Keep Watching the Skies

Before there was The Thing (2011) with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, before there was The Thing (1982) with Kurt Russell, there was The Thing from Another World (1951), a horror movie that deserves to be remembered.

It didn't have the flamboyant shape-shifting special effects or the greater fidelity to the source material (a novella by John W. Campbell, Jr.) found in the 1982 The Thing, directed by John Carpenter. What it did have was Howard Hawks, the great studio-era director whose Winchester Pictures produced The Thing from Another World. Credited as producer, Hawks did not officially direct The Thing from Another World--that credit goes to Christian Nyby. But it has long been thought that he might have directed it for Nyby, and at the least his influence is all over it. It has rapid-fire dialogue in which characters interrupt one another; a focus on men in action; a feisty love interest who talks back to her man; and a curiosity and skepticism about scientists--all hallmarks of Hawks. Above all, it has the tension and style of the master cinematic story-teller.

The Thing from Another World is about an alien buried in Arctic ice who is dug up and accidentally restored to life. A plant-based life form who looks something like Karloff's Frankenstein monster (heavy brow, flat head, big physique)--although he is never seen clearly in the film--the Thing goes ravaging through an army base, seeking the blood on which it lives. Guns won't kill it, and a debate goes on between the soldiers and the chief scientist about whether it should be killed at all or reasoned with. This being a horror movie, reasoning with the creature does not win the day.

There are no stars in the cast, unless you count James Arness as the Thing. Then unknown, he went on to star for two decades as Matt Dillon in TV's Gunsmoke. Other than that, the players were competent character actors who did a good job making the outlandish story believable. With the ending came one of the most memorable lines in horror and science fiction history, a warning called in by a reporter to the outside world: "Keep watching the skies!"

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

Sexual Parasites

Horror movies have mixed attitudes toward sex. The slasher subgenre is always showing teenagers having sex, then slaughtering those teenagers, leading the slasher movie Scream to articulate the horror movie rule, "You can never have sex." Whereas such movies suggest that the slasher disapproves of sex, other horror movie monsters seem to like sex--or at least iconic images of sex. Dracula is always biting women on the neck and sucking their blood, in a kind of metaphor for sex. However, my vote for the most peculiar horror movie take on sex is They Came from Within (aka Shivers, 1975), an early work by Canadian director David Cronenberg. What makes it so strange is that its deformed destructive being (DDB) is a parasite that causes people to want to have sex.

They Came from Within takes place at a high-rise apartment complex near Montreal. A mad scientist who believes humans have become too cerebral, out of touch with their bodies, devises a parasite that will make people crave sex. The wormlike parasite lives in people's bodies and spreads from person to person by kissing, blood, grates, drains, and other vectors. The parasites infest the building and soon people are running around sexually attacking each other, spreading more parasites, and generally creating chaos. A doctor who works in a clinic at the building tries to stop the madness, but is ultimately sucked in by it. A closing newscast suggests that the infected sex zombies are spreading out to the larger area of Montreal.

The movie occupies an interesting place in movie history. The shuffling mindlessness of the sex zombies owes a debt to Night of the Living Dead, but otherwise the film is starkly original, particularly in its portrayal of the parasites. The wriggling creatures, who can burst from chests and leap onto faces, are a probable inspiration for the alien in Alien.

What is most interesting about They Came from Within is its attitude toward sex. The premise seems bizarre: a mad scientist thinks people don't have enough desire for sex? Has he ever been in high school? Or college? People seem to have plenty of desire for sex. Yet in this movie, one can almost see what he means. The doctor, for example, has an attractive nurse girlfriend who strips in front of him without arousing any interest. Only when the sex-zombified girlfriend attacks him, and presumably infects him, does he have a chance of recovering his own libido. The movie appears to be siding with the mad scientist--regarding modern humans as undersexed, and requiring that they take a dose, however disgusting and horrible it may seem, of old-fashioned carnality.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

Horror vs. Action

Lately I've been writing about action films, and it occurs to me there is much overlap between that genre and horror. Both are centrally concerned with the struggle between more or less normal characters and some kind of destructive nemesis. Both usually involve violence and fear.

The main difference is in the primary purpose of each genre--what it is principally trying to do. The horror film's primary purpose is the presentation of a deformed destructive being (DDB), ie, the monster. The action film's primary purpose is the presentation of a physical fight between a hero and a villain. The horror film mainly wants to show you the monster; the action film wants to show you a fight. This difference is marked between two closely connected films, Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).

Alien is the story of a grotesque extraterrestrial that gets aboard a spaceship and starts killing the crew one by one. Though the DDB is rarely shown in full detail, the focus of the movie is this monster, and the prevailing feeling is one of fear. Attempts to fight the alien with makeshift weapons are mostly ineffectual. At the end, the final girl, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), barely manages to defeat the alien by having it sucked into space. Alien is clearly a horror movie: it is all about the DDB.

Aliens, the first and best sequel to Alien, is also about the species of extraterrestrials that caused such havoc in the first film. Weaver returns as Ripley to contront the creatures again. But this time she is accompanied by a squad of space marines wielding heavy weaponry. In a series of dynamite action scenes on a desolate planet, she and the marines wage battle against hordes of aliens, only to find themselves outfought. The few survivors devise a plan to leave. With minutes ticking before the area is about to undergo nuclear explosion, Ripley has to stay and fight more aliens in single combat--including the dreaded alien queen--to protect a little girl, Newt. Ripley and Newt escape on their spaceship, only for Ripley to have to face the alien queen again. Ripley does so in a mechanical loader that resembles yellow battle armor. After exchanging punches, Ripley again forces the alien to be sucked into space.

The difference is tremendous. Aliens is not a horror movie at all--it is an action movie. The point is not primarily to show the DDB but to show the hero (Ripley and her marines) having one physical fight after another with the villain (the alien queen and her aliens). Ripley's heroism is emphasized by giving her a child to protect; the alien queen's villainy is emphasized by having her focus on attacking the child. Alien and Aliens show how closely the horror movie and the action movie are linked--so closely that one can be transformed into another with the addition of a few more weapons and some space marines.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

Announcing the New Year's Contest Winner

Jon T has been selected by random drawing to win a free copy of Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films. Congratulations, Jon T! To claim your prize, email me at bkarloff1@gmail.com with your postal mailing address. I will send the book to that address.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the New Year's Contest.

George Ochoa

Playing with Acromegaly

This will be the last reminder about the contest (see rules) before it ends on Tuesday, January 31. Become a public follower of this blog by then, and you have a chance to win my book, Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films. Welcome to those who have joined this month.

I am always looking for good horror movies I have not already seen, and I found one this week: a little known PRC quickie from 1944 called The Monster Maker. It stars veteran character actor J. Carrol Naish, who is best known to horror fans as mad scientist Boris Karloff's hunchbacked assistant in House of Frankenstein, released the same year. Here Naish is himself a mad scientist, Dr. Igor Markoff (good name). He is playing around with an actual disease, acromegaly, a glandular disorder that causes distortion of the face and hands, and that afflicted real-life B-movie player Rondo Hatton, who used it to look menacing on film. Markoff has a more sinister use for the disease.

It seems that Markoff has fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of a famous concert pianist, Anthony Lawrence (Ralph Morgan). To make things more twisted, Markoff desires the daughter because she reminds him of his dead wife, whom he drove to suicide by injecting her with acromegaly in a jealous rage (he made her hideous so no other man would look at her). Markoff injects Lawrence with acromegaly, turning him into a hideous monster and ruining his piano career. Markoff promises to cure Lawrence if he will get his daughter to marry the mad scientist--presumably so he can inject her with acromegaly too.

All this and I haven't even gotten to the gorilla. That's right, there's a fierce gorilla locked up in a cage for some reason, and when it gets loose...

The Monster Maker is 62 minutes long, and it moves right along at a nice pace. Naish's performance is typically good, the support is competent, the agromegaly makeup is well done, and though the sets are few, the maximum is made of them. From the point of view of deformed destructive being (DDB) theory, The Monster Maker is interesting because this mad scientist has dedicated his life to generating deformity that results in destructiveness. Markoff is himself a DDB (his mind is deformed and destructive) whose madness is precisely in wanting to make more DDBs (these acromegalics are not only deformed but, it turns out, destructive). Even when he gets a hold of beauty, he wants to turn her into one of his beasts. This is a low-budget film that is both entertaining and philosophically suggestive.

George Ochoa

The Mad Scientist

A staple of the horror movie is the mad scientist, and with good reason. The purpose of the horror film is to present a deformed destructive being (DDB), and the mad scientist, through his demented experiments, produces just that: a monster that is new, unnatural, and terrifying. In so doing, he is almost an avatar of the filmmaker, doing within the movie what the filmmaker tries to do through the movie.

The granddaddy of mad scientists is Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein in Frankenstein. With his intense, neurotic look, his tendency toward screeching, his desire to play God, he set the pattern for mad scientists throughout horror film history. The DDB he created from dead flesh, the Frankenstein monster, was the pattern for later experimental monstrosities.

An ethical rule of horror films that Frankenstein violated is the rule prohibiting tampering with nature, often set in a religious context (God is the ruler of nature; therefore, altering nature is forbidden). This rule continued to be violated in future films. In The Invisible Man, the title character confesses on his deathbed, "I meddled in things that man must leave alone." Invisibility might not seem like such a sacrilegious thing to aim for, but in the horror film any monkeying around with nature can be disastrous.

The mad scientist is always trying some new alteration of nature: teleportation in The Fly; turning animals into people in The Island of Lost Souls; reviving the dead in Re-Animator; separating out the good and evil components of man in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; creating a twelve-limbed humanoid in The Human Centipede; reconstructing alien DNA in Species. The plan is always to create something that can be controlled, but the experiment always turns on the creator; the DDB breaks its bounds. This is true whether the DDB is, respectively, a fly-human hybrid, animal-men, crazed zombies, Mr. Hyde, the human centipede, or a deadly Natasha Henstridge.

The mad scientist is sometimes remorseful for what he has done, but sometimes he doesn't care. Peter Cushing's Frankenstein in the Hammer Frankenstein series never seemed repentant for his monstrosities. In any case, we can expect more mad scientists in horror movies, because they are so successful in creating DDBs.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

P.S. Don't forget to enter the contest.

"The 4th Floor"

Reminder: You have until January 31, 2012, to enter the drawing to win a free copy of my book, Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films, just by following this blog publicly. See this post for  details.

I had a chance recently to see a movie I'd never heard of, The 4th Floor (1999), starring Juliette Lewis and William Hurt. I was glad I did, not because the movie was good but because it was weird. Here was Hurt, the Oscar-winning star of Kiss of the Spider Woman, appearing as support in a grade B horror movie. Here was Lewis, whining and getting hysterical in her usual Lewis way--which is to say, a weird way. Here was Tobin Bell doing his creepy potential serial killer thing as if preparing for Saw, which he would make five years later.

The plot of The 4th Floor hinges on an apartment that Lewis inherits and doesn't want to give up, even though a mysterious downstairs neighbor (on the fourth floor) is sending her menacing notes about making too much noise. The dispute escalates, and soon the neighbor is sending her maggots and mice, and otherwise making her life unpleasant. Lewis has never seen this neighbor, and the movie is built like an old-fashioned mystery, where you have several suspects to choose from, including Bell, who lives across the street and peeps in at Lewis, and Hurt, a TV weatherman who is Lewis's boyfriend. Neighbors Shelley Duvall and Austin Pendleton are possibilities too.

It doesn't really matter who the maniac is, and in fact the movie is a little muddy about it, finally implicating at least two individuals. The point seems to be to build tension and generate scares, and here the movie falls short. The pace is leaden and the plot twists unbelievable. In one episode, Lewis is facing off against her adversary, and decides to deck the person with an artsy plaque she has mounted on her wall. So she starts pounding her feet into broken glass in an effort to make the plaque fall. And it falls. Now, I have had objects around the house that tend to fall at inopportune times, and the whole point is that you can't control when they fall--they just do, sometimes. Lewis seems to be violating the law of entropy by controlling disorder in an orderly way.

Despite these problems, The 4th Floor was kind of entertaining. It was offbeat and mildly wacky. And it had the worst fake commercial for a TV weatherman I have ever seen.

George Ochoa