Trailer Tuesday: PREMATURE BURIAL

THE PREMATURE BURIAL (1962)

Starring: Ray Milland, Hazel Court, Heather Angel, Alan Napier, Richard Ney.
Written by: Charles Beaumont
Directed by: Roger Corman
Produced by: Roger Corman

A change of stars and a change of writers. The backstory is that Roger Corman felt that AIP was making all kinds of money from these films, but their creative accounting was making sure that he did not get his fair share. So he decided to make a film on his own, partially financed by Pathe labs. Because Vincent Price was under contract to AIP, he had to find another actor... and that was Ray Milland. The sets and props they had accumulated in the previous films belonged to AIP. But many of the key crew members like cinematographer Floyd Crosby came with him (even though this film has a different look). The screenplay was by Charles Beaumont, who wrote a bunch of TWILIGHT ZONE episodes, as had Richard Matheson (who wrote the previous Corman Poe films). This script has a different feel than the two previous films in the series... and takes place in a different time period...



Sometime in Victorian era (around 1830) two laborers Sweeney (John Dierkes) and Mole (Dick Miller) dig up a grave in a foggy graveyard as Guy Carrell (Ray Milland) and Dr. Gideon Gault (Alan Napier - Arthur from BATMAN) look on. Sweeney & Mole are both grave diggers and bodysnatchers - stealing this corpse for Dr. Gault’s medical research. They pull off the lid of the coffin - it is scratched and bloody! Sweeney & Mole scream and jump out of the grave - inside the coffin a man, arms up, trying to claw his way out... dead now, but not when he was buried!

Pretty Miss Emily Gault (Hazel Court) rides up to the fog shrouded mansion in a carriage, knocks on the door, which is answered by butler Judson (Clive Halliday). Just inside Emily runs into stern looking Kate Carrell (Heather Angel) and asks to see Guy... but Kate says he does not wish to see her. Emily says she will have to hear that from Guy himself, she deserves an explanation. She brushes past Kate and enters Guy’s study, where he is painting. Seems that Guy broke off their engagement with a letter, and this did not please Emily. She asks him to say that he doesn’t love her - but he can’t, he *does* love her... which is why he had to break up their relationship. “I didn’t run away from what was inside that coffin, but from what is inside myself. That is why there can never ne a marriage between us.” He asks Emily to come with him... down to the family crypt.

Bats fly through the dark corridor at them. When they reach the crypt, Guy says she always wanted to meet the rest of his family... well here they are. The famous and infamous. “From the beginning, death has come to the Carrell’s like an assassin.” For years he has lived in dread of being buried alive, “Can you possibly conceive it? The unendurable oppression if the lungs, the stifling fumes of the damp earth, the rigid embrace of the coffin, the blackness of absolute night, and the silence - like an overwhelming sea. And then, invisible in the darkness, but all too hideously read to the other senses, the presence of the conqueror worm.”

Guy tells Emily that every member of his family has met with a violent and horrifying death, and now he waits his turn. His father had catalepsy - and when Guy was 13 years old seemed to have died of a heart attack, was sealed in his vault... but that night Guy heard him screaming. Buried alive!

Kate does not believe this. She believes their father was dead when he was buried.

Guy says his wedding gift to her would be his catalepsy and his morbid fear of being buried alive... but Emily says she accepts this, and still wishes to marry him.

So they are wed.

At the wedding reception, Emily’s old flame Miles Archer (?) (Richard Ney) wishes her happiness. Emily plays a tune on the piano, “Molly Malone”... which seems to drive Guy crazy, he yells at her to stop and runs upstairs to his bedroom.

Later, Emily (in her negligee) enters the bedroom and wakes Guy with a kiss. She asks if he is feeling better. Guy explains that Sweeney & Mole were whistling that same tune when they unearthed that man who had been buried alive... wen she played it on the piano it brought back memories. She kisses him to make him forget. Then a scream in the night! Guy grabs a candle to investigate, tells Emily to stay in the bedroom.

He creeps through the dark and stormy night for the source of the scream... finds Kate over his dog. The dog was killed by the lightning. Guy says he will get a shovel and bury him... but then the dog pops to his feet, only stunned by the lightning strike. Guy freaks out - he was going to bury his dog alive!

The next morning Emily asks if they will be going on honeymoon to Venice... Guy says they will not. He has a project that will be taking up his time here at home.

A month later, Emily calls for Miles... she is concerned about Guy. He is ill. Something he may have caught while they were on honeymoon in Venice? She tells him they never went to Venice, and leads Miles outside to the mausoleum that Guy has built. She knocks on the door, and Guy gives them a tour of the mausoleum... It has a fully stocked bar! Also a coffin built so that it can be opened from the inside. It also has a bell that can be rang from the inside the coffin, various tools within the coffin, a larder in the mausoleum in case he needs to eat, books, music... and in the event that no one comes to open the mausoleum - poison to kill himself so that he will really be dead. Every possibility accounted for. If Guy is buried alive, this mausoleum provides every solution!

Emily and Miles discuss Guy - is he crazy? Miles worries that this obsession with catalepsy will actually cause Guy to develop the disease. Emily wishes Miles could spend more time with her, and Miles mentions that Guy has offered him the use of the basement laboratory... so maybe he will take him up on that offer and spend more time with Emily? Kate overhears all of this...

In the basement laboratory, Miles demonstrates how an electrical current can create reanimation in the body of a dead frog... then encourages Guy to continue with his own experiments... to take his mind off these troubling thoughts of his.

Emily and Guy take a walk through the spooky fog shrouded woods around their house. Guy hears a strange noise - whistling? - and runs to follow it, leaving Emily behind. He ends up lost in the fog, trying to follow someone whistling “Molly Malone”... and eventually comes face to face with Sweeney & Mole and faints.

He wakes up in a green tinted sequence, trapped in a coffin! He tries to escape, eventually knocking the coffin over - he is in his mausoleum! He tries ringing his bell - no one answers. All of his James Bond Mausoleum Gadgets break or fail to work! And there’s a freakin’ tarantula on his box of TNT and rats have infested his food and booze supplies! He is left with only one “escape” method left... his poison! He prepares to drink it - but the flask is filled with worms!

He awakens from this nightmare with Emily and Miles callling his name - he has passed out. Emily never saw Sweeney & Mole nor heard them whistling. They take him back to the house and put him to bed. Then Miles tells Emily that Guy *imagined* the Laborers because he’s obsessed with premature burial... probably because his father was buried alive. Kate has been eves dropping (as usual) and chimes in that their father was *not* buried alive - she saw him in the coffin, resting in peace.

Guy wakes up... hears the whistling coming from somewhere in the house. Follows the sound... down to the basement. Opens a door and *wham* a rocking horse toy’s head pops out at him. He goes deeper into the room. A voice behind him: “It’s the wind!” Guy spins and Kate stands in the doorway. The window *has* blown open, and Guy goes to close it... but Sweeney looks through the window at him. Guy jumps back. “Did you see him?” “See who?” Only Guy has seen Sweeney.

Miles and Emily hatch a plan to cure Guy...

Emily find Guy painting in his mausoleum (?) - a hideous painting of Satan lording over a world consumed in flames. You know, something a perfectly sane person would paint. Emily tells Guy he must make a choice - be obsessed by death and hang out in his mausoleum... or come back to the house and be a husband. But if he doesn’t come back, she’s going to split. The mausoleum or her - he must choose one or the other.

He decides to choose Emily, and destroys his mausoleum.

A dinner party Friday night to celebrate his decision.

The hand of someone unseen unlocks a cupboard exposing several keys and selects one, the hand then takes the key down into the basement crypt below the house and unlocks the tomb door for Guy’s father and enters the chamber.

At the dinner party, Guy is looking and acting much better. As they are having brandy and cigars, Guy hears the cat mewing... from within the walls! So does everyone else, and Miles finds a loose wall panel and rescues the cat. But Guy worries - what if they had not heard the cat? And it was walled up forever. Miles tells Guy the only way he will get over this fear is to go down to his father’s crypt and see with his own eyes that his father was *not* buried alive. So the whole danged dinner party goes down the spooky stairway, through the spider webs, to the crypts... but first a stop at that cupboard to get the key. Except the key is missing. Miles wonders if Guy took the key, so that he wouldn’t have to actually look into his father’s tomb and see that he was not buried alive. Guy says he did not do that... and they don’t need a key, they can pry it open. Grabs a crow bar and the dinner party goes deeper and deeper into the crypt. To the door to his father’s tomb - where Guy gets cold feet. “If you fail now, you’ll be haunted forever”, Miles says.

Guy takes the crowbar to the door and pries it open... and his father’s skeleton falls out at him... out of it’s coffin! When the skeleton hits Guy, he goes down.

They carry him upstairs - Dr. Gault examines him... heart attack, dead! Eyes open, unblinking. Not breathing. Dead.

We hear Guy’s thoughts: “I’m not dead, I’m alive!”

Miles says there is one more test, and has the women leave the room as he brings in his electrical apparatus and gives Guy a shock. Nothing happens. His heart does not seem to start up again. “He’s dead.”

Guy’s thoughts: “I am not dead!”

“May as well take him back to the crypt,” says Dr. Gault. Emily says she promised him that she would not bury him in the crypt.

Guy’s funeral. Guy in a coffin, we hear his thoughts: “Help me! Someone help me!”

Emily gives him one final kiss, everyone says their goodbyes.

The pall bearers carry his coffin to the graveyard, funeral procession following behind. The coffin has a small glass window... and Guy’s eye pop open! He wonders if anyone will look inside the window and see that his eyes are open now... but nobody does. They put him in the hole, not even noticing that his eyes are wide open. “I’m alive! I’m alive!” Then Sweeney & Mole shovel dirt over the coffin... over the window and Guy’s open eyes. Soon the coffin is covered in dirt.

At the house, Kate wonders if Emily will stay in the house, or move on with her life (and hook up with Miles)? Emily says she hasn’t thought about leaving. Miles believes that Guy killed himself in a way - because he was so obsessed with death, he created the situations which lead to his death.

That night Sweeney & Mole are digging up a grave... more medical research. They get to the coffin and Sweeney has Mole go fetch the crowbar to pop the lid. While Mole is gone, Sweeney managers to get the lid open by hand... and the corpse reaches up and strangles him!

Mole grabs the crow bar, hears someone walking up behind him and says, “Found it Mr. Sweeney!” But it is not Mr. Sweeney... it is a deranged Guy who stabs Mole with the crow bar!

Dr. Gault is in the basement laboratory of his medical practice when the door opens and Sweeney enters with the corpse over his shoulder. The corpse, wrapped in a burlap sack, is placed on a table in the back. “Ironic isn’t it? In life Guy Carrell contributed nothing to medical science, but in death he shall serve it admirably.” Dr. Gault unwraps the corpse from the burlap... but when he uncovers the face, it isn’t Guy... it’s *Sweeney*! Dr. Gault spins to see Guy standing in the darkness behind him. “No! You’re dead!”Guy knocks out Dr. Gault - hooks up Miles’ electrical apparatus to him and lights him up. Electrocuting Dr. Gault.

Meanwhile, back at the house - Dr. Miles is examining Emily, if you know what I mean and I think you do. She’s half naked in bed and tells him that she in need of someone to give her solace. “You and I were very close once, Miles.” She puts the moves on him. “Maybe it’s not too late for us.” Just as they are about to kiss, a knock at the door.

Judson enters - A medical emergency, Dr. Gault needs him.

Emily brushes her hair when a figure enters her bedroom... Miles? Nope, Guy. “No kiss?” Is she seeing a ghost? Her husband is dead. She reaches out to touch the ghost... gets flesh instead. Faints on the spot.

Meanwhile, Miles has discovered Dr. Gault dead - electrocuted. He races back to Emily.
But when Miles gets back to Emily’s bedroom he finds the bed empty.

Guy has carried unconscious Emily away... through the fog, back to the grave he was so recently buried in. Emily wakes up and pleads with Guy. She wasn’t the one who set up his father’s corpse - that was Kate. Kate is the evil one, not Emily. Emily *loves him*. She just adjusted to what happened next. “You wouldn’t kill me?” “No, darling, not at all. Just as you didn’t kill me. You wouldn’t soil your pretty hands with murder. No, you just stood aside and let men bury me alive! And so, I shall not kill you... That sorry task I shall leave to the earth... and the darkness... and the terrified pounding of your own heart.” Then he dumps her into the coffin he so recently vacated and grabs a shovel. Emily screams as he throws shovels full of dirt on her face!

Miles shows, and they fight for the shovel. Guy wrestles the shovel away from him, raises it up to cleave it down upon his face!

Bang! A gunshot. Guy falls over, dropping the shovel. Kate stands there with a gun.

As Miles scrambles into the grave to rescue Emily, Kate walks up to where Miles lays dying. Miles digs through the dirt and finds Emily, pulls her out of the grave... but it is too late. She is dead. Miles freaks out, but Kate says Emil got what she deserved, look around her neck. Miles pulls out Emily’s necklace... and the crypt key is at the end of it! (Hidden between her lightly freckled bosoms.) Emily was the one who set up the corpse in the crypt that sent Guy into a state of shock... but she never had time to return the key. “Sweet, beautiful, gentle, Emily... Once you told her how easy ot would be to use Guy’s fear to kill him, she went to work. First, hiring the grave robbers to torment him, the cat in the wall, and finally the desecration of our father’s tomb.” Kate will see to Guy’s funeral, now that he is really dead.

Fade Out...

If you are wondering what happened between Roger Corman and the AIP guys, well, they bought the rights to PREMATURE BURIAL and came to some sort of agreement with Corman which brought him back into the fold for more AIP Poe films with Vincent Price. In the DVD extras, Roger goes out of his way to say that AIP treated him fairly, and my guess is that this film was partially a learning experience for him - that every distributor does “creative book keeping” (look at the HARRY POTTER movies that Warner Brothers claims lost money) and you kind of have to just accept that (and make *your* deal with that knowledge). (Some novelist, and I’m going to guess it was Lawrence Block since I read his Writer’s Digest column every month, said you can only expect to be paid whatever you get upfront, and that is my advice for screenwriters - the money in hand may be the only money they ever give you - no matter what they promise to pay you later.) Roger Corman continued to work with AIP - making 4 to 5 films a year for them.

We are going to skip one of the films in the series for time (we only have 13 days) so next up is THE RAVEN.

Bill

Fridays With Hitchcock: Scorsese On DIAL M FOR MURDER

Scorsese's MEAN STREETS is one of my ten favorite films, and here he is talking about DIAL M FOR MURDER - which was based on a great stage play by Frederick Knott, and is kind of a contained thriller before that was a thing. Shot in 3D, and even if you see the "flat" version, the dynmaic shots composed for 3D add to the film. But what does Marty have to say about the film?

- Bill

Of course, I have my own books focusing on Hitchcock...

HITCHCOCK: MASTERING SUSPENSE

LEARN SUSPENSE FROM THE MASTER!

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed 52 movies, was known as the “Master Of Suspense”; but what exactly is suspense and how can *we* master it? How does suspense work? How can *we* create “Hitchcockian” suspense scenes in our screenplays, novels, stories and films?

This book uses seventeen of Hitchcock’s films to show the difference between suspense and surprise, how to use “focus objects” to create suspense, the 20 iconic suspense scenes and situations, how plot twists work, using secrets for suspense, how to use Dread (the cousin of suspense) in horror stories, and dozens of other amazing storytelling lessons. From classics like “Strangers On A Train” and “The Birds” and “Vertigo” and “To Catch A Thief” to older films from the British period like “The 39 Steps” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” to his hits from the silent era like “The Lodger” (about Jack The Ripper), we’ll look at all of the techniques to create suspense!

Films Included: NOTORIOUS, SABOTAGE, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE 39 STEPS, REBECCA, TO CATCH A THIEF, FRENZY, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, THE LODGER, THE BIRDS, TORN CURTAIN, SABOTEUR, VERTIGO, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1955), SUSPICION, and NUMBER SEVENTEEN. 17 Great Films!

Only 125,000 words!

Price: $5.99

Click here for more info!

OTHER COUNTRIES:


UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

And....

HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR

USA Readers click here for more info!

HITCHCOCK DID IT FIRST!

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master Of Suspense, but did you know he was the most *experimental* filmmaker in history?

Contained Thrillers like “Buried”? Serial Protagonists like “Place Beyond The Pines”? Multiple Connecting Stories like “Pulp Fiction”? Same Story Multiple Times like “Run, Lola, Run”? This book focuses on 18 of Hitchcock’s 52 films with wild cinema and story experiments which paved the way for modern films. Almost one hundred different experiments that you may think are recent cinema or story inventions... but some date back to Hitchcock’s *silent* films! We’ll examine these experiments and how they work. Great for film makers, screenwriters, film fans, producers and directors.

Films Examined: “Rear Window”, “Psycho”, “Family Plot”, “Topaz”, “Rope”, “The Wrong Man”, “Easy Virtue”, “Lifeboat”, “Bon Voyage”, “Aventure Malgache”, “Elstree Calling”, “Dial M for Murder”, “Stage Fright”, “Champagne”, “Spellbound”, “I Confess”, and “The Trouble with Harry”, with glances at “Vertigo” and several others.

Professional screenwriter William C. Martell takes you into the world of The Master Of Suspense and shows you the daring experiments that changed cinema. Over 77,000 words.

UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

THRILLER Thursday: THE STORM

NEW! SEASON 2: THE STORM

The spider web fills the screen, it's Boris Karloff's THRILLER!

Season: 2, Episode: 18.
Airdate: January 22, 1962.

Director: Hershell Daugherty Writer: William D. Gordon, based on a story by MacIntoch Malmar.
Cast: Nancy Kelly, David McLean, James Griffith, Jean Carroll.
Music: Morton Stevens.
Cinematography: John F. Warren.
Producer: William Frye.

Boris Karloff’s Introduction: “George Herbert, rector of Bemerton once wrote, ‘By all means tale some time to be alone. Salute thyself. See what thy soul doth wear.’ One wonders if it is possible ever to heed that advice. Does the condition of safe solitude exist? Here, for example, we have a wide still space about us, and a curtain of heavy weather descended to cut off the rest of the world. Yes, we have the illusion of solitude. But here too are some witnesses who will attest that the illusion is grotesquely false: Janet Wilson whose character is portrayed by Nancy Kelly, Ben Wilson to be played by David McLean, and Ed Brandes played by James Griffith. And... dear ,em I think I’ve forgotten someone - of course, it’s Baba. (He picks up the black cat.) Baba who perpetuates the name of the Egyptian philosopher of the 18th Dynasty, 1600 BC. It’s a pity, wouldn’t you say, that Baba was the only witness to a murder? And such a brutal one. The victim so young, so beautiful, so helpless. The killer safe - free to roam the stormy night, perhaps to kill again. And again. As for little Baba, I suspect that only he knows the secret of solitude without danger. But the others? Seclusion will become the cradle of panic. The storm, from which the story derives its title from, has many ingredients: wind, rain, wickedness, terror. But I needn’t tell you anymore - you’ll be there to see it explode in all its glory.”

Synopsis: A storm rages. Outside a large country home - miles away from the next house - a black cat watches as a Man chases a Woman. We see neither’s face. The man catches the woman near a fence and strikes her... killing her... and she falls to the ground. Her limp arm tangled in a fence. We see that she is wearing a distinctive diamond ring.

There is a killer on the loose in the storm.

Janet Willsom (Nancy Kelly) pulls up in front of that large country home in a taxi cab driven by creepy Ed Brandes (James Griffith - more quirky than creepy) who warns her that the storm will be getting worse, there will be flooding and road closures, so maybe he should take her to the hotel in town. She says that she has been away, and just wants to get home. He offers to carry her bags inside...

Once inside, the cat (Baba) greets her... and Brandes the taxi driver continues to come on to her like a super lonely guy. You feel sorry for him. He offers to take the suitcases to the bedroom, he asks if she has anything alcoholic to drink, he asks if she wants him to spend the night to keep her safe. Janet tells him that she is expecting her husband any minute, pays him and gets him to leave.

Now she is alone in the house during the storm. Just her and the cat.

Lightning. Thunder. Wind. Rain.

The house is cold, so she turns on the furnace... but it isn’t working. Cold, So she puts on a jacket. Bundled up. She starts a fire in the fireplace, and goes to the phone to call her husband. This is a rural area, and every call goes through an operator, who Janet talks to for a while. The gossip line. She gets some information on the storm - which is getting worse - as the operator tries to connect to her husband Ben (David McLean). No answer at the office, he must already be headed home. Driving in this weather. Janet was going to warn him that she came home a day early after tending to a sick sister.

She hangs up the phone and we get an exposition filled flashback of her and Ben’s relationship. Even though both are middle aged, they have only been married a couple of years. They found each other late in life, and Ben swept her off her feet. This is the first of a couple of exposition dump flashbacks, and one major thing that it does is put a face on the offscreen husband.

The flashback ends when the power flickers... then goes out. Suddenly there is a loud banging from outside and the cat shoots across the room.

Janet looks out the window and discovers the noise is the cellar door banging open and closed. She grabs her raincoat and goes outside to secure it. Weird that it wasn’t latched closed.

Back inside the house, the power goes out. Darkness.

She grabs her coat and a flashlight, goes back outside and opens the cellar door, descending into the darkness. The cellar is creepy (but the spider webs never come into contact with the actress). She goes to the fuse box and checks the fuses - all are good. This is a downed power line somewhere. She goes back into the house, securing the cellar doors behind her. Grabs candles and hopes that Ben comes home soon.

The fire has died down, and when she stokes it with newspapers from a bin, she finds a letter addressed to her husband, and we get another flashback - this time to explain that in the past her husband kept getting letters from some woman named Agnes that he claimed was his cousin. Ben doesn’t open the letters in front of Janet and refuses to talk about them. All of this seems suspicious as hell in a brief flashback, but for some reason Janet just accepts it. We aren’t even at the first commercial and I already know who the killer and the victim are in this story.

She puts the cat outside, and then notices that the cellar window is open. It’s as if the cellar is beckoning to her. She grabs the flashlight and raincoat and goes down to close and lock the cellar window... and discovers a dead woman in a trunk! And the dead woman is wearing that distinctive diamond ring!

She races back inside the house and tries to call the police, but the storm has fouled up the phone lines - she can hear the operator but the operator can’t hear her.

She hears someone outside! She runs out to the garage, goes to the hook on the wall where the keys to the old pick up truck should be... but they are gone! She gets into the pick up, and the keys are in the ignition. She starts it up and drives away from the house, but a tree branch blocks the road. When she tries to get around it, she gets stuck in the mud. She runs back to the house, closes and locks the door, then notices an icepick on the kitchen table (earlier she had told the taxi driver that neither she nor her husband drinks, so what the heck is the ice pick for?). She grabs the ice pick to use as a weapon, and searches the house... finding the cat inside and wet shoe prints on the floor. Someone else is in the house!

The front door rattles. She goes up to the door, ice pick ready, and unlocks the door... daring the killer to come in. This does not seem like a safe thing to do, nor a sensible thing to do.

A man enters and when she tries to stab him with the ice pick, he grabs her... it’s Ben, her husband. She tells him about the dead woman in the cellar and he doesn’t believe her. He takes her down into the cellar to show her that it’s all her imagination... and there is no dead woman in the trunk. She imagined it all.

Back inside the house, she still wants to phone the police, and he talks her out of it. She mentions the letter that she found, but it isn’t where she put it. Ben says that he noticed it when he came in and put it in his pocket. When he pulls it out, that distinctive diamond ring comes with it, and falls on the floor. Ben is the killer!

Janet runs, Ben chases. She runs to the pick up truck, and we get a “cavalcade of bodies” scene when she pulls a tarp from the back and there is the dead woman! She screams, then keeps running. Ben stops chasing her for some reason, the end. Kind of a weird ending - it’s as if they ran out of film or time, so Ben just stops chasing her.

Review: This episode predates the classic Hitchcock Hour AN UNLOCKED WINDOW by a couple of years, and shows how the same idea can be a great episode and a bland one. This is the bland one. The one that keeps making mis-steps at the script stage.

Right from the beginning we get odd choices in the story. If the Taxi Driver is supposed to be our potential killer, he certainly doesn’t act like it. Though casting was a huge mistake here, James Griiffith seems like the guy at the top of the list when you look up “Taxi Drivers” in the casting directory, when the role really needs someone seriously creepy and strange; the real problem is the dialogue isn’t creepy and strange enough. He seems like a lonely guy hitting on a woman alone, instead of a potential murderer. This is where you want “two way dialogue” that has both a conversational meaning and a deeply disturbing meaning. Things that can be taken two ways. But you also want just straight out crazy stuff. If the Taxi Driver had talked about the dangers of the storm and how he once saw a new litter of puppies drown in a house basement... his house’s basement when he was a child... and he just watched them from the stairway... that would have made this guy a potential killer. He needed to be a serious threat that she must get out of her house... and then we fear that he might be waiting in the cellar for her. But he’s a lonely guy with lonely guy talk... pathetic instead of a threat.

Once he’s gone, it’s just Janet and the cat for most of the story - and it seems as if they have padded out the story instead of tried to create actual suspense and dread. Various noises keep sending her into the cellar... but because we have no idea that there is the body of a dead woman down there, it really doesn’t matter. Unlike the Hitchcock episode where we know that there is an escaped lunatic killer on the loose in the storm, here we have no constant warning that something bad might happen. Once we have negated the Taxi Driver as a threat, we just have the storm and that opening teaser where a woman is killed. Now, if that teaser had shown the killer taking the body into the cellar, where he maybe is waiting out the storm, that might have made those pointless trips to the cellar to latch a window more suspenseful... but minus a threat in the cellar, it’s just a woman in the dark securing a window - no big deal. And a huge chunk of this episode is her securing windows and being afraid of owls. They must have thought the storm was enough to be afraid of - but a storm is just rain, and it washes off.

The other issue with the script are these dead flashbacks designed to give us information that the exposition dumps on the phone with the operator didn’t cover. I’m sure in the story that this was adapted from, she sees the letter addressed to her husband and remembers their conversations about the letters... but instead of finding a way to *adapt* this scene to a visual dramatic medium, the script just does what the story does. It comes off as boring *and* an obvious exposition plant for the Husband Is The Killer Twist (which kills the twist). Instead, I would have had her read the letter and discover that her husband has a crazy admirer who is threatening to come to the house - making this mystery woman another possible killer in the storm.

If they had also made the mystery woman a threat, they could have had all sorts of fun with wet or muddy footprints in the house... a woman’s shoes... and now she tries to match her shoes to the prints. It would have given her something active to do, and built up the suspense.

It’s as if every time there is a chance to make the episode work, the script does the opposite of what it should have done.

Instead of racheting up the suspense and dread with actual things that are potential threats - things that are legitimate fears - if comes up with a bunch of excuses that just pad out the story until we get to the twist ending. This is where “poking the tiger” is important in a screenplay or story - whatever the actual physical threat is, it needs to be regularly shown in the story in order to remind the audience that it is there. Once we have that unlocked window in the Hitchcock episode, things begin to happen in the house that remind us of the crazy killer... and tell us that the killer is IN THE HOUSE. Not a potential threat, but an actual threat. Here, that noise outside is just an owl.

One of the other things that doesn’t work is that cat - which seems to exist only for scenes where she put the cat outside and then somehow the cat is inside. I didn’t even nothing this until she mentions it outloud close to the end. Was I supposed to be keeping track of the cat this whole time?

The end is also a complete let down. It seems like they just ran out of time or film and ended it with the husband in the storm. He could still have chassed and killed her. A better ending would have been to have a police car roll up (the operator had them do a check) or even the creepy Taxi Driver return because he stole something personal from the house and decided to return it an apologize. Something to actually resolve the conflict of the killer husband. But nope.

Next week we go to Hollywood for the story of a washed up old sexpot who gets one last chance at stardom... with a little help from a witch.

- Bill

ATLiH: Trilogy Of Terror: Part 1.... The Acting Dead!

ALL THE LOSERS IN HOLLYWOOD...

One night, sitting in Residuals Bar in Studio City (where the DRAGONHEART script was conceived) and drinking a Guiness, I was telling one of the stories that usually end up on this blog - a story about some poor misguided person in the film biz, and one of my friends said: “Where do you find these people?” I replied, “I bet I know all the losers in Hollywood”.... and they said that should be the title of my autobiography (or this blog). But instead, this blog ened up being called SEX IN A SUBMARINE due to a crazy script note I got from HBO on CRASH DIVE, and ALL THE LOSERS IN HOLLYWOOD was a title without a story... until now.

When looking for regular features for the blog, I thought it would be fun to tell a bunch of those stories of the oddballs I’ve met in the almost 30 years I’ve been in this business. I’m changing all of the names to protect the very very guilty (and avoid meeting lawyers) but the stories you are about to read are true... well, mostly true.

THE ACTING DEAD.

Ready for some really scary stuff?

This is a fable, even though the stories are true and the names have been changed to protect... well they aren’t exactly innocent, are they? A fable is when a story has a larger meaning, but I’m going to let you figure out that meaning on your own and take away any lessons you want. Our little fable concerns four people who set out to make horror movies. Horror films are hot these days...

We’ll begin our tour of this gallery of gore with the actor. You don’t know his name, but you know his face. He’s mostly a TV actor, but he’s done a bunch of movies, too. If the movie is about a prosecutor, he plays the defense attorney’s 2nd chair. If the story is about a defense attorney, he plays the #2 prosecutor - the sounding board guy. He also plays corporate VPs and the detective in a buddy cop movie who isn’t one of the buddies and FBI Agents. Oh, and I’ve seen him play a gangster before - but he’s kind of too clean cut for that. Basically, he’s *one* step down from the important characters in the film - a guy who gets two dozen lines in the whole film. That makes him a character actor - but one who is almost always working. Problem is, he’d like to be a star. Wait, that’s not the fable part - it’s not about hubris.

So, several years ago he started making his own movies, starring himself (of course). He’d gather together some other character actor friends and make a serious drama... but the films have no story at all. They are like a collection of really great scenes. You haven’t seen any of these movies, because none have ever found distribution. One actually played out of competition at Sundance one year (probably because of all the names in the cast) but no distrib picked it up. You need more than just some good TV names in your film, the disrib needs to make money from the film... and these films don’t even have a *story*. They are “actor porn”.

For instance, one is about four guys in their 40s who play golf together every Tuesday morning. The film isn’t about the relationship between the four guys (though there was a little of that), most of the film is about each one of the guys in some big dramatic scene. The scenes aren’t thematic - it’s not about 4 guys and their love lives, or 4 guys dealing with growing older, or 4 guys learning to accept (or not) how their lives turned out. That would be some form of story. No, the film was just a collection of great scenes with these 4 guys... and, of course, my character actor acquaintance getting twice as many scenes as everyone else. Only fair - it was his money. One character may have a big blow up with his wife. Another character might have a great big dramatic scene with his boss. And there was a scene where a character has a melt-down at a fast food place. None of the scenes were connected in any way - except these 4 guys played golf together every Tuesday morning.

After I saw the film, I thought it was like one of those books they sell at Sam French, 25 GREAT SCENES FOR ACTORS, shot with the same 4 actors and a couple of scenes where they golf together.

Because I know this guy, I’ve tried to give him a little advice about story... all of which he’s argued with or completely ignored. “It’s all about the truth of the dramatic moment, not some contrived story”. Okay... Every time I do my class in Los Angeles, his name is on the comp list... and he never shows. But after the third film he has funded out of pocket wasn’t picked up by *any* distrib for *any* medium (not DVD, not TV, nothing)... and his wife was about to divorce him, he decided to make a horror film (because they’re hot right now, and he can make some quick cash and save his marriage).

So he asks me for a little advice. I *give him* some Blue Books and the Horror CD and advise him to watch 5 to 10 horror movies and *study them* - figure out how and why they work. Then apply that information to his script. Kind of my basic advice.

So he makes his film... Whenever I bump into him, I ask him about it... and he tells me it’s great. The best horror film ever made. That’s good, because his wife files for divorce. He also missed pilot season for the first time ever. In other words - everything is now riding on this horror film. Now *that’s* a dramatic situation!

There’s this strange and illogical phenomena where the more important something is to a person, the more important it should be to everyone else in the world. If it is important for you to sell your next script, your next script is the best work you’ve ever done. It has to be, because if it’s just your average script, you’re screwed. This makes no sense at all - the script is the script and it doesn’t get better or worse depending on how much you need a sale. But this is often the way we think. So the more that was riding on my friend’s film, the better that film became. Had to be great, or he was screwed. In reality, it’s just creating and believing your own BS. Jim’s a good actor - and he convinced himself that he made a great film.

He rents a screening room on Sunset, to show the film to distribs. And he’s managed to get all of the major players to show up. He rounds up some folks to fill all of the empty seats in the screening room - a “warm body” audience to laugh and scream. Because I’m not an actor the distribs might recognize, I get to fill a seat. See - I’m good for something! This will be the first time I’ve seen one of his films on the big screen... and without the words “For Screening Purposes Only” not fading in and out at the bottom of the screen. I take my seat, he does a little speech to the distribs, the light dim, and...

We get off to an okay start - a maniac escapes from a mental institution, grabs an ax, steals a car. He doesn’t kill anyone, yet, but it’s early. Then we get some hot teen actors going on vacation at a cabin in the woods... then Jim playing the Town Sheriff (he’s still trying to ride this film to stardom) who warns the kids about the escaped maniac. Then we get about 20 minutes of completely unrelated big dramatic scenes with the kids (plus two, count ‘em, two, with the overly educated Town Sheriff chewing scenery like crazy.) (Dude, you won the audition, take it easy!) None of these scenes are about the maniac. A handful of the distribs sneak out during these 20 minutes.

About 30 minutes in, one of the teens is *discovered* dead on the back deck of the cabin. Killed by an ax. There’s blood and a lot of it... but we didn’t see the character killed or chased or anything. The guy’s just dead. Some FX guy has done great job of creating gore - but it just sits there.

This leads to maybe another 20 minutes where the teens have big dramatic discussions... but they seem more interested in chewing scenery than being afraid of some maniac with an ax (or that one of their friends is chopped up on the back deck). All but one of the distribs sneaks out during these 20 minutes. To tell you the truth, I want to sneak out, too. And I almost do. But what am I going to tell Jim the next time I bump into him? So I stick it out.

Another kid is found murdered with an ax. We never see the kid killed, we just see him dead. No stalk, no slash... just a body. This, of course, leads to about 20 minutes of big dramatic scenes about the nature of life and responsibility and all kinds of other things that start a little laughter in the screening room.

It’s difficult not to laugh when people are wasting time with these big dramatic scenes while some maniac with an ax is killing them one by one offscreen. Why don’t they *do something*? Why don’t they shut up and try to stop the maniac? Or at least run for their lives? The last distrib sneaks out sometime during these scenes. Now the screening room is nothing but shills. The screening room is being rented by the hour, and maybe Jim can get a partial refund if he stops the movie right now... but he keeps the projectors running. Like some maniac with a movie, he traps us in that screening room and forces us to watch the whole film.

“Stop me before I screen again!”

And it doesn’t get better. Another teen is found dead, which leads to another 20 minutes of big dramatic scenes. Not only are the dramatic scenes kind of funny given the situation, they also make the film boring. It’s all talking heads. And because the big dramatic scenes often have little or nothing to do with maniacs and axes, it’s almost as if the scenes are at war with the story... and the scenes are winning. There is no stalk, no slash in the entire stalk & slash movie. No suspense. No dread. No violence. The closest we get to anything even resembling a horror film is the dead people who are discovered *after* the action. The best gore money can buy.

Of course, the film ends with a 30 second battle between the leading lady and the maniac with the ax - no chase, no struggle, she just kills the sucker - the end.

Afterwards Jim says there’s a celebration at the Standard Hotel (rooftop) bar - he’s buying the drinks. If he’s buying drinks, I’m going next door. I want to be paid for my time. He compares the film to *Oscar Winner* SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and I mention that SILENCE wasn’t just Hopkins and Foster having endless conversations. “Yes! My film is better than that because I minimized all of the chase bullshit and focused on the drama.” My only response was to agree with that.

Jim thinks the distribs will begin calling in the next few days. They don’t. A couple of months ago, he calls me to ask if he can sleep on my sofa for a while. SAG has screwed up on some residual checks and he’s broke. All of his money was tied up in the movie... and his divorce pretty much wiped him out. I really want to tell him that he should have just listened to me and made a real horror movie, instead of some actor’s showcase. But instead I tell him this isn’t a good time for me, and suggest another mutual acquaintance who would hate me, now... except SAG got Jim his residual check before he was evicted, and he just landed a recurring role on a new TV show. For a couple of weeks I was sure he would end up sleeping on my sofa. I’m too nice to say no to people who are really in trouble... but part of me wants to start a serious discussion about personal responsibility that will drag on for 20 minutes until someone finds me hacked to death on the patio.

The next segment of our Trilogy Of Terror deals with a director I know who decided to make a horror movie... because horror is a hot genre right now. And that screenwriter who hired the PR firm, who decided to write and direct a horror film... because horror is a hot genre right now. Stay tuned... the really scary stuff is yet to come!

- Bill

Trailer Tuesday: PIT AND THE PENDULUM

THE PIT & THE PENDULUM (1961)

Starring: Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, Luana Anders, Antony Carbone.
Written by: Richard Matheson
Directed by: Roger Corman
Produced by: Roger Corman and James H. Nicholson (American International Pictures)

This is my favorite of all the Corman Poe movies, and that may be because it was the first one that I saw back when I was a kid, or it may just be that the story kicks ass. It is scary as hell, and manages to get under yours skin. One of the other great things about it is that it is presented almost as a murder mystery, complete with a locked door puzzle and a skeptical detective who doesn’t believe in ghosts... well, until he has no other choice. And Price gets to really show his acting chops - his slow descent into madness is Oscar calibre stuff. All of that is before we even get to the pit and the pendulum part of the story!

Like USHER, Roger Corman shot this in 15 days in color Cinemascope and designed as a stand alone feature which would not be double billed. Budget once again was under $200,000, which was much much lower than a studio film, and was very successful at the box office... PIT AND THE PENDULUM doing even better than USHER had before it. These films are still great, lush, spooky films... made on a low budget but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. PIT features some great period costumes (they may look a little silly with their puffy trousers, but authentic) and with each new film in this series they accumulated more props and set pieces - so each film has better production value than the last. PIT looks beautiful - the sets are amazing and the lighting and cinematography seem even better than USHER. This gave these films so much production value that AIP could say they cost $1 million and most people believed them. A ticket buyer who saw this film in a cinema thought it looked like a big studio film!

These Corman Poe films were shot on sets rented from studios and look like crazy fever dreams. Corman said, “One of my theories was that these stories were created out of the unconscious mind of Poe, and the unconscious mind never really sees reality, so until THE TOMB OF LIGEIA. we never showed the real world. In PIT, John Kerr arrived in a carriage against an ocean background, which I felt was more representative of the unconscious.” Plus, when you are shooting in Los Angeles the Pacific Ocean is free production value. PIT AND THE PENDULUM has all kinds of shocks and scares and builds suspense and dread... and has a great performance by Price that takes him through all kinds of emotions. One of the interesting Corman techniques is the color tinted flashbacks, which predate the same technique used by Soderbergh... but Corman does some great work here - changing the blue tint to red and twisting the image . This film is a nightmare before we get to the title device. The film opens with a strange psychedelic title sequence that really sets the mood of insanity.



Spain... a few decades after the Spanish Inquisition. A horse drawn coach drops off Barnard (John Kerr) on the road, it doesn’t go all the way to the castle... he has to walk. The castle is on a cliff over the ocean. Barnard walks through the fog surrounding it and knocks on the door, asks to see Don Medina. The Servant tries to get rid of him, but Catherine Medina (Luana Anders) allows Barnard in when he says he is Elizabeth’s brother... His sister Elizabeth was married to Don Nicholas Medina, he came as soon as he heard that she passed away. He would like to visit his wife’s grave... Catherine tells him she is in the family crypt... below... please follow me.

A locked gate leads to descending stairs. Cobwebs. Shadows. A *loud* mechanical noise is a jump moment. Another gate, another stairway going down, deeper and deeper. Barnard gets ahead of Catherine - following the machine noise to a doorway. Catherine warns him not to open the doors... as Barnard reaches for the door handle - WHAM! - the doors open in front of him and Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) stands before him. “Who are you?!” Catherine introduces him, and Medina softens - the brother of his departed wife. He locks the giant door behind him and they continue down to her crypt.

Medina tells Barnard that his sister died of a lingering disease of the blood, which was diagnosed by Dr. Leon... his personal physician. They get to the crypt - the coffin is behind a bricked in wall with a plaque bearing Elizabeth’s name. Barnard is still suspicious of his sister’s cause of death, and when Medina asks if he will stay the night, Barnard answers, “That and more” - he wants to investigate the cause of his sister’s death.

Upstairs, Barnard asks if a painting on the wall is Don Medina - “That is my father, Sebastian Medina. The other is my uncle Bartolome.” Medina asks Barnard to come with him and they go up to Elizabeth’s bedroom - untouched since her death. As he shows Barnard all of the luxurious furnishings of the room... a woman’s shadow appears ghost-like behind the curtained partition... moving towards them! When it comes in to the light it is... the Maid Maria. After the scare, Medina tells Barnard that he is *still* in love with his sister, and shows him a painting of her (a nice way for the audience to know what she looked like). She sang like an angel and played the harpsichord every night after dinner (a plant which will pay off later). Medina breaks down in tears and Barnard leaves him in Elizabeth’s bedroom.

Dinner: Barnard and Catherine do some mild flirting when there is a knock at the door. Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) who is introduced to Barnard, and they all have a glass of wine. Barnard gives Dr. Leon the third degree about his sister’s death. Dr. Leon mentions just living in this castle as one of the factors. What? “Your sister’s death was caused by failure of the heart, sir, due to a terrible shock. Literally, she died of fright.” What? “Show me where it happened!” Medina says they were wrong not to be totally honest with Barnard, they must show him where his sister died... and they open that gate and climb throse stairs into the depths below the castle, to that locked door that Medina popped out of when we first met him. Beyond that door is...

A torture chamber. His father Sebastian’s torture chamber from the Spanish Inquisition days. “I shall not dwell upon the history of this blasphemous chamber, suffice it that the blood of a thousand men and women was spilled within these walls. Limbs twisted and broken! Eyes gouged from bloody sockets, flesh burned black.” Barnard says his sister was a strong, willful woman, not someone who would succumb to evil atmospheres... so Medina tells the story, and we get a blue tinted flashback...

Elizabeth Medina (Barbara Steele) as his perfect wife and their perfect life. He would always bring her breakfast in bed, she would pose for his painting, dinner - often with Dr. Leon, she would play the harpsichord afterwards and sing with her beautiful voice... And then one morning she had no slept, and then she stopped eating... Then one night she disappeared, and when Medina searched the castle for her he found her down in the torture chamber, obsessed with all of the evil devices. Medina’s curse - his blood curse inherited from his father - had been passed on to her. Medina decided to take her away from this cursed castle - an extended holiday to rid her of the curse. On the night before their departure, Medina and Dr. Leon heard a scream... they ran down to the torture chamber to find her... locked in the iron maiden! Just before she died she called out a name - “Sebastian!”

Later, Catherine begs Barnard to believe that Don Medina did not mean to lie to him, only to save him from the frightening details of his sister’s death. Barnard thinks Medina is acting guilty... Catherine says of course he acts guilty - he believes his blood, the curse he inherited from his father along with that torture chamber, is to blame for his wife’s death. Catherine decides to reveal the deep, dark, family secret to Barnard, in a blue tinted flashback...

When Nicholas Medina was just a ten year old boy, we wandered down to the torture chamber even though he was forbidden to ever open that door. Curiosity. A nice creepy bit where the boy pokes around the foggy torture chamber, opens an iron maiden and a skeleton pops out. Footsteps on the stairs above - the boy hides. He spies his father Sebastian (also Price) and Mother and Uncle Bartolome climbing down the stairs to the torture chamber. Sebastian gives them a tour of torture chamber... then Sebastian picks up a hot poker and kills Uncle Bartolome. Our blue tinted flashback becomes red tinted! As Sebastian kiss his brother Bartolome he keeps screaming one word over and over, “Adulterer!” And then he turned on her. Accusing her of sleeping with is brother...

“And there before my brother’s eyes, our mother was tortured to death,” Catherine says as we come out of the flashback. Since then, Medina has been haunted by his mother’s death, and then his wife’s death almost pushed him over the brink into insanity. Barnard promises Catherine that he will be more gentle with Don Medina.

That night, the sound of a harpsichord echoes through the castle...

Barnard hears it, and goes to investigate... a hand grabs his shoulder! Catherine. She heard it, too. As did Dr. Leon (who says he feel asleep in a chair after dinner). Barnard thinks it must be Don Medina (since he is the only one not present), but Catherine says Don Medina *doesn’t know how to play the harpsichord*. Spooky! They go downstairs to the harpsichord, and when they turn a corner in the stairway - A Woman Pops Out - it’s Maria the maid, she heard the harpsichord, too. At the base of the stairs - Wham! - Don Medina! He is completely freaked out - that was his dead wife’s playing, he recognized it! The music stops. Barnard unlocks the door to Elizabeth’s bedroom and throws open the doors - the room is *empty*. On the harpsichord, Elizabeth’s ring... as if she had taken it off to play the keyboard. Are there any other doors - ways out of the room? No. Don Medina takes one look at the ring and faints.

They take Don Medina to his room, and Dr. Leon gives him a sedative to help him sleep. Outside the room, Catherine asks Dr. Leon to stay for the rest of the night, and he agrees. How did the ring that she was buried with end up on the harpsichord? Dr. Leon asks Catherine and Barnard to come with him to the dining room so they can discuss this...

Dr. Leon says that what he is about to say is something that only Don Medina and he have known... and insists that Catherine and Barnard have a drink first. Must be something really weird, right? Don Medina believed that Elizabeth may have been interred... prematurely. The doctor says this is not the case... she was quite dead. But Don Medina believes this due to what happened to his mother when he was 10 years old. You see, she was not tortured *to death*, as Catherine was told. “Your mother was walled up in her tomb, while yet alive.” From that day, Nicholas Medina has been afraid of being buried alive. Since Elizabeth died, he has had trouble sleeping - thinking that he hears her roaming the hallways of the castle... that he has heard her speaking his name.

Barnard’s skepticism jumps in - But we all heard the harpsichord playing.

Dr. Leon answers that he thought only himself and Don Medina knew of his belief that his wife was buried alive... but maybe one of the servants overheard, and are behind this.

But Barnard is still the skeptic: “I want to know one thing, sir. Are you absolutely positive that Don Medina’s dread is unwarranted?”

“If Elizabeth Medina walks the corridors of this castle, it is her spirit, not her living self.” So now we have three possible explanations for the harpsichord playing: It’s a servant trying to gaslight Don Medina for some reason (but what would be the motivation?), it’s Elizabeth’s ghost haunting the castle because she was buried before she died, or it’s just Elizabeth’s ghost who was buried dead but still haunting the castle.

The next morning - a blood curdling scream from Elizabeth’s room - Dr. Leon, Catherine, and Barnard run to the room. When they open the door - WHAM! - Maid Maria blasts through the door at them. While Dr. Leon tends to the frightened Maid, Barnard investigates the room - empty. The Maid says he *heard* Elizabeth’s voice. She said, “Maria, leave this room!” That’s when Don Medina shows up, “My wife spoke to you?”

Don Medina is freaked out, taken back to his room and given a sedative.

At breakfast, Barnard is in full investigative mode - he knows it is not ghosts, so who is behind these things? Dr. Leon says only Maria heard the voice. Barnard says he questioned the maid, and the voice was just a whisper - not completely identifiable as Elizabeth’s voice. It could have been anyone...

BANG! The sounds of a things being thrown around and broken upstairs. They run up and follow the crashing sounds to Elizabeth’s room - door locked. They pound on Medina’s room and ask him for the key. Barnard and Dr. Leon take the key and open the door to Elizabeth’s room. Catherine tries to hold Medina back, but he insists on looking inside. Inside that locked room. Barnard and Dr. Leon find that the room has been **destroyed*. All of the furnishings broken. The painting of Elizabeth *slashed*. And no one is in the room. Locked door - no way in or out... so *what* could have done this? When Medina see s the slashed painting, he faints. Dr. Leon takes him back to his room.

Barnard is alone in Elizabeth’s trashed room. How could this have been done behind a locked door? He begins to poke around the room, looking for some secret passage... and finds one! Covered in spider webs. He enters the passage - a narrow corridor between the walls of the castle - and follows the voices until he find the secret passage into Medina’s bedroom. Startling Medina and Dr. Leon and Catherine.

Barnard accuses Medina of being behind all of this. He breaks it down, “haunt” by “haunt” - Medina is the one person who could have done all of it. But Medina pleads innocence... and eventually breaks down and wonders if it is possible that he is doing these things unaware, to punish himself? Has he gone crazy? Has his subconscious mind created this evidence of Elizabeth’s revenge from beyond the grave because she was buried alive to punish him? Could he be haunting himself? Medina wonders if he is crazy...

Medina says the only way he can be at peace is if he knows for sure.
Knows that his wife Elizabeth was dead when she was buried.
They all go down to the crypt with axes...


They use the axes to cut through the brick and mortar, Medina has another blue tinted flashback to when he was a boy, watching his mother being bricked up in her tomb alive.

They break through the wall, and Elizabeth’s ornate coffin is in the crypt. They climb through the hole, open the coffin lid, exposing...

A horrifying mummied corpse of his dead wife - hands raised and clawing at the coffin lid! Her scratch marks on the coffin lid!

“True! True!” Medina screams as he is pushed over the edge into madness.
Dr. Leon tries to comfort him: “On my honor as a physician I though she was dead. I swear to you!”
This doesn’t help. Medina runs off screaming “True!”

Catherine finds Medina in his room, a pistol against his head. He says, “I killed her!” and breaks down, dropping the pistol and himself to the floor. He keeps repeating, “I killed her!”

Dr. Leon tries to calm him... but can not. “While we were up here mourning her, she was alive - struggling to be free. I am responsible, for if it were not so she would not want to haunt me.” Dr. Leon says he must leave in the morning, and begs Medina to leave with him. “I can never leave. I must accept whatever vengeance Elizabeth chooses to inflict upon me.”

Downstairs, Barnard apologizes to Catherine. Even though all of his suspicions were true, he can not blame Don Medina for this horrifying accident... for which Medina is suffering. He feels only sympathy for Medina. And he does a nice subtle hit on her, hoping that they meet again someday under better circumstances, perhaps in Barcelona where she lives. Catherine responds very favorably - the romance subplot that has been quietly running in the background of this horror story reaches its resolution... they will be hooking up later.

On the stairs Barnard bumps into Dr. Leon, who advises him not to disturb Don Medina. Maybe in the morning Don Medina will be... more himself. Dr. Leon offers Barnard a ride into town in the morning, which is accepted. Is this the end of our story?

Don Medina snuffs out all of the candles in his bedroom to prepare to sleep... when he hears Elizabeth’s ghostly voice calling his name. “Nicholas...” Did he imagine that? The secret passage in the wall slowly creaks open. Medina grabs the last candle and follows her voice into the secret passage.

Dark, dank, filled with spider webs... he follows her voice calling his name deeper and deeper into the bowels of the castle. The candle blows out, leaving him in almost total darkness. A great creepy moment when he walks full face into a spider web - the webs clinging to him, suffocating him... yech! He wipes them away. Her voice continues to call him deeper and deeper down the secret rat-filled corridors. All the way down...

Upstairs, Catherine finds Medina’s bedroom empty... knocks on Barnard’s door. They form a search party with Dr. Leon - Catherine and Barnard will search the upper floors, Dr. Leon will search the lower floors of the castle... including the torture chamber.

Medina continues too follow his dead wife’s voice... on the brink of insanity... he comes to a Y in the hallway - one door leads to the torture chamber, the other leads to the crypts. Her voice calls to him from... the crypts. He follows the echoes to the broken open crypt for his wife. “Elizabeth?” He peers through the shattered bricks to her coffin...

And the coffin lid slowly opens...

And a bloody hand emerges...

Bloody fingernail scratches on the underside of the coffin lid...

And dead Elizabeth crawls out of the coffin...

Medina falls to the ground in terror...

Elizabeth rises before him - bloody and dead and...

Medina runs like hell... the corpse dragging her dead form down the dark corridors behind him. He unlocks the crypt door, races to the doorway leading up to the torture chamber - but it is locked. He fumbles for the keys as she creeps closer, and closer, and closer! He finally gets the door unlocked, running onto the landing above the torture chamber, slamming the door behind him. But Dead Elizabeth throws open the door, screaming his name! He sees her dead face and stumbles backwards... falling all the way down the stairs to the floor of the torture chamber, where he is finally pushed over the edge to complete insanity... a babbling lunatic. No longer a man.

We saw her face, too - it was not Maria the maid dressed like Elizabeth, this was Medina’s actual dead wife!

The door opens and Dr. Leon enters, sees Dead Elizabeth and says, “I told you to wait.” So everyone can see this ghost? Dr. Leon goes down the stairs to examine Medina - “He’s gone.” Medina is over the edge crazy...

Dr. Leon goes back to Dead Elizabeth and gives her one hell of a kiss. Then another one. And another one.

This has been Dr. Leon and Elizabeth’s plan - they have faked her death, and then begun gas-lighting Medina... making him believe that her ghost is haunting the castle. Using the secret passages so that she could play the harpsichord, whisper his name, play the ghost. Once Medina has been driven crazy they will have him committed and liquidate the castle and all of Medina’s belongings and run away together - wealthy! Dr. Leon scolds Elizabeth for jumping the gun and doing the final phase of their plan a day too soon. Couldn’t she have waited until Barnard left in the morning? Elizabeth says it had already been too long..

Elizabeth bends down to Medina, “We have finally broken you. Is it not ironical my husband: your wife - an adulteress, your mother - an adulteress, your uncle - and adulterer, your closest friend - and adulterer? Do you not find that amusing dead Nicholas?”

Medina laughs like a lunatic, then moves to his feet... and calls Elizabeth by his mother’s name, Isabella... and calls Dr. Leon “his brother”... the son has become the father. Their plan was to drive him crazy... and they have succeeded! He grabs Elizabeth, tells her that he will torture her to death and drags her to the iron maiden, locking her inside! Dr. Leon tries to escape, but Medina chases him... Leon opens the door at the end of the torture chamber and runs through... right off the edge of the landing and into *the pit*. He screams all the way down to the bottom!

Splat!

Barnard comes downstairs - he heard strange sounds. Sees Medina, “Oh, there you are, sir, we’ve been searching all over for you.” Medina hits him, knocking Barnard out.

69 minutes into our story, and Barnard wakes up... strapped to a table on a platform over the pit. Above him - the pendulum. Medina explains the horror that “Bartolome” is about to endure... then sets the pendulum in motion. The razor sharp blade swings lower and lower and lower - inching towards Barnard’s stomach!

Catherine pounds on the torture chamber door, then runs to get the servant.

As Medina operates the pendulum, swinging it closer and closer to Barnard’s stomach - blade slicing the man’s shirt - Medina flashes back to his father using the pendulum on his Uncle Bartolome (in blue and red tint). The blade swings closer - scratching flesh. A few more swings and Barnard will be sliced open.

Catherine and the Servant break open the door, the Servant wrestles with Medina while Catherine tries to figure out how to stop the pendulum. Medina fights the Servant, then mis-steps and goes over the edge into The Pit. Screaming all the way down. Splat!

But Catherine has not stopped the pendulum’s descent! She calls for the Servant to help. They finally get it stopped - it has sliced into Barnard, but not deep enough to be fatal. Catherine tends to his wound, unties him from the table, and she and the Servant help him up and out of the room. On their way out of the torture chamber, Catherine locks and bolts the door, “No one will ever enter this room again.”

Of course, Elizabeth is still locked in that iron maiden!

Great twist end shocker! I love how everyone is basically hoist by their own petard - they want to drive him crazy... and they get their wish! I think these kinds of resolutions are great in horror flicks, and wish there were more of them.

Tomorrow we will take a look at one of the non-Price Corman Poe movies... THE PREMATURE BURIAL, starring Oscar Winner Ray Milland.

- Bill