Halloween HorrorFest 2010 and Night Gallery countdown conclusion on Monday Morning Diary (October 12)

Screen capture from 1972’s “Night Stalker”.

by Sam Juliano

We had a very close call this week. Lucille had a low grade fever, diarrhea and nausea on Sunday, so I rushed her up to Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck to be checked for COVID. We waited almost three hours but she ended up negative thank God. It was still best for her to stay home from a family wedding last night (one I attended alone) as she was still a bit under the weather from another slight viral condition. The election continues to wind down and I am quite upbeat at the probably outcome. Unlike 2016, this year is showing positive numbers with very few people still out there that haven’t made up their minds. This past week J.D. Lafrance posted a splendid review of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. Jamie Uhler has continue to pen more entries in his spectacular 2020 Halloween Horror Fest, with four fantastic capsules up there today. Finally the Night Gallery FB countdown has concluded with my #1 posting of “Camera Obscura”. R.I.P Yankee legend Whitey Ford and also baseball great Joe Morgan. Wishing all continued safety!

Forbidden World (A. Holzman… 1982)

A Sci-Fi Horror film produced by Roger Corman in hopes of cashing in on the Alien tidal wave (or, more apt, ‘cash in again’ on Alien as Galaxy of Terror had been a success, and better film, the previous year [this one even borrows sets from it]) this hatches from a mutant creation of human female and spider like cocoon embryo and slithers around like a burgundy liver. It grows over the film and unleashes a wrath on a Keystone Kops like crew who have otherwise been more preoccupied with fucking and peeping on each other (how the organism gets loose is an insane bit of incomprehensible carelessness). The last remaining members eventually kill it by getting it to eat a large, bulbous cancerous tumor that a scientist on the crew had been slowly dying of. In other hands with a better script this works OK, but as it stands, pass.

Witchboard (K. Tenney… 1986)

We open this one with a trashy, 1980’s party, where our rich guy Prep archetype takes time from dishing out egotistical insults to extol the virtues of Ouija board seances (he even has a chuckle inducing bit where he offers the correct pronunciation of ‘Ouija’). It summons David, a dead 10 year old he claims the board has had a long connection too. When others there—as retribution for being insulted previously—mock the idea of real life spirits and ghosts, it riles up a spirit who spends the rest of the film terrorizing the group (mainly Jim, who was most vocal) and trying to take over the body of Jim’s girlfriend Linda (a pre-White Snake Tawny Kitaen as this is a year before the ‘Here We Go Again’ video would rocket her to ‘stardom’). The spirit is only using the idea of David as a cover, rather, it’s Malfeitor, a murderer that had lived in the same house 50 years earlier. This, like Forbidden World above, is a totally valid idea for a Horror film, but the kills are (very, very) weak, and the acting/presentation strained so seriously that you scratch your head wondering how anyone could think this was serious business. Another to pass on, unless you’re a supreme Horror completist.

Night Stalker (J. Llewellyn Moxey… 1972) TV horror

Night Strangler (D. Curtis… 1973) TV horror/sequel

My introduction to these films, specifically the first one, was an initial trip to a Horror convention my freshman year in college. Those spook-centric events are ones that still happen, like comicon’s, mostly as a way for the industry to hype big new theater or TV releases. But in 1999/2000, the ones I went to were mostly just shows for buyers and sellers, booths full of Horror memorabilia—cheaply made t-shirts, books, original one-sheet posters, comics, masks and the occasional B- or C-list celebrity or director from decades prior hawking autographs. Mostly though it was for movies, the types you couldn’t easily find, and as this was just at the cusp of the new DVD boom, predominantly video cassette. I only went to a handful—a college friend persuaded me and had done them for years—but you quickly understood the films that only the Horror losers liked, eccentric oddball films that they’d pride themselves in knowing, owning and spreading the gospel of. Giallos and extreme Japanese gore from the 1980s, for example, were, at that time highly obscure to American audiences but found in abundance there. Now, in 2020, that’s not the case obviously, the internet flattened everything and while I’m sure many that were in attendance back then probably have some reservations about this, as their secret club was such a part of their personalities, I’m the opposite. All this stuff being available if you want it easily enough (for the most part) is nothing but a supreme blessing to me, a fact I think about every year when we do these email write-ups. I want people to see these oddities and gems that push Horror towards real art, or at the very least, as entertaining a form as anything else. But there, made-for-TV Horror of the 1970s and ‘80s was also prized, bootleg copies of Crawlspace (1972), Bad Ronald (1974), and The Town That Dreaded Sundown (small theatrical run in 1976/77, but grew when it played on TV in 1978) were sold for stupid sums when you realized their actual quality (which, in some cases was nil). To me, of this group, nothing stands higher than the pair of films (and the following series) that followed the often humorous exploits of soft-boiled newspaper man Carl Kolchak.

Both films are essentially the same, the eccentric, near carnival-barker, but nonetheless razor sharp sleuth Carl Kolchak (the great Darren McGavin in the role/performance of his career) happens to find himself in a city (Stalker in the glowing gem of Las Vegas surrounded by the dark desolate desert, while Strangler is the rain drenched Seattle underground) where a series of killings of young women have rocked the area. Both are initially seen as the work of a serial killer to only eventually be untangled by Kolchak as the work of demonic monsters of Horror lore (Stalker is a snarling Vampire who interestingly has no dialogue in the film, while Strangler is a zombie like mad scientist who has almost discovered a tonic for reincarnation). The stories pit Kolchak as the ultimate outsider, having to fight all those around him to prove his theories correct, hoping to better understand the killers to find and end their reigns of terror before more die. The great twist is how each story finds similarity in Kolchak—while on the hunt for the Vampire in Stalker, he is also a lonely prowler in the night, driving endlessly up and down the Las Vegas strip, his ear affixed to a police scanner hoping to catch the killer scoop, while, after being forced out of Las Vegas in the films conclusion we open to him in the Pacific Northwest in Strangler, having to reinvent himself much as our monster who returns every 21 years in hopes of finally discovering a permanent concoction for everlasting life does. You wonder how many of these films they could have made—at some point you’d have had to mix up the formula to avoid tedium—but as it is, here are two wonderfully entertaining films. The first is the better of the two, and I’d argue an important film for the understanding of Vampire on Film, as here he is only a snarling, rabid animal, gone are the approximations of a suave, wealthy European man of culture.

I mentioned what the internet has done for all this type of stuff in the open as I’d be wrong to not mention how I just watched this pair: both on YouTube (for free) in easily the best prints I’ve ever seen of each film. Sure, they’re from the Kino Lorber HD (I believe 4K) releases, but, from starting my experience of these via a grubby, several generation dub of a dub, it’s something worth relishing in—the plot of these films is about Kolchak, a guy who desperately wants the tapes and/or news stories to see the light of day, letting the world know the true stories of ghastly killings by unfathomable monsters, only to be thwarted by editorial or bureaucratic fascism at every turn. Horror, in the old days was little different, conventions full of Kolchak’s, who wanted their truths delivered to more, and even in their wildest dreams probably couldn’t have imagined high-definition releases of their esoteric favorites, let alone being able to plop down and watch them for free anytime, virtually anywhere in the world. Hell they could even do it from a device they keep in their breast pocket. It sure beats driving 40 minutes to a dusty, cavernous Ramada Inn ballroom from 11 am – 3 pm on a Sunday in March.

Top 27 Rod Serling’s Night Gallery segments (presented in reverse numerical order)

Segment Number 1 “Camera Obscura” (Season 2) 21:47

A chilling tale of time-travel retribution disturbingly photographed by Leonard J. South in colored lenses that yield saturated distortion in defining an otherworldly realm where cretins are imprisoned, “Camera Obscura” is one of television’s crowning achievements. Written by Rod Serling from a short story by Basil Cooper the segment is eerie and foreboding and compellingly evokes the cinema of Ingmar Bergman and Alain Resnais in a general mise en scene that is right out of Dickens. The kaleidoscopic segment is evocative of a bad dream that has crossed the line into a palpable limbo, a place where its protagonists will re-live for all eternity (recalling Twilight Zone’s “Shadow Play”) a phantasmagorical repetition of events brought on by avarice and heartlessness. John Badham’s virtuoso fever-dream direction is visually imaginative and the two lead performers negotiate a unique eternal damnation from opposite sides of an expansively defined moral equation.

A British industrial village circa 1920 in the bookend setting of the brilliantly concise segment, where a cruel moneylender named William Sharsted calls on an older client to remind him that his note is due. The affable but rather mysterious man, Mr. Gingold, who owes the money lives in a quaint multi-leveled circular abode which houses some rare collectibles. After diverting Sharsted by showing his some of his treasures which the moneylender reluctantly goes along with Gingold, who also asks him to forgive payment for a close elder friend who is ailing but the uncaring Sharstead holds firm, not only rejecting the plea but callously reminding Gingold he will be evicted if his payment is not made in the coming week. After displaying a “camera obscura” device Gingold coaxes the exasperated Sharsted into ascending stairs for the elder gentleman’s piece de resistance, a second camera obscura, which he proudly asserts is the only one in existence. Initially the device reveals disorienting images but soon enough Sharsted recognizes the old Corn Exchange builiding from his childhood which has since burned down. Similarly he is astonished to gaze on the old Victoria Greens, which ceased to exist in the early 1890s. Sharsted is subsequently stunned to see the old shop of his long-deceased Dad, a shylock as infamously merciless and obdurate as his son but after the novelty wears off he accuses his client of conjuring up ancient slide images and the entire look into the past is a photographic hoax.

After one last attempt to convince Sharsted to waive his demands of his impoverished friend, the moneylender adamantly refuses. Gingold glumly wishes him an ominous goodbye, the manner of which is nor lost on Sharsted who departs via a back entrance door. He encounters oddly deserted streets, but then some people whose sculptured faces seem oddly menacing. He notices old lamplights from his early years and again gazes on the Corn exchange and Victoria Greens, which he attributes to Gingold for implanting them in his consciousness. No matter where Sharsted tuns of whatever street he takes up on the Corn Exchange continues to appear in his recurrent nightmarish episode. He meets some terrifying people from his youth inclusing Abel Joyce, a fellow moneylender, Sanderson, a grave robber who had supposedly perished in prison, Amos Drucker, a war profiteer who killed and his dreadful father, William Sr. Sharsted frantically tries to stay ahead of the phantoms, but there is no escape. He screams out to Gingold, promising total reform but the old man looks into the camera obscura and announces Sharsted’s horrific fate: “Oh no, Mr. Sharsted, too late for reprieve. Now you shall stumble, and weep, and swear along the alleys and squares and streets of your own private hell. And you shall do it for all eternity.

A highly-regarded television and film star, Rene Auberjonois plays the soulless Sharstead with an obviously phony cockney accent but it does little to dim his uncompromising portrait of a man who feels nothing but his building bank account. The actor always reported in interviews that for all the work he did as an actor, none brought him public interested and adoration more than his Sharsted. He is famous for his “Sheehan” in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” Ross Martin brings an air of judgmental finality to his role as a money-poor aficianado of antiques who has more than quanit possessions up his sleeve. He absorbs insults and demands but like the Celia Johnson’s verbally regaled schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” he quietly prevails in the end. The array of characters in “Carnical of Souls” mode complete the ghoulish vision. The comparatively minimalist score by Paul Glass greatly adds to the unease and Serling’s superlative script includes many unforgettable lines. “Camera Obscura” is a television landmark and one of the most haunting time-travel yarns ever filmed.