Shhhh! At long last, lost Lewtons: ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY, THE FALCON AND THE COEDS

Shhhh! Let us speak of Val Lewton, but quietly. A man whose oeuvre of poetic B-movie horrors we knew of, even in the 80s of Central Jersey suburbia (where we taped them off local TV creature double features, like a fisherman dipping his claw into the soft stream), Lewton made subtle and shadowy noir-horrors that are still ephemeral, mere wisps of smoke through the threader. Yet how come even my Journey-crankin' gearhead brother also liked Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie after I taped them back-to-back when they came on WORs Creature Double Feature and we watched them nearly every night one long ago summer, the fan on next to the window drowning out the crickets,  and the harp and frond shadows whistling all around the dark verandas? We dug the growls in eerie WMCA basement pools, and the rustle of the cane fields. They didn't shout and telegraph their emotions --they talked in low, conspiratorial voices and operated on a level of subtlety that drew us in (we had to lean into them), leaving us transported, and... then... suddenly realizing, as does the lovelorn birthday girl in Leopard Man, that it's gotten dark and we're locked in with some strange deadly force we can never see clearly. Where most horror was like a crazy derelict shouting at us over shrill orchestration, Lewton's movies lured us close with seductive calming whispers.

Maybe that was part of their appeal --the low, quiet talking was part of the wartime experience. Loose lips sink ships! The guy on the park bench reading the paper might be a Nazi spy! We could watch these films all night and never wake the parents (and they were good for hangovers, too).

It being the war, the thinking at the big studios was that if one must make horror films, make some of them hilarious, so that America might laugh at its Euro-thrashing boogeyman fears. Boris Karloff was on Broadway with Arsenic and Old Lace, and 1942's underrated Boogeyman will Get You was at Columbia; Lugosi was chasing the Dead End Kids around moldy Monogram passageways. And at RKO--on the B-lot with Lewton and Tourneur--a new way to exorcise the horror of war was manifesting, a style the both looked forward to film noir and backwards to classic literature and ancient myth, and with a minimalist leave-it-to-your-imagination approach to monsters.

The latter was something that we young Famous Monsters of Filmland devotees were initially turned off by, but then later-- when confronted with too many bad monster suits--we finally realized how seeing is never the same as believing; a really dark black shadow is itself scarier than any illuminated monster hiding within it.

That shadowy minimalism, in combination with the quiet whispering and the mostly-indoors filming, and the supernatural--unconscious--power-of-suggestion-genuine supernatural transformation aspects, makes Lewtons seem very personal. Everyone in the world could be wearing I walked with a Zombie T-shirts and we'd still think we were the only one who resonated with its weird dream poetry. It was just some small precious thing that spoke only to us in a 'psssst' sort of conspiratorial whisper, like some girl you meet at four AM outside on a stoop and have an hour-long conversation with in low voice to not wake the neighbor while you share a cigarette (and then you realize she was never even there - just a dream, your anima projected onto the smoke). I'm always amazed when I hear other people say they love these films, for I presume they're my discovery alone, and so perhaps do they.

That's why we fans--especially those who love both film noir and art films as well as horror pics, feel protective of them. I don't like all Lewton's later movies as well as the first four; I think it was a mistake to separate him and Tourneur after the third film, a mistake to start casting children (as in Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher) and setting things in period costumes, and a mistake to lose narrative steam by getting hung up on polemics on 'authority in tight spaces evoking madness '(Ghost Ship, Isle of the Dead). All the tri-corner hats and clattering hooves and smiling coachmen (Bedlam, Body Snatcher), make me feel like I'm being dragged through Colonial Williamsburg as a bored, thirsty kid with aching feet (an experience which left me with a lifetime aversion to period pieces and the smell of horses).

The later Lewton would have no doubt done an actual Jane Eyre instead of I Walked with a Zombie, for example. If only the executives in their infinite wisdom didn't give him such easy literary titles as Body Snatcher and Bedlam! Better they got weirder and more prosaic like The Thorned Glove of the Time Traveler or I was a Voodoo Vampire. 

All of which is a tortuously long preface to the discovery of two 'sort of' Lewton films made by RKO's other B-units but using many of the same people, same actors, crew, writers, sets, props, ghostly mythopoetic flavors and signifiers from the first four films (all from 1942-1943) in the Lewton RKO series. When I've run the Lewton circuit and I got to have more, and am eyeing the Bedlam, Body Snatcher last gasp with grim countenance, maybe I'll turn to these instead. 

So here are two I have found and folded into my Lewton box, if you get my meaning. None of this will mean much to people not in love with the breezy interiority of I Walked with a Zombie. But then again, who wouldn't be, if they surrendered to it?

THE FALCON AND THE CO-EDS 

(1943) Dir William Clemens

***

From its crashing waves close-ups and swirling romantic piano music score, right down to the title font, the resemblance of Falcon and the Co-Eds to the opening of I Walked with a Zombie is uncanny; I only noticed it though as I recently saw them both--quite by accident-- back-to-back (1).
In addition to cast, font and mood, the figure of a gloomy fragile-doomed poet hangs over both this film and Lewton's fourth, The Seventh Victim. All three of them are from 1943, and two were written by Ardel Wray, a mysterious poetic figure who seems clearly to have modeled these fragile doomed poets on himself, possibly exorcising some inner doomed poet, forever at odds with the RKO B-movie system, looking for one muse to lift him from suicidal despair.

In both instances, a poet is hanging around and wafting in his (spacious) bungalow, clearly nursing a fabulous dreamy crush on some girl who's really a shimmering reflection of his own dream anima. A teacher at the all-girls school, the dead poet/English professor has fans who are sure it wasn't an accident or suicide and that the dean just wants to avoid scandal. Hence a saucy student heads down to the city to steal the Falcon's car so he'll need to go up there to get it. Once he's up there, reading the dead poet's manuscript as a crushing girl is swallowed in billowing curtains from an ocean view window, we think instantly of Seventh Victim's Jason (Erford Gage) and his original draft of poetry that Dr. Judd accepts from him on their way to the Satanic mass, or thereabouts. Reconstructing the personality from mute evidence, the Falcon declares this dead poet "a man who perhaps demanded too much from people and had to live in books to get it, who spent most of his time alone,.... who took refuge in his new imagination (...) how easily a man like that could be dominated by others." and "He lived such a narrow empty life that it finally suffocated him." Damn dude, been reading my seventh fLstep? Nimbly prowling around the grounds, Tom romances or confounds the endless string of suspects, manages to maintain the student body's collective crush without either dampening or indulging it, and employs three singing moppets to shadow suspects, the very cool 'Ug Sisters.'

Haunting Co-Eds with otherworldly presence is a dreamy psychic student named Margueritte (the alluring Rita Corday), with a dead composer father--supposedly similar in temperament to the dead poet (but more famous)--who keeps having premonitions of death ---voices whisper to her in the wind to kill herself. We hear what she hears in the sound mix, and it's pretty creepy as the whispers blend with the wind until we almost feel like we're going crazy. And for a supposedly grounded mystery, the film keeps a tactful and open-minded opinion on the supernatural, mirroring that of Lewton's films, wherein the real and the vividly imagined merge into a poetic realism (i.e. Irina is a cat and/or a frigid hysteric in Cat People; Jessica is a zombie and/or a casualty of tropical fever in I Walked with a Zombie - the supernatural as a dweller on the threshold of existence).

Tom Conway seems to have been quite busy amidst the RKO B-lots, for in 1943 alone he was in three Falcons and two Val Lewton pictures (Seventh Victim and I Walked with a Zombie). Like Lewton, Conway was born in Russia (St. Petersburg) to a wealthy family that fled the Bolsheviks, bringing with them with barely any of their vast fortune). Looking at Cat People now I realize that it is not really my favorite Lewton film anymore - it lost some esteem when I lost my own virginity (and stayed human). But whether the curse is real or not, I'm a huge fan of Conway's lascivious Dr. Judd. I'll grant you he doesn't really buy into her story and he should, because he's already losing his chance to get her on the rebound, but then it's too late; one certainly can't hold it against him if he turns up the following year after supposedly being torn up, to go around pimping Jean Parker and pissing off more poets in The Seventh Victim. 

Here are some more similarities -

WOMEN

The women angle too is interesting, as Lewton films are stocked with so many strong females. With women doing so many of the jobs usually taken by men during the years 1941-45, it's imperative to remember that, while women suffer at the hands of soldiers and blah blah, its a great time for feminist advances in the workplace and an even better time for attractive men still at the home front, that is if they want to experience a world where the women compete for the men, for a change. That's part of the noir fantasia we so love in The Big Sleep for example, all the hot available lady cab drivers, librarians, book store managers, etc. We think 'oh how novel!" now, but these films reflect a very real facet of life at home during the height of the war, and not only are there many women, but war widows, and in the morality of the time, a widow was basically allowed to sleep with anyone she wanted. She had given her maidenhood to the cause, and now the rest of her sex life was her own.

The girls' school, seen in both Co-Eds and 7th Victim is a prime example of this Edenic safe space in the time of war (ala the woman's dorm in A Matter of Life and Death). This is a kind paradise a man overseas can imagine without feeling either sexual desire or paternal affection but something in between and yet neither, beyond any one final thing, reflecting the feminine eternal flame that cores the death drive like an apple.

THE AMBERSON STEPS

Astute viewers will also notice the school's main stairwell (built for Welles' Ambersons and used regularly by the B-unit) used for the interior of the all-girls' schools in both Co-Eds and Seventh Victim - leaving us to wonder - is it the same school?

Alas, Jean Brooks

I am not a fan of Brooks, and though she wears a few nicely trimmed dresses here and is a decent actress am shocked by her callous behavior towards the "students" (many of whom seem no older than her) and that we're supposed to not think she's the dragon lady. Kind of the missing link between Joan Bennett and Shelly Winters, she has gravitas and a no BS sense of acting and purpose that creates a kind of hangover contagion rather than the allure we'd hope for. Not sure if it's me but I can't abide her character being mean to Marguerite or letting a panther loose, or turning down a poison drink for weeks only to pick a noose instead. Nothing makes sense when it comes to our Ms. Brooks. 

ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY

(1945) **

Deconstructing the horror / war mindset is tricky. We can understand the psychology behind the horror ban as a classic example of Hollywood misdiagnosing the contradictions that abound in viewer psychology. The feeling was that audiences didn't 'need' more horror (the war provided plenty). Lewton's B-unit and Universal's THE WOLF MAN and SON OF FRANKENSTEIN proved audiences needed the old horrors more than ever, but they also needed to be able to laugh at their fears. Thus, horror comedy became a huge parallel program, stretching from Bob Hope in CAT AND THE CANARY (1939) and GHOST BREAKERS (1940) through to BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU (1942 and the stunning success of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE on Broadway, which kept Karloff out of films for almost a year.

RKO finally loaded itself into the horror-comedy canon for ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY in 1945, a clunky if well-crafted little blend of scares, laughs and island intrigue. The comedy comes from a pair of shifty talent agents who try to appease gangster Sheldon Leonard's yen for nightclub entertainment by procuring a real 'live' zombie for his voodoo-themed lounge. What makes it, like Co-Eds, a long lost Lewton is that the boys go to San Sebastian, the same island setting as 1943's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, and there they meet several actor/characters from that film, including the tall scrawny bug-eyed zombie, Darby Jones (above- the skeletal tall black man who plays the scariest of the zombies in Lewton's film, Carrafour) and the strolling calypso singer, Sir Galahad.

Though not part of the Lewton crew (he'd only appeared in a small role in the same year's Body Snatcher), Bela Lugosi has a florid, full-tilt villain role as the zombie maker who ensnares our bumbling pair of Abbot-and-Costello-esque comics (2), tying them up and then letting them run amok through his trap doors and passages, chased by himself and Jones.


As with Lewton's Zombie, a real chilling highlight is a song from Galahad, this one played as the boys disembark on the San Sebastian dock. First Galahad sings happily about how San Sebastian is a tropical paradise but when the boys walk past him and he's behind them, and all the other passengers have gone from the dock, the song gradually darkens in melody and lyric, to become a tale of menace, paranoia and woe.

Sir Galahad's songs are always direct addresses to the people he's singing about, which is what makes him uncanny - as in his slow ghostly walk across the empty veranda towards Frances Dee after brother David has passed out in I Walked with a Zombie. But of course the boys are imbeciles, and don't think Galahad's eerie tourist trap warning could apply to them.

Though played for comedy, these little termite moments gives Broadway the Lewton vibe. Also, it's entirely (RKO) studio-bound, with atmospheric lighting especially in the night/dungeon scenes The front of the NYC club could be the same set as in Leopard Man, the NYC exteriors the same as in Seventh Victim.e

As for the boys, they're fairly forgettable. The stooge screams like a hysterical baby the moment anything goes wrong, even while sneaking up on a voodoo ceremony, making the panic of Mantan Moreland in KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941) seem like square-jawed heroism. I'm also not a huge fan of Darby Jones' doofus ping-pong ball eyes this go-round. It's not a good look. His eyes were plenty buggy in Lewton's film, so what's the rumpus? Luckily we wouldn't see ping pong ball eyes in style again for zombies until 1972's SUGAR HILL where they rawk. At any rate, Bela makes up the difference. He seems to be having a grand time here, stretching his muscles in real sets after loping around Monogram's waterlogged cutaways for so long, Best of all, there's no Jean Brooks!

So enjoy what ye can while ye can, for the war can't last forever and once Johnny comes marching home, all that dizzy poetry will have to be stopped. Played by Alan Ladd or Robert Mitchum, our returning vets will be brooking no umbrage from fey 4F poets who've had the pick of the dame pool for too damn long.

Until then... Shhhh!

NOTES:
1. I thought I was the first to make the Ardel Wray connection, only to find Time Out London's Film Guide had beaten me to it, them crafty Brits.
2. Strangely, aside from Hold that Ghost in 1941, Abbot and Costello stayed away from horror until well after the war (... meet Frankenstein came out 1948), preferring westerns, period pieces, and sports spoofs.
Special shout out to the indispensible DVDBeaver from whom I copped some of the above Co-Eds stills

The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist-Hole: THE WITCH

Enshrouded in portentous gloom and droning cello, THE WITCH (2015) is the first great woodsy pre-Salem devil film in 300 years, a SHINING for the ANTICHRIST x BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW subdivision of the HAXAN community (with a dash of the recent HONEYMOON if you're keeping track). Set in 1630s New England on a small patch of farm and field, surrounded by deep (if leafless) woods, it's a character piece that delves into the same dark patch of the soul that many witch and devil movies make feints at but then run away from, i.e. the actual dark superstitions  of the time, recorded in woodcuts and old typeface by jimson weed-addled mystics. First time-writer/director Robert Eggers has a unique flair for the period and a trust that the authentic super low lighting--candles and hearth fires casting sinister shadows on the rough wood log walls; thin grey light at early evening's onset, filtered through the opaque spidery branches of the barren woods--won't be dismissed as 'murky' in years to come (as it would were it to be transferred to VHS). And by being straightforward with both the paranoia and the reality of witchcraft, Eggers' film functions on both conscious and unconscious levels. The result, a vivid circumnavigation of a phenomena that's both real and imagined, an expression of both repressed female psychic energy under the pressure cooker of dogmatic patriarchy and a validation of that patriarchy's overwrought fears and draconian responses.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Thomasin (above, amidst deepdreamgenerator pareidolia), a naif to the menstrual age, who prays valiantly for deliverance from sinful thoughts but nonetheless falls prey to shady woodsy pagan strangeness, especially once her baby sibling disappears literally out from under her nose. Kate Dickie, brilliantly unhinged, is the salt of the earth mom slowly dissolving into the dirt from the loss; the loving yet ineffectual dad (the nicely deep-voiced Ralph Ineson) can do nothing but shy away from all blame; young Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) can't help but lust for his developing sister as there are no other options, at least at first. Running rings around them all are moppet evil twins and a strapping horny goat named Black Phillip, possibly the embodiment of Goat of Mendes i.e. Baphomet or maybe just a buck in heat or in the early stages of rabies. Somehow that crazy goat steals the show and miraculously never seems CGI fake or badly cut-in to appear to not be doing naturally the eerie stuff he's up to. There's also a rabbit and a raven, filmed in such a thin grey outdoor light the full uncanny ambiguity of their black eye stares becomes something far more sinister and eerie than it would if it morphed into some devilish visage. If ever thou were a young tyke wandering alone by the creek at a big family picnic, only to find your solitary contemplation suddenly broken by an angry, honking territorial goose (looming at a giant Harryhausen-size compared to your five year-old frame), your parents only laughing in the picnic distance while you screamed in mortal terror, then you'll shiver with delayed recognition.  

Or what about the time you were scared by the eye of a motionless rabbit in a field, it just sitting there in the tall grass--staring at you out of the corner of its all seeing ambivalent monster eye-- all the more uncanny as the reflection (in its stillness) of our own hiding under our sheets while ghosts sniff around our bed in the dead of night, then this WITCH shall resonate (as it did with me).

Above and beyond the film's naturalistic approach to horror lurks some obvious Kubrick aspirations, vis-a-vis a steady relentless Steadicam forward glide through the forest, ever vacillating between sane rational perceptions (when you know what you see is real), hallucination (when you know it's not), and madness (when you don't know the difference). It's in this beyond either/or interpretive cabin fever meltdown that THE WITCH finds its crux. Rather than go the 'lascivious magistrate condemning innocent hotties to the pyre' route of so many Salem-based films, or the 'witch vowing revenge from the stake on her tormentor's descendants' route (or both), Eggers take the New England road less traveled. Traveled almost never, in fact, because it's too direct. It occurs to almost no previous American filmmaker to just take the period's spooky folktale mythos at face value. That's why, perhaps, it feels so fresh covering familiar ground. That it's set in a time before rational objectivity (the sort of thinking America was created to help foster) helps explains its power, because it sticks to that era's ideas of the natural world with admirable focus. There won't be an electric light for centuries to come, and--like a scared kid longing for a nightlight to guide his way to the midnight bathroom-- you desperately pray for illumination. If stared into long enough, darkness can't help always takes human or animal shape, starts to move, takes on three dimensions. If you've ever seen things move in the distance when it's getting dark and the inanimate objects in the distance do actually look like they're moving, and even knowing consciously they aren't doesn't stop you from seeing them move, you'll be like damn - so that's paredolia. THE WITCH gets paredolia right. Only in one or two other films have we seen beautiful women materialize out of the darkness of the woods or the gleam of the bathtub, as irresistible as a warm slug of whiskey in an unfriendly wilderness. Our willpower long gone, we lower our lips towards their hearth and then suddenly these figures grab onto us as if with clawed tentacles and thorny paws. They are not hot and young at all, but decomposing and very old! The ringing chimes of that first kiss quickly turn from wedding bells to funeral chimes and fades into a single Donald Sutherland death rattle.

This powerful motif, the 'young-old, soul-catching woman' reflects the imagery found in the sidpa bardo (vis-a-vis the Tibetan Book of the Dead), the level of purgatory where you see only undulating lovers burning like flames in an otherwise all-consuming darkness. If you let yourself be drawn too close to their warmth you run the risk of finding yourself stuck like a fly in the frozen web of the woman's newly-fertilized embryo. But sometimes the lovers flames are just a fishing lure, hooking unwary souls so they can be hauled into hell's trawler, so they can be shred into a million digestible pieces, demon engines eating all the impurities away and reducing you to raw unmediated consciousness. The 'you' you believed yourself to be is shaved away like long hippie hair under the electric razor of a FULL METAL JACKET barber. All that's left is unpartitioned hard drive consciousness, all ready to be filled with more illusions and time-space impressions. The 'you' as you know it is gone forever, only the 'I AM' remains, and even that isn't yours anymore. 

On the other hand, how 'new' are the files uploaded onto your hard drive going to be, really?

But the big question is: THE WITCH, is it really scary? No. But I'm glad you asked. And I am glad the Satanists like it (1). The Satanists need a LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST to call their own.  If you came to the cinema thinking THE WITCH was just going to be another low budget horror movie, maybe you'd be floored by its clarity of focus and freedom from all the tired tropes. Maybe that would be enough. Sometimes a movie just has to be better at what it's trying to do than 95% of all the other movies trying to do the same thing. Sure, THE WITCH is not a masterpiece I'll want to visit again and again, but it's good enough that once I got home I had to unearth my DVDs of THE DEVIL'S RAIN, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, CITY OF  THE DEAD, and RACE WITH THE DEVIL, to see where it ranked. Those films may not be classics, but they are entertaining and, sometimes, even mildly scary. THE WITCH tries harder to say deep things than those films. Part of its effectiveness comes maybe from its set and setting: North America is where the devil never left. The deep woodsy tribes, the wild-harvest entheogens, the evil spirits called into existence by long dead tribal shamans to wreak vengeance on the long dead white man and his descendents, the 70s Hasbro Ouija board-summoned demons still loafing around dusty basement air hockey tables and candle-wax covered wooden planks, never sent back by the kids too freaked out at their floating planchette to say goodbye; the demons speaking backwards through heavy metal music lyrics to impressionable teens who huff glue when mom's at work. It's all connected.

We here in the States know what it is to be frothing at the mouth and running naked in the woods after one toke of jimson weed or a PCP-laced cigarette. We know too--even if only from waaay back in the 15th century--what it is to be hungry and afraid and lost in woods so dark and weird they've yet even to be on any map -- all those things helping the unconscious shucker loose from its floorboards and enhance perception of moving shadows. We know what it is to see things we have no name for, and so have to name them ourselves, even if we were 60% sure what we saw was just a shadow twisted into life by fear and hunger. That's why calling yourself a starving artist is redundant. As the brain gradually runs out of fuel it short circuits the electric fence circling our inner infernal pit. Insane on hunger and psychoactive side effects from when--in starving desperation--we ate whatever leaves or roots we found within reach of our trembling, emaciated pilgrim claws, ask any ghost show on TV and they'll tell you... right after the break. 

I well know too well that condition, and also the profound sense of deliverance prayer offers to the terrified woods-dweller. When I was 14, I spent a summer at a Presbyterian summer camp in the woods of Maryland, and all it took was some hogan-mate's mention of local devil creature 'the Goatman' crunching around in the leaves outside our campsite the night before and the Goatman became our collective obsession for the entire rest of my stay there. The crunching leaves at night news spread from fire to fire until the whole camp was infected with Goat Man fever and the counsellors thought we were all crazy. Our terror-fueled whistling in the dark at night led to sleepless prayers, first light of dawn gratitude, afternoon boasting how we weren't scared (though we were). The arts and crafts room became host to a dozen goat man shrines with a hundred depictions in sketch, marker and clay. We all slept with our bibles clutched tight in our sleeping bags. By day we all laughed, but late at night, after the fire had gone out we weren't laughing or even mentioning the Goatman in anything but a terse whisper. 

Then, after all that helpless anxiety, we prayed and sang around the campfire, the "One Tin Soldier" / Godspell repertoire in unison: grateful transcendent tears streamed down our faces.

We were delivered.

Neither the religion nor terror lasted beyond the end of our two-week stay (needless to say, there were no actual Goatman murders, tracks, or even glimpses), but I thought of those Maryland woods after seeing BLAIR WITCH and again after mulling over THE WITCH. There's other weird things that movie seems to have dredged up in me, also: the mom, played by Kate Dickie, looks an awful lot like my own mom (Nancy), who died last February. Incidentally, mom used to volunteer at the local 4H goat farm. Shortly after she died they named a newborn goat 'Nancy' in her honor.  There's a goat in THE WITCH, too. That's three distinct goat references connecting me, mom and America. 

Furthermore, as the onscreen mom went crazier and crazier onscreen I kept marveling at the similarity with my own mom, a victim of the destructive dogma of her own cult religion, Christian Science. If she'd gone to a NYC doctor she'd still be alive today, via the miracle of digitalis, which is derived from foxglove, and there's no atheist in a foxhole, which is why God made war and why the fox in ANTICHRIST says "chaos reigns" because a fox in an atheist hole is just another word for the devil. Maybe. 

My mom's religion denies the effectiveness of medicine, but for me, well, I take so much medicine I'm back around behind what I was afraid of confronting. It's not normal, but what is? I am called to the poison path by some witchy gene deep inside me (I'm a descendent of Mary Eastey on my father's side). Antithetical to Christian Science, I believe god dwells in medicinal herbs and tonics. With the right forest flower, fungus and/or toad enzyme, a seeker like me can seek council from powerful inner guides and fly around the ceiling over my prostrate body. I've done it enough to know it can be done. Since I leave my body behind during these travels there's no way to scientifically prove I went anywhere real. I'm still flying like a witch on a broom but science considers me merely hallucinating, dreaming or delusional now, They're right of course, but the human perception of matter as a solid is itself an illusion, and they'll espouse that, too, if cornered. Still, tis better to be dismissed as a stoner than stoned by a pilgrim mob.

Science can't handle when evidence is purely subjective, thank god, I guess, but THE WITCH makes clear why this rigidity of thought is so necessary to science's survival. When subjective description reigns over empirical evidence, western thought breaks down and shows its armor chinks and suddenly the devil is right there, bashing on the weakest point trying to get out. Lick the right toad, smoke the right flower, chant the right chant for long enough, drink a tea from the right root, eat the right mushroom, or do some combo of them, all in the right measure and at the right moment in your life, in the right company (or alone) --and thou will see far beyond the narrow sliver of the spectrum your senses normally access. You can travel beyond time and space. But if you do, you find you're like a five year-old wandering down by the creek unchaperoned at a family picnic; the devil goose awaits your visit. Lord knows what he wants to do to you while he has your attention.

Science can only watch on the dock and say, "that's nice, Erich, but it proves nothing." Habeus Corpus. If you want mom to watch you dive, you have to bring your body to the board.

On the other hand, eat the wrong mushroom or root (or even too much of the right one) and you're dead, which is also a way of moving beyond time and space, but then you'll never even know for sure you went anywhere as you'll have no place to come back to. So, if you're ever empirically dead or just astral traveling, remember this: the devil only notices you if your soul's pure, white and shiny. A little dirt-stain sin is the best camouflage, mom, so don't bleat a word to me about my both-ends candle-burning, especially considering your own painfully unmedicated and preventable death. Dying to the sound of prayer is one thing, but refusing yourself the solace of a hospice-strength morphine-benzo cocktail to ease the transition? In my religion, that's heresy. ++
-------------
NOTES:
1. I should preface by saying there is no such thing as an 'official' church of Satan; it's not organized the way, say Catholicism is. Anton LaVey was a genius self-promoter who saw a void and filled it with the C. of S. but he was just a (self-professed, which is why I like him) carny charlatan with a love of whiskey, circus memorabilia  and mannequins. As Aliestar Crowley himself said:

The Devil does not exist. It is a false name invented by the Black Brothers to imply a Unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions. A devil who had unity would be a God … ‘The Devil’ is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes …

 But devil worship needed a face, for the media to personally dislike; LaVey knew cannily filled it. 

2. By the same token, fans of HP Lovecraft roll our many eyes when someone mentions seeing a copy of the real Necronomicon, for there is no such book --or wasn't when Lovecraft first mentioned it within his 30s pulp stories (and his fellow Weird Tales writers borrowed it with his blessing for their own stories). BUT weirder things have happened, like the Nazi-run Thule Society believing Bulwer-Lytton's Vrill: The Coming Race or Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.

Tammy Grimes (Horror at 37,000 Feet) 

LINKUS DIABOLI 

Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #5: Sympathy for the Devil (2009)

1. CinemArchetype 5: The Human Sacrifice

2. CinemaArchetype 17: The Devil

3. CinemArchetype 20: The Three Sisters 

Sharon Tate - Eye of the Devil

Satanic Blondes of '66: INCUBUS, EYE OF THE DEVIL

Bitches' Sabbath: WITCHING and BITCHING

SHINING Examples (Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror)

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY

Shat(ner) on the Altar: DEVIL'S RAIN, HORROR AT 37,000 FEET

Acid's Greatest Horror #1: ANTICHRIST 

Katherine Ross - The Legacy

10 Reasons THE LEGACY (1978)

Her Iron Age Druid Bog Mummy Alcoholic Badass Self: THE ETERNAL

Genealogy of Flies: LORDS OF SALEM, HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

B is for BURN, WITCH BURN

Netflix of the Witch: THE CRAFT, ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, THE PUNK SINGER

Guide to TV's Paranormal / Ghost Hunting TV Shows

Give me My Skin! BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW and the Devil Films of the 70s (David Del Valle)

Misterioso Blu Review: PUMPKINHEAD (1988), LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973)

"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."                                                                                    --- Nietzsche

LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE

(1973) Dir. John Hough

 ***

A serious-minded, less campy, grumpier, more sexually experienced ground level update of Bill Castle's House on Haunted Hill, the British horror film Legend of Hell House (based on a Richard Matheson novel) was once seen often on late shows on weekend TV movies by kids like me. I remember seeing it at slumber parties (before VHS existed so it was just 'on'). We seldom made it to the end before falling asleep or losing our UHF reception, but what we saw scared us silly. While the plot seems kid stuff--a disparate group of people paid handsomely to spend awhile in a very haunted house--it's not just for 70s slumber parties or skeletons on strings, not anymore. Now, with Shout's new Blu-ray, Hell has taken over the adult wing and expanded to a big dark, beautiful monster ready for closer inspection - and man is it pretty. Cinematographer Alan Hume delivers near Bava levels of warm, dusky, painterly light, and shows special magic capturing the the translucently pale skin of the two actresses, giving them an 'alive in the firelight reflection of the rose red wallpaper' glow that makes them look sexy as hell yet creepy, untamed, assertive, even dangerous.

Pamela Franklin (upper left) proves herself a master of slow simmer emotional build-up as Florence the psychic (is this a sequel to her role as the child "Flora" in The Innocents (1961). Am I the first to make that connection?); Gale Hunnicutt is Ann, wife-assistant of Dr. Barett (Clive Revill) and quite prim by day, but open to wild sexual possession at night. The men, on the other hand, are buzzkills. Barrett is self-righteous prig who thinks ghosts are just psychic energy without personality or form, easily dispersed by a magnetic pulse generator, which he's bringing over later, so considers Florence's reports of spirits in the house with scathing condescension. Roddy McDowall is in the Elisha Cook Jr. role (i.e. he's the only survivor of the last such sleepover party) so spends most of the film drinking and tossing off cryptic remarks about their inevitable doom, without any of Cook's dreamy hipster disconnect (instead he's just snippy). They've all been hired by a dying millionaire (who's trying to determine "once and for all" if there's life after death) to to spend a week in the "Mount Everest of haunted houses," the Winchester-ish estate of sadistic, decadent (and long-dead) munitions magnate Earnest Belasco. Past investigations have been calamitous, but when has that ever stopped an intrepid ghost hunter earning $100,000. for a week's sitting around?

Does this dying bastard really figure setting up some investigators for a week in a haunted house will answer the age-oldiest question once and for all? It would be hilarious if it wasn't played so grouchy-dead straight.

Fans who hate when a ghost movie wastes time with character development and other bits of business will rejoice over Hell House, for--like Castle's Haunted Hill--the credits have barely begun appearing before the chosen four are creaking open the gate and entering the very fog-bound manor, the house looming above them, all ominous. Instantly setting the mood, it never returns to exterior daylight, or any of those piddly-ass subplots or cliche patronizing fake-outs where the monster in your room disappears before the witnesses can answer your screams so they all think you were only dreaming. Or what about those tired scenes of incompetent detectives being called in, or sunny daytime shots trudging out to the local church, to see stodgy vicars? Or Cockney horse trainers skulking tiresomely around the grounds, peering around corners while chopping wood with scary axes? Not this house, sisters. And it's all based on what might, one day, be real life paranormal events! In a forward blurb, Tom Corbett, 'psychic consultant to European royalty' notes that “although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bounds of possibility, but could well be true.” Or as Criswell says in Plan Nine, "Can you prove it didn't happen!?"

As the allotted week of investigation goes on, the days and times click by on the bottom of the screen in a kind of countdown of dread, approaching and passing Dec. 25th, though no one mentions Xmas. The randomness of the dates and times adds to a feeling of authenticity and also enhances the sense of endless night and gloom; it might only be 4 PM tea time or 9 AM breakfast, but it all feels like one long night in this mostly windowless, dark strange mansion, which they mostly never leave. Kubrick was undoubtedly inspired by this sense of time's mounting irrelevance for his sporadic use of of similar 'time stamps' ("Tuesday"!) in The Shining.  What better endorsement do you need? Another influential aspect is the throbbing echo-drenched diegetic distortion score by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hogdson of 'Electrophon Ltd.' Pitch-shifted somewhere between Forbidden Planet's 'electronic tonalities' and the avant garde echo-cussions of 70s thriller-period Ennio Morricone, it's so weird it's sublime. It may well have influenced some of the wilder music choices in Shining as well.

Another thing I love in a ghost film is when it totally doesn't waste time debating whether ghosts are real or just figments of a suggestible mind, which is usually a big problem in American and British films. Here the supernatural is a given-- even Dr. Barett believes something's happening-- so the argument can finally move from an 'if' to a question of whether actual personalities survive beyond death or just a form of psychic residue which we instinctually anthropomorphize. Dr. Barett thinks it's all just projected psychic energy, void of personality or soul, and pissily accuses Florence of creating it, unconsciously or not. Florence thinks the activity is being generated by the spirit of the evil Mr. Belasco's walled-up son. In the dead of night, to liven things up, Mrs. Barett sleepwalks, possessed seemingly by the ghost of a major nymphomaniac. When she glides down the stairs or makes sudden appearances in the far corner of the frame, in flowing hair and nightgown she generates an autonomous sultry frisson that's quite unforgettable. Sexually frustrated by her cold fish husband while conscious, asleep she tries to seduce McDowell and get him into an orgiastic menage a trois with Franklin. Modulating a slow burn from smiling self-possessed enigma to furious flesh-rending maenad cannibal, Hunnicutt is simply outstanding here. McDowall, on the other hand, just stands frozen in these scenes like he's not even tempted by this hot babe in her ghost-flowing lingerie. Instead, he just waits patiently until she's at maximum pitched intensity to slap her, as if he has no interest in helping anyone with their big scenes, or trying to do a decent job, or even feigning interest or even homosexual panic. No wonder British women are so sexually assertive, with such men as these for pickings! And why is Roddy even there in the scene? They may as well as put a suit of armor in his place, or a life-size cardboard cutout. Mainly he stands around and waits through almost the entire film until nearly everyone else is dead before he finally steps up to the bat, shouting whole pages of plot point denouement at the ghost of Belasco. Wind howls, doors rattle, and the tenor of McDowell's voice rises and rises to match it. Finally you can sense the phantom residue of Vincent Price rouse from its chewed-scenery nest, proving once and for all, you dying rich sponsor, ghosts is real!

Too bad Revill's smarmy know-it-all doctor makes sure that no one gets along, bonds, or laughs until then. You could offer him a coffee and he'd snarl at you for your stupidity in believing caffeine is the answer when it's merely a placebo for the feeble minded. He curtails all attempts at camaraderie and as a result the cast all keep to themselves, reacting to each other's presence only with shouts and slaps, demeaning disbelief, and worried condescension. It's enough to make one long for the cozy lesbian flirtations between Lili Taylor, Catherine Zeta Jones and Owen Wilson in The Haunting remake. In fact, I know it's heresy, but I'll see that movie again any time, while this this film for all its thick atmosphere, beautiful photography, superb Brit thesping and spooky effects, makes the criminal mistake of forgetting spookshows are supposed to be 'fun'  -- hungover bitchiness never helps generate repeat business.

The Shout Blu-ray does what it can to allay the damage, bringing out the full gorgeous eerie textures and depths of the film. Extras include a genial 'talking shop'-style interview with John Hough, wherein he notes that Disney hired him to direct Escape to Witch Mountain based on his work in Hell House, and there's a repetitive if interesting commentary track with Franklin. She mainly says that Hunnicutt and McDowall kept to themselves while, surprisingly, she and Revill got on famously and that the cinematographer took forever with his lighting, using every single light he had in every single shot, to the point the crew would start hiding lights from him in the cupboards. Though the time spent was clearly worth it, and thanks to this spiffy Blu-ray upgrade, every shot is suitable for framing.

PUMPKINHEAD

1988 - dir. Stan Winston

***

Lance Henrisken is (unsurprisingly) strange, muted, a tad poetic and A-gaming through this EC comics-esque B-backwoods monster tale. As the woodsy general store/gas station owner and bereaved single parent Ed Harley he's the type of character we usually only see in the beginning of a horror film, cryptically warning the teenage weekend campers not to go too far from the highway, before spitting tobacco at their feet and wiping his hands on a filthy oil rag. This time the equation's reversed: the visiting teens are the bad guys, kind of, killing his son (by accident) and spurring old Ed to backwoods vengeance. Surprisingly complex for a monster film, director Winston lets us see both the rudeness of the snotty suburban teen interlopers through the local's eyes and the sheer grimy otherness of the locals through the suburban teen eyes --in fact there wouldn't be a more even-keeled look at the rural-vs.-suburb/city divide in horror until Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. 

The down-ramp of all that though is the usual 'get to the monster already' agitation, that is, unless we're wise enough to lean back and absorb the incredible lighting and lived-in detail, which we can more easily do with Shout's gorgeous new Blu-ray. Now we can see the full magic hour-heavy breadth of cinematographer Bojan Bazelli's genius, how he makes the outdoors seem like indoors, and vice versa, how he makes the backroad country seem pregnant with menace the way Dean Cundey did to the suburban streets in the original Halloween. The first sight of the old witch's cabin as the sun sets, for example: with its orange light shining through the windows, captures an uncanny stillness in the air, as if the whole natural world is hushed and waiting to see what old Ed Harley's gonna do. Using natural candle light and lanterns in rustic cabins, and eerie crosshatches of moonlight and diegetic headlights, flashlights, and lanterns for the outdoor nighttime shots, Bajelli conjures a very Halloween-ready mood that never really survived the journey to the small screen in previous video editions. Now we can savor how how the poetic-realist folktale touch is gradually applied, luring the story from rural revenge saga afternoon, to dark setting sun fairy tale, to nighttime blue-filter monster movie.  I don't mind that it seems to take forever to get started now that the photography glows so duskily and the details of the vast spooky graveyard pumpkin patch can be pored over like we're right down in the muck with Ed. Now too we can see the details of the old crone in her cabin (where on VHS it was all just an orange darkness): her old age makeup makes her look like Freddy Kruger's blind aunt crossed with Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932)!


The rest of the cast is pretty interesting too, now that some of the actors have become minor stars: Devon Odessa (Sharon in My So-Called Life) and Mayim Bialik are two of the barefoot backwoods children a-teasing their small brother with the Pumpkinhead poem chant (there's always one kid who's afraid to hear it. As Tracy, Cynthia Bain is luminous and resourceful: her youth and beauty in stark contrast to the dirt-stained roughness of the locals and even the lesser mortal sheen of her fellow teen co-stars. The pastel 80s fashions and terrible headbands are guaranteed to provide uncomfortable shivers to anyone who remembers an anguished teenagerhood spent amidst Springsteen bandanas, jean jackets, aerobics wrist bands, and stone-washed seamless jeans. Me, now I rejoice to see them, signifiers as they are of pre-CGI monsters to come (vs. the CGI revolution of the early 90s, with its khakis.

But even then, the real reason to see the film is Henriksen, with his ever-strange otherworldly air working in full step with Bazelli's color filters to make the overly familiar backcountry milieu neither hostile nor friendly in conventional ways, but as uncanny as an alien landscape. That his character's southern accent comes out strongest when he's really angry or upset is the mark of a truly subtle actor, as if the rest of the time his Ed Harley is trying to mask his mountain man roots. Only great actors bother to fill their B-roles like this with such layered lived-in termite detail.

That said, if the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts it's because, perhaps, it tries to be too nuanced, it forgets its purpose along with the way. As with Hell House, it's not the kind of 'fun' ride that leads us to demand sequels (though they sure came). If the teens were cooler and the demon was loosed on them for some ridiculously small slight--one of them shoplifted a candy bar or something--it would chill us far more more, which is the point. Also, the idea that any boy wouldn't be keenly aware of the path of those motorbikes, wouldn't be asking to ride one, or at the very least be watching in awe as they jump, is just hard to believe. It would have worked far better if it was a stray bullet from a drunken backyard target practice or somethign. And it never makes sense why Harley wouldn't go to the cops, or his neighborhood drinking (or AA) buddies, especially him being a small business owner where success depends on being sociable and developing repeat customers, or that he wouldn't first try confronting the kids directly, taking revenge himself, or at the very least find some other recourse to be exhausted first. Not to make light of losing your kid, but no matter how aggrieved he got I don't think any man would leap to the demon conjuring option first, without even considering other saner options, especially when he well knows the consequences. Even worse is Harley's second guessing himself, trying to welsh after the first grisly murder, running back to the witch to demand she lift the spell, then to his neighbors to demand they help him kill it when that doesn't work. All this after he demanded they tell him where to find the witch in the first place and they wouldn't. I don't blame them a bit for keeping their doors barred to his pleas. You made your bed now lie in it, Ed Harley!

Such qualms might irk, but they might also melt away once one sees the film a few more times. Its earthy folktale aspect, its devotion to minute atmospheric detail (the lived-in dirt of the rural clothing and faces), its sparingly ominous synth music, the myriad facial expressions and unique movements of the monster, the eerie stillness in the exterior magic hour photography, the way the monster uses the lifeless bodies of its victims to smash in doors and windows, the way it travels with his own whirlwind of leaves, fog, and crackling lightning, it all adds up big time now that it can all be appreciated in its ultimate HD expression. 

Extras include a lively fun commentary track with the special effects guys, and you can tell they had a blast making the film and love pointing out all the strangely-placed puppeteer eye holes, and the cuts that alternate the monster between live-action puppet, stop motion miniature, mechanical head or arm, guy in a suit, and animatronic dummy, sometimes all in a single action. My favorite detail was hearing them point out that the guy wearing the monster suit in some of the walking scenes was deliberately trying to move in the style of Harryhausen's Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth (i.e. a human in a suit aping stop motion animation!) and that in certain spots his sneakers were visible and had to be masked out. There's also a dozen or so talking head interviews, including one with a moist-eyed, breathless, possibly insane Richard Weinman, some great VHS tape monster suit test runs, and a tribute to the late, great Winston.
---------

All in all, Shout's loving care (via their Scream Factory offshoot) and Blu-ray remastering help make these two minor horror films into 1080 HD works of art. Maybe in the end all the needless killing has been worth it, for we are living the dream of every movie lover who died before the advent of this format. I know I dreamt of such things as a monster lover kid. I even wrote a paper in junior high school advocating the importance of creating a widescreen TV, dreaming of perfect vivid picture and giant screens while reading Famous Monsters of Filmland instead of playing kickball --they always picked me last, so why wouldn't I spurn them?. I wonder if I'll have to pay some hellish price for my anamorphic HD Blu-ray wildest dream wishes coming true... Whatever it is, I'll pay it, Ed Harley!

This Sweet Cesspool: PSYCHOMANIA (1973)

This month, Severin releases the seminal entry in the once ubiquitous zombie biker genre, PSYCHOMANIA (1973), a British production in which director/writer Don Sharp made sure the cuts matched and the pacing didn't lag. Alas, he forgot other things, like where the negative was. It's lost, so we'll never get to see this in super duper high... def. On the other hand, who needs def-ness? The story of bikers who commit suicide and return as zombies (that look and act exactly like they did when they were alive), PSYCHOMANIA is a film best seen with your glasses off, the image refracted through rows of empty bottles, and one eye covered so you don't see double. I mean that in the best of all possible ways. It scored a cult following in spots where it played a lot on late night TV, I'm guessing in the UK, I certainly never saw it that way. But  I can imagine stumbling over it at three AM - after being out a rock club at, like 18 or 19, and getting that super giddy Columbus kinda feeling. Expecting a wild living dead vroom vroom kind of trip in advance though, big mistake, unless you're only idea of being bad comes from watching The Monkees or the Bay City Rollers (remember their TV show?)

What strikes me as super strange first off is the notion that a bunch of birds and laddies on motorbikes can ride through workaday British shoppers and harass the locals and only one bobby e'er shows up to stop 'em. Special note to bakery delivery guys carrying unrealistically tall stacks of cake boxes and bread: if you hear a roar of a passing motorbike gang, wait in the shop until they pass. And if you're up on a ladder in the middle of the lane, get down! Then again, reality is not high on the menu in PSYCHOMANIA. Instead it flatters the palate of the sugar-addicted adolescent, making up in vandalism and chipper death cult romance what it lacks in meat, fiber, and coherence. It's like some obliging DEATH RACE 2000 pin jockey has arranged these people in their path just to dramatize that this gang don't care, man, they're destructive.

And it still begs the question: if our pale redheaded heroine Abby is so worried about her leader of the pack late boyfriend being back from the grave and urging the gang to kill themselves so they can come back immortal and indestructible and all, why does she too participate in all the hooligan destruction? She's a 'good' girl... when it suits her. And since when do hippies terrorize locals and/or punk rockers sing like Donovan at the Renaissance Faire? Was British youth culture really so hodge podge slapdash that one size fit all? I mean, like how punk used to encompass everything from what today is known as Hardcore, Goth. Emo, and Indie, to alt-Country? Only the toad in the mirror knows..."ribbit."

"Lick me and see the world."

Anyway, it's through the unholy power of a 100-year old graveyard toad (plucked at the gang's Stonehenge-ish hang-out spot), the mojo of the family's Satanic butler (a post-stroke George Sanders) and Tom's being buried vertically astride his bike (as per his bequest) in the center of said Stonehenge-ish graveyard, that he's able to roar up from his grave, spewing dirt and exhaust and run down a passing pedestrian on his way to bigger slaughters. This is all beautifully rendered in bloodless offscreen violence. You would think after being covered in dirt and decaying for awhile, possibly even filled with formaldehyde (aye, many a toad's suffered that fate), his white scarf might at least be a weensy bit dirty, but wrong ye'd be, mate. Were the make-up man to e'er stir from his pint lunch slumbers, Tom's face might evince a ghastly pallor. But this isn't that kind of zombie movie. In fact, without everybody saying so, you'd have no idea Tom has been dead at all or anywhere but to his tailors to get his leather pants tightened.

Not only in this but countless other areas does Sharp's vision betray a semi-refreshing lack of familiarity with actual bikers, mods/rockers rivalry, Satanists, zombies, or hippies, whether in films, books, or real life. He does know solid BBC thriller pacing so there's competent camera movements around craftily posed but decidedly unmangled or overly bloody corpses, making PSYCHOMANIA kid-friendly, at least in this lone surviving print, if you don't mind your kids beholding super fake deaths, and you shouldn't.

That's another thing: a motorcycle, a relatively small one especially, is not a particularly good murder device. I doubt that the baby in the carriage about to get run "over" in the grocery store invasion (above) will do anything but scream in delight over being bumped around in his stroller. Any idiot with a little toreador experience can just step to the side, hold out the arm and smack these upstarts right into the milk section.

Then again, clear thinking has no place in the world of PSYCHOMANIA. It rides to its own destruction. No... wait, now it wants to go somewhere else. Brummm BrumMM!

The whole biker film genre has always ranked fairly low in my esteem, just above the bottom rung of women in prison films and 1980s sex comedies. I never understood the appeal of watching a bunch of motorcycles ride this way and that, hearing them make loud nosies as their riders set about harassing innocent beachgoers and raping housewives until Cameron Mitchell finally fights back. I got nothing against motorcycles other than they're too loud and remind me of my brother, Fred. That's his world; he's got it covered. I mean it would be different if these Living Dead lads were realistic bikers. Real bikers work on their bikes, like all the time, covered in motor oil stains and signs of hard living. These Living Dead yobs all have clean fingernails, maybe even manicures. They don't get soot on their white scarves from riding around without a windshield. Their little skull eye visors (at right) are cool but clearly a detriment to peripheral vision, something usually all important for self preservation, or spotting pedestrians to run over.

And where you gonna go with it? Most biker films end when the bikers all go 'too far' and someone is dead, and it's your fault, Society! The friend of the leader is usually shot by the cops or killed by the leader himself in a heroic last-minute switchblade flickering rejection of his gang's sadistic credo. Well, PSYCHOMANIA decides to go way past that marker, crashing through the black magic looking glass windshield into places only Jimmy Page, Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Anger know of, and since none of these guys are in, or were involved with, the film, you could say that yes, it doesn't know where it's going. The body count is probably around sixty by the end but we don't see a single death, or moment of Zen maintenance.

Luckily there are more than a few saving grace elements at work here: Sanders' old butler makes the youth-age divide less a factor in who's cool vs. uncool, since even at 64--slurring from his debilitating stroke and deeply depressed--he's still twice the badass of any of these young 'Living Dead' louts. Sanders was so badass in fact he actually committed suicide a year after finishing the film. That's meta, baby, meta. And he left the second best note in all of Hollywood:

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

Thanks George, we'll need it. And your last film seems to prefigure your sad end as it is all about suicide being painless, and considerable celluloid is unspooled happily detailing the methods of each member: One jumps out of a high rise window; another fails to link up his parachute; the annoying red-haired stepkid jumps off a bridge into oncoming highway traffic; Abby uses pills, and has the most psychedelic and scary of interludes after she's overdosed. The drugs kick in and things go weird: suddenly can't tell if the pills worked and she's dead, or dreaming, or has come back from the dead, or is awake or asleep. She watches as George raises a sacrificial knife over her heart, while she herself stands to the side. She's in two places at once! She's being replaced... by herself, William Wilson Style. Or will being killed while undead return her to the living? Or was it all a scam cooperated by the devil to steal her soul? Is she going to be buried alive with only a smiling George Sanders to know the undead Abby is not the real undead one? Dude, that's so Salvia!

So yeah, despite the dopey flaws there is some great legitimately trippy stuff at work here, including a nice if derivative rock score (70's cop show funk rumbling offset by sitar-tinged fairy folk revivalism) and Buffy-esque twists that tie the horror in with social anxiety, i.e. what if your suicide doesn't work and you get left behind by your gang of undead biker friends? In other words: suppose all your friends have jumped off a bridge... are you going to follow, or go home to mom and dad like a punter?

Tied to Kenneth Anger by Hollywood Babylon suicide, biker subculture, and black magic, PSYCHOMANIA would be good on a bill with both LUCIFER and SCORPIO RISING. An alchemical melting pot triple feature like that might get the mods, rockers, spacers, heads, kids, wankers, punters and snottabies together like only Cyrus (the one and only) could have if goddamned David Patrick Kelly hadn't shot him, and then blamed it on another cross-pollinated sub-cultural outfit, THE WARRIORS.  

The 'Living Dead' gang beats out the Warriors however as the most glaringly guilty of voting 'undecided' on its sub-cult policy, especially during Tom's wake, presided over by barefoot hippies and a barefoot minstrel warbling a little tune about a mighty hero who went too fast too soon for this uncaring world. Hippie-o, you freak, Tom was, on every level there is, a grade-A dickaholic, and now you sing his praises like he was James Dean?  Put down that guitar and pick up a meat cleaver! Run down some random pedestrians like a real zombie biker instead of just kind of brushing by the cliche'd establishment signifiers with your scooter and hoping they'll kindly pretend to fall over dead. What do I pay you kids for? Most of these actors aren't going to kill themselves! Chop! Chop! Vroom Vroom!