Hoodoo Voodoo

In 1942, RKO set up Val Newton as the head of their new horror division to produce low budget B movies... he promptly released Cat People with Jacques Tourneur directing. A massive critical and financial success, the very next year he reunited his team to release I Walked with a Zombie (1943). This time bringing in the successful Universal The Wolf Man (1941) writer Curt Siodmak to come up with the premise (asked to loosely base it upon Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Inez Wallace’s original source material article), it was then reworked a bit by Newton and Ardel Wray into the finished product.

If you know anything about your Hammer horror vampire films, you’ll recall that it is a staple for them to be set during the very gothic themed nineteenth century... that is, except for when Alan Gibson directed Dracula A.D. 1972, which, not surprisingly, was released in 1972, and changed the game. An attempted modernization of the famed franchise after many long years – Christopher Lee first donned the pitch black cape all the way back in 1958 in Dracula... now fourteen years later, this was Lee’s sixth appearance as the pesky vampire... his final appearance coming just one year later in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (the only other Hammer feature set during these modern times).

Based upon the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, as well as clearly taking some inspiration from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (2023) is not the horror path one might expect from the monster book/movie referenced above, instead, it feeling like a coming of age sci-fi fantastical fairy tale that also dabbles in the realm of psychology, romance, drama, and even comedy. Set in an eccentric world trapped somewhere between Victorian England and some sort of steampunk futuristic alternative, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone – Bugonia; La La Land) is the latest dynamic if out there scientific experiment by the deformed Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe – Nosferatu; The Lighthouse). A grown woman in body, but with the mind of something closer to a baby, it does seem like she is developing at a quicker pace compared to a normal human child.

What would seemingly have been a massive hit crime film with an utterly impressive cast, Beat the Devil (1953) instead became a most bizarre experiment. With unhappy director John Huston having thrown the script out the window, he brought in the legendary Truman Capote to then help him co-write the story based upon British journalist Claud Cockburn’s novel of the same name at the very last minute. With a cast already assembled in Italy, names like Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida (in her first English language movie), Peter Lorre and others were simply sitting there and waiting to get started.

Taking years as he reveled in the eccentric, outlandish neo-noir mystery thriller landscape he was writing, David Lynch then went on to direct his violent, erotic, drug infused crime caper, calling it Blue Velvet (1986) – with the 1963 song of the same name sung by Bobby Vinton being a big influence on the picture. Though set in the time it was made, the suburban Lumberton feels like it is stuck in the 1950s. Airing a vibe that is more than a touch off-putting, there is no semblance of things being in the right – all seemingly out of time and place. The billboards resemble another era, most of the cars are thirty years old, and lounge singers are popular again.

A slightly more obscure giallo released during the heyday of the craze, co-writer/director Silvio Amadio’s Smile Before Death (1972) is a psychological mystery thriller that certainly pushes the boundaries of the already boundary-pushing Italian genre. Amadio starts with a wild opener, as wealthy Dorothy Emerson (Zora Gheorgieva) is found brutally murdered by an unknown assailant... with it promptly being classified as a suicide by the incompetent police, this then turns into a slow burner of sorts.