Avant-Garde: Thanatopsis (1962, Ed Emshwiller)

Thanatopsis (1962)
USA, 5 min

Directed by: Ed Emshwiller

Starring: Becky Arnold, Mac Emshwiller

Particularly after the dull George Dumpson's Place (1964), Ed Emshwiller's Thanatopsis (1962) took me completely by surprise. An intense soundtrack of industrial machinery and heartbeat – a chilling construction of sound editing that predates Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) – highlights Emshwiller's exploration of a brooding man's psychosis. The director himself described the film as follows: "The confrontation of a man and his torment. Juxtaposed against his external composure are images of a woman and lights in distortion, with tension heightened by the sounds of power saws and a heartbeat." More specifically, I was left with the impression that Emshwiller was drawing the portrait of a serial killer's mind (the title itself, derived from Greek, literally means "meditation on death"). The man (Mac Emshwiller) sits alone in a dark room, rational reality fluctuating around him. A mysterious woman (Becky Arnold), gleaming in white, dances around the room, but so hideously distorted is her form that she more closely resembles a demon, twisting and writhing in apparent agony, her pain placing evil thoughts in the man's mind. Sex and violence merge into a singularly disturbing image of obsession and inner torment. The film ends with the indistinct silhouette of the man walking through a city, the distorted neon lights representing his warped and fractured view of reality – a chilling reminder that men like this are stalking our streets all the time.

7/10

Horror: Vincent (1982, Tim Burton)

Vincent (1982)
USA, 6 min
Directed by: Tim Burton
Written by: Tim Burton
Starring: Vincent Price (voice)

Vincent (1982) isn't the sort of film that you'd expect to come out of Walt Disney Productions, but it's exactly what you'd expect from Tim Burton. The director's first success, this six-minute animated short is both an affectionate tribute to the acting career of Vincent Price, and a vehicle for Burton's perverse sense of black humour. Vincent Malloy is a seven-year-old boy with an unhealthy obsession with the actor who shares his name, such that he actively wishes to become Vincent Price – or, more accurately, the range of characters that Price so memorably brought to the silver screen. Via increasingly-ghoulish flights of imagination, young Vincent envisages mutating his dog into a zombie henchman, dipping his auntie into hot wax, and attempting to dig up the totting corpse of his dead wife. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Price's body of work to spot all the references, but I'm fairly certain that among the movies Burton had in mind were House of Wax (1953), House of Usher (1960), The Last Man on Earth (1964) and, of course, The Raven (1963).

The film is animated in a style reminiscent of 1920s German Expressionism, with the continually-shifting walls and furniture serving to convey Vincent's escalating madness. A definite stylistic inspiration would also have been Ted Parmelee's The Tell-Tale Heart (1953), an excellent animated short film (based on Edgar Allen Poe's short story) that utilised Expressionism to emphasise the insanity of its narrator, voiced by James Mason. But Tim Burton goes one better than James Mason, employing the services of Vincent Price himself, who considered the film one of the most memorable tributes he'd ever received. Price narrates the story as a poem, in a manner than suggests the work of Dr. Seuss, but was probably aiming more to emulate Poe's "The Raven," the final lines of which is used to close the story. Like Poe's protagonists in both "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," young Vincent is left at the whim of his insanity, offered little opportunity for redemption or resolution. If you can handle Burton's macabre sense of humour, then this is a gem.
7/10

Horror: Road to Glennascaul (1951, Hilton Edwards)

Road to Glennascaul (1951)
Ireland, 23 min
Directed by: Hilton Edwards
Written by: Hilton Edwards
Starring: Orson Welles, Michael Laurence, Shelah Richards, Helena Hughes, John Dunne, Isobel Couser, Ann Clery

During a break in the filming of The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (1952), Orson Welles takes the time to recount a creepy "tall tale" allegedly told to him by a broken-down motorist to whom he offered a ride. Welles plays himself in the film, acting not only as the narrator, but more involvedly as the resident storyteller. One can imagine that it was this role, in addition to his obvious talents on the radio, that inspired The Fountain of Youth (1958) – a wonderful half-hour television pilot for "The Orson Welles Show," which boasted a concept not dissimilar to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," but with Welles taking a more active presence in each episode's production (inconceivably, the show was immediately rejected). One also suspects the film's influence on the BBC's brilliant "Ghost Story for Christmas" series, the most impressive of examples of which are A Warning to the Curious (1972) and The Signalman (1976) {adapted from stories by M.R. James and Charles Dickens, respectively}.

The best kind of ghost stories, I think, that those told through an intermediary – it keeps them grounded in reality, which paradoxically makes them all the more creepy. The viewer's natural inclination is to trust the narrator's word, but in this case the narrator must rely on the word of the motorist, Sean Merriman (Michael Laurence), who could be making the whole story up… or, he could be completely sincere. It's that uncertainty that makes Return to Glennascaul (1951) a perfectly chilling ghost tale, and a fine companion for a cold, lonely winter's night. We must not, of course, underestimate the emotional resonance of Welles' narrating voice, which contributes just as much atmosphere as Georg Fleischmann's hazy photography. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1954, but lost out to Bear Country (1953), one of Wal Disney's two-reeler nature documentaries. In any case, think about Return to Glennascaul next time you decide to pick up two female hitch-hikers – I, for one, will be following Orson's example!
8/10

Horror: Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968, Jonathan Miller)

Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968)

UK, 42 min

Directed by: Jonathan Miller

Written by: M.R. James (story), Jonathan Miller (adaptation)

Starring: Michael Hordern, Ambrose Coghill, George Woodbridge, Nora Gordon, Freda Dowie

All good ghost stories should be in black-and-white. There's something inherently creepy in the crisp, greyish tones of B&W photography, effectively evoking a time and place where scientific logic didn't hold such sway, and the existence of lingering human spirits seemed more plausible. Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968) was released as an episode of the BBC television series Omnibus (1967-2002), and was adapted from a short story by M.R. James. Though hampered in some ways by a brief running time, preventing any in-depth exploration of the main character, the film is a classic supernatural chiller, a creepy ghost story in the same stylistic vein as Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) and Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963). Michael Hordern is perfect as the doddering old academic professor who mumbles his way across the exquisite Norfolk coastal countryside, detached from almost all social interaction. With the rustle of bedsheets and the soft whisper of a man's voice, Professor Parkins will discover that his life isn't quite as "lonely" as he thought it was.

At its thematic core, Whistle and I'll Come to You is less a ghost story, and more of a character study. One might choose not to take the bed-rustling spirits literally, and to consider them the manifestation of Professor Parkins' unwillingness to consciously acknowledge the possibility of the supernatural. When asked whether or not he believes in spirits, the professor evades the question with an assortment of largely-irrelevant intellectual musings, boasting a sort of academic elitism that leaves his sincere breakfast companion (Ambrose Coghill) – who is consistently kept at a distance – feeling foolish. The film's brief opening narration notes that M.R. James originally intended his story as an allegorical criticism of "intellectual pride," and this theme always sits at the forefront. Having placed his complete faith in the superiority of academic and scientific thinking, Professor Parkins has lost the ability to coherently interact with other people, and his snobbery extends towards the outright rejection of such far-fetched notions in folklore as that of ghosts. Subconsciously, however, there is always that niggling doubt: what if he's wrong?

Whistle and I'll Come to You has an extraordinary emptiness that I think works extremely well. Very few scenes actually contain any traces of the supernatural, but, as we have already been told that we are watching a ghost story, paranormality is allowed to pervade every moment. Professor Parkins wanders the windy Norfolk coastline, pausing to take in the views, to eat lunch, to read a book – in any other context, such sequences may have bordered on tedium, but our anticipation of the unnatural consistently keeps us holding our breath. Most of the film's icy shivers are brought about through uncanny use of sound effects, knowingly exploiting the instinctive human fear of that which we can hear but not see; the nearby rustling of bedsheets, in these circumstances, was one of the most unsettling noises I've ever heard in a film. Unfortunately, at just 42-minutes in length, the film does feel rather incomplete, as though it is merely the opening half of a feature-length film. Still, considering the medium for which it was made, Jonathan Miller has undoubtedly achieved excellence in the horror genre.

8/10