Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 47

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

What to say about The Lair of the White Worm? It’s wonderful, for starters. On the one hand, I wish that I had seen it years ago, and on the other hand, I’m glad that I managed to miss it for all this time, so I could have the joy of experiencing it fresh when it randomly showed up on Netflix the other day.

Striking the right balance in a horror film can be a surprisingly tricky proposition, especially when you’re dealing with the kind of subject matter that Lair not only deals with but revels in. And while the balance that Lair strikes may or may not be the right balance, it is certainly its own, and I loved it. Violent at times without being grotesque, goofy and over-the-top while at the same time surprisingly subtle. (The characters getting tangled in various white tubing was great.) It has the lurid psychosexual and religious motifs that are apparently the director’s trademarks, and they’re handled in sequences that are often as delightfully surreal as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s also very, very British, starring a very young Hugh Grant in something like his fourth film role.It’s got a giant monster, snake people, ancient buried evil, myths and legends proving partly true, archaeology, and at least a few lead characters who are in it to solve the mystery. And it’s got maybe the best theme song you’re likely to find in a horror flick:

With a few goofier names thrown in, the story wouldn’t feel out-of-place in Lovecraft’s ouevre, though it would probably be even more at home among the writings of one or another of his less celebrated Weird Tales contemporaries. It actually comes by way of Bram Stoker, with liberal doses of the story of the Lambton Worm (song included).

This was my first direct exposure to Ken Russell, though I’ve heard a lot about him. I hear The Devils is probably his best film, but I have to admit that, after seeing Lair of the White Worm, I’m extremely keen to track down Gothic, about the famous night at the Villa Diodati that gave rise to Frankenstein.

November 1, 3:07am

Once again, Halloween has come and gone, and we’ve got a whole year to wait until it comes around again. Normally, this time of year leaves me feeling melancholy, but this year has been remarkably good. We’ve had an open house over the weekend, which has kept me busy and extended the feeling of the holiday through the beginning of November. Also, a realization that I had sometime last year is helping out a bit, too. In thinking about the tradition of ghost stories at Christmas, I realized that looking at Halloween as the end of a spooky season had it all backward. Halloween is the gateway to the spooky season, when nights are long and cold, and everyone huddles around the light and tells stories of why they’re afraid of the dark. November and December are ghost story weather, it’s as simple as that.

So this year I’ve tried to view the passing of Halloween as the beginning of the ghost story season, and that’s already helped to make the days a little brighter gloomier, and the nights a little spookier, so we’re off to a good start.

13 of my Favorite Horror Movies (That Never Make These Lists)

It’s the time of the season when everybody starts trotting out their lists of favorite horror movies. I’ve tried doing those in the past, and maybe one day I’ll try an exhaustive one again, but this year I was just thinking about the problem with those lists, which is that they’re always populated by the same bunch of movies. The classics are classics for a reason, after all, and chances are they’re going to fill anybody’s list of favorites. So this year, I thought I’d focus on a few of my favorite horror movies that probably wouldn’t normally make anybody’s top-ten list. Are these the best movies out there? Probably not. Are they even my favorites? Maybe a few. But they’re all movies I love, and they’re all movies that tend to get forgotten. So here they are, in descending order by release date, to prevent me from having to pick favorites:

13. House of Wax (2005)

I am as surprised as anyone to have liked the 2005 remake of House of Wax. It’s really, really outside my wheelhouse, and while I’m admittedly a little obsessed with wax museum stories, that really shouldn’t be enough to get it a place on my DVD shelf, or on this list. But as I said at greater length around this time last year, it’s just surprisingly good. Director Jaume Collet-Serra brings a giallo approach and a Gothic sensibility to what is basically a backwoods slasher flick, and manages to come out the other side with a movie that I like way more than I probably should.

12. Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

Is it a horror movie? A martial arts film? A costume drama? It’s all of the above, and probably a little more besides. Brotherhood of the Wolf is one of those movies that hits almost all of my obsessions. It’s what would have happened if the weird martial arts Gothics like Captain Kronos (later on my list) had become an actual genre, and it manages to be even weirder by explaining away the seeming monster than it would have been had there actually been a werewolf or something, which is a feat not easily accomplished!

11. Night of the Creeps (1986)

Of all the movies on this list, this is probably the one that you’re most likely to see on some other favorite horror movie list, but I don’t see it on enough of them, so here it is anyway. Monster Squad director Fred Dekker’s first feature, and a movie that just gets better and better every time I watch it.

10. The Stuff (1985)

Hands down the best movie about killer yogurt that you will ever see!

9. Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

John Carpenter does his best Hitchcock in this surprisingly effective–and charming–made-for-TV thriller.

8. Piranha (1978)

Any number of Joe Dante movies could probably go onto any list of my favorites, but Piranha holds a special place in my heart, and is nowhere near as well-regarded as other favorites like Gremlins 2. There are a lot of reasons why I love Piranha, but to sum it up in just a few words: unnecessary stop-motion fishman!

7. Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974)

I love all Hammer films, pretty much without exception. Any list of my favorite films could almost always include all of them, and the only reason they don’t is usually because I’m incapable of picking favorites. When it comes to weird movies that I absolutely love, though, Captain Kronos is a special case. One of the most unusual vampire movies ever made, it’s also full of absolutely beautiful touches. My favorite is the part about the toads!

6. It! (1967)

Roddy McDowall does his best Norman Bates–while also sort of feeling like a Lovecraft protagonist–as a museum curator who stumbles upon a golem and uses it to do his bidding, in the second film in our lineup with an exclamation point in the title! There aren’t enough golem movies out there to begin with, so any one we get is a gem, and this one is a gem of unusual luster. It starts out pretty strange, and gets a lot stranger before the final credits roll.

5. The Comedy of Terrors (1963)

Though not actually based on anything by Edgar Allan Poe, Comedy of Terrors certainly belongs in the same spiritual company as the Corman/Price/Poe films of which it is a contemporary. While a lot of Halloween lists do (and should) include great Corman/Price/Poe films like Pit and the Pendulum (my personal favorite), Comedy of Terrors is often unjustly overlooked. Which is a shame, because it is fantastic. Boasting a cast that includes Price, Peter Lorre, a hilarious Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone, with a script by Richard Matheson and the great Jacques Tourneur behind the camera, Comedy of Terrors isn’t exactly a horror film (as the title might suggest), but it’s a perfect flick for a rainy October evening.

4. Matango (1963)

It should be pretty obvious that I love fungus monsters, and if I could convince everyone in the world to watch one movie that they’ve probably never seen, it would be Matango, also known by the wonderfully lurid titles Attack of the Mushroom People and Fungus of Terror. 

3. The Undying Monster (1942)

The first–and least–of three suspense flicks that John Brahm made for Fox in the 40s and that are available in this great collection. The other two are better regarded and, frankly, just better films. Hangover Square, in particular, is a masterpiece. But The Undying Monster is my unquestioned favorite, sending a host of arrows straight to my heart. There are paranormal investigators, a supernatural mystery, and little almost M.R. Jamesian touches with the family history and curse. It also boasts what might be the most delightfully ridiculous of all the “rational explanation” endings that plagued the movies of the time.

2. Doctor X (1932)

One of only a few movies filmed in two-strip technicolor, there has never been a movie that felt more like the cover of a pulp novel than Doctor X. The pre-code storyline involves cannibalism, mad scientists, “synthetic flesh,” a big creepy house on the cliffs, and just about everything else you could ask for. It’s like a Richard Sala comic come screaming to life!

1. The Old Dark House (1932)

Quite simply one of my favorite movies of all time. I’ve talked about it over and over again, going as far as writing an introduction for the novel it’s adapted from, so I’ll refrain from talking about it here. The whole thing is available on YouTube, so if you haven’t watched it before, you should do that tonight:

“The air itself is filled with monsters.”

Last night, I sat in a full theatre and watched Bride of Frankenstein on the big screen. This morning, I woke up to gray, rainy weather. The day before my birthday, and two days before Halloween, and it finally really feels like October.

There’s nothing left to be said about Bride of Frankenstein, and if there were, I probably wouldn’t be the guy to say it. I love the movie by now, unabashedly, though I think Son or maybe House of Frankenstein are my sentimental favorites of the Universal Frankenstein flicks. Bride has so much great stuff going on, though, and for all that Elsa Lanchester is beautiful and iconic and amazing as the titular character, the best contribution that it made to Frankenstein canon, for my money, is the equally iconic Dr. Pretorius (“no such name”), who appears at the door as a figure of death as if summoned, and takes Frankenstein away from his marital bed to help him make monsters in the night. Whose name is invoked again and again, as if to conjure him. Who comes from nowhere, and who gets all the film’s most wonderful lines, save maybe a few gems left to Karloff’s monster or to Elsa Lanchester playing Mary Shelley in the beginning.

I went with a group of friends and fellow writers, at least one of whom had never seen the movie before. He had the same stupefied reaction that I’ve observed in everyone–myself included–who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Bride with for the first time. It’s just that kind of movie.

In the opening sequence of Bride, Lanchester’s Mary Shelley is prompted by her husband and Lord Byron to finish the tale of Frankenstein’s monster on a dark and stormy night, which she agrees to do, saying, “It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters.” If that phrase doesn’t sum up Halloween perfectly, I don’t know what does. I’ve said before that Halloween is the one time of year when the world in real life most closely resembles the way it is in my head all the time, and I remember Eric Orchard once saying, “I could always use more bats and jack-o-lanterns in my world.” That goes double for me.

I’ve got one more post planned before the season is over, but the next couple of days are likely to be busy, so if you don’t hear from me again, happy Halloween all, and I hope you watch at least one scary movie and read at least one spooky book to commemorate the occasion.

The Witch’s Mirror (1962)

That. Skeleton.

As promised, The Witch’s Mirror kind of has everything. Starting off with an opening narration over Goya paintings, it wastes absolutely no time getting into weird supernatural happenings, and the first scene introduces the titular mirror and also showcases the film’s predilection for low-rent in-camera effects, as the witch and her goddaughter watch a sequence of weird scenes in the mirror, including a masked figure in a cloak, a melting hand, and a skull in a wig.

Just one of an array of weird horror films from Mexican cult director Chano Urueta, The Witch’s Mirror is a perfect example of those kinds of movies that are always playing on TV in other, more recent movies. It’s the kind of thing you’d turn on at two in the morning, not have any idea what was happening, but images from it would stick with you forever.

The gist of it will be familiar to anyone who’s seen any of the Vincent Price/Roger Corman Poe adaptations, though it predates or was concurrent with most of them. The wronged wife even looks somewhat like some of the women who would play similar (though often more sinister) characters in those films. A man murders his wife to be with another woman, but the new couple are haunted by inexplicable happenings, and things go grotesquely wrong from there. The addition of an out-and-out witch orchestrating the supernatural events from the get-go in order to get vengeance for her murdered goddaughter, though, allows the movie to go pretty quickly to some pretty weird places.

The end product feels a lot like somebody trying to synthesize pretty much every horror movie pre-1960 into one film, and like I already said, it has just about everything: A witch, a ghost, tarantulas, an overgrown cemetery, a piano that plays on its own, a premature burial, the severed hands of a pianist that, yes, inevitably wind up leading to a good old fashioned crawling hand scenario.

Through a sequence of events, the murderous husband’s new wife becomes horribly burned, and he becomes obsessed with rebuilding her from the bones up using flesh from dead women that he gets by robbing graves, of course! And in the mean time, the burned woman wanders around the big, dark house wrapped in bandages, her creepy, doll-like head one of the film’s most genuinely striking images.

Mostly, The Witch’s Mirror succeeds on the level of one brand of camp or another, thanks in part to its catalog of different special effects, but there are some genuinely effective moments, sometimes in unexpected places. An early scene of the witch speaking to the demon Adonay, who appears in the corner by the ceiling wrapped in sheets is actually pretty spooky!

October Reads

Lots of people have favorite books that they re-read every year at about the same time. Perennial October classics include Something Wicked This Way Comes and–with a very special place in my heart–Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October. Last year, I contributed a story to the Lovecraft eZine‘s Night in the Lonesome October tribute issue.

For me, the annual October traditions are more likely to involve movies than books–I try to watch Monster Squad (1987) and Trick ‘r Treat (2007) at least once a year around this time, along with other seasonal fare–but I try to get into the Halloween reading spirit as well. This year, my workload is ensuring that I do less reading than I usually might around this time, but I have been making my way back through Junji Ito’s classic Uzumaki, which just got a fresh hardcover release.

It’s worth noting that a year or two back Neil Gaiman started up an All Hallow’s Read campaign, encouraging you to “give someone a scary book for Halloween.” This is an idea that I can wholeheartedly get behind. So if you’re looking for some good scary books to hand out to folks, I’ll toss out some suggestions of a few recent ones that I’ve enjoyed that seem particularly germane to the season at hand.

Valancourt Books are purveyors of fine Gothic and other out-of-print and hard-to-find titles, ranging from horror to pretty much anything else. They’re fine folks, and they used to be local here in Kansas City, and they’re going to be releasing, just in time for Halloween, The Monster Club by R. Chetwynd-Hayes. I’ve never read the book, but I’ve seen the movie, and I’m mostly familiar with Chetwynd-Hayes as the guy whose stories inspired flicks like it and the Amicus anthology picture From Beyond the Grave.

I’m particularly fond of Valancourt because they also released another book that would make a great Halloween treat: J.B. Priestley’s Benighted, for which I wrote the introduction.

Back on the subject of books that I haven’t read yet, I haven’t yet knocked out Adam Cesare and Matt Serafini’s All-Night Terror, but I have no doubt that it’ll be a perfect read for the season, and at a price that can’t be beat. Also, how could you resist that premise?

Now on to books that I actually have read! I just finished The Halloween Legion, which is a cute, pulpy comic book that’s equal parts 50s sci-fi film, early Fantastic Four comic, Ray Bradbury, and those live-action Disney flicks from the 70s, all with great art by Thomas Boatwright, one of my favorite artists and a guy who hasn’t yet hit as big as he really should. As I said in my Goodreads review, it’s really hard to go far wrong with a book that’s got a mummy, a zombie alligator, and flying shrunken heads all within the first two pages.

Earlier in the year I read and talked about my friend Ian Rogers’ debut collection Every House is Haunted, but it bears repeating. It’s one of the best horror collections I’ve ever read, full stop, and it’s got the perfect atmosphere for the autumn season. If the tastes of the people on your All Hallow’s Read gift list lean a little less toward the spooky and more toward the erotic or the hilarious or both (with still more than a dollop of spooky), you could do worse than to pick up Molly Tanzer’s debut A Pretty Mouth, which came out last year around this time. Molly’s one of the best of us, and she’s got a new collection on its way out from Egaeus Press, so you’ll want to snap this one up so that you can say you were reading her back when.

There are no shortage of other books I could recommend for your October reading edification, but I’ll run out of time and space long before I hit them all. Try Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s This Strange Way of Dying or John Langan’s brilliant second collection The Wide Carnivorous Sky. Looking for something from a variety of authors? Try Tales of Jack the Ripper, if you haven’t already, which features my story “Ripperology.” Red Jack may not be the first thing you think of when Halloween rolls around, but there’s plenty of fog and autumn chill in those pages, I can assure you.

And of course, I fancy that my own humble collection, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings would make a pretty solid late-October read, or All Hallow’s gift. This is my season, after all, and I like to think that my love for it, and for all things spooky and monstrous, comes through in all my stories.

Pseudopod Needs Your Help!

Pseudopod is the horror podcasting arm of Escape Artists, Inc. who also do the science fiction podcast Escape Pod and the fantasy-themed Podcastle. All three are fine sources for excellent audio fiction, and all three are in some trouble. Their listener base has been growing substantially, but their paid subscribers haven’t kept up, and all three are in danger of shutting down by the end of the year if they don’t raise some much-needed funds. You can hear more about it at the Escape Artist’s metacast.

My personal experience has been with Pseudopod, who have been kind enough to podcast two of my stories; “The Worm That Gnaws” way back in 2009, which remains my favorite reading of any of my stories that I’ve ever heard, and “Black Hill,” my Lovecraftian oil field story back in 2011. Working with Pseudopod was a great pleasure both times. Their editors were friendly and easy to work with, and their readers were absolutely fantastic. They’re a great voice in the landscape of online horror fiction, and one that we’d all be poorer for having to do without, so if you’re a listener consider throwing a few bucks into the hat, and if you’re not a listener already, consider checking them out today.

“Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Perfect Crime” (1957)

Nobody epitomizes the perfect actor for Halloween better than Vincent Price. Over the years I’ve seen most (though still not all) of his films, but luckily for me, he also did quite a lot of television work over the years, so I’ve always got new Vincent Price gems to stumble upon. Today, I stumbled upon his one and only (so far as I know) collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents from October 1957 entitled “The Perfect Crime.” (Not to be confused with earlier AHP episode, “A Perfect Murder.”)

The episode itself, besides the distinction of being the only collision between these two titans of the macabre, is also one of only a handful of Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes actually directed by the master himself. It’s pretty much a two man show between Price and James Gregory. Price plays a smug detective, who speculates with Gregory’s defense attorney character about the perfect crime, while also bragging a bit about the successful solution of his latest case. It’s a bit like Rope at times, though never as intense, but Hitch does manage to start the tension going early on, and keep ratcheting it up even as the conclusion of events because more and more inevitable. And while Hitchcock provides his usual droll and highly improbable account of how the killer was caught in his outro, it seems a lot more likely that he got away scott free.

I watched the episode on Netflix, where it’s available streaming alongside a number of other episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but if you’re inclined to see it and don’t have Netflix, it also appears to be up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. Typically, I prefer my Halloween treats to be a little more spectral, with a little more mist-shrouded moors, decaying churchyards, and the like, but for a mid-October appetizer, or if you prefer your spooks to be of the parlor room murder variety, it’s a definite treat.

Personally, I really liked the element of the detective’s trophy case. I’ve always liked the idea of great detectives keeping souvenirs of the crimes they solved, of Black Museums and the like. It’s always been one of my favorite things about Batman, and one that’s sadly never been used well on film. I love the version of the Batcave that’s got giant pennies and robot dinosaurs lying about. The trophy case in this film isn’t as garish as all that, but I do want to know more about the case involving that creepy little doll…

It Has Begun

Seriously, ten days into the month of October and I haven’t posted even one single time? I am the worst Countdown to Halloween participant ever. I blame looming deadlines, and unexpected vet visits, and adjusting myself to the rhythms of freelancing. Mostly, though, I’m probably just bad at this.

Unfortunately, we can’t really expect it to improve much, though I’m hoping to have a few festive surprises up my sleeve for you before the month is out. Thus far my October festivities have mostly included getting my Halloween decorating done at last (check out my Instagram for some photos), seeing The Monster Squad at the Alamo Drafthouse the other night, buying a box of Boo Berry cereal (I couldn’t find Yummy Mummy or I’d have gotten that), and watching seasonally-appropriate films when I had the chance. Last weekend, I spent a little time catching up with Carl Kolchak, whose acquaintance I’d never before had the pleasure of making.

My October is shaping up to be pretty busy, in almost entirely good ways, but apologies in advance if you don’t see much of me around here. I’ll try to make those appearances that I do manage hopefully at least count for something.

On “Under the Shadow”

It’s not really a subject that I’ve talked about a lot here, but I grew up with tabletop wargaming. Warhammer was probably my biggest introduction to the fantasy genre. I didn’t have the money to play very often, and I never collected a lot of miniatures–and certainly lacked the patience and skill to paint up those I did have–but I read the books voraciously, and inhabited those worlds more than perhaps any others, save maybe those of superhero comics.

By the time I encountered Privateer Press and their Iron Kingdoms setting, I had moved as a writer away from fantasy stuff to the darker corners of the horror genre. But the Iron Kingdoms and the games set therein reminded me of what I had fallen in love with in the first place, and IK quickly became one of my favorite settings of anything, ever. I played for a while, dabbling in Mercenaries and falling in love with Trollbloods before finally settling on Gatormen as my default faction. I even bought a few of the miniatures, though I’m still no good at painting them. And once again, I read all the books I could get my hands on, voraciously.

Recently, Privateer Press unveiled a newly-minted fiction publishing arm in the form of  Skull Island eXpeditions; putting out ebook stories and novellas in the Iron Kingdoms universe. To say that I was pleased when they approached me to do some work for them would be the understatement of a lifetime.

The first product of that collaboration has now seen press. My story “Under the Shadow” is one of four stories in Called to Battle, an anthology of tales concerning solo characters from the Iron Kingdoms. Mine concerns General Gerlak Slaughterborn, a blighted trollkin who hails from the Cryx faction, an army of necromancers and undead robots that is exactly as cool as that sounds. I loved writing “Under the Shadow,” and found plenty of room to explore some of my own pet themes within the bounds of the Iron Kingdoms setting.

One of my favorite things about the Iron Kingdoms is how they handle dragons. Rather than the fairly generic critters that populate many fantasy settings, the dragons of the Iron Kingdoms are borderline Lovecraftian in their antiquity, power, and scope. Consequently, one of the things I enjoyed most about working on “Under the Shadow” was exploring the relationship between Slaughterborn and Lord Toruk, the first dragon and god-king of Cryx.

“Under the Shadow” was only the first of what I hope to be many pieces I do for Skull Island and Privateer Press, and the subject of dragons is one that I’m looking forward to exploring more in future stories. Keep an eye on this space for more news on that front. In the mean time, if you’re curious for an introduction to the Iron Kingdoms, there’s worse places to start than Called to Battle, which you can pick up from their website now.