MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #143 Terror at the Red Wolf Inn 1972

TERROR AT THE RED WOLF INN 1972

There’s a particular kind of midnight magic that only a late-night horror movie can conjure, the kind that slips between the cracks of your mind and refuses to let go, even when you can’t quite remember the entire movie, but certain scenes poke at you. Terror at Red Wolf Inn was one of those phantom chills for me—this rarely seen, flickering ghost of late-night TV, a whispered rumor on the static-filled channels of my classic horror youth. For years, in my mind, I’d catch glimpses, moments hazy as fog, scenes that hovered just out of sight, like a dream that won’t fully form, teasing a story I couldn’t quite piece together but somehow felt I’d been meant to bring into full view.

Quite simply, well for me it’s never just simply, some movies drift through your memory as hazy fragments for years,—half-remembered, nameless—until years later, you stumble across them again—and just like that, a stray scene is right there playing on the screen and the film reveals itself and you recognize the scene that’s been haunting your mind all along.

Years later, like a haunted traveler stumbling upon a forgotten shrine, I finally laid eyes on the whole thing again. That lightbulb moment hit me like a thunderclap—there it was, all the eerie goodness, the odd little characters, the quiet menace hiding in plain sight. And suddenly, those foggy flashes from the past snapped into sharp focus like memories coming off their blurry leash. I was finally watching Terror at Red Wolf Inn again, and there it was. As an old cinephile with a taste for classic chills, I fell head over heels for this oddball gem years and years ago, but hadn’t gotten the chance to see it in years—the kind of movie that’s less about jump scares and more about sinking slowly into a deliciously unsettling atmosphere. It was like finding an old love letter stuffed between the pages of a dusty book, strange, queasy, personal, and utterly unforgettable.

In the murky twilight of early 70s horror, Terror at Red Wolf Inn sneaks up on you wearing a mischievous grin and an ironic wink, a fairy tale for grown-ups, a darkly humorous parable, a gleefully macabre farce, a wicked satire, and a grisly romp where claustrophobia meets camp in a deliriously twisted seaside inn. A gruesome family saga wrapped in the quietude of a remote—sitting in the hush of a nowhere —coast.

Directed by the genre-hopping Bud Townsend, this obscure gem invites us into a world that revels in the tension between quaint domesticity and ravenous monstrosity, where the Inn itself is as much a cage, or should I say a big walk-in freezer, as it is a home. The film’s charm lies not just in its spine-tingling premise but in the singular performances breathed to life by a cast who walk the line between unsettling oddity and captivating caricature.

The film’s aesthetic itself is an intriguing cocktail: part campy charm, part unsettling Gothic creepiness, with a dash of dark humor that bubbles up unexpectedly. This isn’t a movie that relies on visceral gore or frantic scares, though there’s some of that. Instead, Townsend leans into atmosphere and character quirks, blending the cozy domesticity with a low-key but constant threat that simmers under every polite dinner and well-meaning smile. The clash between the genteel hospitality of Henry and Evelyn Smith, played by Arthur Space and Mary Jackson, and the grotesque secrets lurking just out of sight creates a deliciously dissonant vibe; these aren’t your typical horror villains but more like the eerie grandparents from your nightmares who bake pies with a suspicious extra special ingredient.

Linda Gillen’s Regina McKee is our spirited, perpetually curious, and unsuspecting college student plucked from obscurity by the tantalizing promise of a free vacation. She arrives at this remote outpost bundled not just by the biting coastal chill but by a narrative that unfolds like a slow-burning fuse, part darkly comic cautionary tale, part grotesque portrait of a family that dines together —but the recipe is far from ordinary. The Inn itself, managed by the elderly Smiths, exudes an off-kilter hospitality that’s less “home away from home” and more “last stop before oblivion,” while their grandson Baby John bumbles through the landscape with an unsettling blend of childlike innocence and enigmatic menace.

Regina’s journey to the Red Wolf Inn isn’t just a case of winning a mysterious contest; it’s a classic setup for the kind of unsuspecting vulnerability that horror delights in. She’s a lonely college student, an every-gal with no money and no plans for spring break, suddenly thrust into an all-expenses-paid seaside retreat she never entered. That letter arrives like a tempting, too-good-to-be-true invitation, and when a private plane whisks her away, Regina doesn’t pause to question the fine print because who wouldn’t leap at the chance for a break?

Starting off her venture, propelled by lonely hope more than choice, she’s guided by Baby John Smith (John Nealson), whose awkward innocence cloaks a deeper, almost tragic complicity in the macabre family business. The film slyly teases out its macabre secret with wry gusto: This is no ordinary inn, but a quaint purveyor of cannibalism.

David Soul, Bruno Kirby, and Richard Dreyfuss all auditioned for the role of Baby John.

On their way to the Red Wolf Inn, Regina and Baby John share a joyride, during which he, the peculiar but oddly charming grandson of the inn’s elderly proprietors, sets an early tone of offbeat energy, taking Regina along for a ride that includes fast driving, police escapes, and a teasing thrill that ultimately gives way to creeping dread. Baby John, with his awkward mix of loyalty and latent rebellion, becomes a twisted symbol of innocence corrupted, tugging Regina and us between fear and sympathy.

The elderly innkeepers, Henry and Evelyn Smith, embody that wholesome yet subtly sinister energy, embodying an unnerving blend of warmth and cold calculation.

Regina: It’s really good. What is it?
Evelyn: Filet, dear. Filet.

Mary Jackson plays Evelyn Smith in Terror at Red Wolf Inn, forever etched in our minds as Emily Baldwin, one of the lovable and eccentric bootlegging sisters on the long-running TV series The Waltons. Far from just a character actress lost in the background, Jackson brought a distinct warmth and familiarity to small-town, maternal roles throughout her nearly fifty-year career in television and film. Her career highlights include appearances on Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, and the mega disaster hit Airport (1970), showcasing her ability to embody dependable, down-to-earth characters who could effortlessly flip from comforting to unsettling, a skill that serves her eerily well in Red Wolf Inn.

Jackson, with a deceptively warm demeanor, masterfully masks the character’s cruel intentions. This is a perfect casting choice for a figure who embodies domestic horror with a gracious, wise woman and a kindly sage smile. Jackson’s earthy presence twists familiar wholesomeness into a brand of sinister that conceals centuries-old secrets served as delicacies. Arthur Space, who plays Henry Smith, is known for his long time career in film and TV including role in 20 Million Miles to Earth 1957 and television’s The Big Valley and The Twilight Zone, embodies that troubling calm that spreads a sinister undercurrent like a creeping vine making the story all the more chilling because of his understated delivery.

Henry: A butcher’s work is never done.

Both Space and Jackson’s ordinary veneer just barely conceals the extraordinariness of lurking evil. Together, these two seasoned actors bring a layered familiarity to the aging couple, sewing the seeds of horror in a reality that’s disarming before it darkens. They are, in large part, what solidifies the off-kilter tone in performances that feel both oddly relatable and deeply wrong.

There’s only one thing that tops the spine-chilling terror of evil, menacing children, and that’s a sinister, scheming elderly couple. Because nothing says “don’t trust Granny and Grandpa” quite like a pair who bake their dark secrets right into the family recipe, all while serving up smiles that could curdle milk. They’ve got the years, the patience, and that pleasantly wrinkled facade hiding the nastiest of intentions, proof that age doesn’t mellow monsters, it perfects them.

The cinematography is a deliberate seduction; tight shots and muted tones drape the inn in a suffocating embrace that thickens the air with lurking discomfort. These aren’t the bright, screeching horrors of later decades but a slow, creeping claustrophobia worn by time in the melancholy of aging walls whispering old stories, hugged in amn earthy color palette that leans heavily into washed-out browns, smoky grays and hazy creams that are tinged with whispers of soft, faded blues and fleeting sparks of mellowed reds that punctuate the weathered greens. It all feels like a faded photograph from an unfinished dream, giving the inn a timeworn look that drips with the patina of isolation. Instead of harsh shadows slicing through darkness, the film bathes its spaces in diffused, melancholic light, creating a visual atmosphere that presses in on the nerves, making every move the characters make an echo of a hungry fate.

The inn’s oppressive atmosphere becomes an active player in this dance of dread and dark humor. John McNichol’s camera never rushes, opting instead for languid shots that let tension seep in gradually. His use of a wide-angle lens subtly warps the frame with barrel distortion, bending the edges of the images and creating a slightly distorted perspective that draws you intimately into the scene, as if watching from the far end of the table. This creeping, queasy effect heightens the spatial tension, enhancing the claustrophobic atmosphere to creepy effect, with disturbing relish.

And then there’s the tone the film sets: a crafty blend of camp and dread that possesses a subversive charm beneath nostalgic layers and comfortably odd within the genre. It’s as if the film winks at its own macabre absurdity, serving horror with a side of dark humor, like a polite, sinister hostess who slips in a sardonic quip while carving the meat. This balance is a precursor to the sly genre blends that would flourish decades later, a tonal tightrope where menace and mirth twist together into a uniquely unsettling melody.

For example, you can see it in 1989 when Bob Balaban directed Parents that would revisit the taboo of cannibalism, it’s that darkly hilarious little horror gem where young Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt’s kid discovers his folks aren’t just dysfunctional, they’ve got a taste for family dinners that’s a bit more literal than your average casserole, turning suburban suburbia into a buffet of bone-chewing family secrets with a side of chewy black comedy. Hurt’s Lily Laemle, the seemingly perfect 1950s housewife with spotless hair and a spotless kitchen, hides a dark secret behind her cheerful smile.

Terror at Red Wolf Inn is a story which unfolds like a creeping low grade fever. Regina’s arrival at the inn initially feels like a reprieve, a hopeful escape from routine into seaside charm. But as days flicker by, the veneer cracks; guests Pamela (Janet Wood) and Edwina (Margaret Avery – Shug from The Color Purple 1985) disappear without explanation.

Edwina’s ‘checkout time’ is a quiet terror that unfolds under the cover of night. After a hearty home-cooked celebration marking her supposed departure, the Smiths sneak into her room, rendering her unconscious with a chloroform-soaked cloth. Her fate is sealed with cold, merciless precision, killed and dismembered before being hidden in the inn’s walk-in freezer, part of the grisly secret lurking behind the facade of hospitality. The scene is unsettling not for overt gore, but for its icy, mechanical brutality and the eerie calm with which the murders are carried out, pushing the horror further through quiet menace rather than spectacle.

To me, this scene is one of the film’s most disturbing moments, balancing the sense of domestic normalcy with the underlying carnage that’s been taking place under Regina’s nose, creating an atmosphere of subversive dread rather than explicit violence.

Henry: [helping Baby John carry Edwina into the walk-in freezer] Careful, Baby John, this is choice Grade A!

Regina’s explorations, aided and hindered by Baby John’s strange loyalties, tear through the cozy disguise hiding darker truths to reveal the inn’s gruesome unveiled feast: human flesh served on polished plates, a grotesque communion cloaked in old-world tradition. Regina’s growing horror meets the family’s chilling insistence that she join their ritual, culminating in a harrowing test that is as much about survival as it is a brutal rite of passage.

Terror at the Red Wolf Inn may stumble under the weight of its modest budget and pacing, but its atmospheric potency and eerie charm elevate it into obscure cult legend territory. It’s a film that lingers, like the salt air around its fictional coast, haunting the memory with its strange rhythms, bizarre characters, and the delicate balance it strikes between the familiar and the horrifying. As an artifact of its decade, it offers a fascinating glimpse of horror at a crossroads: rooted in gothic tradition, yet slyly anticipating a more playful, self-aware future.

Terror at Red Wolf Inn is a beguiling cocktail of dread and dark whimsy, a cinematic chimera that seduces with its peculiar performances, visual poetry, and twisted family drama. It’s not merely a film but a mood—a late-night transmission from the depths of 70s cult horror, one that calls upon us to savor its deliciously unsettling feast.

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MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #142 Tourist Trap 1979

TOURIST TRAP 1979

I’m gearing up to plunge even deeper into Tourist Trap at The Last Drive In, where the screen flickers like a portal to a desert dreamland warped by psychokinetic nightmares and lifeless mannequins being orchestrated by a genially macabre puppet master. This film, the maddening, moody masterpiece that closes out the 70s horror era with a whisper and a scream, defies tidy logic like a carnival mirror stretching reality into uncanny forms. It’s not about sense or narrative neatness; it’s about atmosphere thick enough to suffocate, a queer-voiced Slausen whose chilling calm unsettles like a velvet glove hiding a razor claw, and the sick, gruesome ballet of turning flesh into painted plaster toys.

Tourist Trap haunts the folds of your brain; it hasn’t ceased to do that to me, a creepy little gem that sings its own weird lullaby of terror and dark sadness, all wrapped up in that dusty roadside museum come to twisted life. I want to tinker further with Tourist Trap like one of Slausen’s mechanical automata, to wind up the gears and cogs of this sinister museum, pulling at the hidden mechanisms beneath its creepy facade and pry open the clockwork heart of this mannequin menagerie, unravel the twisted strings that animate its horrors and sinister workings behind the painted smiles. I’ll pull on the levers and loosen the screws of this haunted automaton house, to reveal the dark machinery driving its malevolence, in order to celebrate its unapologetic weirdness, and excavate all the strange emotions it stirs in genre fans like me. Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t just freak you out—it lingers, unsettles, beguiles, and insists on being reckoned with. And honestly, that kind of horror, with its blend of eerie, odd, and outright creepiness, is too deliciously rare to ignore. What can I say, I love this movie.

Director David Schmoeller was startled when the film received an MPAA PG rating despite its disturbing subject matter and what he perceived as graphic violence. Schmoeller stated in an interview with TerrorTrap.com that he felt the film would have been more commercially successful had it received an R rating.

Tourist Trap (1979) is an odd, deliciously macabre gem of late-70s horror cinema that has quietly carved its own niche amid the slasher boom overshadowed by the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th. Directed by David Schmoeller (Puppet Master 1989) in his debut feature, (This is a remake of director Schmoeller’s equally terrifying 1976 thesis short film The Spider Will Kill You 1976). That story is about a blind man living in an apartment full of life-like mannequins. Tourist Trap blends eerie supernatural elements with slasher tropes to create a darkly hypnotic atmosphere that’s as unsettling as it is compelling.

Set against the desolate stretch of the American desert, Tourist Trap drops a group of unsuspecting friends into the decaying roadside curiosity museum of the enigmatic Mr. Slausen, portrayed by Chuck Connors. Slausen is steeped in a hidden bitterness and grief over his wife’s death, and his museum filled with lifelike figures is a haunting mausoleum of his fractured psyche. His mannequins and automata don’t just stand frozen in time; they move with a sinister life of their own, thanks to the psychokinetic powers perhaps inherited from his brother, or is he the one with the power? It’s hard to know, a twist that elevates the film beyond mere slasher fare.

In his book “Danse Macabre”, Stephen King praised the film, referring to it as a “sleeper” and a “gem”. King considers this movie to be one of the scariest he’s ever seen. He enjoyed the film’s frightful opening scene, the special effects, and he said that the murder scenes have a “creepy, ghostly” quality to them. However, he said that Chuck Conners was “not very effective as the villain.” He said Conners was “game, he’s simply miscast.” Maybe Jack Palance, who was the original choice for Slausen, and who was already famous for having a simmering hyperintense quality as an actor, would have been a better choice for the villain than Conners, who is more or less playing another variation on the square jawed cowboy type character he played in The Rifleman. Most horror fans however agree with King that in spite of all of this, the film works very well.

Mr. Slausen’s backstory is undefined, deliberately murky, possibly tied to a tragic betrayal and murder that the film never fully spells out in a straightforward way. With the vaguest of suggestions, the story drops just the faintest, almost whispered hints that his beautiful wife may have been unfaithful—with the brother, no less—though it leaves the truth tantalizingly ambiguous.

Somewhere in that haze of suspicion and heartbreak, Slausen’s fragile mind seems to have shattered, possibly amplified by his eerie telekinetic powers, and in a devastating psychotic break, he likely killed them both, his wife and his brother, only to be driven mad by crushing remorse.

That violent, almost mythic past clings to the film’s atmosphere like dust in sunbeams, made even more haunting by the lifelike mannequins that become twisted, silent memorials to his shattered world. Slausen’s wife, immortalized as an automaton, even shares a chilling scene where he dances with her figure, a poignant yet unsettling ballet of grief and madness that perfectly captures the film’s eerie heart.

Slausen takes on the persona tied to his dead brother as a way to channel guilt and manifest a darker side, not unlike Norman Bates’ adopting his mother’s identity. Slausen dons a doll-like mask molded from a creepy human face and invokes the name “Davey,” his late brother, to separate his murderous alter ego from his own, underlying his multiple personality disorder and fractured psyche. Though the masked killer was called Davey, the production crew had since dubbed him “Plasterface.” This is obviously a spoof on Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s “Leatherface.”

Davey: [deep, raspy voice] We’re going to have a party!

Davey: You’re so pretty.

Davey: My brother always makes me wear this stupid mask. Do you know why? Because I’m prettier than him.

As a matter of face, invoking Norman — Slausen’s line, “Once they moved the highway, I’m afraid we lost most of our business,” is lifted directly from the film, Psycho (1960). In that film, Norman Bates says this to Marion near the beginning.

The opening scene of Tourist Trap (1979) introduces Woody (Keith McDermott) and his girlfriend Eileen (Robin Sherwood) stranded on a rural road after getting a flat tire. Woody ventures off to find a nearby gas station, which appears deserted. Inside, he faces the wrath of several mannequins that suddenly come to life with sinister laughter, and an unseen force traps him. Objects fly at him violently, culminating in Woody being impaled silently by a metal pipe; he’s done in with unsettling calm.

Tourist Trap is aided immensely by Nicholas von Sternberg’s (Dolemite 1975 blaxploitation crime comedy directed by D’Urville Martin) eerie cinematography. His wide-angle shots capture the vast, isolating desert, contrasting with tighter, claustrophobic interior shots that give the museum an uncanny, almost surreal feel, like a dreamscape teetering on the edge of nightmare.

The film then shifts to the rest of the group of friends, which includes Eileen, Becky (Tanya Roberts), Jerry (Jon Van Ness), and Molly (Jocyln Jones)—traveling in a separate vehicle. When they arrive at the spot where Woody disappeared, they discover Slausen’s Lost Oasis, a rundown roadside museum and tourist trap. Their vehicle mysteriously breaks down, and the proprietor, Mr. Slausen, appears as an odd but polite man who has a distinct, quietly menacing presence. He offers to help and insists on taking them back to his ‘weird’ off-the-beaten-path place for tools, introducing them to the bizarre and animatronic mannequin displays.

Eileen: Mr. Slausen, can I use your phone?

Mr. Slausen: Oh sure, help yourself… but it doesn’t work. I got nobody to call.

The women stay behind in the museum while Jerry and Slausen go to repair the car. Eileen’s curiosity leads her to the nearby house, where she encounters eerie mannequins and is ultimately strangled to death by her own scarf, manipulated by an invisible force.

The story deepens its curious violence, unfolding along the edges of surreal horror. As he stalks the remaining members of the group, Mr. Slausen lashes out wearing a grotesque, doll-like mask that looks like a mold cast from a dead human face—smooth, pale, and eerily expressionless with hollow, dark eye holes that seem to swallow the light. This chilling visage transforms him into a living mannequin, blurring the line between man and the sinister figures that populate his museum.

Another unsettling effect is his attire: an old-fashioned, crocheted shawl draped over his shoulders, paired with vintage, roughly worn clothes that give the impression of a relic from another, forgotten era. As the killings occur, the mannequins animate with supernatural menace,

From the moment Molly arrives, Slausen’s gaze lingers on her, with an unsettling, almost reverent fixation. Unlike the others, she’s treated with a bizarre tenderness, as if she holds the key to a twisted salvation. His chilling calm softens when he’s near her, a subtle shift in posture, a rare softness. While his captive, he carefully tends to her, offering silent protection amid the looming menace of his sinister museum. His actions make it clear that Molly is more than just another victim; she’s the centerpiece of his new eerie obsession.

Eventually, Jerry and Becky find themselves ensnared in Slausen’s secret chamber. The walls are lined like a gallery of plaster cast faces, like ghosts trapped in clay, and a chilling little display of lost souls. It’s his macabre workshop where he carries out his grotesque craft, and humanity dissolves into lifeless artifice. Chained and helpless, they discover another captive woman, Tina, strapped to a table, as Slausen is slowly covering her face with plaster, while sadistically narrating her impending fate, creating another layer of nightmarish suffocation and helplessness.

Davey: [Covering Tina’s eyes with plaster, right before suffocating her with it] Your world is dark. You’ll never see again.

This reveals Slausen’s method of transforming his victims into “living dolls,” a gruesome and painful process where he magically blurs the lines between living person and animated mannequin. He obtains their death mask.

First, there’s this cruel little straw trick, letting his victims breathe just enough. Then, bit by bit, that air gets snatched away as the plaster hardens, sealing their faces forever in this grotesque mask of silence. It’s like watching someone become both statue and tomb, caught between life and death in this slow, agonizing freeze-frame

And it isn’t just slow, suffocating horror, it’s terrifying because it’s so intimate. He doesn’t just kill them. Gradually, the suffocation becomes torturous and inevitable as the plaster hardens like he’s sealing them inside a nightmare.

Jerry and Becky eventually succumb to Slausen’s nightmare and die in a more surreal and symbolic way in Tourist Trap. After escaping from the basement where they were captive, Becky is recaptured by Slausen and taken back to the museum. There, one of the animatronic mannequins throws a knife that fatally stabs her in the back. Jerry, meanwhile, tries to rescue Molly but is ultimately transformed into a mannequin himself and reanimated by Slausen’s telekinetic power, effectively losing his humanity and becoming part of the eerie collection.

At the climax, Molly escapes from Slausen’s immediate grasp by killing him with an axe, ending his telekinetic control over the mannequins. However, the chilling final scene rolls into motion, revealing Molly driving (Jerry’s “Jeep” is actually a Volkswagen Thing. Remember those!, a model that was not very successful in the US market.), her expression blank, almost doll-like. Her friends, mannequin versions of themselves, sitting beside her in the car, silent and unnaturally still, are grotesque shadows of life, encased in the lingering mystery of Slausen’s dark power, her expression disturbingly vacant and doll-like herself.

This ending leaves it unclear whether Molly has truly escaped, been mentally broken, or transformed into one of the living dolls herself. Multiple interpretations exist: Some believe Molly has gone insane, seeing the mannequins as living companions and driving away in a delusional state. Has she become part of the eerie collection, blurring the line between reality and nightmare? The film cuts to this eerie, frozen tableau, leaving the haunting question unanswered: Is Molly still herself, or has she too been ensnared in the silent curse of the living dolls?

The film offers no definitive explanation, embracing its surreal ambiguity that closes the film on a note as unsettling as it is unforgettable.

The production design by Robert A. Burns, a maestro whose fingerprints are all over the late-70s horror fabric (Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes), is the unsung hero, crafting sets and mannequins that oscillate between the grotesque and the mesmerizing, lending a tactile creepiness to Tourist Trap. The way the mannequins shift and move, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently, catches the eye and the imagination, creating a weird ballet of horror that transcends standard kill scenes.

And I can’t leave this unspoken; I have to shine a spotlight on one of my favorite composers by highlighting the brilliant score crafted by Pino Donaggio. His composition is a revelation, weaving an ironic circus-like melody with darker, suspenseful undertones that echo the film’s dual nature: playful yet deadly, nostalgic yet disorienting. This score doesn’t just accompany the film; it inhabits it, wrapping us up in a haunting sonic slow carnival ride that’s as memorable as the visual oddities on screen. Three years before composing this film, Pino Donaggio composed Carrie 1976 another 70s horror film about a string of telekinetic murders. And in 1973, he delivered one of the most evocative and haunting scores to Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, one that weaves melancholy and menace into piano and strings, echoing the film’s delicate dance between innocence and the heartbreak of loss.

What sets Tourist Trap apart, and what makes it so ripe for re-examination, is its unusual tenor. It doesn’t strictly adhere to slasher conventions; instead, it’s a hybrid, an atmospheric ghost story posing as a roadside horror, a film where the enemy is not just a killer but a supernatural force of grief and madness, embodied in lifeless forms turned lethal. Its tone fluctuates between modern Gothic creepiness and funhouse haze, and that unpredictability is its greatest strength. This film doesn’t just scare, it mesmerizes, subverts expectations, and invites us into a freaky, wild ride down a lonely desert highway and off the beaten path, where losing your way and falling into a trap tilts the world toward fatal gravity, where the suffocating dread gives way to chilling terror and relentless peril.

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MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #141 The Velvet Vampire 1971

THE VELVET VAMPIRE 1971

Desert Sun, Velvet Seduction, Sand and Spellbound: The Hypnotic Bite of The Velvet Vampire 1971

If you ever find yourself rummaging through the far-out archives of 1970s cult cinema, The Velvet Vampire (1971), aimed squarely at the arthouse set, flows into focus like a bloody mirage of desire, surreal and seductive, equal parts sun-baked oddity and erotic slow-burn, a gleaming example of desert surrealism spun through vampire mythology. Produced under the legendary Roger Corman’s watchful eye, The Velvet Vampire was among the pioneering films released by his newly formed New World Pictures. Directed by Stephanie Rothman, a rare trailblazer among exploitation filmmakers, her work includes: It’s a Bikini World (1967), The Student Nurses (1970), Group Marriage (1973), Terminal Island (1973), and The Working Girls (1974); she also co-directed Blood Bath (1966). Rothman challenges and overturns the worn-out tropes and sexist clichés all too common in horror films. To satisfy the exploitation genre’s appetite for spectacle, Rothman’s screenplay, co-written with Maurice Charles and her husband Charles S. Swartz, barely scratches the surface of our vampiress Diane’s deeper, more poignant story; her aching loneliness and mournful longing for her long-departed husband remain largely unexplored.

The Velvet Vampire gleefully turns expectations on their head with a sly, playfully dreamy edge. Rothman sets her fanged tale in a landscape washed out with blinding light, where the supernatural feels at home amid Joshua trees and endless dunes. Daniel LaCambre’s cinematography leans into the contrast; the vast, scorching desert by day, painted in sharp reds and golden tones, becomes a stage for uncanny dreams and blood-red symbolism, heightening the sense of unreality. That imagery, coupled with Roger Dollarhide (studio engineer who collaborated with notable musicians such as Sly Stone) and Clancy B. Grass III’s wonderfully spaced-out score, lulls you into a trance where every sigh of the desert breeze and feverish note vibrates with seduction and threat.

“Susan, have you ever noticed how men envy us?”

“Envy us, how?”

“The pleasure we have that only we can have. We can’t help it. It’s just our nature, the way we are. And in their secret hearts, they hate us for it because they can never know what it’s like.”

The score of The Velvet Vampire carries a quiet ache, its melodies lingering with a sense of longing that draws you further into the film’s hypnotic imagery. Each note seems to pull you deeper into the modern mythology of its vampire tale, casting a subtle spell that links music and story in a way that has stayed with me and subtly reshaped how I see its imagery and meaning. It’s part of why I have remained a fan of this film all these years.

The plot, as offbeat as its milieu, starts innocently: the Golden Pair, a 70s horror film Adam and Eve, married couple Lee and Susan Ritter (Michael Blodgett and Sherry Miles), sporting that unmistakable California bleach-blonde glow, stumble into the orbit of the mysterious Diane LeFanu, (Celeste Yarnall, regal and mesmerizing) whose vampy allure and jet-black raven hair turn heads at the LA art scene’s tongue-in-cheek Stoker Gallery. Diane’s surname is an overt homage to Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novella Carmilla (1872) is a foundational work in vampire literature and particularly influential in female vampire mythology.

No sooner have Lee and Susan declared two years of wedded bliss than Lee, wanderlust-ridden and restless, starts circling Diane like a sunburned moth to her shadowy flame. Diane, who only moments before proved her appetite and ruthless prowess in a swift act of self-defense, turns the tables and overpowers a man who tries to assault her, a moment that both establishes her power and subverts expectation. Not only that, but she gets to satisfy the need to indulge her cravings and drink from the scarlet well. When it comes to the two young blonde beauties, she welcomes their attention. Meanwhile, Susan finds herself adrift in the surreal swirl, trying to latch onto reality as desire, danger, and daylight all get deliciously tangled. The subtle touch of cunning darkness can undo pure innocence, can’t it?

Diane invites them to her isolated estate in the desert, a sensual, sunstruck vision, a crimson oasis, a sunlit purgatory where vehicles break down, dreams bleed into reality, and lust sizzles just beneath the skin.

When Diane extends her invitation to her Mojave hideaway, Lee is first in line, ever eager, barely concealing his enthusiasm, while Susan trails in his wake, her doubts piling up faster than she can voice them. The couple’s trek across the sun-bleached highways is a checklist of warning signs: oppressive heat pressing in from all sides, not another car in sight, sudden car trouble, and locals who size them up like they wandered into the wrong side of a waking dream. Every mile seems to whisper a fresh omen, but off they go, oblivious and unsure, straight toward Diane’s desert lair.

Though there are so many warning signs, as victims are apt to do in these stories, the blissfully unaware daydreamers at the abyss push forward, ignoring every setback until their car finally gives up, leaving them stranded on a desolate stretch of sand, baking under the desert sun, with nowhere to go. Then, as if conjured by the heat itself, Diane appears in her canary yellow dune buggy, bright, bold, and perfectly timed to deliver them from their sandy dead-end.

As soon as the trio arrives at Diane’s haven in the desert, all those familiar Gothic tropes get turned inside out. Forget misty moors and looming stone castles, here, we’re greeted by a villa ablaze with sunlight, its isolation punctuated by stretches of cracked earth and shimmering heat. This is vampirism reimagined, where the harsh light of day dissolves old shadows, the sand takes the place of cobwebs, and sunlight itself becomes a challenge to ancient nocturnal rites. Yet for all its sun-soaked bravado, Diane’s world hasn’t entirely ditched tradition, and just over the rise, a cemetery keeps its own secrets buried under relentless blue sky. Diane relies on Juan (Jerry Daniels), her fiercely loyal companion, who handles the messy business of keeping her thirst satisfied all the while blending old legends with something unmistakably, eerily new.

Once Diane has coaxed Lee and Susan into her sun-scorched sanctuary, the boundaries dissolve and her strange ritual begins. Her presence becomes a mirage, distorting their sense of reality, part seduction and watchful intent; she becomes an enigmatic trespasser in their dreams. Both Lee and Susan tumble through the same surreal, uncanny nightmare. Diane fractured and shifting at its center, a specter whose true motive remains a mystery. That flicker of uncertainty, what Diane really wants with her beautiful guests, is the thread of suspense that runs through The Velvet Vampire, leaving us wandering in uncertainty right beside them, caught somewhere between attraction and unease.

What begins with hospitality soon twists, as Diane preys on both husband and wife, folding them into her web of erotic tension, vivid nightmares, and lurking violence. Rothman, infusing the script with her own genre-savvy wit and feminist self-awareness, lets the vampire as seductress skewer both convention and expectation. Yarnall, at once hypnotic and haunted, delivers a performance that hovers compellingly between camp and cool detachment; Blodgett (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls 1970, The Carey Treatment 1972), with sun-bleached good looks, is both predator and prey. Lee actively pursues Diane, jointly participating in the charged triangle of seduction and tension. His motivations and actions reveal a certain self-serving and opportunistic nature; his attraction to Diane leads him to ignore his wife’s discomfort, and he becomes as much a pursuer as the pursued.

Scene after scene unravels with dreamlike slowness: blood-red linens and desert hallucinations; Diane gliding in her dune buggy like an apparition torn from a Magritte canvas. The house, overseen by the hulking Juan, is less a sanctuary than a bizarre arena for the couple’s undoing.

Lee has fallen prey to Diane’s seductive grip, lured and drained in intimate fashion, a scene that’s more sensually unsettling than overtly gruesome, with blood and eroticism intertwining beneath the film’s hallucinatory atmosphere. Blodgett’s demise is marked by his gradual succumbing rather than outright gore; it’s the fatal embrace of the vampire, the slow seepage of life, and the surrender to forbidden desire that does him in.

Sherry Miles as Susan teeters between ingénue and liberated survivor. The most striking moment comes as Susan, desperate and traumatized, flees from Diane’s clutches. Her escape turns into a chase through sand and sunlight, culminating in a climactic Greyhound bus chase where sunlight and a flash mob brandishing crucifixes spell Diane’s demise in a spectacle of modern-meets-mythic absurdity and where the ordinary suddenly collides with the supernatural.

The memorable scene in The Velvet Vampire unfolds at the climax, as the sun-drenched tension finally boils over into surreal violence. Diane LeFanu, our exquisitely dark temptress, finds her powers waning under the relentless desert sun. When Diane approaches Susan, intent on claiming her, only to be repelled by the crowd flaunting crucifixes, it turns the mundane everyday world into something mythic and strange. Diane collapses, her skin blistering and bloody under the oppressive daylight, leaving behind a haunting silhouette and a splash of vivid crimson in the dust.

In the end, Yarnell’s Diane is not brought down by a man but by the inescapable will of fate itself, by the collective force of sunlight and superstition. Her end is reminiscent of classic vampire tales but staged with a psychedelic edge, fitting the film’s surreal spirit. With its blend of mythic horror and offbeat 70s style, this moment stands out as a creative synthesis of the film’s hypnotic visuals, seductive tension, dark fantasy, dreamlike mood, and eerie climax.

In case you’re wondering, in The Velvet Vampire, Diane LeFanu’s vulnerability to daylight evolves over the course of the film. Early on, Diane is able to move through the sun-drenched desert and urban spaces by carefully shielding herself, wearing wide-brimmed hats and concealing clothing, which allows her to resist the harmful effects of sunlight. This adaptation permits her to navigate the world with relative freedom, blending unsettlingly into the daytime environment despite her vampiric nature. But this protection is fragile and conditional; as her protections slip, notably in the climactic finale, the sunlight reveals itself to ultimately be lethal. Diane’s endurance is limited and linked to the way she is able to conceal herself. Finally, it’s the sunlight that strikes her down, asserting the undeniable natural law that the film plays with to underscore the conflict between the supernatural and the harsh desert reality. Nuanced, this subverts and reinterprets classic vampire lore about their historically documented weaknesses to fit the film’s surreal, sunny mythos.

Much like the Belgian cult gem Daughters of Darkness, The Velvet Vampire explores the eroticism, allure, and disruption that embraces a sexually fluid, female vampire with non-binary desires, brought to the fragile terrain of an uneasy marriage. Both films delve into the ways desire and identity complicate romantic connection, suggesting that the vampire’s obsession with the couple isn’t just predatory but also a catalyst for transformation, exposing cracks in the relationship while offering tantalizing glimpses of freedom beyond conventional boundaries. Held under this light, the vampire is less a monster than an agent of erotic possibility and existential unrest, shifting the heart of fear from external threat to the inner turmoil of longing and dissatisfaction.

The Velvet Vampire may not boast the polish of its European arthouse contemporaries, yet what works in every frame is that it feels soaked in a low-budget Technicolor mirage, a unique, trippy tension of subtle comic moments, psychosexual gamesmanship, and sun-poisoned dread. Rothman’s sly direction is coupled with haunting visuals and the serpentine, groovy score, which is sonically winding, sinuous, and unpredictable.

The haunting and cyclical melody evokes the repetitive, hypnotic quality of an adult lullaby, a velvet sonnet, an elegant reverie, a whispered requiem, with a bright, metallic timbre that lends a mesmerizing, slightly antique feel, which fits the film’s blend of psychedelic and horror elements. The score includes spaced-out synths and folk instruments (such as acoustic guitars), which add layers of warmth and eeriness. The repetition draws us into the film’s hypnotic and surreal narrative. The music’s cyclical structure reinforces the trance-like immersion into the desert setting and the modern vampire mythology the film explores, making it simultaneously romantically trippy and haunting.

Unforgettable is the presence of Celeste Yarnall, which earns this film its cherished slot in the twilight parade of cult vampire cinema. Yarnall left a distinct mark on film and television through the 1960s and 1970s, celebrated for her striking, classically beautiful looks, often described as photogenic and glamorous, with a poised screen presence. She was named the Foreign Press Corps’ “Most Photogenic Beauty of the Year” at Cannes in 1968 and “Most Promising New Star” that same year. Yarnall’s most iconic role aside from Diane LeFanu in The Velvet Vampire, where her enigmatic glamour defined the film’s eerie energy, is her appearance as Yeoman Martha Landon in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “The Apple,” and as Ellen opposite Elvis Presley in Live a Little, Love a Little, where she inspired the song “A Little Less Conversation.” Her career also included the ’60s exploitation film Eve (1968), also known as The Face of Eve or Eve in the Jungle, in which she stars as a jungle goddess, and the Filipino horror, gore-heavy Beast of Blood 1970. Often referred to as a Scream Queen and swinging chick of the ’60s, she had a flawless, camera-ready style that truly made her stand out.

Every now and then, I get the itch for that blood-soaked, sun-drenched desert, and nothing scratches it quite like a visit with The Velvet Vampire, just to get my dose of kicks from the wild, 70s brand of female vampirism. And, the desert night still hums, and Yarnall’s hypnotic bite deserves a closer look—so stay tuned for my next midnight unhurried rendezvous with this film at The Last Drive In!

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MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #140 The Uninvited 1944 & The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 1947

THE UNINVITED 1944

Arriving quietly but forcefully in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age, The Uninvited remains one of cinema’s most evocative haunted house stories, wrapping genuine psychological depth in a shimmer of Gothic atmosphere. Directed by Lewis Allen, the film sweeps us up and sets us down in windswept Cornwall, where the urbane Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) impulsively buy a lonely cliffside mansion that promises sea views but is, of course, steeped in whispers, mists, and shadows. What begins as a picturesque escape quickly slides into mystery as the American siblings, joined by local ingénue Stella (Gail Russell), become enmeshed in the old house’s tragic secrets, and spectral forces begin to assert a mournful presence within the walls.

The Uninvited is less about shrieks than chills that creep up softly: flickers of cold air, a woman’s weeping echoing in empty rooms, candles flickering out when no breeze disturbs the air, all the trusty hallmarks of a proper classic ghost story. The film’s legacy is as much about what it doesn’t show as what it reveals; the ghostly is conjured with restraint, allowing our imaginations to fill the void as surely as the roiling waves crash against the cliffs. The supporting cast: Donald Crisp plays Commander Beech, Stella Meredith’s austere grandfather. He sells Windward House to the Fitzgeralds and is deeply protective of Stella, forbidding her from visiting the house due to its tragic past. There’s also the formidable Cornelia Otis Skinner as the imposing Miss Holloway, who runs a nearby sanatorium and is a former and ‘close friend’ of Stella’s late mother, Mary Meredith. Holloway idolizes Mary, and her obsessive devotion leads her to conceal key details about Mary’s tragic fate. Commander Beech’s over-watchful guardianship and Holloway’s maniacal worship of Stella’s mother only deepens the sense of history and unresolved longing that clings to every frame, while Victor Young’s haunting score, most memorably captured in “Stella by Starlight,” adds an indelible note of melancholy.

Stella’s longing for her mother in The Uninvited is a poignant undercurrent of yearning and unresolved grief, embodying the haunting connectedness of love that transcends death and shapes her fragile sense of identity.

Beyond its technical achievements, including shadow-soaked cinematography by Charles Lang Jr., who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the film, and the measured, suspenseful pacing, The Uninvited lingers for its willingness to suggest that the past, with all its grief, love, and unresolved trauma, refuses to stay quiet. The film’s nuanced exploration of haunting both tangible and ethereal, material and otherworldly, makes it a forerunner of the psychological horror genre, and a timeless meditation on longing, inheritance, the inescapable pull of memory, and spectral heartache. The Uninvited is a journey into a beautifully uncanny twilight and one of the most enduring classic ghost stories of 1940s cinema.

A Tale of Two Spirits- The Haunting of Windward House: A Study of Gothic Horror in The Uninvited 1944

THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR 1947

Few ghost stories linger as gently and hauntingly as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1947 classic, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Cloaked in the shimmer of Leon Shamroy’s Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography, this film floats between reality and reverie, moored and held steady by performances that ache with longing and wry spirit. Adapted from R. A. Dick’s (a pen name for Josephine Leslie), the author of the original 1945 novel by screenwriter Philip Dunne, (How Green Was My Valley 1941), the film opens with a widowed, quietly rebellious Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney, luminous as ever) leaving the suffocating embrace of her late husband’s family, steely with resolve and trailing a little moonbeam named Anna (Natalie Wood spilling over with an expressive, bright-eyed energy) in tow. Their destination: the brooding, wind-harassed Gull Cottage, perched alone on the English coast, a house that seems to groan with memory and mutter secrets in every gust.

The setup is simple and a touch Gothic. A young widow, hungry for her own life, purchases a house deemed uninhabitable by locals. But within its salt-swept walls, Lucy soon meets the cottage’s former owner, the crusty yet charismatic ghost of Captain Daniel Gregg (played by Rex Harrison with a playful authority, commanding confident charm, and a bit of wounded masculinity). Their first encounters are frothy and flirtatious with comic tension: doors slam; Lucy’s lamp flickers in the dark; the Captain’s briny baritone echoes from nowhere. But what begins as supernatural warfare, her stubborn rationalism pitted against his blustery haunting, slowly evolves into the story’s living, pulsing heart: two souls, adrift in their own loneliness yet awakening, together, to something far more.

Scene by scene, the film traces Lucy’s defiant settling in. Rejecting both her in-laws’ interference and the local estate agent’s warnings, Lucy and Anna shape a home beneath Gregg’s spectral, sometimes overbearing guidance. The Captain becomes her confidant and protector, teaching her self-reliance (and even how to curse a little, should the occasion demand!). He tells her the salty saga of his seafaring life, shares a quiet gentleness masked by roguish banter, and coaxes Lucy out of the shadows of her own wariness.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir possesses this gentle magic where romance and the supernatural mix so seamlessly and it’s in the film’s middle that reveals its most brilliant twist: Captain Gregg proposes Lucy ‘ghost’ write his memoirs, “Blood and Swash,” a rollicking account of his adventures at sea ( a captivating sendup of romance and adventure novels that were popular back then). Scenes of Lucy poised at her writing desk, ghostly dictation swirling in the night air, give the narrative a lovely, otherworldly shimmer, caught perfectly between practicality and enchantment, sensible and spellbinding. The manuscript’s biting wit and Gregg’s gruff narrative voice prove irresistible to London publishers, and the newly financially comfortable Lucy forges a life on her own terms, able to glimpse the edges of freedom.

Enter George Sanders as Miles Fairley, a visiting author whose charm veils a snake’s duplicity, a duplicity that only Sanders could manifest. Lucy’s tentative romance with Miles, set against the always-present, invisible Captain, flickers between real-world possibility and spectral devotion. When the truth of Miles’ dishonesty (he’s married with children) surfaces, Lucy’s heart is broken once again, but this time, she finds the strength to keep going, her resolve now tempered by Gregg’s steadfast ghostly love.

As years pass, the film floats through time; Anna grows up and moves on. The Captain gently chooses to withdraw, erasing himself from Lucy’s memory “like a dream,” in what may be the film’s most poignant, aching scene: his love so deep, he’s willing to accept absence for his beloved’s own peace. Lucy’s hair turns silver, and in a sequence glimmering after a journey marked by longing and finally peaceful fulfillment, she falls asleep for the final time, her spirit greeted once more by Captain Gregg, young and waiting, ready to make their way to the sea together, hand in hand, in a quiet, wordless exaltation. If I were to pick a film to nestle among my favorite tearjerkers, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir would be the one to flood me with tears, and truly make me “cry me an ocean” rather than just a river.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is as much about the textures of memory and loneliness as about romance. Mankiewicz’s direction bathes each moment in wistful yearning without ever tipping into sentimental schmaltz; Shamroy’s cinematography dips pillowy sunlight and candlelight in shadows, catching the moody cliffs and the billow of curtains in a house alive with spirit, literally. Alfred Newman’s score, especially that lilting main theme, laces every scene with longing. The film belongs to Tierney’s luminous, quietly fierce Lucy and Harrison’s blustering, battered Daniel, their performances humming with chemistry that defies easy explanation. It is complex, subtle, and challenging to describe in simple terms, devoted, at once gentle and wild at other times. Even Sanders, in a smaller but crucial role, leaves an oily yet wounded impression.

And while the silver screen version is the one most fondly revisited by cinephiles, the story flourished again in the television world much later. The Ghost & Mrs. Muir became a delightful ABC-CBS sitcom in the late 1960s, starring the graceful and radiant Hope Lange (winning two Emmys for her performance) as Mrs. Muir, her first name changed to Carolyn, and Edward Mulhare, who was a fabulous Captain indeed. Though more whimsical and sunny than spectral, the show echoed the original’s sense of possibility, humor, and “impossible” connection, bringing Gull Cottage’s magic to yet another generation of dreamers, skeptics, and romantics like me.

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MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #139 TAM LIN 1970 & QUEENS OF EVIL 1970

TAM LIN 1970

Directed by actor Roddy McDowall in his sole foray behind the camera, Tam Lin is a British proto-folk-horror curio that swirls together psychedelic decadence with supernatural myth. The luminous Ava Gardner commands the screen as Michaela Cazaret, a wealthy and mysterious socialite empress who lures a group of young jet-setters, led by Ian McShane, into her orbit.

Gardener moves through the screen like a fairy queen, particularly in the film’s lush or naturalistic scenes, in long dresses, diaphanous fabrics, and an air of free-spirited glamour that reflects the era’s trend toward organic elegance. It’s a wild collision of Ossie Clark-Celia Birtwell-style designs, swinging Sixties and early Seventies London fashion, mood, and music, and groovy-mod ideology. Tam Lin shimmers with the cool, rebellious vibe of the counterculture social scene, a world of restless elegance, playful glamour, and defiant grace. Beneath this lively surface runs an ambiguous supernatural undercurrent, hinting that Michaela ‘Mickey’ Cazaret might be more than just a temptress—perhaps a powerful sorceress in disguise. It’s this blend of Tam Lin’s high society sparkling whimsy, untroubled spirit, and the whisper of mysterious magic that gives the film its haunting edge.

When Gardner’s chosen muse, Tom, falls for an innocent outsider, Janet Ainsley, played by Stephanie Beacham, jealousy and mysticism unwind into a sensuous, ritualistic vengeance. With its dreamy visuals, contemporary fashion, and flashes of mod opulence, the film pulses with the shifting energy of the early 70s. Gardner’s icy glamour and bubbling sensuality, and the supporting cast’s youthful allure (including a young Joanna Lumley), merge into a wicked fairytale, one poised between Swinging London’s twilight and the rise of folk horror.

Queens of Evil (1970) / Le Regine

Tonino Cervi’s Queens of Evil wraps a countercultural phantasmagoria in fairy-tale velvet and giant hunks of glutinous cakes, featuring Haydée Politoff, Silvia Monti, and Ida Galli as one of three enchanting femmes fatales. Ray Lovelock’s free-spirited, mythically gorgeous hippie David stumbles into their decadent woodland retreat, a virtual garden of Eden, a trap of enticements, after a fateful run-in with the law, and soon finds paradise is lined with danger, temptation, and ominous glamour. The film’s a mesmerizing blend of psychedelic and pastoral elements, with strong influences from late 1960s flourishes and ethereal high fashion; Queens of Evil’s look blends these traits with supernatural and Gothic touches to create a unique cinematic style. Ray Lovelock’s gruesome fate strikes with a brutal revelation, but in truth, it’s the inevitable price of his surrender to a false paradise. Lured by seductive pleasures and beguiling witches, Lovelock’s free-spirited wanderer is gradually ensnared, lulled into a dream world where danger lurks beneath the surface. His fate is sealed by the film’s twist climax, a dark reckoning that turns paradise into a cage, and leaves him to pay in full for mistaking enchantment for freedom.

Tam Lin and Queens of Evil’s legacy lingers in its hazy, surreal blending of psychedelic visuals, Gothic elegance, and sexual rebellion: Both films capture the stylish unease and provocative edge of early 70s European horror, with iconic and cult actresses striding through set pieces as lush as they are strange. If you’re a fan of retro fashion, mythic intrigue, the singular charisma of Gardner, the three evocative muses, and the dangerously sexy lure of cult hunk Ray Lovelock, these movies should not be missed, especially if you’re drawn to offbeat, transgressive cinema of the decadent and the beautiful, oh yeah, and the horror of it all.

The full features are below if you want to venture further!

TAM LIN 1970 & BABA YAGA 1973 – Ava Gardner & Carroll Baker: THE FAERIE QUEEN" & VALENTINA'S DREAM: Two Hollywood icons in search of mythology. Part 1

THE PRICE OF DECADENCE AND LIBERATION: Seduction and Isolation: A Dual Journey Through Queens of Evil 1970 and L’Avventura 1960 Part 1

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MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #138 The Tenant 1976

THE TENANT 1976

Inside the Walls: Polanski’s Haunting Symphony of Paranoia and Identity in The Tenant

Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit: “Hell is other people!”

If you’re drawn to the tense, closed-in mood that thrillers of ’70s cinema offer, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) unfolds like a dark lesson in psychological horror, a slow-burning descent into madness and estrangement in the labyrinth of the city, where the boundaries between identity and environment dissolve. A surreal horror thriller that explores themes of isolation, identity dissolution, and the oppressive power dynamics within urban living, with the director building a hypnotic demonstration of control and craft in his signature style. The story is based on Roland Topor’s 1964 novel and completes Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy,” following Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, cementing his reputation for exploring fractured psyches through atmospheric urban settings.

Set within the pale, oppressive walls of a Paris apartment building, the film follows Trelkovsky, a timid Polish bureaucrat (played by Polanski himself), who rents a flat with a sinister history: its previous occupant, Simone Choule, has attempted suicide by leaping from the apartment window.

From the film’s first moments, Polanski’s vision is clear, he is less interested in grisly spectacle and more intent on exploring how the silent watch, the weight of the eyes of society, its rules and expectations, can gnaw away at a fragile sense of self, reducing it to a state of spectral uncertainty, the anchor of those watchful eyes dragging him down.

From the film’s first moments, Polanski’s vision is clear: he is less interested in grisly spectacle and more intent on exploring how the silent watch—the weight of the eyes of society, its rules, and expectations—can gnaw away at a fragile sense of self. This slow unraveling reduces the self to a state of spectral uncertainty, with the anchor of those watchful eyes dragging him down. The Tenant is a portrait of urban madness and terrifying banality, where the apartment becomes a prison.

Polanski manifests this vividly through the film’s surreal atmosphere and its exploration of fraught psychological concepts at play. He constructs a cinematic world where reality and nightmare bleed into one another, spilling out of the cracks in Trelkovsky’s mounting paranoia and existential dread, seeping from the feverish edges of his mind. What we’re shown is just the terrifying fragility of personal identity, how easily a sense of self can crack under the constant pressure of ever-watchful neighbors and silent, collective stares, suspicious, judging faces, and the quiet machinery of psychological manipulation.

You can really see how the film digs into that uneasy feeling of social alienation and the burden of being watched and judged. The weight of other people’s scrutiny and all that social pressure can start to chip away at the foundations of who you are, blurring the edges of your identity until those lines are barely distinguishable from the suffocating world around you.

Polanski turns the apartment itself, and its inhabitants lurking behind those walls, into living, breathing symbols of this claustrophobic paranoia, showing just how easily the boundaries between victim and persecutor, self and other, can be worn down and eventually fade away.

In order to get under our skin, Polanski achieves a surreal effect primarily by his manipulation of perspective and space. The Parisian apartment building isn’t just a physical setting, but it actually starts to feel like a reflection of Trelkovsky’s own mind. Hallways twist and turn in weird ways, spaces seem to repeat or fold in on themselves, and pretty soon, it’s hard to tell who’s watching whom. The line between observer and observed collapses. Moments like Trelkovsky stumbling across strange hieroglyphs in the bathroom or catching a glimpse of his own double outside the window perfectly capture that uncanny, dream-like quality running through the whole film.

Sven Nykvist’s cinematography is beautifully attuned to Polanski’s unsettling, surreal vision. His disorienting camera lingers on a cold, pastel-tinged palette, soft greens, grays, and muted tones, creating a feeling of unreality and suspended stillness, delicately poised as the film gradually closes in on itself.

Nykvist’s static shots and subdued colors, subtle yet deliberate, give the apartment interiors an almost washed-out, oppressive quality. Everything inside, from the décor to the wardrobe and lighting, hangs in a quiet balance that perfectly mirrors Trelkovsky’s intense psychological unraveling. The city outside, the constricting urban environment of Paris, seems indifferent and inhospitable, as Trelkovsky’s world shrinks. This use of color and tones that shift from neutral and observational to increasingly unsettling also leans into the vision of a world that feels all at once ordinary, yet disturbingly off-kilter and hostile, underscoring the film’s themes of isolation and an identity that will soon become broken.

His shots evoke a slow suffocation; with haunting moments, a view across the courtyard where neighbors stand motionless, they become silhouettes, always watching, always judging, an unforgettable image of the tenants peering from the communal restroom like figures out of a Kafka nightmare. It’s a world where every knock on the wall, every muffled conversation, is a threat. Every detail reinforces the film’s chilling descent into paranoia and loss of identity, all a chilling dream-like motif of voyeurism and invasion.

These faces in the frame become the Invisible Monsters of The Tenant. At its core, the film is steeped in the anxieties of being watched and the uneasy experience of watching others in all its unsettling forms. It functions as a perpetual loop of observation and violation.

Trelkovsky is routinely spied upon by his neighbors who furtively gaze at him through the peephole in his door, windows, and thin walls; he himself becomes a watcher, peering nervously across the courtyard where the other tenants stand quietly in the communal bathroom, their eyes fixed on him. And in one tense hospital scene, when he visits Simone Choule, she quietly studies him. This sense of surveillance is mutual and escalating, and the more Trelkovsky observes, the greater his fear of being observed grows, fueling his paranoid descent.

While the film maintains a superficially realistic style, the deliberate use of the camera’s visual language, particularly the panning shots, underscores the story’s pervasive themes of voyeurism. The window often acts as a surrogate for the camera, a peephole into private worlds and forbidden desires.

As The Tenant unfolds, daily life turns into a “theater of judgment,” with every glance from neighbors (or us) feeling like an evaluation, warping ordinary interactions with a sinister sense of performance.

You can say that The Tenant’s obsession with voyeurism, of watching and being watched, can be tied to deeper feelings of social anxiety and isolation. Trelkovsky’s sense of always being “seen but never really known”, whether because he’s a foreigner or simply the new tenant stepping into the shoes of someone who tried to end their life, creates a delicate balance, builds a tightrope walk, between the face he presents to the world and the self he keeps hidden. And that tension only grows stronger under the constant prying eyes of everyone around him. The Tenant is rich with the logic of voyeurism, both as a literal plot mechanism and as a metaphor for the fragility of identity under the watchful, unyielding, condemning eyes of society and neighbors. The director uses this fixation to explore paranoia, loss of self, and the oppressive power dynamics that come with living close to others in shared, crowded urban spaces.

The film’s stellar, quirky cast grounds this psychological unease in vivid character: Polanski in the central role of Trelkovsky, whose nervous, mild-mannered demeanor hides profound psychological turmoil. His reflective and sometimes fragmented monologues, such as his grotesque internal dialogue while trying on Simone’s shoes, reveal his crumbling psyche. Isabelle Adjani brings an emotional ambiguity as Stella, who flits between sympathy and distance, a confidante whose role blurs the lines between ally and potential conspirator. The formidable Melvyn Douglas, as the landlord Monsieur Zy, is icily civil but never far from menace. He’s the landowner whose cold surveillance amplifies Trelkovsky’s fears.

Shelley Winters and Jo Van Fleet bring memorable, deeply textured performances to The Tenant as they help close the trap around Trelkovsky. Their fierce concern for the building’s order masks a quiet antagonism. Both performances are layered with suspicion and eccentric precision. Winters plays the surly, sharp-tongued concierge who mixes menace with dark humor. Her portrayal as a forceful presence (all too often overlooked yet, as usual, stellar) adds an unsettling edge to the building’s atmosphere. Her character has a biting, world-weary wit and a mischievous cruelty, trolling Trelkovsky with both jokes and veiled threats, which adds to the building’s feeling of claustrophobia and hostility. Jo Van Fleet, though in a more minor role, channels a commanding toughness wrapped in quiet menace. Known for playing tough types, she carries a haunting intensity and unconstrained violence that keeps you on edge. Even with limited screen time, her presence is still riveting, imbuing the world around Trelkovsky with an ominous weight, an embodiment of the oppressive, judgmental social environment he faces. Together, Winters and Van Fleet are living embodiments of the suspicion, cruelty, and suffocating social pressure that haunt Trelkovsky throughout the film. I can’t help but light up at the mention of Shelley Winters and Jo Van Fleet; there’s just something magnetic about the way they command the screen. Their performances throughout their careers have always been a storm of unyielding spirit, making even the smallest moments unforgettable. I’ve always adored the depth and unpredictability they bring, both in their roles and in the larger-than-life presence that seems to follow them from film to film. Watching either of them work is one of cinema’s great pleasures for me.

Trelkovsky is a uniquely riveting figure, a gentle, almost painfully self-effacing, awkwardness, and the embodiment of a character who journeys from meek, careful tenant to a shattered, paranoiac soul overwhelmed by the gaze and judgment of those around him, making his alienation palpable. As the narrative progresses, Trelkovsky becomes increasingly internalized: every nervous glance, stammer, and bodily hesitation heightens our sense of unease and identification with his plight.

He finds himself drawn to this towering, narrow apartment building, Gothic in its quiet gloom, where, by some twist of fate, there’s a room available high up on the top floor. Good luck for Trelkovsky, or so it seems at first, until he discovers the vacancy comes with a ghost: the last tenant flung herself from the window. During his tour, he can’t help but lean out and look down, tracing the air to the very spot where her story ended.

Trelkovsky rents the apartment once inhabited by Simone Choule. The concierge (Winters) states, “The previous tenant threw herself out the window,” she states matter-of-factly, grounding the film’s premise in a chilling sense of everyday normalcy. “You can still see where she fell,” she adds.

Before settling in, he crosses paths with a surly Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas), who grumbles about the woman who’d tried to take her own life and all the chaos she left behind. This leans back on the events, giving the building itself a haunted undercurrent that never wholly dissipates. Trelkovsky tries to ease his worries, saying he’s just a quiet bachelor, but the old man shoots back with a knowing smirk, “Bachelors can be a problem, too.”

His journey unfolds scene by scene, but without overt signposts. Early on, he visits Simone Choule in the hospital, where she lies comatose, her body bandaged, her face half-erased, and meets Stella (Adjani), who is shaken, grieving, and generous with concern, whose emotional distress foreshadows the psychological cascade Trelkvosky is about to endure. As Trelkovsky settles into the apartment, the pressure from his neighbors intensifies; the atmosphere thickens, and strange, subtle occurrences begin to escalate. Even his minor habits, despite his attempts to be unobtrusive, a glass set down too heavily, friends visiting late, trigger complaints and cold rebukes.

He discovers a human tooth hidden in a hole in the wall, finds himself watched from every angle, and senses that he is being judged for transgressions he cannot name. The sense of surveillance grows unbearable: at night, neighbors appear frozen, assembled in the bathroom with the stillness of conspirators. Each scene unspools the invisible web suffocating Trelkovsky’s spirit, even as he tries desperately to conform to communal expectations. As the film moves along, that uneasy sense of being under scrutiny, a constant, prickling awareness that every move might be noted, just keeps tightening its grip.

In The Tenant, the pressure to conform becomes so intense that it veers into the realm of absurdist drama, with Trelkovsky’s desperate attempts to fit in ultimately erasing his own identity. The film satirizes the extremes of societal conformity, revealing how the demands of the community push ordinary existence into the bizarre and jolting ripples of discord and unrest in the soul.

Gradually, the apartment’s psychological pressure pushes Trelkovsky to the edge. He begins adopting Simone’s persona, repeating her habits, and beginning to dress in her clothes and apply her makeup, in a disturbing blurring of identity, not to mention his internal monologue, fragmented and haunted, which shows a psyche morphing under the strain of hostile observation.

Slipping into Simone’s skin and retracing her final moments feels less like imitation and more like getting swept up in a storm of borrowed lives and borrowed pain. It’s as if the relentless pressures swirling around Trelkovsky have worn away his boundaries, fragmenting his grasp on who he is, picking up pieces of another person until his own reflection grows strange and unfamiliar. In this tangled masquerade, the city’s silent demands and invisible bruises steer him toward a fate that’s never truly his, but becomes his all the same.

The climax arrives as he vandalizes Stella’s apartment, convinced she is part of a vast plot against him, and with violent confusion: Trelkovsky destroying what little human contact he has left. The film reaches its horrific conclusion with Trelkovsky unsuccessfully flinging himself from the window, not once, but twice. The first jump: After spiraling further into paranoia, dressed in Simone’s clothes, Trelkovsky throws himself out the window in front of his neighbors, hallucinating their cheers. The second jump: He survives the initial fall, and when the police arrive moments later, he manages to crawl back to his apartment and jumps again. His identity finally surrendered to the will of the building and its inhabitants.

One of the most striking scenes in The Tenant that best illustrates the film’s fluid, dream-like narrative style is when Trelkovsky, deep in his psychological unraveling, investigates the communal bathroom where he has long spied neighbors standing motionless for hours. In this sequence, he discovers a wall inexplicably covered with hieroglyphs, a surreal, otherworldly detail that threads past and present, fantasy and reality, together. As he stares out the window, he is horrified to see another figure watching him through binoculars from the opposite apartment; in a jarring, impossible twist, that figure is himself, occupying his own flat. The camera floats with measured precision, hallways seem to bend and warp, and time feels nonlinear, all trademark features of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography that give the entire episode a fevered, hallucinatory quality.

This scene dissolves any boundary between Trelkovsky’s fears and reality, leaving us lost within his waking nightmare. Polanski’s technique here blurs the chain of events, making it hard to tell what causes what, looping back on itself so that the narrative progresses like a lucid dream, bizarre, hyperreal, disorienting, and deeply unsettling. The hallucinations, warped spaces, and the unnerving doubling of Trelkovsky as his own observer distill it to its most honest, purest form of the film’s hypnotic, surreal flow and signature dream logic.

The Tenant received mixed critical reception at the time of its release. Critics were divided; Roger Ebert found the film’s spiraling paranoia compelling but ultimately frustrating, and the finale “ridiculous” in its most intense, extreme expression. The film is a bleak, Kafkaesque, nightmarish allegory and a chilling social commentary on modern urban alienation that immigrants and outsiders often endure.

The dry, deadpan humor threaded throughout didn’t soften the impact, if anything, it heightened the horror of its ordinary setting with its mixture of disturbing psychological horror and sometimes its humor swallowed by cold silence.

Psychologically, The Tenant reveals a study of the impact of social rejection and creeping hostility that chip away at a person’s sense of self. Trelkovsky’s slow transformation into Simone Choule isn’t just a slide into madness; it’s the result of being trapped under a relentless, suffocating gaze of a ‘faceless menace’ that hides behind the ordinary faces and routines of city life, swallowing him whole. In a way, it’s a haunting portrait of how the self can dissolve when pushed too hard from the outside and shaken from within by fear.

The apartment ceases to be a refuge; instead, it embodies the past trauma and collective hostility that coerce Trelkovsky’s breakdown, a stage upon which Trelkovsky’s undoing plays out. What once seemed mere eccentricity in his neighbors deepens into something cruel: their insistence on conformity erodes Trelkovsky’s individual character, leaving only a ‘hollow echo’ where identity used to be.

In the end, The Tenant is a complex, unsettling film that weaves together a vision of paranoia, sexual repression, madness, alienation, and the dissolution of self in the face of the sharp edges of silent, social judgment. It’s a chilling portrait of urban isolation and the strange, suffocating mechanisms by which our environment can consume us from within. And its horror lies in the banality of evil and the capacity for ordinary places and people to become monstrous through indifference, exclusion, and quiet malice.

#138 down, 12 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #137 Targets 1968

TARGETS 1968

I’ve always been drawn to Targets 1968 not just as a tight, gripping horror thriller but for the bittersweet nostalgia it carries—Boris Karloff’s final bow on screen feels like a tender farewell to the old Gothic fairy tale horrors that shaped so much of cinema’s past. Watching Karloff, you sense the closing of a chapter, while the film quietly ushers in a new era defined by raw, real-life violence, a stark, unsettling kind of monster born not from shadows but from the fractures of modern fear. It’s in the meeting of these two worlds, the timeless and the terrifyingly new, that Targets finds its haunting power. This convergence creates an experience that’s as much about reflecting on what we’ve lost as it is about confronting what’s coming. Some moments play so unflinchingly close, it’s as if the gun’s smoke could brush your face, certain scenes hit you with the immediacy of a witness, as if you’re standing just a breath away when the shots ring out. I’m eager to dive deeper into this richly real film and its legacy in a more involved piece for The Last Drive-In, where I can explore how these themes still resonate today, a vivid reckoning with American fear.

From Celluloid Phantoms to Living Nightmares: Unmasking American Terror in Targets:

Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) paved the way for independent horror, marking both the director’s confident feature debut and the bittersweet farewell to Boris Karloff’s illustrious career. The film innovatively bound together two parallel narratives: one following Byron Orlok (Karloff), an aging horror movie legend weary of his own fading genre, and the other tracking Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a seemingly all-American young man unraveling into a cold-blooded mass shooter.

Some of Peter Bogdanovich’s thoughts:

“What terrified audiences in the Thirties was no longer terrifying. … What was terrifying in 1968 was this random violence, people being killed for no reason.”

“The idea that fear has evolved into something far different. Ghost stories & creepy characters no longer cut it. The new brand of terror is faceless, anonymous, soulless and random. Enter the phenomenon of the mass killer.”

“It is spare, clean, modern, lacking in embellishment or decoration, but the people speak naturally, move fluidly and seem real. And there is a stillness, again a feeling enhanced by the lack of music, that creates verisimilitude, but also a general sense of unease.”

Bogdanovich conceived Targets with help from his wife, Polly Platt, and input from Sam Fuller, against the backdrop of a turbulent 1960s America marked by real-life violence, including the Texas Tower sniper Charles Whitman’s killings, and the looming shadow of political assassinations, which directly inspired Bobby Thompson’s character.

Roger Corman produced Targets and set the unusual ground rules that shaped it: Peter Bogdanovich had to use stock footage from Corman’s earlier film The Terror 1963 and cast Boris Karloff, who was under contract to Corman and owed him two days’ work. Beyond that, Corman gave Bogdanovich free rein, but these quirky constraints ended up influencing the film’s distinctive dual-story structure. Karloff was so impressed with the film’s script that he refused any pay for any shooting time over his contracted two days, working for a total of five days on it.

When Roger Corman brought Peter Bogdanovich on to direct, he asked if he knew the directorial styles of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Hitchcock was precise, efficient, and organized, while Hawks had a more kinetic, partly improvised shooting style. Corman’s advice was simple: shoot it like Hitchcock.

Sam Fuller, famed for his lean, realism, and hard-edged storytelling, gave Targets an uncredited rewrite, shaping its tone, tightening its structure, and advising Bogdanovich to save the narrative’s ‘firepower’ for the shocking climax. His fingerprints are all over the film’s crisp, unsentimental edge, even without his name on the credits.

Targets is the first feature film for production designer and writer Polly Platt, who was married to director Bogdanovich at the time. They would collaborate on several films in the future, The Last Picture Show 1971 and Paper Moon 1973 in particular. The Last Picture Show was nominated for eight Oscars in 1972, including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Bogdanovich. The film won two Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Ben Johnson and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Cloris Leachman. Paper Moon would earn a total of 10 nominations, including for Best Supporting Actress for Madeline Kahn.

Polly Platt’s mark on Targets went far beyond her credits as production and costume designer; she helped shape the script itself, even co-conceiving its dual narrative and the chilling ‘Vietnam vet-turned-sniper’ storyline. Her eye for realism and emotional detail grounded the film’s suburban scenes, which were steeped in truth and blended seamlessly with its terror. Bogdanovich himself has called her a true co-creator, with her influence woven through both its look and the construction of the story.

Targets would not have emerged as the sharp, modern meditation it is without Sam Fuller’s incisive script work and Polly Platt’s foundational creativity and storytelling insight. Their combined efforts shaped not only the film’s message but also its method, merging classic genre elements with an urgent, contemporary edge.

Poised between the shadows of classic cinematic horror and the harsh dawn, the rise of raw, modern terror, Targets plays out as a chilling outward gaze on the fragile and shifting landscape of fear and violence. Other than the music that naturally belongs in the scene, like a tune drifting from a car radio, Targets moves ahead without any score.

The film opens with footage from Roger Corman’s The Terror (1963), featuring Karloff as Byron Orlok, who is watching a screening of one of his old horror films. Orlok is a man disillusioned by the shift from theatrical monsters to real-world violence; an irony not lost considering that Boris Karloff, whose career defined the golden age of classic horror, embodies this very character.

This opening quietly, but powerfully sets up the film’s central tension; it poignantly contrasts Karloff’s legacy of iconic, supernatural terror with the raw, unsettling violence of contemporary reality, making clear how real-life horrors have eclipsed the old-time monsters.

Boris Karloff was 80 when he made Targets, and his health was failing; he was battling advanced rheumatoid arthritis, wore leg braces, and often needed a cane just to stand. You can even catch glimpses of that dignified fragility, an enduring spirit tempered by time in a few scenes. But he hung on long enough to see the finished film and to enjoy the praise it rightfully brought him, a well-deserved ovation for a legendary career.

Although Byron Orlok in Targets may look and sound a bit like Boris Karloff, the real man was worlds apart from his fictional counterpart. Both were iconic British actors forever linked to horror, but where Orlok is jaded with the industry and ready to walk away, Karloff never lost his gratitude for the career it gave him. Far from resenting his reputation as a ‘horror actor,’ he embraced it with grace and pride, especially his turn as Frankenstein’s Monster, a role he spoke of with deep fondness and respect. That warmth, that humility, and the way he carried his legacy with quiet dignity are part of why Karloff wasn’t just admired—he was beloved.

Orlok dismisses contemporary horrors as beyond anything he can evoke. He shrugs at modern horrors, thinking they’re worse than anything he could dream up, far darker than anything he could ever bring to life. He is accompanied by his secretary, Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), who also has a personal connection with the young writer-director Sammy Michaels (director Peter Bogdanovich, who plays a significant part in the picture), who is dating her. Throughout the film, she plays a practical role in Orlok’s life, helping manage his engagements, including the final promotional appearance at the drive-in theater that will bring him face to face with the mass shooter, Bobby.

Jenny: (speaking sharply) You’d love it if somehow you could convince yourself you’ve been betrayed by everyone. Then, you’d really be happy. No guilt and full of self-pity.
Byron Orlok: Quite a speech!
Jenny: You ought to hear it in Chinese.

In the mix is also Byron’s Orlok’s manager, Ed Laughlin (Arthur Peterson), who urges Orlok to attend the premiere of his latest film at a drive-in theater, but Orlok initially resists.

With a fight in his old soul, he holds onto nostalgia, standing firm in a world that’s stopped fearing the old painted monsters. He’s still holding on to an old kind of fear that could still send a chill through the theater, even though the world has moved on. Marshall Smith tells Orlok: If it weren’t for me, the only place you’d be playing is in the Wax Museum!

Byron Orlok: My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore.

Byron Orlok: You know what they call my films today? Camp! High camp!

Byron Orlok: Oh, Sammy, what’s the use? Mr. Boogey Man, King of Blood they used to call me. Marx Brothers make you laugh, Garbo makes you weep, Orlok makes you scream.

Byron Orlok: Sammy, you’re a sweet boy, but you can’t possibly understand what it feels like to be *me*. I’m an antique, out of date.
Sammy Michaels: Alright, what are you going to do? Plant roses? Actors don’t retire! In about six months and you’ll blow your brains out, Byron.
Byron Orlok: I’m an anachronism.
Sammy Michaels: What does that mean?
Byron Orlok: Sammy, look around. The world belongs to the young. Make way for them. Let them have it.

Meanwhile, across town, Bobby Thompson visits a gun shop, acquiring a high-powered semi-automatic rifle and adding it to an already disturbing arsenal stashed in his car trunk. He returns to the gleaming sterility of a middle-class suburban American home, where the emotional coldness beneath the surface is almost painful to watch. His home is the picture of a sanitized Americana, tidy desolation, a still-life of suburbia. With its sparse walls and tight, airless rooms, the house feels claustrophobic by design; it’s Bogdanovich’s way of mirroring the warped, grim fairy tale that is Bobby’s life.

His relationship with his wife, Ilene (Tanya Morgan), who is emotionally distant, disinterested, and disconnected from Bobby’s troubled inner world, doesn’t help his increasingly violent delusions and calm disintegration.

Bobby Thompson: I don’t know what’s happening to me.
Ilene Thompson: Why?
Bobby Thompson: I get funny ideas.

Only deepening the cracks, in the same cold orbit, his parents, father Robert (James Brown), and mother Charlotte (Mary Jackson), are distant and fraught with silent resentment.

The family as a whole lives like performers in a forgettable 1950s sitcom turned bleak domestic tragedy, a slow-burning nightmare, with a home environment devoid of warmth or genuine connection. This dynamic underscores Bobby’s isolation and inability to communicate his internal struggles, which intensifies the film’s chilling portrayal of modern terror and emotional alienation. After an unsettling shooting range outing with his father, where Bobby almost fires at him, tensions simmer beneath the suburban facade, hinting at the psychological fractures driving Bobby’s disconnection with the people around him and his simmering exploration into violence.

Bobby’s dark unraveling, his descent into a murderous spiral, begins in chilling fashion: after his father leaves for work, Bobby methodically murders his wife, mother, and an unfortunate grocery deliveryman in the wrong place at the right time. His cold detachment is unnerving, underscoring a psychopathic quiet, as quiet as a held breath, a calm before the storm. After he kills his wife and mother, he types out a message stating that he has committed these murders and warns that more people will die before he is caught or killed.

At the same time, Orlok finally agrees to make a public appearance at the drive-in premiere, where he plans to read a ghost story to the audience after the film. This is where the two stories edge closer, their separate tracks pulled by the same dark gravity toward an inevitable final reckoning.

I think a huge part of why the atmosphere in Targets feels so disquieting lies in the Hungarian American László Kovács’ cinematography. He blends a naturalistic, almost documentary style with carefully stylized visual elements —sterile suburban interiors, sprawling highways, and the evocative drive-in theater, to create a world that feels both familiar and subtly charged with menace. Kovács shoots the film with a pastel-leaning color palette and carefully balanced lighting to emphasize the atmosphere and mood of unsettling realism. To give the film more emotional and thematic depth, he uses color in a subtle but purposeful way, shifting between warm and cool tones to quietly set characters and settings apart, visually distinguishing them from each other.

His eye gives the film a fresh, gritty realism that feels worlds apart from Boris Karloff’s Gothic horror past. That contrast, the theatrical shadows of Orlok’s old films set against Kovacs’ unvarnished lens, perfectly captures the shift from classic Hollywood’s horror’s constructed fantasy and cinematic illusion of monsters to the stark reality of modern violence of late ’60s America.

Shots of Bobby calmly loading his weapons, shown alongside Orlok’s reflective and weary eyes, visually represent that colliding fantasy and harsh reality. The suburban home scenes carry an oppressive, sterile quality, raising the level of psychological alienation at the heart of the story.

Bogdanovich carefully stages Bobby’s shooting spree with a detached yet gripping precision. After positioning himself on top of an oil storage tank near a busy freeway, Bobby begins randomly firing at motorists, the film chillingly showcasing mass violence happening from a distance, echoing actual events from the 1960s.

This act of terror draws the tension taut as wire, and ruptures the quiet with a sudden storm of bullets and fear, winding those moments tighter until it trembles on screen, while the police respond with increasing urgency. Bobby’s evasion of capture by hiding at the drive-in theater screening Orlok’s film draws the two plots intimately together for a final, iconic confrontation.

The climax at the drive-in is one of cinematic history’s most tense moments. Bobby infiltrates the theater, quietly killing a handful of patrons while the horror film plays, spilled in light across the drive-in screen. The final collision, the rupture where worlds bleed together, the point where the silver screen tears and something darker steps through, a violent meeting of celluloid phantoms and flesh-and-blood fear meet up. Between the imagined and the inevitability of real-life terror intruding on cinematic fantasy is visually and emotionally jarring.

Orlok, a relic of old Hollywood’s theatrical monsters, watches this play out with a mix of wistfulness and resignation as the world around him witnesses a turning point where real death comes not from fantasy but from the withdrawn and wrathful, trading imagined, invented horrors for the all-too-real violence of the alienated and the unseen.

Karloff’s Orlok, initially reluctant and seemingly out of place in this story, meets in defiance and stands against this new type of monster. The showdown between the old horror icon and the modern killer becomes a metaphor for the death of one kind of fear and the rise of another, the mythic gives way to the real, and the legendary face of terror contends with cold, faceless threat, an anonymous fury, and the far-reaching darkness of the soul.

Orlok’s final act — he confronts Bobby toward the film’s climax after Bobby runs out of ammunition during his shooting spree at the drive-in theater. Orlok disarms him by knocking a gun from his hand with his cane and then physically subdues him by slapping him multiple times in the face; it symbolizes the uncertain struggle against a society increasingly gripped by real-world horrors.

[Bobby Thompson cowers before Byron Orlok]
Byron Orlok: Is *that* what I was afraid of?

On the surface, Targets is a horror thriller, a quiet shocker, but it’s powered by a keen understanding that takes it somewhere richer. It cuts deep with sharp psychological insight, driven by an unflinching look into the human mind with its razor-sharp eye for the psychology behind the fear.

Bobby’s unraveling isn’t shown as just an outburst of violence; it feels more like the endpoint of a deep social and personal disconnect. His detachment and alienation, his inability to talk to the people around him, and that hollow sense of existential emptiness and meaninglessness all reflect a wider cultural restlessness, one that grew from the cracks in the American dream, the isolating sterility of suburban life, and the growing unease of a country facing overseas wars and unrest at home.

The film subtly critiques how society isolates people and seduces them with a fascination for violence, media spectacle, and consumerism’s spiritual void.

The performances give the film its emotional heart. Karloff, playing a role that mirrors his own legacy, brings Orlok to life with a touching mix of dignity, sadness, and quiet defiance. Tim O’Kelly’s portrayal of Bobby is chillingly detached, his calm demeanor heightening the menace within the tense, fractious environment that fuels the tragedy.

Within the landscape of independent horror, Targets is iconic for its inventive melding of classic horror movie chills with urgent contemporary realities of its own time. It forecasts the rise of the “real monster” trope and influences later portrayals of the kind of terror that is wearing the plain face of everyday life, dressed as the familiar, paving the way for mass violence and societal breakdown in cinema. With his first time in the director’s chair, Bogdanovich delivers a sharp, unsettling look at fear itself, capturing that uneasy moment when innocence gave way to a harsher, more grim reality.

In the end, Targets plays like a blunt jolt of American dread, reality stripped of comfort and a cold stare into its violence. It is a searing psychological and cultural portrait, a film where the monsters are both on screen and hiding in plain sight, even as they breathe among us. Fantasy and reality grind against each other until the distance between them collapses, leaving a stark mural of American violence, alienation, and the shifting nature of what we fear and what is truly terrifying. Its lasting power lies in its haunting blend of homage and sharp critique, tragedy and suspense, making it a groundbreaking work that still feels uncomfortably, chillingly relevant.

When it was released in 1968, Bogdanovich’s Targets received a mix of thoughtful critical attention and some reservations, but it was widely regarded as a landmark work that had the vision to see what was coming in independent horror cinema.

Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader called it “an interesting response to the demands of low-budget genre filmmaking,” noting that while it worked within tight production constraints, it brought a fresh perspective to horror’s evolving nature. Variety highlighted Bogdanovich’s skill with “implied violence,” observing that he deftly conveyed moments of “shock, terror, suspense and fear” without gratuitous gore, which amplified the film’s psychological impact.

When I look at Targets, what stands out for me is how chillingly it captures this new kind of horror – one that isn’t born out of monsters but rather, emerges from random, senseless violence—in a young mass killer, echoing real-life events that were occurring at the time (and tragically, today, it’s become an epidemic of collective trauma), like Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree and the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The film’s release amid this climate made its messages both urgent and challenging for audiences to face, contributing to its initial commercial failure.

But its critical power endures, as a somber mirror reflecting the shadowy shift in American fear. Quentin Tarantino hailed it as “one of the most powerful films of 1968 and one of the greatest directorial debuts of all time,” calling it “the best film ever produced by Roger Corman” and praising its bold social commentary on gun violence embedded within a thriller framework.

Boris Karloff in Targets is in his element; he’s handing down a quiet, powerful legacy wrapped in every look and pause, a final bow from one of horror’s true legends, marking his final screen role, which was widely noted as dignified, distinguished, and noble. Watching him, you sense the weight of an era gently fading and the resilience in that dignity and sadness. Karloff doesn’t just play a character; he embodies the soul of a changing cinema, carrying the weight of a bygone era with grace and deep emotional resonance. It’s a river carving through stone, a poetic testimony to his craft, rooted in reverence but alive with the complexity of modern fear. His final role feels like a whispered farewell and a lasting imprint on the heart of horror itself.

Karloff’s portrayal brought emotional and thematic depth, a performance that feels like a poignant bridge between two worlds: the shadowy, classic theatricality and iconography of horror’s cinematic past and the raw, unsettling violence creeping into reality with this film’s more disturbing modern themes. It captures the waning breath of a world slipping into memory of horror cinema and the unsettling rise of a more violent hard truth.

[last lines —to the police as he is being arrested] Bobby Thompson: I hardly ever missed, did I?

#137 down, 13 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #136 Spirits of the Dead 1968

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD 1968

When I first experienced Spirits of the Dead, I fell into an altered state of consciousness, a door opening to another kind of poetic and haunting beauty that would come to define horror in the 1960s—the era when darkness found its lyricism, and fear was woven through with elegance, dreamlike dread, and a poignant gaze into the human soul’s shadows in vivid color. This was a time when horror shed classical fright, timeless, a primal kind of fear, one that relies on mood, silhouette, and suggestion for something more baroque: a sensibility that was simultaneously unsettling and exquisitely atmospheric, a symphony of surreal visions and psychological torment whispered through a colorful prism.

I am irresistibly pulled by Spirit of the Dead’s intricate psychological depths and its exploration of human darkness rather than any straightforward ghost story. Instead, Spirits of the Dead draws you into a haunting elegy of the human psyche, carved into three distinct yet interconnected vignettes. Each segment—Metzengerstein, William Wilson, and Toby Dammit- unfolds a complex meditation on obsession, self-destruction, and the inescapable shadows within.

In Metzengerstein, the Countess Frédérique’s obsession consumes her like a wildfire that devours the soul’s landscape, her decadent yearning collapsing into ruin. In William Wilson, the doppelgänger is a spectral conscience, a psychic torment doubling the soul in ruin at the heart of the story’s cruelty until self-annihilation becomes inevitable. Toby Dammit plunges into the fragmented delirium of a shattered mind, where reality and hallucination twist together in a dance of doom, with all psychological shadows and internal specters stalking the tale’s damned fallen idol.

I want to wander deeper into each segment’s extraordinary imagery: and believe me I’ll be paying careful attention to construct a visual narrative to help me convey Spirit of the Dead’s psychological twists and turns tracing how the film’s distorted characters embody the corrosive weight of guilt, desire, and madness; the black stallion as a symbol of unchecked passion and fatal destiny; the mirrored double reflecting the fracturing of identity; the cityscape of Rome turned surreal stage for a descent into oblivion.

So, plan on reading my journey at The Last Drive In soon as I wander deeper into these phantasmal realms, reading Spirits of the Dead as a dark requiem for the fractured human condition, a confrontation with the ghostly forces of desire, guilt, and decay that haunt us all from within.

In the Company of Ghosts: Exploring Death’s Liminal Realm in Spirits of the Dead

Spirits of the Dead (1968) feels like a haunting journey through three of Edgar Allan Poe’s most eerie imaginings. It is a triptych of Poe’s uncanny tales seen through the visionary eyes of three masterful European directors: Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Each segment feels like stepping into a vivid dream, where reality blurs with the spectral worlds that breathe in the air of existential dread, moral decay, and the strange, unsettling beauty found in the darker corners of the mind.

Known in France as Histoires extraordinaires and in Italy as Tre passi nel delirio, Spirits of the Dead is a seamless blend of Poe’s classic dark Gothic sensibilities and the boldly poetic art-house aesthetics of European cinema. It is not an ordinary horror film; it’s a mysterious dance between shadow and light, sanity and madness. Each vignette is a vivid, otherworldly brushstroke on the canvas of fear and fascination that Poe so masterfully conjured.

Spirits of the Dead brings together Vadim’s lush Gothic decadence, Malle’s cold psychological precision, and Fellini’s feverish surrealism, merging their distinct signatures into a hallucinatory anthology where visual excess, existential torment, and playful nightmare gather in a single flame within a single cinematic vision.

The first vignette, Metzengerstein, directed by Roger Vadim, immerses you in a tale steeped in old-world decadence, doomed aristocracy, and fatal obsession. Jane Fonda having electrified cinema screens that same year as the eternally iconic Barbarella, practically rocketed from outer space straight into Poe’s Gothic hall of mirrors, trading her ray gun for a riding crop, but losing none of that star-power spark, She commands the screen as the cruel, self-indulgent Countess Frédérique de Metzengerstein, whose icy detachment unravels into madness with her volatile affection for her cousin, Baron Wilhelm (Peter Fonda). Countess Frédérique, aloof, spoiled, and icy until her cool exterior starts to crack and give way to chaos.
Her dangerous obsession becomes a catalyst for doom, captured in the eerie arrival of a spectral black horse, a symbol of guilt and retribution. The horse stalks the characters and the edges of the story in a way that transcends the natural world, like fate itself.

Vadim’s segment thrums with lush, baroque cinematography by Claude Renoir, (Blood and Roses 1960, Barbarella 1968, The Horsement 1971, French Connection II 1975, The Spy Who Loved Me 1977) draping the narrative in dramatic shadows, rich velvety colors, like were wandering through a painting where every brushstroke echoes the inescapable grip of fate.

The story’s roots lie in Poe’s tale of the same name, an early Gothic masterpiece that explores themes of inherited sin and supernatural vengeance, whispering through the film. Yet, Vadim’s adaptation is bathed in a kind of extravagant grand theatricality, and gives us a world that’s beautiful, corrupt, and teetering on the edge of collapse, mirroring the countess’s moral decay and decadent indulgence. This decadence is vividly portrayed through scenes that exude a sense of uninhibited excess and dark, sensual power. Fonda’s character, Countess Frédérique, reigns over her vast estate with a cruel and self-indulgent spirit. The imagery of hedonism comes alive in her lavish surroundings, where she lives free of restraint, reveling in orgies and commanding her servants with icy detachment.

A striking element of this baroque excess is how she interacts with her leopard, an exotic and dangerous symbol of her wild and untamed nature. The leopard lounges in opulent settings, perfectly at ease amidst her drinking deeply of pleasure, underscoring Frédérique’s dominion over both people and beasts. The scenes include orgiastic gatherings rich in sensuality and excess, where Fonda’s character fully embraces her sexuality, cool, commanding, and unapologetically corrupt. The costuming– revealing and luxurious– amplifies this portrait of a woman enthroned in her own cruel pleasures.

Two key scenes in the Metzengerstein segment of Spirits of the Dead stand out for vividly capturing its Gothic atmosphere and supernatural tension.

The first is when Countess Frédérique becomes trapped in a forest snare and is rescued by her cousin, Baron Wilhelm. This moment sparks her obsessive and destructive infatuation with him, an obsession that turns deadly when Wilhelm rejects her because of her debauchery. This scene sets the stage for her vengeful wrath and the unraveling of her sanity, anchoring the narrative in the toxic dynamics of literally a consuming fire and rejection.

The second crucial scene unfolds after Baron Wilhelm perishes in a stable fire set by Frédérique’s orders. The mysterious, wild black horse, implied to be supernatural, escapes the fire and finds its way to Metzengerstein Castle. Frédérique’s fixation on taming this horse mirrors her growing obsession with her surrendering to desire, power, and control. The eerie discovery of a damaged tapestry depicting a horse identical to this spectral beast deepens the story’s sense of ancestral curse and fate. The haunting climax comes during a thunderstorm when Frédérique, mounted on the horse, is swept away into a fiery blaze caused by lightning, with a sense of eerie inevitability, symbolizing her ultimate downfall, consumed by the very forces she sought to command.

Moving from Gothic excess to psychic torment, we shift gears from the lush and decadent to something more chilling and psychological. Louis Malle takes us deep inside the mind of a man trapped by his own cruelty and guilt.

Malle’s William Wilson delves into the ritual of inhumanity and the haunting conscience embodied by a doppelgänger. Alain Delon is honestly hypnotic as the titular William Wilson, a man consumed by corruption and menace, whose shadowy double relentlessly thwarts his darkest impulses. Wilson can not escape the part of himself that is a higher reach of his nature.

The tension reaches its climax with a chilling duel that symbolizes the final eclipse of Wilson’s better self, a poignant allegory of self-destruction and lost redemption. The duel that feels less like a fight and more like Wilson’s last chance for salvation slipping away. Brigitte Bardot turns up as Giuseppina, infusing the whole thing with a kind of smoldering energy; she’s mysterious and sharp, adding a glamorous, sensual darkness to the mood.

Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography employs cold, harsh lighting and tight framing that accentuates the film’s claustrophobic and oppressive fictional air, framing the narrative within a hall of mirrors that distorts identity and morality, making spaces feel like fragmented hallways or mirrored chambers where the self is endlessly duplicated and distorted. This visual motif deepens the sense of psychological horror and the supernatural battle within Wilson’s soul.

Delli Colli, the renowned Italian cinematographer, shot Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti westerns: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, with whom he made twelve movies, including Mamma Roma (1962). He worked with Fellini, Polanski, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and Roberto Benigni on Life Is Beautiful (1997), for which he won a David di Donatello Award for Best Cinematography.

This segment draws directly from Poe’s story, William Wilson, a profound meditation on identity, duplicity, and the eternal struggle between good and evil within the self. You’re left questioning where the real William Wilson begins, and whether he ever stood a chance against himself.

The final story, Toby Dammit, is Federico Fellini at his wildest and surreal. The anthology culminates in Fellini’s macabre fantasia of nightmarish decadence. A mirage of the mind that feels both dazzling and sinister.

Terence Stamp gives a mesmerizing performance as Toby, a burnt-out, washed-up British actor wandering through a delirious, phantasmal, carnival-like Rome, haunted by ghosts and temptations that never seem to let up. Stamp’s performance captures the tormented exhaustion of a man lost in the hollow, glittering world of fame and the sweet abyss of seduction. His restless energy and haunted demeanor reflect Toby’s inner disintegration, dragging you into his spiraling nightmare of artistic torment and existential despair.

This segment transcends Poe’s original inspiration, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” by conjuring a whirl of fractured beauty, a montage of fame’s hollowness, temptation, and the inescapable grip of the devil, or perhaps the demon of inner immaturity, and self-sabotage manifested hauntingly as a childlike figure. Fellini turns it into something stranger and deeper, where the devil isn’t horns-and-brimstone, but a bizarre little girl with golden hair and a bouncing ball—creepy, innocent, and inexplicably powerful.

Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography and Fabrizio Clerici’s art direction construct a vivid dreamscape where the boundaries between reality and illusion dissolve into a hallucinatory fever. The visuals, shot by Rotunno and designed by Clerici, are pure nightmare logic: flashing neon, endless tunnels, surreal parties, a carnival of living caricatures, their faces painted by excess, their garments aflame with impossible fashion. A masquerade of beautiful monstrosities, swaddled in fabrics that burn with surreal bravado. All blur together until you can’t tell if Toby’s lost in a dream or losing his mind for real.

Nino Rota’s score pulses beneath the delirium, augmenting the sequence’s hypnotic disorientation. His music throbs through it all, making the whole experience feel like it’s drifting between heaven, hell, and high art.

Key moments: The frantic high-speed Ferrari race through the neon-lit streets of Rome is unforgettable. It metaphorically expresses Toby’s reckless ride toward doom, speeding headlong toward his own ruin, with no control over where he’s headed—or should I say beheaded?

Toby speeds recklessly through distorted, shadowy tunnels and eerie empty highways that feel like the twisted corridors of his own fractured psyche. The scene pulses with frenetic energy, capturing Toby’s spiraling descent into chaos and self-destruction. The dazzling, almost hallucinatory visuals combined with Nino Rota’s driving score create a nightmarish carnival ride that feels both thrilling and terrifying as Toby hurls headlong toward his doom.

Through these vividly surreal metaphors—the phantom city, the child-devil, the high-speed race, and the beheading—Fellini captures Toby Dammit’s existential despair, fame’s hollow seduction, and the tragic consequences of a life consumed by decadence and inner turmoil. This powerful segment becomes a hallucinatory allegory of self-annihilation wrapped in the grotesque splendor of a nightmare. The neon-lit cityscapes, endless tunnels, and bizarre, carnival-like parties form a phantasmagoric dreamscape where nothing is quite stable or certain.

The supernatural showdowns with the ‘devil’ and the final shocking moment when Toby pays his price with the chilling loss of his head serve as a blunt metaphor for the ultimate price of his decadent lifestyle: the climax is a literal severing that symbolizes the loss of identity, sanity, and life itself. This vivid, macabre image serves as a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of excess, fame, and inner demons dominating Toby’s fate and underscores the segment’s allegorical critique of celebrity culture and existential despair.

Under Fellini’s vision, the story becomes an almost hypnotic warning about how easy it is to get lost chasing illusions, haunted by demons both real and imagined. Through his feverish lens, Fellini transforms Poe’s original cautionary tale into a potent blend of surrealism, a bold, visionary exploration of fame’s emptiness, human frailty, and artistic torment.

One of the most striking metaphors in Fellini’s Toby Dammit is the creepy golden-haired demon child with the bouncing ball. Unlike traditional images of evil, this innocent yet sinister child symbolizes the seductive yet destructive temptations that haunt Toby internally. This unsettling, haunting presence represents the grip of the devil not as an external force but as an intimate demon of decay that Toby cannot escape.

The little blonde girl in Toby Dammit is widely acknowledged as a surreal echo and clear homage to Mario Bava’s iconic spectral child in Kill, Baby, Kill (1966).

In Bava’s film, the ghost of Melissa Graps terrorizes the village. The figure is a Victorian-dressed little girl (actually a boy actor) whose slow-motion bouncing ball and knowing, malevolent smile similarly haunts the story with an eerie, disturbing way of showing up everywhere all at once, drifting into every space, like smoke seeking every crack and crevice—a haunting face at the window, or crouching in Bava’s colorful darkness.

Both figures embody a disturbing blend of a heart unstained by shadow and a serpent in the garden, untouched purity and sheer menace, innocence and evil, serving as spectral symbols of supernatural dread and subconscious fears that linger and unsettle throughout their respective films. This motif of the sinister child becomes a powerful visual metaphor for the uncanny and the intrusion of otherworldly forces into everyday reality.

Fellini himself admired Bava’s film and imagery, and after seeing Spirits of the Dead, Bava commented that Toby Dammit used “the same ideas as in my film, exactly the same!” He recounted mentioning this to Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, who just shrugged with a smile, saying, “Well, you know how Federico is…”

When you take all three stories together, Spirits of the Dead really feels like wandering through a gallery of dreams, each one a window into Poe’s twisted imagination, yet each shaped and colored by the directors’ unique styles. It’s more than just a trio of horror tales; to me, it’s like stepping inside a living piece of art where the familiar Gothic darkness morphs into something almost lyrical. Every segment catches a slightly different part of human nature, our longing, our fears, the secret shadows we don’t talk about, and lets them bounce and refract in strange, beautiful ways.

Together, these three vignettes were forged in the fires of a poetic exploration of the uncanny, bound by Poe’s dark imagination and the distinctive cinematic artistry of their directors. All three ghostly or eerie stories invite us into surreal realms where light and shadow, color and space, and symbolic imagery all work together to evoke feelings of dislocation, dread, and otherness.

Spirits of the Dead is not merely a collection of tales but an immersive experience where Gothic horror is transmuted into a visual language that voices a haunting lamenting, each story a prism refracting the shadowed facets of desire, identity, and doom. The imagery is just astonishing. Between cinematographers — Claude Renoir’s lush, decadent colors, Tonino Delli Colli’s chilly, psychological starkness, and Giuseppe Rotunno, each crafts distinct visual palettes that heighten the film’s dreamlike quality; feverish, surreal landscapes, you’re constantly tossed between psychological landscapes, opulence, ruin, and the uncanny.

The ensemble cast is a dream team: Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, and Terence Stamp, they’re all magnetic, each one owning their piece of this haunted world of these ethereal narratives with performances that balance intensity and subtlety, embodying Poe’s tortured characters with haunting realism.

Ultimately, Spirits of the Dead becomes a kind of waking nightmare, a vivid, strangely beautiful, oneiric reflection on fear, longing, the unknown spaces in our minds, the supernatural, and the psyche that remains haunted. It’s a cinematic reverie where the boundaries of reality waver and the specters of the human soul emerge in their full, unsettling glory.

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MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #135 Sugar Hill 1974

SUGAR HILL 1974

“Notable for their anti-assimilationist ideologies, themes of revolution and revenge, and heroic enduring resilient Black Women who defeat the monster and live on, ready to fight another day. Robin R. Means Coleman continues: Voodoo is reclaimed in these films as a powerful weapon against racism (e.g., Scream, Blacula Scream 1973, and Sugar Hill 1974). Horror films from the 1970s also do not escape the label of Blaxploitation — the prevalence of financially and culturally exploitative films featuring Blackness during the decade. Here, Blaxploitation era horror films frequently advanced the notion of Black empowerment through violent revolution.” Robin R. Means Coleman.

Sugar Hill (1974) is a distinctive blend of blaxploitation and supernatural horror with some of the cultural and social themes of the 1970s. It is recognized for its pioneering portrayal of a strong Black female lead and its culturally potent integration of voodoo mythology. While Paul Maslansky is best known for his work as a writer and producer, Sugar Hill was the only film he directed. Marki Bey as Diana “Sugar” Hill, a resourceful fashion photographer, is a strong and determined Black female heroin who seeks revenge through voodoo and an army of zombies against the mobsters responsible for her boyfriend’s murder.

Bey’s portrayal of Sugar Hill is evocative and empowering, marking one of the earliest instances of a Black woman leading a horror film. This groundbreaking character subverts the typical victim role, embodying empowerment and resilience, a significant milestone in horror cinema history. The cast also includes Robert Quarry minus the undead glamour as the ruthless mob boss Morgan, Don Pedro Colley as the voodoo spirit Baron Samedi, and Zara Cully as Mama Maitresse, the voodoo queen who helps Sugar invoke the supernatural forces.

1970s horror films featuring Black women handled the Final Girl with noteworthy variation. White Final Girls were generally unavailable sexually and were masculinized through their names (e.g., Ripley) and through the use of (phallic) weaponry (e.g., butcher knives or chainsaws). By contrast, Black women were often highly sexualized, with seduction serving as a principal part of their cache of armaments. Much like the White Final Girl, Black women stare down death. However, these Black women are not going up against some boogeyman; rather, often their battle is with racism and corruption. In this regard, there is no going to sleep once the “monster” is defeated, as the monster is often amorphously coded as “Whitey,” and Whitey’s oppressions are here to stay. With no real way to defeat the evil (systems of inequality) that surrounds them, Black women in horror films could be described as resilient “Enduring Women.” They are soldiers in ongoing battles of discrimination, in which a total victory is elusive. —from page 132, chapter Scream, Whitey, Scream – Horror Noire – Robin R. Means Coleman

Sugar Hill’s cinematography by Robert C. Jessup supports the film’s unique atmosphere, shot on location in Houston, Texas, notably featuring sites like the Heights branch of the Houston Public Library as the Voodoo Institute. The visual style offers a moody, gritty representation of urban life mixed in with eerie supernatural elements such as the iconic depiction of zombies, former slaves summoned by Baron Samedi, who are both terrifying and emblematic of a deeper cultural history.

The film’s weaving of voodoo and zombie lore emerges as a profound engagement with African and Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, presented not as superficial or sensationalized elements but as vital expressions of cultural identity. This deliberate reclaiming and reinterpretation serves as a meaningful challenge, pushing back against Hollywood, which historically tended to exoticize and reduce these traditions to mere spooky stereotypes and exotic horror tropes.

The film opens with the brutal murder of Sugar’s boyfriend, Langston (Larry Don Johnson), by a ruthless mob, after he refuses to sell his club, setting Sugar on a path of vengeance. Marki Bey brings Sugar to life as a fiercely determined character who is deeply and emotionally wrought; every gesture and look feels charged, drawing us into her struggle, strength, pain, and resolve.

As Sugar goes on a quest for justice, she allies with Mama Maitresse, the voodoo queen, who possesses a mystic authority. The film’s mood darkens as Sugar learns to harness voodoo magic.

Marki Bey, beguilingly called ‘Sugar’, is the perfect example of the Black Enduring Woman driven by the same desire as Pam Grier in the non-horror Blaxploitation film Foxy Brown 1974, who uses both her charm and fierce resolve to take down “The Man” avenging her boyfriend’s murder despite facing brutal violence herself. Here in Sugar Hill, Marki Bey also seeks to avenge her boyfriend Langston’s death at the hands of a ‘white’ crime boss. Sugar’s strength lies not in traditional “masculine” weapons or in rejecting her sexuality; rather, she weaponizes her sensuality. Unlike other horror heroines who might have been written as shedding their ‘femininity’ to fight, Sugar embraces hers while exacting her revenge, embodying a distinctly powerful and enduring feminine force.

Her journey is marked by ritual scenes full of symbolism and cultural resonance. In these moments, Bey’s presence becomes almost hypnotic as she shifts from a grieving lover into a powerful avatar of supernatural power. Her expressions move between intense focus and raw emotion, revealing a character who feels deeply connected to ancestral strength and spirit.

The urban landscape, captured through moody, atmospheric cinematography, creates a striking contrast with the film’s eerie supernatural touches, the restless zombies called forth to fight alongside Sugar, and the haunting voodoo rituals that ripple through the shadows. This gives the movie a dreamlike, otherworldly whisper of spirit. And through it all, Sugar moves with a magnetic presence, her charisma drawing you in so completely that she inhabits the fantastical world with undeniable force and grace.

The climax sees Sugar confronting Morgan and his syndicate, orchestrating their downfall through voodoo’s dark might. In the merciless and unrelenting showdown, Sugar orchestrates Morgan’s downfall, luring him into the swampy trap where her journey began, watching coldly as he sinks into a pit of quicksand, powerless against the forces she commands-Baron Samedi’s zombie army and her own fierce will. This is the ultimate reckoning for Morgan, a symbol of brutal oppression, as he literally drowns beneath the weight of his own corrupt dominion and the unstoppable surge of Sugar’s retributive justice.

Sugar Hill closes on a powerful note, a moral triumph of the oppressed over cold, ruthless power, carried so vividly by Marki Bey. She leads the story with a presence that’s impossible to forget; through her, we witness a woman transformed by both supernatural forces and her own sheer determination. There’s a quiet magnetism to her mesmerizing performance, weaving through every scene, making her both the film’s emotional heart and formidable force in her own right.

Marki Bey was a singular presence in 1970s American cinema, best remembered for her fiercely captivating lead in this cult classic, Sugar Hill. Bey possesses both elegance and fire. Though not always grouped with iconic blaxploitation figures like Pam Grier or Tamara Dobson, Bey is continually praised for making a distinct impression in every role she took on, commanding the camera with a cool confidence and sympathetic depth. Despite the story’s supernatural elements, Bey’s style grounds the film; her measured intensity and wry delivery of one-liners add sly wit and a modern defiance to the role. Visually, she exudes strength and style, not to mention her stunning 70s fashions and the way she fully embraces her sexuality, commanding and unapologetically herself.

Outside of Sugar Hill, Bey showed range and adaptability in supporting roles, such as in Hal Ashby’s The Landlord 1970 and the suspense ensemble in Arthur Marks’ The Roommates 1973, as well as on television, where she had a recurring role as Officer Minnie Kaplan on Starsky & Hutch. Even decades after she left Hollywood, Marki Bey’s legacy endures among cult film fans. Marki Bey can make even minor roles memorable through a mix of quiet intelligence, warmth, a distinctive blend of poise and beauty, emotional resonance, and that unmistakable, mesmerizing screen presence.

Her own comments about acting reveal a thoughtful, ensemble-minded artist. Bey has said, “I always took every job seriously, like most performers do, and you prepare for the work… With each one you have to do the best that you can. The minute you start to think that you are the one who’s carrying the film, you’re lost. If you don’t work in tandem and you consider yourself the star, then you’re lost. I have never not worked without thinking of myself as part of an ensemble.” This humility and sense of craft are evident onscreen, where she avoids showiness for show’s sake, instead playing her parts with the goal of serving the story and elevating her castmates.

Mama Maitresse, played by Zara Cully, appears as a regal yet enigmatic voodoo queen—her white hair gleaming like a halo in the dim light, skin weathered with the wisdom of centuries, eyes twinkling with sly, knowing mischief. Cully’s face wears so much character. Draped in flowing garments that blend seamlessly with the swamp’s mist and shadows, Mama Maitresse exudes the power and mystery of a mythic elder, a matriarch who communes with spirits and summons respect with every word and gesture. Her presence is quietly commanding, wrapping the supernatural rituals she performs with an authentic sense of spiritual authority, and her voice carries the deep lilt of Southern folklore.

Zara Cully had a remarkable acting background. Born in 1892 in Massachusetts, she was renowned as an elocutionist and drama teacher, famously dubbed “Florida’s Dean of Drama” before relocating to Hollywood to escape Jim Crow racism. Her stage career spanned decades and included work as a writer, director, and teacher. In film, she appeared in projects such as
The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Brother John, and The Great White Hope, but she is best known for her role as Olivia “Mother Jefferson” George’s irrasible mother on TV’s The Jeffersons, where she became one of television’s oldest active performers in the 1970s. You can see Zara Cully in another role as a voodoo priestess in the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode “The Zombie,” where she is mischievous and vengeful, sly, cheeky, and determined, driven by the desire to avenge her beloved son’s death. Instead of a benevolent protector, she becomes a catalyst for supernatural retribution, wielding her magic to exact justice against those responsible. Kolchak, with his relentless pursuit of the truth, of course, gets in her way.

In Sugar Hill, her portrayal of Mama Maitresse is both earthy and otherworldly: she blends grandmotherly warmth with the steely resolve of a conjurer, guiding Sugar through rites of vengeance and supernatural justice. Cully’s distinctive blend of dignity, subtle humor, and spiritual wisdom turns Mama Maitresse into more than a supporting role; she becomes a living link to ancestral magic, a keeper of secrets who channels the film’s pulse of potent mysticism.

The zombie high priest in Sugar Hill is the imposing and unforgettable figure of Baron Samedi, portrayed by Don Pedro Colley (Black Caesar 1973). He is a spectral monarch of the dead, cloaked in the dark regalia of a funeral procession, top hat perched like a crown, black tailcoat flowing like the shadows of the underworld, and eyes gleaming with a mischievous, almost otherworldly fire. His face, often painted or shadowed like a skull, seems to straddle the boundary between the living and the dead, a timeless sentinel of the voodoo realm.

Baron Samedi’s presence is a symphony of contradiction: part boisterous trickster, part somber guardian of souls. His laughter rumbles like distant thunder, his voice a gravelly incantation that commands the earth to tremble and the dead to rise. Through his weave of dark magic and unholy power, he summons an army of ancient souls, zombies that claw their way from grave-covered soil, their eyes quicksilver and unblinking, their bodies dusted with the ash of forgotten ancestors. These revenants, bound by his will, become both instruments of vengeance and living echoes of a history stained with bondage and rebellion. Don Pedro Colley infuses the character with a potent charisma, lending a hypnotic energy that dances between menace and dark humor.

In his portrayal, Baron Samedi is less a mere antagonist and more a primordial force, a charismatic god of death and resurrection who moves with the grace of inevitability, his crooked smile hinting at secrets only the night knows. Samedi emerges as a haunting, poetic figure, a bridge between worlds, draped in shadow and mystery, wielding the power to command the restless dead and tilt the scales of justice in a world gripped by cruelty and betrayal.

Critically, Sugar Hill stands as a culturally significant film within the blaxploitation and horror genres in the 1970s. It portrays a narrative of vigilante justice through a Black female lens, emphasizing empowerment in a genre dominated by white male protagonists. The use of voodoo as a source of strength rather than fear resonates as a reclamation of Afrocentric cultural identity.

In retrospect, many scholars and critics recognize Sugar Hill’s lasting influence as an important step in carving out space for Black voices and characters within the horror genre and its expanding cultural boundaries. At the same time, it’s clear that the film wasn’t without its flaws; some of the stereotypes common in blaxploitation films do show up, especially in how much freedom the Black female characters actually have. These limitations of autonomy granted to Black female characters and persistent racial tropes are important to acknowledge because they shaped the evolution, influences, challenges, and conversations that followed, helping to steer the way Black horror cinema has changed since then. Still, it remains celebrated for offering a powerful and dignified Black female protagonist and for reclaiming voodoo lore in a culturally significant way.

Sugar Hill’s complex legacy, one that invites both appreciation and critical reflection, lies in its bold narrative choices, atmospheric style, and representation of Black identity and empowerment in horror cinema. It continues to be studied and appreciated as both a cult classic and a meaningful cultural artifact within 1970s genre filmmaking.

The film’s inclusion of voodoo is more than a mere exotic horror trope; it is an engaging reimagining of African and Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, portraying them as sources of strength and justice rather than fear. This aspect resonates strongly, positioning the film as a cultural statement amid the social tensions of 1970s Black America.

Sugar Hill’s impact on Black horror does two things: it is both a product of its era’s exploitation cinema and a forward-looking foundation for representation. Its impact extends beyond the era’s exploitation trends by inspiring later films that center Black experiences and voices in horror, melding genre entertainment with social commentary.

Its blend of supernatural horror and culturally rooted voodoo practices, combined with Marki Bey’s dynamic performance, helped create a cult classic that influenced later genre films featuring Black heroines. The film also illustrates how horror served as a statement on resistance against systemic oppression, with its narrative symbolizing the fight of Black individuals against racial injustice through supernatural means and the quest for empowerment in the face of systemic oppression.

Sugar Hill (1974) is significant not only for its engaging revenge-driven plot but also as a culturally rich artifact that stands at the intersection of blaxploitation and horror. Director Paul Maslansky’s vision brought together a talented cast led by Marki Bey, atmospheric cinematography that captured the essence of urban voodoo-inflected horror, and a story that resonated deeply with not just Black audiences of the time.

#135 down, 15 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #134 SUSPIRIA 1977 & PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE 1974

SUSPIRIA 1977

Crimson Dreamscapes: Dancing Through the Witch’s Labyrinth in Suspiria

Trying to write a quick tribute to Suspiria is a bit like stepping into one of its crazy hallways—full of twists, insanely vivid colors that scream at you, and a bit of Giallo mystery. It’s not the kind of movie you can just dip your toes into; you have to jump right into the madness and music. So hang tight with me, because I’m not just writing about Suspiria; I’m figuring it out as I go, moving with the rhythm and the wild energy of Argento’s phantasmagorical film. There’s a lot more to say, and I’ll be back with the full story soon.

Suspiria isn’t a film you watch so much as experience, a feverish ballet – literally – spun from light, sound, and nightmare logic under the spell of Dario Argento’s hypnotic visual style. Here, the very first step Jessica Harper’s Suzy takes into Freiburg is like the opening of Pandora’s box: rain thrashing, Argento’s camera carving through the night, Goblin’s score thundering like a ritual heartbeat.

Argento, steeped in the legacy of Italian maestros like Mario Bava, inherited a vivid visual language in which mystery and color weave together to tell stories that are as much about mood as they are about plot. This influence has rippled through generations of directors.

Argento, himself a master of the lurid and the uncanny, crafts a world where every corridor seems to pulse with secrets and every color, eyeblinding reds, bruised purples, and cavernous blues, threatens to bleed off the screen and into your psyche.

The journey opens with Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), an American dance student, arriving in Germany to attend the prestigious Tanz Akademie. From the moment she exits the airport, she is thrust into elemental chaos: howling wind, relentless rain, and a cab ride through a vacant city, watching along the way, the deep woods that feel more Grimm Brothers than real geography.

Joan Bennett cuts an unforgettable figure in Suspiria as Madame Blanc, blending old Hollywood glamour with a distinctly sinister poise. Her style is the essence of controlled elegance, with her sharp cheekbones, expressive eyes always a little too perceptive, and coiffed hair that signals both refinement and authority. Swathed in richly tailored clothing, she commands the academy’s ornate halls with every crisp gesture, her elegance (as always with Bennett) bordering on the imperious.

Bennett’s look is at once inviting and forbidding, a living relic from a more opulent era, but one whose friendliness flickers with calculation. Her performance glides between maternal concern and icy detachment, often flashing a sly, enigmatic smile that leaves you guessing about her true intentions. Each line she delivers is carefully weighted, her voice smooth and cultured, but always tinged with the threat of power just beneath the surface. You can’t help but sense that she’s someone you should never dare to cross, and if you did, it would be nothing short of perilous. In Suspiria, Joan Bennett’s Madame Blanc becomes the embodiment of decadent authority, coolly charismatic, meticulously styled, and exuding an air of mystery that deepens the film’s fairy-tale menace. She is the calm at the center of Argento’s storm of color and chaos, her presence lending gravity and intrigue to every scene she dominates and haunts.

Alida Valli casts a formidable shadow in Suspiria as Miss Tanner, the school’s head instructor. She is a figure both striking and austere, commanding every room with her severe poise and bracing authority. The flash of those white teeth of hers, that cruel smile, like a silent threat, razor-edged and unforgiving; a warning that beneath that smile lies the danger of being torn apart. Valli’s sharp, sculpted features are amplified by a crisp blazer, a tightly wound updo, and a gaze that mixes strict discipline with a flicker of almost gleeful intimidation, giving her a presence that’s at once iconic and unsettling. While others in Argento’s labyrinthine academy exude baroque elegance, Miss Tanner feels like living iron: upright posture, crisp movements, and a voice that slices through chaos as she drills the students with military resolve. Her style is meticulously restrained, no-nonsense, tailored, almost androgynous, elevating discipline to an art form. Valli definitely imbues Tanner with an air of controlled menace, as her eyes flash with a crazed intensity that hints at both sinister delight and unwavering commitment to the school’s mysterious order. Rather than mere villainy, her performance is textured with a sense of pride and sadistic glee, suggesting someone who relishes her role as both guardian and enforcer of the academy’s secrets. In the vibrant expressionistic nightmare and distorted reality of Argento’s world, Miss Tanner becomes the embodiment of institutional power turned menacing, her elegant but icy demeanor injecting every encounter with a theatrical tension. Through Valli’s singular screen presence, Miss Tanner lingers in the memory: a warden with immaculate posture, a sardonic smile, and a chillingly cheerful devotion to the rules of a haunted house that devours its own.

The walls of the academy are not just backgrounds but breathing entities, dizzying with their ornate Art Nouveau curves and impossible stains of red and green, an architecture of unease that cinematographer Luciano Tovoli molds into a living, predatory organism. Luciano Tovoli, the renowned cinematographer who shot Suspiria, has a distinguished filmography spanning decades and many acclaimed titles. Notable films he has worked on include: his acclaimed collaboration with Michaelangelo Antonioni for The Passenger 1975, recognized for its striking and contemplative visuals, and he shot Bread and Chocolate 1974. He also shot Tenebrae 1982 for Dario Argento, which features the clean, modernist look that distinguished Italian Giallo thrillers of this era. He’s worked with director Barbet Schroeder on his Reversal of Fortune 1990 and again with Schroeder on Single White Female 1992, a film that is recognized as a defining erotic and psychological thriller of the early ’90s, notable for its intense character study and unsettling portrayal of identity theft. What sets it apart is how it ushered in the shift of stalking narratives where a woman stalks another woman, breaking away from the more typical male-on-female dark pursuit narratives and expanding the cinematic conversation around obsession and psychological breakdown.

Argento’s genius lies in his orchestration of set piece after set piece. Crafting dreamlike, baroque tableaux that captivate with haunting beauty and unsettle with profound intensity, Argento’s imagery transcends storytelling to immerse us all in a fable-like nightmare that digs into primal fears and subconscious myths.

The opening is a vivid illustration of modern horror: Suzy glimpses Pat Hingle, a terrified student, fleeing the Tanz Akademie after discovering the sinister secrets hidden within the school. She runs off into the storm-soaked night, through the woods, her words lost in the thunder. Right from the start, Suzy seems like a child awakened within a nightmarish bedtime story. Pat seeks refuge at a friend’s apartment in town, and is then ambushed and gruesomely murdered by a shadowy figure, stabbed multiple times by the gloved killer, and has her head forced through a stained-glass sunburst, which is a visual aria of stylized violence. Each frame is painted in hues so intense they threaten to combust. She is ultimately hanged by a cord wrapped around her neck when her body crashes through the stained-glass ceiling.

Argento’s violence isn’t merely shocking; it’s seductive, choreographed with the same relish and precision as the dance themes in his film.

Within the secret story of Suspiria, the witches are part of a legendary trio known as The Three Mothers (“Le Tre Madri” in Italian), a mythic concept woven through Dario Argento’s trilogy: Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), and Mother of Tears (2007). Each “Mother” is an immensely powerful, ancient witch, and together, they’re referred to as the Three Mothers both within the films’ lore and by fans and critics. Their mythic names and roles are: Mater Suspiriorum (Mother of Sighs): The central antagonist of the original Suspiria, she is revealed to be Helena Markos, the founder of the Tanz Akademie in Freiburg. She is the oldest and wisest of the three, known as “The Black Queen.”

Mater Tenebrarum (Mother of Darkness): Introduced more broadly in Inferno 1980, (which I warn cat lovers, there are horrible scenes of cruelty and harm to cats), she is the youngest and most cruel of the sisters, ruling from New York. Mater Lachrymarum (Mother of Tears): The most beautiful and powerful, her story is primarily explored in Mother of Tears 2007, and she rules from Rome. Only Mater Suspiriorum (Helena Markos) is directly featured in the original Suspiria, but all three concepts and mythic names are confirmed in the sequels and expanded lore. The mythology itself draws inspiration from Thomas De Quincey’s essay “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow,” which describes three personified sorrows: Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum, and Mater Tenebrarum.

Harper’s Suzy is both ingénue and steely survivor, a softness that never slips into passivity. She floats through the phantasmagoric school, eyes wide to every bizarre ritual: the strict Madame Blanc, the cryptic Miss Tanner, and a staff who tiptoe between elegance and menace. Each morning brings new dissonance: Suzy collapsing, strange maggots raining from the ceiling, friends disappearing, reality itself warping with each step down the Technicolor labyrinth.

No moment is wasted: Daniel, the blind pianist, banished after his service dog attacks the wicked little Albert, Madame Blanc’s nephew, meets his doom in the deserted plaza. In a chilling twist, Daniel’s dog, seemingly possessed by an evil force connected to the witches’ coven, attacks and kills Daniel himself by ripping his throat out. Here, Argento lingers, the empty square, the dog’s sudden frenzy, the swooping camera mimicking unseen evil. Goblin’s electronic sorcery ratchets up the tension, their music both a prophecy and a curse. It’s more than an accompaniment; it slithers, it chants, it pounds, embedding itself into the film’s DNA to the point where you half-suspect Goblin’s spells are as powerful as those cast by the school’s unseen Mothers from Hell.

Colors here are incantations, with Argento and Tovoli turning every scene into a painting: the swimming pool’s cerulean glow; the saturated reds of the academy’s secret chambers.

When Suzy’s friend Sara tries to escape, pursued through tilted corridors and pools of color, the sequence becomes a waking nightmare, her breath echoing, her shape obscured by shadows, her death as bizarre and baroque as anything Argento ever filmed. Sara’s death scene in Suspiria is a tense and haunting sequence that unfolds with mounting dread. After uncovering suspicious notes left by Pat (the first victim), Sara tries to investigate the academy’s dark secrets, but her efforts are cut short. While fleeing through the school, she is chased by an unseen assailant and eventually cornered in the attic. Attempting to escape, Sara climbs through a small window only to fall into a pit filled with razor wire like coiled metal snakes, which entangle her. Helpless and trapped, she is then mercilessly slain by the attacker, who slashes her throat, leaving her to bleed out and die.

Later, Suzy discovers Sara’s disfigured corpse hiding inside a room beneath the academy. In a chilling, supernatural moment, the coven reanimates Sara’s corpse to attack Suzy, heightening the horror before the climax. Sara’s death, both brutal and symbolic, underscores the relentless and mystic danger lurking within the Tanz Akademie.

The dance academy is filled with an eerie assortment of odd characters. Franca Scagnetti (credited as Cook) stands squat and unyielding—a sinister figure whose cold gaze sharpens with secret malice, as if she’s waiting to poison the soup with nothing more than a single, venomous stare. The intimidating giant Pavlos’s mute presence, along with his strange, false teeth, makes his lurching and gaze feel both menacing and mysterious, hinting at the dark secrets hidden within the academy. Pavlos often watches Suzy with a fixed, unsettling intensity that hints at his threatening nature beneath his silent exterior.

Gradually, Suzy uncovers the truth: the school is a coven for witches, presided over by Helena Markos—a name whispered with reverence and fear. The climax becomes a delirium, reality distortion as Suzy, drugged into near-paralysis by the staff’s daily milk, resists, discovers Markos’s lair, and confronts the invisible High Priestess.

Suzy unlocks the cryptic puzzle to enter Helena Markos’s hidden chamber by recalling a whispered clue about “three irises” and a secret key. She turns a blue iris painted on a mural in Madame Blanc’s office, which triggers a hidden door to open, revealing a narrow, shadowed passage. Following it cautiously, Suzy discovers the secret room where the school’s dark heart beats—the lair of Helena Markos. The chamber is dimly lit, filled with eerie symbols, and suffused with an atmosphere of oppressive dread. As Suzy approaches, she hears the uncanny, labored breathing behind a curtain and sees the silhouette of Markos, setting the stage for their chilling confrontation.

This unsettling sound signals the presence of Helena Markos, the academy’s sinister founder. When Suzy moves the curtain, she only sees the surreal dark silhouette, who then taunts her with an invisible, ghostly, malevolent presence. The silhouette, flickering in and out of view amid flashes of lightning, conveys a haunting and intangible terror. Markos’s figure looms ominously, a spectral force.

Suzy vanquishes Helena Markos by stabbing her through the neck with a broken glass quill from a decorative peacock. As lightning flashes, Markos’s invisible silhouette becomes visible in its full decrepit form, writhing in pain before succumbing to death. The final confrontation is an assault of light and screaming color, a peacock feather of death, a knife, a corpse, a storm swelling as the old world burns behind her. Suzy flees, free and forever changed, stepping out into rain-slicked freedom as Goblin’s music rises, leaving us breathless. Argento’s direction is a dance itself: precise, theatrical, yet wild-eyed. He’s supported by a cast that breathes enigmatic life into every turn.

Harper is extraordinary, her porcelain delicacy offset by flashes of will and defiance, always the emotional center as the world tilts further into fairy-tale terror. The supporting players, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett, and Udo Kier (widely regarded as a cult star), playing Dr. Frank Mandel, an occult expert and former psychiatrist, with an epic, Gothic presence and impressive stature, their performances carry an arch and knowing intensity.

Suspiria’s impact is indelible, driving a stake into the polite restraint of earlier Gothic horror and giving birth to a new baroque, aggressively sensual cinema. Here, horror isn’t something to be shied from, but something to bask in like a pool of warm blood, every color turned up, every note from Goblin’s synths pierces your skin, every image vibrating on the edge of delirium. Argento gives us a world where beauty is dangerous, magic is real, and dread is a velvet ribbon threading through every glowing frame. The result is alchemy—pure, terrifying, and absolutely spellbinding alchemy.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE 1974

I’ll be pairing Phantom of the Paradise with Suspiria at the Last Drive-In because both masterpieces feel like dropping a velvet curtain over the world and stepping into a dreamscape where every shadow aches and every song and score is a spell. For me, it won’t just be a Jessica Harper double feature, though that’s tribute enough—it’s a communion, a secret gathering at the crossroads where haunted melody and midnight terror conspire. These films mark out the borders of my own artistic landscape as a singer/songwriter: I grew up worshipping at the altar of classic horror, chasing the elegant ghosts of Universal and the shadowplays of RKO’s Val Lewton, but later the odyssey of these twin wonders, gripped me with their Gothic spectacle each held aloft by Harper’s quiet, otherworldly presence.

Phantom of the Paradise isn’t just a film—it’s an Operatic fever, a burst of electric longing, where Paul Williams’s music wraps around you like a glorious shroud and refuses to let go. The first time I heard Jessica Harper’s voice, pure, aching, luminous, I felt something inside me unspool. Here was a film that wasn’t afraid to pour agony into glamour, to turn every heartbreak into a power chord, every glittered costume into a confession. As a singer-songwriter, that kind of alchemy stopped me in my tracks: the old monsters and haunted mansions I loved still remain, yet now crisscrossing with the music that shaped who I am. Back-to-back, these two films are a conversation between pain and beauty, dread and desire. Phantom spins its web with rock Opera bravado, dazzling and sharp and wild, while Suspiria coils its magic in silent corridors and enigmatic colors, yet Harper is the silken thread that binds them, whispering that real transformation often lives in the quietest parts of our longing.

For anyone who’s ever sought solace in music or found themselves entranced by the glow of a haunted screen, this double feature is a rite of passage. It’s a testament to the possibility that horror can be beautiful, and that the right song—or the right scream—can carry you all the way home, as the night deepens outside. So don’t leave your seats, the stage is set at The Last Drive In for an upcoming feature.

Wings of Glam and Ruin: Spiraling Into Phantom of the Paradise:

Phantom of the Paradise 1974 is a delirious Faustian mosaic, electric hallucination conjured by Brian De Palma—a rock Opera stitched from fragments of Faust, Phantom of the Opera, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but utterly singular in style and tone. From the first moments, the film vibrates with energy, each scene sculpted by De Palma’s restless camera and the introspective and melodic songwriter Paul Williams’s mercurial score. The soundtrack of Phantom of the Paradise is a diverse, stylized musical journey crafted by Williams, blending genres from ’50s rock ‘n’ roll to glam-rock, quirky surf-rock, and lush, tragic, mournful ballads, cabaret style, and dark blues. Each song acts as a vivid character piece that drives the film’s dramatic color.

Phantom of the Paradise creates an absurd and wildly entertaining world with a glam-rock twist on the Phantom of the Opera mythology, where every heartbeat of the film and its characters syncs to music and desire, where innocence is torn to shreds by machinery, and where every costume is a mask hiding wounds and fading dreams. You feel that haunting ache beneath all the spectacle of evocative, wounded glamour.

The film is an utter masterpiece, combining Gothic fantasy-horror with caustic satire and some of the most beautiful, vivid cinematography by Larry Pizer, marked by a vivid contrast between rich, deep shadows offstage and vibrant, saturated colors onstage, creating a dynamic visual world that pulses with energy and mood. He skillfully uses chiaroscuro lighting, striking color palettes, and inventive camera angles, like low-angle shots and fish-eye lenses, to emphasize the film’s operatic, surreal, and sometimes grotesque atmosphere, conveying a neon-70s aesthetic fused with eerie thriller style. Phantom of the Paradise is a nihilistic satire of music and commodification that functions as a cautionary tale about corruption and fame, not to mention a biting indictment of the music industry.

The song, Old Souls, lingers with me, Jessica Harper’s voice unraveling memory and longing like silk in twilight, each note a gentle ache, the song haunting my heart as if it were stitched from pieces of my own dreams and regrets. Every time I hear Old Souls, it’s like Jessica Harper is singing straight through the wiring of my own heart, her voice soft enough to stop the world. It’s a lullaby—wistful, haunted, timeless.

I’ve always been drawn to Paul Williams. And, it’s not just me. He is iconic. A beloved and well respected songwriter, his work is bittersweet, possessing that beautiful loser pathos, a quality that brought both warmth and a heart breaking melancholy to songs like We’ve Only Just Begun, and Rainy Days and Mondays (Roger Nichols wrote the music and Williams penned the lyrics ) which was a major hit for the Carpenters in 1971. Those exquisite lyrics that the gentle radiance and intimate tone of Karen Carpenter’s voice breathed velvet warmth and quiet ache into and made the music sigh with life and longing. Talk about singing straight through the wiring of your heart, broken or otherwise.

Williams also wrote Rainbow Connection for the Muppets and co-wrote several songs for the 1976 film A Star Is Born, most notably conjuring the lyrics to Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born) with Barbra Streisand, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. That song, through Streisand’s transcendent voice, simply slays me every time I hear it.

Paul Williams’s songs didn’t just ride the wave of the 1970s; they pressed their thumb right on its pulse. The guy’s music could make you feel seen, whether you were belting out the hooks alone in your car or humming along softly in the kitchen. His music doesn’t just tug at my heart; it rips it wide open, drags every raw, aching piece out into the light, and leaves me drowning in a flood of pain and longing. Williams’s magic was his sensitivity. His introspective, emotionally rich lyrics and unforgettable melodies not only shaped the spirit and sound of that era but also proved that true artistry and vulnerability could rise to the top of the charts.

Jessica Harper’s striking yet approachable: large, expressive eyes, delicate features, and a softness that evokes both innocence and a kind of classic, fairy-tale beauty can’t be overstated. Her acting style is naturalistic and quietly magnetic, a quality that has made her a cult favorite and a memorable presence in some of the most visually arresting films of the 1970s and ’80s. Critics and fans alike have noted her “regular-girl charm” and “wide-eyed girl-next-door appearance,” which lend her a relatable vulnerability, but beneath that surface lies a subtle strength and intelligence that grounds even the most surreal stories. Harper’s performances are marked by a gentle, almost minimalist approach. She conveys emotion through nuanced facial expressions and body language rather than melodrama, making her reactions feel authentic even in the most bizarre circumstances.

Phantom of the Paradise fuses both these dynamic elements — Paul Williams’s raw, heartbreaking songwriting with Jessica Harper’s haunting, luminous presence and voice to tell a story where music and madness collide in a dark, unforgettable swirl.

Wings and bird imagery run right through Phantom of the Paradise, from Swan to Phoenix, the names alone make it clear this story is all about transformation, flight, and the kind of rebirth you can only find when you’re caught between the stage lights and the shadows.

The bird imagery pops up everywhere in the Phantom’s sharp, owl-like or falcon-esque mask, signifying his transformation into something both predatory and spectral. Phoenix rocks her feathered jacket onstage, and Beef (Gerrit Graham), the glam-rock singer, struts around with this crazy, rooster-inspired tail. Even Swan can’t resist, showing up in bird-print shirts now and then. It’s like every character gets swept up in this strange, swirling world of transformation and flight. Bird symbolism is further etched into the branding of Death Records, Swan’s label, which uses a dead songbird as its logo. This morbid twist foreshadows the toxic machinery of Swan’s empire, a place where beauty and music (and the birds they evoke) are ultimately doomed.

This obsession with wings and birds is not only a surface style but also an allegory: the three central characters, Winslow (the Phantom), Swan, and Phoenix, are all undone by their ambition, a nod to the myth of Icarus and the dangers of flying too close to the sun. The bird imagery reinforces themes of transformation, aspiration, and doomed flight, the fate that awaits anyone seduced by the Paradise.

The bold, colorful, and flamboyant costumes were designed by Rosanna Norton, who collaborated closely with actor William Finley to create the Phantom’s iconic owl-like mask and futuristic bondage-inspired costume featuring leather and buckles. The costumes transform the cast into living avatars of decadence, corruption, and longing.

These costumes fly between glam rock spectacle and Gothic excess, glittering and unsettling, woven with equal threads. The Phantom himself wearing that black leather bondage suit and a silver owl-falcon mask that fuses S&M futurism with plague-doctor hauntings, transforming him into a night creature both tragic and threatening.

The stage of the Paradise is a riot of visual invention, with feathered jackets, sequins, and outlandish glam make-up turning every performer into a baroque icon or a fallen idol. Phoenix’s feather-trimmed stagewear conjures mythic rebirth, like her legendary creature, who rises from the ashes. While Beef’s over-the-top glam looks verge on self-parody, it is a shimmering, hyperreal display of doomed ambition. Even Swan’s entourage, in Death Records tees and serpent brooches, shimmer like phantoms of stardom flickering at the edge of nightmare.

These costumes are not just threads and sequins but theatrical masks, dazzling shells concealing wounds, desires, and monstrous metamorphoses. Each look is a living metaphor, shimmering on the edge of excess and collapse, a fantasy world of identity creation and playful sensuality, where everyone is both masquerader and sacrifices. Norton’s work on the film marked an early point in her career; she later became known for her Oscar-nominated designs for Tron and has also worked on notable films such as Carrie, Airplane!, Gremlins II, The Flintstones, and Casper.

Distilled to its heart, Phantom of the Paradise is about a songwriter named Winslow who gets his music—and his life—stolen by a ruthless producer named Swan (Paul Williams). Winslow’s quest for justice turns him into the Phantom, haunting Swan’s theater and trying to protect Phoenix, his muse and the singer he believes should be a star.

We step into the story through Winslow Leach, a shy, passionate composer. His music, an epic cantata on Faustian themes, sets the stage, catching the ear of the elusive impresario, Swan. Swan is all shadow and myth, a string-puller so rarely glimpsed that his very presence warps the air of the Paradise, the club he’s about to open. Winslow’s music is stolen; he’s discarded, then railroaded into prison. All the while, the world is set aflame by pop churn: bands like the Juicy Fruits, doomed to surf Swan’s rises and falls, shift through styles like borrowed clothes, a funhouse mirror of the music industry. These bands rapidly and superficially adopt different musical styles without genuine originality or identity, which satirically reflects how the music industry often pushes for constant restless trends and commercialization rather than authentic artistry.

Winslow’s transformation into the Phantom isn’t just a plot twist. His transformation is a horrific incident of grotesquerie, a brutal, nightmarish twisting of flesh and fate that shatters his humanity and forges the monstrous Phantom. Spun out of pain and twisted luck. He’s desperate to get his music back from Swan, but instead, he’s framed and left broken. The moment everything changes comes when Winslow tries to sneak into Swan’s record factory by night, hoping to sabotage the place and steal back his own voice. But fate is cruel: he gets caught in a machine, and a record press slams down on his face, mangling him, leaving him half-blind, half-mad, and voiceless.

The record press scene where Winslow’s face is crushed is such a stark display of cinematic brutality in its unflinching physicality and excruciatingly explicit violence. The relentless mechanical precision, the sudden eruption of chaos, and how visceral it is — the shattering of flesh, the erasure of identity, converge to create a moment of raw shock, with its graphic realities of bodily harm. For me, this sequence stands out as one of the film’s most unyielding bursts of horror and a testament to both De Palma’s willingness to startle us and the genre’s ability to disturb us on a profoundly gut level.

He stumbles out, wounded and desperate, and disappears into the darkness, only to be reborn in the shadows of the Paradise theater. Now, part man, part myth, he cobbles together a cape and that fierce, birdlike mask to hide his ruined face. The pain, the betrayal, and that desperate longing for justice all fuse together, transforming him from Winslow Leach, the hopeful songwriter, into the Phantom, a haunted, vengeful presence stalking the catacombs of Swan’s empire, his music echoing his heartbreak for all to hear.

De Palma, always the gleeful magician, crafts scenes that zigzag between the grotesque and the ecstatic. Winslow’s escape from prison is a cascade of humiliation and violence, including brutal dental surgery straight from the Inquisition. His final transformation comes at the cost of his very face, pressed and mangled in an industrial accident at Swan’s record factory. Bloodied and mute, Winslow emerges as the Phantom, donning a silver owl mask and a cape, stalking the Paradise’s labyrinthine backstage world. De Palma wields split screens and lurid lighting not just as tricks, but as an invitation: step inside the dream, the nightmare, the fantasia.

Every moment hums with Paul Williams’s music, a chameleonic parade that skewers and celebrates pop. Tracks leap from the doo-wop pastiche “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye” to sun-bleached surf (“Upholstery”), to the swaggering, camp anthem “Somebody Super Like You,” and finally to shattering ballads like “Faust” and “Old Souls.” The soundtrack, perhaps some of Williams’s finest work, is not just background, but oxygen. It colors every frame, ricocheting between cynicism and William’s signature sentiment, longing, never more so than in “Old Souls,” where hope shimmers just out of reach.

Phoenix, played by Jessica Harper, in her first major film role, is the wounded angel at the film’s heart. Harper brings an uncanny blend of fragility and determination: her voice is crystalline, real, and achingly full of hope. As Phoenix, she navigates De Palma’s minefield with wide-eyed grace and steely resolve, her performances so psychologically charged you almost flinch. Her audition, murmured quietly to herself, is the film’s first truly honest moment, a voice that fills the room without ever straining. Phoenix’s journey is both a meditation on the cost of innocence in the machinery of spectacle and a showcase for Harper’s subtle, haunting charisma. Her music, particularly “Special to Me” and “Old Souls”, acts as both balm and spell, the beating heart beneath the film’s satirical skin.

The plot’s wild pirouettes propel us from scene to scene: Winslow, now Phantom, attempts sabotage with dynamite; Beef, the preening glam rocker, gets a death by electric guitar in a scene as absurd as it is operatic; Phoenix is snatched from innocence for the Paradise’s main stage. At every turn, De Palma punctuates the grotesque with slapstick, gore with grandeur, his camera always in motion, split screens fracturing reality like a disco ball.

The film crescendos with Swan’s ultimate betrayal. Phoenix, lauded as the Paradise’s star, is seduced and corrupted, just as Winslow feared. In a surreal finale, contracts written in blood—literally—bind Phantom and Swan to each other’s destruction. The Paradise becomes a true carnival of ruin: musical hits, murders, fame, and death all tangled up together as Paul Williams’s songs turn from ecstasy to requiem. Winslow’s and Swan’s fates play out on stage under the glare of spotlights, fantasy and reality collapsing together, a masquerade ball drenched in spilled secrets.

De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise is both a love letter and a poison pen to the music industry, a tale of masks and betrayals where the most beautiful voices are always at risk of being silenced or stolen. It’s a work of wild invention, brimming with satirical bite and genuine sorrow. The film leaves you dazed, reeling in the memory of lights, sounds, and sins, wondering if you’ve survived the spectacle!