THE UNINVITED (1944) - UK special edition DVD

THE UNINVITED

(1944, USA)

Slick mainstream chiller with a light touch but serious ghosts

The Uninvited is an early example of a movie where haunting is taken seriously and investigated as a phenomenon, setting up many of the key traits of every ghost hunt ever since. The haunting is linked to location, its arrival heralded with a temperature drop and even a scent, it scares animals and possesses the living...

So many silent 'haunted house' movies of the 1920s reveal their spooks as human mischief in the last reel. Decades before before the tradition of Scooby-Doo, last-minute unveilings of wires, mirrors and masks, filmmakers portrayed spiritualists and ghosthunters as frauds and/or for laughs. There were many real-life mediums and spiritualists in work after the massive, incomprehensible losses of life during the first World War, but I'm guessing that as the decade wore on, scepticism replaced the belief that the afterlife was contactable.

Monsters, rather than ghosts, were more popular as supernatural beings at the start of the 1930s. But after the second World War began in 1939, it's no coincidence that ghost movies returned and, this time around, audiences were ready to believe. Again, a yearning that it was possible to contact loved ones who'd passed, and that death wasn't the end, especially for those who'd died young.

I'm thinking of the wartime British ghost stories that are more drama than horror, such as Thunder Rock (1942) and The Halfway House (1944). Then Dead of Night (1945) went for the throat with a clutch of stories so chilling that they still unsettle us today. In those films, the ghosts don't turn out to be faked, but neither are they particularly ethereal. They appear to be physical beings.

Similarly, in the US, there were ghosts in films before The Uninvited, like Topper and Topper Returns. But those ghosts are primarily a comedy device, also portrayed as very physical and non-transparent people. Added to this, the central character is unafraid of the phantoms. These comedies still have their eerie moments (like the murder in Topper Returns). See also Blithe Spirit (1945), the Noel Coward comedy where Rex Harrison is again plagued by his first wife, inadvertently called back during a seance.

Watching The Uninvited again after a long break, I was very taken by its modern approach to portraying ghosts as a series of phenomena, with characters who waste little time in taking it seriously, while being aware of the danger. Of course, this may not be a case of a film being ahead of its time, but rather one that is hugely influential. Guillermo Del Toro even rates it as one of his favourite fright movies.

It's also interesting to see that The Uninvited is very much an 'A' list picture, pitched as a follow-up to Rebecca (1940)! That is, a dark drama with a young woman trapped by the lure of an old house. It even strongly hints that one character is a lesbian, even less subtly than Hitchcock outed Mrs Danvers. For 1944, the backstory is remarkably rich with stuff that couldn't be shown in those censored times.

Oh yes, the story. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey play a brother and sister who stumble upon a solitary, clifftop house on the Cornish coast of England. Falling in love with it, they buy up and move in, only to discover a series of mysteries. Their pet dog refuses to go upstairs, there's a damp inexplicably cold studio up there and... noises in the night.

Once they realise that the sobbing in the night has no earthly cause, they soberly adjust to the idea that it can only be a ghost. They logically analyse the clues and psychological effects of the house to discover who it might have been. Meanwhile, Ray is getting involved with the young woman (Gail Russell) who grew up in the old house, though her father (Donald Crisp) forbids her to return to it...

Throughout it, I was thinking of Poltergeist, the long winding staircase leading up to trouble, the billowing ghost, and elements of the story, like the young woman caught in a tug of war between this world and the next... Maybe an unfair comparison to tease you with, because The Uninvited is more like a Thin Man mystery, with ghosts instead of criminals. It's not a bonanza of visual effects, but there are more on display than in, say, The Haunting or The Innocents.


Mistakenly, I started off convinced that this was actually a British film. The attention to detail and authentic accents puts the rest of Hollywood history to shame in its depiction of a small village in England. An RAC logo, signs for British beers in the pub windows, country lanes... all very convincing, but made in L.A.!

The cast are likeable, believable, though still playing it all with a dose of comedy and romance for a mainstream audience. Impressively, Ray Milland scored best actor Oscar with his portrayal of an alcoholic hitting rock-bottom, the following year with The Lost Weekend. Here's an actor on the top of his game.

Lovely to see Alan Napier getting a decent role, decades before achieving immortality as (Adam West) Batman's butler on TV.

I first knew of it as one of William K Everson's Classics of the Horror Film, who devoted a chapter to it with Dead of Night. It's about time it hit DVD in the UK. Exposure Cinema's region 2 release includes radio re-enactmants, an original trailer and a thick booklet filled with glossy reproductions of poster art, lobby cards, and essays on the film and its stars.

Moviemail have it on sale, with an informative page and some original publicity photos.

ONE MILLION B.C. (1940) - the original Tumak and Luana

ONE MILLION B.C.

(1940, USA, MAN AND HIS MATE)

Trend-setting rarity not on DVD, later remade by Hammer Films

I've always enjoyed dinosaur movies, but ones with good dinosaur effects are hard to find. This mixes great special effects with rubbish ones. It also set a blueprint for caveman movies for decades to come. The script was closely remade by Hammer Films in 1966, the format repeated by When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

 King Kong (1933) and The Lost World (1925) mixed humans and dinosaurs by having the animals survive for millions of years. This story reverses the format by pushing humans back into the same timeframe as dinosaurs, a huge historical inaccuracy that the film makers ignored, mixing in mammoths and other large mammals as well.

Until Jurassic Park, the most convincing dinosaurs had always been realised with stop-motion animation. But One Million BC ignores this approach, making it a weak link between King Kong (1933) and the remake One Million Years BC (1966) which had special effects by animation giants Willis O'Brien and his protegee Ray Harryhausen respectively. The special effects are still strong enough to make it worth seeing. The modelwork for the earthquakes and erupting volcano are exceptional. Some ingenious composite work also provides some shocks.

'Paste-up' composite publicity photo of a giant iguana somehow walking on two legs

The 'dinosaurs' are depicted with every visual effect that has never ever realistically worked. One Million BC has a crocodile with a dimetrodon sail fin stuck on its back, and a pig dressed up as a triceratops! Oh, and a pangolin with some rubber horns on its head - little more than a visit to a pets' fancy dress store. This looks silly, but the technique endured into the 1960s. Irwin Allen used dress-up animals extensively for his 1960 remake of The Lost World. Harryhausen even used one at the start of One Million Years BC. Visual effects like these made the basic animatronics in The Land That Time Forgot (1975) look like an improvement. 

But it gets worse - the animals are filmed fighting each other. There are some very nasty scenes of a crocodile and a gila monster chomping on each other and trying to twist off limbs. Exotic lizards are tipped through crumbling sets, buried in rubble, and surrounded by fire. There's a bear killing a snake and an almost dead gila monster pumping blood. Plus an astonishing shot of a cave/stuntman braining a charging bull with a staff. It's not quite Cannibal Holocaust but it's halfway there. This animal cruelty is apparently the main reason that this film has disappeared from home video. It used to play occasionally on British TV, sometimes under the alternate title Man and his Mate.

Least convincing is a disastrous 'man in a T Rex suit' which again looks like fancy dress. They knew it wasn't going to work and the suit is only seen in distant long-shots or hidden by really thick foliage. It's the scene in the remake where Tumak saves the girl up a tree in the village of the shell people. I've seen worse 'man in a T Rex suit' movies, but the best is easily The Land Unknown (1957).

The story, characters and dialogue were closely copied for the Hammer remake, though there's more soppiness here as the cave people all learn how to get along. A major difference is that the volcano eruption isn't the climax in the original. Victor Mature and Carole Landis seem to playing to a pre-teen audience, while Lon Chaney Jr milks pathos out of the deposed chief of the rock tribe, in a rare, disfigured make-up.

Without Harryhausen's dinosaurs and Raquel Welch's everything, this is a dry-run for a great remake with better dinosaurs.


Never on DVD, but it's all on YouTube, in segments...

The Ghouls: Book Two - more inspiring horror stories

THE GHOULS: BOOK TWO

The Stories Behind Classic Horror Films

The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Beast With Five Fingers by W. F. Harvey

The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury

The Fly by George Langelaan

Viy by Nikolai Gogol

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce

The Colour Out Of Space by H. P. Lovecraft

The Skull Of The Marquis De Sade by Robert Bloch

The Oblong Box by Edgar Allan Poe

In the first volume of The Ghouls editor Peter Haining collected short stories that inspired horror films from the 1890s to the 1940s. This second paperback involves more familiar films, from 1945 to 1970, the idea being a sequential look at the history of horror films. Published in hardback in 1971, I bought them as paperbacks in 1974.

Here's the remaining nine stories and the films they inspired...

THE BODY SNATCHER

(1945, USA)

Based on The Body Snatcher (1884) by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson is well known for the novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His short story The Body Snatcher is about the relationship between Dr MacFarlane and a medical school friend of his, Fettes, who both studied under Dr Knox (the real-life surgeon who employed the graverobbers Burke and Hare). Both copies I have of The Ghouls have all references to Knox obscured to read as 'K----', presumably to sidestep an old legal issue, even though it was written over fifty years later.

The film expands on Stevenson's story adding layers to the characters. Stevenson portrays the doctor and the body snatcher as scheming partners-in-crime. The film adds a middle-man, Fettes (Russell Wade), studying under an upright Dr MacFarlane (stony-faced Henry Daniell), while Gray (Karloff) is the more obvious villain. The script cleverly, slowly implicates MacFarlane as being equally responsible for Gray's crimes, adding shades of self-delusional morality to his character. The student Fettes is attracted to MacFarlane's immense knowledge and skill, but hesitates to chase after medical advances with such freshly obtained 'research material'.

This is a different angle from the subsequent adaptions of the 'Burke and Hare' story in that it portrays that characters that knew them rather than following the original events. For an American production, it displays enough authentic detail to represent the Scottish locations.

The Body Snatcher is a jewel of 1940s horror, as you're no doubt aware, it's one of Val Lewton's productions for RKO. While the budgets were low, the directing, lighting and acting were all superb. The scripts had psychological layers, moral ambiguities and regularly challenged 'untouchable' authority figures (notably in The Ghost Ship). Lewton's works are the 'films noirs' of horror.

Gray is a purely evil role for Karloff (also detestable as the asylum owner in Lewton's Bedlam), when the actor usually gave his mad doctors and monsters a sympathetic angle. Even here he initially throws us off guard by being friendly to a little girl. Compared to Karloff, Lugosi's role is tiny, with scarcely any dialogue (though the posters and trailers made it look like they were the two stars). I love their confrontational scene - it symbolically brings their much-publicised 'rivalry' as horror actors to a definitive end.

THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS

(1946)

Based on The Beast With Five Fingers (1928) by W. F. Harvey.

The story of a disembodied hand haunting the nephew of the dead owner is given a slightly more logical basis in the original. Because Adrian Borlsover is blind, but very good with his hands - he can read braille, feel his way around, and as he's slipping away, develops the talent for 'automatic writing', jotting down thoughts when he's unconscious. In this way, his hand changes his will and requests its freedom after his death. The hand then starts causing trouble in the library...

The movie dispenses with the blindness, making the hand's many skills more mysterious, but adds the Uncle's skill of great piano-playing. This is used to great effect in a key scene where his nephew (Peter Lorre) hears music when there's no-one sitting at the piano... But is Uncle exerting some kind of power over his legacy from beyond the grave, or is it all his nephew's paranoia?

The studio wanted this to be a comedy as much as a horror thriller, watering down the film's original dramatic intent. The film lurches between romantic comedy and gothic horror, at its most potent in the hallucinatory death scene - a disorientating, lurching camera and distorted music made all the more intense by Max (King Kong) Steiner's soundtrack.

Peter Lorre (The Raven, M, Maltese Falcon) is acting his heart out as the librarian on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is cruelly interrupted by Robert Alda (MASH actor Alan Alda's dad) pursuing a light-hearted romance, and J. Carroll Naish spending too much time making a joke of everything in a hokey Italian accent. This spoils what it could have been, but the antics of the hand, running around behind the books in the library (an idea from the story) and locked in a safe nailed to a block, make it strong enough to seek out. I was thrilled to see another hypnotic performance from Victor Francen, who was beyond excellent in the sound version of the extraordinary anti-war movie J'Accuse (1938).

The story was plundered by many other films, especially a great episode in Dr Terror's House of Horrors, with Christopher Lee being terrorised. The central uncertainty of whether Lorre's character is imagining the roving hand was also exploited in Oliver Stone's horror The Hand (1981). But the first 'nod' was the most popular - the character of 'Thing' which made itself so handy around The Addams Family TV household (1964).

While this was included in William K Everson's Classics of the Horror Film, The Beast With Five Fingers has never been released on DVD, but it's out there somewhere, maybe hiding in your bookcase...

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS

(1953, USA)

Based on The Fog Horn (1951) by Ray Bradbury.

This very short story, first published in a newspaper, describes one evening where two lighthouse keepers see something in the stormy sea attracted by their fog horn.

Written by his childhood friend Ray Bradbury, this single scenario grew into the basis for Ray Harryhausen's first chance to work on his own movie project, setting a template for many more in which he had huge creative input, but without actual onscreen credits for script, producing, or directing. He created spectacular results on low budgets for his fifties sci-fi movies, practically single-handed. The lack of money isn't even that noticeable, especially compared to many other monster B-movies then and since. Even the scenes of panic in the streets were memorably done.

Testing nuclear bombs in the Arctic activates and releases a frozen dinosaur (whoops). It decides to rerun to its old haunts which are, unfortunately, where Manhattan presently is. Cue mass panic, a useless army and navy and a mad old professor trying to save the citizens of New York...

I still marvel at how Harryhausen integrated the animated model of the monster into footage of the streets in a daytime scene. Matching the lighting on the creature to the sunlit street scenes even makes frame blow-ups look good today. This rampage was a step up from the nocturnal metropolitan exploits of the giant monsters seen in The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933).

The monster's visit to Coney Island is admittedly at night, but that's mainly to show up the flames, when a wooden rollercoaster is burnt down. I believe this location is still there, though the rollercoaster is long out of use. There's another smaller rollercoaster still operating at the Coney Island fair - just as terrifying as any modern ride, because it's old, creaky and wooden.

The success of this movie, and particularly the idea of a radioactively reactivated dinosaur, directly inspired Japanese producers to make the first Godzilla (1954).

THE FLY

(1958, USA)

Based on The Fly (1957) by George Langelaan.

Playboy isn't just about the bunnies and the centrefolds, it has articles, interviews and short stories. This is how The Fly first appeared, nestled between the delicately touched-up breasts in Hugh Hefner's groundbreaking magazine for men.

The story reads much like the film, starting with the mysterious murder of Andre Delambre by his wife, with a steam hammer. We know whodunnit, but why did Helene kill him, and why use the hammer twice when his head was crushed the first time?

Andre's brother Francois and the police talk to Helene about her husband's experiments, wondering why she's so fraught whenever there's a fly in the room. It turns out he was experimenting with matter transportation and something went terribly wrong...

The highlight of reading the story again was discovering that the family cat, Dandelo, is actually accounted for... though it's not a happy ending (in the film he simply disappears into an other-worldly meow). Mostly, the story and the characters are very closely adhered to - if it's not broke, don't fix it. Though the ending was tweaked to adhere to the motion picture code.

The 1958 version is completely different from the Cronenberg remake. It's much like the experiments of many other white-coated scientists in the sci-fi boom of that decade. A close comparison would be Leo G Carroll's storyline in Tarantula (1955). The addition of widescreen, vibrant colour, and a good cast set it above many contemporaries, and the concept of teleportation still fascinates.

The scene of the monster's unveiling is a genre highpoint, but I'm equally unnerved by the scientist hiding under a black veil, unable to talk to his wife, his humanity ebbing away.

Vincent Price isn't the mad scientist here, it's nice to see him as a sympathetic character for a change. It's Patricia Owens (as Helene) who has the task of carrying the whole fantastic story in and out of the flashbacks. David Hedison (as Andre) may have thought this was going to be his most unbelievable role, not realising he was about to enter Irwin Allen's lost world, and endless voyages to the bottom of the sea. 

This original version of The Fly spawned two sequels - detailed here in my the trilogy of Fly films.

VIY: SPIRIT OF EVIL

(1967, Russia)

Based on Viy (1835) by Nikolai Gogol.

Horror stories used to be rare in Russia. This tells of a hapless philosophy student who gets cornered by ancient witch. Trying to repel her advances, he kills her and abandons the body. In death, she appears young and beautiful... 

When he hears of the death of a rich Cossack's daughter in a faraway village, he sees the chance to earn a little for reading scriptures over her as she lies in state. Hitching a lift cross-country, he strikes a deal to to be locked in their old church for three nights with the recently deceased girl, while he recites blessings over her. But on the first night, he discovers that somehow the witch may yet have her revenge. She unleashes a vast array of powers to attack him before his task is over...

For the introduction to this story, Haining enthuses over Black Sunday (The Mask of Satan), Mario Bava's celebrated Italian horror. It's a must-see for horror fans, for Barbara Steele's haunted performance, the stunning monochrome photographic effects and an example of how much more violent European cinema was in comparison to the UK or US in 1960.

But. Black Sunday bears only a slight resemblance to Gogol's story, except for the idea that a witch/vampire is getting her revenge. A much closer adaption of the story is Alexander Ptushko's colourful and imaginative Viy: Spirit of Evil (1967). Russia's very first official horror film, it's a cross between a medieval fairy tale and The Exorcist! While the story's descriptions of the witch's night-time assaults are vague, the film attempts to depict them as three distinct set-pieces, using in-camera shock tactics as old those used in Nosferatu, others using free-roaming imagination... 

While the philosophy student resorts to excessive drinking before being forced back into the church has a humorous slant (his visions of demons are blamed on his drunkenness), his overnight vigils get increasingly nightmarish.

The film predates The Evil Dead with increasingly frantic, fast-cutting surrealist horrors inside a rundown wooden building. It even matches many South East Asian horrors with a twitchy, floaty, lank-haired, white-skinned, vengeful young witch.

INCIDENT AT OWL CREEK

(1962, France, La rivière du hibou)

Based on An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge (1890) by Ambrose Bierce.

This very old and very short story was perfect for The Twilight Zone and could easily have influenced several dozen plotlines of the classic TV series. It paints a simple tableau - a traitor in the American Civil War is about to be executed by being hung from a high bridge over a river. The meticulous preparation draws out the suspense and presumably describes the authentic military ceremony for an official hanging. The fate of the accused seems completely hopeless, but at the crucial moment he has a surprise...

This was faithfully adapted into a short French film in 1962, which expanded the story slightly. With very little dialogue, it's a dream-like experience, beautifully-shot and observed.

Unusually, it was then used as a fifth season episode of The Twilight Zone (airing in 1964) as An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. It was slightly re-edited to be included as a special episode, ensuring that the film still remains accessible.

MONSTER OF TERROR

(1965, UK/USA, also called DIE, MONSTER, DIE!)

Based on The Color Out Of Space (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft's nameless shapeless horrors lurch into the realm of sci-fi here with a meteor crash-landing on an old estate in the fictional New England city of Arkham. For once there's a scientific reason for the horror, radiation from space causing extensive mutations in plant and animal alike... The escalating scale of the problem depicted in this early hybrid of sci-fi and horror is ripe for a more faithful adaption.

The movie mostly retreats from showing these horrors and falls back on rather dated gothic chills (a shadowy mansion, walking around at night with candlesticks). But the deteriorating characters and the glimpses of mutation lurking in the shadows make for fascinating monsters in this classic horror setting rather than the bright light of the irradiated deserts of American nuclear sci-fi (Tarantula, Them!).

Boris Karloff is joined by Nick Adams (Invasion of the Astro-Monsters) looking like a tough guy detective and Suzan Farmer (Dracula - Prince of Darkness) as the damsel in distress. How she keeps up with the latest fashions in the middle of nowhere isn't explained.

Director Daniel Haller was obviously a Lovecraft enthusiast, he'd been production designer on Corman's The Haunted Palace and soon directed The Dunwich Horror for the psychedelic era.

My full review of Die, Monster, Die is here.

THE SKULL

(1965, UK)

Based on The Skull Of The Marquis De Sade (1945) by Robert Bloch.

Bloch's short stories are as impressive as his novels. Here he realistically described an obsessive collector of occult curiosities. Like in 'The Man Who Collected Poe' (expertly adapted in Torture Garden) you can tell that the details about Poe and De Sade were all accurate. Bloch presents a pair of ghastly characters, the collector and his favourite 'dealer', as they bargain over the actual skull of the man who 'invented' sadism.

Their relationship remains in the film, but the characters are softened, particularly Peter Cushing as Maitland (a popular name for characters in Amicus horror films). Cushing makes him sympathetic by being academically engrossed in the occult, rather than morbid and unhealthily interested.

Patrick Wymark (Repulsion, Witchfinder General) makes the most of the slimy trader who brings black magic plunder to Maitland's door, but he's repulsive in the story. Christopher Lee has a couple of scenes but is far less interesting than Wymark. To expand the story to feature-length, Maitland now has a wife, a rare horror role for celebrated stage actress Jill Bennett (The Nanny). Also features Nigel Green in yet another of his detective roles (the same year as he made The Ipcress File), and Patrick Magee (Asylum, Tales From The Crypt, A Clockwork Orange).

A good cast and a good idea still presented a huge challenge to director Freddie Francis, who had to derive a movieload of chills from a small solitary skull. He largely succeeds, using innovative point-of-view 'skull-vision', and eerie nightmares. This will please fans of Cushing, Lee and psychological horrors, though the lack of blood and 'skull on a wire' special effects won't hold modern attentions.

After seeing so many scary black-and-white photos for The Skull, when I finally saw it I was surprised that it was not only in colour, but also 2.35 widescreen. The Skull recently debuted on DVD and has just been released on blu-ray as a double-bill with The Man Who Could Cheat Death, with which it has nothing in common except country of origin.

THE OBLONG BOX

(1969, UK)

Based on The Oblong Box (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe's tale is a mystery set aboard an ocean liner, another of his pioneering sleuth stories. A passenger is trying to solve the sleeping arrangements of his neighbours onboard and why they have a huge box in one compartment. It takes a disaster to answer his questions...

But the film has nothing to do with the tight little story, apart from using the title and featuring a large box in a completely different way. Instead it starts in colonial Africa, following two brothers back to their estate in England. One is hideously disfigured, forcibly kept in a locked room and going stir-crazy. This rich foundation for horror dissipated by tedious discussions interrupted by short outbursts of unconvincing violence.

The confusing multitude of characters takes time to pay off, though many excellent actors are in the cast. It's disappointing that Christopher Lee and Vincent Price share so little time onscreen together. Fun that Price appears here again with Rupert Davies and Hilary Dwyer, both from Witchfinder General. Shocking to see Dwyer genially playing Price's wife.

But The Oblong Box is a poor example of 'classic horror' for The Ghouls to close with.

Collecting the inspirations for horror movies into volumes of stories was a great idea that sadly didn't catch on, or was too costly to pursue. Usually a single famous short story is enough to carry a collection of less interesting fiction, justifying eye-catching movie photos on the front cover.

While it's often impossible to condense and represent a novel when adapting it into a movie, short stories can just as easily provide the basis for a script. They make for interesting comparisons, but like I've said, finding specific old short fiction isn't easy.

Good stories, however brief, used to become instantly popular by appearing in high-circulation newspapers and magazines. Movie-makers would snap the rights up because the public were already interested in the story. Hitchcock had his people scouring for new stories for his movies and TV shows. But currently short fiction is a rarity in modern publishing, meaning scriptwriters have to find their inspiration elsewhere.

You can read the first review of this collection here - The Phantom of the Opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Magician and more in The Ghouls: Book One.

The superior cover art for both paperbacks was painted by John Holmes. For volume 2 of the 1974 Orbit paperback (at top) he combined a skull, a fly and a female vampire into a single striking vision. More of his gruesome and surreal cover art can be viewed here on British pulp horror fiction site The Vault of Evil. (A big thank you to Johnny Mains, of Noose and Gibbet Publishing for the info.)



The Ghouls: Book One - horror fiction into film

THE GHOULS: BOOK ONE

The Stories Behind the Classic Horror Films

The Devil In A Nunnery by Francis Oscar Mann

The System Of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether by Edgar Allan Poe
Feathertop by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
The Magician by Somerset Maugham
Spurs by Tod Robbins
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker
The Devil And Daniel Webster by Steven Vincent Benet

Novels that inspire horror movies are easy to find, but short stories might need more detective work. They might only be found in old anthologies or even magazines. So when I saw these two paperbacks, I pounced on them! The Ghouls: Books One and Two were edited by Peter Haining, with nine short stories in each, every one used as source material for a horror film.

I bought these paperbacks just after they were published in 1974 (previously available as a single hardback). All I know is that they were sold in the UK and US, and reprinted in the UK in 1994. Such a brilliant theme for a collection, I'm surprised that there haven't been many more.

As a tribute to a great idea, here's an over-ambitiously long article that took months to put together - I've read all the stories again and watched as many of the movies they inspired as was possible. While I'd disagree that all the films are 'horror classics', I've been led to some great films that I'd not seen before.

Haining's introduction, as well as the foreword and afterword from genre giants, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee respectively, contain insightful notes on the genre.

So here's a look at the films and stories of Book One, a second article on Book Two will follow...

Foreword by Peter Haining

Haining makes a case for a place in the world for horror films and novels, at a time when gory or scary films were still widely being dismissed by critics and scholars alike. He originally chose these tales to illustrate how fiction has inspired horror films through the years, from the very first decade of cinema.

His introductions to each story reminded me of the state of the genre back then. For instance he remarks that Freaks "was the most horrific film ever made" and that The Magician was a "missing" film. Thankfully, far more horrific films have been made since 1974, and The Magician is no longer lost. In fact, it's just hit DVD.

 

THE DEVIL IN A CONVENT

(1896, France)

Based on The Devil In A Nunnery, a Medieval tale retold by Francis Oscar Mann.

This ancient story tells of the devil tricking his way into a convent by posing as a troubadour. As he sings to the nuns, they start behaving completely out of character. There's a sense that the author is hinting about a multitude of sins without getting into trouble for naming them explicitly.

This premise became one of the short (just three minutes long) frantic films created by French pioneer and genius Georges Méliès in the first few years of cinema. Well ahead of Hollywood tradition, Méliès completely rewrote the story by having the devil pose as an old priest - a far more wicked disguise.

While the story depends on wordplay, this short silent film visually riffs on the mayhem that a pantomime demon could wreak in a church - summoning little devils and monstrous animals. Mischievous fun rather than anything too blasphemous, the film has a single camera angle but a constantly evolving set powered by trap doors, puffs of smoke and his trademark in-camera editing. Hardly a horror classic, but a gracious nod to cinema's first studio of the fantastic.

Thanks to the wonderful DVD boxed set of practically all of Méliès' existing works, I was able to see this. It's also on YouTube. I'm not sure the next film still exists though...

THE LUNATICS

(1913, USA)

Based on The System Of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe.

Who else would early film-makers turn to for bizarre and scary ideas?

Two rambling holidaymakers are shown around a 'lunatic asylum' which is trying out a variety of unusual new treatments. On the tour, as they meet a variety of inmates, they're unaware of one of the most drastic cures on offer there...

This lesser-known tale from Poe is more of a comic twist than a descent into horror, though the premise has often been used in far more ghastly 'madhouse' movies, such as Ghost Story and Asylum. The slim short story would have been ideal as a short film, which lasted only 15 minutes. Incidentally, it was directed by Maurice Tourneur, father of Cat People and Night of the Demon director, Jacques.

The story was again officially adapted in Mexico as The Mansion of Madness (1973), directed by Juan López Moctezuma (Alucarda).

PURITAN PASSIONS

(1923, USA, also called The Scarecrow)

Based on Feathertop (1852) by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

From the author of The Scarlet Letter, is this dark fairy-tale of a New England witch who brings her scarecrow to life, looking like a human being. She then fixes on the idea that her scarecrow should find love, (a contrivance to set up this story of fateful romance).

While the premise of a living scarecrow is more usually horror nowadays, this tale (and The Wizard of Oz) present him as a friendly fantasy, despite the use of witchcraft.
 
I couldn't find any silent version of this, I'm not even sure if the early films (also 1912, 1916) still exist. A Broadway stage adaption, filmed for TV in 1972, had very poor reviews, despite having Gene Wilder as Feathertop himself.


 

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
(1925, 1929, USA)

Based on the 1909 novel by Gaston Leroux.

At this point Haining cheats a little, presenting a specially abridged version of Gaston Leroux' book. But this is a good way to enjoy the story and avoid the overlong sub-plots of opera house politics and romantic rivalry. This condensed version seems to have been trimmed to give us the passages that were translated to the screen for Lon Chaney's brilliant work. Conversely, this silent 1925 adaption (slightly reworked for sound in 1929) is a quite faithful adaption of events in the novel, apart from the completely revamped ending.

A ghost is said to haunt the Paris Opera House. A string of accidents force the directors to reconsider their choice of lead singer in their prestigious productions. Letters from 'The Phantom' threaten them to comply, or great tragedy will befall them...

I enjoy this movie version the most with its focus on The Phantom as the central character and the extensive use of gothic atmosphere in, well, everything - the cavernous sets and production design, the lighting, even the angry mob with torches. It's a horror epic.
 
Lon Chaney's Phantom is the most famous of his extreme make-ups and the movie is required viewing as America's first landmark horror film. The restorations available on DVD include the early two-strip Technicolor sequences that treat us to The Phantom in eerie colour.
 
Leroux' story is now well known, though most subsequent adaptions diminish the severity of the horror content compared to the first, silent adaption.


 

THE MAGICIAN
(1926, USA)

Based on the 1908 novel by Somerset Maugham.

Haining cheats again by offering just an extract from a novel. He chose the passage describing the hypnotised heroine's dream of Hell, which became the film's delirious highlight.

Maugham is a celebrated author in Britain and many of his stories have been adapted as movies through the years (most recently The Painted Veil with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton) but at their most popular in the 1940s. Most of his novels were dramas, but The Magician was a dark fantasy focussed on a caricature of occultist Aleister Crowley, reimagined as the bragging Oliver Haddo, who might actually have discovered the mastery of dark powers. The silent adaption is faithful to the story and characterisations of the novel, right down to the French locations, though it adds a dramatic subplot to open the film.
 
Warner Archive have just released this influential silent horror. I was excited to see Germany's horror star Paul Wegener (The Golem, Alraune, Svengali, The Student of Prague) in his only American film. This was easy casting to arrange because director Rex Ingram shot the film entirely in France, boasting many actual locations. It was obviously easy for a German actor to appear in a Hollywood film when they were silent.

At the time, any news of Crowley was usually scandalous (he was still alive), possibly enough to damage the film's chances - it didn't do well. But Ingram implies much more than he shows, and also adds tongue-in-cheek humour to the melodrama. There's a wonderful moment when Wegener exaggerates his character's exit with a superbly haughty throw of his cloak over the shoulder.
 
A hunchback dwarf in a mountain-top tower housing a huge laboratory is intended as a ridiculous egocentric overly-dramatic setting. It manages to satirise Frankenstein five years before it was made. All that's missing is the flashy flashing electrical equipment. The scene in Hell is more serious and more sexual, a visually different depiction to Hollywood's usual reliance on Dante.
 
As well as pre-dating Frankenstein, suffering censorship problems with the subject of satanism, the story also veers into the world of Svengali, who Wegener portrayed the following year. Much of Haddo's success is due to his powers of hypnotism.

It's a fascinating and influential silent movie, beautifully made. If only it had been more successful in America, Paul Wegener and his early achievements as an actor might be more widely known, rather than just as the big guy who played the hulking Golem...

FREAKS
(1933, USA)

Based on Spurs (1923) by Tod Robbins.

Director Tod Browning chose this story to continue his love affair with circus life and trump the horror of Dracula (1931) more thoroughly than the studio actually wanted.

The short story Spurs provided the premise of the plot. A beautiful horse rider in love with a strong man laughs off the affections of a dwarf until he inherits a fortune from his uncle. She decides to marry for money, then murder him. The outcome of the story is very different to the film - brutal, sadistic and involves a pair of spurs...


The little person of the story is far from the helpless and sympathetic character of the film. He's a suspicious dwarf who has the upper hand because of a huge, fierce dog under his command. Author Tod Robbins earlier wrote The Unholy Three (in 1917) which Tod Browning had adapted as a silent film (in 1925) starring Lon Chaney. It was remade as a talkie (in 1930) and proved to be Chaney's last film.

Despite the parade of real-life physical abnormality in TV documentaries, this 1933 film still has the power to unsettle and shock, mainly due to the extreme nature of the circus people's disabilities and the lack of medical and public understanding they must have endured. While Browning had a circus background to draw on for realism and inspiration, his portrayal of the 'freaks' is two-faced, inspiring much criticism and censorship through the decades. Though they are sympathetically portrayed through much of the film, Browning switches to using them to prey on our fears, as scary monsters in the nightmarish climax.

But this would prove to be the only portrayal of many extreme physical disabilities for several decades and the largely positive portrayal was contrary to the regular movie rules that disfigurement equated with evil - scars or eyes/limbs missing visually meant that they were bad guys. Speaking of scars, Count Zaroff has a corker...

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
(1933, USA)

Based on The Most Dangerous Game (1924) by Richard Connell.

A classic and often reused story - a hunter who likes to hunt... humans. A simple short story that quickly unfolds as a shipwreck survivor learns that his ship was wrecked deliberately. Anyone left alive provides quarry for a mad huntsman living in an island fortress, from which there's no escape.

The story features a single (first-person) protagonist in a prolonged battle with Zaroff. The film would add a gradual realisation of the survivors' plight, a love interest and a nasty trophy room...


The first and best movie adaption also re-used the sets of King Kong (1933), with many of the same cast and crew (while the extensive animation was being finished). It's fun to see Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong together again, with Fay running across Skull Island's famous log bridge, but being chased by Count Zaroff and his pack of hell hounds. It's my favourite of the many versions because it's the purest telling of the tale - there are no subplots or mucking about - we're on the island the whole time. The film is almost too short, barely over an hour.

I also like this as a flipside of Kong's world. As if they got rid of the giant gorilla and made a prototype Battle Royale instead. For its age, it's still exciting and even brutal, though most of the explicit violence was toned down (cracking of bones removed from the soundtrack, torture and mutilation cut completely out).


This is the greatest character that Leslie Banks (Went The Day Well?) played -the insane Zaroff, with Joel McCrea (the star of Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent) and Fay Wray looking bedraggled, but gorgeous, even after dragging themselves through a swamp.

DRACULA'S DAUGHTER

(1936, USA)

Based on Dracula’s Guest (1897) by Bram Stoker.

This was first published in 1914, but was written in 1897 as the opening chapter of Stoker's most famous novel Dracula. It describes how Jonathan Harker encounters the weird and uncanny before he even reaches Castle Dracula.

It's hard to see exactly how this became the inspiration for Dracula's Daughter, only one late scene in the film bears any relation to the story. Presumably publicity was trying to hype up as many links as possible between the first ever Dracula sequel and the literary prequel.

Dracula's Daughter is an early good example of a horror sequel. The story continues directly on from the end of Dracula (1931) with Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan again) being arrested for murdering the Count! Meanwhile a mysterious hooded woman spirits away the corpse (a rather obvious dummy substituting for Lugosi) but continuing his work in obtaining involuntary blood donations. Like her father, she is also very interested in female victims...



This is a very good Universal horror, but would've been even better if it hadn't been restricted by new censorship rules for horror films. The gothic mood is constantly interrupted by bursts of comic relief, mostly provided by an unlucky policeman (silent comedy star Billy Bevan). But Gloria Holden is extraordinary and ethereal and her duel of wits with the living is more effectively dramatic than the staginess of Dracula.

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER
(1944, USA, also called All That Money Can Buy)

Based on The Devil And Daniel Webster (1937) by Steven Vincent Benet.

This story is in itself an adaption of a tale as old as the hills. A variation of the Faust legend given an American mid-19th century setting. Whenever you get a wish, there's always a catch. The film was famously referenced in The Simpsons' very first Treehouse of Horror, which is a good taster for the finale - a courtroom drama staged by the Devil himself.

A young farmer, Jabez Stone, struggling to raise a family, curses his luck and swears that he'd do anything to improve his life. Out of nowhere, a stranger helps change his fortunes for the next seven years, in return for a small consideration, his soul.

It helps if you know a little early American history (gulp), in particular Daniel Webster. Here he's a popular politician dedicated to helping the farmers. Luckily for Jabez Stone, he's also a great lawyer. In reality, Webster also ran for President no less than three times.

The story decribes many of Webster's achievements without detailing them. So all the dialogue for the famous legal scene had to be written from scratch.


The lighting in this film is extraordinary. It noticeably and literally adds shades to the performances, and transforms simple sets into frightening tableaux. The Devil, though he's never actually named, arrives through a barn door - doesn't sound like much - but the lighting makes it startling. It reminded me of the appearance of a demon, the highlight of the bonkers Esperanto Incubus (1966).

With Bernard Herrmann composing the music, sharp black and white cinematography, and ironic dialogue unafraid to highlight inhumanity and injustice, the film looks like a pilot movie for The Twilight Zone, but fourteen years early. As Jabez Stone gets closer to his fate, the denizens of Hell come up and meet him. These shadowy glimpses of half-seen apparitions are still scary.

Until I'd re-read The Ghouls for this article, I'd barely heard of this film, though I now realise its credentials are close to legendary, being produced at RKO Studios the same year as Citizen Kane, sharing some of the same production crew, like the composer (Herrmann) and editor (Robert Wise).

Walter Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, And Then There Were None) plays 'Mr Scratch', constantly reminding me of his son, John (actor - Myra Breckinridge, director - The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon) who I've enjoyed in many films. John handled cigars just like his dad. Walter's performance is outstanding though subtle - I don't think he raises his voice throughout the film. This lack of threat enables him to gain friends and allies and then betray their trust...


I was delighted to see Simone Simon co-star as a mysterious temptress. The following year she'd of course take the lead in the first of two RKO horror films as Irena, one of The Cat People. Val Lewton's films had to be low-budget because of RKO's losses from Citizen Kane. Their loss, our gain. Simon plays Belle, a French nanny who casually appears out of nowhere...

The production design is ambitious and successful, portraying very similar situations to Days of Heaven but entirely on a soundstage. Director William Dieterle later directed the great version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1939.

A supernatural fantasy hinting at the horrors of damnation, this is a superb movie.

The Ghouls was first published as a single hardcover by W. H. Allen in 1971, then as two paperbacks from Orbit in 1974. I've always thought that the cover needed a stronger hint that these stories were connected to films - perhaps using photographs. I've changed my mind after seeing the US paperback edition (above).

The superior cover art for both paperbacks, painted by John Holmes, is the stuff of nightmares. More of his gruesome and surreal cover art can be viewed here on British pulp horror fiction site The Vault of Evil. (A big thank you to Johnny Mains, of Noose and Gibbet Publishing for the info.)

Wait till you see the cover of Book Two...