Halloween gets started a little early this week on TCM, with the spookshow getting under way at 5am PST/8am EST on Friday (Hell Night) morning and the whole haunted hayride running up until just before the witching hour on Halloween night… at which point it really gets weird. Oh, what a cavalcade of chills! What a festival of frights! Put the coffee on, gather up the family, bar the windows and doors, and glut your soul on Halloween, TCM-style.
Even though I own just about everything that TCM will throw at us between All Hallows Eve Eve and All Hallows Eve, I still get excited when I see a TV line up that includes the likes of CURSE OF THE DEMON (1957), FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967), DRACULA AD 1972 (1972), and THE TINGLER (1959), all running back to back and pig-a-back and jumbled up and jivey. This just isn’t what TV looks like anymore, and all of us olds can thrill to a modern day approximation of what so many of our childhood weekends looked like back in the day. I love that the TCM programmers have scheduled the movies in thematic blocks, so the day begins on Friday with a spate of Hammer horrors, among them THE MUMMY (1959), FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969), DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965), and the lesser-known latter-day psycho-thriller CRESCENDO (1972). Check tcm.com for a more definitive schedule but way to share the sturm und drang!
Programming takes the road less traveled on Friday afternoon for a run-through the RKO/Val Lewton canon, which challenged the vogue in the mid-1940s for monster romps and rallies on the order of THE WOLF MAN (1941), FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943), HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), and HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945) with eerie, psychologically-based weird tales that dripped with atmosphere and hearkened back to literature and folklore while maintaining that the audience’s imagination and expectations were the best special effects. You may argue with the statement that there are no literal monsters in CAT PEOPLE (1942), I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943), THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1944), or THE BODY SNATCHER (1945) but you will agree, I am sure, that they suggest more than they show and in so doing evoke more genuine gooseflesh than anything accomplished by the Universal bogies. These movies are great to watch one at a time but it’s a real treat when they are slotted in one after another, so that you can appreciate Lewton’s house style and the ways that his directors (Robert Wise, Gunther von Fritsch, Jacques Tourneur, and Mark Robson) brought those radical ideas to vivid and immortal realization.
And yet, as much as I appreciate the academic approach of Friday, I also really, really love the horror hodgepodge that is Halloween proper, during which time Ealing’s seminal shock omnibus DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) keeps company with Roman Polanski’s creepy comedy THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967), Michael Curtiz’s early two-strip Technicolor spooker DOCTOR X (1932) rubs elbows with William Castle’s PSYCHO (1961) hat-tip HOMICIDAL (1961), Terence Fisher’s stylish and classy THE DEVIL’S BRIDE (aka THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, 1967) hooks up with Francis Ford Coppola’s inky proto-slasher DEMENTIA 13 (1963), and the whole shivery shebang wraps up just shy of midnight with Tod Browning’s underrated MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), which boasts some of the most invigoratingly Gothic imagery of any horror movie forged during the Golden Age of Hollywood. But wait… there’s more!
Just when you thought it was safe to go to bed, TCM Underground goes live with a clutch — a clutch, I tells ya — of short films directed by none other than David Lynch, both before his feature film debut with ERASERHEAD (1977) and after his canonization as Hollywood’s Mr. Big Weirdo. They are all remarkable, they are all highly unsettling, and they are all deliciously predictive of his body of work. You will see images here that are the seeds for ones that sprout in ERASERHEAD, THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980), DUNE (1984), BLUE VELVET (1986), WILD AT HEART (1990), his TWIN PEAKS TV series, and that show’s feature film addenda FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) and beyond. Included in this assortment are the “Dumbland” animated shorts from his personal website. There’s really no dead weight here. As the kids say, it’s all good.
So, Turner Classic Movies has launched its own wine club and in honor of the kickoff this week, we Morlocks have been asked to suggest wine pairings for the programming we are discussing. Because I am putting on the table nothing less than a smorgasbord of shocks and shivers, clearly we will need something hearty and bold, red like the color of blood yet dry as a gust of graveyard air, and fitting that spirited bill, to my way of thinking, is the 2013 Principi Strozzi Selavescura, a versatile, fruity Tuscan rosso that complements both the blood and thunder of the Hammer horrors and the bottomless chiaroscuro of the Val Lewton films, with their fondness for shadow and eerie silences, while putting you in a relaxed and contemplative place for the bathtub full of blood at the end of THE TINGLER. Bottoms up!
To learn more about the TCM Wine Club please visit www.tcmwineclub.com and join us on social at #CinemaSips.