Halloween Horror: Abominable, Adorable, Indelible

Nobody ever dresses up as Dr. Anton Phibes for Halloween, and I need an explanation of why that is. Underexposure? An allergy to camp? The death of the UHF groovy-movie marathon channels? Whatever, the man needs more respect. He demands it. Or he will set a plague of boils upon thee.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) is a great helping of late-period Vincent Price on a ham platter. It's also the rotten little B-horror treasure that foretold at least two mass mainstream successes. And it's a Halloween movie to its marrow, with masks, hooded robes, dark kitsch, deathly allure, and (tasteful '70s) gore. The Doctor of the title -- wealthy polymath, gifted musician, fiendish plotter of deathtraps and riddles -- is a dead man, burned to a crisp in a Swiss car accident as he rushed to the side of his dying wife. Alas, she too would die, despite a nine-person medical team's best efforts. As far as the not-so-dead Dr. Phibes is concerned, their best wasn't good enough; in fact, it was tantamount to murder.

From just this side of the grave, courtesy of the great Sam Arkoff's American International genre factory, Phibes reaches out to destroy those surgeons, syncing his murders with the Ten Biblical Plagues of Egypt. On screen, his victims are consumed by locusts, frozen into mansicles, bitten to death by bats, choked to death by mechanical frog masks, exsanguinated by hot ladies, and impaled with a brass unicorn.

No, I don't think that last bit was in the Bible either.

If you can't be arsed to hunt it down and watch it -- and I'm indebted to scholar and genre-film fan Dan Hassler-Forest for my DVD copy -- find an excellent scene-by-scene recap at The Bad Movie Report and a solid appreciation at Mark Bourne's Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal. But if you've any appreciation at all of David Fincher's Seven or the Saw films, you're missing out on their progenitor. By his efforts, Phibes marks himself as the granddaddy of John Doe (the Seven Deadly Sins vs. the Hebrew plagues) and Jigsaw (psychologically significant deathtraps). Take that legacy for what it's worth ($327 million and $848 million respectively), but acknowledge that mainstream film culture has scraped the strata of schlock and polished the gems there to a new shine.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a camp carnival that must be seen to be believed. The antihero is a Phantom of the Opera given new life in a kind of mod Agatha Christie dreamscape, pursued by bumbling Scotland Yard detectives named Trout and Crow (Peter Jeffrey and Derek Godfrey) to absolutely no effect. Humor and horror, intertwined and balanced by former "Avengers" director Robert Fuest, expertly acted by a seasoned star who never once opens his mouth to speak, surprise-guest-starring the great Joseph Cotten as the Final Girl, and speaking elegantly to matters of loss, death, madness, and the survival of love.

And please don't let that sequel fool you. Dr. Phibes never rose again. The last scene of this movie, with love and death fulfilled, is the last of the magnificent musician-mastermind. AIP is history; Vincent Price is gone. We may see his like again, but we'll nevermore meet Dr. Phibes himself.

Watch Out Where The Wehrmacht Goes

Good Hallow's Eve, my children of the night, my darling spectres and succubi. Gather close. Closer still. Are you sitting comfortably? Right. Let me tell you a tale, my little sex pumpkins.

Let me tell you what a shitty movie Dead Snow is.



This derivative Norwegian lump (Død Snø) made a stir on the festival scene back in 2009, and its trailers became an online sensation. Nazi zombies! How fun! How new! But I'm pretty convinced "Nazi zombies" was just the incantation that summoned earnest money from investors, who'd never heard of a little gem of Cushingiana called Shock Waves.



Look at that! Not just Nazi zombies, but underwater Nazi zombies. That's amping things up a bit.

I digress. Thing is, Nazi zombies, unless deployed in a correct context, are no scarier or more dangerous than regular zombies. Once risen, all zombies are equal, no matter what they did in life. We know that barricading oneself in a snowbound cabin with an undead horde outside is an untenable position, so does it really matter if the walking corpses are wearing Schutzstaffel armbands, or lederhosen, or nothing at all?

Not unless you're going to take it all the way. What do Nazis do that's bad? Two things come to mind, and since the setting of Dead Snow is the ass-end of the fjords, we can discard "annexing the Sudetenland." If the trapped protagonists, each just vague silhouettes of slasher-flick victim stereotypes, had some personal or ancestral stake in the matter -- if one or more of them were Jewish, say, or if they were the only ones in a position to repel a Nazi zombie putsch into the population centers -- that makes a difference. If the zombies had some ultimate purpose beyond, apparently, safeguarding the gold they looted during the war and killing any warm human who snowshoes onto their glacier -- that makes a difference. If their undeath spread like disease, as zombiehood usually does, and victims risked being transformed not just into walking corpses but into doctrinaire National Socialists ... you see where I'm going. Real monsters are metaphors, and these monsters are devoid of any meaning deeper than a uniform and a snarl.

The filmmakers would probably rather we not discuss politics, but they brought it up. Nazis are political, and any cinematic impact they carry is rooted in their well-recorded misdeeds. (I mean, they recorded them themselves.) I fear we're moving too far away from that history, so there's no shame in proving Godwin's Law anymore. Dead Snow is like a facet of the Tea Party protests, where fringies decry national health care with reductio ad Hitlerum placards -- for shock value, just to get the cameras turned their way.

Dead Snow's posthumous brownshirts, although acting in an organized military fashion, aren't driven by any racist or nationalist ideology or even a hunger for brains. It's dangerous in that it's so free of real-world reference. Even Shock Waves had the sense to touch on Nazi medical butchery, to make the gimmick matter. Raiders of the Lost Ark highlighted the Nazis' territorial aggression and racial doctrine, and then meted out God's incinerating justice.

Halloween movie fests are a tradition. It's fun to select a stack of flicks for your party or sleepover and indulge in a case of the creeps, or the titters. Dead Snow is available on Netflix Instant Watch. Avoid it. Don't rent the disc, don't torrent the stream. I don't care how much you love ScandiHorror -- this is not Let the Right One In. As horror spoofs go, this is not even Shaun of the Dead and it's a hell of a long way from Evil Dead 2. It's just a waste.

Okay, I misspeak -- there's one good kill. One! A Nazi zombie hooks his fingers into a fat guy's eye sockets and pulls until his skull splits and his still-living brain flomphs out on the cabin floor. That's ... pretty awesome. But it's just a garnish on a bucket of vacuous bilge, something that's hollow and desperate at best and, at worst, subtly corrosive to the untutored conscience.

You know what else is on Netflix Instant? Shock Waves.

To end on a positive note: I'd love to know the fright films, if any, that find their way to your home screen around Halloween time. My touchstones are the Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond, the first Alien, and select Hammer fare including, but not limited to, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. Please share in comments ... and Happy Halloween, my tumescent sin biscuits.

Frankenstein ... and 'Friend'

The man who made the monster was gay. This is known to any student of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), or anybody who's watched Ian McKellen's superlative take on Whale as a character in Gods and Monsters. But it was The Curse of Frankenstein, the movie that established Hammer Films as the preeminent horror studio of the '60s, that first employed forbidden sexuality as the life-giving lightning for Mary Shelley's creation.

Terence Fisher's movie erupted in 1957, in glorious "Eastmancolour" that put a new sheen on the story's blood and viscera. The frightfully mature young Victor Frankenstein (Melvyn Hayes), recruits scholar Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) to be his in-home tutor, and the two engage in a years-long, passionate pursuit of knowledge ... during which time, Victor ages into Peter Cushing. Krempe is delighted when they're able to reanimate a dead puppy, but for the promethean Victor, creating human life — reproduction — is the goal. Krempe, the victim of an intellectual seduction, plays along.

The fruit of their union is the deformed and violent Creature (Christopher Lee), an unnatural offspring to be caged, shunned, and if Krempe has his way, exterminated. Frankenstein will hear none of it. He constantly lures Krempe back into his experiments, reminding him all the while of his complicity in the original misbegetting. He ignores his betrothed, Elizabeth (Hazel Court), in favor of his Creature's care and feeding — even on their wedding night.

Frankenstein does have one, perfunctory heterosexual affair, with housemaid Justine (Valerie Gaunt). But he treats her with worse than contempt, and ultimately feeds her to his homunculus. In killing Justine, pregnant with Victor's baby, the shambling child-beast also cuts off his creator's natural line of descent. Whelped by two men behind locked doors, the Creature by his very being threatens the social order of his sires.

Throughout, Krempe struggles to disentangle from Victor, hoping his indiscretion can be put behind him. He attaches himself to Elizabeth, and bars Victor from disclosing the Creature's existence to her. "Her mind would be incapable of receiving such a shock," he claims. Perversion must remain locked in the attic. The psychosexuality of Curse is a repressive and frightened kind, a mesh of the Victorianism of its setting and the post-Freudianism of the '50s. It hates itself for wanting what it wants, and fears the results of getting it. Krempe is led astray by an alluring younger man — he's a victim, not a deviant, no, never that. Indulgence of the "curse" gives way to monstrosity, and the abomination that arises will take away all that we love.

We think of this movie and remember only Cushing and Lee, driven father and monstrous son, but their relationship is far from the story's center. Indeed, the final fracture is not the requisite "destruction" of the Creature, but Krempe's fatal break with Frankenstein, when he sashays off with his friend's long-suffering wife. She, by the by, is swaddled for this scene in a furry, symbolically rich garment best described as "labial."

Horror, as Dorian Wright points out in his excellent essay on Fright Night, has always offered a comfortable home for gay themes — buried, save in rare instances, in layers of code and misdirection. The further back in time, of course, the heavier the layers. I don't know how much credit to place at the doorstep of Fisher, Hammer's go-to director for much of the '60s, or that of writer Jimmy Sangster. Both men would help to greatly sexualize the classic movie monsters in their Hammer reinventions. It's tempting to call The Curse of Frankenstein revolutionary, but only insofar as it allowed its self-despising subtext to swim so close to the surface in 1957. This was not art raging against the closet — this was the closet, packed full to bursting with the monsters we'd made.