horror – Wretched Richard's Almanac

November 21, 1931: It’s Alive

Posted on November 21, 2024November 13, 2024 by Richard Daybell

On the screen, a man steps from behind a curtain to tell us we are about to see “one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation; life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So, if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to uh, well,––we warned you!!”

It’s November 21, 1931, and the warning is all about Frankenstein, the gothic horror film based on the novel by Mary Shelley. There have been countless films over the years featuring the famed monster but this one is the daddy of them all. Audiences and critics all loved it, and it, along with Dracula released earlier in the year, saved Universal Pictures.

The story is well known. Young Henry Frankenstein has this notion. He wants to create a living being from dead spare parts, mostly stolen. Perhaps he played Mr. Potatohead too often as a child. Things move along swimmingly until the time comes to give the creation a brain. Frankenstein’s assistant, Fritz the Hunchback, botches the brain acquisition, dropping the good brain and substituting a bad brain for it. The assembled creature is brought to life amid an amazing display of electrical pyrotechnics and shouts of “It’s alive!”

Karloff (without the Boris) is both frightening and sympathetic as the monster. He kills a lot of people. It’s not that he’s really bad, he’s just misunderstood. Nevertheless, the villagers form a mob and hunt him down, trapping him in a windmill and setting it ablaze.

One of the most famous and controversial scenes was cut from the original and not restored until the 1980s:

Humor He Wrote

American humorist Robert Benchley died on November 21, 1945, (born 1889) after a writing career that took him from the Harvard Lampoon to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Although he described himself as not quite a writer and not quite an actor, he enjoyed success as both. His topical and absurdist essays, particularly at The New Yorker gained him both recognition and influence. He was also one of the members of the group that made up the fabled Algonquin Round Table. As a character actor, he appeared in such films as You’ll Never Get Rich, Bedtime Story, the Crosby/Hope Road to Utopia, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.

New York – The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say “These New Yorkers don’t dress any better than we do.”

OCTOBER 6, 1962: YOU CAN COME OUT FROM UNDER YOUR SEAT

Posted on October 6, 2024September 27, 2024 by Richard Daybell

When one thinks of offbeat film-making, directors Tim Burton and David Lynch come to mind. You’d be hard pressed, however, to find a more offbeat body of cinematic work than that of Tod Browning. Who?, most people would be asking. Tod Browning’s strange macabre films were a pulp-fiction parade of crooks, carnies, lowlifes, deadbeats, wretches, wastrels, scoundrels and, of course, vampires and freaks. And they helped to define the horror film genre.

Browning came to this career honestly. Born in Louisville, Kentrucky, he gave up his comfortable home life at 16 to immerse himself in the world of carnivals, sideshows and circuses. His resume included stints as a Ringling Brothers clown, a barker for the Wild Man of Borneo and the “Living Corpse” for which he was buried alive. He also worked as a magician, dancer and actor before finding his niche as a director of dozens of silent films, including a 10-film collaboration with Lon Chaney. When sound came to the movies, he made his mark with two of his most notable films: Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and Freaks, his master work and the film that destroyed his career. Freaks was so grotesque and unnerving that it was banned in the United Kingdom for three decades. In the U.S., MGM took the film away from Browning and chopped it by almost a third. It performed miserably.

His career on the skids, Browning made a handful of films during the 1930s before “retiring” at the end of the decade. He died on October 6, 1962.

Freak Show

The Halloween season (not to mention the political season) offers the perfect opportunity to indulge in Freaks. It’s a love triangle set in a bizarre carnival world, featuring Hans, a wealthy dwarf, Cleopatra, a gold-digging trapeze artist, and Hercules, a strongman. Cleopatra and Hercules plan to trick Hans into marrying Cleopatra and then poison him. All the performers are real sideshow “freaks” — Koo Koo, the bird girl, Daisy and Violet, the Siamese twins, Johnny Eck, the Half Boy, Schlitzie, the Pinhead, to name a few, but the beauty of the film is Browning’s portraying them as the real human beings they are. The film remains frightening and grotesque, even after MGM’s “editing.” The deleted scenes were trashed, so it’s likely that no one still living today has seen the original version.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb

Cold war and nuclear fears had been ramping up for years, when President John F. Kennedy took to the tube on October 6, 1961, to suggest that American families build bomb shelters to protect them from atomic fallout when those pesky Communists of the Soviet Union attacked the Homeland with their nuclear missiles. Just a year later, the Cuban Missile Crisis raised the stakes even higher.

While folks like Nelson Rockefeller and Edward Teller were outlining grandiose plans for an enormous network of concrete lined underground fallout shelters to shelter millions of people, civil defense authorities were talking up concrete block basement shelters that could be constructed by home handifolk for a couple hundred bucks. Exactly how much protection they might actually provide was an open question.

Most people calmed down during the mid-1960s, and fallout shelters pretty much went the way of duck and cover. They were converted into wine cellars, recreation rooms or mushroom gardens. For others, the fallout shelter notion has been kept alive by internet sites devoted to nuclear hysteria. You can survive a nuclear or dirty bomb attack, shouts one such site. It will not be the end of the world. But, you must be prepared!

Being prepared naturally involves purchasing a fallout shelter from one of the many firms that still market them — Acme Survival Shelters, Hardened Structures Inc., Safecastle. Taking it over the top is a company called Zombie Gear whose motto is Be prepared for anything.

MAY 18, 1896: MORE WOLFBANE, VAN HELSING?

Posted on May 18, 2024May 12, 2024 by Richard Daybell

What’s in a title? Had a certain Gothic horror novel been published under its original title, The Un-dead, would it have achieved legendary status, becoming the iconic depiction of the most infamous character in supernatural fiction? Or would it have remained just a good adventure story, like many others popular throughout the 1880s and 1890s, invasion literature, in which fantastic creatures threaten the British Empire?

Bram Stoker’s novel, retitled just before its May 18, 1896, release as Dracula, tells the story of the Count’s attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and his subsequent battle with a group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Although it was not an immediate bestseller, reviewers were liberal in their praise, placing Stoker in the company of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. And it certainly made more of a splash than his previous work, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. Stoker’s and Dracula‘s status have grown steadily in the last hundred and some years, inspiring countless books, plays and movies – reaching a standing that even the Twilight series was unable to kill. Over 200 films have featured Dracula in a major role, a number second only to Sherlock Holmes. Arguably the classic portrayal remains the one by Bela Lugosi in 1931.

Bela Lugosi, Frank Langella, Christopher Lee

What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?

When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demonaic fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat.

My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries and time is on my side.

For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you’re a wise man, Van Helsing (from the movie).

Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.

On the Other Hand

Queen of the Damned (2002) The vampire Lestat becomes a rock star whose music wakes up the queen of all vampires (Taylor Swift, probably).

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) The 16th President of the United States discovers vampires (with orange hair) are planning to take over the United States.

Vampire Academy (2014) Nice vampires versus bloodthirsty vampires (Was Mister Rogers a vampire?)

Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009) The title says it all.

February 10, 2024: Year of the Dragon

Posted on February 10, 2024February 10, 2024 by Richard Daybell

Today is the beginning of the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Dragon. It’s bound to be a bit more exciting than the departing year, that of the Rabbit. The Rabbit makes nice, the Dragon makes noise. To those who believe in the Chinese zodiac, dragons mean good luck, strength and power. They control the weather and water. Alas, they don’t breathe fire. Western dragons on the other hand, all breathe fire. They scorch, devour maidens, and whack knights.

According to those who study such things, dragons are the creations of our innate fear of snakes, big reptiles and other predators who dined on our primate ancestors. They lurked in dark caves’ deep pools and haunted forests. Their images were exaggerations of living creatures such as Komodo dragons, gila monsters, iguanas and alligators.

One of the most notable dragon legends features the dashing onward Christian soldier, St. George. It seems that a nasty dragon was terrorizing the English countryside, demanding tribute from the local villagers. They gave the dragon trinkets and livestock, but they eventually ran out of such stuff, so they began offering human tribute. This worked out okay until a princess was chosen as the next offering. St. George came to her rescue and killed that dragon. Don’t you believe it, folks; dragons live forever, but not so little boys. It says so right there in the song.

Here’s another take on the St. George legend:

Year of the Wolf

Struggling in the long shadow cast by his famous father, Lon Chaney, Jr. (Creighton Tull Chaney), born February 10, 1906, finally found his career in the 1930s after his father’s death. Cast mostly in small supporting roles for several years, his first major film role came in 1939, when he reprised his turn on the stage as Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, a critical success.

Then in 1941, he starred as the tortured Larry Talbot, a role with which he would always be associated, in The Wolf Man. Like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, he would be a horror film actor for the rest of his life. (Chaney was the only actor to play all four of Universal’s heavyweight creatures: Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man)

Year of the Nose

Unlikely star entertainer Jimmy Durante was born February 10, 1893. Said critic Leonard Maltin about Durante: “The old ‘schnozzola’ was the living embodiment of the term ‘beloved entertainer’: Everyone adored him, but no one could ever really figure out just what it was he did. He sang, he danced, he played the piano and, of course, he clowned — but he wasn’t really great at any of these tasks. Mostly, it was the sheer force of his overbearing personality that won viewers over.”

November 21, 1931: It’s Alive, It’s Alive

Posted on November 21, 2021November 14, 2021 by Richard Daybell