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Is there such a thing as a movie poster that’s too effective? This particular promo was painted by J. Gommers to promote the Belgian run of the horror movie The Haunting. Luckily, we already saw the movie, because we aren’t sure we’d brave it based on this freaky piece of art. It opened in the U.S. in 1963 and reached Belgium titled La Maison du diable in French, and Het duivelshuis in Dutch, sometime in early 1964. You can read a bit more about it here.
French illustrator Roger Soubie has a long and impressive résumé. He painted more than 2,000 posters during a career spanning four decades, and produced iconic promos such as those for Lolita and The Unholy Wife. The above effort is for The Haunting, called in France La Maison du diable. Based on Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of Hill House, it’s about an anthropologist who rents a creepy old mansion in order to determine whether it’s haunted. Of course it is—and it proceeds to seriously flip out the anthropologist and the witnesses he’s brought along to verify his findings.
Jackson wrote her chiller in 1959, and it’s considered by many to be the greatest haunted house tale of all time. Director Robert Wise uses zooms and odd angles to jar the audience but follows the novel’s plot closely, which was a good decision. Today his movie is likewise considered to be one of the finest in the horror genre. Horror has really improved with time, but The Haunting holds up nicely. If you haven’t seen it, know going in it’s fueled by atmosphere rather than events, but we think it’s worth a gander. After its 1963 Stateside premiere it opened in France today in 1964.
Those of you in the U.S. who appreciate horror cinema may want to carve out a little time Sunday night for the final episode of the retrospective Eli Roth’s History of Horror. It’s been airing weekly on the cable network American Movie Classics, aka AMC, since mid-October. Though the British network BBC broadcast a very good three part horror retrospective in 2010 (and it even had a similar title—A History of Horror), genre landscapes shift quickly. The Brit series was made before important films like Get Out, It, Let Me In, its remake Let the Right One In, et al hit cinemas. Eli Roth’s History of Horror is a newer and deeper look at fright films. Each 60-minute episode focuses on a specific type of terror, such as vampires, monsters, demons, and slashers.
Overall the series is great. Roth discusses not just the movies, but horror’s cultural impact, and weights those observations toward the last ten years. Because of the change that has occurred this decade those sections resonate nicely. Horror’s ability to make social issues digestible as allegories is a key part of the form’s worth. For instance, Get Out‘s idea of the sunken place, a metaphor for living (and dying) while black in America, would be rejected by many white filmgoers if it were in a standard narrative. But for us the social impact of horror movies is merely a bonus. We love them viscerally first, intellectually second. We love
the tension that results from not knowing—usually, at least—which characters will survive. We love how the films’ kinetic and often low budget natures lead to amazing little accidents, such as the bit in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when Leatherface grabs Teri McMinn on the porch of his house and both the girl’s sandals fly off. That sort of detail isn’t in a script. It happens during the shoot, and the director thanks the filmic gods for the extra iota of serendipitous realism.
While very good, the series isn’t perfect. In the episode on zombies, Roth discusses slow moving zombies for a while, then erroneously credits the arrival of speedy zombies to Danny Boyle 2002 hit 28 Days Later. But it was 1985’s Return of the Living Dead that featured the first sprinting zombies in an American movie, and this was preceded by the 1980 Italian zombie epic Incubo sulla città contaminata, aka Nightmare City. We also were surprised Near Dark was ignored in the vampire episode. Time
has shown it to be better and more influential than The Lost Boys, which was discussed at length. If you doubt that, note that Near Dark‘s critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is 88%, while Lost Boys‘ is 27%. Critics are often wrong, especially when it comes to horror, but that level of variance is no fluke. And just to settle the argument, the audience rater on that website also prefers Near Dark. We suspect either box office receipts or Roth’s personal preference played a role there, when quality should have been the deciding factor.
But we were gratified to see that many of our cherished beliefs were echoed by Roth and his co-hosts Rob Zombie and The Walking Dead producer Greg Nicotero. Yes, the towering werewolf from The Howling is the scariest ever put on screen. Beyond a doubt, John Carpenter’s The Thing, which was close to universally panned upon release, is a top tier thriller.
We’re anticipating the segment on ghosts, the focus of Sunday night’s series finale. We imagine these were saved for last because viewers are most interested in the subject, a curiosity that derives from the fact that many people actually believe ghosts exist. We expect the episode to discuss such old and new classics as The Haunting, The Shining, The Ring, and The Woman in Black. We’ll see. But no spoilers, please. If you’re in the States you can watch it before we do, whereas we’ll have to (totally legally, we swear) download it the next day. But whenever you watch it, the show has been a nice treat for horror aficionados.
The Saturday Evening Post publishes Norman Rockwell’s painting “Boy with Baby Carriage”, marking the first time his work appears on the cover of that magazine. Rockwell would go to paint many covers for the Post, becoming indelibly linked with the publication. During his long career Rockwell would eventually paint more than four thousand pieces, the vast majority of which are not on public display due to private ownership and destruction by fire.
A birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, in New York City. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe’s breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday,” which does more to fuel speculation that the two were sexually involved than any actual evidence.
In the U.S., Canadian born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears from Venice Beach, California in the middle of the afternoon. She is initially thought to have drowned, but on June 23, McPherson stumbles out of the desert in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, claiming to have been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and held for ransom in a shack by two people named Steve and Mexicali Rose. However, it soon becomes clear that McPherson’s tale is fabricated, though to this day the reasons behind it remain unknown.
In Britain, scores of youths are jailed following a weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers in Brighton and other south coast resorts. Mods listened to ska music and The Who, wore suits and rode Italian scooters, while Rockers listened to Elvis and Gene Vincent, and rode motorcycles. These differences triggered the violence.
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery.
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin’s corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family.
