Patreon update #44: Halloween (+ Fire Walk With Me as horror movie, The Old Dark House & more) and preview of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari review

Halloween horror dominates this special podcast episode; taking the week off from other topics and postponing most of the extensive listener feedback I received since Episode 42, I focus on the holiday theme in almost all sections. The film in focus was an obvious pick, with John Carpenter's unforgettable theme music leading into my musings on the first Michael Myers slasher flick. For Opening the Archive, I picked James Whale's evocatively-titled but dazzlingly idiosyncratic horror comedy The Old Dark House, reading my review from seven years ago. And "Twin Peaks Reflections" emphasizes one section of my recently published essay 4 Ways to Watch Fire Walk With Me, exploring the film's links to the horror genre. The one piece of feedback, meanwhile, shares a listener's favorite horror film (expect at least one more in the next episode).

Even the biweekly preview participates in the spooky mood with a full (and longer than usual) review of early Expressionist horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Although I got both podcast and preview up on Patreon in time for the eve of All Hallow's Eve, by the time you're reading this cross-post we're several days into November. But like The Shape himself, the spirit of Halloween is always ready to spring out from the shadows just when you think you've finally put it to rest.

Episode 43: Halloween (+ Fire Walk With Me as horror movie, The Old Dark House & more)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920, dir. Robert Wiene (October "See the Future" Preview #3 - 2nd tier reward)

Line-up for Episode 43

INTRO

WEEKLY UPDATE/recent posts: 5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me resumes

WEEKLY UPDATE/work in progress: lost Mad Men review, re-recorded Lindsay Hallam interview, Fire Walk With Me & season 3, finalizing 4 Ways to Watch Fire Walk With Me

TWIN PEAKS REFLECTIONS: Fire Walk With Me as a horror movie

FILM IN FOCUS: Halloween

LISTENER FEEDBACK: Listener's #1 horror film

OPENING THE ARCHIVE: The Old Dark House

OUTRO

BECOME A PATRON

The Old Dark House

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The Old Dark House (1932/United States/directed by James Whale)

stars Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart, Lillian Bond, Raymond Massey, Brember Wills, Elspeth Dudgeon

written by R.C. Sherriff and Benn Levy from J.B. Priestley's novel • photographed by Arthur Edeson • designed by Charles D. Hall • music by David Broekman • edited by Andrew Cohen

The Story: On a dark and stormy night, a married couple and their bemused third-wheel friend are forced to stay the night at a gloomy old home, inhabited by the very strange Femms, a family full of neuroses and dark secrets.

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See a movie called The Old Dark House and you think you know what to expect. Well, unless you’re psychic, half-mad yourself (you’d have to be to come up with this scenario), or have already seen it, you’d be dead wrong. Sure, there’s an old house on a hill. Okay, a bickering young couple and their friend wind up having to spend the night there. Yeah, the residents of the house are a bunch of freaks, weirdos, and psychopaths. But the devil’s in the details and if the outline sounds familiar, the details are anything but. Every line of dialogue, every gesture, every plot development is unexpected and off-the-wall.

Who could predict the lesbian onslaught of sister Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore), pausing every now and then in her overbearing religiosity to a cop a feel from the heroine? Who would expect the appearance of 102-year-old Sir Roderick Femm, bedridden, cackling, and despite the misleading cast listing (actor’s name supposedly “John Dudgeon”) quite clearly an old lady with a scraggly beard glued to her wrinkly chin? And best of all, who should foresee the climactic revelation of Saul Femm (Brember Wills), outcast brother locked in his room for twenty years, set free to plead sanity – almost convincing us (we’ve certainly seen how nuts his siblings are) before the hero turns his back and Saul’s meek expression dissolves into a mask of fantastically cunning dementia?

Frankenstein ("Fixing a Hole")

Today's chapter in "32 Days in Movies" - called "A Violent Release" and featuring movies from the half-century mark with violent themes or elements - was posted this morning. But I also want to use today to announce a new series I am launching on Wonders in the Dark. Called "Fixing a Hole" its sole purpose is to review notable films that have not yet been covered on that site (thousands of films have been, but cinematic history is so rich that tens of thousands, including classics, obscurities, and controversial movies among them, have as of yet slipped through the cracks).

Every month will have a theme and this October is designated "Universal Horror Month." I will be writing several of the entries, but I've also invited guest writers to contribute and the inaugural entry is by one such guest writer, the passionate, knowledgeable, and extremely engaging Dennis Polifroni, whose personal pieces for the site I've always admired. I assigned him "Frankenstein" and he's hit the ball out of the park. Here's a sample, and then I encourage you to follow the link and take it all in!

"Karloff so perfectly infuses gentleness into his hand movements when pulling the petals off a daisy stem in his moment with the little girl by the pond that you forget this is just an actor in a costume and some very heavy make-up. In these moments you really believe it’s a being who is trying to recreate, for himself, the same kind of innocent whimsy that attracted him to the smile of this little child. You can see, in the way he crouches next to her and slowly inches his way closer to her, that he sees her as his mentor, someone with answers to his many inner questions, in what is beautiful about a life that has just begun for him."

Update 2018: Unfortunately, this sample is now all that remains of Dennis' essay, as the piece was deleted. 

Frankenstein

Close on the heels of Dracula, I re-watched Frankenstein, James Whale's 1931 horror classic which is, if anything, even more iconic than the vampire pic. In many ways, Whale's movie has more to offer - while the vampire myths are fun and can be interpreted any variety of ways, Mary Shelley's gothic-romantic classic is compelling on a different level. The idea of man-created man both fascinates and repels us, and it only grows more relevant with time (evidenced by the countless sci-fi and horror spin-offs of the film, as well as the popularization of the term "he's created a Frankenstein monster"). Yet in some ways, I find Frankenstein less satisfying than Dracula, perhaps because it is more ambitious than the other film, and hence it's more noticeable when it falls short.