Halloween HorrorFest 2020 and Presidential Election on Monday Morning Diary (September 28)

Last night I loaded up the flash drive for a night alone with the teevee with two more obscure works from a pair of American Horror masters. The first, an outlandish vehicle for Tobe Hopper’s continued descent into the ridiculous (he broke out with Texas Chainsaw Massacre like a bullet from a gun, but nonetheless made film after film thoroughly dulling that initial masterpieces’ blast) dubbed Spontaneous Combustion. Sure, it was quite ridiculous, but, it was also really interesting in parts and highly original in others, the sort of low rent trash that bad filmmakers just can’t muster. No, only a failed (maybe) master could do something like this, the tale of the world’s first (literal) nuclear family who, once ‘safe’ birth an offspring that decades later finds himself the continued scientific experiment that had killed his very parents in the first place (shortly after his birth, in, you guessed it, ‘spontaneous combustion’). He (the great, great Brad Dourif, one of America’s low art treasures for 5 decades or so) soon discovers the sinister plot and the pyrotechnics bloom. When all is said and done it’s a wonderful romp, a chuckle inducing quasi-super hero origin story for the modern age*. The second, Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace, an eery, atmospheric tale dubbed (in the trailer and all promotional materials) as another in his masterful run of eight Edgar Allan Poe adaptations is, nevertheless, an H.P. Lovecraft film (literally perhaps the first one for film—certainly the first good to great one) in a similar vein. It’s cheap, but given his usual lush period color cinematography for all his genre works and evocative atmospherics and high-pitched (often) Vincent Price lead performances, works tremendously. Here, Price is two characters at once, a demonic worshipper of the dark arts in 1700’s New England and a peaceful offspring 110 years later returning to claim the family real estate castle (because, you know, the 1700’s heathen is torched at the stake). Since the town had killed his great, great grandfather—a fact he had no prior knowledge of—that once he inhabits the huge palace they suspect something afoot when he begins to fall under the swirling satanic forces. When coupled with the number of evil-doers that have stayed along waiting for offspring to return in the castle, it spells disaster for all involved…

But how do you discuss two wholly different films—one an original, contemporary script relying a lot on (to our modern 2020 sensibilities, rudimentary sure) special effects and the other a low budget work maximizing the charms of cheap studio atmosphere, larger than life acting and a simple, (now) classic script—against each other? Well, here, as elsewhere, you draw arbitrary distinctions and (unnecessarily) rank them. Sometimes we’ve discussed the idea of the ‘Mount Rushmore of Horror Cinema’ and while no one here would include Tobe Hooper, many, in my otherwise stomachache inducing turns around the internet, have. And, if not him, you just insert a litany of directors maybe slightly better (Carpenter, Del Toro, Fulci, Raimi, maybe Craven) or slightly worse (Cunningham, M. N. Shyamalan, Whannell, Jordan Peele** and Eli Roth) that essentially argue the same lowbrow point about Horror. That point being that (at least) one of its 4 greatest practitioners is more or less a trash merchant, an artist of several decades that was only able to maybe produce one great film to their name. It hit me a lot with Spontaneous Combustion, which, if I had to argue, is easily Hopper’s second greatest film (we discount Poltergeist due to the [probably very credible] allegations that Spielberg directed major chunks of the film). Consider the directors mentioned in this paragraph, the great ones had one (if that) good to great films to their name (ahem, Carpenter and Fulci are the clear outliers, with their great works being 3 or 4, depending how you rank them), yet, like Hooper, Horror hounds debase the genre by stupefying the genre to include them near the upper echelon. Then, thinking that—a simple enough point—I drifted to the forgotten, thoroughly discarded Roger Corman. Here was, in The Haunted Palace, probably an average work for him for his first decade or so, and yet still a very strong, highly atmospheric and highly entertaining work. Why has he been so relegated outside the Horror Masters? He has, by my count, as many Horror cinematic masterpieces as any (seriously!) director that has ever lived. I’ve probably slighted him in the past to no doubt, but, on a dark, slightly warm late September night a merely pretty good work for him I shook myself straight. Roger Corman was as good as any for Horror. Was that so hard to realize?