30 Days of Halloween - last day

[shadowkat]

Pick a Horror Novel or Film from the Decade You Were Born

Watch on YouTube

This is actually the version of Turn of the Screw that I read in High School - I read the adaptation written by Truman Capote and William Archibald. (I've never made it through a novel by Henry James. I think I agree with Mark Twain - who sunk the "Henry James" in Huckleberry Finn. Of course it could be a mood thing?)

I also saw the film. It's a creepy psychological horror story - similar to the Haunting of Hill House, which may explain why they chose to do a television adaptation of it. Although the original is better - in that it doesn't romanticize the ghosts, nor does complicate it. It's simpler.

Comments

[petzipellepingo]

The Cat People , 1942 by Val Lewton.

[mtbc]

That looks interesting and I've not seen it. I'd better fix that, thank you.

[cactuswatcher]

One of many remakes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This one with a first class cast:

Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman (1941) Warning the clip is genuinely disturbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kmeixKc9yk

[kerk_hiraeth]

Wasn't sure where to leave this comment; but have just become aware of the passing of an author who wrote the books upon which a crowdfunded project; Morganville, which Amber Benson was involved with. https://www.tor.com/2020/11/02/morganville-vampires-author-rachel-caine-has-died/

It's been something like five years maybe since I watched it, but I have all the episodes from YT, so may end up watching them again sometime soon.

kerk

The Tingler and William Castle

[cjlasky7]

When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I loved to watch old horror and scifi flicks on TV: Saturday morning scifi on Creature Features (NY Channel 5) and late night horror on Chiller Theater (Channel 11).

One of my favorite Chiller Theater flicks was The Tingler (1959), about a prison pathologist (played, of course, by Vincent Price) and his discovery of a parasite that grows in the human body in moments of extreme fear.

The plot is ridiculous, but almost irrelevant. Price swans through the movie with an erudite, cynical detachment that's perfectly suited to the character (or maybe it's his opinion of the script). The fun here is watching director William Castle mess with the movie audience, addressing them directly at the start of the movie, and sending the Tingler into a crowded movie theater at the end.

Castle's whole MO was jolting the viewers with gimmicks. In House on Haunted Hill, he had a skeleton fly out from the rafters; for The Tingler, he placed vibrators under random seats to give the audience a little tingle of its own.

It sounds cheesy (and it was!), but Castle is still beloved in horror circles for his Barnum like showmanship. (John Goodman's character in Joe Dante's Matinee was based on Castle.)

***************

One good Castle story to send the whole thing home:

Even though William Castle was King of the Bs, he always yearned for respectability. In 1967, when a stylish new horror novel was about to hit the presses, Castle snapped up the rights and took it to Robert Evans at Paramount. Evans loved the book--but he didn't think Castle was good enough to direct it. Evans had his eye on a talented young director from Europe....

Roman Polanski.

Castle received a producer's credit on Rosemary's Baby. He even had a cameo: he's the man outside the phone booth with the cigar when Mia Farrow is trying to call her doctor. But that was his first and last chance at the A List. His health deteriorated and he never got a major project off the ground before his death in 1975. Maybe, as Castle said (before his death), he shouldn't have messed around with the devil.

Halloween 🎃 is over. Election Day is tomorrow.

Now the true horror begins...