Night of the Hunted (1980) Blu-Ray review

By the late 70s Jean Rollin was starting to feel that perhaps he had exhausted the vampire genre. He had made a series of wildly unconventional surrealist vampire vampires and that cycle of films would come to an end in 1979 with the superb Fascination. He was also disillusioned by the commercial failure of Lips of Blood. Between 1978 and 1982 he made three extraordinarily interesting and unusual movies, The Grapes of Death (1978), Night of the Hunted (1980) and The Living Dead Girl (1982). The Grapes of Death and The Living Dead Girl are horror movies and they’re zombie movies, although they’re not like anyone else’s zombie movies. He also made The Escapees about this time, a movie that has thematic similarities to Night of the Hunted.

Night of the Hunted (the original French title was La Nuit des Traquées) is not quite a horror movie. It’s not quite a zombie movie, but it has close thematic links to The Living Dead Girl. It’s a science fiction film, of sorts. And, being a Jean Rollin movie, it’s an exercise in subtle surrealism.

In 1978 Rollin had begin his filmic association with Brigitte Lahaie. Miss Lahaie was a very successful nude model and porn star (making both softcore and hardcore movies). Rollin thought she had potential. He thought she had an intriguing screen presence and plenty of charisma. And he was right. She went on to make quite a few non-porn movies but her superb performance as Elisabeth in Night of the Hunted is the highlight of her acting career.

This movie’s origins are intriguing. A producer asked Rollin to do a hardcore film. Rollin told him that for the same minuscule budget he could make a proper movie. The producer agreed. With $40,000 Rollin shot Night of the Hunted in ten days.

The movie begins with a girl running along the road, dressed in a nightgown. We will find out that her name is Elisabeth. Robert (Alain Duclos) picks her up and takes her back to his apartment. She is clearly frightened and confused. She is running away from something but she cannot tell Robert what she is running away from. She cannot tell him where she lives.

Robert is a good-natured guy. He wants to help her but he doesn’t know where to start. Elisabeth knows where to start. She wants to make love. She needs to make love. That’s the only thing she is sure about.

Robert leaves for work the next morning and a man and a woman show up. She is told that the man is her doctor. They are going to take her home. They take her to a huge modernist building. Elisabeth is told that she shares an apartment with Catherine (Cathy Stewart). She doesn’t recognise Catherine and Catherine doesn’t recognise her.

Catherine also has no memories. They live in a tower building referred to as the Black Tower. All the people there have the same problem. They are losing their memory. They are becoming mindless zombies.

Elisabeth has not lost her humanity completely (unlike some of the inhabitants of the Black Tower). She still has emotions. She cares about Catherine. She also cares about Véronique (Dominique Journet). She doesn’t remember her but she thinks they had been friends. Elisabeth makes plans to escape. Véronique had accompanied her the last time she escaped. Elisabeth intends that the three of them - Véronique, Catherine and herself - will escape together.

But escape is not easy, and the attempt will have unexpected consequences.

At times this movie is just slightly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville in its use of stark modernist architecture as a science fiction setting, and its use of modernism as something remote and alienating.

The Black Tower is neither a prison nor an apartment block nor a hospital, or perhaps it’s all three. It’s an incredibly stark setting and the visuals in this movie are bleak and colourless, and deliberately so.

The performances are generally effective. Lahaie is the standout. She really is superb. It’s sad and very moving performance.

The sex scene between Elisabeth and Robert is fairly explicit but it’s absolutely necessary. Indeed it’s a crucial scene. Elisabeth is losing touch with her own humanity. She is becoming something less than human. She desperately wants something human to cling to, some intense human experience. And human experiences don’t come much more intense than sex. It’s one of the most touching sex scenes you’ll ever see. And it’s desperately sad. Elisabeth’s pleasure is intense. For that moment she is human again. She is a woman again. But her joy is fleeting. She had hoped that the sex would be something so intense that she would not forget it. But she forgets everything that happens to her within a few minutes.

Rollin does not make the mistake of explaining what is happening at the beginning. He lets us piece things together. Elisabeth has no memories. None at all. Five minutes after Robert introduces himself to her she has forgotten his name or how she came to be in his apartment. We gradually figure out some of what is happening. The eventual explanation is perhaps the only disappointing thing about the movie.

There’s a lot of nudity and a lot of sex. Additional much more graphic sex scenes were also shot by Rollin. He was keeping his options open. There was always the possibility the film would be recut as a softcore sex film (although it would have mystified the audience for such movies). A version with hardcore insets was later released although Rollin wanted no connection with that version.

Night of the Hunted was savaged by critics (who entirely failed to understand it) and flopped at the box office. That was perhaps inevitable. This is a very bleak movie. It’s also a weird kind of love story, but in a way that would hardly draw mass audiences in.

Night of the Hunted remains one of Rollin’s most fascinating movies, with an extraordinary and powerful ending. Very highly recommended.

The Grapes of Death (1978)

The Grapes of Death (Les raisins de la mort), released in 1978, was the first of Jean Rollin’s three zombie movies (the others being Night of the Hunted and The Living Dead Girl). OK, he also made Zombie Lake in 1981 but that one doesn’t count. He was just a director for hire on that film and he had zero interest in the project.

Rollin’s three zombie movies are probably the three most interesting zombie movies ever made. They’re not exactly conventional zombie movies and most crucially they’re zombie movies with an emotional element. We cannot see any of Rollin’s zombies as mere shambling flesh-eating monsters. We’re never allowed to forget that these were perfectly normal human beings with perfectly normal human hopes and fears and feelings. And Rollin’s zombies always retain a degree of humanity. His zombies suffer.

The Grapes of Death has a typical opening for a Rollin zombie movie. In a wine-growing district of France the vines are being sprayed with pesticide. It’s an experimental pesticide and it turns out to have disastrous effects. I don’t think Rollin was especially interested in giving us an environmentalist message. What he did like to do in his zombie films was to give us a totally rational plausible explanation for his zombies. In The Living Dead Girl it’s a chemical spill. For a man who made so many vampire movies Rollin had surprisingly little interest in the supernatural. In fact in The Nude Vampire he gives us a vampire movie with no supernatural elements at all, and most of his vampire films pretty much ignore the supernatural aspects of vampirism. They also ignore the religious and moral ramifications of vampirism. Rollin had other fish to fry.

Rollin’s zombie movies also had a genuinely tragic feel. His zombies are the result of human mistakes.

Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) and her friend Brigitte (Evelyne Thomas) have left Paris by train. Brigitte is heading for Spain while Élisabeth is heading for the tiny village of Roubles in wine-making country. The train journey becomes a journey of horror. The shaken Élisabeth makes it to Roubles where she finds that everyone is suffering from some kind of disfiguring disease which turns them into mindless killers. But not entirely mindless. You don’t get many zombie movies in which a zombie brutally kills someone and then starts sobbing from the horror and shame of what he’s done.

Élisabeth asks for help from a man and his daughter only to find more horror. And a suicidal zombie.

Élisabeth does encounter one person who seems normal, a blind girl named Lucie (Mirella Rancelot). They take refuge in an abandoned house.

More horrors follow before Élisabeth meets a rather odd very attractive blonde woman (Brigitte Lahaie) who seems a bit evasive when questioned. The woman’s story sounds a bit strange but she offers to help Élisabeth escape from the village.

Two men show up, oddly unaffected by the madness.They’re armed and they’re out to kill zombies. They may represent salvation, but in this movie you can’t be entirely sure of anything.

The performances are generally good. Rollin always got effectively odd and mysterious performances from actresses. The standout performance comes from Brigitte Lahaie, largely because the woman she plays is a very Jean Rollin character. We just don’t know what’s going on with this woman and Lahaie conveys her enigmatic nature perfectly.

This movie, like The Living Dead Girl a few years later, sees Rollin moving into more overtly commercial territory. He’d figured out that audiences wanted zombies and they wanted gore. The Grapes of Death offers both and it is a full-blown horror movie. But it’s still a Rollin movie, with touches of characteristic Rollin atmosphere and at least a few hints of Rollin surrealism.

While superficially it seems like a straightforward zombie flick there are two things that make it very unconventional. Firstly, we’re not sure whether we really should be sympathising with the two vigilantes who are slaughtering every zombie they come across. Élisabeth voices the suggestion that maybe these are just sick people who could be cured. There is also of course the possibility that the homicidal madness is merely temporary. And these zombies still have self-awareness. They know that they are in the grip of homicidal madness and they’re tortured by guilt and remorse. The madness forces them to kill, but they don’t want to.

The second unconventional touch is the very Rollinesque enigmatic ending.

Rollin seems to have had a more generous than usual budget to work with. The makeup and the special effects are quite impressive. Technically this film compares favourably to any of the other zombie movies of its era.

The UK Black House Blu-Ray is barebones but the transfer is nice.

For my tastes this movie is not quite as interesting as Night of the Hunted and The Living Dead Girl. Those two movies packed an immense emotional punch. The Grapes of Death does have an emotional impact but it’s more diffuse, less personal. This is still vastly more interesting than most zombie movies. The Grapes of Death is not quite top-tier Rollin but it’s still very much worth seeing. For horror fans who haven’t sampled Rollin’s work this movie and The Living Dead Girl are the best place to start. They have other things going for them but they also work as straight-out gore-drenched horror films. Recommended.

Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)

Michele Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore (released under the much more prosaic title Cemetery Man in the U.S.) is a zombie movie. Now I have to say upfront that I am not a fan of zombie movies. There are some exceptions. I absolutely adore movies dealing with voodoo. Those types of zombie movies I like. And I love Jean Rollin’s zombie movies but Rollin’s zombie movies are very very unconventional zombie movies. But the zombie movies that started to become so poplar in the wake of Night of the Living Dead, the movies about shambling flesh-eating zombies, hold no appeal for me.

Michele Soavi is however a director with interesting credentials. He was a protégé of Dario Argento, working on many of Argento’s movies in the 80s and early 90s. He is often spoken of as a director with at least some of Argento’s visual flair.

And Dellamorte Dellamore has the reputation of being an unusual zombie movie. A kind of black comedy zombie movie but with a bit of philosophical heft to it as well, and a certain amount of eroticism. So, given that I’ve had Anchor Bay’s DVD release of this movie siting unwatched on my shelf for literally years it seemed like it might be worth actually sitting down and watching it.

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is the caretaker at a small cemetery. It’s not such a bad job really. It suits him. He’s not really a very sociable guy. Recently some slightly disturbing things have been happening at the cemetery. Some of the dead, after seven days, have started coming back to life. Well perhaps not quite back to life. They’re zombies. They’re not too much of a problem. If you shoot them they go back to being dead and they stay dead.

Francesco is vaguely aware that he ought to report the matter to the relevant authorities. The trouble is that that would involve writing reports and filling in forms and all sorts of bureaucratic hassles. It might even put his job at risk. The easiest thing to do is to just shoot the zombies and rebury them and say no more about it. Francesco is a guy who doesn’t like to make his life more complicated than it needs to be.

Then comes the day when he spots a gorgeous young woman (played by Anna Falchi) at a funeral. It’s the funeral of an elderly man. Francesco assumes it’s the young woman’s father but she informs him that the man was actually her husband. She then goes on to tell Francesco how her husband was incredibly good in bed, a skilful and tireless lover. She’s obviously missing his physical attentions. So her behaviour is slightly odd but Francesco doesn’t let that worry him. Grief does strange things to people. What matters to Francesco is that she’s totally gorgeous and he wants to sleep with her more than he’s ever wanted anything in his life.

This seems like an unattainable goal, unto, the day he mentions in passing that the cemetery has a fine ossuary. A building filled with assorted skeletal remains. She is very very anxious to see the ossuary. It excites her very much indeed. In fact it gets her incredibly hot. Maybe making love on her husband’s grave might seem insensitive but she assures Francesco that she has never had any secrets from her husband.

From this point on the movie gets progressively stranger. For a while it tries being a horror film. Then it tries black comedy. Then it tries adolescent existentialism. The zombie thing kind of gets forgotten. Maybe none of it is real anyway. It’s more like a crazy hallucinogenic dream. There’s lots of gore and some genuinely disgusting gross-out moments. I think the director is trying to be zany. The sad thing is that the crazier the movie gets the less interesting it gets. Instead of the inspired lunacy which Soavi was presumably shooting for we get an incoherent mess.

And once we decide that none of it can be real then there’s no reason to care what happens next. Maybe Francesco is really suffering. Maybe he’s just insane.

The first time Francesco shoots a living person instead of a zombie, by mistake, it has a certain shock value. Then he just keeps shooting people for no reason.

As a comedy it didn’t work at all for me. Comedy is a very individual thing and maybe this is just not the kind of comedy that appeals to me. As horror it doesn’t work because it’s too farcical and it’s impossible to feel any terror or suspense or shock. As an exercise in absurdism it falls flat because it’s too silly and cartoonish.

There are a few good visual moments early on. For the first half hour the movie has an interesting off-kilter vibe. It just ends up (to my way of thinking) trying to do too many things and trying to be too many things.

Lots of people really like this movie. I can’t really recommend it but I’m not going to advise you to avoid it because it might really work for you. Most people seem to like this movie a lot more than I did.

It just didn’t work for me.

The Living Dead Girl (1982)

The Living Dead Girl (La morte vivante) is the third and final film in what could be described as Jean Rollin’s zombie trilogy. Yes I know that technically he made four zombie movies but I don’t count Zombie Lake. He was merely a hired gun on that picture, it was not one of his personal films and his interest in the project didn’t extend much further than a desire for a badly needed pay cheque. I think it’s therefore fair to speak of his zombie trilogy - The Grapes of Death (1978), The Night of the Hunted (1980) and The Living Dead Girl (1982).

What these three movies have in common is an unconventional approach to the zombie movie sub-genre. They’re unconventional both thematically, emotionally and stylistically. The most radical thing about them is that they add an emotional dimension to the zombie movie.

The opening of The Living Dead Girl makes it plain that Rollin is treating zombies as a science fictional phenomenon rather than a supernatural one. Chemical waste is what turns the zombies into zombies. Which is interesting because Rollin had also treated vampirism as a science fictional phenomenon in some of his vampire films (especially The Nude Vampire).

What’s also interesting is that in The Living Dead Girl he makes no attempt to convince us that his science fictional explanation is plausible. We’re not going to have a scientist offering us huge amounts of techno-babble about how zombies are created. Rollin doesn’t care. All we need to know is that these zombies are not supernatural. What really interests Rollin is the consequences, and where his zombie movies become very unconventional is is his interest in the emotional consequences for the zombies. Having the zombies played by beautiful young women was obviously a sound commercial move but it also makes us instinctively sympathetic. We want to sympathise with beautiful young women.

The Living Dead Girl is as close as Rollin ever got (among his personal films) to making an out-and-out horror movie. It’s the only Rollin movie to feature significant amounts of gore gore (and it is a bit of a gore-fest at times). Rollin’s vampire movies are horror movies of a sort but mostly they’re exercises in surrealism and dream imagery. The Living Dead Girl is unequivocally a horror movie, although it's also much more than that.

Despite this it’s still recognisably a Rollin movie. A young woman in a long flowing white dress wandering through an empty chateau is very Rollin.

A spill of chemical waste in a crypt has an unexpected effect. It brings the corpse of Catherine Valmont back to life. Well, back to life in a way. She is re-animated as a zombie. She seems to have no identity and no awareness. She begins to kill, but instinctively and without any thought or emotion.

Her childhood friend Hélène discovers Catherine. She realises that Catherine has been on a killing spree but as children they made a vow to each other. Whatever Catherine has done Hélène will stand by her.

An American photographer, Barbara, also discovers Catherine’s existence.

The tantalising and tragic thing is that Catherine is not a mere zombie. She remembers a few things. A very few things, but she does remember things from the time when she was alive. She kills everyone she encounters, but not Hélène. She remembers Hélène. She remembers their friendship. She remembers the music box Hélène gave her as a gift. And, tragically, she begins to remember more and more. It’s tragic because she begins to understand that she is dead, that she is a living dead girl. And she begins to understand that she must kill to survive.

While Elysabeth in The Night of the Hunted is slowly losing her human-ness and her identity Catherine is slowly regaining hers. But that’s just as bad because Catherine knows she can never be human again, she can never really be alive again.

The relationship between the two girls slowly changes, in an extremely interesting and emotionally compelling way, but I can’t say any more because this is really the heart and soul of the movie and I’m not going to spoil it.

Is she a zombie or a vampire? There are certainly hints of vampirism. The truth is that she’s both and neither. She’s a one-off, the result of the bizarre effects of the chemical wastes to which her corpse was exposed. In some of Rollin’s vampire movies (especially Two Orphan Vampires and The Nude Vampire and in his novel Little Orphan Vampires) there is also considerable ambiguity - are they actually vampires?

Rollin’s zombie movies are, paradoxically, his most emotionally engaged movies. The zombie idea is used to explore identity, and what it is that makes us human, and the terror of losing our human-ness. In The Night of the Hunted the heroine is slowly losing her humanity and her identity. In The Living Dead Girl the heroine has already lost these things, but not completely. There’s still a shred of the woman she once was. In both movies there’s an overwhelming sense of loss. In both cases there’s the horror of existence without identity.

Françoise Blanchard is extraordinary as Catherine. She has very little dialogue, and none at all for most of the film. She has to convey her strange emotional states mostly wordlessly, and she does so. Marina Pierro is equally good as Hélène.

Rollin was famously obsessed with female doubles. Most of his movies feature two girls. They may be twins, they may be lesbians (but not always). There is always a mysterious and intense bond between the two girls. In this movie the bond is one of simple friendship, but it’s the kind of intense friendship that develops between girls of a certain age. As children Catherine and Hélène made a vow of eternal friendship, a perfectly normal thing. What’s abnormal is that for Hélène that vow of friendship is still as real as it was all those years ago. Her horror at Catherine’s killings cannot shake that bond.

It’s odd that despite all the gore this is Rollin’s most psychologically complex film, with characters who are not only complicated but they change in interesting and convincing ways.

The Living Dead Girl is vintage Rollin. Very highly recommended.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress (anime mini-series, 2016)

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress is a 12-episode 2016 anime mini-series with lots of mayhem and a definite steampunk vibe.

There are zombies and hints of vampirism. There are cool armoured trains. There are cute girls. There are complex characters, and complex interactions between them. There's love and betrayal and honour and courage. And there's lots of carnage.

Here's the link to my review at Cult TV Lounge.

The Mad Ghoul (1943)

The Universal horror movies of the 1940s are a bit of a mixed bag but The Mad Ghoul does have quite a few things in its favour. Most notably it has the right cast. It has George Zucco as a mad scientist, it has famous scream queen Evelyn Ankers and it has Turhan Bey to add the necessary touch of exoticism.

Zucco plays chemist Dr Alfred Morris who has been researching some strange aspects of ancient Mayan rites. He believes that the Mayans may have used a type of poison gas to induce what he calls a state of death-in-life. He also has a theory about the Mayans’ rather unpleasant custom of tearing out the hearts of living sacrificial victims. He believes they had a means of reversing the state of death-in-life.

With his eager young student and assistant Ted Allison (David Bruce) Dr Morris is determined to prove the correctness of his theory.

At first we assume that Dr Morris is the kind of movie mad scientist who is led into evil through his single-minded pursuit of science without any moral grounding. He scornfully dismisses the idea of morality. He is a scientist and believes there is no good or evil, only true or false. There is however another factor at work in this case. Dr Morris knows a good deal about science but he is a fool when it comes to women. 

The worst thing is that he thinks he knows all about women. And as the old saying goes, there’s no fool like an old fool. Dr Morris’s foolishness about women will lead him to use his knowledge of science for evil rather than good.

Young Ted is also somewhat naïve when it comes to women, and this will have equally disastrous results for him. Ted is engaged to be married to popular singer Isabel Lewis (Evelyn Ankers) but he has an unknown and formidable rival in the person of her accompanist, Eric Iverson (Turhan Bey).

Soon a ghoul is on the loose, robbing graves all over the country. There seems to be some mysterious link to Isabel Lewis. Of course Isabel herself cannot possibly be involved. Reporter Ken McClure (Robert Armstrong) has a theory but he will need some hard evidence before he can go to the police. He has an idea he knows how to find that evidence.

George Zucco is in fine form. Dr Morris is the kind of mad scientist who doesn’t struggle very hard against the temptations of evil but he’s smooth and clever and he’s able to maintain an outward appearance of respectability. People trust Dr Morris. Zucco doesn’t overdo his performance - Dr Morris is a villain but he’s a victim of his own delusions and he’s not entirely unsympathetic.

David Bruce does an excellent job as the hapless innocent Ted Allison. Evelyn Ankers makes a sympathetic and glamorous heroine. Turhan Bey is as suave as ever as her handsome lover.

While the term zombie is never used this can be seen as a type of zombie movie, with a scientific rather than mystical explanation.

One of the great things about this movie is the lack of comic relief. I just can’t tell you what a joy it is to encounter a 1940s Universal horror flick without irritating comic relief. Even the smart aleck reporter is mostly played very straight.

The movie includes many of the staples of Universal horror films with some nicely atmospheric graveyard scenes. The makeup effects (by the legendary Jack Pierce) are effective without being in any way excessive. Universal’s horror films of this era might have been uneven but they always looked good.

The script, by Brenda Weisberg and Paul Gangelin, is serviceable and in fact surprisingly intelligent and has some original touches. Director James P. Hogan spent his career in B-features but he knew his business and his work here can’t be faulted. He gets the most out of the material and the results are quite classy by B-movie standards. Sadly Hogan died of a heart attack shortly before the film’s release.

The Mad Ghoul is one of the five movies included in TCM’s excellent (although hard to find) Universal Cult Horror DVD boxed set. Sound quality is just a little uneven. On the other hand the image quality is superb. There are a few extras. The Mad Ghoul is a neat little horror movie that has been unjustly neglected and is highly recommended. As for the TCM boxed set, it’s pretty much a must-buy for classic horror fans.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

I had seen I Walked With a Zombie before, and even reviewed it, but that was the best part of a decade ago so I think I can be forgiven for revisiting what is after all considered to be one of the great horror classics.

This 1943 release was a product of the celebrated Val Lewton B-movie unit at RKO and was directed by Jacques Tourneur, the best of the directors who worked for Lewton.

Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) has been employed as a nurse to care for the wife of sugar planter Paul Holland (Tom Conway) on an island in the West Indies. Holland’s wife Jessica  has been in a state of near-catatonia for several years. She can walk but she cannot communicate and appears to have no mental connection with the world at all.

This partly accounts for the slightly brooding atmosphere at the plantation but there is more to it than that. There was apparently a romantic triangle involving Mrs Holland and the two brothers and shortly before she was stricken by her illness there had been a particularly unpleasant scene.

Betsy is in something of a quandary. She realises immediately that she is falling in love with Paul Holland. She is convinced that he still loves his wife and Betsy is driven by a combination of guilt and compassion to conceive the idea that perhaps Jessica Holland can somehow be restored to normality. Dr Maxwell (James Bell) has been willing to do all he can but nothing has had any effect. Betsy is informed that there are in fact better doctors who can cure Mrs Holland - voodoo doctors. We would imagine Betsy as the kind of person with little time for such notions but her zeal (or her guilt) overwhelms her judgment and she decides to give the voodoo doctors their chance. Of course she does not inform Paul Holland of her decision.

As the audience will have already gathered most of the characters have very conflicted emotions. They are not always entirely honest about their emotions and in some cases they may well be willfully deceiving themselves. Whatever the immediate outcome of Betsy’s visit to the voodoo priests might be the longer term consequences for herself, for Paul and for his brother are likely to be unpredictable.

This is certainly a horror movie that is more character-driven than most and the relationships between the characters are crucial. The motivations of the characters are also quite complex. Betsy’s guilt is not entirely unwarranted. She knew from the start that Paul was a married man and she made no attempts to discourage his interest in her, and he is a very wealthy man while she’s a more or less penniless nurse. It’s understandable she might feel that her behaviour could be interpreted as conniving. In fact it may even be conniving, perhaps without ever admitting it to herself.

Tom Conway was always somewhat overshadowed by his more famous brother George Sanders. To be honest Conway was the less talented of the brothers but he was a competent actor in the right role and he did some of his very best work in the Lewton pictures. His performance in this one can’t really be faulted. Paul Holland is a man who is repressing some very strong emotions and Conway conveys this effectively. James Ellison is quite adequate as Paul’s half-brother. Frances Dee is a satisfactory heroine, a confident self-assured woman who discovers she doesn’t know quite as much about life as she thought she did.

This movie breaks most of the rules for horror films. There’s very little overt horror, and until fairly close to the end there’s none at all. Tourneur knows what he’s doing however. The sense of unease and subtle menace builds gradually but inexorably. 

As a cinematographer J. Roy Hunt does not have the glittering reputation of Nicholas Musuraca for photographed Cat People for Tourneur but based on his work on this film perhaps he should. There are shadows. Lots of shadows! In fact some of the best use of shadows you’ll ever see. This is a movie that is heavily reliant on atmosphere and the visuals serve the purpose admirably. Since it’s so similar in visual style to other Tourneur movies one can’t help assuming that Tourneur’s influence was very much the dominant one although Hunt deserves credit for giving Tourneur the look he was after.

The sets are quite impressive also, especially by B-movie standards. The island setting is surprisingly convincing.

This movie was inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and if made today would doubtless be titled Jane Eyre with Zombies. Given that Jane Eyre is one of the masterpieces of gothic fiction the idea of turning it into a horror movie actually is not outrageous at all. The movie preserves at least a fair proportion of the spirit of Brontë’s novel.

One thing I found interesting was the way voodoo was portrayed. It wasn’t demonised in the way you’d expect in a 1943 movie, not was it depicted as being merely ridiculous. 

The Warner Home Video DVD release pairs I Walked With a Zombie with another Lewton movie, The Body Snatcher. I Walked With a Zombie gets a good transfer plus a very worthwhile audio commentary from Kim Newman and Steve Jones.

There are those who say this is the best of all the Lewton RKO films, but personally I think this one, Cat People and The Seventh Victim are all so good I wouldn’t like to even try to pick a favourite.  And they have aged very well indeed. This is magnificent subtle horror. Very highly recommended.

The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

The Plague of the Zombies was, I believe I am correct in stating, Hammer’s only attempt at a zombie film. And a very worthy attempt it is too.

John Gilling had made some interesting movies in the film noir genre in the 50s, most notably Deadly Nightshade (1953) and The Challenge (1960), before becoming a semi-regular director for Hammer in the 60s. He made five movies for Hammer, including two back-to-back in 1966, the underrated The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies. In fact they were made more or less simultaneously using the same locations and sets.

An eminent physician, Sir James Forbes (André Morell), has been called down to Cornwall by Dr Peter Tompson (Brook Williams). Dr Tompson is general practitioner in a small village and he is facing a situation that has him alarmed and perplexed. Young villagers are dying in disturbing numbers and he can find no clues whatsoever as to the causes. The situation is not helped by the refusal of the superstitious villagers to allow him to conduct post-mortem examinations.

Sir James is accompanied by his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare). It’s immediately obvious that there is something very wrong in the village. On their arrival they see a funeral disrupted by a crowd of young and obviously wealthy ruffians on horseback. Sylvia’s old school friend Alice (Jacqueline Pearce), now married to Dr Tompson, seems ill and very uneasy. Dr Tompson is drinking more than he should. The atmosphere in the village’s pub is tense to say the least.

Sir James convinces Dr Tompson that they will be able to make no progress unless they can carry out a post-mortem on one of the victims, even if they have to rob the victim’s grave to do so. Which is what they proceed to do. The discovery of an empty coffin in the grave adds to the mystery.

It transpires that someone is practising voodoo, but to what ends? Why do they need an army of zombies?

This movie doesn’t have too many familiar Hammer faces but the cast is perfectly adequate. André Morell is superb as Forbes, Jacqueline Pearce is excellent, Diane Clare is quite competent. Brook Williams is a little dull but Dr Tompson is a rather thankless role. The biggest surprise is Michael Ripper - he isn’t playing an innkeeper! He plays the local police sergeant, and has great fun doing so.

This film has all the usual strengths of a Hammer film. The gothic atmosphere is effective, as you would expect with Arthur Grant doing the cinematography. With Bernard Robinson as production designer the movie looks splendid.

The zombie make-up effects work very well indeed.

Within a couple of years of the release of this film George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead would usher in a new era of gore-drenched zombie movies. Personally I prefer zombie movies of the earlier type, and I much prefer a movies that tie zombies in with voodoo, as this one does quite effectively. There isn’t much gore in The Plague of the Zombies but it still manages to evoke some genuine chills and a nicely creepy ambience.

Anchor Bay’s old DVD release still stands up extremely well.

The Plague of the Zombies is classic Hammer gothic horror. It looks good, it has a strong cast, a decent script and it benefits from having a director who knows what he’s doing and isn’t trying to be excessively clever. This is fine entertainment for Hammer fans. Highly recommended.

Santo contra los zombies (Santo vs The Zombies, 1962)

Although Mexican wrestling star and pop culture icon had appeared in a couple of earlier movies it was Santo contra los zombies (Santo vs The Zombies) that really started the Santo movie craze. Santo would eventually appear in 52 luchador (wrestling hero) films.

Santo was actually Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta (1917-1984) and he played a large role in making professional wrestling into a major sport in Mexico.

The Santo movies all follow pretty much the same formula. Santo is a legendary masked wrestler who in his spare time is a daring masked crime-fighter. He fights not only criminal gangs but monsters, vampires, invaders from outer space and in this particular film, zombies.

The plot can be disposed of fairly quickly - if you’re watching a Santo movie for the plot then you’re missing the point. A professor has disappeared mysteriously. He had an interest in the subject of voodoo and zombies. As it happens zombies are being employed in a series of robberies. There is of course a diabolical criminal mastermind at the back of all this.

The police are baffled. The police chief decide it’s time to call on Santo’s help. Fortunately he has a direct radio-television link from his office to Santo’s headquarters. The professor’s daughter and her boyfriend are also involved in trying to find her missing father.

The zombie bad guys make an attempt to kidnap children from an orphanage, the children presumably to be used in experiments on zombification. The diabolical criminal mastermind knows that Santo is on his trail because he has a special television viewer that allows him to keep an eye on anything that he might need to know about.

It’s all just an excuse for lots of action. As in all Santo movies the action includes quite a lot of wrestling scenes but in this case at least one of the wrestling matches does serve an important plot purpose as Santo has to fight a zombified wrestler.

Needless to say at some point the bad guys kidnap the missing professor’s beautiful daughter, intending to turn her into a lady zombie. Can Santo find her in time to save her from this awful fate?

The feel of the movie is very close to that of Hollywood serials of the 30s and 40s and in fact the plot could have been lifted from one of those serials. Given the worldwide popularity of the Hollywood serials and the love of Mexican audiences for action adventure stories it’s fair to assume that those serials were very popular in Mexico and that this movie is very consciously modeling itself on them. And it does so very successfully.

The acting is of passable B-movie standard. Santo may not have been much of an actor but he has plenty of physical presence and enough superhero-type charisma to carry him through.

Director Benito Alazraki doesn’t try to get too clever (he would have had neither the time nor the money to do so) but he knows how to keep the action moving long nicely. and he does throw in a couple of dutch angles late in the film. This is obviously a low-budget film but the sets are quite serviceable, there’s some fun silly scientific paraphernalia in the mad scientist’s laboratory and the remote viewing televisions are handled quite well.

The Mexican film industry was always pretty good at achieving spooky atmosphere on very low budgets and Santo contra los zombies has some quite effectively moody scenes.

The Cinematográfica Rodríguez Region 1 and 4 DVD offers a very decent transfer, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Santo contra los zombies has no ambitions to do anything other than offer great fun-filled entertainment and it succeeds superbly in doing just that. This film is pure enjoyment. If you’re never seen a Santo movie this is as good a place as any to start and if you’re a confirmed fan you’ll certainly love this one. Tragically only a small proportion of the Santo movies are available in English-friendly editions but among those that are you’ll certainly want to check out Santo in the Wax Museum (1963), Santo Versus the Martian Invasion (1967) and Santo and Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (1974).

Highly recommended.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Carnival of Souls is one of the great low-budget horror movies and it’s also a rather unusual movie of its type. Made in 1961 on an absurdly small budget it disappeared almost without trace at the time but since then its reputation as a cult film has grown steadily.

Herk Harvey was a maker of industrial and educational films in Kansas. One day he discovered, quite by accident, a location that seemed absolutely perfect as a setting for a horror film. He asked his friend John Clifford to write a script and then set about raising  finance from local businessmen to make a feature film.

The setting was Saltair, a resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The resort included an amusement park and a pavilion and it was the pavilion that would feature so strikingly in the movie. This was actually the second such pavilion, the first having been destroyed by fire in 1925 (unfortunately the second pavilion would also be destroyed in a fire in 1970). The second Saltair pavilion was an enormous dance hall, and it would be the scene for the bizarre dance sequence at the end of the movie.

When he first saw the pavilion Harvey had the idea of the dead emerging from the lake to attend a kind of danse macabre. This idea was to form the central inspiration for the movie’s plot.

The movie opens with three girls in a car being inveigled into a drag race. They lose control on a bridge and their car crashes into a river. Frantic attempts to rescue the girls seem to have been in vain when one of the girls emerges from the river, having miraculously survived the accident.

The girl, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), is a rather quiet girl who is about to take up a position as a church organist in Lawrence, Kansas. She finds a room in a boarding house where she attracts the (somewhat unwelcome) attentions of fellow lodger John Linden (Sidney Berger). 

Mary seems to be becoming more and more disconnected from reality, as if she somehow doesn’t belong. She is also convinced she is being followed by a corpse-like figure. The man doesn’t threaten her but his presence (or possibly imagined presence) certainly disturbs her. Mary’s strangeness causes concern to kindly Dr Samuels (Sam Levitt) who tries to help her. 

Mary is also increasingly drawn to the abandoned Saltair Pavilion which she had passed on her way to Lawrence. As she becomes more disconnected her fascination for this gloomy but oddly beautiful place grows steadily. The pavilion will be the scene for the movie’s climax.

There’s no need to say any more about the plot. This is not really a plot-driven movie in any case - it’s the mood and the strange central character that matter.

John Clifford admits that when he started writing the script he had no clear idea where it was going and that even in the finished script he had no truly coherent idea of what it all meant. This is in fact one of the movie’s greatest strengths. I have always firmly believed that it is not the business of a horror movie to scare the audience, that the aim should be to create an atmosphere of unease and of a vague cosmic wrongness. This aim is often easier to accomplish if the movie avoids the temptation of over-explaining things. Horror that is formless, amorphous and ambiguous is generally more effective than horror that is overt and explicit. Carnival of Souls is a textbook example of how to create the subtle horror of suggestion.

Herk Harvey claimed that his intention was to make a movie with the look of Bergman movie and the feel of Cocteau. He had always had the idea that the movie might be more suited to the art-house than to the drive-in circuit. These were considerable ambitions for a first-time director. The surprising thing is that overall the movie really does achieve what he set out to do.

The movie failed commercially on its initial release, due in large part to nightmarish distribution problems. It finally started to attract attention when it was sold to TV and its cult following built steadily. Herk Harvey was never to make another feature but he did live long enough to have the satisfaction of seeing Carnival of Souls not only achieve his ambition of playing the art-house circuit but also being lauded internationally at film festivals.

Obviously a movie made on a budget of around $30,000 could have been more polished had more time and money been available but overall the minuscule budget was more of an asset than a liability - Harvey and Clifford had very little money to work with but they did have complete freedom. More money always involves more compromises. It also has to be said that Harvey made the small budget go a very long way. This is a visually stunning film. This was partly due to Harvey’s good fortune in finding truly amazing locations - the pavilion, the organ factory, the wooden-slatted bridge. Harvey himself pays tribute, and rightly so, to his cinematographer Maurice Prather. There’s no question however that much of the film’s success is due to the extraordinary vision of director Herk Harvey.

Candace Hilligoss’s performance is crucial, and impressive. Harvey and writer John Clifford wanted the protagonist to be a person with no real emotional connection whatsoever with other people. That’s a challenge to an actress but Hilligoss is equal to it, capturing the aloof emotionally empty quality of the character extremely effectively. 

While Harvey admits that his inexperience in feature films coupled with the lack of time and money does make the movie rather less polished than it might otherwise have been he believes that this actually enhances the movie’s disturbing weirdness, and he’s undoubtedly correct. Despite these minor rough edges what is truly impressive about Carnival of Souls is just how visually striking it is. There are some extraordinarily inspired touches of subtle spookiness. The scenes in Saltair are as effective and as well-crafted as anything you’re likely to find in a big-budget major studio production. Being entirely new to the world of feature films gave Harvey and Clifford the advantage of being able to approach the project without any preconceptions and with refreshing originality.

The major revelation of the story is unlikely to come as a surprise but it’s the atmosphere that is created that matters and that atmosphere is achieved superbly.

Criterion really went to town with their DVD release which includes (on two discs) both the original theatrical print and a slightly longer director’s cut as well as a host of extras, most notably an abbreviated but highly informative audio commentary from the writer and director and print interviews with them as well as star Candace Hilligoss. Image quality is superb.

Carnival of Souls is a genuine masterpiece of low-key horror. Very highly recommended.

Night of the Seagulls (1975)

Night of the Seagulls was the fourth and final installment in Spanish director Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead cycle with began with Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) and continued with Return of the Evil Dead (1973) and The Ghost Galleon (1974).

The cycle deals with a chapter of the Knights Templar, suppressed and destroyed during the Middle Ages for its evil practices, whose members rise from the dead as blind zombies.  They spread terror centuries ago and they continue to spread terror even in the modern world.

These movies follow a template that was extremely popular in European horror in the 70s, and especially in Spanish horror. They open with a prologue set in medieval times and then jump forward to the present day. In the case of Night of the Seagulls we have a young doctor taking over a practice in a remote and very backward village near the sea. Dr Henry Stein (Víctor Petit) arrives in the village with his young wife Joan (María Kosty) and it is immediately apparent that the villagers don’t want them there. It is also clear that something frightening and wrong is going on in the village. Dr Stein picks up a few clues from the village idiot Teddy but he fails to put the pieces of the jigsaw together. He also fails to realise that the young village girls who are taken each night to play a part in some mysterious ritual are in fact being offered up as human sacrifices by the dead Templars to the demon god they worship. The villagers deliver the girls up to the Templars in return for being allowed to survive.

The first hint of something badly wrong comes when Dr Stein and his wife hear the seagulls crying at night. Seagulls do not call at night. We will later discover why these particular seagulls do in fact call at night and it provides one of the movie’s better moments.

Dr Stein’s attempts to intervene to protect a village girl named Lucy seem doomed to failure. There appears to be no way to stop the blind knights, unless somehow he can discover the secret of their power.

Although the village seems to be in Spain the villagers have Irish names! Although this might possibly only be the case in the English dubbed version.

There’s a fair amount of gore but it doesn’t overdone to the extent that was (unfortunately) becoming common in European horror. The film is at its best when de Ossorio concentrates on creepiness and old-fashioned terror rather than gore and he’s quite good at being creepy. The screenplay (also by de Ossorio) is quite well thought-out and while it’s not startlingly original it’s effective and the ending works well.

The great strength of the Blind Dead films is the idea of the zombie Templars. It’s an inherently creepy idea and de Ossorio knows how to make it effectively terrifying. The knights are scary not just because they’re blind and remorseless but also because they’re silent. Some of the tricks the director uses were ones he devised in the earlier films in the series, such as shooting the knights in slow motion. This technique can often be crude and irritating but it works superbly in these movies, emphasising the fact that the blind knights are slow but inexorable and unstoppable.

You might think that being the fourth and last of the Blind Dead movies this would be the weakest but actually it’s one of the best of the series. It’s very heavy on atmosphere and the visuals are impressive. The climax makes sense and provides a fitting ending to the series.

Zombie movies had become all the rage in the 1970s but the Blind Dead movies have more going for them than the average zombie movie. These zombies are both more interesting and more genuinely scary and the mood of oppressive dread is achieved very effectively.

Blue Underground’s DVD is not one of their best efforts, the image being excessively grainy. There’s also very little in the way of extras, just an image gallery and a trailer.

Amando de Ossorio was not one of the great European horror directors but he was very good at creating an atmosphere of evil and dread. In my view he was at his best when he was at his most outrageous, particularly in the deliciously crazy Night of the Sorcerers. His best horror film was the superb The Loreley’s Grasp.

Night of the Seagulls should satisfy eurohorror and eurosleaze fans. Recommended.