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.

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.