Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (French pronunciation: ​[ɡʁɑ̃ ɡiɲɔl]: “The Theatre of the Big Puppet”) – known as the Grand Guignol – was a theatre in the Pigalle area of Paris (at 20 bis, rue Chaptal). From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, it specialized in naturalistic, usually shocking, horror shows. Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre (for instance Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil), to today’s splatter films. The influence has even spread to television shows such as Penny Dreadful.

Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was founded in 1894 by the playwright and novelist, Oscar Méténier, who planned it as a space for naturalist performance. Méténier, who in his other job had been a chien de commisaire (a person who accompanied prisoners on a death row), created the theatre in a former chapel, the design keeping many of the original features, such as neo-Gothic wooden panelling, iron-barred boxes and two large angels positioned above the orchestra – the space was embellished with further Gothic adornments to create an atmosphere of unease and gloom. With 293 seats, the venue was the smallest in Paris, the distance between audience and actors being minimal and adding to the claustrophobic nature of the venue. The lack of space also influenced the productions themselves, the closeness of the audience meaning there was little point in attempting to create fantastical environments, the illusion shattered immediately by the actors breathing down their necks – not that there was any room on the 7 metre by 7 metre space for anything much in the way of backdrops.

The Guignol from which the theatre and movement took its name was originally a Mr Punch-like character who, in the relative safety of puppet-form, commentated on social issues of the day. On occasion, so cutting were the views that Napoleon III’s police force were employed to ensure the rhetoric did not sway the masses. Initially, the theatre produced plays about a class of people who were not considered appropriate subjects in other venues: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins, con artists and others at the lower end of Paris society, all of whom spoke in the vernacular of the streets. Méténier’s plays were influenced by the likes of Maupassant and featured previously forbidden portrayals of whores and criminality as a way of life, prompting the police to temporarily close the theatre.

André de Lorde

By 1898, the theatre was already a huge success but it was also time for Méténier to stand to one side as artistic director, a place taken by Max Maurey, a relative unknown but one who had much experience in the world of theatre and public performance. Maurey saw his job to build on the reputation the theatre already had for boundary pushing and take it to another level entirely. He saw the answer as horror, not just the tales of the supernatural but of the realistic, gory and terrifying re-enactments of brutality exacted on the actors, with such believability that many audience members took the plays as acts of torture and murder. Maurey judged the success of his shows by the number of audience members who fainted, a pretend doctor always on-hand to add to the pretence.

The writer of the majority of the plays during this period was André de Latour (later de Lorde), spending his days as an unassuming librarian, his evenings writing upwards of 150 plays, all of them strewn with torture, murder and what we would now associate with splatter films. He often worked with the psychologist, Alfred Binet (the inventor of the I.Q. test) to ensure his depictions of madness (a common theme) were as accurate as possible. Also crucial to the play’s success was the stage manager, Paul Ratineau, who, as part of his job, was responsible was the many gory special effects. This was some challenge, with the audience close enough to shake hands with the actors, Ratineau had to develop techniques from scratch, ensuring that not only were devices well-hidden but that the actors could employ them in a realistic manner, without detection. A local butcher supplied as much in the way of animal intestines as were required, whilst skilfully using lighting helped to make the scenes believable as well as aiding the sinister atmosphere. Rubber appliances made suitable spewing innards when animal’s were not available and several concoctions were devised to simulate blood, ranging from cellulose solutions to red currant jelly. Actual beast’s eyeballs were coated in aspic to allow for re-use, confectioner’s skills employed to enable the eating of the orbs where required. Rubber tubes, bladders, fake blades and false limbs were also used to create gruesome scenes, though on occasion these did prove hazardous – reports detail instances where one actor was set on fire, one was nearly hanged and yet another was victim to some enthusiastic beating from her co-star, resulting in cuts, bruises and a nervous breakdown.

The actors themselves were not especially unusual – they were performers taking work wherever it came. There were a few stars of note – Paula Maxa (born Marie-Therese Beau)  became known as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal” or, if you prefer, “the most assassinated woman in the world”, an appropriate claim for an actress who, during her career at the Grand Guignol, had her characters murdered more than 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways and raped at least 3,000 times. Maxa was shot, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, flattened by a steamroller, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, had her innards stolen,  stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, crucified and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses and kissed by a leper, amongst other treats. Another actor, L.Paulais (real name, Georges) portrayed both victim and villain with equal skill and opposite Maxa in every one of their many performances.  He once commented that the secret to the realistic performances was their shared fear. The actress Rafaela Ottiano was one of the few, perhaps even only, original actors in the theatre to transfer to the Big Screen, appearing in Tod Browning’s Devil Doll (1936).

At the Grand Guignol, patrons would see five or six plays, all in a style that attempted to be brutally true to the theatre’s naturalistic ideals. These plays often explored the altered states, like insanity, hypnosis, panic, under which uncontrolled horror could happen. Some of the horror came from the nature of the crimes shown, which often had very little reason behind them and in which the evildoers were rarely punished or defeated. To heighten the effect, the horror plays were often alternated with comedies. Under the new theatre director, Camille Choisy, special effects continued to be an important part of the performances. Many of the attendees would barely be able to control themselves – if they weren’t fainting, they were quite possibly reaching something approaching orgasmic fervour, private booths being extremely popular to allow some privacy for their heightened emotions. On occasion the actors were forced to come out of character to reprimand more excitable audience members. Some particularly salacious examples of plays performed include:

Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, by André de Lorde: When a doctor finds his wife’s lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor’s brain.

Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, by André de Lorde: Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a young, pretty fellow inmate out of jealousy.

L’Horrible Passion, by André de Lorde: A nanny strangles the children in her care.

Le Baiser dans la nuit by Maurice Level: A young woman visits the man whose face she horribly disfigured with acid, where he obtains his revenge.

Jack Jouvin served as director from 1930 to 1937. He shifted the theatre’s subject matter, focusing performances not on gory horror but psychological drama. Under his leadership the theatre’s popularity waned; and after World War II, it was not well-attended. Grand Guignol flourished briefly in London in the early 1920s under the direction of Jose Levy, where it attracted the talents of Sybil Thorndike and Noël Coward, and a series of short English “Grand Guignol” films (using original screenplays, not play adaptations) was made at the same time, directed by Fred Paul. Meanwhile in France, audiences had sunk to such low numbers that the theatre had no option but to close its doors in 1962. The building still remains but is used by a theatre group performing plays in sign language. Modern revivals in the tradition of Grand Guignol have surfaced both in England and in America.

Grand Guignol was hugely influential on film-making both in subject and style. Obvious examples include Prince of Terror De Lorde’s works being used as the basis for D.W. Griffith’s Lonely Villa (1909), Maurice Tourneur’s The Lunatics (1913)  and Jean Renoir’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1946). Others clearly influenced include the Peter Lorre-starring Mad Love (1935), Samuel Gallu’s Theatre of Death (1967), H.G. Lewis’ Wizard of Gore (1970) and Joel M. Reed’s notorious Blood Sucking Freaks (1975). More recently, More recently, Grand Guignol has featured in the hit television series, Penny Dreadful. The 1963 mondo film Ecco includes a scene which may have been filmed at the Grand Guignol theatre during its final years – as such, it would be the only footage known to exist.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

We are grateful to Life Magazine for several of the images and Grand Guignol website for some of the information.

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In the lacklustre Milton Subotsky production The Uncanny, Peter Cushing plays a man desperate to expose a sinister cat conspiracy against the human race: ‘They prowl by night… lusting for human flesh!’ Seemingly laughable… but an idea that possibly strikes home more than a similar theory about, say, dogs? For cats have always had a singularly spooky quality to them that has seen them both revered and reviled throughout history.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats as gods: to kill one was punishable by death and if yours was killed then the owner would shave their eyebrows in honour! On the other hand, in the middle ages, cats were often seen as demons or devils. Thought to be the familiars of witches (by virtue of often being the only companion of the poor old wretches who would be accused of witchcraft), many unfortunate moggies were hung, burned and stoned to death.

Undeniably, cats are odd creatures, at least by domestic standards. Independent and aloof, they often seem to stare at their owners’ inscrutably, almost contemptuously, before disappearing into the night. Their amazing athletic abilities and disturbing nocturnal cries only add to their aura of mystery. And there remains something strangely sexual about the image of the cat. Many films have used the word “cat” to conjure up images of the exotic and the mysterious, whether it be the sexy and seductive Catwoman, arch nemesis of Batman, or the outer space cuties of Catwomen of the Moon. It’s no surprise then that horror filmmakers have found them to be a rich source of inspiration.

The earliest “cat” chillers didn’t, in fact, feature a cat at all. 1919 saw the German film Unheimliche Geschicten, an omnibus collection directed by Richard Oswald that included a story based on several Edgar Allan Poe tales, including The Black Cat. The first of many films to use either the title or the plot (rarely, oddly enough, both together) of Poe’s tale, it was remade by Oswald as a comedy using the same title (renamed The Living Dead for English speaking audiences) in 1932.

The Cat and the Canary – first filmed in 1927, and remade in 1939 and 1978 – was an archetypal “Old Dark House” film, where an escaped lunatic (known as The Cat) may or may not be responsible for a series of murders. It was 1934’s legendary sideshow shocker Maniac that first brought genuine feline fright frolic to the screen. Again “inspired by” The Black Cat, this ‘ghastly-beyond-belief’ cheapie from Dwain Esper threw in every shock image it could think of, including a scene where a cat’s eye is seemingly gouged out.

The same year saw a rather more intellectual adaptation of Poe’s story. Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat saw the first teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a whacked-out, Bauhaus-infused, expressionist nightmare that, brilliant as it was, had no connection with the original story (at one point, a black cat runs across a room and is killed by Lugosi, presumably as a token gesture justification of the title).

Poe was even less present in the next version of the story, made in 1941 by Albert S. Rogell. A passable attempt to cash-in on the success of Bob Hope’s comedy chillers (started, ironically, in 1939 with The Cat and the Canary), it also featured Lugosi, alongside Basil Rathbone and Gale Sondergaard. The Case of the Black Cat, made in 1936 had even less connection to the story, being a Perry Mason mystery.

For a while, it seemed that cats were only good for movie titles. Then, in 1942, Val Lewton’s Cat People appeared. Here at last was a movie that fully exploited the sensual and supernatural aspects of felines. Making use of chilling atmospherics and suggestion, Cat People is ambiguous in its approach: we never see the heroine/monster transformation, and the film never explains if she really could become a cat, or if in fact it was all a mental delusion. The film was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Curse of the Cat People (1944), which despite its lurid title was a gentle fantasy with little connection to the original film.

Most cat-themed horror films were rather less subtle than Lewton’s poetic tales, though. The Catman of Paris (1946) was a Lewton-inspired twist on the popular werewolf theme, and is more murder mystery than supernatural horror film, while Erle C. Kenton – who had brought us the humanimal Panther Girl in his 1932 version of The Island of Dr Moreau, Island of Lost Souls, made The Cat Creeps in 1946 (unrelated to the 1930 film of the same name, which was another Cat and the Canary remake), from the same year had a cat possessed by a dead girl… a theme that would crop up in more than one future pussycat production. Indeed, the strongest theme of cat movies is the idea of the feline avenger, persecuting and punishing those responsible for its owner’s death.

A variation on this possession theme – mixed in with a claw-back of Cat People - cropped up in the entertaining British shocker Cat Girl (1957), in which Barbara Shelley, resplendent in a black shiny mac, was cursed with a psychic link to a leopard, causing her to have sporadic attacks of possession when aroused!

Barbara Shelley obviously enjoyed feline thrills, and returned in 1961’s The Shadow of the Cat, an effective John Gilling chiller in which the cat of a wealthy murder victim causes no end of trouble for the killers. Gilling keeps things relatively ambiguous: it’s never clear if the cat is actually taking vengeance, or if its presence simply adds to the guilt of the murderers and drives them to madness and death.

1966 saw another version of The Black Cat, once again showing only few connections to the Poe story. Rather, this was a gore shocker, featuring axes in heads and violence, ala H.G. Lewis, albeit in black and white.

Roger Corman also tackled the story in his Poe anthology Tales of Terror (1962), playing the story as black comedy, with Peter Lorre as the cat’s persecutor/victim. Cats also featured in another Poe-inspired Corman project, The Tomb of Legeia (1964), in which Vincent Price’s dead wife returns as a cat.

1969’s Eye of the Cat was a textbook “vengeful cat” movie, directed by David Lowell Rich and scripted by Psycho writer Joseph Stefano. Michael Sarrazin and Gayle Hunnicutt play a scheming couple who do away with a wealthy aunt, only to fall victim to her hordes of cats. The implausible plot is given a slight twist by making Sarrazin a cat phobic.

Cats have played a role in Japanese horror cinema, most notably in 1968’s classic Kuroneko, in which the ghosts of two women brutally murdered return to take vengeance, assuming the form of a cat at times.

Also from Japan, bizarre Hausu (1977) features supernatural cats amongst its series of strange events and genuinely surreal visuals.

Cats made their way into the Italian giallo thrillers in the 1970s. While Dario Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails and Antonio Bido’s The Cat’s Victims might not have actually featured feline killers, 1972’s The Crimes of the Black Cat had the novel idea of featuring a cat as a murder weapon: a mad old woman has poisoned the claws of her pet with curare and induced it to cause mayhem and mischief when irritated by dousing yellow scarves – sent as gifts – with an irritant!

Human beings became unwilling cat food in Ted V. Mikels’ The Corpse Grinders (1971), in which unscrupulous pet food manufacturers add corpses to their cat food mix! Before long, cats are attacking people on the street and in their homes… Although the original has some macabre merit, Mikels went on to make a forgettable and entirely unnecessary belated shot-on-video sequel in 2000.

Cats with a taste for human flesh cropped up in Rene Cardona’s Mexican schlocker Night of a Thousand Cats (1972), where a mad killer women feeds his victims to his half-starved pets; inevitably, the tables are turned in the grisly end.

The Cat Creature (1973) was a slightly above-average TV film, directed by Curtis Harrington (Night Tide) and written by Robert Bloch (Psycho screenplay). Despite the stifling restrictions of American TV at the time, the film is a fairly solid story of the reincarnation of an Egyptian cat goddess.

Sergio Martino’s Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, aka Excite Me (1972), was another retread of The Black Cat, staying slightly closer to the original tale than most others, and starring Edwige Fenech as the eye-gouging, walling up villainess.

Another Italian production, directed by horror veteran Antonio Margheriti, was Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eyes, a bizarre late entry in the gothic-style tales of the 1960s involving a Scottish castle, a family curse and a gorilla! As the title suggests, whenever a murder is in the offing, the omnipresent cat is in attendance. The film’s eccentricities make up for its defects (chiefly its languid pace, a trait from the Sixties) and there are some memorably absurd images.

In Britain, Ralph Bates fell off the deep end through a combination of sinister feline activity and a domineering mother (Lana Turner) in Persecution aka The Terror of Sheba (1974). It was the first production from Hammer wannabes Tyburn, and the only one that was actually worth watching.

Más negro que la noche (“Blacker than the Night”) was a 1975 Mexican gothic horror about four women that move to a creepy house, inherited by one of them from an old aunt; as a condition, they must take care of the aunt’s pet, a black cat.

Once the pet is mysteriously found dead, a series of bizarre murders begins…

The Uncanny (originally titled Brrr during shooting!) was produced by Milton Subotsky in 1977, shortly after the demise of Amicus and using the same tax shelter deals that made many Canadian productions possible. It was another compendium film, obviously designed to follow in the footsteps of previous Subotsky winners like Tales from the Crypt. However, thanks to the dull direction of Denis Heroux, and a change in public tastes, the film was a total disaster. Each story dealt with spooky cats taking revenge on generally bad eggs, something that didn’t quite gel with the linking theme of cats wanting to take over the world. Subotsky had also featured an evil cat in his earlier Amicus anthology Torture Garden in 1967.

A white cat was up to mischief in the low budget British film The Legacy (1979), which tried to emulate The Omen with a series of bizarre deaths (including The Who’s Roger Daltrey choking to death on a chicken bone!), but failed to ignite the box office – although the paperback tie-in was a surprise best seller. Also in 1979, an unlikely space traveller was Jones the cat in Alien (and briefly Aliens) but he was a feline friend not intergalactic foe.

Lucio Fulci, on a cinematic roll with gore-drenched surreal horrors such as The Beyond and House By the Cemetery, made his version of The Black Cat in 1981. Shot in the UK, this take on Poe’s tale stars Patrick Magee and David Warbeck, and, although generally considered to be a minor addition to the director’s canon, is actually one of his best films, with the emphasis on supernatural atmosphere rather than gore for once.

The film also managed to incorporate a few elements of the original Poe tale into its plot, including the walling up of cat and victim (interestingly, Fulci had also used a similar idea in his 1975 thriller Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes).

Director Paul Schrader updated Cat People with a glossy 1982 remake, but despite lashings of blood and eroticism, and the screen presence of Natjassia Kinski and Malcolm McDowall, the film doesn’t work as well as it should, coming across as little more than an expensive retread of the popular werewolf shapeshifter films of the previous year.

Far better, and considerable more honest in their treatment of the erotic aspects of cat mythology, were The Cat Woman (1988) and Curse of the Cat Woman (1991), two hardcore porn films from actor turned director John Leslie. While Cat Woman is merely above average, Curse… is quite startling, with unsettling but potent sex scenes as it delves deeply into the world of the cat people.

Somewhat less classy than Leslie’s film was Luigi Cozzi’s incredibly clumsy version of The Black Cat (1990), which attempts to bring Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy to a close. Filmed as a tribute to Argento (the plot concerns a film-makers attempts to make a sequel to Suspiria!), the film has nothing of Poe, and little of Dario Argento either. Argento himself, oddly, was also filming The Black Cat around the same time, as his contribution to the Poe film Two Evil Eyes. It was far from vintage Argento, despite a suitably deranged performance from Harvey Keitel, but it did follow the original story fairly closely, and benefited from being paired with George A. Romero’s truly awful The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

Romero also produced Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, a feature film based on the lacklustre TV series. Nevertheless, this three story anthology was better than it should have been, and includes a tale about a Cat from Hell that leaves a trail of victims in its wake.

Evil Cat arrived from Hong Kong in 1986, the tale of a cat demon that possesses human bodies and has to be killed every fifty years by a member of the same family. Cheerfully trashy, it’s a fun horror romp. More deranged is 1992’s The Cat, directed by Ngai Kai lam, which features a cat from space and features – as far as I’m aware – the only dog-cat kung fu battle ever captured on film!

Greydon Clark’s amusing Uninvited (1987) features a mutant cat on the loose aboard a cruise ship, where it terrorises horny teenagers and gangsters, to no great effect. 1991 TV movie Strays tries to make a house full of killer cats seem scary, but fails miserably, and has human characters so dull that you are actually rooting for the cats by the end.

Stephen King has been attached to a handful of cat related horrors. As well as the underrated 1985 film Cat’s Eye – a trilogy of stories linked by a heroic cat, and directed with style and fidelity to the original stories by Lewis Teague (Alligator), there was the 1989 Pet Semetary, which sees a zombie cat brought back to life after being buried on cursed ground, and 1992 saw Sleepwalkers, a gory and sexy retread of the Cat People theme based on a somewhat incoherent King screenplay. Mick Garris’ film tells the story of demonic cat people (who fear real cats!) and is ludicrous enough to be throwaway fun.

A hand-drawn Ghanian poster for Sleepwalkers!

More recently, in 2011, Korean film The Cat featured a feline that was the only witness to a murder, a ghostly child and possible demonic possession, as bad things start to happen to the woman who is looking after the titular cat.

The aforementioned 1975 Mexican movie Más Negro Que La Noche (“Blacker Than the Night”) has just been remade in 2014, in 3D, as a full-blown gothic Spanish production with a focus, like the original, on murders that occur once a cat has been killed.

Meanwhile, Alexandre Aja’s produced The Pyramid (2014) pits a group of archeologists against hairless cat-creatures based on the Ancient Egyptian Anubis mythology.

It seems certain that cats will continue to provide a steady flow of ideas for film-makers looking for sinister ciphers. Only Alien and Cat’s Eye has shown cats in a particularly positive light within the context of the horror film. Other than this, the best they could hope for was to be witches familiars in the likes of Bell, Book and Candle or I Married a Witch. This might seem like an outrageous slander against this innocent animal. But, even if the feline population were made aware of their sly image in the cinema, one imagines that they would simply stare at you for a while, yawn disinterestedly, and then walk away. Cats have better things to worry about…

David Flint, Horrorpedia

The Devil’s Chimney is a limestone rock formation that stands above a disused quarry in Leckhampton, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England.

It is named for its peculiar shape, that of a crooked and twisted chimney rising from the ground. The Devil’s Chimney is a local landmark, but its origins are uncertain. In 1926 it survived a minor earthquake, but not without a few cracks. In 1985 it was repaired and protected from further erosion.

Legend holds that the Devil’s Chimney is the chimney of the Devil’s dwelling deep beneath the ground. Supposedly the Devil, provoked by the many Christian churches of the area, would sit atop Leckhampton Hill and hurl stones at Sunday churchgoers. However the stones were turned back on him, driving him beneath the ground and trapping him there so he could not further harass the villagers. Now he uses the mass of stones as his chimney to let free the smokes of Hell.

Visitors to the Devil’s Chimney would leave a coin on top of the rock as payment to the Devil in exchange for his staying in his underground home and not leaving to create mischief and spread evil in the local area.

The 19th-century geologist S. Buckman suggested that the strange shape of the Devil’s Chimney could be put down to differential erosion, involving the softer outer rock being worn away to leave only the inner harder rock remaining. However, this would require some explanation of why there was a column of harder rock there in the first place.

The truth is probably that the Devil’s Chimney was left behind by 18th-century quarry workers, who quarried around it as a joke.

The Devil’s Chimney in Gloucestershire should not to be confused with two other British landmarks, a rock cleft in the Isle of Wight and a rock formation at Beachy Head.

Wikipedia

The rectory in 1892

Borley Rectory was a Victorian mansion that gained fame as allegedly “the most haunted house in England”. Built in 1862 to house the rector of the parish of Borley, Essex, and his family, it was badly damaged by fire in 1939 and demolished in 1944.

The large Gothic-style rectory had been alleged to be haunted ever since it was built. Reports multiplied suddenly in 1929, after the Daily Mirror published an account of a visit by paranormal researcher Harry Price, who wrote two books supporting claims of paranormal activity.

The uncritical acceptance of Price’s reports prompted a formal study by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which rejected most of the sightings as either imagined or fabricated and cast doubt on Price’s credibility. His claims are now generally discredited by ghost historians. Neither the SPR’s report nor the more recent biography of Price has quelled public interest in the stories, and new books, television documentaries and two upcoming 2015 films continue to satisfy public fascination with the rectory.

A short programme commissioned by the BBC about the alleged manifestations, scheduled to be broadcast in September 1956, was cancelled owing to concerns about a possible legal action by Marianne Foyster, widow of the last rector to live in the house.

The first paranormal events allegedly occurred in about 1863, since a few locals later remembered hearing unexplained footsteps within the house at about this time. On 28 July 1900, four daughters of the rector, Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, reported seeing what they thought was the ghost of a nun at twilight, about 40 yards (37 metres) from the house; they tried to talk to it, but it disappeared as they got closer. The local organist recalled that the family at the rectory were “very convinced that they had seen an apparition on several occasions”. Various people were to claim to have witnessed a variety of puzzling incidents, such as a phantom coach driven by two headless horsemen, during the next four decades. Henry Dawson Ellis Bull died in 1892 and his son, the Reverend Henry (“Harry”) Foyster Bull, took over the living.

Alleged sighting in the grounds

On 9 June 1928, Henry (“Harry”) Bull died and the rectory again became vacant. In the following year, on 2 October, the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved into the home. Soon after moving in Mrs Smith, while cleaning out a cupboard, came across a brown paper package containing the skull of a young woman. Shortly after, the family reported a variety of incidents including the sounds of servant bells ringing despite their being disconnected, lights appearing in windows and unexplained footsteps. In addition, Mrs Smith believed she saw a horse-drawn carriage at night. The Smiths contacted the Daily Mirror. On 10 June 1929 the newspaper sent a reporter, who promptly wrote the first in a series of articles detailing the mysteries of Borley. The paper also arranged for Harry Price, a paranormal researcher, to make his first visit to the house that would ultimately make him famous. He arrived on 12 June and immediately objective “phenomena” of a new kind appeared, such as the throwing of stones, a vase and other objects. “Spirit messages” were tapped out from the frame of a mirror. As soon as Harry Price left, these ceased. Mrs Smith later maintained that she already suspected Harry Price, an expert conjurer, of causing the phenomena.

The Smiths left Borley on 14 July 1929, and the parish had some difficulty in finding a replacement. The following year the Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster (1878–1945), and his wife Marianne (1899–1992) moved into the rectory with their adopted daughter Adelaide. Lionel Foyster wrote an account of various strange incidents that occurred between the time the Foysters moved in and October 1935, which was sent to Harry Price. These included bell-ringing, windows shattering, throwing of stones and bottles, wall-writing, and the locking of their daughter in a room with no key. Marianne Foyster reported to her husband a whole range of poltergeist phenomena that included her being thrown from her bed. On one occasion, Adelaide was allegedly attacked by “something horrible”. Foyster tried twice to conduct an exorcism, but his efforts were fruitless; in the middle of the first exorcism, he was struck in the shoulder by a fist-size stone. Because of the publicity in the Daily Mirror, these incidents attracted the attention of several psychic researchers, who after investigation were unanimous in suspecting that they were caused, consciously or unconsciously, by Marianne Foyster. Mrs Foyster later stated that she felt that some of the incidents were caused by her husband in concert with one of the psychic researchers, but other events appeared to her to be genuine paranormal phenomena. Marianne later admitted that she was having a sexual relationship with the lodger, Frank Pearless, and that she used paranormal explanations to cover up her liaisons. The Foysters left Borley in October 1935 as a result of Lionel’s ill health.

Borley remained vacant for some time after the Foysters’ departure, until in May 1937 Price recruited a corps of 48 “official observers”, mostly students, who spent periods, mainly during weekends, at the rectory with instructions to report any phenomena that occurred.

In March 1938 Helen Glanville (the daughter of S. J. Glanville, one of Price’s helpers) conducted a séance in Streatham in south London. Price reported that she made contact with two spirits, the first of which was that of a young nun who identified herself as Marie Lairre. According to the planchette story Marie was a French nun who left her religious order and travelled to England to marry a member of the Waldegrave family, the owners of Borley’s 17th-century manor house, Borley Hall. She was said to have been murdered in an earlier building on the site of the rectory, and her body either buried in the cellar or thrown into a disused well.The wall writings were alleged to be her pleas for help; one read “Marianne, please help me get out”.

The second spirit to be contacted identified himself as Sunex Amures, and claimed that he would set fire to the rectory at nine o’clock that night, 27 March 1938. He also said that, at that time, the bones of a murdered person would be revealed.

On 27 February 1939 the new owner of the rectory, Captain W. H. Gregson, was unpacking boxes and accidentally knocked over an oil lamp in the hallway. The fire quickly spread and the house was severely damaged. After investigating the cause of the blaze the insurance company concluded that the fire had been started deliberately.

Rectory after the fire

Miss Williams from nearby Borley Lodge said she saw the figure of the ghostly nun in the upstairs window and, according to Harry Price, demanded a fee of one guinea for her story. In August 1943 Harry Price conducted a brief dig in the cellars of the ruined house and discovered two bones thought to be of a young woman. The bones were given a Christian burial in Liston churchyard, after the parish of Borley refused to allow the ceremony to take place on account of the local opinion that the bones found were those of a pig.

After Price’s death in 1948 Eric Dingwall, Kathleen M. Goldney, and Trevor H. Hall, three members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), investigated his claims about Borley. Their findings were published in a 1956 book, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, which concluded Price had fraudulently produced some of the phenomena.

The “Borley Report”, as the SPR study has become known, stated that many of the phenomena were either faked or due to natural causes such as rats and the strange acoustics attributed to the odd shape of the house. In their conclusion, Dingwall, Goldney, and Hall wrote “when analysed, the evidence for haunting and poltergeist activity for each and every period appears to diminish in force and finally to vanish away.” Terence Hines wrote “Mrs. Marianne Foyster, wife of the Rev. Lionel Foyster who lived at the rectory from 1930 to 1935, was actively engaged in fraudulently creating [haunted] phenomena. Price himself “salted the mine” and faked several phenomena while he was at the rectory.”

Marianne later in her life admitted she had seen no apparitions and that the alleged ghostly noises were caused by the wind, friends she invited to the house and in other cases by herself playing practical jokes on her husband. Many of the legends about the rectory had been invented. The children of Rev. Harry Bull who lived in the house before Lionel Foyster claimed to have seen nothing and were surprised they had been living in what was described as England’s most haunted house.

Wikipedia

The Golem: How He Came into the World – original title: Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam – is a 1920 German silent horror film co-directed by Paul Wegener with Carl Boese from a screenplay written by Wegener and Henrik Galeen, and starring Wegener as the golem. The script was adapted from the 1915 novel The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. 

The film was the third of three films that Wegener made featuring the golem, the other two being The Golem (1915) and the short comedy The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917), in which he dons the monster make-up in order to frighten a young lady he is infatuated with.

Architect Hans Poelzig designed the expressionist sets. The cinematography by Karl Freund, in collaboration with Poelzig and Wegener, is cited as one of the most outstanding examples of German Expressionism.

Plot teaser:

Set in Jewish ghetto of medieval Prague, the film begins with Rabbi Loew, the head of the city’s Jewish community, reading the stars. Loew predicts disaster for his people. The next day the Holy Roman Emperor signs a royal decree declaring that the Jews must leave the city before the new moon.

Loew begins to create a huge monster out of clay, the Golem, which he will bring to life to defend his people. In an elaborate magical procedure, Loew summons the spirit Astaroth and compel him, as per the ancient texts, to say the magic word to bring life. The Golem awakes…

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Reviews:

‘Wegener’s acting performance in The Golem is subtle as he plays a force of nature without conscience or emotion. The Golem is only capable of brute force; therefore violence is inevitable. He quickly learns that he can remain alive if he refuses to let anyone take off the amulet and so he pushes away anyone who tries to remove it.’ Michael Koenig, Film Monthly

‘A relic certainly, but a fascinating one, Der Golem is perhaps the screen’s first great monster movie … Wegener’s golem is an impressively solid figure, the Frankenstein monster with a slightly comical girly clay-wig. The wonderfully grotesque Prague sets and the alchemical atmosphere remain potent.’ Kim Newman

‘Abstaining from the dominant Shylock tradition of the cruel and money-grubbing Jew, the bribing of the pain-bent and emaciated gatekeeper of the ghetto by the arrogant Knight Florian instead exposes the Christian dominance over Jewish people at the time. In reversing the notion of the Jews’ financial hold over the Christian, Der Golem effectively undoes the most dominant anti-Jewish stereotype since the Christian Middle Ages.’ Cathy Gelbin, Kinoeye

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Wikipedia | IMDb

There are essentially three things required to contact the dead; a dead person; a living person to whom they are acquainted (or would like to be); a very open mind. Of course, over the years tools have been introduced to facilitate this, allowing both highly-tuned mediums and amateur inquisitors to speak to those in the realm beyond. Perhaps the most famous of these, despite being one of the most basic, is the Ouija board.

The ouija (/ˈwiːdʒə/ WEE-jə), also known as a spirit board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, “hello” (occasionally), and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to facilitate the communication of the spirit’s message by spelling it out on the board during a séance. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, and it is moved about the board to spell out words, seemingly by a force other than the participants. “Ouija” has become a trademark that is often used generically to refer to any talking board.

Following its commercial introduction by businessman Elijah Bond on July 1, 1890, the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlour game unrelated to the occult until American Spiritualist Pearl Curran popularised its use as a divining tool during World War I. Paranormal and supernatural beliefs associated with Ouija have been harshly criticised by the scientific community, since they are characterised as pseudoscience. The action of the board can be parsimoniously explained by unconscious movements of those controlling the pointer, a psychophysiological phenomenon known as the ‘ideomotor effect’.

Some mainstream Christian denominations have “warned against using Ouija boards”, holding that they can lead to demonic possession. Occultists, on the other hand, are divided on the issue, with some saying that it can be a positive transformation; others rehash the warnings of many Christians and caution “inexperienced users” against it.

Early references to the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song Dynasty. The method was known as fuji (扶乩), “planchette writing”. The use of planchette writing as an ostensible means of contacting the dead and the spirit-world continued, and, albeit under special rituals and supervisions, was a central practice of the Quanzhen School, until it was forbidden by the Qing Dynasty. Several entire scriptures of the Daozang are supposedly works of automatic planchette writing. Similar methods of mediumistic spirit writing have been practiced in ancient India, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe.

During the late 19th century, planchettes were widely sold as a novelty. Businessman Elijah Bond had the idea to patent a planchette sold with a board on which the alphabet was printed. The patentees filed on May 28, 1890 for patent protection and thus is credited with the invention of the Ouija board. Bond was an attorney and was an inventor of other objects in addition to this device, including a steam boiler (not to be used for contacting the dead). Bond’s self-produced board was named “nirvana” and featured a swastika as a logo, well before the Nazis appropriated the symbol.

An employee of Elijah Bond, William Fuld took over the talking board production and in 1901, he started production of his own boards under the name “Ouija”. Charles Kennard (founder of Kennard Novelty Company which manufactured Fuld’s talking boards and where Fuld had worked as a varnisher) claimed he learned the name “Ouija” from using the board and that it was an ancient Egyptian word meaning “good luck.” When Fuld took over production of the boards, he popularised the more widely accepted etymology: that the name came from a combination of the French and German words for “yes”.

The Fuld name would become synonymous with the Ouija board, as Fuld reinvented its history, claiming that he himself had invented it. The strange talk about the boards from Fuld’s competitors flooded the market, and all these boards enjoyed a heyday from the 1920s through the 1960s. Fuld sued many companies over the “Ouija” name and concept right up until his death in 1927. In 1966, Fuld’s estate sold the entire business to Parker Brothers, which was sold to Hasbro in 1991, and which continues to hold all trademarks and patents. About ten brands of talking boards are sold today under various names.

Various studies have been produced, recreating the effects of the Ouija board in the lab and showing that, under laboratory conditions, the subjects were moving the planchette involuntarily. Sceptics have described Ouija board users as ‘operators’. Some critics noted that the messages ostensibly spelled out by spirits were similar to whatever was going through the minds of the subjects. According to Professor of neurology Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003):

“The planchette is guided by unconscious muscular exertions like those responsible for table movement. Nonetheless, in both cases, the illusion that the object (table or planchette) is moving under its own control is often extremely powerful and sufficient to convince many people that spirits are truly at work… The unconscious muscle movements responsible for the moving tables and Ouija board phenomena seen at seances are examples of a class of phenomena due to what psychologists call a dissociative state. A dissociative state is one in which consciousness is somehow divided or cut off from some aspects of the individual’s normal cognitive, motor, or sensory functions”.

In the 1970s Ouija board users were also described as “cult members” by sociologists, though this was severely scrutinised in the field. The renowned sceptic, The Amazing James Randi, conducted an experiment in which he blindfolded the operators in order to prove that any ‘actual’ messages were only the result of ideomotor effect or the subconscious. The results showed that not one understandable word was produced, nor any dates nor even a “yes” or “no”.

Most religious criticism of the Ouija board has come from Christians, primarily Roman Catholics and evangelicals in the United States. Catholic Answers, a Christian apologetics organisation, states that “The Ouija board is far from harmless, as it is a form of divination (seeking information from supernatural sources). The fact of the matter is, the Ouija board really does work, and the only “spirits” that will be contacted through it are evil ones.”

In 2001, Ouija boards were burned in Alamogordo, New Mexico by fundamentalist groups alongside Harry Potter books (!) as “symbols of witchcraft.” Religious criticism has also expressed beliefs that the Ouija board reveals information which should only be in God’s hands, and thus it is a tool of Satan. A spokesperson for Human Life International described the boards as a portal to talk to spirits and called for Hasbro to be prohibited from marketing them. Bishops in Micronesia called for the boards to be banned and warned congregations that they were talking to demons and devils when using the boards.
Ouija Boards Enjoy a Renaissance

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In popular culture:

Ouija boards have been the source of inspiration for literary works, used as guidance in writing or as a form of channeling literary works. As a result of Ouija boards’ becoming popular in the early 20th century, by the 1920s many “psychic” books were written of varying quality often initiated by Ouija board use:

• Emily Grant Hutchings claimed that her novel Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board (1917) was dictated by Mark Twain’s spirit through the use of a Ouija board after his death.

• Patience Worth was allegedly a spirit contacted by Pearl Lenore Curran (February 15, 1883 – December 4, 1937) for over 20 years. This symbiotic relationship produced several novels, and works of poetry and prose, which Pearl Curran claimed were delivered to her through channelling Worth’s spirit during sessions with a Ouija board, and which works Curran then transcribed.

• In late 1963, Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts started experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Roberts’ research for the book. According to Roberts and Butts, on December 2, 1963 they began to receive coherent messages from a male personality who eventually identified himself as Seth, culminating in a series of books dictated by “Seth”.

• In 1982, James Merrill released an apocalyptic 560-page epic poem entitled The Changing Light at Sandover, which documented two decades of messages dictated from the Ouija board during séances.
Spirit Boards in the News

The writer, G. K. Chesterton used a Ouija board in his teenage years. Around 1893 he had gone through a crisis of scepticism and depression, and during this period Chesterton experimented with the Ouija board and grew fascinated with the occult.

Early press releases stated that Vincent Furnier’s stage and band name “Alice Cooper” was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th-century witch with that name. Alice Cooper later revealed that he just thought of the first name that came to his head while discussing a new band name with his band.

Sylvia Plath wrote Dialogue Over a Ouija Board, the results of a session divining with spirits in 1957.

Former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi claimed under oath that, in a séance held in 1978 with other professors at the University of Bologna, the “ghost” of Giorgio La Pira used a Ouija to spell the name of the street where Aldo Moro was being held by the Red Brigades. According to Peter Popham of The Independent: “Everybody here has long believed that Prodi’s Ouija board tale was no more than an ill-advised and bizarre way to conceal the identity of his true source, probably a person from Bologna’s seething far-left underground whom he was pledged to protect.”

The Mars Volta wrote their album Bedlam in Goliath (2008) based on their alleged experiences with a Ouija board. According to their story, Omar Rodriguez Lopez purchased one while traveling in Jerusalem. At first the board provided a story which became the theme for the album. Strange events allegedly related to this activity occurred during the recording of the album: the studio flooded, one of the album’s main engineers had a nervous breakdown, equipment began to malfunction, and Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s foot was injured. Following these bad experiences the band allegedly buried the Ouija board.

Morrissey’s song, “Ouija Board, Ouija Board” was the first of the ex-Smith’s singer’s solo singles not to reach the top ten in the UK. It was criticised by the music press for being lacklustre and the press for promoting the dark arts. The accompanying promo video featured Carry On actress, Joan Sims.

Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, used a Ouija board and conducted seances in attempts to contact the dead.

Much of William Butler Yeats’s later poetry was inspired, among other facets of occultism, by the Ouija board. Yeats himself did not use it, but his wife did.

Aleister Crowley had great admiration for the use of the ouija board and it played a passing role in his magical workings. Jane Wolfe, who lived with Crowley at his infamous Abbey of Thelema, also used the Ouija board, crediting some of her greatest spiritual communications to use of this implement. Crowley also discussed the Ouija board with another of his students, and the most ardent of them, Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones): it is frequently mentioned in their unpublished letters. In 1917 Achad experimented with the board as a means of summoning Angels, as opposed to Elementals. In one letter Crowley told Jones: “Your Ouija board experiment is rather fun. You see how very satisfactory it is, but I believe things improve greatly with practice. I think you should keep to one angel, and make the magical preparations more elaborate.”

Books:

In his book, Possessed, author Thomas B. Allen discusses the exorcism of Robbie Mannheim, in which the aunt of Mannheim introduces him to a Ouija board. The story of the possession and exorcism formed the basis for the film The Exorcist discussed below.

Films:

The Exorcist (1973): A Ouija board figures prominently in the film, 12-year old Regan McNeil (played by Linda Blair) becoming possessed by a demon she calls “Captain Howdy”. The 1949 case of the ‘true’ possession of a young boy by a demon, which partly inspired William Peter Blatty’s book, was said to be the result of the boy using a Ouija board.

Witchboard (1986-1995) The Witchboard trilogy, beginning with a gathering of friends using a Ouija board to channel an evil entity impersonating the spirit of a little boy.

At certain cinemas, Paragon Arts International distributed complimentary Witchboards to those who watched the first film on opening night.

Ouija (2014). Chaos ensues when a group of teens unwittingly unleash the forces of darkness.

Grave Encounters 2 (2012). Used as a convenient device to eke out yet more coins from the found footage genre.

I Am ZoZo (2012). Bargain basement devil-bothering via talking board.

The Pact (2012): A Ouija board is used to try to unravel the mysterious events in the film.

Séance: The Summoning (2011). In a bid to prove a local medium isn’t a fake, the spelling out of letters causes more problems than it solves. ‘Dare to play’, indeed.

The Ouija Experiment (2011) and its cumbersomely titled sequel The Ouija Resurrection: Ouija Experiment 2.

The Unleashed (2011). Supernatural chaos escalates when a troubled woman with a dark past dabbles with the infamous Ouija board.

Necromentia (2009). What happens when you tattoo a Ouija board on your body? Nothing good.

Paranormal Activity and its sequel both feature a Ouija board.

Satanic aka Demon Board (2002). Shocker starring Jeffrey Combs and Angus Scrimm.

Is Anybody There? (2009). Directed by Israel Luna, who seems to have something of a fetish for low-budget films featuring Ouija boards.

Long Time Dead (2002).

Spookies (1986). A Ouija board is used to summon a variety of monsters to dispatch some mansion-intruding teenagers.

Sorority House Massacre 2 (1992). The title says it all. College girls use an ouija board to summon up a mass-murderer, as you do…

Repossessed (1990). Leslie Nielsen had a gas bill to pay, clearly.

What Lies Beneath (2000). Robert Zemeckis’ big hit mainstream psychological thriller starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Amityville 3-D (1983). Brief usage of a Ouija board in this rotten sequel.

Satan’s Blood (1978). Spanish erotic horror film, eventually released by on DVD by Mondo Macabro.

Tales From the Crypt (1972). Poor old Grimsdyke speaks to the late Mrs Grimsdyke via the ghostly telephone.

13 Ghosts (1960). William Castle’s typically gimmick-laden creepy classic.

The Uninvited (1944): Ray Milland stars in the played-straight creepy tale.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Wikipedia | With thanks to Museum of Talking Boards and Ouija Board Movies for some images.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is a 1926 British silent thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It stars Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, June Tripp, Malcolm Keen, and Ivor Novello. Based on a story by Marie Belloc Lowndes and a play Who Is He? co-written by Belloc Lowndes, the film is about the hunt for a “Jack the Ripper” type of serial killer in London. The film was released on 14 February 1927 in London and on 10 June 1928 in New York City.

Originally, the film was intended to end with ambiguity as to whether or not the lodger was innocent. However, when star Ivor Novello was cast in the role, Gainsborough studio demanded alterations to the script.

Upon seeing Hitchcock’s finished film, producer Michael Balcon was furious, and nearly shelved it (and Hitchcock’s career). After considerable bickering, a compromise was reached and film critic Ivor Montagu was hired to salvage the film. Hitchcock was initially resentful of the intrusion, but Montagu recognised the director’s technical skill and artistry and made only minor suggestions, mostly concerning the title cards and the reshooting of a few minor scenes. Ultimately, Hitchcock followed these instructions, but avoided showing the true villain onscreen.

The result, described by Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto, is “the first time Hitchcock has revealed his psychological attraction to the association between sex and murder, between ecstasy and death.” It would pave the way for his later work.

Plot teaser:

A young blonde woman, framed against a sheet of glass, her golden hair illuminated, is seen screaming. She is the latest victim of a serial killer known as “The Avenger”, who targets young blonde women.

That night, Daisy Bunting (June Tripp), a blonde model, is at a fashion parade where she and the other showgirls heard the news of the murder. The blonde girls are horrified; covering their hair with dark wigs or hats while Daisy laughs at their fears. She returns home to her parents, Mr and Mrs Bunting, and her policeman sweetheart, Joe (Malcolm Keen), who have been reading the details of the latest Avenger crime in the day’s paper.

Later that same night a man, bearing a strong resemblance to the description of the murderer (Ivor Novello), arrives at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting and inquires about the room they are renting. Mrs. Bunting (Marie Ault) takes him to the room on the top floor of her house which is decorated with portraits of beautiful young women, all blondes. The man is rather reclusive and secretive, which puzzles Mrs. Bunting. However she does not complain after he willingly pays her a month’s rent in advance, and asks only for bread, butter, and a glass of milk and to be left in peace…

Reviews:

“Part of the fun here is watching Hitchcock experiment with visual storytelling so early in his career, with this representing his third film.  For instance, while the lodger paces in his room, the family below looks up at the hanging lamp as it sways. Hitchcock creates an invisible floor. It’s an interesting effects shot that shows us both the Lodger’s actions and the perspective of the family. There is also a short montage at the beginning of the film that focuses on the faces of Londoners as they contemplate the murderous work of The Avenger.  Each face conveys a powerful emotion while cross dissolving in and out of one another.” John Ary, Ain’t It Cool

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“The Lodger is a jolting mess of a film, but one that remains electrifying. Not simply because it anticipates some of the director’s best known tropes – we’ll see vertigo-inducing stairwells later in his career, as well as women rummaging through a potential killer’s belongings while they are out – but because this is a kind of cinema that has been refined out of existence, not least by Hitchcock himself.” Andrew Pulver, The Guardian

“Visually, the movie looks a lot like German Expressionism films of the time.  Dark shadows and strange uses of lights highlight the film (I liked the through the floor view of the lodger pacing). Hitchcock shows some of his style and these earlier films are fun to watch to see how he develops.” JP Roscoe, Basement Rejects

Cast:

• Marie Ault as The Landlady (Mrs. Bunting)
• Arthur Chesney as Her Husband (Mr. Bunting)
• June as Daisy Bunting, a Model
• Malcolm Keen as Joe Chandler
• Ivor Novello as Jonathan Drew (The Lodger)
• Eve Gray as Showgirl Victim (uncredited)
• Alfred Hitchcock as Extra in newspaper office (uncredited)
• Reginald Gardiner

Wikipedia | IMDb

Montague “Monty” Rhodes James OM, MA, FBA (1 August 1862 – 12 June 1936), who used the publication name M. R. James, was an English author, medievalist scholar and provost of King’s College, Cambridge (1905–18), and of Eton College (1918–36).

Though James’s work as a medievalist is still highly regarded, he is best remembered for his ghost stories, which are considered as among the best in the genre. James redefined the ghost story for the new century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more realistic contemporary settings. However, James’s protagonists and plots tend to reflect his own antiquarian interests. Accordingly, he is known as the originator of the “antiquarian ghost story”.

James was born in Goodnestone Parsonage, near Dover in Kent, England, although his parents had associations with Aldeburgh in Suffolk. His father was Herbert James, an Evangelical Anglican clergyman, and his mother, Mary Emily (née Horton), was the daughter of a naval officer. From the age of three (1865) until 1909 James’s home, if not always his residence, was at the Rectory in Great Livermere, Suffolk. Several of James’s ghost stories are set in Suffolk, including Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (Felixstowe), A Warning to the Curious (Aldeburgh), Rats and A Vignette (Great Livermere).

In September 1873 he arrived as a boarder at Temple Grove School, one of the leading boys’ preparatory schools of the day. He eventually settled in Cambridge, first as an undergraduate, then as a don and provost, at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was also a member of the Pitt Club. The university provides settings for several of his tales and its insular world informs many of the often drifting souls he characterises. Apart from medieval subjects, James studied the classics and appeared very successfully in a staging of Aristophanes’ play The Birds, with music by Hubert Parry.

His academic career saw him cataloguing and translating many medieval works, the hidden texts and found knowledge echoing several of his published fiction work, as well as being very highly regarded by his academic contemporaries. He later became a director of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum before seeing out his final years as Provost of Eton College, the town where he is now buried. As with his time in Suffolk, his Cambridge surroundings, especially those within University walls, are featured in several of his tales; A School Story, Temple Grove, East Sheen and A Tractate Middoth.

Many of James’s ghost stories were written for public performance, specifically for reading to a small group of assembled friends (and occasionally, choirboys) as part of spirit-fuelled polite revelry on Christmas Eve in his private quarters at the University. Such precise and well-orchestrated behaviour is a reminder of the very Victorian quality of James’s writing, and he as a person – it was also an excuse to display his acting skills, as well as to assert his dominance in an environment of constant one-upmanship.

From his own recollection, his first written and published ghost story was Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, which appeared in National Review magazine in 1894, with Lost Hearts appearing in Pall Mall magazine the following year. These, plus a further six tales were collected into one volume, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904:

• “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book”
• “Lost Hearts”
• “The Mezzotint”
• “The Ash-tree”
• ” Number 13″
• “Count Magnus”
• “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad””
• “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”

The first edition of this collection featured four atmospheric illustrations by James McBryde, a friend of James’ and one of the few who were present at the stories first Christmas readings. It was intended that McBryde would provide illustrations for each featured story but his premature death meant only four were completed. A distraught James, whom, it is said, harboured romantic feelings towards his friend, refused to allow the publisher to use images supplied by anyone else to complete the unfinished work.

The success of this volume led to three further collections:

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911)
• “A School Story”
• ” The Rose Garden”
• “The Tractate Middoth”
• “Casting the Runes”
• “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”
• “Martin’s Close”
• “Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance”

A Thin Ghost and Others (1919)
• “The Residence at Whitminster”
• “The Diary of Mr Poynter”
• “An Episode of Cathedral History”
• “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance”
• “Two Doctors”

A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925)

• “The Haunted Dolls’ House”
• “The Uncommon Prayer-Book”
• “A Neighbour’s Landmark”
• “A View from a Hill”
• “A Warning to the Curious”
• “An Evening’s Entertainment”

Despite the subjects of his stories, James claimed neither to have any real belief in ghosts or the supernatural, nor to have witnessed anything himself which could not be rationally explained. Although operating in an era when literature had several of the great practitioners in full effect, notably, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, James honed both a style and structure which were distinct and memorable. Relying on neither the actions of wicked, misguided individuals (much of Poe) nor the unimaginable horrors of Lovecraft, James wrote of unassuming (if, often, well-to-do) individuals who by circumstance found themselves the victim of restless spirits, none of whom were in the least welcoming or benign.

The classic Jamesian tale usually includes the following elements:

• A characterful setting in an English village, seaside town or country estate; an ancient town in France, Denmark or Sweden; or a venerable abbey or university
• A nondescript and rather naive gentleman-scholar as protagonist (often of a reserved nature). Few women appear in his tales, romance even less.
• The discovery of an old book or other antiquarian object that somehow unlocks, calls down the wrath, or at least attracts the unwelcome attention of a supernatural menace, usually from beyond the grave
• A mundane, contented life disturbed by an initially innocuous presence or occurrence, leading to a more malignant force.

Analysts have suggested that James’s sexuality and his inability to come to terms with it leant a detached malaise to his tales; a lack of, or even fear, of human contact quite a noticeable theme. Whilst this is possible, what is undeniable is the influence of Sheridan Le Fanu’s writing, which James was never slow in praising.

On the other side of the coin, James himself was no stranger to praise from high places. Foremost of these was H.P. Lovecraft, saving significant reverence for James in his extended essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, first published in 1927. He also wrote:

“M.R. James joins the brisk, the light, & the commonplace to the weird about as well as anyone could do it—but if another tried the same method, the chances would be ten to one against him. The most valuable element in him—as a model—is his way of weaving a horror into the every-day fabric of life and history—having it grow naturally out of the myriad conditions of an ordinary environment…”

Other admirers of his work include Sir John Betjeman, Paul Theroux, Ruth Rendell and horror fiction heavyweights, Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell. More keenly, Kingsley Amis used James’s signature motifs for one of his most famous works, The Green Man. James’s character-led tales have made them ideal for television and film adaptation.

Buy Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories from Amazon.co.uk

Television:

1951 – Lights Out – “The Lost Will of Dr. Rant”. A clear adaptation of The Tractate Middoth, starring Leslie Nielsen
1966-1968 – Four teleplays were broadcast on ITV in the UK, all of which are now considered lost in their entirety.
1968 – Whistle and I’ll Come to You – perhaps the most famous TV adaptation of them all, directed by Jonathan Miller for the BBC

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1971 – The Stalls of Barchester. From 1971, in a tradition James would most certainly approve, each Christmas saw a James tale dramatised, each directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark.

1972 – A Warning to the Curious

1973 – Lost Hearts

1974 – Treasure of Abbot Thomas

1975 – The Ash Tree

1976 – The Signalman

1977 – Stigma
1979 – Casting the Runes. Clark again, this time for ITV.

Buy Casting the Runes on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

1980 – A slightly more grown-up version of Jackanory, Spinechillers, saw three James tales read by Michael Bryant (The Stone Tape); The Mezzotint, The Diary of Mr Poynter and A School Story

1986 – Robert Powell’s partially dramatised readings of The Mezzotint, The Ash-Tree, Wailing Well, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad and The Rose Garden were screened on BBC2 for an even older audience.
2000 – Christopher Lee took the reading reins for another series of James re-tellings, this time in front of a roaring fire with a suitably-attired small audience. These are still regularly screened around Christmas time. With Lee playing the role of James reading his own stories, the 30 minute episodes produced by the BBC include The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, The Ash-tree, Number 13 and A Warning to the Curious

2005 – BBC4 screened updated adaptations of both A View From a Hill and Number 13
2010 – A new version of Whistle and I’ll Come to You was developed for broadcast around Christmas. Starring John Hurt (Alien), most consider it massively inferior the Miller’s earlier film, which starred Michael Hordern in the same role.

2013 – Horror fan and writer Mark Gatiss directed The Tractate Middoth, up-keeping a Christmas tradition now eagerly anticipated.

Film:

1957 – Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon). Jacques Tourneur’s masterful adaptation of Casting the Runes.

Buy Night of the Demon on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

1989 – The Church (La Chiesa). Michele Soavi’s film, co-written with Dario Argento but taking significant influence from The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.

Buy The Church on DVD from Amazon.com

Forthcoming – Joe Dante has been linked with a new adaptation of Casting the Runes for several years, having already adopted the Jamesian curse for his 2009 film, Drag Me To Hell

Radio:

The performed origins and suggestive scares have made James’s work some of the most performed horror on radio.

1947 – CBS Radio – Escape – Casting the Runes
1973 – BBC Radio 3 – Lost Hearts, read by Bernard Cribbins (Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.)
1974 – CBS Radio – This Will Kill You – Casting the Runes, starring E.G. Marshall
1981 – BBC Radio 4 – The Hex – Casting the Runes, starring Conrad Phillips (Circus of Horrors)
1997–1998 – Radio 4 broadcast The Late Book: Ghost Stories, a series of 15-minute readings of M. R. James stories, abridged and produced by Paul Kent and narrated by Benjamin Whitrow (repeated on BBC 7, December 2003–January 2004, September–October 2004, February 2007, October–November 2011). The stories were Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, Lost Hearts, A School Story, The Haunted Dolls’ House and Rats.
1982-92 – A series of four double audio cassettes was released by Argo Records, featuring nineteen unabridged James stories narrated by Michael Hordern. The tapes were titled Ghost Stories (1982), More Ghost Stories (1984), A Warning to the Curious (1985) and No. 13 and Other Ghost Stories (1988).

ISIS Audio Books also released two collections of unabridged James stories, this time narrated by Nigel Lambert. These tapes were titled A Warning to the Curious and Other Tales (four audio cassettes, six stories, March 1992) and Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (three audio cassettes, eight stories, December 1992).

2007 – Tales of the Supernatural, Volume One, an audiobook presentation by Fantom Films, featuring the James stories Lost Hearts read by Geoffrey Bayldon (Tales From the Crypt, Frankenstein Must be Destroyed), Rats and Number 13 by Ian Fairbairn, with Gareth David-Lloyd reading Casting the Runes and There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard.
2007 – Radio 4 – The tradition of James’s ghost stories for the festive period returned once more, with a series of adaptations of his most popular tales. Each lasted around 15 minutes and was introduced by Derek Jacobi (The Medusa Touch) as James himself. Due to the short running times the tales were fairly rushed, with much of the stories condensed or removed. Stories adapted included Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, Number 13 and Lost Hearts.

2007 – A Warning to the Furious. Forty-five minute play, written by Robin Brooks, concerning a film-making team setting out to make a documentary about MRJ on the Suffolk coast.
A series of seven tales billed as Doug Bradley’s Spinechillers were released as audio downloads, read by Pinhead himself

Spinechillers

Comics:

Anna Sahrling-Hamm – Hearts/Wailing Well. Online adaptations

Scott Hampton – Spookhouse Volume One. A compendium of tales, also featuring W.W. Jacobs Monkey’s Paw, James’s The Mezzotint is included.

Kelley Jones – Eerie – Volume 6, 2014 – The Ash Tree

Daz Lawrence

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (27 May 1922 – 7 June 2015) was an English actor, singer, and author. With a career spanning nearly seventy years, Lee initially portrayed villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the final two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).

Obituary:

We knew it was coming – the man was 93, after all – but you could easily believe that if anyone was going to live forever, it would be Christopher Lee. His death on Sunday, announced today, shows that even he was mortal.

But what a life. It’s fair to say that whoever you are and however long you live, you will never be as utterly cool as Christopher Lee. This is a man who was a wartime spy, had a film career than lasted almost seventy years – working with everyone from Jess Franco to George Lucas – and in his Nineties recorded a bunch of heavy metal albums, picking up a Metal Hammer award to go alongside his knighthood, BAFTA  Fellowship and other gongs.

Lee made so many films that even listing the highlights will turn into a gargantuan list. He rose to fame working for Hammer – in The Curse of Frankenstein, he was simply the monster – sorry, ‘creature’ – but then got to prove his acting chops with Dracula the next year, in the process becoming the iconic version of the character in a variable series of films. Lee would be a Hammer regular in the late 1950s and continued to work with them, often co-starring with Peter Cushing, throughout the 1960s and 70s, on films as varied as She, Taste of Fear, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Pirates of Blood River,The Devil Rides Out, Terror of the Tongs and the final horror film of Hammer’s first incarnation, To the Devil a Daughter. In 2011, he returned to the revived company to appear in The Resident.

Lee also worked frequently for Hammer’s rivals Amicus – he starred in their first horror film The City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) and would be one of their go-to stars for films like Dr.Terror’s House of Horrors, The Skull, The House That Dripped Blood, Scream and Scream Again and I, Monster. But Hammer and Amicus were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Lee’s horror work in the 1960s, as he travelled across Europe to star in a huge number of films. He worked with Mario Bava on The Whip and the Body and Hercules in the Haunted World, spoofed his Dracula role in Uncle Was A Vampire (he would do likewise in 1976 in Dracula and Son) and also appeared in The Virgin of Nuremberg, Terror in the Crypt aka Crypt of Horror, Castle of the Living Dead, Night of the Big Heat, Circus of Fear, The Blood Demon and The Oblong Box amongst others. He played Sir Henry Baskerville in Hammer’s Hound of the Baskervilles and then graduated to playing Sherlock Holmes.

Also in the 1960s, he developed another recurring role, playing arch villain Fu Manchu in five films. The last two of these were directed by Jess Franco, who Lee would go on to make several films with – from the ambitious but ultimately misguided Count Dracula (an attempt to stick to Stoker’s novel) to The Bloody Judge and Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, though Lee maintained that he was unaware of the sort of film he was making in that instance!

In the early 1970s, Lee continued to make international horror films, including The Creeping Flesh, Horror Express, Dark Places, Nothing But the Night (for his own Charlemagne company) but increasingly found himself able to move beyond the genre. While still a horror movie, The Wicker Man was a cut above the usual in terms of respectability, while other films like The Three Musketeers, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, western Hannie Caulder and Julius Caesar allowed him to move away from the genre to a degree.

A move to the USA and an iconic role in James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun cemented a move to the mainstream, and in the latter half of the decade and early 1980s, he had major roles in the likes of Airport ’77, Return from Witch Mountain, 1941, Bear Island, Goliath Awaits and a surprising number of martial arts action films: An Eye for an Eye, Jaguar Lives and Circle of Iron. Not that he abandoned low budget genre films – he was essentially tricked into hosting The Hollywood Meatcleaver Massacre, but also appeared in The Keeper, Starship Invasions, End of the World, Arabian Adventure, House of the Long Shadows and, most bizarrely, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf and the appalling Funny Man.

In the 1990s, he worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky on The Rainbow Thief, appeared in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow and turned up in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch. This latter appearance was a precursor to his 2000’s career revival when he was often hired by directors who grew up watching him. So he worked with Tim Burton on Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Alice in Wonderland, Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and appeared in both the decade’s biggest franchises, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. And he just kept working – between 2010 and 2013, he made twelve films!

And it was more than just films and TV. Lee lent his voice to numerous audiobooks and latterly provided voices for video games – he also appeared in CD ROM project Ghosts in the mid 1990s. He fronted collections of horror stories, and wrote his autobiography, and made numerous records – in the 1970s, he narrated Hammer’s Dracula LP and made an opera single, in the early 2000s sang a handful of shockingly bad pop songs and then became a heavy metal star, first working with symphonic metal band Rhapsody and then releasing his won albums. He seemed to genuinely love this new and unexpected career twist, presumably no longer giving a damn what anyone thought of him.

They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, and they are often right. But I met Lee twice – once while working on a The Wicker Man featurette with David Gregory, and once when hanging around with the boys as they filmed Lee and Jess Franco for The Bloody Judge extras. Lee was exactly what you wanted him to be – dignified, serious, gentlemanly and charming. In short, he seemed a thoroughly decent chap. When he called me up after The Wicker Man shoot to get a number for one of the crew, my inner ten year-old exploded with excitement: Dracula on the phone!

Lee might not have been entirely comfortable with his ‘horror star’ reputation, but I think he eventually came to realise how much his work meant to so many people – including those now employing him. And regardless of what he thought of the films he’d made, he was a genuine connoisseur of the gothic and the nightmarish in literature. He never seemed ashamed of his past.

The death of Christopher Lee is the end of an era. I doubt any living actor will clock up the sheer number of credits that he has, or leave the same sort of cultural imprint. I’ll miss never seeing another Lee Christmas message. And I’ll miss his reassuring presence – he was an integral part of my life since I was a small child and the world feels that little bit emptier now.

David Flint, Strange Things Are Happening

Filmography

H. P. Lovecraft by Sean Phillips

Howard Phillips Lovecraft aka H. P. Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction.

Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre.

Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. He encountered problems with classmates in school, and was kept at home by his highly strung and overbearing mother for illnesses that may have been psychosomatic. In high school, Lovecraft was able to better connect with his peers and form friendships.

Beginning in his early life, Lovecraft is believed to have suffered from sleep paralysis, a form of parasomnia; he believed himself to be assaulted at night by horrific “night gaunts“. Much of his later work is thought to have been directly inspired by these terrors.

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In early adulthood, Lovecraft was established in a reclusive “nightbird” lifestyle without occupation or pursuit of romantic adventures. In 1913 his conduct of a long running controversy in the letters page of a story magazine led to his being invited to participate in an amateur journalism association. Encouraged, he started circulating his stories; he was 31 at the time of his first publication in a professional magazine. By age 34, he was a regular contributor to the newly founded Weird Tales magazine.

Lovecraft returned to Providence from New York in 1926 and, over the next nine months, he produced some of his most celebrated tales, including The Call of Cthulhu, canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor, Lovecraft saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died at the age of 46. In early 1937, Lovecraft was diagnosed with cancer of the small intestine, and suffered from malnutrition as a result. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937, in Providence.

His oeuvre is sometimes seen as consisting of three periods: an early Edgar Allan Poe influence; followed by a Lord Dunsany–inspired Dream Cycle; and finally the Cthulhu Mythos stories. However, many distinctive ideas and entities present in the third period were introduced in the earlier works, such as the 1917 story “Dagon“, and the threefold classification is partly overlapping.

Although he was able to combine his distinctive style (allusive and amorphous description by horrified though passive narrators) with the kind of stock content and action Weird Tales‘s editor wanted—Wright paid handsomely to snap up “The Dunwich Horror” which proved very popular with readers—Lovecraft increasingly produced work that brought him no remuneration.

Affecting a calm indifference to the reception of his works, Lovecraft was in reality extremely sensitive to criticism and easily precipitated into withdrawal. He was known to give up trying to sell a story after it had been rejected just once.

Sometimes, as with The Shadow Over Innsmouth he wrote a story that might have been commercially viable, but did not try to sell it. Lovecraft even ignored interested publishers. He failed to reply when one inquired about any novel Lovecraft might have ready, although he had completed such a work: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; it was never typed up.

Lovecraft was relatively unknown during his own time. While his stories appeared in the pages of prominent pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (eliciting letters of outrage as often as letters of praise from regular readers of the magazines), not many people knew his name. He did, however, correspond regularly with other contemporary writers, such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, people who became good friends of his, even though they never met in person. This group of writers became known as the “Lovecraft Circle”, since they all freely borrowed elements of Lovecraft’s stories – the mysterious books with disturbing names, the pantheon of ancient alien entities, such as Cthulhu and Azathoth, and eldritch places, such as the New England town of Arkham and its Miskatonic University – for use in their own works with Lovecraft’s encouragement.

After Lovecraft’s death, the Lovecraft Circle carried on. August Derleth in particular added to and expanded on Lovecraft’s vision. However, Derleth’s contributions have been controversial. While Lovecraft never considered his pantheon of alien gods more than a mere plot device, Derleth created an entire cosmology, complete with a war between the good Elder Gods and the evil Outer Gods, such as Cthulhu and his ilk.

Lovecraft’s writing, particularly the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, has influenced fiction authors including modern horror and fantasy writers. Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Alan Moore, Junji Ito, F. Paul Wilson, Brian Lumley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, William S. Burroughs, and Neil Gaiman, have cited Lovecraft as one of their primary influences. Beyond direct adaptation, Lovecraft and his stories have had a profound impact on popular culture.

Lovecraft’s fictional Mythos has influenced a number of musicians. The psychedelic rock band H. P. Lovecraft released the albums H. P. Lovecraft and H. P. Lovecraft II in 1967 and 1968 respectively; their titles included “The White Ship”. Metallica recorded a song inspired by “The Call of Cthulhu”, an instrumental titled “The Call of Ktulu”, and another song based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth titled “The Thing That Should Not Be”, and another based on Frank Belknap Long‘s “The Hounds of Tindalos“, titled “All Nightmare Long“. Black Sabbath‘s “Behind the Wall of Sleep” appeared on their 1970 debut album and is based on Lovecraft’s short story “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”. The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets entire repertoire is Lovecraft-based. Melodic death metal band The Black Dahlia Murder produced “Throne of Lunacy” and “Thy Horror Cosmic” based on the Cthulhu Mythos. Progressive metal band Dream Theater‘s song “The Dark Eternal Night” is based on Lovecraft’s story “Nyarlathotep“. UK anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Penimake repeated references in their song titles, lyrics and artwork, including in the album Cacophony, all 30 songs of which are inspired by the life and writings of Lovecraft. In the Iron Maiden album Live After Death, the band mascot, Eddie, is rising from a grave inscribed with the name “H. P. Lovecraft” and a quotation from The Nameless City: “That is not dead which can eternal lie yet with strange aeons even death may die.” German metal group Mekong Delta made an album called The Music of Erich Zann.

Lovecraft has also influenced gaming. Chaosium‘s role-playing game Call of Cthulhu (currently in its seventh major edition) has been in print for 30 years. The board games Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror, and dice game Elder Sign are derived from mechanisms first introduced in the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Two collectible card games are Mythos and Call of Cthulhu, the Living Card Game. Several video games are based on or influenced heavily by Lovecraft such as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness, Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice, Shadowman, Alone in the Dark, Chzo Mythos, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, Cthulhu Saves the World, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Bloodborne, Dead Space, Terraria, Splatterhouse,Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage, Penumbra, Blood, The Last Door and Quake.

For most of the 20th century, the definitive editions (specifically At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Dunwich Horror and Others, and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions) of his prose fiction were published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a considerable amount of other literature as well.

Penguin Classics has at present issued three volumes of Lovecraft’s works: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and most recently The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories.

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Films based upon Lovecraft’s work include:

The Haunted Palace (1963)

Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

The Shuttered Room (1967)

The Dunwich Horror (1969)

Re-Animator (1985)

From Beyond (1986)

The Curse (1987)

The Unnamable (1988)

Dark Heritage (1989)

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)

The Resurrected (1992)

The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993)

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Necronomicon (1993)

The Lurking Fear (1994)

Witch Hunt (1994)

Castle Freak (1995)

Bleeders (1997)

Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (1998)

Cool Air (1999)

Cthulhu (2000)

Dagon (2001)

Alone in the Dark (2005)

The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House (2005)

Cthulhu (2007)

The Tomb (2007)

Chill (2007)

The Whisperer in Darkness (2011)

Call Girl of Cthulhu (2015)

Wikipedia

Angus Scrimm (born Lawrence Rory Guy; August 19, 1926 – January 9, 2016) was an American actor and author, best known for playing the Tall Man in the 1979 horror film Phantasm and its sequels.

Scrimm was born in Kansas City. He was originally a journalist and has written and edited for TV Guide, Cinema Magazine, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and many other publications. He has also written liner notes for many LPs and CDs for artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to the Beatles.

Scrimm stood approximately 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m). To appear even taller when playing the Tall Man, he wore suits that were several sizes too small and platform shoes.

Although he had acted in a couple of horror thrillers previously, Sweet Kill (1971) and Scream Bloody Murder (1973), his well-received 1979 Phantasm role led led him to become a horror icon.

Selected filmography:

• Sweet Kill (1973) Henry
• Scream Bloody Murder (1973) Doctor Epstein
• Phantasm (1979) The Tall Man
• Witches’ Brew (1980) Carl Groton
• The Lost Empire (1983) Dr. Sin Do/Lee Chuck
• Phantasm II (1988) The Tall Man
• Transylvania Twist (1989) The Tall Man
• Subspecies (1990) King Vladislas
• Mindwarp (1992) The Seer
• Munchie Strikes Back (1994) Kronas
• Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994) The Tall Man
• Wishmaster (1997) Narrator
• Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) The Tall Man
• Masters of Horror: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005) Buddy
• Automatons (2006) The Scientist
• Satanic (2006) Dr. Barbary
• I Sell The Dead (2008) Doctor Quint
• Hollywood Horror (2009)
• Satan Hates You (2009) Dr. Michael Gabriel
• John Dies at the End (2012) Father Shellnut
• Phantasm V: Ravager (2016) The Tall Man

Posted in tribute to the late Angus Scrimm who died on January 9, 2016, he died at the age of 89 in Los Angeles.

Wikipedia | IMDb

The Abominable Snowman is a 1957 British horror film directed by Val Guest for Hammer Film Productions. It is based on a 1955 BBC television play, The Creature, written by Nigel Kneale (The Quatermass Xperiment and sequels), who also wrote the screenplay adaptation for the film.

Main cast:

Forrest Tucker, Peter Cushing, Maureen Connell, Richard Wattis, Robert Brown.

Plot:

Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing), his wife, Helen (Maureen Connell), and assistant, Peter Fox (Richard Wattis), are guests of the Lama (Arnold Marlé) of the monastery of Rong-buk while on a botanical expedition to the Himalayas.

A second expedition, led by Dr. Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) arrives at the monastery in search of the legendary Yeti or Abominable Snowman.

Despite the objections of his wife and the Lama, Rollason decides to join Friend’s expedition. Whereas Rollason is motivated by scientific curiosity to learn more about the creature, Friend seeks fame and fortune and wants to capture a live Yeti and present it to the world’s press…

Reviews:

“For once an engaging monster is neither bombed, roasted nor electrocuted. For this welcome courtesy, as well as its thrills and its nonsense I salute The Abominable Snowman.” The Sunday Times, 1957

“an intelligent but commonplace adventure thriller with the Yeti little more than background figures… a little too ponderous and hence unexciting” Bill Warren, Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties. Volume I: 1950–1957

“A gripping essay in the macabre, tensely directed by Val Guest and spoiled only by some very obvious studio mountains: Hammer at its most subtle.” Alan Frank, The Horror Film Handbook

“the film conveys a taut, paranoid atmosphere; set largely in wide open spaces, it’s remarkably claustrophobic in scale.” Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story. The Authorised History of Hammer Films

“The story’s modest albeit effective narrative conflicts transferred well from the small to larger screen. Kneale and Guest intelligently kept the focus of the filmic adaptation not on the special effects the larger budget allowed, but on creating a chilling atmosphere and foreboding sense of dread.” David Coleman, The Bigfoot Filmography

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” … combined with excellent performances and convincing production design, easily make it the best of a quartet of films about the Yeti produced in the Fifties (the inferior others are The Snow Creature, Man Beast and Half Human).” Gary A. Smith, Uneasy Dreams: The Golden Age of British Horror Films, 1956-1976 

“A thin horror film with intelligent scripting: more philosophising and characterisation than suspense. The briefly glimpsed Yeti are disappointing creations.” Leslie Halliwell, Halliwell’s Film Guide 

Release:

US: Anchor Bay released a widescreen anamorphic DVD in 2000.

UK: Icon Home Entertainment DVD in a 16×9 2.35:1 widescreen transfer from the original Regalscope, renamed “Hammerscope” by the company.

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Choice dialogue:

Rollason: “It isn’t what’s out there that’s dangerous, so much as what’s in us.”

Wikipedia

“A terrible thought crept like a snake into my mind – hunting was beginning to bore me.”

Like calamitous oceanic buses, two shipwrecks have left Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrae) and a handful of other lucky souls marooned on a remote island, the only survivors from their respective vessels, both run aground on reefs due to apparent tampering with local shipping signals. Once ashore, Rainsford navigates the local overgrown flora and finds himself at a huge mansion, more likely to be found in rather more gothic surroundings.

Rainsford is warmly welcomed by Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), a decadent host accustomed to a life of decadence and death after leaving the family estate in the Crimea and then a stint serving as a Cossack commander. Zaroff is now living a God-like existence on the remote island, enjoying a lavish lifestyle, free from prying eyes and outside influences. From his youth shooting his father’s wild turkeys for sport, his experiences at war have contributed to his disturbed mindset, his bloodlust having exhausted the local wildlife and developed to craving more trying prey.

Rainsford himself is revealed to be a hunter of some note, a plot twist which would be likely given short shrift by a modern audience, though it served its purpose as a device for cinema-goers at the time. Delighted to find a sportsman of such renown, Zaroff introduces him to two other castaways – the beautiful Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and her brother, Martin (Robert Armstrong), already significantly inebriated thanks to Zaroff’s plentiful supply of premium vodka.

Zaroff engages Rainsford in animated conversation about their shared interest and asks if he too has grown tired of traditional prey and seeks a greater challenge. It takes Ms. Trowbridge to join the dots for him, though by that time, a presumably staggering Martin has been let loose, slain and been thoroughly plucked for the Count’s trophy cabinet. The remaining duo are given until sunrise to flee into the jungle, armed only with a small knife, Zaroff and his ravenous hounds giving them a head start but little chance. Survive and they will have their lives spared… but the odds are against them!

Released in Britain under the title The Hounds of Zaroff, The Most Dangerous Game (1932) is a superior example of Pre-Code horror, which even now is shocking in its fervent sadism, not to mention the thinly veiled sexual threat (and indeed, Wray’s thin veils).

Adapted from the 1924 short story written by Richard Connell, it sticks closely to the original narrative, save for some character changes, most notably the addition of a female character. Published in the American magazine, Collier’s, also the home of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, pre-book form, it reveals Man at his most basic: hunter; exploiter; imperialist and autocrat – asserting his position at the top of the food chain.

The notion of hunting humans is immediately gripping, though other elements are equally disarming. Of all the characters, by far the most interesting is Zaroff – elegantly bewitching, though otherworldly as an aristocratic ‘foreigner’, a hierarchy within the household is quickly established – Zaroff as alpha male (actually, alpha human); Bob as the challenge to his dominance; Eve as his sexual quarry; his faithful, blood-thirsty hounds; his Cossack servants and lastly, lesser, male prey.

Zaroff continually shows the odds are always in his favour. He feeds, clothes and avails himself to his guests and, even when hunting, recognises a modest token of defence for his game is fair sport (“I’m a hunter, not a murderer!”), opting himself for a longbow, reflecting both his background and his genuine belief of himself as evolutionary superior to others. This would all fall somewhat flat and a tad silly were it not for the sensational performance by Leslie Banks.

Wounded in WWI, he was left with significant scarring to the left side of his face, as well as some deformity around the eye. As such, he spent much of his career having perfected a technique whereby the camera would only film him from the right, a show of brave defiance which would be almost unthinkable now. The Most Dangerous Game was the film which acted as the springboard to his career and one in which he was confident enough to use his features to their fullest.

When slowly turning to face his guests, he intones that his wounds, including a fractured skull which he absent-mindedly caresses throughout the film, were as a result of a confrontation with a Cape buffalo – this is not a film with a protagonist who is pure, undiluted evil but one with a mentally and physically scarred man. As such, it is possible to watch the film in true support of Zaroff, as much a victim of circumstance in the same way as King Kong, Frankenstein’s monster and The Wolfman. It has to be said, this view is aided somewhat by those who he deems fit to hunt. Banks would later star in Hitchcock’s 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and perhaps most famously, 1942’s Went the Day Well?

McCrae is, it must be said, a lead actor of certain qualities – sadly these do not include acting. As a butch, action hero, he looks not unlike a more rugged Flash Gordon (ironically, Buster Crabbe makes a brief, uncredited appearance on the ship, as well as being McCrae’s stunt double), fleet of foot, able to drag a woman by the hand at a moment’s notice and look in different directions when prompted. He does not, sadly, for a minute, prompt much sympathy from the audience. As a hunter himself, boastful of his many four-legged gunshot-riddled conquests, he is scarcely any different from Zaroff, who at least has the grace to give his guests a weapon and a head-start.

His character behaves little better, in truth. Given the opportunity to flee before Zaroff’s hunting party give chase, he opts to build an elaborate man-trap, which by his own admissions will take a few hours. This peculiar preference to running as far away as possible is immediately revealed to be folly of the highest order when Zaroff enters the clearing and spots it instantly, disarming it and immediately locating his prey.

If people know anything about The Most Dangerous Game, it’s that it was filmed in tandem with 1933’s King Kong – I am not about to disappoint you. Largely filmed at night, utilising some of the immediately recognisable jungle scenery (in particular the chasm-spanning log), there was a very obvious need to re-use props, environments, actors and crew – King Kong had gone dizzyingly over budget and RKO were beginning to panic. This had been exacerbated by the hiring of composer Max Steiner, the first horror film to deliver a truly specifically composed score and one which also heavily utilised sound effects. Steiner’s music is indeed present in The Most Dangerous Game, but is noticeably less pronounced and serves as a more traditional action adventure score than what would become more commonly heard in the horror films which followed in the late 1930’s and 1940’s. Due to the technical complications of Kong, The Most Dangerous Game hit the big screen first, though this was not as intended.

Also on double-time were director, Ernest B. Schoedsack; producers Merian C. Cooper and David O. Selznick; screenplay writer, James Creelman, as well as actors, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Steve Clemente and Noble Johnson. Alas, Wray rather sleepwalks through the film, clearly having saved her best work for the daytime – indeed, in her autobiography, On the Other Hand, she barely sees fit to mention the film’s jungle twin at all. Eve as a character is given little to do and seems almost as aloof as Zaroff – her fondness for her brother seems a little lacking and it’s difficult to discern any burgeoning relationship between herself and Rainsford. Those with magical ears will recognise some of her screams are identical to those also used in King Kong.

Armstrong performs far more appealingly, just about on the right side of jambon grande as the louche castaway, seemingly entirely happy with the way things have turned out. He provides much necessary comic relief, though his swift dispatch means the film’s thunderous pace in the second-half is utterly without respite. Though his death appears off-camera, we are left to visualise ourselves how pitiful the hunting of a defenceless, completely sozzled man in a completely alien setting would be. The eternal truth of what you don’t see speaking as loudly as what you do, being a device many modern filmmakers could learn from.

Clemente was quite possibly the first Latin-American actor to break through into the Hollywood system, albeit in a rather minor capacity. His exotic looks, accent and handy ability at expertly throwing knives, made him a popular villain for filmmakers, appearing in the likes of King Kong, its sequel Son of Kong, The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and Murder in the Museum (1934).

Perhaps most interesting is the appearance of Noble Johnson as Zaroff’s loyal but “dumb” tartar servant, Ivan. A masterclass in subtlety, his performance is all the more eye-popping due to the fact that far from cossack or even caucasian, Johnson was a black African-American, whited-up by the make-up department, immediately rendering his physical appearance as…unusual.

A childhood friend of Lon Chaney Snr. Johnson’s willingness, as well as talent, to play a multitude of races meant that he became cinema’s first Black American film star, even rising high enough to set up his own film company, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. There is, of course, the none too subtle inference that these subservient swarthy men are somewhat less than human themselves, hence Zaroff’s tolerance.

At a meagre 63 minutes, not a second is wasted in the film, the audience thrown off the sinking ship and onto the island as quickly as those marooned. It’s worth noting that that the wreck itself, whilst never convincing in terms of scale, is oddly brutal in enactment, with the addition of sharks thrown into an already perilous predicament. Zaroff is introduced as a new character at the same time as Eve and Bob, allowing us to share their observations first-hand and leaving Banks alone to convey to us the nature of the predicament. If 63 minutes seems overly brief, it is worth noting that the short story is indeed that – 8000 words with not even Wray’s character involved. The film revels in the very basic human fears of being lost, chased and, of course, the unknown.

In fact, a significant part of the film remains lost – preview screenings are listed as running for a full 73 minutes. Much of the missing action takes place in Zaroff’s tour of his hunting gallery, the displays featuring not only wild beasts but also mounted human heads and dramatically-posed stuffed bodies, but was excised for reasons of decency after preview audiences objected. Although an obvious bedfellow in film terms with King Kong, the film actually makes an ideal double bill with Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, also from 1932. Both films boast a sensational villain played to perfection, a remote island which has adopted its own morality, and themes which are as relevant now as they were 80-odd years ago.

On the subject of morality, if there’s one element of Zaroff’s personality which isn’t so easily dismissed, it’s his carnal desires for Eve. Repeated motifs on both the door knocker and a huge wall mural depict a satyr-like creature holding a defeated, bedraggled female in its arms, remarkably similar to famous depiction of Kong and Wray, the tap on the nose being that Zaroff too will ultimately assert his dominance over his prized woman. When the Count speaks of the hunt, “quickening the blood”, it is clear that he does not intend to romance Eve as such when he triumphs, more that he will rape her.

The most dangerous game the title speaks of, both as the nature of the quarry and the morally troublesome notion of playing God, works on film as perfectly as it did on the page. The British re-titling of Hounds of Zaroff is less subtle and indeed does little to present Zaroff to us as a benefactor before we’ve even met him. The hounds themselves were not especially fearsome and had to be dyed a darker shade in order to convey more readily a sense of evil. Less happy with this arrangement was the owner of dogs who had loaned them to the producers, without being informed of the rough and tumble they would be asked to perform, nor of their new hairdos – none other than the legendary silent comedian, Harold Lloyd. A pair of glass but with no smile, one suspects.

As with an alarming number of films of the period, the film was considered lost for a significant number of years, despite its cast, crew and success – filmed for a cost of approximately $200,000, it quickly made its money back plus a profit of $70,000 in the first year alone. In fact, once the film had exhausted its run at cinemas (perhaps brought to a more abrupt end than it deserved due to the success of its ape twin), it was over a decade before the film raised its head above the parapet once more. First it was reformed as an episode of the CBS Radio series, Suspense, in 1943 with Orson Welles playing the role of Zaroff, then an entirely new film production, 1945’s A Game of Death directed by Robert Wise (The Haunting; The Day the Earth Stood Still) which changed the setting to a post-war environment, with a Nazi as the more obvious villain.

Also making an appearance is our good friend, Noble Johnson, playing Carib, an island native, whilst also appearing as Ivan in stock footage used for part of the hunting dog sequence…such was the meagre budget afforded the film. Indeed, RKO, the once mighty film Goliath, had barely more than a decade left in its recognisable form before the curtains were drawn shut for one last time. Thus, perhaps the most confusing pub quiz question ever devised is born: which actor appears three times playing two different characters based on the same source material?

Yet another decade passed before the Richard Widmark and Trevor Howard 1956 vehicle, Run for the Sun, again employed the same storyline (still finding a female character was necessary; all subsequent versions lean more heavily on the film than the short story, interestingly) and again using it as a metaphor for WWII.

By now, the films were existing in a world where few of the audience would have been aware that what they were watching was essentially a cover version of the groundbreaking original – more than this, they were given necessarily diluted versions, the censorial threats post-Hays Code meaning that the blunt savagery of the original is lost. What may seem a very modern ugly conceit by filmmakers to overlook their source material was alive and well much longer ago than one may expect. That aside, it would actually take the physical rediscovery of the film in the 1970’s for a new wave of filmmakers to find inspiration in The Most Dangerous Game – aided by the fact that copyright had not been obtained in 1932.

If The Most Dangerous Game seems doomed to be forever the black sheep of the Golden Age of horror, it’s because since the late 1960’s, so many other television and film productions have drunk heartily from its trough without as much as a tip of the hat. Like a filmic Velvet Underground, clearly the people who had seen it went out immediately and made a film… sometimes, almost the same film.

Television was a prime offender, seeing episodes from the obvious – the island-based, Gilligan’s Island and Fantasy Island – to the less immediately fitting Bonanza and The Incredible Hulk. Later visitations were more gracious in saluting their source material: both The Simpsons’ Survival of the Fattest episodes of their annual Treehouse of Horror and American Dad riffed on the film’s set-up whilst still holding the film aloft for praise.

The Most Dangerous Game holds its appeal as audiences will never tire of the rich tyrant, bored of both cheap and expensive thrills, concocting ever-more elaborate games in which the ultimate prize really is the difference between life and death. It would not be too outlandish to assert that the inappropriately-titled “torture porn” sub-genre (the Hostel series; Saw et al) sees its roots in the film – rich, bored, disaffected white males finding the only way to get their kicks from the trapping and slow, calculated slaying of unfortunate strays.

More immediately traceable are Peter Watkins’ 1971 social commentary Punishment Park and, straying towards the other end of the scale somewhat, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Turkey Shoot (1982). Even later films to be influence include Predator, The Hunger Games and perhaps most successfully, Battle Royale, a film which not only strongly echoes the plot but also the cold-hearted nonchalance at the centre.

Best of all is Peter Collinson’s hugely undervalued Open Season (1974), an unforgiving human-hunting sensorial overload which depicts a broken America at war with itself.

There are some obvious reasons The Most Dangerous Game regularly fails to feature in discussion of 20th Century horror: the huge success of King Kong – we can only wonder how, had this film appeared first, as intended, opinion would have differed; the cast – pre-filming documentation sees both Ray Milland and one Creighton Chaney (Lon Jr to you) listed in the cast – such acting ballast would have served the marketing campaign well. The lack of secured copyright meant that the film was free to pick from at leisure, a factor compounded when a home release finally was considered – cheap, extremely ropey copies were allowed to exist as there were no checks and measures necessary. Even now, only Criterion have attempted anything like a reverential release, though this is now out of print and nowhere near what fans would now expect of a release of such an important film.

Though indirectly, the film’s legacy is hugely significant, it is now time to re-evaluate The Most Dangerous Game. A film which, at the starting pistol of horror films featuring other-worldly and supernatural villains, chose to put Man himself as the epitome of evil; a film which pulls no punches and delivers a genuinely merciless threat; a film which offers no apologies and little redemption. In 1968, a series of clue-ridden letters, “ciphers”, if you will, were sent to local Californian newspapers. In it, a still unknown serial killer, now known as the Zodiac Killer, left his first clue. When unscrambled it read as follows:

“I like killing people because it’s so much fun
It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous game”

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

A Most Dangerous Timeline – Releases and Influence

January 19th 1924 – Publication of the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell in Colliers
September 16th 1932 – US theatrical release of The Most Dangerous Game (dir. Pichel/Schoedsack)
October 20th 1932 – UK theatrical release
September 23rd 1943 – Featured segment of Suspense radio show. Starred Orson Welles
February 1st 1945 – Featured segment of Suspense radio show. Starred Joseph Cotton
November 23rd 1945 – A Game of Death (dir. Robert Wise)
October 1st 1947 – Aired on radio as part of the adventure anthology, Escape. Starred Paul Frees.
1953 – The Dangerous Game – Short film directed and starring Joseph Marzano
1953 – The 7th Victim – Short story written by Robert Sheckley
July 30th 1956 – Run for the Sun (dir. Roy Boulting)
September 13th 1961 – Bloodlust! (dir. Ralph Brooke)
December 1st 1964 – The 10th Victim (dir. Elio Petri)
November 11th 1966 – The Naked Prey (dir. Cornel Wilde)

November 26th 1966 – Island of the Darned – Episode of television series Get Smart
January 16th 1967 – The Hunter – Episode of television series Gilligan’s Island
September 27th 1967 – Hunter’s Moon – Episode of television series Lost in Space
November 15th 1969 – Arena – Episode of television series Star Trek
October 18th 1970 – Das Millionenspiel (dir. Tom Toelle)
January 1st 1971 – Punishment Park (dir. Peter Watkins)
November 1972 – The Woman Hunt (dir. Eddie Romero)

January 16th 1973 – The Hunter – Episode of television series Bonanza
September 11th 1974 – Savages (dir. Lee H. Katzin, based on the 1972 novel Deathwatch by Robb White
November 1st 1974 – Open Season (dir. Peter Collinson)
December 10th 1975 – The Perverse Countess (dir. Jess Franco)

1976 – Seven Women for Satan aka Les week-ends maléfiques du Comte Zaroff (dir. Michel Lemoine)
January 14th 1977 – Pilot episode of television series Fantasy Island
September 1st 1977 – Devil’s Planet – Episode of television series Space: 1999
September 1977 – The Capture – Episode of television series Logan’s Run
December 9th 1979 – The Snare – Episode of television series The Incredible Hulk
October 19th 1982 – Turkey Shoot (dir. Brian Trenchard Smith)
May 27th 1983 – Le Prix du Danger (dir. Yves Boisset)
November 30th 1987 – Deadly Prey (dir. David A. Prior)

December 18th 1987 – Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (dir. Ken Dixon)
January 1st 1988 – Predator (dir. John McTiernan)
October 21st 1988 – Running Man (dir. Paul Michel Glaser)
November 10th 1989 – Survival Quest (dir. Don Coscarelli)
June 24th 1992 – Death Ring (dir. R.L. Kizer)
January 31st 1993 – Captive Pursuit – Episode of television series Star Trek: Deep Space 9
July 1993 – Hunting Party – Novel by Elizabeth Moon
August 20th 1993 – Hard Target (dir. John Woo)
April 15th 1993 – Surviving the Game (dir. Ernest Dickerson)
April 4th 1998 – Dogboys (dir. Ken Russell)
December 16th 2000 – Battle Royale (dir. Kinji Fukasaku)

June 1st 2001 – Series 7: The Contenders (dir. Daniel Minahan)
February 1st 2004 – The Eliminator (dir. Ken Barbet)
December 18th 2005 – Survival of the Fattest – The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XVI
December 11th 2006 – The Hunt (dir. Fritz Kiersch)
March 7th 2007 – Zodiac (dir. David Fincher)
April 1st 2007 – Naked Fear (dir. Thom Eberhardt)
April 27th 2007 – The Condemned (dir. Scott Wiper)
September 30th 2007 – The Vacation Goo – Episode of television series American Dad
October 17th 2007 – Trigger Man (dir. Ti West)

January 4th 2008 – Rovdyr (dir. Patrik Syversen)
July 10th 2009 – Paintball (dir. Daniel Benmayor)
July 25th 2010 – The Tournament (dir. Scott Mann)
March 18th 2011 – Blooded (dir. Edward Boase)
March 23rd 2012 – Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross)
January 26th 2016 – El Contador – Episode of television series Archer

‘Fearless! Unstoppable! Ready for his close-up!’

My Name Is Bruce is a 2007 American comedy supernatural horror film, directed, co-produced by and starring cult actor Bruce Campbell. The film was written by Mark Verheiden (The Mask; Timecop).

Plot:

In the mining town of Gold Lick, Oregon, Jeff (Taylor Sharpe), a young fan of B movie actor Bruce Campbell, and his friend Clayton (Logan Martin) go out to a cemetery to meet two girls, Big Debbie (Ariel Badenhop) and Little Debbie (Ali Akay). Jeff removes a medallion off the mausoleum, unleashing the Chinese god of the dead, Guan Di (James Peck), who kills Clayton and both Debbie’s while Jeff flees.

Meanwhile, Bruce Campbell is finishing filming for the fictional Cave Alien II, and is promised a birthday surprise from his agent, Mills Toddner (Ted Raimi). Bruce meets Jeff, who kidnaps Campbell and takes him to Gold Lick in hopes that his hero can save the town from Guan-Di. Upon arrival, Bruce assumes it’s his birthday surprise from Mills, and thinks it’s all a movie, despite a lack of cameras and a script, and agrees to “help”.

Reviews:

“You’d think that all those years hanging out with Sam Raimi would have rubbed off on him, but Campbell doesn’t cut it as a director, turning in a clumsy comedy-horror, packed with gags both racist and creaking, that squeaks through on the force of his personality alone. For Deadheads only.” Tom Ambrose, Empire

“Fans will embrace Bruce for the lovable genre hero he is; others may wonder whether the godawful ghost of Troma hasn’t risen from the grave. Yet ask yourself – would you rather have Jean-Claude Van Damme moaning about how hard it is to be himself in JCVD or Bruce Campbell merrily celebrating his own chainsaw-wielding ridiculousness? No contest!” Mark Kermode, The Guardian

” … irrepressible, cheap-as-chips spoof that is the very thing it’s lampooning: a late night picture show, straight-to-DVD fun-fest with special FX so cheesy they make Bubba Ho-tep‘s look like Weta on Berocca. But, littered with clever in-jokes and daft slapstick, this is honestly the most fun you can have on a Friday night and I just loved it.” Film Reviews by Elaine MacIntryre [“the most fun on a Friday night” C’mon, Elaine? Horrorpedia staff]

“The script, by Mark Verheiden (who wrote Timecop and multiple episodes of the television series Smallville, the revived Battlestar Galactica, and Heroes, among other things), has its moments, but it’s just too dang dumb. I did laugh a few times, but not often, and sometimes I cringed.” D Gary Grady

“My Name is Bruce is a self-deprecating film made by and starring Bruce Campbell, B-movie icon. For what it is, it’s a really funny movie that makes fun of Campbell’s entire career — save for, perhaps, his cameos in the Spider-man films. It borrows plot elements from a lot of movies he was in previously, and it makes more references than it could if it wanted to include anyone not in the know.” Marter, The Escapist

“The script by Verheiden is quirky, fast-paced, and loaded with quotable dialogue mostly given to Campbell because let’s face it, just about every line of dialogue the Mighty Chin speaks these days usually ends up being quoted for the rest of time. There are also a lot of choice quips aimed in the direction of some of Campbell’s more questionable career decisions.” Geeks of Doom

Trailer:

Wikipedia | IMDb

The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire (textbook of magic) appearing in the stories by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft’s 1924 published short story “The Hound“, written in 1922, though its purported author, the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City”. Among other things, the work contains an account of the Old Ones, their history, and the means for summoning them.

Other authors such as August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith also cited it in their works; Lovecraft approved, believing such common allusions built up “a background of evil verisimilitude.” Many readers have believed it to be a real work, with booksellers and librarians receiving many requests for it; pranksters have listed it in rare book catalogues, and a student smuggled a card for it into the Yale University Library’s card catalog.

Capitalising on the notoriety of the fictional volume, real-life publishers have printed many books entitled Necronomicon since Lovecraft’s death.

In 1927, Lovecraft wrote a brief “History of the Necronomicon” that was published in 1938, after his death. According to this account, the book was originally called Al Azif, an Arabic word that Lovecraft defined as “that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of demons”, drawing on a footnote by Samuel Henley in Henley’s translation of “Vathek”. Henley, commenting upon a passage which he translated as “those nocturnal insects which presage evil”, alluded to the diabolic legend of Beelzebub, “Lord of the Flies” and to Psalm 91:5, which in some 16th Century English Bibles describes “bugges by night” where later translations render “terror by night”.

In the “History”, Alhazred is said to have been a “half-crazed Arab” who worshipped the Lovecraftian entities Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. He is described as being from Sanaa in Yemen, and as visiting the ruins of Babylon, the “subterranean secrets” of Memphis and the Empty Quarter of Arabia (where he discovered the “nameless city” below Irem). In his last years, he lived in Damascus, where he wrote Al Azif before his sudden and mysterious death in 738.

In subsequent years, Lovecraft wrote, the Azif “gained considerable, though surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age.” In 950, it was translated into Greek and given the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, a fictional scholar from Constantinople.

After this attempted suppression, the work was “only heard of furtively” until it was translated from Greek into Latin by Olaus Wormius. (Lovecraft gives the date of this edition as 1228, though the real-life Danish scholar Olaus Wormius lived from 1588 to 1624.) Both the Latin and Greek text, the “History” relates, were banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, though Latin editions were apparently published in 15th century Germany and 17th century Spain. A Greek edition was printed in Italy in the first half of the 16th century.

The Elizabethan magician John Dee (1527-c. 1609) allegedly translated the book—presumably into English—but Lovecraft wrote that this version was never printed and only fragments survive.

According to Lovecraft, the Arabic version of Al Azif had already disappeared by the time the Greek version was banned in 1050, though he cites “a vague account of a secret copy appearing in San Francisco during the current [20th] century” that “later perished in fire”.

According to “History of the Necronomicon” the very act of studying the text is inherently dangerous, as those who attempt to master its arcane knowledge generally meet terrible ends.

The Necronomicon is mentioned in a number of Lovecraft’s short stories and in his novellas At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. However, despite frequent references to the book, Lovecraft was very sparing of details about its appearance and contents. He once wrote that “if anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it.”

According to Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon“, copies of the original text were held by only five institutions worldwide:

• The British Museum
• The Bibliothèque nationale de France
• Widener Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• The University of Buenos Aires
• The library of the fictional Miskatonic University in the also fictitious Arkham, Massachusetts

The Miskatonic University also holds the Latin translation by Olaus Wormius, printed in Spain in the 17th century.

Although Lovecraft insisted that the book was pure invention (and other writers invented passages from the book for their own works), there are accounts of some people actually believing the Necronomicon to be a real book. Lovecraft himself sometimes received letters from fans inquiring about the Necronomicon‘s authenticity.

Pranksters occasionally listed the Necronomicon for sale in book store newsletters or inserted phony entries for the book in library card catalogues.

The line between fact and fiction was further blurred in the late 1970s when a book purporting to be a translation of “the real” Necronomicon was published. This book, by the pseudonymous “Simon,” had little connection to the fictional Lovecraft Mythos but instead was based on Sumerian mythology. It was later dubbed the “Simon Necronomicon“. Going into trade paperback in 1980 it has never been out of print and has sold 800,000 copies by 2006 making it the most popular Necronomicon to date.

Three additional volumes have since been published — The Necronomicon Spellbook, a book of path-workings with the 50 names of Marduk; Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon, a history of the book itself and of the late 1970s New York occult scene; and The Gates of the Necronomicon, instructions on pathworking with the Simon.

The Necronomicon makes minor appearances in many films and television shows and a few video games, and a version of it known as the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is featured as a primary plot point in the Evil Dead film series. This specific version of the Necronomicon then appears briefly in the ninth film of the Friday the 13th franchise, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.

Necronomicon is a 1993 film anthology of three Lovecraft stories, directed by Brian Yuzna, Christophe Gans and Shusuke Kaneko.

Wikipedia | Image credits: The Escapist

Posted with credit to the Wikipedia Creative Commons Deed

Robert Albert Bloch (April 5, 1917 – September 23, 1994) was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, horror, fantasy and science fiction, from Milwaukee,Wisconsin.

Bloch is best known as the writer of the 1959 novel Psycho, the basis for the 1960 film of the same name directed by Alfred Hitchcock. His work has been extensively adapted for the movies and television, comics and audio books.

His fondness for a pun is evident in the titles of his story collections such as Tales in a Jugular Vein, Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of and Out of the Mouths of Graves.

Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over thirty novels. He was one of the youngest members of the Lovecraft Circle. H. P. Lovecraft was the young writer’s mentor and one of the first to seriously encourage his talent. However, while Bloch started his career by emulating Lovecraft and his brand of “cosmic horror”, he later specialized in crime and horror stories dealing with a more psychological approach.

Bloch was born in Chicago, the son of Raphael “Ray” Bloch (1884–1952), a bank cashier, and his wife Stella Loeb (1880–1944), a social worker, both of German Jewish descent. Bloch’s family moved to Maywood, a Chicago suburb, when he was five.

Formative Years and Early Career

At ten years of age, he attended a screening of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). The scene of Chaney removing his mask terrified the young Bloch and sparked his interest in horror.

In 1929, the Bloch family moved to Milwaukee. Robert attended Lincoln High School, where he met lifelong friend Harold Gauer. Gauer was editor of The Quill, and accepted Bloch’s first published work, a horror story titled “The Thing” (the “thing” of the title was Death).

Bloch’s first professional sales, at the age of 17 (July 1934), to Weird Tales, were the short stories “The Feast in the Abbey” and “The Secret in the Tomb”. “Feast…” appeared first, in the January 1935 issues which actually went on sale November 1, 1934; “Secret in the Tomb” appeared in the May 1935 Weird Tales.

Bloch’s early stories were strongly influenced by Lovecraft. Indeed, a number of his stories were set in, and extended, the world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. These include “The Dark Demon”, in which the character Gordon is a figuration of Lovecraft, and which features Nyarlathotep; “The Faceless God”; “The Grinning Ghoul” and “The Unspeakable Betrothal”. It was Bloch who invented, for example, the oft-cited Mythos texts De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes des Goules. Many other stories influenced by Lovecraft were later collected in Bloch’s volume Mysteries of the Worm.

After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, which affected Bloch deeply, Bloch broadened the scope of his fiction. His horror themes included voodoo (“Mother of Serpents”), the conte cruel (“The Mandarin’s Canaries”), demonic possession (“Fiddler’s Fee”), and black magic (“Return to the Sabbat”). Bloch visited Henry Kuttner in California in 1937. Bloch’s first science fiction story, “The Secret of the Observatory”, was published in Amazing Stories (August 1938).

In an Amazing Stories profile in 1938, accompanying his first published science fiction story, Bloch described himself as “tall, dark, unhandsome” with “all the charm and personality of a swamp adder”. He noted that “I hate everything”, but reserved particular dislike for “bean soup, red nail polish, house-cleaning, and optimists”

In 1944 Bloch was asked to write 39 15-minute episodes of a radio horror show called Stay Tuned for Terror. Many of the programs were adaptations of his own pulp stories. A year later, August Derleth’s Arkham House, published Bloch’s first collection of short stories, The Opener of the Way. At the same time, one of the first distinctly “Blochian” stories was “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”, which was published in Weird Tales in 1943.

The story was Bloch’s take on the Jack the Ripper legend, and was filled out with more genuine factual details of the case than many other fictional treatments. It cast the Ripper as an eternal being who must make human sacrifices to extend his immortality. It was adapted for both radio (in Stay Tuned for Terror) and television (as an episode of Thriller in 1961 adapted by Barré Lyndon).

Bloch followed up this story with a number of others in a similar vein dealing with half-historic, half-legendary figures such as the the Marquis de Sade (“The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”, 1945) and Lizzie Borden (“Lizzie Borden Took an Axe…”, 1946).

Bloch’s first novel was the thriller The Scarf (1947). (He later issued a revised edition in 1966). It tells the story of a writer, Daniel Morley, who uses real women as models for his characters. But as soon as he is done writing the story, he is compelled to murder them, and always the same way: with the maroon scarf he has had since childhood.

With the demise of Weird Tales, Bloch continued to have his fiction published in Amazing, Fantastic, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Fantastic Universe; he was a particularly frequent contributor to Imagination and Imaginative Tales. His output of thrillers increased and he began to appear regularly in such suspense and horror-fiction magazine projects as Shock.

Jack the Ripper

Bloch continued to revisit the Jack the Ripper theme. His contribution to Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions was a story, “A Toy for Juliette”, which evoked both Jack the Ripper and the Marquis de Sade in a time-travel story. His earlier idea of the Ripper as an immortal being resurfaced in Bloch’s contribution to the original Star Trek series episode “Wolf in the Fold”.

His 1984 novel Night of the Ripper is set during the reign of Queen Victoria and follows the investigation of Inspector Frederick Abberline in attempting to apprehend the Ripper, and includes some famous Victorians such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle within the storyline.

Psycho (1959 novel)

Norman Bates, the main character in Psycho, was very loosely based on two people. First was the real-life serial killer Ed Gein, about whom Bloch later wrote a fictionalized account, “The Shambles of Ed Gein”. Second, it has been indicated by several people, as well as allegedly by Bloch himself, that Norman Bates was partly based on Calvin Beck, publisher of Castle of Frankenstein.

Bloch has also, however, commented that it was the situation itself – a mass murderer living undetected and unsuspected in a typical small town in middle America – rather than Gein himself who sparked Bloch’s storyline. He writes: “Thus the real-life murderer was not the role model for my character Norman Bates. Ed Gein didn’t own or operate a motel. Ed Gein didn’t kill anyone in the shower. Ed Gein wasn’t into taxidermy. Ed Gein didn’t stuff his mother, keep her body in the house, dress in a drag outfit, or adopt an alternative personality. These were the functions and characteristics of Norman Bates, and Norman Bates didn’t exist until I made him up. Out of my own imagination, I add, which is probably the reason so few offer to take showers with me.”

The novel is one of the first examples at full length of Bloch’s use of modern urban horror relying on the horrors of interior psychology rather than the supernatural. “By the mid-1940s, I had pretty well mined the vein of ordinary supernatural themes until it had become varicose,” Bloch explained to Douglas E. Winter in an interview. “I realized, as a result of what went on during World War II and of reading the more widely disseminated work in psychology, that the real horror is not in the shadows, but in that twisted little world inside our own skulls.” While Bloch was not the first horror writer to utilise a psychological approach (that honour belongs to Edgar Allan Poe), Bloch’s psychological approach in modern times was comparatively unique.

Bloch’s agent, Harry Altshuler, received a “blind bid” for the novel – the buyer’s name wasn’t mentioned – of $7,500 for screen rights to the book. The bid eventually went to $9,500, which Bloch accepted. Bloch had never sold a book to Hollywood before. His contract with Simon & Schuster included no bonus for a film sale. The publisher took 15 percent according to contract, while the agent took his 10%; Bloch wound up with about $6,750 before taxes. Despite the enormous profits generated by Hitchcock’s film, Bloch received no further direct compensation.

Only Hitchcock’s film was based on Bloch’s novel. The later films in the Psycho series bear no relation to either of Bloch’s sequel novels. Indeed, Bloch’s proposed script for the film Psycho II was rejected by the studio, and it was this that he subsequently adapted for his own sequel novel.

The 1960s: Hollywood and screenwriting

TV work included ten episodes of Thriller (1960–62, several based on his own stories), and ten episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1960–62). In 1962, he wrote the screenplay for The Cabinet of Caligari (1962), an unhappy experience.

In 1962, Bloch penned the story and teleplay “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The episode was shelved when the NBC Television Network and sponsor Revlon called its ending “too gruesome” for airing. Bloch was pleased later when the episode was included in the program’s syndication package to affiliate stations where not one complaint was registered. Today, due to its public domain status, the episode is readily available in home media formats from numerous distributors and free video on demand.

Bloch wrote original screenplays for two movies produced and directed by showman William Castle, Strait-Jacket (1963) and The Night Walker (1964).

Freddie Francis directed British production The Skull (1965) was based on his short story “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade” but penned by Milton Subotsky. Bloch went on to write five feature movies for Amicus Productions: The Psychopath, The Deadly Bees, Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood and Asylum. The last two films featured stories written by Bloch that were printed first in anthologies he wrote in the 1940s and early 1950s.

In 1968 Bloch contributed two episodes for the Hammer Films series Journey to the Unknown for Twentieth Century Fox. One of the episodes, “The Indian Spirit Guide”, was included in the TV movie Journey to Midnight (1968).

The 1970s and ’80s

During the 1970s Bloch wrote two TV movies for director Curtis Harrington – The Cat Creature and The Dead Don’t Die. The Cat Creature was an unhappy production experience for Bloch. Producer Doug Cramer wanted to do an update of Cat People (1942), the Val Lewton classic. Bloch says: “Instead I suggested a blending of the elements of several well-remembered films, and came up with a storyline which dealt with the Egyptian cat-goddess (Bast), reincarnation and the first bypass operation ever performed on an artichoke heart.” A detailed account of the troubled production of the film is described in Bloch’s autobiography, Once Around the Bloch.

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Meanwhile, (interspersed between his screenplays for Amicus Productions), Bloch penned single episodes for TV series Night Gallery (1971), Ghost Story (1972) and Gemini Man (1976).

His numerous novels of this two decade include horror novels such as the Lovecraftian Strange Eons (1978); the non-supernatural mystery There is a Serpent in Eden (1979); his two sequels to the original Psycho (Psycho II and Psycho House), and late novels such as the thriller Lori (1989) and The Jekyll Legacy with Andre Norton (1991). Omnibus editions of hard-to-acquire early novels appeared as Unholy Trinity (1986) and Screams (1989).

Bloch’s screenplay-writing career continued active through the 1980s, with teleplays for Tales of the Unexpected (one episode, 1980), Darkroom (two episodes, 1981), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (one episode, 1986), Tales from the Darkside (three episodes, 1984–87) and Monsters (three episodes, 1988–1989 – “Beetles”, “A Case of the Stubborns” and “Everybody needs a Little Love”). No further screen work appeared in the last five years before his death, although an adaptation of his “collaboration” with Edgar Allan Poe, “The Lighthouse”, was filmed as an episode of The Hunger in 1998.

In 1994, Bloch died of cancer at the age of 77 in Los Angeles after a writing career lasting 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film.

Wikipedia | Image credits: Too Much Horror Fiction

Häxan (English title: The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages) is a 1922 Swedish-Danish silent horror film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen.

Based partly on Christensen’s study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films.

With Christensen’s meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish kronor.

Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion.

Reviews:

” …Häxan is a deeply rationalistic piece of humanism, exposing the horrors of superstition and hysteria rather than of witchcraft itself. Every scene of witchcraft here is carefully framed as a dream, a delusional hallucination, or the content of a false confession extracted under torture; and while we see body-snatching anatomists mistaken for sorcerers, women denounced in error (or malice) as witches, and repressed, neurotic monks and nuns convinced they are possessed by the Devil, the closest that the film comes to a ‘real’ witch is a crone (Pedersen) who concocts and dispenses obscure pharmaceutical philters and unguents – for money, of course.” Anton Bitel, Film4

” …it’s a wonderfully strange and engaging film” Brian W. Collins, Horror Movie a Day

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“Overall, it is an interesting piece of cinema history and I would recommend it as such, but it doesn’t really work as conventional movie due to the constant changes of narrative style and it doesn’t work as a documentary, because it spends too much time on just dramatically portraying various myths. Still, recommended for enthusiasts of cinema history, other than that it doesn’t offer much for a modern viewer.” Karlails Films

“The movie is a collage, but what holds it together is Christensen’s authorial presence, an innovative technique for its time and still uniquely effective. Though shifting suddenly between drama and direct address to the audience, he appears as a guiding hand that is learned, compassionate and humanistic.” David Christenson,  Monsterzine.com

“Genre fans will certainly recognise imagery which has been copied endlessly through the years, and the film certainly stands as a great example of early, sensationalistic horror. Although it is a little slow moving in places, the film is ghoulishly captivating throughout and incredibly, despite its age it has certainly stood the test of time, remaining the definitive work on the subject and still being accessible enough to be enjoyed by modern viewers.” Beyond Hollywood

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“Part earnest academic exercise in correlating ancient fears with misunderstandings about mental illness and part salacious horror movie, Haxan is a truly unique work that still holds the power to unnerve, even in today’s jaded era.” James Kendrick, 1001 Movies You Should See Before You Die

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Offline reading:

Horror Films: The Pocket Essential by Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blance – Pocket Essentials, UK, 2011

Artwork designed by Hartter

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For some, all the world’s a stage, for others, a battlefield. Circumstances sometimes mean that these two options are thrust upon a person, both socially and as a career. It’s one thing to possess what would be deemed ‘unconventional looks’ as an actor – these would perhaps be accentuated or swathed in make-up for a role, the over-riding tone being that they are instantly recognisable and often fit that most go-to pigeonhole-means-nothing phrase – ‘character actor’. For some actors, there is no disguise, no hiding place and often no sympathy.

The use of men, women and children affected by dwarfism and other related conditions is, of course, nothing new – from freak shows, circuses and the entertainment of royalty there is a rich, if unforgiving history of short entertainers. With the exception of the Ancient Egyptians who gave dwarfs exalted status and the most desirable occupations, more often they have found themselves slaves to be used for sex, salacious entertainment and mockery in ancient Roman, Chinese, African and European culture.

A modicum of respect and deference was given to some dwarfs in the European courts of the 15^th to 19^th centuries but more often this gave way to treating dwarfs more like pets than members of their immediate social circle. Eye-popping examples include the demeaning-as-you-might-expect ‘dwarf pits’ of the Medicis, to the playthings of the courts of France and Russia, where numbers were often assembled into harems.

By the 19^th and well into the 20^th century, it was considered almost de rigueur for dwarfs to consider the travelling fair or freak show as not only gainful employment but also a way of life. Regardless of intellect or talent, it has often proved impossible for people to look beyond the stature and physique, though the exploits of P.T. Barnum did at least offer the opportunity to showcase the skills of many performers whose look differed from the norm, in return for safe surroundings and an often not inconsiderable income.

Many of the dwarf actors in this article come from a circus background, from Harry Earles to Luis de Jesus, their performances on-screen often reflecting the wide-eyed acts they honed in front of live audiences desperate for salacious and thrilling spectacle. It is notable that in many of the films mentioned – Freaks, She-Freak, Circus of Fear and others – the circus environment and the tapestry of strange characters therein, hold the key to the unfolding double-crossing and hidden secrets of the narrative.

Upon establishing Barnum’s American Museum in 1841, what would nowadays be recognised as a ‘freak show’ was born. Though not the first to exhibit people with physical deformities as entertainment, Barnum’s outlandish showmanship and feverish marketing techniques brought the spectacle out of the royal palaces and sordid backstreets an uncomfortably into the mainstream. Though distasteful on many levels, they were enormously successful and gave performers denied an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in other forms of employment, a meaningful career.

One of Barnum’s most celebrated stars came early in his career, in 1842, the Connecticut-born Charles Stratton Sherwood, he would become better known through his stage name, General Tom Thumb. Hitting the stage when aged only four-years-old (though advertised as being eleven), Stratton never grew beyond 3’35” (though spent most of his career nearer the 2’5” mark) and his performance pitched his size against his age in adulthood, smoking a pipe, joke-telling and impersonating the likes of Napoleon, whilst masquerading as an infant. It is said that Stratton was always grateful for the life Barnum had afforded him, despite the apparent exploitation a modern audience may perceive.

Incidentally, it is said that Barnum first suggested the use of the word ‘midget’ to differentiate between small but proportioned individuals and ‘dwarfs’, those with a condition which affects the proportions. In either case, modern reference generally defines either as being at or below the height of 4’10”.

By the time of Barnum’s death in 1910, the appeal of freak shows was still at its height – touring shows appeared across America and Europe, with previously hidden natural wonders now eagerly proffered for the potentially sizeable returns for exhibition. As well as mobile presentations, there were also static displays, of particular note Coney Island in New York and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

Though it would take until towards the end of the century for attitudes to change (at least to some extent – it still took some time to largely banish phrases such as ‘the handicapped’), there remains a fascination for many, with films such as David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) shining a different light on the lives of those presented as freaks. However, though travelling fairs died out, there became a new medium for to both satiate the thirst for the exotic and to give careers to those regularly shunned.

Harry and Daisy Earles

Harry was born Kurt Fritz Schneider in 1902 in Germany, one of seven children, four of whom were small in stature, including his sister Daisy (born Hilda, in 1907). In 1915, both Harry and Daisy relocated to America where they soon found employment in both the travelling circus and vaudeville around the New York area. Just after the turn of the decade, their similarly-sized siblings, Gracie (born Frieda) and Tiny (Ellie), joined them and they named themselves ‘The Doll Family’ an entertainment troupe specialising in song and dance, with the extra string to their bow of being skilful horse-riders.

Appearing for both the Ringling and Barnum circuses, they had initially assumed the surname Earles after the American entrepreneur who enabled their passage to America. It was Harry and Daisy whose performances really stood out, particularly Harry’s ability to hold the audience in his hand and Daisy’s glamourous looks.

It isn’t clear as to when or how they found themselves in Hollywood but they soon came to the attention of the director, Tod Browning, who at this time had already worked with the legendary Lon Chaney on the highly effective 1919 film, The Wicked Darling. In 1925, Browning was ready to adapt a short crime story, The Unholy Three, into a film, and began a search for the casting of one of the most critical roles – a miniature adult thief disguised as a baby to avoid detection.

Once Harry came to Browning’s attention, he was soon cast and made his appearance in the dark and often alarming The Unholy Three in 1925, alongside a cross-dressing Lon Chaney and Victor McLaglen. The film was the first of a remarkable six occasions that Earle would appear as an adult masquerading as an adult – typecasting of a most unusual kind but still often bypassing the roles he really wanted to avoid – comedies which amounted to little more than ridicule.

The advent of sound led to a remake in 1930, again featuring Chaney and Earles. It is a much undervalued film, abruptly startling and unforgiving. Earles is excellent as the squinting, debauched miniature menace, a perfect foil for Chaney in his only speaking role. Despite his fulsome German accent, Harry is undubbed throughout.

Without question, it is Earle’s portrayal of Hans in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) that lingers longest in the memory. Playing the pivotal role of a soon-to-be wealthy sideshow performer, he is tempted to stray from his similarly-sized fiancée (played by Daisy Earles) by the conventionally-sized Cleo, a money-hungry trapeze artist in cahoots with her strongman boyfriend, Hercules, to woo, then bump off her target. An astonishingly expressive performance from Harry is both believable, and by turn, doused in pathos and overflowing with over-wrought indignation and largess.  When Cleo reels Hans yet further into her spiteful web by getting him drunk, the camera is unforgiving, yet sympathetic, showing the character as vulnerable, despite his regular bravado. What really comes across from the performance is Earle’s extraordinary confidence as an actor – in a film packed with real sideshow performers, many amateur actors at best, he more than holds his own, an essential ingredient to adding a veil of reality to the film, immediately elevating the film above what could so easily have been cringe-worthy and farcical.

Along with his three siblings, Harry appeared, perhaps inevitably, in The Wizard of Oz (1939), as part of the ensemble of Munchkins, indeed he is instantly recognisable. Though this was his last known screen role, Harry continued to perform on stage in travelling shows for many years to come, certainly until he was well into his 50’s, after which he retired with his three siblings in Florida, in a specially adapted house, dying in 1985 at the age of eighty-three.

Daisy had a much briefer career on-screen – a brief, uncredited role alongside Harry in the 1928 circus-set drama, Three-Ring Marriage, was her only appearance before taking the role of Frieda in Freaks. Both Harry and Daisy were amongst the first of the circus-folk to be cast, through virtue of already having been acquainted with director, Tod Browning. Partly due to their prowess, though more likely to pertain to their less alarming appearance, both Daisy and Harry were permitted to dine with the other studio staff and actors at MGM’s canteen.  It would be reasonable to say that Daisy’s role was the lesser of the two Earle’s roles – Daisy’s doe-eyed concern at her beloved’s taunting at the hands of Cleo borders on the saccharine, though her predicament is made all the more sympathetic by Harry’s oddly brusque and uncaring attitude to her pleas for caution. As was the unspoken requirement, Daisy also appeared in The Wizard of Oz, passing away at the family home in 1980.

Angelo Rossitto

Often known as Little Ang or simply, Moe, Angelo Rossitto was born in Nebraska in 1908 with dwarfism, restricting his height to only 2’11”. Angelo’s prolific and varied acting career can be seen as a benchmark of sorts for actors of restricted height, his seventy film career, as well as roles on television being only one aspect of his remarkable life. Along with the other noted dwarf actor, Billy Barty, he formed The Little People of America, a non-profit organisation still offering support and information to people of short stature and their families today.

From his earliest acting days, Rossitto was happy with roles of any magnitude, from pivotal speaking parts to uncredited appearances in heavy disguise. By his own admission, he was a “ham and eggs actor”, never expecting stardom and supplementing his income for large parts of his life by selling newspapers from a stand on Hollywood and Vine, becoming one of Hollywood’s most recognisable faces somewhat via the backdoor.

Rossitto’s first film role was in The Beloved Rogue in 1927, alongside the meaty acting chops of John Barrymore and Conrad Veidt. His name now in casting director’s contacts books, he starred as everything from pygmies to Vikings to monsters, usually in blink and you miss him roles , though had a slightly more extended appearance in Benjamin Christensen’s Seven Footprints to Satan as a mysterious goateed house guest, up until the Year Zero for actors of unusual appearance, 1932’s Freaks. With a good deal of screen time and an unusual weighty presence, Angelo achieved a level of pop culture fame which would resonate for decades to come, leading the chant of “one of us”, at the sideshow performers’ wedding feast.

In no sense did Angelo’s appearance in Freaks lead to his acting star rising heavenwards. Though he could be seen onscreen in vehicles as diverse as Cecil B. DeMille (Sign of the Cross) and Laurel and Hardy (Babes in Toyland) it was only in roles that could politely be referred to as ‘supporting’ – occasionally parts would present themselves in the unlikeliest places (Shirley Temple’s stunt stand-in, for example).

His connection to the horror genre was never far away, not least due to regular appearances alongside screen giants Boris Karloff (two Mr. Wong films) and more especially Bela Lugosi, alongside whom he made several well-intentioned but often somewhat ropey films. However, for every dud (1941’s Spooks Run Wild; 1947’s Scared To Death) there’s the odd gem (1942’s The Corpse Vanishes).

By the 1950’s, work was beginning to thin out, not least in the sense of his time onscreen in films anything above camp trash – 1953’s Mesa of Lost Women; the iconic lead alien in Invasion of the Saucermen (unrecognisable under Paul Blaisdell’s costume) and the Johnny Weissmuller atrocity, Jungle Moon Men (1955) will give you an idea of the standard of parts available. Even what, on paper, looked like blockbusters were a false dawn – 1957’s The Story Of Mankind may have boasted stars such as Vincent Price, John Carradine, Caesar Romero and the Marx Brothers, but even then it was hailed as camp of the highest order.

Some salvation came in the mid-60s when television was given greater credence, leading to role in the likes of Gunsmoke, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, as well as a recurring role in, of all things, H.R. Pufnstuf. If Angelo’s film roles in the 40’s and 50’s seemed a little on the low-budget side, audiences can rightly have left cinemas heading straight for the shower after his appearances in two of Al Adamson’s trashiest sleazefests – Brain of Blood and Dracula vs. Frankenstein (both tainting 1971).

Although Angelo had the longest-running role of his career in the mid-70’s, in the fondly remembered Beretta as shoe-shine boy informant, Little Moe, the twilight of acting life also saw him accepting roles which were as garish, out-there and sleazy as ever.

On the tamer side of things were the likes of the well-worth seeking out gangster film, Little Cigars (1973) and literal and metaphorical car crash of a movie, Smokey Bites the Dust (1981), whilst the other end of the scale saw appearances in the largely forgotten William Devane-starring The Dark (1979) and 1980’s thoroughly entertaining Galaxina. A low point, but still entirely in keeping with his philosophy of taking whatever job was presented to him, was the softcore movie Adult Fairy Tales, which saw Rossitto as one of the few stars to keep his clothes on.

Rossitto’s final roles of note are amongst his most engaging since the 1930’s – a small role in the impressive interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983); an iconic turn as The Master in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985 – an experience he regarded as the most enjoyable of his career); and his final on-screen role in the Vincent Price-starring From a Whisper To a Scream (1987). By this stage, Angelo was almost totally blind – though his body and mind were willing to still carry on, film producers were unable (or unwilling) to give him roles as no insurance company would provide appropriate cover for him.

Having already achieved immortality in a 61-year film career (and in music, featuring on the cover of Tom Waits’ seminal 1983 album Swordfishtrombones). Rossitto retired, dying at the grand old age of eighty-three in 1991.

Billy Barty

Though his involvement in horror was somewhat fleeting, despite his lengthy career, it would be wrong of us not to spend a moment considering the contribution of Billy Barty.

Born in 1924, the 3’9” Barty was the driving force behind the formation of The Little People of America in 1957, alongside the aforementioned Angelo Rossitto. His acting career clung far closer to the mainstream, becoming popular for comedic roles and voice-acting right up until his death aged seventy-six in 2000.

Barty’s earlier appearances on-screen had run the usual course of ‘baby’ roles, though with a slight twist – a regular participant in pre-code Busby Berkeley musicals, he often played a quite shockingly seedy infant, leering and plotting to catch glimpses of the chorus girls.

In 1935, he made what could be politely described as a cameo appearance in Bride of Frankenstein, in rather indistinct long-shots of Dr Pretorius’ bottled experiments, perhaps inevitably, dressed as a baby in a high chair. Clearer still shots have been discovered in recent years.

A far more prominent horror role came in 1957’s The Undead, a blisteringly bad, though inadvertently entertaining time-travel farrago from Roger Corman, which sees Billy playing the part of an imp. An equally enjoyable/painful watch is 1989’s Lobster Man from Mars, a spoof film-within-a-film in which Barty plays a somewhat fleeting part.

Billy Curtis

Despite being born in 1909, Curtis, who stood at 4’2” tall, was never either compelled or drawn towards exhibiting himself at sideshows and enjoyed a healthy fifty-year career as an actor.

After spending some time on Broadway (often playing children, as was de rigueur), his very first screen role was no less than the lead in the now derided musical Western, The Terror of Tiny Town, rather like The Wizard of Oz, an almost obligatory gig if you were of a certain size in the industry at the time. However, at the time, the film made huge returns at the box office and promised several sequels and spin-offs, none of which materialised.

Like many of the short actors who appeared in 1939’s Wizard of Oz, Curtis’ part goes uncredited, a fact that rather supports his oft-quoted line that Toto the dog got paid $200 dollars, compared to those with roles as Munchkins’, $50. However, Curtis’ career revolved not only around his size but equally his acting prowess – he rarely took roles which others may consider demeaning, appearing in many Westerns as a character who happened to be short, as opposed to a comedic aside of sorts.

Curtis changed direction just before the end of the War with a (yet again) small, uncredited role in Ghost Catchers and in the 1943 supernatural anthology, Flesh and Fantasy, which he could at least console himself with the fact Peter Lawford also appeared without an acting credit.

The 1950’s and the advent of the dreaded Atom, provided slightly more opportunities to appear in film, though not necessarily in stellar roles. In George Reeve’s debut in Superman and the Mole Men (1951) he played, yes, a Mole Man; in the peculiarly heavyweight Gorilla at Large he featured alongside Anne Bancroft, Lee Marvin and Cameron Mitchell, leading to a lead role… of sorts… in 1954’s Gog, in the unenviable position of being responsible for manoeuvring the metallic/cardboard contraption.

Other genre roles from this period include the excellent The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and Angry Red Planet (1959) and a strange bookend to everything we’ve seen so far – the role of Harry Earles in The Unholy Three re-enactment in James Cagney’s rather so-so biopic of Lon Chaney, Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).

Like Billy Barty, television allowed more regular opportunities for work, though it could be argued that Curtis got the cooler parts – the 1960’s saw him appear in everything from Batman to The Monkees to Bewitched to Get Smart. Curtis had certainly warmed to science fiction and fantasy; he starred alongside Horrorpedia favourite Reggie Nalder in the Star Trek episode Journey to Babel and as an ape child in the genre-shaking Planet of the Apes.

Skip Martin

Hailing from London and born in 1923, Skip became something of a horror film regular, fondly thought of by keen-eyed enthusiasts for his appearances in movies with a very European gothic slant. Acquiring his nickname from his habit of skipping school, Martin was born Alec Derek George Horowitz, the surname being due to his Russian father. Although managing a perfectly serviceable career as an actor, he earned his trade on a more stable footing as a tobacconist.

Filmed in 1958, though released in 1962, Martin appeared in the Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff vehicle Corridors of Blood as a tavern regular – not a part that saw him speak or do very much other than slowly carry his gruel to his table but certainly a part he could boast about to his regular customers. Continuing his habit of appearing with horror film icons, he next appeared in the 1961 film, The Hellfire Club, alongside Peter Cushing, the film itself scripted by Hammer stalwart, Jimmy Sangster.

The role for which Martin is best remembered is undoubtedly that of Hop-Toad in Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (1964), also giving him the opportunity to complete his holy quadrangle of horror co-stars alongside Vincent Price. Rather than the silent cameos he had been given previously, Hop-Toad is given a pleasing amount of screen-time, as well as some particularly juicy lines and the film’s standout killing.

Clearly doing enough to catch the eye of Harry Alan Towers, his next appearance was equally significant, as Mr. Big in the 1966 film, Circus of Fear, another chance to work with Christopher Lee, as well the challenge of being on-screen with Klaus Kinski. Whilst not an especially rewarding film, Skip’s character has a lurking menace which at least makes it a fascinating study of shady dealings and potential danger in every shadow.

An easy to miss role in Tinto Brass’ highly-stylised 1967 murder mystery Col Cuore In Gola (I Am What I Am aka Deadly Sweet) may have suggested an increasingly steady decline in more meaty acting parts but instead proved only to be a blip before three more significant horror films.

In Vampire Circus (1971), he again creates unease as the tumbling, mysterious clown, leading to a particularly satisfying revenge enacted upon him by the poor, pestered villagers.

Martin also lends his sonorous voice and magnetic charisma to Horror Hospital (1973) before an unfortunate coda to his career: firstly an appearance in the irredeemably poor rock ‘n’ roll musical Son of Dracula alongside the likes of Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson; and finally the role of a mini-Rolf Harris in the famous episode of The Goodies set in a zoo. True horror!

Michael Dunn

Born Gary Neil Miller in Oklahoma, Dunn allegedly taught himself to read at the age of three, a sign that the rare case of dwarfism, which affected both his bone structure (both his hips were dislocated, making walking extremely painful) and his lung-growth, would do little to hold him back. A talented pianist and singer, Dunn and his family rejected overtures for him to receive an education in a ‘special school’, preferring instead that his voracious appetite for knowledge be satiated in a standard setting.

Dunn’s acting ability is arguably a step ahead of many of his shorter contemporaries, indeed, often degrees above both his averagely-heighted co-stars and the calibre of vehicle he was appearing in. His acting career began in the theatre after moving to New York from his home in Miami where he had gained a degree in journalism. His parts initially were off-Broadway, though he became a familiar fixture in local bars where he sung with his surprisingly strong voice to great applause.

In 1963, his dedication to his craft paid off when he appeared in the Edward Albee adaptation of the novella, The Sad Cafe, by Carson McCullers. Playing the mysterious hunchback, Cousin Lymon, he earned a Tony award nomination, the play itself sweeping the board at that year’s ceremony.

After forming a nightclub act alongside the actress Phoebe Dorin, he appeared in 1965’s Ship of Fools, alongside the likes of Lee Marvin and Vivienne Leigh. His lynchpin part, narrating both the beginning and end of the film, alongside a moving role in the main body, led to an Academy Award nomination.

It was from this springboard that his most famous appearances on television: firstly on Get Smart as Mr Big, then to fondly remembered one-off parts in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; Star Trek (in which he would have stolen the show appearing as Alexander in the episode, Plato’s Stepchildren, now more often remembered as the episode in which Kirk kisses Uhura) and Wild, Wild West, where his role as the villainous Dr. Miguelito Loveless endeared him to a generation of viewers.

Dunn’s first true genre appearance was in Gordon Hessler’s (Scream and Scream Again; Cry of the Banshee) 1971 adaptation of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, a small part in an unfulfilling movie. Better was to come with an appearance in the Night Gallery episode, The Sins of the Fathers, one of the more alarming episodes of Rod Serling’s less appreciated TV series.

Roles became more and more difficult to find, leading to Dunn taking increasingly less-stellar parts in what could be seen as more demeaning for a man with such great notices earlier in his career. 1973 saw him appear in The Werewolf of Washington, as Dr. Kiss, presumably a nod to Wild, Wild West.

Far worse was to follow the year after in Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks as the perverted, corpse fondling Genz, alongside Horrorpedia favourite, Sal Boris (here listed as Boris Lugosi). It’s a film that doesn’t even pass the ‘so bad it’s good’ test, a waste of Dunn’s considerable talents.

From his early days appearing in New York nightclubs, Dunn had developed a fondness for alcohol (he was already a smoker from an early age), not uncommon for the actors of the time in the city. It had taken its toll on his liver and an ill-fated relationship with a burlesque dancer had left him wiped out financially. It was now a case of taking roles of any kind, though his later appearances show him moving with even more difficulty than only a few years prior.

It was in this state of physical degradation that Michael Dunn appeared in The Mutations (aka Freakmaker), alongside Donald Pleasence. He lends a terrific element of the unnerving to what veers towards farce on occasion, his ability to hold the camera with his gaze evident in abundance. It was to be his final appearance during his lifetime.

Whilst filming The Abdication in London during 1974, he passed away at the hotel he was staying in whilst in London. Though rumours still circulate that his body was ‘stolen’ for a period and his room ransacked, evidence suggests no foul play and that his medical condition has led to his death at the age of 38.

Felix Silla

Felix Silla was born near Rome, Italy, in 1937, moving to the United States in 1955, joining a succession of circuses where he perfected various skills, from bareback horse-riding, to acrobatics to flying trapeze. When the Ringling Brothers circus he performed with disbanded in the early 1960s, he became an in-demand stunt performer, his stature (3’11”) filling a niche for skilled performers who could fulfil roles not normally possible for average-heights actors.

His relocation to Hollywood quickly earned him to bit-parts in TV series, though it was a casting-call for the soon-to-be aired The Addams Family which led to sustained employment. Passing the audition on-sight, his role was to be that of Cousin Itt, a part which left him disguised under a heap of (real) hair and shades – his burbling voice was dubbed over afterwards. The costume was later replaced with a synthetic, flame-retardant hair ensemble, lest Felix be engulfed in fire from a stray cigarette butt.

Silla was always willing to take parts which either had little value in terms of art or craft, or indeed left him unidentifiable on-screen. A role where Felix is able to exercise his acting chops more clearly came in 1967, with She-Freak the shaky-handed re-telling of 1932’s masterful Freaks. Appearing as the conniving Shorty, he is in an environment he no doubt knew only too well, though the casting of Silla in the film led to an even more shadowy outcome, a nine-year affair with lead actress, Claire Brennan, one which led to them having a child but was kept secret from the outside world.

Aside from a minor role as a child gorilla in Planet of the Apes, Silla worked extensively in television, from H.R. Pufnstuf to Bewitched, toothsome film parts being few and far between. Little Cigars alongside Billy Curtis promised much but only led to inconsequential, appearances as sideshow acts and diminutive monsters –neither as an attraction in 1973’s SSSSnake; a fireplace imp in TV movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark; a malformed infant in 1977’s Demon Seed; nor an admittedly creepy supernatural being in 1978’s The Manitou led to critical acclaim nor award nominations, though as one of the creatures in David Cronenberg’s The Brood, he at least worked with a notable auteur.

More financially rewarding was the role of the somewhat annoying robot, Twiki, in the much-loved (at the time) Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century television series, the second repeat appearance he made in a landmark sci-fi show, following from his appearances in Battlestar Galactica.

Towards the end of his screen career, he made the requisite appearance as an ewok in the third instalment of the Star Wars saga (or the sixth, if you’re picky), a critter in House and Dink in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. Whilst Silla was rarely given (or perhaps even craved) the acting opportunities afforded to his similarly-sized contemporaries, he has achieved lasting fame playing monstrous oddities and comedic weirdos, something many in Hollywood would be grateful for.

Hervé Villechaize

Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaize, some twenty-odd years after his death is still one of the best-known dwarf actors, to the extent where his name will often prompt an impression from someone in the room, should alcoholic drinks have been taken.

Born in France in 1943 of Filipino and English extraction, the 3’10” Villechaize preferred to be referenced as a midget, as opposed to a dwarf, his head and body being in proportion. Despite several medical procedures, something his doctor father was insistent upon, his thyroid-related condition led to his growth being restricted.

Although nationally recognised at an early age for his painting and photography skills, Villechaize left for America aged 21, having taught himself English by watching American television programmes, appropriate given that his greatest success would be via that medium.

Settling in New York, he appeared in blink-and-you-miss-it film roles until a meatier role came along in the form of Christopher Speeth’s 1973 film, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood. Now considered a classic of American low-budget drive-in cinema, it allowed the actor to use his own very drawly French accent to convey an appropriately strange tone to an already bewildering spectacle.

The following year saw him build on this somewhat cult foundation by starring as the evil Spider in Oliver Stone’s big screen debut, Seizure. Evidently a casting agent had caught one of these early appearances as he soon found himself in the James Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun, as Nick-Nack, still now hailed as one of the franchise’s greatest villains. It was the first acting part that really paid off financially, the actor living rough at the time in Los Angeles.

Despite the fame this brought him, it did not lead to further blockbuster roles, his next meaningful film appearance being in 1980’s, The Forbidden Zone, as the sexually-charged King Fausto. Indeed, Villechaize’s experience on Bond had sparked an outward confidence with the ladies, fuelled by a fondness for alcohol.

His star actually peaked on television from 1977-1983, as the character Tattoo in Fantasy Island, his refrain, “De plane, de plane!” being better remembered than the show itself. It was here he met his future wife, Donna Camille, a minor actress and model. The relationship only lasted two years, Villechaize a victim of drink, the self-aggrandisement his TV fame brought him and depression, leading to suicidal thoughts. Not long after, Villechaize had an appeal for a wage increase declined, leading to his departure from the hit show and the beginning of a downward spiral into far more intermittent work.

By 1993, he was reduced to self-referential TV cameos, the end truly being self-inflicted when he committed suicide by shooting himself. His suicide note explained he could no longer live with the severe pain his condition caused him.

Luis De Jesus

Born in New York in 1952, details of the 4’3” Luis de Jesus’ life and indeed film career are somewhat sketchy, perhaps befitting of a performer who took exploitation to a whole new level. It is said he began his career in entertainment at the circus, entirely believable considering that the sideshows of Coney Island were still a going concern. From here, his attentions turned to a particular form of film – one in which he appeared in for much of the rest of his life, to almost legendary notoriety.

The first appearance of de Jesus in film is agreed to be a 1970 peep-show loop, later expanded to a full feature, entitled Anal Dwarf, which featured Luis doing exactly what you’d expect. For many years, it was thought to be something of an urban myth, something now ‘helpfully’ clarified. During this somewhat hazy period, it was alleged the actor in question was not in fact de Jesus but Hervé Villechaize, disregarding the fact there was no resemblance beyond their height.

Not long after this, the director, Joel M. Reed, was casting for the horror-sleaze epic, The Incredible Torture Show (1976, later re-titled Blood Sucking Freaks when picked up by Troma in the early 80’s), the key role of the demented and sadistic dwarf, Ralphus, being earmarked, ironically, for Hervé Villechaize, whom he knew via his appearance in Oliver Stone’s aforementioned Seizure. Villechaize had at that time relocated briefly back to Paris and was insistent that his airfare be covered, should he accept, something Reed’s budget would not stretch to. Eager to find a replacement quickly, de Jesus was the first through the door and passed the audition through size and appearance alone, his mass of curly hair and fiendish grin being more than enough talent.

Without an R-rating, The Incredible Torture Show received limited showings in New York, eventually an excellent marketing tool, though at the time a disaster. Less so for de Jesus, who had enjoyed sexual liaisons with at least one of the models who featured in the film off-camera, despite the presence of her boyfriend. It was clear his acting career was not going to lead to a slew of offers from Hollywood after this part, a riotously entertaining, though equally filthy romp.

Indeed, he quickly returned to adult films, appearing in the likes of Gerard Damiano’s Make My Puppets Come (perhaps the only film that could compare to The Incredible Torture Show in terms of ludicrousness) Ultra-Flesh and Fanta-sex Island, a parody of Fantasy Island that yet again saw the two actors briefly crossing the horizon at the same time. By the time of his death in 1988, de Jesus had made a vague attempt at a mainstream career, appearing briefly in Under the Rainbow and as an ewok in Return of the Jedi.

Nelson de la Rosa

Nelson was recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s shortest man in 1989, reaching an adult height of only 2’4”. He became something of a national hero in his native Dominican Republic after becoming a regular fixture on Venezuelan television, though genre fans will remember him best for his appearance as the titular RatMan, a 1988 Italian production shot on location in his homeland.

His fanged mutation, technically classed as a rat/monkey hybrid, is a real treat, de la Rosa cropping up in the unlikeliest of places with a genuine creepy menace. Yet greater stardom beckoned, cast in the doomed Richard Stanley retelling of The Island of Dr. Moreau. The acting behemoth, Marlon Brando, became somewhat obsessed with de la Rosa, insisting his role was greatly expanded and goading him into making sexual advances towards female members of cast and crew.

Whilst the H.G. Wells film did not lead to further screen success, he became an adopted mascot by the Boston Red Sox baseball team and de la Rosa earned a comfortable living in circuses across South America, leaving a wife and child on his death in 2006.

Zelda Rubinstein

Zelda Rubinstein was something of a late-comer to the world of entertainment, not venturing into the void until she was in her late 40’s. At 4’3” and with a distinctive, high-pitched voice, roles did not necessarily jump out at her, though her first job as a voice-over artist on The Flintstones cartoon did however, give her the confidence to leave her job as a blood bank technician and become a performer full-time.

Work on television adverts followed, leading to her first film role in Under the Rainbow, along with The Wizard of Oz and the Star Wars films, almost a rite of passage for actors of restricted height in Hollywood.

Her breakthrough came quickly, in Tobe Hooper’s (more likely the stewardship of writer, Steven Spielberg) 1982 hit, Poltergeist. Playing the psychic, Tangina, Rubinstein plays a pivotal character arriving slap-bang in the middle of the film. The part was written specifically for a small person and it was one which the actress had to battle hard for, going through several auditions to win the role. Her performance is one of both tenderness and stern warnings, many of her lines – “this house is clean”; “go into the light” – becoming quoted and referenced for many years afterwards.

A huge box-office hit, the film revitalised the haunted house genre and ushered forth two sequels in 1986 and 1988 – more were considered but the death of the little girl, JoBeth Williams brought the run to a close.

Rubinstein remained busy: of note for horror fans was Anguish, Bigas Luna’s dazzling, extremely strange 1987 film which sees the actress in an even more central role as a domineering mother controlling her son via hypnosis to commit grisly crimes. Here, her stature and voice add a more outwardly uneasy tension to the action, an excellent use of her acting skills in a far arty, surreal setting.

Television continued to be a reliable source of employment – recurring roles in Picket Fences and Santa Barbara still allowing time for one-off appearance in Tales from the Crypt and lesser feature films including Little Witches (1996); Wishcraft (2002) and Southland Tales (2006).

Her final film role came in 2006 in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Away from the world of film and television, she was a strong HIV/AIDS awareness activist, as well as supporting other actors of short stature – she founded the non-profit Michael Dunn Memorial Repertory Theatre Company, named after the trailblazing actor who broke down so many barriers before her. Zelda died in Los Angeles in 2010.

Warwick Davis

Perhaps the most well-known dwarf actor in the world (certainly in the UK), Warwick’s 3’6” stature won him the role of Wicket the ewok in Return of the Jedi at the tender age of 11, an association with the franchise that extended to the two spin-offs, Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, as well as different roles in The Phantom Menace, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the as-yet-untitled part 8. He became the go-to actor for roles in many fantasy films of the 1980’s onwards, from the still fondly-remembered, Willow (1988); Labyrinth (1986) and, most memorably to younger eyes, the Harry Potter films.

For fans of horror, Davis became a horror icon, albeit, arguably, one of a rather lower division to that of Jason, Freddy et al – the wise-cracking anti-hero in the long-running Leprechaun series of films (six thus far – surely no more!?).

The 2004 film, Skinned Deep, a lousy Texas Chain Saw rip-off about a dysfunctional family of ghouls and 2007’s appalling Small Town Folk may have paid a gas bill but Davis’ career has largely been on television in recent years, in comedic roles and, bizarrely, as a game-show host.

Phil Fondacaro

New Orleans native Fondacaro was born in 1958 and has carved out an extremely productive career both onscreen and off as a voice-over artist. The ever-reliable Under the Rainbow in 1981 set him off on a career in entertainment that regularly weaved between genres, utilising his 3’6” stature and acting skill to play everything from evil villains to henchmen, monstrous entities and regular Joes. Fondacaro has shown more of a willingness than many dwarf actors to embrace horrific roles, rationalising that these are only characters, as any actor plays, and not a reflection of himself.

A role as a killer clown in Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1983, followed by the inevitable ewok in Return of the Jedi proved to be the springboard for a slew of roles in horror films. Fondacaro voice the character of Creeper in 1985’s Black Cauldron; The Dungeonmaster; Mickey in the ridiculous Hard Rock Zombies before appearing buried under the impressive costume of Torok in the highly successful Troll (1986). The cherry on the cake of Troll is its opportunity for his dual role as Malcolm Mallory, allowing Fondacaro to demonstrate his considerable acting skills.

The voice of Greaser Greg in The Garbage Pail Kids, roles in Invaders from Mars, Willow, Tales from the Darkside and Phantasm II led to an acting part in Ghoulies II, yet another opportunity to work with the infamous Band clan, here for the prolific Charles.

Later collaborations include Dollman vs. Demonic Toys; Blood Dolls; Decadent Evil Dead; Evil Bong and Devil Dolls (spot the running theme). Also of note is his appearance as Dracula in Band’s 1997 film, Deformed Monsters, hailed as the shortest Dracula on screen, a peculiar badge of honour.

Fondacaro had the distinction of taking Felix Silla’s role as Cousin Itt in the small screen revisit to The Addams Family Reunion, before an appearance in George Romero’s Land of the Dead. With regular mainstream TV appearances on the likes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and CSI have ensured a healthy career for the actor.

They Also Served:

Piéral

1923 – 2003 – 4’0”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956)

Spermula (1976)

Luigi Francis Shorty Rossi

Born 1969 – 4’0”

Sideshow (2000)

Ice Scream – The ReMix (2006)

Mészáros Mihály

1939 – 2016 – 2’9”

Waxwork (1989)

Warlock: The Armageddon (1993)

Freaked (1993)

Torben Bille

1945 – 1993 – height unknown

The Sinful Dwarf (1973)

Rusty Goffe

Born 1948 – 4’2”

Disciple of Death (1972)

Spidarlings (2016)

Tony Cox

Born 1953 – 3’6”

Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980)

Invaders from Mars (1986)

Retribution (1987)

Beetlejuice (1988)

Rockula (1990)

Silence of the Hams (1994)

Leprechaun II (1994)

Ghoulies IV (1994)

Chumbinho

Details Unknown

As Taras do Mini-Vampiro (aka Little Vampire Taints) (1987)

Kiran Shah

Born 1956 – 4’1”

The People That Time Forgot (1977)

Legend (1985)

Gothic (1986)

Aliens (1986 – stunt performer)

Jekyll & Hyde (1990)

Deep Roy

Born 1957 – 4’4”

Alien from L.A. (1988)

Disturbed (1990)

Howling VI: The Freaks (1991)

Shatterbrain (1991)

Freaked (1993)

Corpse Bride (2005, voice only)

Paranormal Movie (2013)

Arturo Gil

Born 1960 – 3’6”

Nightmare Cafe (TV Series, 1992)

Freaked (1993)

The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas (1996)

Deadtime Stories (TV Series, 2013)

Patty Maloney

Born 1936 – 3’11”

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)

The Addams Family (1991)

Jerry Maren

Born 1920 – 4’3”

Bewitched (1967)

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Bigfoot (1969)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

The Being (1983)

House (1986)

Frankenstein Rising (2010)

Dahmer vs. Gacy (2010)

Kenny Baker

1934-2016 – 3’8”

Circus of Horrors (1960)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982)

When the Devil Rides Out (currently in post-production)

Tamara De Treaux

1959-1990 – 2’7”

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)

Ghoulies (1984)

Rockula (1990)

Adelina Poerio

4’2” date of birth unknown

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Debbie Lee Carrington

Born 1959 – 3’10”

Invaders from Mars (1986)

Monsters (TV series, 1989)

Seedpeople (1992)

Daniel Frishman

Born 1946 – 4’3”

Twilight Zone (TV Series, 1986)

Night of the Creeps (1986)

Joseph S. Griffo

Born 1952 – 4’3”

Night of the Creeps (1986)

Freaked (1993)

Carnival of Souls (1998)

Little Frankie

Biographical Details Unknown

Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla (1994)

Blind Beast vs. Dwarf (2001)

Kevin Thompson

D.O.B. unknown – 4’5”

Night of the Creeps (1986)

Twilight Zone (TV Series, 1986)

Munchies (1987)

Nightmare Cafe (TV Series, 1992)

Ed Gale

Born 1963 – 3’4”

Phantasm II (1988)

Child’s Play (Chucky’s Stunt Double, 1988)

Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1989)

The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas (1996)

Jordan Prentice

Born 1973 – 4’1”

Wolf Girl (2001)

Long Pigs (2007)

Silent But Deadly (2011)

Sadie Corre

1918-2009 – 4’2”

Devil Doll (1964)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

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George Claydon

1933-2001 – Height Unknown

Berserk (1967)

Twins of Evil (1971)

I Don’t Want to be Born aka The Monster (1975)

Shadows (TV Series, 1975)

George Appleby

4′ 6″

Wilhelm the Dwarf Vampire (short film, 2011)

Ravenwolf Towers (streaming and DVD series)

Article by Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia © 2017

William Peter Blatty (January 7, 1928 – January 12, 2017) was an American writer and filmmaker.

The Exorcist, written in 1971, is his most well-known novel; he also wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film adaptation, for which he won an Academy Award, and wrote and directed the 1990 sequel The Exorcist III.

Blatty was born in New York City, the son of Lebanese parents who travelled to the USA on a cattle boat. His father left home when William was three-years-old. He was raised in what he described as “comfortable destitution” by his deeply religious Catholic mother, whose sole support came from peddling homemade quince jelly in the streets of the city.

He attended a Jesuit school, on scholarship, then Georgetown University. also on a scholarship. He went on to The George Washington University for his master’s degree in English Literature. His writing career began in earnest in the 1960s and aside from novels he worked on screenplays, writing comedy films such as the Pink Panther film, A Shot in the Dark (1964).

Allegedly retiring to a remote and rented chalet in woodland off Lake Tahoe, Blatty wrote The Exorcist, a story about a twelve-year-old girl being possessed by a powerful demon, that remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 straight weeks and at the Number One spot for 17 of them. It would eventually be translated by himself and director William Friedkin into one of the most famous mainstream horror movies of all time.

William Peter Blatty with Max Von Sydow

The first sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), was disappointing both critically and commercially. Blatty had no involvement in this first sequel and his own follow-up ignored it entirely.

In 1978, Blatty adapted his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane! into the retitled The Ninth Configuration; and in 1980 he wrote, directed and produced a film version. In it, a commanding officer who attempts to rehabilitate patients at an insane asylum for Army soldiers by allowing them to live out their fantasies. The film was a commercial flop. It has since acquired a cult following.

In 1983, Blatty wrote Legion, a sequel to The Exorcist which later became the basis of the film The Exorcist III. He originally wanted the movie version to be titled Legion but the studio insisted otherwise.

On September 27, 2011, The Exorcist was re-released as a 40th Anniversary Edition in paperback, hardcover and audiobook editions with differing cover artwork. This new, updated edition featured new and revised material. Blatty commented:

“The 40th Anniversary Edition of The Exorcist will have a touch of new material in it as part of an all-around polish of the dialogue and prose. First time around I never had the time (meaning the funds) to do a second draft, and this, finally, is it. With forty years to think about it, a few little changes were inevitable – plus one new character in a totally new very spooky scene. This is the version I would like to be remembered for.”

The Exorcist was adapted into a TV series in 2016.

Blatty died on January 12, 2017, five days after his 89th birthday. His death was announced a day later by The Exorcist director William Friedkin via Twitter.

Wikipedia

“The Hearse Song” is a song about burial and human decomposition, of unknown origin.

It was popular as a World War I song, and was popular in the 20th century as an American and British children’s song, continuing to the present.

It has many variant titles, lyrics, and melodies, but generally features the line “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out”, and thus is also known as “The Worms Crawl In“.

It gained more popularity in present times by being included Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981) by Alvin Schwartz, who gives the lyrics as:

“Don’t you ever laugh as the hearse goes by,
For you may be the next one to die.
They wrap you up in big white sheets
and cover you from head to feet.
They put you in a big black box
And cover you with dirt and rocks.
All goes well for about a week,
Until your coffin begins to leak.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout,
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.
A big green worm with rolling eyes
Crawls in your stomach and out your sides.
Your stomach turns a slimy green,
And pus pours out like whipping cream.
You’ll spread it on a slice of bread,
And that’s what you eat when you are dead.”

Popular variations include that performed by Harley Poe on his album Satan, Sex and No Regrets, with major differences occurring in the final chorus:

And the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
They crawl all over your dirty snout.
Your chest caves in, your eyes pop out,
And your brain turns to sauerkraut.

They invite their friends and their friends too,
They all come down to chew on you.

And this is what it is to die,
I hope you had a nice goodbye.
Did you ever think as a hearse goes by,
That you may be the next to die?
And your eyes fall out, and your teeth decay,
And that is the end of a perfect day.

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In the 1960s, Terry Teene released a rock-and-roll novelty recording, “Curse of the Hearse”, loosely based on The Hearse Song lyrics, with a different melody.

This song was included in Finders Keepers, the 2014 horror film starring Jaime Pressly.

Wikipedia