Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre Play It For Laughs

Roger Corman's The Raven Offers Halloween Hilarity

Buried in a crypt, behind a hollow closet wall, down a winding, cobweb-filled staircase–well, it's in a file cabinet somewhere in my mess–is my passport to Transylvania. I qualified for it when I was 10 years old, sending the label from a Cocoa Marsh jar and two quarters, to the horror show host Zacherley. Zach (rhymes with Drac) hosted a monster movie show on TV in 1959 and 1960, when horror movies were going through one of its occasional boomlets. For many years, John Zacherley (also spelled Zacherle, his real name) was a disc jockey on a number of New York FM rock radio stations, including WNEW-FM and WPLJ.

I see no conflict here: as Vincent Furnier, aka Alice Cooper, will tell you, horror movies and rock were joined at the hip. Both were aimed at teenage and younger audiences, both liked to provoke a little outrage and some push-back from adults, both liked pushing the envelope of good taste.

My passion was driven by the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, the creation of an entrepreneurial punster named Forrest J. Ackerman; Ack (rhymes with Drac) also went by "Dr. Acula" (see where he's going here), and FMOF did for the classic monster movies of the earliest cinema  what disc jockeys such as Wolfman Jack (there are no coincidences) did for the early history of rock: It exposed younger audiences to the originators of blues, r&b, rockabilly and doo-wop.

Perhaps it did even more. As Brock DeShane wrote in the Criterion Channel magazine (now called Currents) in 2009:

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"Published from 1958 to 1983, “the world’s first filmonster magazine” inspired generations of young moviemakers and ushered horror fandom into the mainstream. Filled with behind-the-scenes articles, rare photos, and Ackerman’s trademark puns (“You Axed for It!” was the title of a regular feature), Famous Monsters was the Cahiers du cinéma for fright flicks. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Guillermo del Toro all count the magazine as an influence, and thousands of other “monster kids” spent their adolescence experimenting with stop-motion dinosaurs and ghoulish makeup effects under Ackerman’s tutelage.

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A few times a week I'd go to Gene's Candy Store on Franklin Avenue after school. Awaiting each new issue of Famous Monsters, I'd stock up on comic books and loftier pastimes such as Mad, Cracked, and Sick, in descending order of Idiot Quality (I.Q.). My friends and I in sixth grade adored these magazines so much that we published an issue of our own parody called C.L.O.D., meaning Cooperative League of Dimwits.

I would add Fooey, but I've got to be the only person who bought the inaugural issue (perhaps it lasted for one more) of Fooey. My mother generally took a favorable view of reading for pleasure, but she threw a fit when she found out I had brought Fooey to school, with its back cover showing the bare tushies of a family of four, who are fully dressed on the inside back cover. (A toast to Mad and its inside back page "fold in" quizzes.) Mom insisted she was throwing it out, but despite her constant recalibration of boundaries, and her excessive shame over this minor bit of nudity that I found insanely overreactive, I was always a strategic step ahead of her. When I noticed that Fooey was not in the garbage after a few days, I knew  where she stashed it: In the linen closet. I retrieved it, mixed it with my junk, and it was never mentioned again. I still have the magazine.

But we come in praise of Famous Monsters this Halloween weekend. Famous Monsters was dominated by stock photos of golden oldies going all the way back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari the 1920 German silent film, to the original American classics: Boris Karloff's Frankenstein and, Elsa Lanchester's Bride of Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi's Dracula, and Lon Chaney, "The Man of A Thousand Faces." Attention was paid to brilliant spin-offs such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman (1948), doubly scary because Lou Costello's ability to insert into this parody/comedy's moments of real fright, and real hilarity. It featured Glenn Strange as Frankenstein, Lon Cheney Jr., as the Wolfman, and Lugosi once again as Dracula.

            Famous Monsters kept up, of course, with the then current horror films, from 13 Ghosts to master practitioner Alfred Hitchocock's Psycho. I convinced my indulgent Nana to take me to see 13 Ghosts (1960) at a matinee in Astoria, which she found about as tolerable as "The Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," stretched to nearly 90 minutes. 13 Ghosts was a William Castle scare-a-thon. Castle was the master of promotion and theater stunts which were often scarier than the movies themselves. But 13 Ghosts, which I recall as an original twist on the family-moves-into-haunted house charade, was the first movie that really scared the hope out of me, possibly because of Castle's "Ghost Viewer": a pair of cardboard and plastic 3-D glasses: virtual reality visions of the unseeable!

            England's Hammer Studios, and Roger Corman's prolific schedule of America International releases, provided elements of modest literacy and varying degrees of spookiness.  They seem quaint in a 21st century filled with slasher movies, mainstream zombie TV megahits like The Walking Dead, and the Real Housewives franchise.

            Corman's series of movies based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe were berserk in a clever way, thanks to the acting of Vincent Price, who always played a version of the sophisticated madman whose gradual unraveling never ended well. When Price was unavailable for Corman's The Premature Burial (1962), Ray Milland was the perfect replacement: Milland's neurotic obsession about a family proclivity to being not quite dead at their own funerals (see: real life definition of voudon) caused him to build an above-ground mausoleum. Inside was an open-latch coffin; a curtain with thick ropes that would ring a steeple bell; and his ultimate fail-safe, a poisoned wine goblet so he could really die. The inevitable failure of this system, conveyed with accelerating hysteria by Milland, made me unable to sleep for months. Because what if I woke up sort of dead, but not completely dead, mute and without any vital signs, but my mind screaming: Hey, it's me, I'm still here!

            Neurotic hysteria is not Vincent Price's thing; he had the distinctively original patrician calm that cloaked his insanity. But in what may be the most underrated of Corman's Poe movies, The Raven, Price and the rest of the cast play against type. I hadn't seen The Raven since I was 12, but I bought it last week for $4.99 on Amazon Prime, where it was also for rent for a dollar less.

To get in the mood, I suggest listening to the real horror of Poe's poem, read by Shane Morris, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

The very loose movie adaptation stars Price (Dr. Craven), Boris Karloff (Dr. Scarabus), and Peter Lorre (Dr. Bedlo), all eccentric sorcerers or magicians. Hazel Court is Lenore, Olive Sturgess is Craven's daughter Estelle, and a 26-year-old Jack Nicholson, who looks about 16, is Bedlo's son Rexford. Would you believe there is a rock band named Rexford Bedlo? Of course there is. The screenplay is by the productive and talented Richard Matheson, and the ahead of its time and very effective electronic music score is by Les Baxter, whose music has had a comeback as the epitome of tiki bar/martini lounge music.

Price's Craven is retired, depressed by his unabated grief for his beloved Lenore, dead (or is she?) two years. You know there's something different about this Poe adaptation from others in the Corman canon at the very beginning, when Price hears a tapping outside his chamber door. As he gets up to investigate, he bumps his head into his telescope: a physical comedy gag that if you didn't get it the first time, occurs two more times, with different parts of the body. When The Raven flies in and perches on the bust of Pallas, as in the poem, he says a great deal more than "Nevermore." The Raven keeps talking like a voluble New York taxi driver of the era, and demands to wet his beak in some wine. He is Dr. Bedlo (Lorre), turned into a black bird by Craven's family rival, Dr. Scarabus. Bedlo has a formula to turn him back into a human, with absurdly esoteric ingredients. They go into the cellar, where Craven's father (and fierce rival of Scarabus), who died 20 years earlier, had his lab. Every time something dubious comes up, Craven says, "never mind," and not "Nevermore."

They decide to confront Dr. Scarabus, but before they leave Craven's estate, there is a scene in which Price and Lorre have a lengthy disagreement about what to wear, discarding this scarf and that hat because the colors clash, and you wonder: What kind of wizards are these that can't just color-coordinate with a wave of the hand?

Nicholson takes over driving the horse-drawn carriage since the coachman has been indisposed by "Diabolic Mind Control." Then Nicholson falls under the influence of "DMC" and goes into a frenzy in which he flashes the maniacal grin you will recognize, perfected in The Shining.

The second part of the film takes place at the castle of Scarabus, where Karloff is full of deadpan jokes and curious asides. Being introduced to the Nicholson character as Peter Lorre's son, Karloff mutters, yes, I see the family resemblance.

Lorre gets drunk again and insults his host. Estelle, Craven's lovely daughter, is exploring the castle when a man puts his hand over her mouth. It's Nicholson's Rexford. She screams. "Why did you cover my mouth?" Rexford: "I thought you'd scream."

A duel to the death appears to be the only recourse for Scarabus and Craven, and their stunts using their magical hand manipulations are increasingly ridiculous.

Karloff sends a cannonball at Craven; Price blows up the cannonball and it explodes with confetti. There is a light-sword duel that had to be an influence on George Lucas' saber battles in Star Wars. Will good magic triumph over bad? Will Lorre, once again turned into a raven, ever regain his human form? Will Nicholson's Rexford and Olive Sturgess' Estelle Craven find a bedroom? Will the lovesick Dr. Craven, having found Lenore alive as his rival's mistress, take her back as the Scarabus castle implodes?

Sorry, no spoilers.

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