30 Days of Halloween - last day
Nov. 1st, 2020 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Pick a Horror Novel or Film from the Decade You Were Born
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-01 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-01 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-01 05:12 pm (UTC)Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman (1941) Warning the clip is genuinely disturbing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kmeixKc9yk
no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 05:17 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2020-11-02 10:39 pm (UTC)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.)
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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...