Biblioholic's Bookshelf: Donovan's Brain and Hauser's Memory by Curt Siodmak

Curt Siodmak made significant contributions to the Universal horror canon with screenplays for The Wolf Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Son of Dracula and others. 

His novels add dimension to the horror and science fiction realm. This handy edition brings together a couple of his greatest works, both of which were made into films. Hauser kind of expands on ideas in Donovan's Brain, so this makes for a nice package. This twofer is from November 1992 from Leisure Books. 

Noel Carroll examines Donovan's Brain in The Philosophy of Horror in contemplating the overreacher plot, the structure/paradigm in the Frankenstein mold. 

SEE ALSO: Biblioholic's Bookshelf - Six Great Science Fiction Novels

Here's an interesting interview with Siodmak.

 

Having a Sip of The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula

Fortunately, BBC 4 radio allows streaming outside the UK. Just in time for Halloween, I gave Hammer Horror's The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula a listen.

Endeavoring to do things right, I closed my eyes and tried to immerse myself in the world, created from a Hammer script by Anthony Hinds for the Christopher Lee Dracula series. It was abandoned in favor of Dracula A.D. 1972. 

Re-imagined as Unquenchable with Mark Gattis directing, it proved to be an interesting experience, and I think I was successful in maximizing my immersion. I read of the Hammer films in The Monster Times and Famous Monsters of Filmland as a kid, long before I got to see any of them on late-night TV, so I have experience in visualizing the stories.

For the audio, I was quickly back in a Hammer Dracula world as soon as a young British woman named Penny just made it aboard a departing train, on her way in search of a cooler spot in 1934 India. A least that's what she claimed, upon meeting a pair of Indian teens and an Indian businessman.

It's pretty quickly clear Dracula's alive and embedded with an ancient Indian cult who are helping supply him blood as they plan rituals and nefarious activities.

The plot moves pretty fast with Penny and Prem, the young Indian man, working together to unlock Dracula's secrets and of course, survive, and it builds to some rousing moments and an appropriately chilling ending.

There's a bit of an in medias res feel, but then that's not unusual for a 90-minute feature that has to convey back story and character in fast order and get things rolling.

I enjoyed the aural descent into dark caverns and through twisting passages, and I was OK with the portrayal of the Count, though some reviews seem to complain about a lack of development. Your mileage may vary, as with much of horror.

Though it's narrated by the great Michael Sheen, that's where my disappointment kicked in, that it was narrated at all.  Some of the voiceover sounds like it's straight from the original screenplay, perhaps a bit of preservation-thinking at work. That sometimes reminds that it's from a screenplay, a little like the Blacklist Table Reads.

It might have been more fun to let everything come to us by way of dialogue and effects, but it wasn't truly a spoiling impact.

Overall, I'm glad I got a chance to drop back into something almost part of the Hammer cannon. Apparently it'll be online another 28 or 29 days. Put it on while you wait for trick-or-treaters.
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The Maze - 1953 Atmospheric Horror

Trailer

A friend's post on Facebook recently pointed me to the 1953 film The Maze, an atmospheric thriller with a Lovecraftian feel.

The story is based on the novel of the same name by surrealist Maurice Sandoz and was directed by William Cameron Menzies. 

I liked it. There's plenty for a contemporary viewer to take exception to, but if you're in the right mindset, it's a moody and interesting little ride, originally offered in 3D.

The story focuses on Kitty Murrary played by Veronica Hurst. She and her aunt are hanging out on the Riviera with her fiancé Gerald (It Came from Outer Space's Richard Carlson). They're obviously beautiful people of the day, those people Tom Ripley would love to hang out with.

Gerald's unfortunately called home to the old family castle when his uncle dies just weeks before he wedding date. 

In one of the obvious 3D moments, a bellman thrusts a cable at Kitty a short time later. Gerald writes that he can't marry her, though he promises to always be faithful to her. Have a nice life.

Kitty's not one to let a fiancé off that easily, so with her aunt in tow, they head to the cable's return address to find Gerald greying at the temples, a sure sign he's been under a good deal of stress.

He's not particularly welcoming, but Kitty offers enough excuses for an overnight stay, then connives to get a letter out inviting friends including a physician to come for a few days. The mysterious male servants lock people into their rooms at night, but otherwise it's an interesting spot for a few days' stay.

Oh, and the castle overlooks the maze of the title, a network of hedges where at least one female servant's perished under mysterious circumstances.

Without spoiling too much the plot points toward the payoff in the third act, so the journey is in the buildup. Your enjoyment of the film will be affected by your ability to accept that style of storytelling as well as your ability to tolerate classic Doctor Who-style special effects.

If you can reset just enough, the shocks are kind of fun and creepy, and, well, again if you're in the right viewing mode, kind of shocking.

If you like atmospheric horror and you have a little patience, check it out.

Aside with mild spoilers

The novel upon which the film is based is apparently inspired by the legend of The Monster of Glamis, also inspiration for Joseph Payne Brennan's "The Horror at Chilton Castle."

RIP Richard Matheson

I was sad to hear today of the passing of another of the favorite authors of my youth. Richard Matheson has gone. 

Before I could read,  The Incredible Shrinking Man aired on local television. I was under my grandmother's care on school day afternoons.

God bless my grandmama. She didn't see any harm in letting me watch a story of a man showered with a strange substance that made him smaller and smaller, until he was menaced by his house cat and a tarantula.

It was all fascinating stuff. Imagination rich and wonderful.

It was just the first of many hours with Matheson's work. I read his short stories in horror collections starting when I was 10 or eleven, but no one who's been alert the past 50 years or so has escaped Matheson.

 From Poe adaptations to Twilight Zone to Somewhere in Time, his mark is on our consciousness.

Sad to see him go.

Here's a post from a few of years ago about my fond reading of his collection Shock Waves. 

A Visit to Heroes Club The Art of Toys in San Francisco - Horror Collectibles

My buddy Clifford Brooks was showing me around San Francisco neighborhoods when he did an abrupt U-turn and grabbed a parking spot the other night. "You have to see this place," he said, nodding toward a showcase window with a giant blue robot: Heroes Club: The Art of Toys.

We could only stare in the windows at the shadowed array of collectibles since the shop had closed for the day.

But since we both grew up with Aurora model kits and Famous Monsters of Film Land, we returned the next day for a museum-like tour through an array of super heroes, soldiers, Bruce Lees, steampunk figures and a generous smattering of monsters including a full-sized Jason Voorhees looking down from a ceiling perch.  

Before the Icon

Smaller Jason replicas including a Friday the 13th Part 2 version in a pre-hockey mask burlap sack joined various iterations of Michael Myers, Freddy and a host of other vampires and creatures. An incredible life-size Nosferatu offered a sinister gaze from a rear showcase, and a wooden-frame 3-D replica of the Famous Monsters back page monster mask ad graced another shelf. 

"Are you guys collectors?" he asked.

"Just looking," Cliff said, observing a price tag. 

That didn't seem to bother him. He proceeded to show us a Count Dracula ring and a similar Mummy ring with, he noted, finer detail than some other versions. 

A Hong Kong native, he noted his favorite movie is The Exorcist and pointed to a wall where a bas-relief face of Pazuzu stared forward.

Stan's eye

A hand-eye-coordination statue, not for sale, peered from another case. "That was a gift from Stan Winston," he said. On yet another shelf stretched, a monster from a Twilight Zone-like series from Asia, never seen in the U.S. "Asian people know this," the proprietor said.  "U.S. people not so much." 

A Godzilla figure with an actor stepping out of it was a littl more more recognizable for U.S. audiences. 

Stake out

One of the most fascinating items was a hand-crafted vampire hunter's kit (seriously click the link and have a look) from Zom Bee Toys, maker of Frozen Dead figures as well. 

Moving it from a shelf to the counter, the proprietor offered a closer look. It looked Van Helsing-ready with bottles of holy water and a metal crucifix, plus a weighty wooden mallet and an array of stakes.

"These are hand crafted," the proprietor said, noting the handle-rings etched in the wood and the finely-honed points.

"They sharpen these by hand," he noted, demonstrating the twisting technique and stressing the whittling style of points would be much more jagged. "It takes a lot of time to do that right," he said.

I'll never convince Christine to adopt a collectibles decorating theme, but it was a nice spot to visit. 

Here's hoping the economy doesn't squeeze out this kind of coolness. 

Ouroboros - A New Book That Intrigues Me

They really had me at "small coastal town," when the announcement from Dark Regions press hit my in-box.

Ouroboros, co-written by Michael Kelly and Carol Weekes, is coming out in trade paper soon, and it's going on my wish list.  

It's set in said small coastal town, and revolves around  "an ancient force" that  "stirs, drawn by the cumulative power of life and death, grief and sorrow, and ultimately, endless love."

Coastal towns, those post-card-familiar places, have always seemed perfect for tales of fright. Maybe it's because one of the first scary stories that captured my imagination was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," title story in a Scholastic book club collection, though Captain Company in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland had teased me with H.P. Lovecraft
titles for some time before that.


It was OK with my parents to order from TAB, The Teen Age Book Club, if not from Famous Monsters back pages.

Dark Regions reports Ouroboros  is the tale of Tom Christiansen whose wife of 35-yearshas passed away. As he grieves, the lines blur between real and unreal, and a strange, pale girl shows up in his back yard.

Sounds like a perfect autumn read, so maybe I'll get it for my birthday

Terror for the iPod - Two Tales of Frankenstein

Occasionally things turn up that are almost like discovering one more chapter(s) in the Universal Horror series. 

Some are better than others of course, but I'm always happy to gain access to those missing pieces that utilize talents from the Universal heyday, especially when it's what Forry Ackerman might term the Frankenstein Lonster, Lon Cheney Jr.

Tales of Frankenstein

I never knew of the Tales of Frankenstein pilot from Hammer Films in 1958 until QuasarDragon mentioned recently that is was available on the archive.org site, where cool things seem to materialize regularly.  It's directed by Curt Siodmak who penned Universal horror classics such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman as well as the classic science fiction novel Donovan's Brain.

The lead-in suggests the resultant series would have been a horror anthology since the opening narration notes "any story that chills the soul and freezes the blood is truly a tale of Frankenstein."

The opener features Dr. Frankenstein (Anton Diffring), somewhat like the Peter Cushing incarnation from Hammer theatrical releases, though it's in a silvery Universal black-and-white instead of the trademark Hammer color--inevitably modified by the adjective lurid.

He's called on to help a young but dying man in the pilot, but instead he uses the man's body to reanimate a VERY Universal looking monster. 

It doesn't rise to the level of the best of the Universal films, but it's an interesting piece to watch either online or on an iPod.

Tales of Tomorrow #16 - Frankenstein

This perhaps more infamous live television adaptation of Frankenstein is a bit more engaging and not to be missed by the Universal fan. It stars Lon Chaney Jr.--best known as The Wolf Man but also a memorable mummy and Dracula in Universal flicks--as the creature in a contemporary re-telling that features One Step Beyond host John Newland as Victor Frankenstein. 

I believe this version's been around on DVD, but I've never picked up a copy. 

It's the adaptation that features the allegedly inebriated Chaney being less destructive on his rampages than planned because he believed he was still in a rehearsal and not performing in a live broadcast. That's actually not as distracting as you'd expect. You kind of have to be looking for it. Sorry. Spoiler warning? 

The creature makeup is interesting in its own way and the gloomy castle sets make for a moody backdrop for the fairly fast-moving story of monster making and destruction. 

I was exciting to find these available, preserved for a new visit and a new experience. If you've any love for the roots of contemporary horror, have a look.

Autumn's Emergence

It doesn't seem quite like autumn, but I see by the calendar that we're approaching the October country. A few more days, and it might be time to watch out for Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show.

Autumn, as I've written here before, is my favorite season and a favorite time to read scary stories.

I don't think I'll re-read Something Wicked This Way Comes again this year, but it's a perfect autumn tale, set in autumn which is likewise a character.

Another excellent autumn choice is Fear by L. Ron Hubbard, a dark and chilling tale with a twist. It's been mimicked a few times so the ending may not seem quite a surprise, but it's still a classic psychological horror tale with a wicked opening passage:

"Lurking that lovely spring day, in the office of Dr. Chalmers, Atworthy College Medical Clinic, there might have been two small spirits of the air, pressed back into the dark shadow behind the door, avoiding as far as possible the warm sunlight which fell gently upon the rug."

By the time the professor finds his lost hat, many shivers have crept up the spine.

This year, instead of turning back to one of those classics, I've picked up Basil Copper's Necropolis. For some odd and inexplicable reason our local library owns an Arkham House edition.

It's dubbed a Gothic mystery and is set in a foggy Victorian England. The focal character is a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes. Hopefully it will be a nice choice.

Beyond reading, I need to fit in a screening of some of the Universal Horror tales. They don't air those as readily on cable any more, but I hate to miss The Black Cat and the uber spectacular Son of Frankenstein.

Yes, it should be a good season.

Strange Vuze

Not long ago an Advertising Age columnist spent a week watching television anywhere he could find it, except on his set, and did OK. Cliff in his 8-Things Me-Me confesses to the world he gets by without television except on PC.

The online entertainment options are certainly getting better. It's still a matter of sitting in my home office for me, but I find myself doing that more and more. I mentioned making use of Netflix's "Watch Now" option, definitely added value for that subscription.

This week I discovered Vuze, which has been floating around in code-name form for a while. It's a wedding of You Tube and High Definition video, harnessing the power of that cousin with a slightly dark reputation, Bit Torrent.

Unburnt offerings
Their offerings currently include programinning from Showtime, A&E and the BBC. From what I can tell, the first episode of a featured series is free then it's 99 cents for additional episodes.

I sampled a show I've always wated to see - the British series Strange with Richard Coyle from Coupling, which incidentally is also an offering.

Interesting if not overwhelming show. Coyle is John Strange, a priest defrocked because he's given to a literal interpretation of demons in an age when the church is leaning toward symbolic. The late Ian Richardson of House of Cards and Murder Rooms is Canon Black, a manipulative older priest opposing Strange's effort. Demon hunting frightens parishoners.

Scientific Help
Samantha Janus is a nurse who brings a touch of science to the equation when she's drawn into Stranges battle with evil.

It's an interesting premise, a bit pokey in execution for my American tastes but overall fun viewing, especially in the sharp Windows media file Vuze provided.

I had to get a quick download to get started, but otherwise things went smoothly and relatively quickly. Took about an hour for the 1.3 GB show file on a fast connection. I'm sure it's proprietary in one way or another but I haven't explored that.

All in all not a bad experience and there seems to be enough free content for hours, although each additional episode of Strange will run into money.

Maybe I need a way to connect the PC to the TV in the den with options continuing to improve.

(No rights to image implied.)

Looking into the Afterworld

The word up is that Afterworld is looking like a hot property to advertisers seeking to penetrate the mobile market. (It's in Advertising Age but this blog requires no registration.)


If the adman protagonist of the piece--reminiscet of Cell and The Stand--should pop a top on your favorite softdrink somewhere in the 130-or-so minute-or-so episodes from the creator of the TV show "Dark Skies," well that would be fab.

That sounds like a good bet because it's been downloaded many times so far on You Tube and subscriptions are coming. Will the iPod and iPhone be among them? Would I put it on the SidPod? Not sure.

I'm not certain if I'm willing to pay, but the story so far on You Tube is stylish, cynical and fresh in spite of King echoes.

The hero is from Seattle, but he's in New York when Captain Trips--sorry--when disaster strikes and he has to traverse a post-apocalyptic America to get home.

Would I stay with it for 130 episodes? Will it develop a cult following like the "footage" in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition which anticipated You Tubesque guerilla video?

Time will tell. In the meantime the music video above offers a taste of what's to come.

Addendum
Crown from Bud.TV was nice enough to drop by and remind me in comments that Afterworld is available on the Bud site as well. They have available episodes in a convenient menu scroll. There's a brief registration. It's that Bud, so it is an adult beverage.

Zombie Ads

Microsoft has combined two things I like--zombies and cool advertising---in a new spot appearing in tech magazines.

Touting Microsoft Forefront® enterprise security software , the ad features a guy clearly from the IT department facing down a hoard of undead attackers. (I'm no bigger fan of Microsoft than the next guy, but I do appreciate creativity.)

The message notes it's easy to stop zombies, lumbering, brainless oafs that they are, and even easier to prevent malware on a network with Forefront.

It's a great approach for the message's audience.

No doubt inspired by The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and the "Living Dead" franchise, the ad points to a supporting website, easyeasier.com.

It's a microsite requiring a fast connection, and one flaw I see is that there's not a clever time-killing icon to occupy you during the download.

Otherwise the website provides lots of fun as it dramatizes and expounds upon the zombie-fighting pointers from the ad such as "4. Find a weapon, any weapon." The funny bits culminate with a sales pitch about Forefront and options for additional info on the software.

I've only seen the zombie print ad but the site features other enemies, so I suspect more ads with a James Bond-style spy, a gray alien and a Ninja will be coming in future issues of Network World.

That I shall look forward to.

Addendum
An omission: I should have noted earlier that the new Forefront campaign was created by Mccann Worldgroup.


(No rights to image implied.)

Favorite Stories: Don't Look Now by Daphne du Maurier

(On this eve of The Daphne du Maurier International Centenary Conference, it seems an appropriate time to discuss another of my favorite horror short stories.)

I was introduced to the works of Daphne du Maurier at my aunt's house on a visit. She had a book club edition of The Scapegoat in which a man becomes the dupe of his identical twin.

I knew nothing of Rebecca at that point nor of the author's short stories including "The Birds" which have an even darker tone than her novel-length thrillers which frequently attracted Alfred Hitchcock.

"Don't Look Now" is of course the basis for an intriguing, eerie thriller directed by a different auteur, Nicholas Roeg, most notorious for its extended, steamy love scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.

That scene stems from a single sentence in the source material, but it's generally a faithful adaptation of du Maurier's short story of a couple vacationing in Venice and vicinity. (In the film it's a working vacation as the husband works on a church restoration project. Incidentally there's word that a remake is coming, but why?)

In the story it's simply a holiday and a somber one as the couple copes with the death of a daughter. One son remains in boarding school, but the loss of their little girl has been devastating to the wife, Laura. The "girl meant everything," notes John, the husband.

The story opens with the couple making jokes about elderly twin sisters at a nearby restaurant table, but Laura's encounter with one of the twins who is blind and claims to be psychic sends their holiday on a strange, eerie course.

It is a story of questions. Is the blind twin really seeing the spirit-world version of the lost daughter as she claims? Or is she a con artist?

John is skeptical, but as they wander old world streets, they catch site of a child who could be a ghostly version of their daughter.

Everything is interrupted by word that their son is in need of appendicitis surgery. They decide Laura will go home immediately, and John will follow with their car.

But as he returns to their hotel, John sees Laura on a passing boat with the twins and begins a frantic search to find hear amid rumors that a "maniac" is prowling the city.

The ending comes with a pair of twists, one odd and bizarre, and evokes an eerie, unsettling chill.

I like the tale because it's like many of those pieces that's more than it seems at a glance. It offers strong mood and perplexes. It's quiet horror to be sure, one of those tales that keeps you contemplating long after you've finished it.

(Pictured is the short story collection I own, which includes both "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds.")

Masters of Terror - Black and White Terror

As I've mentioned, paperback anthologies darkened my back-to-school autumns when I was in junior high. I was introduced to Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, August Derleth and of course H.P. Lovecraft in selections from the Teen-Age Book Club.

Marvel and Warren's black-and-white horror comics brought fear to my summers and furthered my education of the horror greats. The other night--serendipitously, I think, the same night Cliff was writing Horror Can Be Comic--I was digging through several boxes of comics to locate issue #1 of Masters of Terror from Marvel.

The mag introduced me to Theodore Sturgeon's "It" which came along before Stephen King's pronoun-titled tome. It also includes Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"-- in which a police detective partners with a psychologist to track down a modern-day ripper. It was new to me then, long before I discovered it had been adapted as an episode of "Thriller."

Robert E. Howard's work in the horror field was also featured. Masters presented Howard's "The Horror from the Mound," an adaptation that looks like it probably started out in one of their four-color comics. It features art by Frank Brunner
and pits a cowboy against a vampire.

"The Drifting Snow" by Derleth and "The Terrible Old Man" by Lovecraft.

It was an impulse buy, probably because there were no new issues of Vampire Tales or Vampirella, but it was a good choice, 76 pages of chills.

Cliff rememers more issues, but unfortunately #1 was all I ran across. Maybe I'll scope out the next on ebay.

Shock Waves

One of my favorite collections of horror short stories or horror and suspense stories is Richard Matheson's Shock Waves.
I don't know that it contains his best tales for there are many including a number of stories that became Twilight Zones.

But it's a book that got me through a whole lot o' boredom once, so I hold it in high regard.

It was near Christmas one day in the '90s and I was called for jury duty. I'd bought the Matheson book used fairly recently so I tucked in my jacket when I left home that morning.

And while I sat through the preliminary selection process and voir dire, I read Matheson stories - "A Visit to Santa Claus," "Finger Prints" and a host of others.

One that I remember vividly still is "A Drink of Water." It's not a horror story exactly, but it at least is a tale of desperation.
It's about a guy who's been to a movie one hot August night, had some popcorn and upon arriving home decides he needs a drink of water since the popcorn was salty.

Sounds simple, but when he reaches his apartment he finds the water's been shut off due to one problem or another.

He's got no water in the fridge, and every avenue he pursues fails him for the next six or seven pages. I was right along with him in that tale, desperate in my own way, trapped in one of those processes from which there's no escape.

You just have to endure and hope you come out the other side.

A good book full of cool stories can make the trip more bearable.

Did the story's hero ever get a drink? Well, I suggest you look up Shock Lines. It's well worth a read.

Favorite Short Stories: The Ship That Saw A Ghost by Frank Norris

When I used to hang out at conventions more than I do now, horror writers were always arguing about quiet horror vs. I, don't know, noisy horror. That's horror achieved with a whisper vs. horror achived with a chainsaw.

I ran across a piece of quiet horror last summer, penned by an author not particularly noted for his ghost stories. The Ship That Saw a Ghost sails from the pen of Frank Norris, best known to me at least for McTeague, a novel my friend's class had to read in college. I didn't have to read it. I went to a different college.

On the good ship Glarus
The short story tells the tale of men aboard a tramp steamer named Glarus on a secret and nefarious mission off the coast of South America in 1902. A visit to a lost and dangerous island promises to make the crewmates rich.

Fate has other plans, however, and to give much away would spoil the story which is available free at the link above.

I suppose the relationships of the sailors including the key mates known as the Black Crows as well as the reports of their San Francisco port of call all mesh with other Norris work.

The sense of sea life and of sailors at home is captured, but the core premise and the chills provided the imaginative reader make it a great late night read.

Put on a candle, imagine the creak and moan of a ship topping constant waves, far away from anything, then imagine being stuck in the middle of nowhere in a dead calm.

It's quite horror but its chilling.

Tags: Horror, Ghosts , Literarture, Frank Norris, Sea Tales