ok lets all shit our pants to something old: pre-2006 horror film thread

I seem to almost always prefer the Universal horror films from that era which don't feature their roster of beastly superstars. I've watched The Invisible Ray and Black Friday this week (which are both more sci-fi than horror, tbf). Both Karloff/Lugosi joints, both a lot of fun (although the former spends a lot of time in Africa, which is thankfully slightly less problematic than it could've been for a film from the '30s but it doesn't dodge that bullet entirely).

Jeez, I found Invisible Ray one of the worst. Maybe I was just pissed Frances Drake wasn't featured more, as some of her fans led me to believe.

Would like to see Curse Of The Undead, a vampire western.

There's supposed to be a lot of old dark house comedies and I generally don't like them much.

I just want the Frankenstein and Dracula sets, for the settings.

I mean, let's be real: most of these golden age Universal horror flicks are trifles. Fun but ultimately pretty disposable. The two I've found the most legitimately interesting were the original The Black Cat and Dracula's Daughter.

I think Bride Of Frankenstein is genuinely good.

Yeah, the Whale Frankensteins are good. I take that as a given. Dracula...well, Dracula looks great, anyway. And it has Dwight Frye!

Having watched a lot of Universal horror over the last couple of years, I don't think much Universal stuff would make my top 10. Or probably even top 20. And I haven't even gotten around to some of the big guns yet (M! Vampyr!).

Oh! I forgot that The Old Dark House is Universal! That one is a delight, probably my favorite of the lot.

'Having watched a lot of '30s horror', I meant to say.

Someone made a retro old dark house comedy several years ago but I cant recall the name.

I was a bit underwhelmed by Vampyr but mine was an old copy and supposedly the remaster breathed a lot of life into it.

PREMATURE BURIAL

The 60s Corman/Poe film without Vincent Price. I think it's one of the better ones but a few things didn't make sense. Of all the solutions to get out the tomb, why didn't Milland make a key? Why didn't more of his friends and family try to wait longer before they buried him, after all that fuss?

The garden is really cool.

I might as well seek out Oblong Box now (Price/Poe without Corman).

I just bought a Corman set which includes that, X: the Man with X-Ray Eyes, and Bucket of Blood (among others). I need to do a proper 'Corman Presents Poe' marathon. Tales of Terror was pretty fun but I think it's the only one I've seen.

I watched The Old Dark House last night for the first time -- it's good! I got a laugh out of the Karloff/Massey brawl, thinking about Arsenic and Old Lace. Charles Laughton looks like a baby and still out-acts everyone else, except maybe Thesinger. Usually I dislike horror + comedy, but it works here; Whale doesn't beat you over the head with gags or musical cues and lets you decide for yourself whether a scene is funny or creepy. I gather a 4K restoration is in the works, but I was impressed with the image quality of the movie as shown on TCM, really sharp and clean for something from 1932.

Bucket Of Blood is funny, superior to the better known Little Shop Of Horrors.

Pit And The Pendulum, Haunted Palace* and Premature Burial are my top 3. House Of Usher, Tomb Of Ligeia and Masque Of The Red Death are a bit weaker. Tales Of Terror is my least favourite. The Raven is complete comedy and is occasionally funny.

I'd be careful about watching them too close together because they're all very similar and recycle a lot of things far too much. None of them are properly great so you really need to like this stuff to have the patience for them all. Maybe I need to rewatch Usher because Pit was very different from how I remembered.

*Really a Lovecraft film with a Poe title and if I remember correctly, a black cat (you could pretend it was Lovecraft's infamously named cat).

And if you wanted something similar, Mansion Of Madness is not bad.

My two favourite Poe screen adaptations are the short animated Tell Tale Heart and the short Watson/Webber Fall Of The House Of Usher. You can probably still get them on youtube.

CAPTAIN CLEGG

Bought this for Yvonne Romain and wasn't expecting much else going on but it's quite good. The horror elements are minor, it's really a film about smugglers, but there isn't much time spent at sea. The matte paintings are great and I wish they had used those phantoms of the marshes as a real supernatural threat in another film.

An adaptation of Russell Thordike's Dr Syn books. Star Peter Cushing contributed costume designs but didn't get his version of the script through.

I put film titles in capital letters for anyone skimming through this thread and a space after for neatness but I'm going to stop that because I feel like I'm putting people off from posting here. Maybe it looks loud and like I'm waving my limbs around the space?

If you wanted to be really complete about that Corman/Poe cycle, you might as well throw in The Terror, which has nothing to do with Poe but the style is completely the same as those other films, and has the not-quite-dead wife trope. Jack Nicholson and Karloff.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE (James Whale, 1932; the Cohen Film Collection restoration, aired on TCM on 10/31/17). I like best the sort of horror that recognizes that average human beings (as opposed to infernal or supernatural beings) can be the truest monsters. Quibble: Melvyn Douglas sounds disconcertingly (to my ears at least) like Edward Everett Horton.

A PAGE OF MADNESS (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926; rewatch with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra). I go back and forth on this one. If it contained the intertitles common to the period, would we recognize the narrative most viewers extract from it (and would we appreciate it as much if we didn't have to make that effort)? On the other hand, I keep linking this to Un Chien Andalou, as an exercise in screwing around with the Kuleshov effect.

I'm glad y'all are seeing The Old Dark House! But I'm mystified that no one is commenting on the 'father' of the clan! Such an odd and inexplicable but also brilliant casting choice.

I've been watching so many old movies lately and realizing that Boris Karloff is in like 3/5 of them. I really love him a lot. I watched the completely ludicrous The Ape this weekend, wherein a man-killing gorilla gets loose from the circus and is subsequently killed by Karloff, who then runs around wearing the dead gorilla like a costume and killing people and extracting their spinal fluid for scientific experiments. I mean...wut.

Also watched the original Phantom of the Opera. Lon Chaney was amazing. I still can barely fathom how he did that to his face.

I listened to a bit of that Boris and Bela series of episodes of You Must Remember This podcast. Some fascinating information in there (Lugosi dating Clara Bow, the roles their Hungarian and part Indian heritage got them) but I just couldn't get on with the very slow reading and constant adverts.

My theory on her reading cadence is that it's a necessary evil because of how long and unwieldy her sentences are to read off the page.

Those Bollywood Horror collections cost a fortune now. I think they were exclusively films by the Ramsay brothers. A lot of them are on youtube but usually in the wrong aspect ratio. The films don't look very good but architecture in some of them really impresses me.

Circus Of Horrors - Early 60s British horror about a dastardly plastic surgeon who owns a circus, gives makeovers to facially scarred beautiful women and gets them to perform in his circus, but he kills them when they endanger him. It's not bad.
Cast includes Donald Pleasance, Yvonne Romain and Yvonne Monlaur (who died in April, I just discovered).

The Black Castle - 50s gothic adventure film set in 18th century, which I'm not sure would qualify as a swashbuckler because it doesn't really have much swordfighting. It's not bad.
Karloff and Chaney Jr in supporting roles.

Behind the Door (Irvin Willat, 1919). Wartime atrocities better not disqualify a movie from the horror genre, because I'm going to discuss it here. Certainly by the time Hobart Bosworth has Wallace Beery in irons on his ship, Bosworth seems suitably unhinged. And the reference to Beery's fate is a perfect illustration of the principle that what you don't see on screen can be all the more powerful.

I saw this in a double bill with Prix de Beaute (Augusto Genina, 1930) and am in desperate need of comedy and happy endings.

Ghost Of Frankenstein - Awful script, even for what it is there's a lot of poor logic. I'm quite fond of Lugosi as Igor but it just seems wrong to have him speaking through the monster's body.

Scarecrows - A military slasher film, combining two genres I don't like much. For all the time I've spent on dull and hackneyed gothic films, every time I see a slasher film I'm glad I haven't made a habit of seeing them. The Scarecrows do look very good though.

Whip And The Body - Very pleased with this one. It's a good illustration of why I persevere with mediocre scripted gothic films. It's one of Mario Bava's best looking films. Yes, it's a bit boring but the style and mood is so consistent you can really wallow in it.
Roughly on a level with Black Sunday and Kill Baby Kill but not as good as Black Sabbath.

Soundtrack is annoyingly repetitive and Kill Baby Kill seems to have reused one of the main pieces. I watched the English version because there was no subtitles for the Italian soundtrack, so maybe the music varies a bit more in Italian, I don't know.

I had been wary of getting this because the reviews of the current Odeon/Screenbound and Kino remasters were so negative, but there might not be another remaster for a long time, so gave in. I have no technical knowledge of film so I don't know how much better it could have looked, but it looks plenty great to me.

Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman is a big improvement from Ghost Of Frankenstein but Bela Lugosi just doesn't look right as the monster. House Of Frankenstein and House Of Dracula are roughly the same quality too.
I just realised that after Universal, I don't see a lot of gypsies in monster films (I vaguely recall there being gypsy looking characters in the first animated Vampire Hunter D film but I could be wrong).

I thought Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein might make a nice change, but I rarely found it funny and I didn't get much out of it. Do fans of old comedy rate Abbott & Costello very high?

The Universal Spanish version of Dracula does have a more lively leading actress and a few of the scenes are better than Tod Browning's version (like the brides getting Renfield) but I'm hesitant to say it's a better film.
It's half an hour longer, far far too long. Perhaps it's unfair to judge Carlos Villarias by what we've come to expect of Dracula but it's difficult for me to see him as anything other than silly.

Woman In Black: Angel Of Death is probably better than the previous film, more restrained with cgi but it still has annoying jump scares and some other conventions I don't care for.
Unfortunately it seems to be the last Hammer film, I didn't see many of the others but I hoped they could have made something more impressive.

Perhaps it's unfair to judge Carlos Villarias by what we've come to expect of Dracula but it's difficult for me to see him as anything other than silly.

I saw the Spanish-language version of Dracula in a double feature with the English-language version. Villarias seemed decidedly insecure to me, as if he was expecting people to break out laughing at him any moment now, and he wanted to be ready to join in. He never owns the role to the degree Lugosi does (although considering Lugosi's career trajectory, that was in its way a curse).

3 goodies coming from 88 Films: One Dark Night with Meg Tilly and two Shaw Brothers films Ghost Lovers and The Enchanting Ghost.

The Fury - One of the most purely enjoyable films I've seen this year. It does so many things. I'm surprised how similar it is to Carrie, but leaning towards Scanners and a whole bunch of other things thrown in. Kirk Douglas is great. I'm a little more eager to read John Farris books now.

I also just saw that for the first time this year. Undecided about DePalma on the whole, but it was ludicrous and fun.

I never had much interest in him outside of Sisters, Phantom Of Paradise and Fury, but that changed recently because of the documentary (also one of the most enjoyable films I've seen this year). In retrospect, I like Blow Out more now than I did years ago. I bought Body Double recently and would like Black Dahlia and Passion sometime.

yeahhhh Body Double! you very well might hate that, but I'm really down with it
De Palma rules, even his failures are watchable

I just watched Body Double and I totally loved it! Great weekend.

And honestly, there's not a lot of films I properly hate.

Body Double is surprisingly affecting too, but it's hard to say why. I'm quite saddened to see how Craig Wasson's film roles dwindled away, but he seems to be Stephen King's choice of audiobook reader now. Can't assume an actor doesn't have a satisfying theatre career but I really wish he was still in big films.

You might be on your own there.

Body Double is kind of a mess of a film, but also maybe the purest distillation of De Palma’s weirdo id. All the things He’s About turned to 11, a cartoonish exaggeration, BDP turning his ~meta~ tendencies on himself. I really like it.

Old Lunch- why? Looking around I've seen a lot of people expressing the same things, Wasson was great, the film is totally great. In the sense of setting, De Palma doesn't have a visual style I'm into but the way he moves the camera and composes scenes really compels me. I think The Fury and Body Double are miles ahead of most of the classics I've seen.

I meant specifically wrt lamenting Wasson's absence from films.

That's what I meant too, when I was reading about him I saw a lot of people who missed him and thought he deserved better.

Don't forget his appearance in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors!

De Palma doesn't have a visual style I'm into but the way he moves the camera and composes scenes really compels me

In terms of setting, clothes, hair etc. Same for Cronenberg and sometimes Lynch.

I wasn't sure how to put that. I tend to gravitate towards certain settings and approaches and De Palma is an exception for me.
The camera movement and composition is a separate style concern.

https://letterboxd.com/capkronos/lists/

This guy is nuts. In a good way of course.

Anyone else frequent Letterboxd? I'm really excited by all the lists for regions and genres, with all this poster art. I don't remember imdb or rateyourmusic ever having this many good film lists.

I've started a watchlist there (https://letterboxd.com/pollyprecoder/), but haven't yet felt the need to curate any lists.

It's been so helpful in finding crazy obscure fantasy films from across the world.

And mood lists like this.
https://letterboxd.com/scumbalina/list/pressed-flowers-and-amethyst-glass/

lol RAG I have never seen anyone actually praise Wasson's performance in Body Double. I love the movie but he is far and away the lamest thing in it.

Sad face...