Glowing in the dark, p.24
Glowing in the Dark, page 24
He also knew when to ignore that stuff. He understood the fragile alchemy that means the difference between verisimilitude and bringing something “down to the mundane.” Harryhausen’s monsters feel like real creatures, but they also feel like real monsters—even when they are just mundane animals like the elephant that fights Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth.
***
Part of this comes from the fact that Harryhausen was doing stop motion. Indeed, if anyone can be said to have perfected the form, it was probably him. Plenty of others have worked in the medium both before and since—Harryhausen himself learned at the feet of Willis O’Brien, who created the stop motion effects in King Kong, in many ways the “big bang” of the monster movie qua monster movie.
I have argued and will continue to argue that stop motion may be the greatest of all special effects techniques—though I don’t think anyone, even someone like Harryhausen, would ever argue that it should be the only one. This is not because stop motion is the most “realistic.” Indeed, you would never mistake a stop motion creation for a real animal. No matter how studied their animations, the way that a stop motion creature moves is unique to it—nothing else, alive or special effect, moves in quite the same way.
No, what makes stop motion so perfect is that it feels real, even when it doesn’t look real. There’s a reason why old tokusatsu pictures have a charm that Hollywood’s recent Godzilla movies can’t match. At the end of the day, they’re people dressing up in monster costumes and playing with toys. There’s something wholesome about that, even (and maybe especially) when it doesn’t feel remotely realistic.
Similarly, stop motion animation feels like what it really is—toys that seem to be moving on their own. I think we have all, at one point or another, imagined our toys coming to life, moving under their own power when we weren’t watching. And despite what Toy Story would tell us, I think we all know that, if they did, they would move like a stop motion creation.
That is the real magic of stop motion animation. Not only does it allow for creatures (and robots, and other things) that can do things no other technique—prior to the advent of CGI—could accomplish, but it contains that sense of wonder because, even when you don’t buy what’s happening on the screen, it still feels, deep down, like your toys are coming to life.
***
Ray Harryhausen passed away back in 2013, and it would be easy enough to believe that stop motion animation died with him. These days, computer animators do what stop motion once accomplished, in a manner that is perhaps less painstaking, though probably no less complicated. But the artform isn’t entirely dead, as evinced by the 2022 release of Phil Tippett’s thirty-years-in-the-making stop motion opus Mad God, an almost impossibly elaborate cacophony of shit and noise and, yes, endless stop motion monsters.
Mad God is a masterpiece of grime and ugliness, in many ways the antithesis of everything Harryhausen did—and yet, brought to life with the same techniques, and the same amount of love and dedication. And it isn’t even just the people who are carrying stop motion ahead into the future where its influences can be felt. There’s a story that Guillermo del Toro tells on the commentary track for the 2004 Hellboy movie, about how he tried to hire Harryhausen as a consultant on the film.
Ultimately, the stop motion maestro passed, citing the film as “too violent”—which, again, he probably would have hated Mad God—but the influence of his vision is still apparent in the way that the computer-animated Sammael creatures in the film move, or the scene when Sammael is being reconstituted from salt “gathered from the tears of a thousand angels.”
Whenever we bring monsters to life, whether it’s on screen or even in prose, there is room for the influences and inspirations of stop motion. It’s there in the juddering motion of pale specters in modern ghost movies, and it’s there whenever a monster on screen feels like more than just a monster, but a genuine part of its environment.
It can even be there in fiction, where the monsters are only in our imaginations, after all. As I said before, there’s a way that stop motion creations move that is not quite like anything else, and most of us have seen at least one or two of them in our lives. A writer can at least try to capture that odd form of movement, that sensation of a creature at once alive and artificial. It’s certainly something I’ve done in my own stories, time and again.
***
The first—and, to date, only—novel I’ve ever published was a piece of licensed fantasy fiction set in the world of the Iron Kingdoms, a setting I’ve done work-for-hire writing in frequently, most recently creating large swaths of the 5e-compatible Iron Kingdoms: Requiem roleplaying game. That first novel involved, among other things, a hydra, and knights fighting gigantic armored creatures like dinosaurs. I dedicated it to Ray Harryhausen.
Though it’s the only such dedication, it’s far from the only time Harryhausen (and other stop motion animators) have appeared in or on the fringes of my work. They’re there in “Baron von Werewolf Presents: Frankenstein Against the Phantom Planet,” my love letter to (among other things) Willis O’Brien’s unmade King Kong vs. Frankenstein film. And they’re also there in less obvious places, in the diorama monsters of “Doctor Pitt’s Menagerie,” in the uncanny title creature of “Mortensen’s Muse.”
Unsurprisingly, my house is filled with monster toys, and when I look at them, as often as not, I’m imagining them lurching into lifelike (but not quite lifelike) stop motion. So long as there are those of us who dream of monsters—even as we dream of our toys coming to life—there will be a place for such old-fashioned techniques, and their legacies. They’ll stay around in our dreams, even after they’ve departed from movie screens altogether.
Author’s Note: I’ve always loved monsters, for as long as I can remember. It doesn’t have an origin point that I’m aware of. But few creators have influenced the shape that love would take more than Harryhausen. When I was a kid, I had a copy of Clash of the Titans recorded off TV, and seeing that movie for the first time was definitely a formative moment.
As I said in the essay above, the experience of going to the Harryhausen exhibit in Oklahoma City was also something that felt truly special and magical, and I was glad to get to pay tribute to it for Unwinnable.
Originally published January 2023
Signal Horizon
“I know enough about strange things
not to laugh at them.”
The Legacy of The Dunwich Horror (1970)
The Dunwich Horror is not the first movie ever adapted from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Indeed, it is roughly the fifth or sixth, depending on how you count. It isn’t even the first to be released under its original title, though most people can be forgiven for forgetting The Shuttered Room (1967). Yet, I have a feeling—based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever—that it is the earliest one with which many fans are familiar.
This claim—again, supported by no actual data—may have as much to do with the fact that The Dunwich Horror is one of the first Lovecraft films to feel “modern” in its depictions of sex and occultism, meaning that it, more so than previous films in the canon, feels like it could play on a double-bill with Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna’s later forays into the Old Gent’s work, with their copious rubber monsters and equally copious nudity.
The first H. P. Lovecraft adaptation to hit the big screen was Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace back in 1963. Ostensibly a part of Corman’s “Poe cycle,” the film borrowed only its title from Poe, and was instead a fairly straightforward adaptation of Lovecraft’s posthumously published novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Daniel Haller, who would later direct The Dunwich Horror, worked as an art director on that film, as he had on virtually all of the “Poe cycle” pictures.
For those who have seen those amazing Technicolor gothics, I don’t need to tell you that Daniel Haller was a bravura art director capable of wringing some truly unforgettable sets from relatively meager budgets. In case you do want to know more about it, though, the booklet that accompanies the new Blu-ray from Arrow Video features a lengthy essay about Haller and his background as an art director.
Haller made his directorial debut in 1965, helming the second or third (again, depending on how you count) cinematic adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft to ever hit screens, the dramatically titled Die, Monster, Die!, a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” There, his background as an art director was already apparent, and the film looks every bit of a piece with the “Poe cycle” movies that came before.
By 1970, however, things were changing, and The Dunwich Horror brought something that had been absent from the “Poe cycle” films. Namely: hippies. It wasn’t the first time that sexuality had made its way into Lovecraftian cinema. Even as far back as The Haunted Palace, the unfortunate female lead is offered as a “mate” to one of the Old Ones, while 1968’s Curse of the Crimson Altar brought in BDSM imagery and a decidedly swinging ’60s vibe.
The Dunwich Horror felt modern in a way that those films hadn’t, though, while also staying truer to the original story than Crimson Altar and bringing in New Age-y dream sequences and psychedelic effects to represent Wilbur’s invisible twin—who, when we do finally see him, looks something like a Beholder made out of spring snakes. Normally, I am all about showing the monster as much as possible, but in this case, the camera’s negative effects might actually have been a good call.
Dean Stockwell’s smirking, corduroy-clad Wilbur Whately could not feel more early-’70 if you paid him, while his love interest and female lead is played by none other than Gidget herself, Sandra Dee. They bring the (relative) youth to the proceedings, while older character actors like Sam Jaffe and Ed Begley (in one of his final film roles) round out the cast.
While all this helps to explain the modern “hipness” of The Dunwich Horror, Haller’s background as art director is still plainly visible, and no place more so than in the Whately house itself, which looks on the outside like the Sawyer clan from Texas Chain Saw Massacre decorated for Halloween, and on the inside like Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum.
Unlike some other films from the era, The Dunwich Horror has remained relatively well-known (and well-preserved) throughout the years, so there have been plenty of previous opportunities to watch it, even before this Blu-ray release. And most of those prints have been in fairly good repair, so while it has never looked better than it does now, the restoration is not such a triumph as some others that have been done before.
Of course, film quality is not the only thing that an Arrow Blu-ray tends to bring to the table. The Dunwich Horror also offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Les Baxter’s otherworldly score, which gets its own featurette on the disc, not to mention new commentary tracks, interviews, and so on. The release also boasts a reversible sleeve, with new artwork by Luke Preece, as well as the original poster art by Reynold Brown.
And if anything is truly responsible for the longevity of this film in the public consciousness, it might be that poster, featuring a chimerical beast that the movie’s meager effects could never hope to replicate.
Author’s Note: I once found a full-size original copy of that Dunwich Horror poster at a local thrift shop, where it was folded up and tucked inside a medical biohazard bag—which feels appropriate, anyway.
Originally published March 2023
Unwinnable
The Two Earliest Films Starring
the Silver Masked Man
“I have to confess that I don’t really know anything about Mexican wrestlers,” Mike Mignola wrote in the author’s notes to Hellboy in Mexico. “I’ve never seen any of the movies, but I sure like the idea of them.”
That was me, pretty much, until a few years ago. Everything I knew about lucha libre came from secondhand cultural osmosis, and the closest I had ever come to any of the films was the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring the K. Gordon Murray dub of Santo contra las Mujeres Vampiro—the seventh of an extremely long line of films featuring El Santo, easily the most famous luchador enmascarado of all time.
Which brings us to the present. Things have changed a bit since then. I’m still not going to act like I know very much about lucha libre but I have, at least, seen a few more of the movies, including Santo in the Wax Museum, Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters, and even the occasional non-Santo lucha libre film, such as Curse of the Aztec Mummy, which features a wrestler character called “the Angel” that is pretty obviously intended as a stand-in for El Santo.
My experience in this realm is still much less robust than I would like it to be, however. So I jumped at the chance to tackle this release from Indicator, a Blu-ray double-feature of the first two movies to star El Santo himself, both originally filmed in 1958 and released in 1961.
“These scientists don’t get much rest.”
—Santo vs. the Evil Brain (1961)
The first Santo film has almost no Santo in it. Let’s just get that out of the way right up front. In fact, it’s about 40% scenes of cars driving slowly around, and another 20% establishing shots of docks. The remainder of the film is made up of a mix of people having dinner, musical and dance numbers, and an occasional wrestling match. Also, Santo spends the vast majority of the film hypnotized by the mad scientist villain and therefore serving the bad guys.
And yet, Santo is introduced in such a way that we in the audience are obviously intended to already know who he is. He’s given no origin story or background, with the police lieutenant referring to him, at one point, as “one of our best agents,” and everyone who sees him, from the bad guys to the heroes, immediately knowing who he is and what he’s about. And Rodolfo Guzman Huerta, the man who was El Santo, with almost no lines, nonetheless demonstrates his stage presence, even if he is not yet an actor.
When Santo is hypnotized, his movements and bearing change. The characters call him robotic, but today we would see him as more like a mix between a zombie and an ape. Even the way he sits changes. The hypnotized Santo slouches and slumps in a way that the legendary Silver Masked Man never would. There’s also another masked wrestler in The Evil Brain, one whose presence is every bit as significant as Santo’s.
In the film, this is a fellow agent of good called El Incognito, who actually gets to accomplish a whole lot more than Santo ever manages, thanks to the title character’s aforementioned indisposition throughout most of the picture. What is noteworthy, however, is that El Incognito is played by fellow wrestler Fernando Oses, who co-wrote this and many of the other Santo movies, and appears, in various roles, throughout them.
Though not released in Mexico until 1961, both The Evil Brain and its companion picture in this set were filmed in Cuba during the revolution, with crews made up primarily of Cuban technical personnel. The booklet that accompanies the Blu-rays recounts an anecdote told by Joaquin Cordero, the actor who plays the villainous mad scientist in Evil Brain and the heroic Joaquin in Infernal Men, that the crew were cautioned to “crouch down when they heard shots.” Cordero goes on to state that the filming was over in a hurry, and that they “left the island just an hour before Fidel Castro entered Havana.”
Perhaps this goes some distance toward explaining the rather slapdash nature of the two films, what an essay in the booklet calls their “careless execution.” More likely, the state of the pictures can be attributed to the fact that they were the first of their kind, filmed simultaneously, on a shoestring budget and in quite a hurry. As a result, both films feel like a patch-up job, with large sections seemingly shot silent with sound then dubbed in later.
They also feel like something that is still finding its footing. While the opening credits of Evil Brain point out that it is the first “cinematic presentation of Santo,” it was not until the third Santo film, Santo vs. the Zombies, in 1962, that the Santo character was officially registered by the Film Production Workers’ Union.
Zombies, the earliest of the Santo films to be re-dubbed and released in the United States—as Invasion of the Zombies—also feels more of a piece with the more than fifty films that were still to come in Santo’s filmography, which see the masked wrestler going up against Martians, monsters, ghosts, vampires, head-hunters, the mafia, mummies, inquisitors, werewolves, Dr. Frankenstein, La Llorona, and many more.
“We had to take a big detour.”
—Santo vs. the Infernal Men (1961)
Reusing numerous shots—not to mention cast and crew—from Evil Brain, Santo is barely in this movie, either. Indeed, he might play an even more minor role in Infernal Men, acting as a phantom that haunts the edges of a straightforward story about an agent who goes undercover to infiltrate a group of smugglers.
Even as the plot is less ambitious, however, the movie is possibly more so. While watching the two in order is tedious, as probably a full reel of film is reused between them, the scenes likely fit better here than in Evil Brain, and while Santo is just as scarce this time around, his presence feels more like what we’re used to from later films. He shows up in a convertible to save the day, and operates on the fringes of what is basically a secret agent plot filled with notes passed via matchbooks and secret messages written on money.
Santo vs. the Infernal Men may have precious few set pieces, but the few it does have are at least marginally more exciting than those of its sibling film, as well. There’s even a chase through part of an abandoned Coney Island amusement park, which the booklet describes as “an unimaginative imitation of the famous conclusion to The Lady from Shanghai.”
