Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

Boris Karloff in Targets

Tim O'Kelly in Targets

Cast: Boris Karloff, Tim O'Kelly, Nancy Hsueh, Peter Bogdanovich, Arthur Peterson, James Brown, Tanya Morgan, Mary Jackson, Sandy Baron, Monte Landis. Screenplay: Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt. Cinematography: László Kovács. Production design: Polly Platt. Film editing: Peter Bogdanovich. 

The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in The Raven

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lester Matthews, Irene Ware, Samuel S. Hinds, Spencer Charters, Inez Courtney, Ian Wolfe, Maidel Turner. Screenplay: David Boehm. Cinematography: Charles J. Stumar. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Clifford Vaughan. 

The Criterion Channel includes The Raven in its collection of pre-Code horror movies, but in fact the movie started filming after the Production Code was introduced, and director Lew Landers had to negotiate over details in the script. The enforcers were nervous about "excess horror," and in particular wanted the film not to show any details of the operation that Dr. Vollin (Bela Lugosi) performs on Bateman's (Boris Karloff) face. Even so, censors took aim at what they called "horror for horror's sake," and The Raven was banned in several countries. The defense from Universal Studios that the movie was a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe impressed nobody. It's still a fairly creepy movie, largely because the filmmakers managed to include some torture devices from Poe's stories like "The Pit and the Pendulum." The poem "The Raven" mainly gives Dr. Vollin an excuse to explain to everyone that the bird is a symbol of death, but it also prompts a rather silly dance recital by the object of Vollin's obsession, Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware). Vollin is a neurosurgeon who saves Jean's life after she's injured in an automobile accident. She's engaged to another surgeon, Dr. Halden (Lester Matthews), and when her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), stymies Vollin's interest in Jean, Vollin takes his revenge. He has a collection of torture devices and an old house outfitted with gimmicks like a bedroom on an elevator and a secret room whose walls close in on people trapped in it. Karloff's Bateman is a bank robber who escaped from San Quentin and is on the run, so in the guise of giving him plastic surgery to change his identity, Vollin instead disfigures him, and then makes him play servant at a house party to which Halden, the Thatchers, and various other guests are invited. Madness ensues. The movie's chief virtue is brevity -- it runs 61 minutes -- so it never gets tedious even though it also never gets either scary or plausible.   

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

 

 

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Julie Bishop, Egon Brecher, Harry Cording, Lucille Lund, Henry Armetta, Albert Conti. Screenplay: Edgar G. Ulmer, Peter Ruric, suggested by a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematography: John J. Mescall. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Ray Curtiss. Music: Heinz Roemheld.

Edgar G. Ulmer’s kinky The Black Cat may have been “suggested by” an Edgar Allan Poe story, as the screen credit says, but the only suggestion Ulmer and co-scenarist Peter Ruric seem to have taken was the title. A cat does appear, and freaks Bela Lugosi’s Dr. Vitus Werdegast out so completely that he kills it – maybe, for it seems to reappear, purring in the cuddling hands of Boris Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig, a few minutes later. Otherwise, the movie is an occasion for Universal’s famed horror stars Lugosi and Karloff to appear together and torment each other, and only incidentally to scare the hell out of a pair of newlyweds, Peter (David Manners) and Joan Allison (Julie Bishop, billed under her original name, Jacqueline Wells). The result is a stew (or perhaps goulash, since the setting is Hungary) of satanism, necrophilia, torture, and revenge. Lugosi’s Werdegast is returning to the place where Karloff’s Poelzig betrayed him to the Russians during World War I, and stole his wife while Werdegast was off in the gulag. Thanks to a chance encounter with the newlyweds on the train and a subsequent bus accident, Werdegast and the Allisons wind up at the home of Poelzig, built in the ruins of the fort Poelzig commanded during the war. It has been modernized in a kind of minimalist blend of Bauhaus and Art Deco – lots of glass brick and pocket doors – but there is also a gloomy substructure made out of the old dungeons of the fort. Werdegast and Poelzig meet again with a kind of stiff courtesy, hardly suggesting that Werdegast will eventually skin Poelzig alive. With good reason, for Poelzig has added Werdegast’s wife to his collection of embalmed women that he displays in glass cases, and married Werdegast’s daughter in her place. The Allisons are there only to add some semblance of normality to the whole business. It’s one of the more delirious of the classic Universal horror movies of the 1930s, with some perversities that would not have been allowed under the Production Code.

Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

 

Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

Cast: Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helene Thimig, Alan Napier, Jason Robards Sr., Ernst Deutsch. Screenplay: Ardel Wray. Cinematography: Jack MacKenzie. Art direction: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Lyle Boyer. Music: Leigh Harline.

Two famous works of art haunt (I use the obvious word intentionally) the film Isle of the Dead. The obvious one is Arnold Böcklin’s painting of that name, five versions of which he painted from 1880 to 1901, the year of his death. The image is re-created early in the movie, when the Greek Gen. Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) and an American reporter, Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) row out to a Greek island to visit the grave of the general’s daughter. But the other, less obvious work that comes to my mind is Francisco Goya’s aquatint etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, one of the images he created for the series Los caprichos in the late 1790s. In it, a man slumped at his desk is surrounded by menacing bats and owls. Producer Val Lewton’s celebrated series of moody psychological horror movies in the 1940s typically depict conflicts between the scientific, rational mind and manifestations of superstition and myth. In the film, the island is swept by what a doctor (Ernst Deutsch) diagnoses as septicemic plague, but the superstitious resident of the island, Madame Kyra, believes it’s caused by a vorvolaka, a vampire-like creature she thinks is embodied in the pretty young Thea (Ellen Drew), who is nursing the sickly Mrs. St. Aubyn (Katherine Emery). And when the doctor himself dies, the superstitious view begins to win out, especially with the general. But the narrative track of the movie, which inevitably includes a romance between the reporter and Thea, and which tends to come apart at the seams a little toward the end, matters less than the creepy effect it creates, including such horrors as the fear of being buried alive. Karloff gives the best performance, of course, as he degenerates from the imperious general who calmly sends a delinquent officer off to commit suicide into a man gripped by terrors he can’t face. 

The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932)

The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932)

Cast: Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas, Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesinger, Eva Moore, Charles Laughton, Lilian Bond, Elspeth Dudgeon, Brember Wills. Screenplay: Benn W. Levy, based on a novel by J.B. Priestley. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Clarence Kolster. 

The title itself has an air of gleefully giving away what you're about to see. It's an old dark house and it's the only refuge from a storm that has Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart) and their friend Penderel (a slightly pudgy Melvyn Douglas) seeking shelter for the night. And when the disfigured butler Morgan (Boris Karloff, who else?) answers the door, you settle in for an evening of mostly tongue-in-cheek scary moments. The travelers are reluctantly invited in by Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger) and his sister, Rebecca (Eva Moore), and just as reluctantly given dinner. Their meal of roast beef and potatoes -- the line "Have a potato" has never been funnier -- is interrupted by another pair of shelter seekers, Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his companion Gladys (Lilian Bond). They're an odd couple but not a spooky one: He's an uncouth industrialist who earned his knighthood and she's a chorus girl. But she's not his mistress, she explains to Penderel as the two of them start to hit it off together. She and Porterhouse just like one another's company, she says, and he likes to appear "gay" -- in the older meaning of the word, though you can be sure that director James Whale knew the current meaning, since he and Laughton and Thesinger were. There's also a centenarian in the attic and a madman in a locked room, and of course the lights go out and everyone finds themselves in some kind of peril. The Old Dark House was thought to be lost for a long time, but it was discovered and restored, for which we all should be glad.