Halloween 2022: September 19th

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

La chute de la maison Usher

Sometime before 1839, Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by local legends surrounding the crumbling estate of a Boston bookseller, as well as E.T.A. Hoffman's "Das Majorat," to write a story. That story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," was one of the earliest literary successes of Poe's career, later prompting the publication of his collection, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." And since Poe is the grandfather of the horror genre as it exists today, this story has been a frequent choice for cinematic adaptation. By some grand coincidence, there would be two silent film versions of the story made in 1928. One was produced in America but was largely overshadowed by a longer adaptation by French critic turned film pioneer, Jean Epstein. Epstein's "La chute de la maison Usher" has remained an influential work of gothic horror. 

Anyone well-versed in the genre should know the general gist of Poe's "Usher." An unnamed traveler is called to the remote home of his friend Roderick Usher. Roderick suffers from a sensitivity to light and sound, his fragile mental state seemingly reflected by the disrepair of the mansion. The biggest alternation this version makes to the source material is changing Madeline from Roderick's sister to his wife. The nevertheless, her fate is the same. After she seemingly dies, Roderick entombs her only to learn, soon enough, that she was buried alive. The two are consumed by their own madness, the house collapsing around them, and a curse on the entire Usher family is fulfilled. Epstein's film even includes the usually excised story within the story, of a medieval fantasy Roderick reads in an unsuccessful attempt to calm his frayed nerves. 

Epstein's "Usher" features a writing credit from Luis Bunuel, a year before he would create "Un Chien Andalou," his groundbreaking surrealist film. Bunuel and Epstein didn't work together well and, supposedly, the completed film features little of his writing. Yet it's easy to see why Bunuel, with his life-long interest in dreams and their interaction with reality, would be drawn to Poe. Dreams and visions of madness were reoccurring themes throughout Poe's writing. In this "Usher," the unreality of Roderick's fragile mental state being linked to the ruined home is emphasized. Epstein and Bunuel's film draws the viewer into Roderick's mad mind, attempting to recreate his sensitivities and obsessions in the viewer. As the Ushers die and their home is consumed by the Earth, the film has successfully crossed the boundary from the real world into the realm of twisted, madness-soaked dreams. 

Epstein's film mostly pulls this trick off with what is some extraordinary camerawork for 1928. The camera moves smoothly but in an off-center manner. Slightly askew close-ups occur all throughout, fixating on the actor's faces or the objects of Roderick's obsessions: his painting, the nails driven into his wife's casket, his lute. Early photography tricks, like double exposures blending together in one frame, are also employed. Among the film's most striking visuals, which adore many of its posters, is Madeline rising from the grave, her burial shroud blowing in the wind around her like a wispy aura. All of this replicates the visual language of a dream, quickly creating a feverish ambiance. That atmosphere is paired with some images of gothic scenery so foundational, they would come off as hokey if this film wasn't 94 years old. A hooting owl watches the manor from a tree outside. Currents billow in stone hallways. A lone coachman drives through a dark and foreboding forest. And, naturally, the titular abode is as strewn with shadows and cobwebs as was possible. 

It's a good thing "La chute de la maison Usher" is so overflowing with surreal photography and spooky atmosphere. Otherwise, it's kind of dry. The pacing is slow, the film feeling dragged out despite only running 63 minutes long. Numerous scenes seem to go on much too long, such as Madeline's burial or Roderick describing his painting. In addition to the standard silent movie title cards, sometimes text from books and letters appear on-screen. This is used to very literally convey the story-within-the-story, by far the movie's dullest stretch. The acting is also fairly hammy. Jean Debucourt, as Usher, seriously overdoes it with his overly expressive hands and madly staring eyes. Margurite Gance, as Madeline, wears a maudlin face through all of her scenes. The film is obviously set within a constructed reality but it struggles to overcome many of the pitfalls of silent cinema. 

This might be why, after finishing up it, I couldn't help but feel like I probably prefer the other 1928 version of this story. That one is even more experimental and manages to squeeze the whole thing into 15 minutes. Yet I don't want to take away from the strengths of this particular take either. Epstein's film has some extraordinary advantages of its own, especially its impressive photography and camerawork. In its best moments, it's a calculatingly dream-like take on one of Poe's most iconic stories, full of powerfully spooky imagery that still stands up nearly a century later. Not a bad choice to start a Halloween Blog-a-Thon with. [7/10]

The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)

By the end of 1957, Bert I. Gordon was actually in-demand as a maker of movies about giant monsters. He had previously directed “Beginning of the End,” about giant grasshoppers attacking Chicago, and “The Cyclops,” about a giant cyclops attacking Lon Chaney Jr. Jim Nicolson of American International Pictures bought the film rights to the novel “The Nth Man,” about a man growing to enormous size, in hopes of cashing in on the success of “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” Roger Corman was originally in-line to direct but dropped out after reading the script. That's when Nicholson brought Gordon into the A.I.P. fold, obviously aware of his ability to quickly make cheap, profitable movies about big critters. “The Amazing Colossal Man” was filmed in June of 1957 and on drive-in screens before the end of the year. 

In the Nevadan desert, the military is testing a new plutonium bomb. An airplane crash-lands in the test field minutes before the bomb goes off. Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning rushes into danger to rescue the pilot and is caught in the explosion. Left covered in horrible burns, it's assumed he will die... That's before the burns miraculously heal overnight. Then Glenn begins to grow and grow. His irradiated cells are causing him to expand at a substantial rate every day. This will quickly cause him to loose his mind and his heart to give out. His fiancée tries to keep him sane and scientists rush to save his life. Yet it's still only a matter of time before Glenn Manning becomes the Amazing Colossal Man.

Bert I. Gordon's movies are not usually very empathetic affairs. His stories about giant insects or other animals rampaging through towns and cities rarely devote much time to the creatures' inner lives. A giant spider is just a giant spider, a threat capitalizing on people's fear of arachnids and nothing more. Yet, clearly drawing inspiration from “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” “The Amazing Colossal Man” focuses much more on Glenn's plight than on his inevitable rampage. In fact, we even see flashbacks to his time in the Korean War, suggesting he has PTSD even before turning into a giant. Many scenes are devoted to his girlfriend and a scientist trying to reverse his condition. The scenes where the science behind his condition are explained are hopelessly goofy. Yet the pathos of his situation, of a good man turned into a curiosity, are played fairly straight. 

Another reason B.I.G. movies don't usually have much melodrama is... Well, his scripts were rarely any good. “The Amazing Colossal Man” is no different in that regard. Its drama is ham-fisted. Its scenes of scientists talking are often tedious. Yet there are multiple moments I enjoy here, largely thanks to Glenn Langan in the titular role. Sporting a shaved head and wearing a giant diaper for most of the movie, Langan digs into the frequently ridiculous dialogue he's given. When monologuing about being a freak inside a circus tent, or speculating on how large he'll grow, Langan goes gloriously over-the-top. His guffawing, mad-eyed performance is easily the highlight of “The Amazing Colossal Man.”

Being the type of movie it is, “The Amazing Colossal Man” cannot spend its entire runtime focusing on Glenn's mad rantings and the sad circumstances of his transformation. He has to escape and go on a rampage. As is totally expected of a B.I.G. production, the special effects are unconvincing. Subpar photography effects puts Glenn in the same shot as normal sized people. His rampage mostly has the actor standing around underpopulated miniature sets of Vegas landmarks. He rips up a cardboard version of Vegas Vic, tosses a giant high heel shoe off a roof, and seems to consider putting a giant crown on before deciding against it. He grabs a girl and, with no skyscrapers in Vegas to climb back in 1957, has to scale the Boulder Dam instead. As far as monster movie rampages go, it's extremely underwhelming. Glenn's apparent death is especially laughable. 

I say “apparent” death because “The Amazing Colossal Man” is one of the few Bert I. Gordon movies to receive a sequel. “War of the Colossal Beast” would follow the next year. This is not the only sign that Gordon's partnership with AIP was mutually beneficial. His next three films would be distributed by the drive-in titans. Two decades later, he would re-team with the studio to make two more, latter-day giant creature flicks. While it's hard to call any of Gordon's movies “good” exactly, they all have a certain charm to them. This is true of “The Amazing Colossal Man,” a Gordon movie that is equal parts surprisingly ambitious and totally underachieving like always. It's got a hell of a title though, which is probably why that's been referenced so many times over the years. [6/10]

Time Walker (1982)

The mummy, unquestionably, has its place in horror history. The classic Universal films permanently embedded the image of an ancient Egyptian corpse, shambling about in rotten bandages, in the public's mind. The ease of wrapping someone in toilet paper has also made it a perennial Halloween costume choice. Yet, as far as being frightening goes, the mummy probably ranks at the bottom of the classic monster archetypes. Stiff with the ages, mummies are painfully slow. While a shuffling gait hasn't stop zombies or Michael Myers, the mummy lacks the visceral threat of those guys. Movie mummies are famous for strangling people, which is probably the least cinematic way to murder someone. And mummies lack the symbolic importance, mythological roots, or cultural resonance of Frankenstein, vampires, or werewolves. Not to mention it's hard to bend modern stories around ancient Egyptian history. Many filmmakers have tried over the years to inject some modernity into this hoary undead subgenre. One such attempt was made by New World Entertainment in 1982 with “Time Walker.”  

Despite being fully excavated in 1922, King Tutankhamun's tomb somehow produces new discoveries in “Time Walker.” An earthquake uncovers the sarcophagus of Ankh-Venharis, said to be a prophet from the heavens. The mummy is shipped to California, where Professor Douglas McCadden uncovers a strange green fungus growing on the shockingly well-preserved corpse. The archaeology department x-rays the mummy multiple times while another student steals five crystals from a secret compartment in the casket. This combined effect seems to reawaken Ankh-Venharis. With a glowing light emitting from his chest, the resurrected mummy sets out to recover the stolen jewels. Douglas, his students, and the campus police attempt to locate the missing mummy, uncover its origins, and stop the murders and the spread of a strange, flesh-eating fungus.

"Time Walker" is most interesting as a movie pulled between older, hokier, instincts and then-modern sensibilities. In 1982, a mummy attacking people was about as antiquated as a horror premise could be. In some ways, "Time Walker" plays that totally straight. There are multiple scenes of the mummy sneaking up on people, via green-tinted P.O.V. shots. Not to mention the plot of a heroic college professor trying to recover a missing mummy, among cartoonish teenage students, feels like something out of "Scooby-Doo." In other ways, this is very much a New World Pictures release from the early eighties. The college students throw a mummy-themed party, which features the kind of sophomoric one-liners you'd expect from an underachieving frat comedy. The scenes of young people pairing off, and getting killed one-by-one by the monster, definitely bring the slasher genre to mind. Yet "Time Walker's" PG-rating prevents any explicit gore. Ankh-Venharis mostly dispatches his victims by tossing them through the air or burning them with his radioactive touch. (The rating didn't stop the inclusion of some gratuitous nudity, because the MPAA didn't give as much of a shit about that stuff in 1982.)

As undeniably cheesy as "Time Walker" is, the movie does have a handful of effective moments. This is the sole directorial credit of Tom Kennedy, a prolific trailer editor and film advertising producer. Despite never making another movie again, Kennedy displays a decent visual eye. There's a shot of the mummy starring up at the moon that's cool. One moment, where the undead Egyptian glides through a misty forest, is kind of eerie. (And a good way to workaround the typical creeping pace mummies usually have.) A chase scene through the empty college hallways, climaxing in the blonde victim hiding in an elevator while the super-strong mummy punches through the floor, is even mildly tense. Richard Band's histrionic score helps build that tension. The addition of a flesh-eating green fungus to the mummy premise provides some novelty as well. Scenes of a finger or a face suddenly covered in the stuff are probably the closest "Time Walker" comes to being shocking.

While it has some clever ideas and one or two effective moments, "Time Walker" never quite finds its (dusty, linen-clad) footing. Ben Murphy's hero is dull as dishwater. The script is fairly repetitive, the mummy seeking his jewels via drawn-out stalking scenes interspersed with montages of Murphy trying to decipher the secrets. "Time Walker" doesn't really get going until its final act. That's when the film's bonkers, "Chariots of the Gods"-inspired twist kicks in. Yes, this is both a mummy movie and an alien movie, an admittedly unexpected combination. That leads to a wacky climax, which intentionally leaves things on an unresolved point, seemingly an overeager attempt to set up a sequel. Let me tell you, I did not expect this, of all films, to literally end with some "To Be Continued..." text. 

It would not be continued. "Time Walker" is not well-regarded. In the annals of New World cult favorites, this one is not often mentioned. That cool twist would even be spoiled when the movie was redistributed on video in the nineties as "Being from Another Planet." Under that title, the film was relentlessly mocked on one of the weaker "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episodes. Despite all the negative points against it, "Time Walker" still somewhat appeals to me. I appreciate the nutty attempt to reinvent the mummy premise as something spiffier in the eighties, while still maintaining the stiffness we associate with this type of story. I guess that's just the old school monster kid in me. Nothing says Halloween like a mummy movie to me, even if most of those aren't very good. [6/10]

Oculus (2003)

Not long before Halloween last year, I reviewed Mike Flanagan's “Absentia.” That was the filmmaker's micro-budget debut, which so impressed people that Flanagan quickly got a chance to pitch a project to a major studio. Namely Blumhouse which has largely defined the horror genre – at least as far as mainstream audiences are concerned – in the last decade. It was a clearly successful partnership, as Flanagan made two more films for Blumhouse before jumping to an even more acclaimed partnership with Netflix. I have yet to love anything Flanagan has done. “Absentia” left me cold. I described “Doctor Sleep” as “dopey.” “Gerald's Game” was pretty good. I keep watching the guy's movies, in hopes eventually I’ll love one as much as other people do. Might as well kick off Halloween 2022 with my latest attempt, in which I give “Oculus” a try.

“Oculus” follows brother and sister, Tim and Kaylie Russell. When they were kids, their mother suffered a psychotic break, eventually leading their father to murder her. The event deeply traumatized Tim, who has just been released from a years-long stay in a mental hospital. Kaylie has come to believe that everything that happened in their childhood home was the work of a cursed mirror their father owned. She has reacquired the mirror, placing it in the old house, and is thoroughly documenting everything that happens around it. While Tim is skeptical at first, it soon becomes apparent that Kaylie is right. The mirror is evil, it exerts an incredible influence on the people around it, and it is determined to protect itself. 

There’s a big issue facing “Oculus:” It’s about a scary mirror. Making an unmoving, basically inanimate object a source of fear is always tricky. How is a mirror going to hurt you? Fall on you? In order to overcome this narrative obstacle, Flanagan adds a bunch of temporal displacement to the story. The mirror seemingly influences the siblings to do things, that they have no memory of. (Or at least makes them think that.) The script jumps back-and-forth between the present day and the siblings' childhood. We see the evil influence the mirror had on the family as it played out, while Kaylie also attempts to convince her brother of the supernatural events happening right now. Naturally, past and present begin to fold in on each other. Whether actual time travel is happening or if it's just an elaborate series of hallucinations isn't made clear. As in “Absentia,” Flanagan keeps the rules of this otherworldly threat frustratingly vague. If nothing else, this is a cleverer solution to the premise’s inherent problem than anything “Mirrors” cooked up. 

My frustration with Flanagan's obtuse stabs at cosmic horror might be rooted in the actual instincts the director displays. Mike Flanagan is good at making scary sequences. A scene where Kaylie sees a sheet over a bust behind her generates some nice tension. A moment prominently featured in the trailer has her picking up an apple and biting into it, only to realize she's actually munching on a light bulb. Shit like this is easily understood. They are reliable, well executed scares that anyone can grasp. Yet Flanagan's ultimate goal to creep out the audience gets increasingly desperate as "Oculus" goes on. The jump scares start coming more frequently. Attackers leap out of the shadows suddenly. Goofy ghouls with reflective eyes start to lunge on-screen. It all feels like a standard boo-show – using the incomprehensible quality of cosmic horror merely as another tool to spook audiences – that is starting to run out of ideas. "Oculus" is based on a short. As is often the case with feature expansions, the film frequently feels like an attempt to stretch-out an idea that worked better within the confines of a 32-minute runtime. 

It's become a cliché to say that all modern horror movies are about trauma. Millennials are obsessed with themes of trauma and catharsis, for obvious reasons. While this observation has been unfairly leveled at a lot of movies, "Oculus" really is about childhood trauma. Tim has spent his entire adult life in therapy, trying to grapple with the fact that his father murdered his mother. He's ready to move on. Kaylie, meanwhile, is trapped by the past, obsessed with it. Her unwillingness to let go of her childhood pain will see her and her brother repeating the trauma of their young lives. "Oculus" never seems to come to a clear point about these themes. Much like "Absentia," this plot ends on a disappointingly vague non-conclusion. Yet I guess Flanagan deserves points for not just using trauma-rehashing as set dressing on his otherwise typical spook show. He actually bakes the idea into the foundation of the story. 

A lot like James Wan, I come away from Mike Flanagan's movies respecting his craft more than anything else. He knows how to engineer a perfectly cromulent scare. Yet I guess his films just don't feel personal to me. "Oculus" is way better than a movie about a scary mirror has any right to be. The lead performances, from a nicely panicking Brenton Thwaites and a stern-faced Karen Gillan, are fine. The musical score is above average. While the film's last act is a frustratingly extended act in tail-eating, it does make good use of an anchor suspended from the ceiling. Ultimately though, "Oculus" just doesn't hold together as a whole for me. A handful of decent moments and plenty of technical know-how isn't enough to make up for an underwritten script that runs out of steam long before the end. Maybe I should give one of Mike Flanagan's TV shows a shot next? Or perhaps I should just accept that his work doesn't click with me. [6/10]

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1972)

In the pantheon of great American ghost stories, few occupy the vaulted position that Washington Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” does. I think most every school child reads it. At least, that was the case back in my day. Considering its unique place in the American canon, it's unsurprising that the “Sleepy Hollow” story has been adapted to film countless times. The earliest film version was made in 1896 and countless others have followed. Among the more forgotten adaptations is a 13 minute long animated take from 1972. However, this “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” most notable for being narrated by John Carradine, has recently been rediscovered thanks to Severin including it as a bonus feature in their extensive folk horror box set. 

The animated short condenses Irving's story down to its bare essential elements. The Dutch colony of Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York, school teacher Icabod Crane, comely young heiress Katrina Van Tassel, her suitor Brom Bone, and the legendary Headless Horseman. Lanky Icabod's fondness for food, harshness with his students, and the Jack-O-Lantern wielding Horseman not being able to cross the bridge are maintained. What really distinguish this “Legend” is how it looks. The animation is cheap, with limited movements. Yet the bold, washed-out colors used in this kind of low budget seventies animation – whole scenes being shaded in red or yellow – is eye-catching in its own way. The character designs are also memorably weird. Icabod Crane looks like a jagged, gangly goblin of some sort. 

My biggest issue with this “Legend” is that it partially disregards the ambiguity of Irving's ending, as Crane is shown to definitively survive his encounter with the Horseman. It definitely probably should've been a little creepier. Carradine's narration is more whimsical than foreboding, which feels like a waste of his talents. Early on, there's references to an Indian chief cursing the area or a woman-in-white ghost, the short never quite recapturing the spookiness of those moments. Yet it's an interesting curio that I'm glad I got a chance to see. The short certainly can't top the Disney version but it's still intriguing to see an iconic horror story like this adapted for kids without being defanged of any of its horrific content. [6/10]