#Boris Karloff&039;s Thriller | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

culturalgutter · 8 years ago

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We people of Earth are experiencing a renaissance in horror on TV like we’ve never enjoyed before, as traditional gatekeepers are dispersed in the wild hunt for content, any content that is compelling or innovative or just plain outré enough to collect people at watercoolers, where presumably advertisers can drop a net on the whole pack and harvest their disposable incomes and/or pineal juices. There’s Scream Queens, Scream, American Horror Story, Ash Vs. Evil Dead, Stranger Things, Bates Motel, and so many more jostling for your eyeballs, and they are all worthy of your eyeballs. The surprisingly gory Supernatural is in its 80th season, I think, and The Walking Dead has proven itself stronger than even zombie fatigue. And for every Penny Dreadful or Hannibal that is cut down, a Twin Peaks or X-Files will rise. But everyone in my house is sick, and have been in various configurations for the last month and a half, so I can’t tell you about any of those new shiny things at the moment. Sick babies are hell on your Netflix queue. And while David Cronenberg and Anthony Burgess’ epidemiologic horror is also top of mind these days, I find myself ultimately retreating to the comfort food of old favorites. In this case, the genteel rictus smile of Boris Karloff’s Thriller.

Stephen King had high praise for Thriller in 1981’s Danse Macabre*, and you’ve got to respect Stephen King’s opinion in these matters. Deference to King aside, since it wasn’t widely syndicated like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock’s anthology shows, and a slew of others, and I fall in the Gen X cohort that missed the first go-around, I never actually clapped eyes on the show until Netflix picked it up a few years ago. There’s only two seasons, but these are 1960s seasons, so the hour-long format delivers a full 50 minutes of content, not the 37-42 minutes we get today, with a total of 67 episodes, so it certainly doesn’t feel like a short-lived series. I think a show would have to be on for almost a decade in Britain to ding 67 eps.

In a lot of ways, Thriller is just like its horror anthology contemporaries and successors: weird standalone teleplays – usually horror, but sometimes a crime or mystery story — starring many faces who, if not already famous and beloved, would certainly become so later on: Ida Lupino (who also directed a boatload of these and scripted one), John Carradine, Leslie Neilsen, Ursula Andress, William Shatner, Harry Townes, Elizabeth Montgomery, Rip Torn, Mary Tyler Moore, and on and on and on. The stories tended to be horror siphoned from a very EC Comics vein, where bad people succeeded in bad things, only to be visited with hells of their own making. The most upfront difference was its host, a man once simply billed by his forbidding last name in Universal’s horror heyday, Boris Karloff, who also starred in a handful of the stories as a glorious bonus.

Boris was a big value add, no question, not only bringing the heft of his horror credentials, but investing every host segment with superbly ghoulish glee. Each episode, after an appropriately shocking cold open, Boris would step into the scene or the camera would pan to reveal him, much in the manner of Rod Serling’s introductions in The Twilight Zone, but instead of Serling’s moralistic omniscience, Boris was conversational and warm, and the bloodier the subject matter, the more delighted he seemed. It’s a neat trick, possibly unparalleled, to be at once so kindly and so sinister. I could watch nothing but a loop of his host sequences for hours. And Boris really worked for it. When he warned, “And those were no ordinary pigeons. They were pigeons from hell!” you knew he meant it. Before the lights went down for the story proper to begin, he would also introduce the cast, reminding you of the unreality of it all briefly before returning to his convivial threats. I love these sequences, especially when the cast physically walks into the picture with Boris, looking haunted or malign, and I love that, at least initially, Boris referred to them as “Mr. Rip Torn. Miss Patricia Barry,” etc. It’s exquisitely mannered. The tagline was, “As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this one is a Thriller!” And he was pretty true to his word.**

There were a few clunkers, though there always are, and even the success of the better episodes may be a matter of taste, particularly several decades after some of the punchlines and the story outlines have been retold so often they’re blunted with quaintess. But the source material was as top notch as The Twilight Zone at its height, harvesting work from August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Richard Matheson, and particularly Robert Bloch, who wrote seven episodes. And hell, Ray Milland directed an episode about Jack the Ripper. There was a ton of talent going into these shows, and if it had had a better timeslot, maybe it would have survived to become the institution The Twilight Zone (deservedly) is. Thriller did at least spawn a comic series, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, which survived the show and Karloff both into the 1980s.

My favorite Thriller episodes all turn on that EC Comics flavor horror. You could easily swap out Boris for the Crypt Keeper as far as that goes, but I do prefer Karloff’s puns. Here, in no particular order, are my five top Thriller episodes for the adventurous viewer. There’s a DVD collection, plus it’s currently showing on the Decades cable channel. You may find many episodes on YouTube.

William Shatner did two Thriller episodes, and I have a hard time picking a favorite. Part of this is simply because Shatner’s really good in both. People make fun, but he’s a damn fine actor, and his black-and-white work could be a lot more restrained than we expect from Captain Kirk or Denny Crane. In “The Hungry Glass,” based on a Robert Bloch story, Shatner is one half of a young married couple who have just bought a house . They were sold the house by a realtor friend, who you may also recognize as Russell “The Professor” Johnson, and it has a spooky reputation that has kept the Century 21 sign out front for a generation. When the Shatners take possession of the house, they’re there for approximately a minute before the realtor’s wife screams that she saw a figure outside the window, and it’s not Torgo because the window overlooks a scenic sheer drop. There are nervous chuckles and rationalizations, but it doesn’t take very long at all for Shatner and his wife to start seeing fleeting figures in reflective surfaces. And then the wife finds an attic full of mirrors.

The second Shatner episode is called “The Grim Reaper,” another Bloch adaptation, and it stars a cursed painting that really looks like sweet heavy metal van art. Here, Shatner is the nephew of a different castaway, Natalie Schafer, who plays an eccentric, exuberant, and very alcoholic mystery writer. She recently acquired the cursed painting because she’s the kind of person who would, and her caring nephew has come to warn her off of it. As he explains, when the scythe of the depicted grim reaper drips blood, someone will soon die. And wouldn’t you know it? He touches the painting to demonstrate and comes away with bloody fingertips. That same night, his aunt discovers her husband is trying to snuggle her assistant. It’s a story that’s equal parts Clue and the Roddy McDowall vignette in the Night Gallery pilot, and it’s perfect.

My third Thriller pick is called “The Hollow Watcher.” The Hollow Watcher is a scarecrow, and I love demon scarecrow stories. It is also a story of southern white rural poor, which always interests me since, well, I was/will always be, and their treatment always grabs my interest, but it’s fair here.*** It starts with Denver Pyle as a meaner version of Briscoe Darling, attacking his son Hugo’s mail-order Irish bride. As father and son fight it out, the bride sneaks up and whacks Daddy dead. Since the son was pretty well knocked out by his father, she’s able to convince him that he beat his father so profoundly that his father ran away, forsaking his land. Hugo, in hillbilly man-child mode, expresses anxiety that “The Hollow Watcher,” a scarecrow up on the hill/avenging monster will visit judgment on him for raising a hand to his elder. In the meantime, a man claiming to be her brother arrives on the scene, his wife recently dead. Hugo is called away, and brother and sister are revealed to be man and wife grifters with a very Crimson Peak approach to building a nest egg. Hugo might be gone, but the Hollow Watcher still overlooks the property, and as Boris reminds us, “The beliefs of simple country folk can create forces that can certainly surprise you.”

Next, I choose “The Terror in Teakwood,” a story about a hatred between two concert pianists so white-hot, it survives death. Hazel Court plays the wife of the still living pianist Vladimir Vicek (Guy Rolfe), disturbed that since the death of his rival Karnovich, he’s been acting, well, a little weird, and she keeps finding him covered in blood. She thinks that someone is trying to kill him. So she goes to her ex Jerry (Charles Aidman) and asks him to come work as her husband’s manager, while secretly trying to get to the bottom of the blood-covered husband biz. Imagine how worried she’d be if she knew what her husband did at his rival’s grave in the cold open.

Lastly, I recommend “The Incredible Doktor Markesan,” based on an August Derleth story, starring Boris Karloff as the titular doktor with Dick York and Carolyn Kearney as his nephew and nephew’s wife, driven to the door of his Old Dark House in penniless desperation. Markesan, creepier even than his house, agrees to let the poor couple stay, but insists they never leave their room after dark, and just to be sure, he locks them in. Markesan, sweetie, if it didn’t work for Dracula, it’s not going to work for you.

Those are my favorites, but even as I make the list, I want to recommend “The Purple Room” for the Psycho exteriors and Rip Torn almost unrecognizably young, “Mr. George” for its darkly comedic tale of a specter foiling three wicked people’s attempts to kill their young ward, Patricia Barry’s Jekyll and Hyde performance in August Derleth’s “A Wig For Miss Devore,” the weird voodoo weirdness of the Robert E. Howard story “Pigeons From Hell,” and on and on. This show has so many goodies. Even the crime thriller episodes have their good points, like…Robert Lansing. “Late Date” is a pretty good one of those, based on a Cornell Woolrich story. And while there’s a lot of exciting new stuff out there that deserves your attention, just because something’s of a certain vintage, that doesn’t mean you should give it up for dead.

[manic laughter, discordant organ music begins]

* Among Stephen King’s very astute judgments in Danse Macabre, I have, with time and home ownership, come to appreciate his verdict on The Amityville Horror as being mostly horrifying when you think how much money that poor family hemorrhaged.

** Of course, he never legally changed his name from William Henry Pratt, so if a show wasn’t a thriller, I suppose the joke would be on us.

***I will note here that the setting is rural North Carolina, and everyone pronounces the word “hollow” with a long o sound at the end. That has a very spooky ring and is certainly evocative of a man made of straw, but since it refers to a place, i.e. the hollow the scarecrow is watching over, it really should be pronounced “holler,” especially by country folk. I assume no North Carolinians were consulted in the making of this episode.

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Angela does wonder about the alternate timeline where Bela Lugosi hosted an anthology show.

For No Mere Mortal Can Resist We people of Earth are experiencing a renaissance in horror on TV like we’ve never enjoyed before, as traditional gatekeepers are dispersed in the wild hunt for content, any content that is compelling or innovative or just plain outré enough to collect people at watercoolers, where presumably advertisers can drop a net on the whole pack and harvest their disposable incomes and/or pineal juices.

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culturalgutter · 8 years ago

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I love me some Edgar Allan Poe. That man lived a fantastically harsh, brief life, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t wring some great writing out of it anyway. It might seem strange then that out of decades and decades of Poe film adaptations, my very favorite – 1934’s The Black Cat – is a Poe movie in name only. To be honest, I’m not sure there are any real Poe movies, or at least, scrupulously faithful film adaptations of his work. I wouldn’t go so far as to say his work is unfilmable, but for such a meticulous writer, so laser focused on the effect of his work, that effect is the sole survivor of many a Poe adaptation. Sometimes not even that. I remember seeing 1963’s The Raven for the first time during my initial seventh-grade love affair with Poe, and before long, I knew my very first fannish high dudgeon. It was a freaking comedy! Angela smash! I was not equipped to appreciate what Comics Editor Carol called its “Sixties deconstruction of Gothic Horror” instead of a film version of Poe’s poem, whatever the hell that would even look like.

Because that is the problem with adapting a lot of Poe. Most of the drama is interior and, often, delusional. There is not much, if any, supernatural in Poe, and it can be harder to show an unreliable narrator than to let him speak for himself. There are ways to dramatize madness, of course, but Poe strove for a unity of effect in his short fiction, not always a conventional narrative, so you end up with something that would translate to the screen most readily as an arty vignette or a Night Gallery episode, not a feature film. His stories are edited to the bone. 2015’s glorious Extraordinary Tales tackled the issue by privileging narration in its abridged animated versions of several Poe tales, but the result is more of an illuminated audiobook than a movie. You only have to watch its gorgeous version of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” narrated by Sir Christopher Lee in his final film performance, to notice how the narrator, Roderick Usher’s childhood friend, is simply gaping at Usher’s involuted obsessions for most of his stage time. You can forgive Corman for adding a little Satan worship and a bizarre love triangle to 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death, where the story proper runs more like plague, party, everybody dies. That’s barely enough for a Cure song.

I hate myths that correlate artistic achievement with suffering and substance abuse, luring artists into one form of fatuous self-destruction or another. But with his sad, yearning daguerreotype portraits stamped onto the cover of most volumes of his work, Poe’s suffering has become, in our hideous modern vernacular, his brand. It’s a brand that has become ever more saleable owing to his legend, aesthetic, and personality, even as his reputation — as a writer who trafficked entirely in the cultural gutter, for all his societal pretensions — remains perennially controversial. His most accomplished work obsesses on the theme of the death of a beautiful woman: Ligeia, Berenice, Eleonora, Morella, Ulalume, Madeline Usher, Annabel Lee, Lenore. It’s something he ruminates about clinically in “The Philosophy of Composition,” but the premature death of almost every woman of import to him in his own life furnishes all the reason you would ever need why anyone would be so fixated on losing someone beautiful and irreplaceable.

“I asked myself — ;Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death — was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious — ‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.’ – Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition.”

It’s not women in refrigerators for Poe though; there’s no exaltation for the bereaved in these gloomy tableaus. These tragedies are not plot points in the narrator’s story. They are the plot, all of it. The narrator is simply a helpless witness. Again and again and again.

I am always a little shocked when I meet someone who believes Edgar Allan Poe was a wicked man, but that’s his brand, too, thanks to a petty autobiographer who sought revenge on a dead man’s reputation. It is almost like his life was reinterpreted into a folktale with the same fidelity as some of the film versions of his stories*, or Angela Carter’s fabulous fabulist short story “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe.” Yet in the end, essential Poe details survive the calumny. So, too, essential Poe themes and aesthetics can survive a little interpolated Satanism.

Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” actually does feature a fair bit of action, with a once kind-hearted narrator first driven to self-loathing by his alcoholism, then to escalating acts of cruelty and violence by guilt, culminating in his wife’s murder. Like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it has the kind of shocking smash cut ending that every episode of Tales From the Crypt aspires to, as the narrator’s guilt is outed to police by a yowling cat he accidentally interred with his murdered wife. “I had walled the monster up within the tomb!” Boom. Cue Crypt Keeper.

But Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, “suggested by Edgar Allan Poe” credit be damned, features none of that. It’s not even a story that broadly addresses the corrosive guilt and willful self-destruction that Poe’s story took on. Ulmer’s The Black Cat is all about Bela Lugosi versus Boris Karloff in an outre little number that just barely skirts the edge of pre-code censorship with its dead ladies in nightgowns intact. Lugosi plays righteous Hungarian psychiatrist Dr. Vitus Werdegast, while Karloff is the serenely corrupt Satanist/traitor/architect Hjalmar Poelzig. Werdegast, after rotting fifteen years in an infamous Siberian prison, is looking up his old comrade Poelzig, hot to avenge himself on the man who betrayed him to the Russians and stole his wife. Actually, unbeknownst to Werdegast, it’s even ookier: his wife’s dead and Poelzig’s now married to their daughter. So, they have a lot of catching up to do.

On his way to Poelzig’s bizarre art deco palace, Werdegast falls in with a bland honeymooning couple, and sharing a carriage ride with the doctor turns out to be a great way to get roped into not only Werdegast’s revenge plot, but Poelzig’s secret satanic rituals. As for Poe fidelity, Poelzig has a black cat he walks around stroking like so much Blofeld, which just happens to trigger a disabling phobia in Werdegast. Thanks for the suggestion, Mr. Poe.

There’s a lot to love in The Black Cat. This was the first of the Karloff-Lugosi team-ups, and it’s far and away my favorite. Karloff hits a weird blend of austerity and lust that blends perfectly with the art deco of the damned all around him. Maybe I’m influenced too much by Karloff’s later work, but I always think of him as sympathetic and genteel, either Frankenstein’s monster or the host of Thriller, and it’s interesting to see him play a character as decadent as Herr Poelzig. And I love Lugosi in this. Except for some hammy over-reacting to cats – which I’m also prepared to blame on the director or the script — this might be my favorite of his performances. He still reeks of Dracula, but for once, he gets to be sort of heroic. Like many an authentic Poe villain though, he’s driven by tragedy and torture to terrible violence. This may be the only movie you’ll ever see where the good guy skins someone alive.

For their part, the honeymooning couple are basically inert chess pieces between Werdegast and Poelzig, but what else could they be? Karloff and Lugosi are the big time. Jonathan Harker to Bela’s Count in a former life, David Manners plays new husband Peter Alison, a mystery writer who is right up there with Lance in House on Haunted Hill as most ineffective horror movie heroes of all time, and in a movie with so much perfect Karloff and Lugosi, I deeply resent every moment I’m asked to pay attention to his benign wholesomeness. Thankfully, it’s not too much. His wife Joan (Julie Bishop) is only really interesting when under the influence of a narcotic Werdegast administers – rather a lot like vamped out Mina in Dracula (1931). That’s fine though. In its running time at just under an hour, The Black Cat still packs in a satanic ceremony, lots of stylish shots of Karloff looking tormented, some Torgo-grade necrophilia, arguable incest, Bela Lugosi being occasionally relatable, and, oh, yes, the flaying.

There is a true strain of Poe in the film that can’t be argued though, and it has nothing to do with Poelzig’s cat. Poelzig has other pets – a collection of dead women he keeps in glass cases. The best sequence in the film — added when the studio complained, because when you ask Edgar G. Ulmer to tone things down, apparently he adds bodies – shows Karloff touring through the cases of dead women, admiring them and stroking his cat meditatively. Later, he brings Werdegast to this chamber to reveal his wife’s fate.

“Do you see, Vitus?,” he tells Werdegast. “I have cared for her tenderly and well. You will find her almost as beautiful as when you last saw her. She died two years after the war.” And when Werdegast asks why his wife has been preserved thus, Poelzig answers: “Is she not beautiful? I wanted to have her beauty always.”

Suspended between Werdegast’s horror and Poelzig’s admiration, Poe’s most poetical topic in the world shines in repose. Werdegast’s pain is so visibly acute and Poelzig’s veneration so unwholesome, together they represent key dimensions of the Poe brand – the bereaved, tormented lover and the repulsive aesthete, Poe’s Romantic intention and the popular interpretation that survived him. Nothing else in the movie has anything to do with Poe, but here, at the heart of the film, it is suddenly, brilliantly faithful – not to Poe’s story, of course, but to Poe’s legacy. It’s only for a moment’s effect, a vignette in a much busier work, and I’m certain it wasn’t intentional. But to look at it another way, amid all the fantastic shocks of Karloff v. Lugosi goodness, Poe’s favorite theme is the most powerful piece in a dynamic picture. Ulmer’s The Black Cat might not really be based on Poe’s story, but almost a century after the sad poet’s death, it vindicated his philosophy.

*I am a bit partial to Shimako Sato’s quiet 1992 indie film A Tale of a Vampire, which I also like to think of as Julian Sands’ Lestat audition reel. Kenneth Cranham plays a vampiric Poe orchestrating a very Poe-y revenge on Sands’ more idealized, romantic vamp for cuckolding him some century and a half earlier. I think Poe might have appreciated what Sato did with a dead, idealized woman crossed with her husband’s obsessive revenge. It is languidly paced and ultra-low budget, though beautiful, and most people I have tried to show it to have either fallen asleep or out of interest by the end. If you’re a Poe scholar or a Julian Sands fan though, I do recommend it.

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Angela has never lived in Baltimore, but her home team is still the Ravens.

Dead Ladies in Nightgowns are Always Poetical I love me some Edgar Allan Poe. That man lived a fantastically harsh, brief life, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t wring some great writing out of it anyway.

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