to give anything away. Psycho
is a master class in plot twists and surprising turns and it’s best to walk
into it cold. Only, I don’t know if that’s possible anymore; the shower scene
is a part of cinematic history, one of the most-references scenes ever. But all
of the trailers and print ads were adamant about not ruining the movie for
anyone who hadn’t seen it. Even Hitchcock’s six-and-a-half-minute preview tour was more
about teasing the audience than spilling the beans. Brilliantly so, I think.
The film was based on the book by Robert Bloch, who based
his story on the serial killer Ed Gein (who also inspired Leatherface in The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, among others). The ending of the film is particularly
effective and blood-curdling. It’s unfortunate that succeeding directors and producers
tried to make a “franchise” out of the movies, and a little sad that Perkins,
who had some personal troubles for many years, felt like he had to be a part of
the sequels. They are not good. Thankfully, the original stands head and
shoulder above the others and they do not pull Psycho down to their
level. If you haven’t seen it, this is one of those can’t-miss films that
belong on everyone’s list of Great Movies That I Have Seen.
