Just now wrapping the manuscript on the expanded edition of the first Forgotten Horrors, which now contains the original manuscript (1975-1977) as it had shaped up before George Turner and I made many deletions -- chiefly, to remove the larger independent studios and trim the verbiage at the original publisher's behest -- and a good many new selections and insights beyond what we had added for the 1999 edition.
Big discovery is that of the surviving footage from Edgar Ulmer's lost film (pre-Black Cat). Additions for this period of 1929-1937 include the first Bulldog Drummond thriller, Harold Lloyd's Welcome Danger, Hell Harbor, Sign of the Wolf, Blonde Captive, The Sin of Nora Moran (dwelling particularly on its surreal flashback technique, as well as the ghostly finale), The Lady in Scarlet and its kinship to Midnight Phantom, Hal Roach's serial-killer comedy (!) Oliver the Eighth, and the Engish-American Tell-Tale Heart.
Here (below) is a teaser from the closing chapter, leading up to expanded notes on Sam Katzman's Orphan of the Pecos, one of those what-the-heck-are-all-these-Westerns-doing-in-a-horror-movie-book? titles that point up how narrow the barriers between genres are -- especially, during a foreign censors' formal ban on horror films. And herewith:
Big discovery is that of the surviving footage from Edgar Ulmer's lost film (pre-Black Cat). Additions for this period of 1929-1937 include the first Bulldog Drummond thriller, Harold Lloyd's Welcome Danger, Hell Harbor, Sign of the Wolf, Blonde Captive, The Sin of Nora Moran (dwelling particularly on its surreal flashback technique, as well as the ghostly finale), The Lady in Scarlet and its kinship to Midnight Phantom, Hal Roach's serial-killer comedy (!) Oliver the Eighth, and the Engish-American Tell-Tale Heart.
Here (below) is a teaser from the closing chapter, leading up to expanded notes on Sam Katzman's Orphan of the Pecos, one of those what-the-heck-are-all-these-Westerns-doing-in-a-horror-movie-book? titles that point up how narrow the barriers between genres are -- especially, during a foreign censors' formal ban on horror films. And herewith:
Orphan of the
Pecos
(Victory Pictures Corp.)
The British Board of Censors and its European
counterparts may have accomplished more good than harm on behalf of the
horror-film enthusiasts with that picayunish ban against the genre. For to
legislate morality is to provoke subversion. (Go figure how the most horrific
English-speaking film of 1937, year of the ban, managed to get produced in Great
Britain, wellhead of the ban: Rowland V. Lee’s Love from a Stranger stars Basil
Rathbone as a serial murderer.)
The infusion of weird, exotic, and fantastic elements into more conventionally conceived American pictures during 1936–1937 helped to sustain the genre until a gradual resurgence during 1938–1940. About which, more presently in Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2. To find a morsel of strangeness outside the rigidly defined boundaries is as great a pleasure as to settle in for an unapologetic hair–raiser. Tough luck for those who prefer the arthritic reverence of categories.
We cannot determine what to make of the horror-busting Fun Police. Their tribe professes to Champion Normalcy while denying the perfectly normal inclination to gaze into the Abyss in the vain hope it will not gaze back. And yet, no literary realm Champions Normalcy more so than classic horror, whether supernatural or naturalistic: The medium displays the Pits of Chaos at a safe distance, invites the absorbed reader or viewer to identify with Innocence Threatened, and then vanquishes the menace with an implicit moral lesson against Tampering with Forbidden Knowledge. This truism applies as readily to The Vampire Bat and White Zombie (yes, even to Dwain Esper’s Maniac) as to the classier likes of Frankenstein and Dracula and The Invisible Man. The rule remained stable until the rise of the Nihilistic Shocker during the 1960s and 1970s—as in Two Thousand Maniacs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. That upheaval is the concern of another book, long in preparation, called Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree.
We exit 1937, meanwhile, with a motion picture that illustrates well the Horror Is Where You Find It Rule of H.P. Lovecraft. Sam Katzman scarcely could wait to get back to making such outright chillers as The Rogues’ Tavern and A Face in the Fog. While marking time, Katzman sprinkled imaginative weirdness, from science fiction to derangement, through his comedies and tales of virile adventure. The devices in Orphan of the Pecos include an imaginary haunting and a show of rabid villainy from Forrest Taylor, master of snarling intimidation... Stay tuned...
The infusion of weird, exotic, and fantastic elements into more conventionally conceived American pictures during 1936–1937 helped to sustain the genre until a gradual resurgence during 1938–1940. About which, more presently in Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2. To find a morsel of strangeness outside the rigidly defined boundaries is as great a pleasure as to settle in for an unapologetic hair–raiser. Tough luck for those who prefer the arthritic reverence of categories.
We cannot determine what to make of the horror-busting Fun Police. Their tribe professes to Champion Normalcy while denying the perfectly normal inclination to gaze into the Abyss in the vain hope it will not gaze back. And yet, no literary realm Champions Normalcy more so than classic horror, whether supernatural or naturalistic: The medium displays the Pits of Chaos at a safe distance, invites the absorbed reader or viewer to identify with Innocence Threatened, and then vanquishes the menace with an implicit moral lesson against Tampering with Forbidden Knowledge. This truism applies as readily to The Vampire Bat and White Zombie (yes, even to Dwain Esper’s Maniac) as to the classier likes of Frankenstein and Dracula and The Invisible Man. The rule remained stable until the rise of the Nihilistic Shocker during the 1960s and 1970s—as in Two Thousand Maniacs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. That upheaval is the concern of another book, long in preparation, called Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree.
We exit 1937, meanwhile, with a motion picture that illustrates well the Horror Is Where You Find It Rule of H.P. Lovecraft. Sam Katzman scarcely could wait to get back to making such outright chillers as The Rogues’ Tavern and A Face in the Fog. While marking time, Katzman sprinkled imaginative weirdness, from science fiction to derangement, through his comedies and tales of virile adventure. The devices in Orphan of the Pecos include an imaginary haunting and a show of rabid villainy from Forrest Taylor, master of snarling intimidation... Stay tuned...
