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Experiments in Terror
review by Gregory
Avery, 2 January 2004
The subjects of the recent documentary
Cinemania -- a handful of New Yorkers who have devoted their
lives to seeing two, or more, movies every day -- are vetted with
the inevitable question at one point as to whether they dream of
movies. Rainer Werner Fassbinder said that the reason he made so
many movies was so that, making one right after the other, it would
begin to feel like he was making, or in, one continuous movie, that
his life would become a movie. The filmgoers in Cinemania
respond that, yes, they did dream of movies, sometimes in
black-and-white, usually in the standard screen ratio used before
the advent of Cinemascope and widescreen formats (dreaming in
Cinemascope and color seems anathema to them). One of my own
recurring dreams, not in the form of a movie, is of traversing
through what is supposed to be a great multiplex, past many
entrances, until, finally finding one, entering an auditorium only
to find that the seating is arranged in such a way as to make it
impossible to get a good view of the screen or to have an enjoyable
experience (note the element of peril and foreboding in this
account). Personal dreams don't always come to mind while watching a
film, but they did while looking at Experiments in Terror, a
collection of short films most of which unfold in their own sort of
dreamtime or dream-like circumstances -- a woman displaced in
reality, a troubled young girl in a mysterious house, creatures
rocketing from Earth to Alpha Centauri and back again. The Hollywood
"dream factory" is represented as well -- William Castle, who made
going to the movies to become mutually scared in the dark not only
fun but a wholesome, all-American activity; the magnificent William
Marshall, fanged and unstoppable; and those two inimitable screen
ladies, Allison Hayes and Martine Beswick. Experiments in Terror
-- which was presented in special theatrical engagements earlier
this year, and has just now made its debut on DVD -- also serves as
a pleasant reminder that, at a time when movies are getting more and
more timid (with big-screen versions of Starsky and Hutch and
Thunderbirds, with human actors playing the Tracys clan,
coming our way in 2004, whether we like it or not), that people are
still stretching the boundaries and doing some genuinely interesting
things with film.
One of the biggest surprises in the
collection is The Virgin Sacrifice a short 1974 film by the
director J.X. Williams, whose career is about to get a big boost
through the re-release of his 1965 feature Peep Show, which
outlines a conspiracy theory of Laocoönian proportions. Starting out
with all the banality of a porno loop before the action really gets
started, Virgin Sacrifice somersaults into a grand-scale,
bona-fide late-Sixties, early-Seventies freak-out, at times both
spacey and ravishingly beautiful.
Lloyd M. Williams' Ursula,
filmed in 1961, uses faded, watercolor hues reminiscent of early
Technicolor to tell the story of a young girl and a patrician woman
whose attempts to teach the girl right and wrong have gone seriously
awry. Of the more recently-made films, Kerry Laitala's Journey
Into the Unknown uses the magnificent Paramount Theater, in
Oakland, California, as the entrance to a rabbit hole that sends us
down into an alternate universe, one that's part film-noir, part
Academy Leader variations, all with splashes of lysergic color.
David Sherman's Tuning the Sleeping Machine also goes all out
for the abstract and atmospheric, with spectral glimpses of Faust,
John Barrymore as Svengali, and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in
The Curse of Frankenstein showing up like glimmers over
burning flames. All the way over on the other side of the spectrum
is Dawn of an Evil Millennium, which Damon Packard made on
super-8 film stock and which shows gushing (literally) demonic
creatures swaggering and then blasting themselves, turbo-charged,
across time, space, and over space and distance, while the
soundtrack teases you with sound effects and half-comprehensible
bits of dialogue to try and get a handle on what's going on (this is
not meant as derogatory -- you can just sit back and enjoy the play
of images in the film).
Hollywood arises through some
vintage trailers, and there to be found is William Marshall,
magisterial in Blacula -- he had stature in the film because
he was always more interesting than the characters who were supposed
to be the nominal protagonists (and it was surely meant that way).
Allison Hayes, fifty feet tall and looking for her worthless,
philandering husband (and boy is she mad!). And does anybody
remember why Ralph Bates' Dr. Jekyll turned into Martine Beswick's
Sister Hyde after he drank the potion? (Considering that it's
Martine Beswick, though, WHO CARES???) The most interesting
inclusion is newsreel footage made of the producer William Castle
interviewing people going in and out of his new picture Homicidal.
Homicidal attracted some notoriety when "Time" magazine said
that it was not only better than the movie it was trying to imitate,
Psycho, but also included it in the magazine's list of the
ten best films of 1961. (This gives you some idea of how wigged-out
some people were over Hitchcock's movie when it was first released.)
Castle had theaters set up a "Coward's Corner" where patrons could
get their money back if the picture proved too frightening (and, in
fact, the film does have one genuinely hair-raising moment);
Castle's interviews also including asking several people if they
would reveal the surprise ending to Homicidal or not (they
say "no" -- one character is revealed to actually be another one,
but the only way the movie would've worked was if it was the other
way around).
The short film that opens
Experiments in Terror is Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space,
and it's brilliant. The film, made in widescreen and
black-and-white, literally flickers to life in the middle of the
screen, gradually assembling the main elements: a woman, night, a
house, her walking through the front door and into the house. Sound
of music, the voice of her teenage son. The image becomes unstable
-- super-imposures, reverse negative, sprocket holes and the film's
audio track snake across the frame, stretches of image degradation
such as burns or decomposure, the magnetic hum of the soundtrack
going on and off, then on, again -- as if the film we were watching
was experiencing difficulty as it is being shown to us, or had come
back from the processing lab really, really bad. Then, things crash
in -- a cascade, avalanche, assault. What we see, the setting, the
character of the woman, flickers in and out, and long moments when
the screen goes blank, as if attempting to obliterate the setting
and person we were seeing on the screen. The menace comes from
without, but it's not a monster or a psychopath or some commonplace
anomaly -- the film itself becomes the intruder, the menace, the
element that seeks to do harm, and the character of the woman fights
back, even as the attempt is made to displace her, to displace the
way and means in which she exists, the filmic image that we are
watching from our remove as an audience. The kicker comes at the
end, when, as what we are watching quiets down, we hear voices on
the soundtrack after the assault of errant sight and noise: she can
be heard saying, "The first time, it was..." Then the authoritative
voice of a man, as that of a police detective, asking, "This wasn't
the first time?" Breathtaking.
The closing film.... The American
Dental Association made a big push in the 60s and 70s to promote
better dental care, including making short films for distribution to
schools or as P.S.A.'s on television, and the distribution of little
red dye tablets that, when dissolved, showed where plaque was or was
not being cleaned from your teeth. Anyway, someone came up with the
insane idea of doing a short dental care film in the form of a
haunted house movie, and that's all I'm going to reveal about it,
here -- sometimes, the audience has to have the benefit of
discovering some things, and some priceless gems, themselves. |
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