Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 7

Drinking with Skeletons

In 1892, three cabarets/theme restaurants opened in fin-de-siecle Paris, each one based around a different depiction of death and the afterlife. These morbid, macabre, and often titillating escapes had antecedents as well as contemporary parallels and modern successors, but there was nothing else quite like them before or since.

All three have taken on a sort of mimetic second life on the internet in recent years, as postcards of the distinctive architecture of especially the Cabaret de l’Enfer have made the rounds online, often with little context. Indeed, for context on any of the three “cabarets of death,” one must turn to Mel Gordon’s posthumously published book of the same name.

As a horror writer by both inclination and trade, I am possessed of something of a macabre bent, and so it is easy to lament not ever having gotten to experience any of these places in person. The Cabaret du Neant, with its combination of stage magic and moribund philosophy is particularly appealing to my own aesthetics, even while it is impossible to argue with the gaping “hell mouth” and demonic bas-reliefs which decorated the facade of the Cabaret de l’Enfer.

Rather than feeling sorry for myself about what could have been, however, I have tried to console myself with the fact that I can visit these amazing nightclubs of the past vicariously through Gordon’s book and, in so doing, I have also realized something else. While these “cabarets of death” may no longer exist, we actually do have modern equivalents that come closer to this experience than one might think.

I myself was lucky enough to visit New York’s famed Jekyll & Hyde Club at its location on the Avenue of the Americas some years ago, before it was closed down by COVID. For those who never made it to the club itself, you can get a small taste of it in a rather surprising spot: an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, in which Titus gets a job at a fictitious horror-themed bar that is clearly intended to stand in for the Jekyll & Hyde.

When it comes to Omaha’s Monster Club, I was not so lucky. It also closed down during the pandemic – likely never to return – before I ever got a chance to attend. But even as these less ephemeral inheritors of the mantle of the “cabarets of death” succumb to the inevitability of entropy, they are replaced with more transient examples of a similar idea.

Here in Kansas City, we have a spooky-themed pop-up bar called Apparition which materializes every year around Halloween. And it’s not alone. While they may not serve food and drinks, the Halloween haunted attractions that are as much a part of the holiday as bedsheet ghosts and grinning pumpkins are also relatives of the “cabarets of death.”

More recently still, in 2023, my friend and Horror Pod Class co-host Tyler Unsell launched a new spin on the pop-up bar idea. The inaugural Drinkaway Camp was a slasher-themed “pop-up experience” which combined the standard fare of themed drinks and decorated ambiance with games and interactive puzzles meant to lead to a more immersive affair overall. It was a big success, and future iterations (with different themes) are already in the planning stages.

I’m not actually a drinker, so there is very little to tempt me into most bars. But I am a connoisseur of morbid entertainments, and so these sorts of fascinating anomalies always attract me. Is it more fun to imagine the so-called “cabarets of death” that once haunted Montmarte than it would have been to actually go to them? Perhaps. But it is a lot of fun to imagine.

To Keep It Unholy

The first of November can be a particularly sad time for people like us. Halloween is “spooky Christmas,” after all, and for horror nerds and, most especially, those of us for whom Halloween, in particular, holds a special place, the long year that stretches out ahead of us, bereft of the comforts of pumpkins and bats, can seem barren indeed.

That’s why it’s more important now than ever to remember that Halloween is not the culmination of the spooky season – it is the doorway to it. We can talk all we like about Halloween being the one night of the year when the veil between worlds grows thin and “the dead might be looking in to sit by our fires of turf.”

But here’s the thing: Regardless of its actual origins or what the massive comercialization of Christmas might try to tell you, what Halloween really is is the last gasp of life before the world starts to die for the year. This is why, for me, Halloween is about a very specific kind of horror – why certain movies and books just aren’t appropriate for the Season of the Witch, even though they’re spooky favorites. Halloween is about whistling past the graveyard. It’s about scaring ourselves to remind us that we’re alive, at least for now.

From there, though, the days grow shorter, the nights grow tall, and it’s time for all of us to huddle close around the fire. As soon as the last of the pumpkin fires are extinguished, the ghost story season begins. Each day, from here until the solstice, at the very least, is a slow creep toward the grave, and a reminder that we are walking always in the footsteps of the dead, and that soon enough we will join them.

A person like me watches scary movies and reads creepy books all year round. A person like me celebrates Halloween with gusto and, perhaps more to the point, keeps it in my heart (and, in many cases, on my walls and on my person) the whole year long. But it’s also worth remembering that November 1st need not be a sad affair, but rather the beginning of a new season of dark nights and eerie stories that will carry us until the season of grinning pumpkins returns anew.

HALLOWEEN FOREVER!

“There ain’t no stop signs on the black road.” – Dark Harvest (2023)

Over the years, there have been lots of books that changed my life and influenced the path that I would take as a writer, that led me from there to here – wherever here is. One of those is Norman Partridge’s The Man with the Barbed Wire Fists from 2001.

I don’t know how I got turned on to Partridge in the first place, but The Man with the Barbed Wire Fists almost literally saved my life, helping to pull me out of a particularly dark place and reminding me of what writing was capable of, when you were willing to give it full throttle.

From there, I tracked down a lot (though probably not all) of his other published work, and devoured it as hungrily as the boys in Dark Harvest devour the innards of Sawtooth Jack. Which means that, by the time I got to his 2006, Bram Stoker Award-winning novella Dark Harvest – the place where most people I know first arrived at his work – I was already deep in Partridge’s writings.

When my second collection came out from Word Horde back in 2015, Norman Partridge was kind enough to give it a blurb, which remains one of the crowning achievements of my career as a writer.

A cinematic adaptation of Dark Harvest has been in the works for a long time. In fact, it’s my understanding that the film itself has actually been in the can for some time now. Like Trick ‘r Treat before it, the studio seemingly didn’t know what they had, and opted to just put it on a shelf for a while, then unceremoniously dump it into release.

Of course, Dark Harvest is no Trick ‘r Treat. If that movie was like an Amblin Entertainment picture gone sour, then this is the raging Halloween mask of a bildungsroman like The Outsiders. All metaphor for the dystopia that was and is small-town America.

As I said on social media right after finishing the movie, it’s been a minute since I read the novella, and though it is undoubtedly Partridge’s most famous work, it was never my favorite. So I can’t compare the movie with the book very closely, except to say that the ending was definitely changed in ways that honestly feel less cinematic, which is certainly puzzling.

While I can’t say how accurate Dark Harvest is as a literal adaptation of the book, however, I can tell you what it gets right about Partridge’s work in general: That sense that anything is narratively possible, if you’re bold enough.

Partridge always repurposed pop culture and greaser nostalgia into smooth-running engines in a way that felt absolutely effortless, but what he did that was much more important was to take swings that felt too big and make them, instead, seem obvious.

That’s something that David Slade’s 2023 version of Dark Harvest gets right, regardless of what else it may get wrong. Right or wrong, it’s a bold, weird, vivid, striking Halloween movie that is packed with punk rock references and feels like an engine thrumming underneath you the whole time. That the engine never really opens up and flies down the road is certainly a mark against it, but most movies never even get this far.

How to See Ghosts (or Surely Bring Them To You)

“This part of the book is for children who were born in the morning or around lunchtime. If you were born at midnight – some say just at twilight – you were probably born with the gift of being able to see ghosts and other spirits and don’t have to be told how.”

Back at the tail end of September, I posted a bit about what my October was going to be like. As part of that post, I linked to some of the stories I have available to read online that are set on or around Halloween, but I somehow forgot the most recent one.

How to See Ghosts & Other Figments is my latest single-author collection. Like all of my collections, it is, I think and hope, a series of fun, spooky stories. But also, more so than maybe any of my other collections, it is a book about longing. Because I think, for many of us who stare into the dark, there is as much longing there as fear.

Nowhere is that more true than in the title story, which borrows its moniker from a Vincent Price-narrated audiobook of ghost stories and other spooky stuff which, in turn, got its name from a book of poetry by Leah Bodine Drake, published by Arkham House in 1950. “How to See Ghosts (or Surely Bring Them to You)” may be the only published story I have ever written that doesn’t contain a speculative element.

It is, instead, about four friends who go to a haunted house (modeled on the real-life haunted houses that occupy the West Bottoms here in Kansas City) and, from there, a hotel room with an attached ghost story (modeled on the Muehlebach Hotel, here in Kansas City) where they have a seance. It is a story about unrequited love, about the chains we forge ourselves, and about wanting so badly for there to be something magical in the world, even and maybe especially if it is also terrible.

It’s also one of two stories original to How to See Ghosts that is set explicitly on Halloween, and deals directly with Halloween haunted houses. The other is “Old Haunts,” which is the one I forgot to include in my earlier roundup. A more traditional horror story about an aficionado of Halloween haunts who gets more than he bargained for in a run-down home haunt, “Old Haunts” was presented in audio form by Pseudopod last year, one of a long list of times that they have put out one of my weird tales.

There are several other pieces in How to See Ghosts that, while not explicitely set on Halloween, are probably pretty perfect spooky-season reading. “Masks” is a fragmentary little number about the shadow of old Hollywood. “Doctor Pitt’s Menagerie” features an attraction of sorts that shares a lot of DNA with a Halloween haunt, even while it is ultimately something very different. Even stories like “Prehistoric Animals” or “The Drunkard’s Dream” have Halloween-y moments – and they’re both pieces I’m very proud of.

I’m proud of How to See Ghosts overall, even while I think it has made the smallest splash of any of my collections so far. It’s perhaps the most mixed of them, the themes that tie the stories together less obvious at a glance. But they are there. Releasing the book in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic probably didn’t help, either.

If you’re looking for something to read this spooky season, why not give “Old Haunts” up there a try. If you like it, maybe pick up How to See Ghosts from Word Horde. Who knows… maybe you’ll even see one?

“Just say you aren’t scared. Just say how brave and nonchalant you’d be if you ever saw a ghost, and see what happens.”

“Forget all these old bugaboos…” – Flesh and Fantasy (1943)

I don’t know where it was that I first saw stills from Flesh and Fantasy, but I’m going to guess that it was courtesy of Richard Sala, who turned me on to plenty of these old movies.

The stills you see are always from the first segment, which takes place during Mardi Gras. It makes sense, because the first segment, and especially the beginning of it, is as visually striking as the film ever becomes – and more so than most films ever get. In the opening sequence, in a moment like a pantomime of hell, masked figures dressed as specters and demons drag a drowned body from the river.

Originally, the body was to have belonged to an escaped killer (Alan Curtis) who perished in a storm in a sequence that was mostly shot but ultimately not included in the film. It was, instead, eventually expanded into the 1944 picture Destiny which, at the time of this writing, I have never seen.

Besides the opening sequence of the masked figures, there are also plenty of stills of the mask shop where our ostensibly homely protagonist (Betty Field) gets a mask that makes her beautiful for a night. Of the film’s three segments, it is the one that is most a morality play, but the beauty of it is not limited to the mask shop or the figures at the beginning – see, for example, one gloriously-staged dance sequence set at the Mardi Gras party.

The opening may be the segment that is most remembered for its stunning visuals, but it’s probably the least interesting of the three, and the one least concerned with the film’s overall preoccupation with the conflict between free will and determinism.

The strongest sequence definitely belongs to Edward G. Robinson, who plays a lawyer who is told by a palm-reader at a party that he is going to kill someone. When the fortune-teller’s other predictions seem to be startlingly accurate, he becomes fixated on the idea of knocking someone off to “get it out of the way.”

The segment is based on a short story by Oscar Wilde, “Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime,” and is as close as the movie actually gets to a horror story – which is still fairly far away. Instead of horror, all three segments could better be classified as slightly spooky melodramas, all concerned with fate, destiny, dreams, portents, and the like.

The third segment stars Charles Boyer and Barbara Stanwyck. Boyer plays a high-wire performer with a particularly dangerous act, who dreams of falling and subsequently worries that he may have lost his nerve. When he encounters the woman who was also in his dream onboard a ship bound for New York, he begins a whirlwind romance with her that also leads him to try to determine whether or not he believes that he is master of his own destiny.

While the segment with Robinson is the best of the bunch, and engages in some striking visuals, it is probably the least visually interesting. Just as the first segment had its incredible Mardi Gras tableaux to fall back on, the final segment has some extremely memorable images of the circus.

All this is wrapped up in a framing story (tacked on at the last minute) which sees two fellows in a gentleman’s club each discussing the various merits of dreams, fortune-telling, superstition, and so on.

Flesh and Fantasy is, by no means, the first film of its type – director Julien Duvivier had made Tales of Manhattan just the year before, for example – but it is a notably early one, and acts as a good companion piece to something like Dead of Night, even while it is never as iconic or as horrific as that picture.

I was hoping, based on the stills I had seen, that it would make good October viewing. And it certainly doesn’t make for bad October viewing, but I would kill for a movie from this era that captures the look of Halloween with the same vividness with which this one captures Mardi Gras.

Haunted Season

Tomorrow is the first day of October. To the surprise of absolutely no one, October is an important – and busy – time of year for me. And, as always, I have a lot going on this October, from hosting movies to attending movies to a variety of other activities.

And that’s not even mentioning all the new stuff that’s coming out to watch, read, see, and do this month that I’m excited about. I’m going to be busy, is what I’m saying. And one of the biggest things I’m doing is covering haunted houses for The Pitch. I’ve already posted a sort of round-up to get you started, and I’ll be keeping a “haunt diary” there all month long if you want to follow my byline.

If you’re local, then odds are you’ll see me around Stray Cat or the Screenland Armour sometime this month. Besides a bunch of other movies, I’ll be at Nerdoween for the ninth year running on October 7, catching an Analog Sunday double feature on October 15, and of course the Horror Pod Class will be going all out this month as we host the WNUF Halloween Special on October 25 – and that one is, as always, completely free!

Most years, I also participate in the Countdown to Halloween, and try to watch at least one horror movie per day for the entire month of October. This year, in part due to the previously mentioned busy schedule, I’ll not be doing either of those things, though I still plan to keep the season in a number of ways. For one of those, I’ll be reading a bunch of suitably spooky books for teenage and young adult (and mid-grade) readers, and you can follow along with that on my Instagram. We’ll see how many “a bunch” ultimately turns out to be.

Aside from that, this is my first Halloween in my new house, and while I haven’t been able to go quite as “all out” on the decorations as I had hoped, I do feel like it’s coming along. There’ll be more photos of that on my Instagram as the month progresses, too.

Finally, the spooky season is a time when a lot of people read spooky books – and sometimes give them as gifts to friends and family. If you’re thinking of doing any of the above, I have written a few spooky books, as you may already know, and my latest one is How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, which even features a couple of Halloween stories that saw print there for the first time.

If you read How to See Ghosts – or any of my other books – this is also a great opportunity to leave a review someplace. And if you’re new to my work and have found your way here for some other reason, I’ve got a few Halloween stories that are free to read online in various places.

“Goblins” was originally published as a new piece in the deluxe edition of my first collection, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, from Strix Publishing. It was later read in audio form at PseudoPod for the holiday. Similarly, “Screen Haunt” made its first appearance in It Came from the Multiplex from Hex Publishing, and was performed on PseudoPod for Halloween. Finally, “The All-Night Horror Show” is available to read online at The Dark, where it first appeared, though attendees of the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird may remember me reading an early draft of it there a few years ago.

Teaching an Old Skeleton New Tricks

I am an old hand when it comes to Halloween haunts. I have been going to them for as long as I can rememember, and they have always been comfort food to me. When I was a kid, I would spend all day at the Joyland amusement park in Wichita, riding the Wacky Shack dark ride over and over and over again.

I love haunts, and I’ve traveled far to attend them, which makes it ironic that I had never been to the Halloween Haunt event at Worlds of Fun, despite having lived here in Kansas City for going on twenty years. In fact, I’m not positive that I had ever been to Worlds of Fun, full stop, before I made it out for the media night preview of the Halloween Haunt last week.

Though I was dimly aware of the Halloween Haunt, I think I had always written it off, imagining it to be something like a spooky Renaissance faire, where costumed scare actors wandered the park and spooky music was piped in over the PA system or something. I didn’t expect actual haunts nestled in among the rides. I certainly didn’t expect seven of them.

I went to Worlds of Fun as a representative of The Pitch, prepping for a month of haunt coverage to coincide with the Halloween season. As a member of the press, I was absolutely feted by the folks at Worlds of Fun, who treated me to their new Zombie Boo-ffet offering, which was a massive, all-you-can-eat banquet prepared by a very enthusiastic resident chef. Honestly, my greatest regret of the evening is that I didn’t arrive hungrier.

From there, my friend Tyler Unsell and I were allowed to explore the park and its various haunts at our leisure. As is always the case, I am told, the evening began with the Overlord’s Awakening, a parade of ghastly ghouls that kicked off the park’s transformation into haunted wonderland.

As I said, I wasn’t really expecting haunts qua haunts at all. And so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the haunts at Worlds of Fun are a match for just about any that I have ever attended. In rigor, each one is a notch or two below something like the Beast or Edge of Hell, Kansas City’s famous landmark haunts, each of which are multiple stories. But there are, as I mentioned, seven of them.

Themes include a zombie high school, a vampire-infested manor and crypt, a slaughterhouse, a house on the bayou, the streets of Whitechapel haunted by the crimes of Jack the Ripper, a creepy corn maze, and a village that has been overcome by a pumpkin curse. Each one has high points, and each one probably takes about 20 minutes to explore.

They are also surprisingly gory. The other thing I had assumed about the Worlds of Fun event was that it would probably be bowdlerized. “Family friendly.” But these haunts were every bit as grisly as any I have attended, with the slaughterhouse, in particular, giving the most gruesome a run for its money.

This is less a sales pitch for the Halloween Haunt at Worlds of Fun – already an extremely popular Halloween staple here in Kansas City – than it is an opportunity for me to admit when I’m wrong. I had always overlooked this particular venture, in spite of my fondness for haunted attractions, and when I finally went, I had a blast.

It’s always nice when things work out that way…

X Marks the Spot

I think I first got to know Ross Lockhart – please correct me if I’m wrong about this, Ross – after he bought a reprint of one of my stories for The Book of Cthulhu II, which would put it around 2012.

Not too long after that, Ross launched his own publishing imprint. The first book published by Word Horde was Tales of Jack the Ripper, which came out ten years ago to the day – around three days ago. (I’m a little late making this post.) My story “Ripperology” appeared in there.

Since then, Ross has continued to be my most frequent publisher. I’ve had a story in very nearly every anthology that Word Horde has released, the sole exception, I believe, being Amber Fallon’s Fright into Flight. Perhaps more to the point, Word Horde has published my last three short story collections, all those I have put out since they launched.

The first of those – and my second collection full-stop – was Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, released back in 2015. Since then, Ross has put out two other collections of mine, most recently How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, which was released just last year.

Ross and I are also working together on another project. Something that isn’t a short story collection, but I can’t say more just yet. We should be announcing it very soon, though, and I hope my readers will be excited.

I’m excited and proud to have been such a big part of Word Horde’s first decade. Ross has always treated me and my books well, with generous promotion and work behind the scenes that ensures that my books always look amazing. Besides the books with my name on or in them, Word Horde has published a wide array of great titles that I highly recommend.

Word Horde’s first ten years have been filled with unforgettable books, from John Langan’s The Fisherman to Scotty Nicolay’s And at My Back I Always Hear, and many more besides. Word Horde authors include Molly Tanzer, Nadia Bulkin, Scott R. Jones, Livia Llewellyn, Kristi DeMeester, Craig Laurance Gidney, S.L. Edwards, Nicole Cushing… the list goes on and on.

Recently, Ross and company also opened up a physical bookstore, the Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic, where they sell much more than just Word Horde titles. Indeed, the Emporium traffics in just about everything suggested by that moniker. I haven’t gotten a chance to visit the physical store in Petaluma, California just yet, but I hope to someday. And in the meantime, here’s to many more years of Word Horde goodness!

Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Dinosaurs

When I was a kid, I had a VHS copy of Planet of Dinosaurs that I bought from a flea market. According to Wikipedia, “The film’s director, James K. Shea, instructed most of the budget to be spent on the special effects for the film, which included an array of award-winning stop motion dinosaurs, leaving little money for props or even to pay the main actors.” Certainly, the stop-motion dinosaurs are what I watched it for.

Years later, while watching It Follows, I was struck by the footage of some old sci-fi movie that the characters were watching in the film. Eventually, with the help of Nick Gucker, I was able to identify it as the 1962 Russian film Planeta Bur or, more likely, one of the two Roger Corman-released recuts of it, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet from 1965 or Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women from 1968.

Neither (none?) of those movies is particularly good but, like Planet of Dinosaurs, the original Planeta Bur (and therefore also the other films made using its footage) has some really striking special effects that deserve to be seen.

What do these movies have in common? They all belong to one of the smallest subgenres that is still robust enough to justify the name: films about astronauts who crash land on planets that are populated by dinosaurs.

As movies editor at Exploits, my job, primarily, is to source a 350-word essay each month about some movie. During my tenure there, we’ve covered everything from Mad Love to Mermaid in a Manhole and many more besides.

When David Busboom pitched me an essay about the subgenre of spacemen vs. dinosaurs, I wanted badly to take it. There were just a couple of problems. One, we generally reserve Exploits essays for covering a single movie, rather than a subgenre. Two, and more importantly, there was no way he could bring it in under 350 words.

Normally, I don’t have anything to do with the editorial side of things over at Unwinnable but, since Unwinnable and Exploits are sibling publications, I figured it would be a good idea to reach out to them and ask if they would be interested in taking David’s essay on. Luckily for me (and for you, I think), they were.

Stu Horvath, publisher at both mags, asked if I had any suggestions for a cover artist. Besides a few vintage comic book covers with old-timey spacemen pointing rayguns at dinosaurs, I blueskyed one of my favorite artists, Alan Cortes. Even more luckily for me (and for you, I think), he was game for the assignment, and turned in a cover frankly even more perfect than I had imagined.

All of this is a (very) long way of saying that I had nothing to do with writing the essay in the latest issue of Unwinnable, nor with drawing the cover. But I am proud of my small contributions toward bringing all these very talented people together under one proverbial roof, and extremely excited to share the results with all of you!

And, of course, this issue of Unwinnable is, as always, packed to the gills with great writing on a variety of subjects pop cultural and otherwise, and is well worth your time even if you are (somehow) not a fan of astronauts fighting dinosaurs.

“I myself have heard the rattling of chains” – Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959)

Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is a frustrating, goofy, pointless mess that barely remembers to have a ghost, a dragstrip, or a hollow – and yet, I had a lot of fun while watching it, and isn’t that the truer measure of whether a movie is “good” or not?

Apparently not, if you believe most of the reviews. Dennis Schwartz claimed that, “This one stinks even for AIP,” while TV Guide called the script “deformed.” And they’re not wrong. At once mash-up and spoof of monster movies, haunted house movies, juvenile delinquincy movies, and hot rod movies – often American International’s own output in all of those genres – Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is plotless to a degree that most experimental films never manage.

The premise seems simple enough: A Los Angeles hot rod club gets evicted from their clubhouse because they can’t pay the rent. That their clubhouse involves a cartoonish cajun cook and a band that fires off guns while they perform goes unremarked upon. Ostensibly because they are looking for new digs, they eventually wind up exploring a purportedly haunted house where they immediately throw a Halloween costume party that gets crashed by a (fake) monster and a (real) ghost.

Here’s the thing, though: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow isn’t interested in any of that. No ghost or haunted house is even mentioned until around 40 minutes into the film’s 65-minute running time. Instead of a plot in any meaningful sense, we get an endless series of subplots. Weirder still, none of those subplots are ever resolved.

Our delightfully charming female lead has a rivalry with the unfeminine girl from a rival club (or maybe former members of the same club, I’m unclear). The rival club shows up several times a la that scene in Anchorman just to create pointless tension. All of this is apparently resolved off camera, with our lead simply saying that she doesn’t think they’ll “bother us anymore,” leading at least one Letterboxd user to assume she murdered them – which does not actually seem impossible.

Our lead, played by Jody Fair, is in trouble with the law because of a duel with her rival, and in trouble with her square of a dad who both doesn’t like her hot rodding and doesn’t like her seeing boys. “You’re approaching womanhood,” he tells her, during the most weirdly erotically charged birds-and-bees discussion you can imagine in a ’50s movie. “I’ve got news for you,” she replies, “I’ve arrived.”

The generational divide between Jody Fair’s character and her dad occupies vastly more of the film’s running time than the haunted house, and yet that subplot is dropped like a hot rock as soon as the haunted house subplot begins, and her dad is never seen again.

Even the haunted house, which is theoretically meant to solve the problem of their not having a clubhouse doesn’t really seem to do so. There’s a monster creeping around the place and a real ghost, before all is said and done, and I guess once both of those are taken care of – the monster unmasked, Scooby-Doo style, the ghost exorcised by rock ‘n’ roll music – the gang can use the haunted house as their new headquarters, but the movie barely pays any attention to any of that.

The monster is the suit from The She-Creature, a more straight-faced if no more inspired AIP creature feature from three years before, and it is worn by Paul Blaisdell, who designed that critter as well as plenty of others for AIP. When the monster is unmasked, rather any of the characters we have thus far met in the movie it is, in fact, Paul Blaisdell, playing himself, sneaking around the house in a monster suit because he is angry that AIP didn’t use him in Horrors of the Black Museum.

“I scared you to death in The Day the World End,” he snivels into the camera. “You shivered when you saw me in She-Creature. Oh the shame of it, the indignity! They didn’t use me in Horrors of the Black Museum after my years of faithful service. They just… threw me away!”

Ironically, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was pretty much Blaisdell’s last film, making his non sequitur motivation weirdly prophetic. The real-life ghost in the house is equally pointless, and only shows up for one scene at the very end.

What the film is really all about are gags and teen lingo and musical and dance numbers. There are countless visual gags. There’s a foul-mouthed parrot. There’s more innuendo than a bawdy limerick. The nerdy hot rodder invents a talking schlepcar powered by artificial intelligence and dry ice, apparently. There are at least four full parties, including a slumber party where the girls all watch TV that inexplicably reverses itself and employs inappropriate sound effects. There are several complete songs and lots and lots of teen dancing – and even more “ginchy” lingo. Here’s an example:

“It’s not a chop, kitten. I purr you. Why, I’m not just makin’ sound waves. Like, if you werent’ jacketed, I’d move in. ‘Cause you’re a dap. I mean a real dap!”

If that’s all Greek to you, don’t worry. Context clues will usually get you through and nothing that happens ever matters anyway.

Back to the songs for a minute; at one point one of the girls holds up a record long enough for the audience to see that it’s from American International Records – interestingly enough, a real thing. AIP launched a record label around the time the movie came out, and the songs from this film were among their first pressings.

There’s not a convenient place to fold it in, but the sexuality of this picture is something else. Even among the juvie movies of its era, its fairly tame as far as its actual content, and even progressive in the form of Jody Fair’s character, who is “more interested in hod rods than hot romances.” Sure, there’s innuendo to spare – at one point, the nerdy hot rodder wakes from a nap and tells his girl, “I dreamed I was an 18-cylinder motor. It was wonderful. You should have seen my driveshaft!”

But, like most of the rest of the movie’s qualities, its erotic energy is more vibes than actual content. The aforementioned “talk” between Jody Fair’s character and her dad is one good example, but an even better one comes from the nerdy hot rodder and his girl. The latter is played by unusually tall former Miss New York Sanita Pelkey, who had been a showgirl before going into acting. The vibe of their relationship – where she is equal parts girlfriend, mother, and dom – must be seen to be believed.

There’s even a halfhearted attempt at some sort of theme. Russ Bender plays a newspaper reporter who is doing a series of articles on hot rod culture – another subplot that is shortly forgotten. In explaining it at one point, though, he describes how “kids these days” feel like they have to grow up fast because, “They’re not sure there’ll be a tomorrow.”

It’s somehow a lot and yet not much, all at the same time. And that’s Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow in a nutshell.

“This place is loaded with ectoplasm, isn’t it?”