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It was in the early Iron Man stories of Tales of Suspense where I first laid eyes on the art of Don Heck. I wasn’t impressed. With talents like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko working on Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man, I didn’t have the attention span to appreciate the art and style of Don Heck. Once I discovered Tales of Suspense, with Iron Man, I never missed an issue. I enjoyed the character and the stories Don drew in those early issues. His style was a little too scratchy for my tastes back then but he was consistent, depending on who inked his work. Eventually Don wound up drawing almost every Marvel character at one time or another during the 1960s. At one point I started collecting the pre-hero Marvels, mostly for the Ditko and Kirby stories, and along the way discovered a lot of great Don Heck fantasy stories too. The years went by, and I really didn’t focus much on superhero comics or the work of Don Heck, preferring to concentrate on 1940s and 1950s horror comics. That’s when I discovered his early work for Comic Media. These books were like a slap in the face for me.
Above, Don’s cover for Horrific #3 (Jan. 1953) would have shocked, but how many readers would have realized he had cleverly manipulated the figure in his cover from the first issue of War Fury (Sept. 1952) shown below? Alongside, the drama from Danger #1 (Jan. 1953).
Not only was Don’s pre-Comics Code work well constructed and drawn, it was unique when compared to most other horror comics of that period. For Comic Media, Don created the idea of putting large monster portraits on the front covers. He put them right in your face, with eyes shooting straight out into yours. His imagination ran wild with a gamut of characters, including a zombie, witch-doctor, devil, shrunken head, ghoul, hunchback, gorilla, and a guy with a bullet-hole through his forehead. By the way, this particular cover— Horrific #3, January 1953—was spawned from Don’s previous Comic Media cover on War Fury #1, dated September 1952. The scene shows an American Soldier with a bullet-hole through his forehead, lying dead at the feet of a North Korean soldier who has just been shot in the back by an American G.I. The war comic collectors go crazy over this one and have made it one of their top wants during recent years. Don redrew a full cover-sized image of the soldier’s head only, with the bullet hole, for the cover of Horrific #3. This book is even more popular than the War Fury cover with horror comic collectors. In other instances, Don went beyond large horror portraits
by drawing great scenes of horror on the covers. Who else would have put you, the reader, inside of an oven, looking out at a man shoveling coal in on you? Or even more horrific, a close-up of the condemned man staring you in the face as the blade of a Guillotine plunges downward. These kinds of situations really grabbed the attention of potential comic book buyers of the early 1950s, and now over sixty years later, all of these iconic Comic Media covers for Horrific and Weird Terror have been pushed to the top of horror comic collectors’ want lists everywhere.
By the summer of 1953, Don was working up preliminary drawings for horror hosts who would introduce the stories to readers. Don and Comic Media were aware of the success that EC horror comics were having with their “Ghoulunatic” horror hosts and producing some of the best horror comics in the business. It took me over twenty years to put together a complete collection of Don’s Comic Media horror comics. This was in the years long before the internet came along. I was so taken with his covers that eventually I decided I had to interview Don about this early part of his career. Don only gave three or four interviews during his lifetime and I’ve read them all. In every case, it seems, the interviewer almost ignored his early work, and jumped right into his Marvel Iron Man and other superhero books he had worked on. I’ve seen it happen many times when the interviewer doesn’t really have a good knowledge about an artist’s past work or they’re too focused on their own
30 YEARS PAST: DON HECK
A youthful Don heck, then in his 20s, enjoying a productive period in the employ of Comic Media.
With these grisly comics now at their peak, the fiery cover to Horrific #11 (May 1954) would have excited these readers even more.
30 YEARS PAST: DON HECK
from DC asking me to please bring samples. So I brought up the exact same samples that I had taken before and they were fine. [laughter] I was always a big fan of Milton Caniff and Alex Raymond and Foster and all the good ones at that time. And in those days they had a lot of great illustrators in the magazines too. Unfortunately, today, there’s not much market for it anymore.
RH: Did you have some formal art training before you started working in the comics?
DH: Yeah, I went to school, you know, but I went for layout and design... but I always wanted to draw comics. I wanted to do a strip.
RH: Which schools did you attend?
DH: I went to a vocational school called Woodrow Wilson, right here in Queens. Then I went to... what is now like a community college. It’s now called State Tech. So we were the first ones in. The state was trying these two year colleges and we were the first ones through. It was a new process they were testing out in those days. But there were a lot of people who graduated from there who went on to become art directors, etc., who became very good in their field. I went to the School of Visual Arts for about two months also. It just didn’t seem to fit with what I wanted to do. The class was good, but I was just antsy at the time I guess, and jumped off of it.
From Don’s own files, we present a series of preliminary sketches for a wide range of macabre horror hosts. If Don had had his way, Comic Media would have needed to introduce several more titles to find a home for each of these creepy narrators.
PAST: DON HECK
30 YEARS
work that came in. So when I started to go out on my own, I spotted EC and the first one I spotted was Alex Toth. I still remember the story: it was called “F-86 Sabre Jet.” [Frontline Combat #12, May–June 1953]
RH: Oh yes. A great story for sure.
DH: And Toth was another one who had a great influence on me after that.
RH: What about other EC artists like Wally Wood or Jack Davis?
DH: Oh yeah. Great stuff. EC seemed to pick up all the good artists. I mean, they also had Joe Kubert and there was a guy who had worked at Harvey before going to EC: Jack Kamen! He did just a few jobs at Harvey, I believe. I remember him because he used to use the old Scripto pencil, you know, the old lead pencil. And I thought that was a great idea and I wound up using that afterwards, too.
RH: Since you’re pretty good on remembering dates, what year would you say it was when you saw Jack Kamen working there?
DH: 1951.
RH: Would that have been horror work?
DH: Either that or the romance stuff. I couldn’t say for sure. But I’m almost positive that I saw him in there a
couple of times. The various artists used to come into the art department all the time.
[Interviewer’s Note: Further research has shown that Jack was penciling romance stories for Harvey from 1951 to 1952, but others were inking the work.]
RH: Do you remember when the horror comics began getting a bad name in the press?
DH: Oh yes. You had the Kefauver Committee going on.
RH: Now did that have an immediate effect on Allen Hardy or you artists working there?
DH: No, not really. We were aware of it. I remember seeing Bill Gaines testifying before the sub-committee. I watched it on TV. It’s true that the stuff needed to be toned down because it was starting to get a little out of hand. In fact, later on, somebody wanted me to do some weird stuff for them. He sent me a script and it had something where somebody’s body parts were bouncing around in a washing machine. [laughter] I sent the story back. The guy called me and said, “Well, you used to do some weird stuff like that.” I said, “No, even the covers I did, you know, I did some of them where you’d see blood, or you might see...” but you never saw me do excessive stuff. You never saw something I did that had entrails all over the place and stuff like that. You might have seen
The covers to Horrific #10 (March 1954) on the left and Horrific #13 (July 1954) marked an unusual departure from the distinctive dark backgrounds that had become synonymous with Don’s covers for Comic Media’s line of horror titles.
CO M IC MED IA (1952–1954)
by Frank Motler
Although short-lived, the comic books from Comic Media published by Allen Hardy Associates featured terrific art, often graced by the covers of Don Heck. Their two horror titles, Horrific and Weird Terror, are particularly noted. Initially, Horrific and All True Romance filled in with stories intended for the earlier Artful Publications, Inc. (1950–1952), before switching to a dedicated group of artists including Bill Discount, Marty Elkin, Pete Morisi, Rudy Palais, and Alberta Tewks.
Artful Publications, Inc. was quite different stylistically, featuring the homogeneous S.M. “Jerry” Iger Studios art on each story, with two notable exceptions. More about these shortly. Iger Studios had strong ties to publisher Robert W. Farrell (1908-1986), who made able use of their studio art in his comics throughout, from 1947 through 1958. The 1953 Author and Journalist (one of several dedicated trade publications) listed H. Chipkin as Artful’s editor on All True Romance, Dear Lonely Hearts, Horrific and Noodnik. In truth, H.
Chipkin was one of the pen names used by Iger’s premier editor and writer Ruth Roche (1917-1983). Otherwise, Artful were a little circumspect in their supply of managerial information and their address, 342 Madison Avenue offers no further clues. As both Farrell and Hardy would feature their names, we have to
Allen B. Hardy in 1959
consider the possibility Artful was a publishing venture by Iger Studios itself. Wallace Wood’s nine-page romance oriented, “I Crashed into Heartbreak” appeared in Artful’s All True Romance #6, July 1952; while his “I Was a Shrew,” another a nine-pager, appeared in its companion, Dear Lonely Heart #7, August 1952. The latter also appeared in the Star Publications title Popular Teenager #14, November 1952, despite being truncated by a half-page. Both bear similarities to the stories from the EC era and may well be Wood/Harry Harrison or Wood/Joe Orlando collaborations, making them worth seeking out. Prior to their comic books releases, Artful released two 68-page comics digests, Confessions of Love and Honeymoon Romance, 1950; each managing just two issues. Several publishers dabbled with the digest format, but for most, the hefty (for the time) 25¢ price tag means they were then uncommon and rarely ever seen today. Interestingly, the art for All True Romance #1 and Dear Lonely Heart #1 (both dated March 1951) look to have been prepared for the digest format,
FORGOTTEN HORROR FILMS
by Michael Price
Some Origins of Pandemic Cinema
Scarcely any menace appears more horrific than the unbroken thread of disease that winds through history. The popular culture—history-in-caricature—has exploited such fears all along. The idiom of fictional horror accounts for a particular fascination with the incumbent realities of contagion: Traditional mythologies and commercial literature alike treat Mittel European vampirism, for example, as a plague, or epidemic, that transforms every new victim into a carrier.
The Afro-Caribbean lore of zombie-ism, variously ascribed to supernatural or hypnotic influences, found itself revolutionized into a state of pandemic in 1968: One audacious motion picture, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, hinted at ascribing a mass resurrection to cosmic radiation. Such an influence has prevailed in a since-overpopulated genre of reanimated-croaker movies. Its 21st-century culmination is a sweeping declaration from Robert Kirkman, source-author of a graphic-novel epic, The Walking Dead, and its dramatized elaborations: “We are the Walking Dead”—in essence, vessels of life awaiting rebirth as undead eating machines.
One breed of plague literature stands apart in its historical and medical bearings. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Masque of the Red Death” in 1842. Poe’s Red Death, an imaginative stretch, may owe its inspiration to tuberculosis, to yellow fever, or to the 14th century’s onslaught of the Black Plague, as in “bubonic.”
In any event, Poe anticipated the 20th century’s real-world surges of Ebola-borne fever. A Hollywood plague-thriller of 1995, Wolfgang Petersen’s naive but urgent Outbreak, stands as greatly in Mr. Poe’s debt as does Roger Corman’s 1964 filming of The Masque of the Red Death. Whether bacterium or virus, the effect is one of a population caught unprepared, not unlike the ill-managed persistence of COVID-19 in times more recent.
Likewise deserving of regard as a backhanded inspiration to the horror-movie genre is the similarly decimating 20th-century plague of polio. Two striking examples are
arrayed herewith—a Black Plague trigger in Spencer Gordon Bennet’s The Midnight Warning (also shown as Eyes of Mystery; 1932); and a polio-borne motivation in William Nigh’s The Ape (1940).
The Midnight Warning
The foundation in urban legend—folklore, that is, or organic mythology—dates from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Alexander Woolcott had written the source-tale, “The Most Maddening Story in the World,” for The New Yorker magazine. Mayfair Pictures assigned its takeoff, The Midnight Warning, to scenarist Norman Battle. The same situation would inspire a 1947 novel by Anthony Thorne, which became a significant British film, So Long at the Fair (1950). The basic plot also fueled a Rocky Lane-series Western at Republic Pictures, Marshal of Amarillo (1948). A similar premise figured in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), and in an installment of the teleseries Alfred Hitchcock Presents
The Midnight Warning is a rough-edged beauty, despite an
A lobby-card come-on for 1932’s The Midnight Warning, capturing Claudia Dell’s tense moment in a morgue.
unevenness of soundtrack engineering and camerawork, from its fascinating and morbid puzzle to a wealth of macabre incidental touches.
Dr. Stephen Walcott (Hooper Atchley) finds the remains of a human ear in his hotel-room fireplace at the Clarendon Arms. While discussing the discovery with investigator William Cornish (William “Stage” Boyd), Walcott is grazed by a bullet. Cornish captures Enid Van Buren (Claudia Dell) and her fiancé, Erich (John Harron), who admit they have been threatening the Clarendon in an attempt to force the owners’ hand regarding a mystery: At the hotel, where she and her brother had checked in a few hours beforehand, no one professes to remember the pair; the register shows Enid had arrived alone.
Hoteliers Gordon (Huntly Gordon), Rankin (Lloyd Whitlock), Klein (Lloyd Ingraham), and Welsh (Lon Poff) imprison Enid in a mortuary. A disembodied voice taunts her. Cornish summons the police. Cornered, the hotel bosses acknowledge a conspiracy: They had destroyed the body of the brother, who had died of bubonic plague, and then sought to drive Enid insane. Having shamed the plotters, Cornish declares it better that the matter remain a secret, lest a panic result.
Director Spencer Gordon Bennet had arrived in 1912 as a stuntman and occasional actor in the Edison company’s adventure pictures. An apprenticeship to director George B. Seitz led Bennet to a directing career, early in the 1920s. A specialist in serials until 1956—when he made the last American serial, Perils of the Wilderness—Bennett also handled feature-length thrillers. He told me during the 1970s that he recalled The Midnight Warning more fondly than his other non-serial efforts.
One of the finer qualities of The Midnight Warning is William “Stage” Boyd’s grim efficiency. The nickname distinguishes him from another William Boyd. The Boyd of The Midnight Warning (and of Paramount’s horrific Murder by the Clock) had a stronger presence on Broadway. Upon the death of “Stage” Boyd in 1935, the other Boyd landed at Paramount Pictures as the star player of the Hopalong Cassidy Western series.
FORGOTTEN HORROR FILMS
“Stage” Boyd dominates The Midnight Warning. He takes forensic detection to an extreme by reading the lips of suspects from afar. (Such a tactic also figures in 1933’s The Circus Queen Murder.) Boyd taunts the culprits by explaining to them the flaw in their scheme: The ear cartilage, the film’s triggering clue, is the hardest part of the body to destroy, by fire or any other means. And he exhibits the practical, resentful sense to comprehend that the conspiracy must go unexposed. Boyd wields the cudgel of intimidation with daunting authority.
More conventional scares figure in a morgue sequence where Claudia Dell finds herself surrounded by stiffs. Groping for anchorage after a stumble, she seizes a cold foot—a nice chill, that!
Hooper Atchley plays against his usual crooked type as a Dr. Watson to Boyd. The pillar-of-society conspirators are sanctimonious to a loathsome extent. Huntly Gordon’s defiant riposte to Boyd, daring him to take their plot to the authorities, crystallizes the attitude of impunity.
Miss Dell is rightly vulnerable as the tormented ingenue, but her inexperience shows in the mortuary scene: Spencer Bennet told me that Miss Dell “didn’t
know how to take a stage fall. So when she had to faint in the morgue, she hit her head on the concrete floor and was knocked unconscious.” The scene remains in the finished film; a retake would have been an extravagance for cash-deficient Mayfair Pictures. Miss Dell grabs her head when she strikes the floor, then goes limp.
Bennet’s ability to work rapidly and shave costs by editing in the camera kept him in demand among the smaller studios. This rare talent, however, often cheated Bennet of opportunities to display creative flourishes.
The Ape
The centuried endemic paralysis of poliomyelitis—a halt-and-go plague, recurring in fits and starts and leading to a widespread and sustained outbreak of the 20th century—affords the nagging motivation behind The Ape. Boris Karloff, in a choice example of the Mad Doctor stereotype that he would court during the 1940s, proves less deranged than outright murderous. As such, he displays the good gumption to confine the killing urge to antisocial rotters, who might as well be contributing spinal fluids to his maverick campaign to conquer polio.
Enid Van Buren (Claudia Dell) given the third degree after threatening the owners of the Clarendon Arms, a hotel she wished she had never heard of.
HANDS OFF!
Severed Hands in Horror Cinema
by Steve Kronenberg
Forget about idle hands. Severed hands are truly the devil’s playthings. Horror cinema is rich with tales of mayhem caused by malevolent manos. Whether grafted onto the limbs of an accident victim or slithering through a gloomy mansion, they’re willful and uncontrollable: throwing knives, strangling their prey, leaving remnants of murder and madness in their wake. Follow along for a history of how horrible hands have left their malignant mark on-screen.
The Hands of Orlac (1924)
Severed hands were first reanimated in Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac. Screenwriter Louis Nerz adapted it for director Robert Wiene, who’d previously helmed the Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Conrad Veidt plays renowned concert pianist Paul Orlac, whose hands are crushed in a horrific railway accident. Desperate to revive her husband’s musical career, Orlac’s wife Yvonne (Alexandra Sorina) enlists the aid of noted surgeon Dr. Serral (Hans Homma), who transplants the hands of executed knife thrower Vasseur onto Orlac’s limbs. The distraught pianist becomes convinced that the grafted hands have a homicidal life of their own—especially when Orlac’s cruel father is found stabbed to death with Vasseur’s knife. Orlac’s paranoia is compounded when he encounters a blackmailer (Fritz Kortner), who claims to be Vasseur, fitted with grotesque mechanical hands. Amidst traumatizing psychological pain, Orlac must sift through the fog of delusion and discover whose hands he really possesses.
As Paul Orlac, Veidt delivers what may be his greatest performance. He masterfully conveys Orlac’s physical and psychic torment, driven to madness by the belief that his hands are now disobedient deadly weapons. “I feel it comes from you!,” he tells an imaginary Vasseur. “Along the arms until it reaches the soul! Cold, terrible,
relentless, damned cursed hands!” Veidt turns the hands into vile, willful characters, holding them high, outstretched, squeezing them, thrusting them, nervously moving them along his face and body. Veidt’s Orlac is a man possessed, and his portrayal presages the “body horrors” created decades later by such directors as David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. Veidt’s kinetic, unhinged portrait is tempered by an unmistakable sadness, an aching fragility manifested in his sad eyes and horrified visage. “I discover how the character I play grows in me,” Veidt once said. “This state can only be described as one of being possessed.” Author Wheeler Winston Dixon labels Veidt’s performance “a tour de force of silent film acting... modern, immediate and utterly convincing.” Film scholar Lotte Eisner praised it as “... a kind of expressionist ballet, bending and twisting extravagantly.” Watch this film and try taking your eyes off him.
The Hands of Orlac may be Veidt’s show, but the film’s twisted atmospherics belong to director Robert Wiene, cinematographers Hans Androschin and Gunther Krampf, and art directors Stefan Wessely, Hans Rovc, and Karl Exner. Echoes of Caligari resonate in the film’s cavernous, dark, and gloomy interiors, its moody lighting, its surreal and skewed exteriors, its hallucinatory imagery. Orlac’s visual highlight is the train wreck itself, photographed as a monstrous mass of twisted metal layered in smoke and debris, swallowing up the entire screen. The film is a superb amalgam of acting, photography, sets, and direction.
Mad Love (1935)
Wiene’s film has been remade at least three times, with varying success. By far the best redux is this Golden Age gem, directed by legendary cinematographer Karl Freund. The John L. Balderston script flips Renard’s original storyline, making Orlac’s surgeon the film’s centerpiece. In his American film debut, Peter Lorre is unforgettable as the renowned Dr. Gogol, obsessed with Yvonne (Frances Drake), the wife of concert pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive). When he’s not lasciviously eyeing Yvonne’s torturous performances in the Grand Guignol Theatre des Horreurs, Gogol avidly attends guillotine executions. Both pastimes consume him, but it’s Yvonne that he covets. When he learns of her marriage to Orlac, he plots to steal her for himself. He starts by purchasing her wax effigy perched outside the theater in which she performs. When a disastrous train wreck crushes Orlac’s hands, Gogol tries to win her
HANDS OFF! SEVERED HANDS IN HORROR CINEMA
The desperation evident in Conrad Veidt’s pose for The Hands of Orlac (1924) was reproduced to extraordinary effect for the posters promoting Robert Weine’s Expressionist masterpiece.
HANDS OFF! SEVERED HANDS IN HORROR CINEMA
life force, survives and possesses teen-aged Paul Lawrence (flash-in-the-pan pop singer Rod Lauren), turning the kid into a pasty-faced killer. The movie’s best scene is a cult film fan’s dream: While Paul murders the manager of a local diner, the lights from a Wurlitzer jukebox dance across his face as the Rivingtons’ bizarre rock classic “The Bird’s the Word” blasts from the speakers. Add to that a supporting cast of B-movie mainstays (including Allison Hayes, Richard Arlen, and Alan Hale Jr.) and a surprisingly effective disembodied hand belonging to co-producer Joseph Robertson. The Crawling Hand got the MST3K treatment, but who needs those wise guys to savor this snifter of schlock?
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)
The first of Amicus’ “portmanteau” horror films, an idea inspired by 1945’s Dead of Night, which screenwriterco-producer Milton Subotsky considers “the greatest horror film ever.” Peter Cushing is Dr. Schreck, an occultist who boards a train car, pulls out a tarot deck, and offers to predict the fortunes of five fellow passengers. A separate story unfolds with each prediction, but snooty and skeptical art critic Franklyn Marsh (Christopher Lee) isn’t buying any of it. He finally relents, and his story is entitled “Dismembered Hand,” which Subotsky readily attributed to The Beast with Five Fingers. It opens as Marsh attends an exhibit of paintings by artist Eric Landor (Michael Gough). Before a packed gallery, Marsh savages Landor’s work as incompetent and amateurish. Landor retaliates by showing Marsh a painting by an unknown artist, which Marsh effusively praises. When the critic asks to meet the artist, Landor trots out a chimpanzee.
A humiliated Marsh departs in a huff, but Landor dogs his every move, dropping reminders of the embarrassing
gaffe. Fed up, the exasperated critic runs down Landor with his car, severing the artist’s right hand. Unable to paint, Landor commits suicide, but his amputated hand creeps and crawls its way into Marsh’s life.
By 1965, Lee could play pompous and priggish with his eyes closed, but there’s something else going on here. When the vengeful hand attacks him, he’s consumed with fear, shaking with terror, cowering in corners as the fanatical phalanges scamper to his shoulders, his foot, and the windshield of his car, before “handing” him a well-deserved fate. Lee genuinely emotes here, treading from uptight to upended, from haughty to horrified. If you’re a Lee fan, the next time someone tells you that Lee was capable only of standing erect and looking sinister, sit them down and treat them to this performance.
The usually chilly Michael Gough also steps out of character, evoking our sympathy as the doomed artist victimized by Marsh’s withering criticism and murderous revenge. Look closely at Gough’s sad, near-tearful eyes as he stares longingly at the artwork he can no longer accomplish without his right hand.
Cinematographer Alan Hume deserves a “big hand” for effectively photographing Landor’s fantastical fist lurking in backgrounds, creeping into corners, through door sills, burned and blistered as it slithers through Marsh’s study, inching its way to his throat, a chilling echo of Peter Lorre’s torment in The Beast with Five Fingers. The hand itself was an effective mechanical prop, which Subotsky recycled for Amicus’ And Now the Screaming Starts!
And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)
One of the few times Amicus departed from its anthology approach and took a stab at a Gothic ghost story. It’s 1795, and newlywed Catherine Fengriffen (Stephanie Beacham) has moved into the family manse
Christopher Lee regrets his actions when he is assailed by the severed hand of the artist Eric Landor in this memorable Amicus portmanteau.
The disfigured Eric Landor, played by eminent British actor Michael Gough, seeks to end his life in Amicus’ Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors.
THOSE HYPNOTIC EYES
Christopher Lee in Cross-Roads
by Peter Normanton
For a good five years, readers of EC’s horror comics had savored every juicy morsel of the dead shambling forth from the grave with one objective in mind: exacting unholy revenge. Such scenarios were prevalent in almost every horror comic of the early 1950s, but no one could have anticipated such a turn of events in the secluded villages of the Hertfordshire countryside—well, certainly not in 1955.
Now, before the horror fiends among you get too excited, I have to warn you this wasn’t quite along the lines of those pages Graham Ingels produced for Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, nor the scenes George A. Romero later committed to celluloid. Their putrescence was set aside when John Fitchen was tasked with directing Cross-Roads, an overlooked short, running all of 19 minutes, produced by the obscure British company Bartlett Films. In place of the decrepitude of the walking dead came an uncanny supernatural thriller Fitchen based on a short story penned by Richard Lawrence Griffiths, a writer whose legacy seems to have drifted into obscurity.
An Eerie Screen Appearance
As with its writer, Cross-Roads may also have drifted even further into the mists of time if it hadn’t starred the then unknown Christopher Lee, in this, the second of his eerie screen appearances. His first had come a year before in John Lamont’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s spine tingling “Markheim,” another short entitled The Mirror and Markheim.
The presence in this feature of German born actor Ferdy Mayne would later arouse the interest of those with a hankering for the vampire brethren, when he played the part of Count von Krolock in Roman Polanski’s comedy horror The Fearless Vampire Killers, released in 1967. As with many of his fellow countrymen, Ferdy’s Jewish lineage had forced him to leave his homeland as a teenager to escape the terrors of Nazi tyranny. Prior to Conrad Veight’s departure, Ferdy had taken up residence in England. He was so incensed by the Nazi regime, he worked as an informant for British intelligence during the early years of the war, unwittingly placing his family at risk,
Conrad Veidt The Man Who Laughs
by Peter Normanton
Cassablanca’s cold-blooded Major Heinrich Strasser endures as one of Hollywood’s most notorious villains. His go-to reaction, I can assure you, would never have been a laugh; it would have been a contemptuous sneer, and that would have been on a good day. As ever, Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was stellar in the role in Michael Curtiz’s film, but he can’t have been entirely comfortable with playing the synonymic Nazi, even though he did admit to quite enjoying making this film. Sadly, his time in Hollywood was all too brief, but in that short period, these stereotypical roles would, for many, become his lasting signature.
Only recently arrived in Los Angeles, he was cast as the merciless General Kurt von Kolb in Escape, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, before going on to play a Nazi saboteur in Vincent Sherman’s All Through the Night, prior to stepping into the shoes of a Nazi diplomat in Jules Dassin’s Nazi Agent, in anticipation of his memorable portrayal in Casablanca—although he did have a dual role in Dassin’s thriller playing the honorable twin brother. However, in Germany, he was condemned as a traitor.
WORLDS of NIGEL KNEALE the DARK
by Barry Forshaw
Who is the most imitated of all British science fiction writers? Obviously, the immortal H. G. Wells has to be the premier recipient of that title, with the key SF themes he originated—or at least created the most influential examples of—including alien invasion, time travel, invisibility, and tampering with animal evolution. Few aficionados would argue with the notion of Wells’ primacy in the field, but there is another, later, writer from the UK who has been massively significant—and who continues to inspire (and continues to be ripped-off) to this day: Nigel Kneale.
In 1953, a television serial was shown which—without exaggeration—rocked the nation. The Quatermass Experiment was shown in six half-hour episodes from July to August, and had much of the British population glued to their TV sets for this mesmerizing, and frequently horrifying, creation from Kneale’s prodigal imagination. Professor Bernard Quatermass, in charge of the British Experimental Rocket Group, has sent the first manned mission into space, but with grim results. Only one of the crew returns, and—viewers were to learn—he has been altered in macabre, otherworldly fashion. Needless to say, there were the complaints from the shockable about the gruesome nature of the proceedings, and the show was perceived as proof of the moral laxity into which Britain had fallen. However, more balanced views realized that not only was Kneale’s creation a pulseracing suspenseful account, it was also written with notable intelligence and
imagination—and it inaugurated Kneale’s career as Britain’s leading writer of science fiction-based material. (Ironically, Kneale himself reportedly—and repeatedly—claimed that he was not enamored of the SF genre.) But who was this groundbreaking, and sometimes curmudgeonly, writer?
Actually, there was no Nigel Kneale. Thomas Kneale was a Manx writer (born in 1922) who quickly became entranced by his own ancestry, which (he claimed) went back thousands of years, the Isle of Man apparently being the result of a massive chunk of earth flung by the Irish giant Fionn Mac Cumhaill (or McCool)—and a fictional legacy of the past was to be a recurrent theme in his work.
Horror at Alexandra Palace
As a young man, Kneale was attracted to a journalistic career (following his father’s example), although he had always been a sickly child, something that left him with a legacy of cardiac trouble. His love of fiction focused more on literary writers such as Chekhov and de Maupassant; he had a disdain for crime novelists such as Agatha Christie. His own short stories had little hint of the science fictional or supernatural elements that were to become his stock in trade, and his move to postwar London took him into a more sophisticated world than the superstitious Manx milieu of his youth. (He also realized that he had to lose his regional accent to be more accepted in the capital.) The first published collection under his newly adopted name was Tomato Cain and Other Stories (1949), several of which touched
THE DARK WORLDS OF NIGEL KNEALE
Born in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, Thomas Nigel Kneale was a versatile writer, who bequeathed science fiction a fabulous legacy.
KILLER B’ s
by Steve Kronenberg
Not of this Earth
It was 1956, and future King “B” Roger Corman had an inspiration. After directing a handful of genre films, he finally understood how to market his product. America was top-loaded with drive-in theaters, meccas for teenagers looking to kiss, cuddle, and carouse in the privacy of their cars while watching monsters and madmen menace the world on giant movie screens. Corman enlisted his friend and frequent collaborator Charles B. Griffith to craft a script suitable for the teen drive-in trade. Griffith and co-writer Mark Hanna came up with a tale about an intergalactic vampire entitled Not of this Earth (1957). Paired with another Corman creature feature, Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Corman, Griffith, and Hanna were prepared to give the kids what they craved. Of the two films, Not of this Earth is arguably the better and more innovative production. Paul Birch plays the mysterious
“Paul Johnson,” an extra-terrestrial vampire from the planet Davanna, ravaged by a nuclear war that has caused the blood of its inhabitants to evaporate into dust. Johnson is sent to Earth to teleport the blood and bodies of Earthlings to Davanna, thereby saving his home planet and initiating a global invasion. His sunglasses conceal a pair of deadly, dead-white eyes, which he uses to burn through his victims’ brains before draining their blood. He’s also able to read minds and hypnotize his targets into doing his bidding. His personal pet is a flying, batlike “umbrella monster” that envelops and crushes the skull of anyone Johnson commands it to attack. Johnson, whose own blood is slowly dissolving, begins his mission by visiting Dr. Rochelle (William Roerick) and mesmerizing him into administering a transfusion. Johnson also commands Rochelle to allow his affable nurse Nadine Storey (Beverly Garland) to provide him with full-time, live-in care. In addition to giving Johnson daily blood transfusions, Nadine tolerates Jeremy, her new boss’ leering manservant (Jonathan Haze). She soon becomes suspicious of Johnson’s weirdly robotic demeanor. When she objects to her bedroom door being locked, Johnson replies: “In the place where I come from, no one would dare sleep in unsecured quarters.” When Nadine asks him where he comes from, he merely bids her goodnight. In short order, she discovers who and what Johnson really is, leading to a frantic, fiery climax and an unpredictably twisted finale.
The heavily-built, sonorouslyvoiced, sallow-faced Birch excels as the exsanguinating ET. His performance is icy and sinister, yet tinged with a touch of sympathy. Determined to save his home planet from extinction, he encounters a Davanna escapee (Anna Lee Carroll)
by Peter Normanton
The Shadow began his crime fighting career as the narrator of the CBS radio show Detective Story Hour in July 1930, a guise conceived to revive the flagging sales of Street & Smith’s long established pulp Detective Story Magazine. As so often happens in life, events took an unexpected turn. Having latched onto this mysterious character, reams of listeners began to seek out copies of what they assumed to be the Shadow’s own magazine, rather than the intended Detective Story Magazine, a pulp introduced in October 1915, which ran through until the summer of 1949 after racking up a staggering 1,057 issues. Street & Smith’s response was swift, offering a contract to writer Walter B. Gibson to scribe a series of stories chronicling the adventures of this enigmatic raconteur—the first of which appeared in the inaugural issue of The Shadow Magazine on April 1, 1931.
SHADOW COMICS: THE HORROR COVERS the Horror Covers
Curiously, The Shadow’s own radio show did not air until September 1937.
Cunning Lure
With The Shadow’s radio plays now being broadcast across the country, Street & Smith looked to broaden their franchise still further. Having observed the popularity of the new fad for four color comics, they launched Shadow Comics on the January 12, 1940. The first half a dozen issues used reprints of Jerome Rozen’s covers from the original Shadow Magazine, thus keeping the set-up costs to an absolute minimum The gruesome display terrorizing the cover to the fourth issue of this new series, dated June 1940, had first shocked the readers of The Shadow Magazine, on June 1, 1936. While it may not have startled in the way Johnny Craig’s infamous cover for Crime Suspenstories #22 (AprilMay 1954) had done, it was still a grisly tableau, calculatingly luring anyone who fell under its gaze. In the hope of satiating the bloodthirsty appetite of those drawn to this issue, a decapitated head was put on show within—just for good measure. However, let’s not get too carried away, because on this occasion, the severed head was revealed to be a wax effigy. Alas for the gore-mongers, disappointment would invariably ensue, as such revelations were commonplace throughout the entire run
of this series. The team of artists who were invited to apply their brushstrokes to these covers seemed to delight in deceiving with an inference of the macabre, leaving Walter Gibson’s sleuth to get on with solving the crimes at hand.
By the time Shadow Comics Vol. 1 #8, dated January 1941, made it to the newsstand, newspaper strip artist Vernon Greene had assumed the position as cover artist, now well and truly established as The Shadow’s lead illustrator. With each passing issue his mastery of these mystery tales became more emphatic, his covers daring to tease every once in a while with the taint of something odious. He held off until November 1942, with the appearance of Shadow Comics Vol. 2 #8, before shocking with the first of these unsettling portrayals. On show that issue was a monstrous plant, plainly looking to consume everything in its path, almost a decade before John Wyndham’s apocalyptic shocker “Day of the Triffids.”
Fiendish Villainy
Upon turning the page, Jack Binder duly followed with his “Horror House” splash. At first sight, this image said it all—well, not quite, for this was never really a horror story. There were, however, a few titillating panels revealing Margo Lane in the shower, scenes that no doubt had this teenage audience quietly tittering to themselves. But enough of that, for by now those readers with a lusting for the macabre would have realized neither Shadow Comics, or its pulp companion The Shadow Magazine, were ever going to step too far into this unholy domain—this was a world of action-packed adventure, where the threat emanated from an array of diabolically fiendish villains.
Vernon coalesced this expectation for action with the ghoulish in his iconic Silver Skull cover for Shadow Comics Vol. 2 #10, dated January 1943; surely one of the most eye-catching images of the period. Of course, the presence of those gun-toting blackguards affirmed the true nature of this title, but once this issue had been put down, it was
The Hound Of The Baskervilles remains one of Hammer’s most enduring films, its script based on the famous novel penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, on its release in the UK in March 1959, as with its subsequent US premier in July 1959, there were serious misgivings as to how the public was going to react to a Hammer Film Production sans their regular monsters.
Conan Doyle’s novel, featuring the author’s famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his trusted companion Dr. John Watson, had been serialized in The Strand
magazine in 1901. By then, The Strand was an established monthly magazine, with a US edition set to follow in 1891, both published by George Newnes, the contents predominantly made up of short stories and general interest articles. This already popular periodical saw its sales soar in Britain when the Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in 1891, the circulation swiftly reaching a staggering 500,000 copies per month.
Conan Doyle had “killed off” his famous fictional detective some years before in the 1893 saga The Final Problem, burdened by the expectation that came with writing nothing but Holmes
BHORROR COMICS EXCESS
by Peter Normanton
efore we say goodbye, let’s return to the grisly theme Steve Kronenberg served up in his “Hands Off!” piece earlier in this issue. It will come as no surprise to learn those muchmaligned horror comics of the early 1950s had a similar fascination with these lacerated appendages. As horrifying as these films were, the imagery abounding in the comic books of the period was so much more gratuitous. It could be said this was largely down to the demands of their bloodthirsty readers, but then the publishers were hardly restrained in satiating these cravings, owing to an absence of adequate legislation to keep them in check—that is, until the latter months of 1954. Thus, anyone seeking blood-soaked excess rife with
dismembered limbs, would have to look no further.
Among the more graphic was Alex Toth’s splash page for Adventures into Darkness #8’s “The Twisted Hands,” from February 1953. These blood-stained hands introduced an appreciably powerful story of a corpse’s return from far out in the ocean—with, as you have probably guessed, vengeance in mind. Unfortunately
Ross Andru and Mike Esposito had their fans drooling when they set their devious hands to embellishing “Hand of Fate” for Stanley P. Morse’s Weird Mysteries #3, cover-dated February 1953.
for that band of frenzied gore-mongers, the remainder of this account chose to avoid the extremes associated with these years. At least they could feast their eyes on Alex’s bold line. Not so with Story’s “The Running Ghost,” from Mysterious Adventures #12, cover-dated February 1953, which went out to shock from the outset when an assemblage of dislimbed arms and legs acquired a grotesque semblance of life. The name of the artist responsible for this diabolical
occurrence in this funeral parlor has long since been forgotten, but there was a ghastly intricacy to his depiction of these dissected body parts and their mission to mete out justice on the wretches who had hacked them up for trade.
That same month, the up-and-coming Ross Andru and Mike Esposito inflicted
HORROR COMICS EXCESS
a severed hand splash on the readers of Weird Mysteries #3. This “Hand of Fate” would have done the trick for its publisher Stanley P. Morse, encouraging anyone perusing this gruesome spectacle
Mysterious Adventures #12’s “The Running Ghost” (February 1953), was one of the more extreme tales from the period.
stark introduction to the top job in the hospital of
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with a sequence of explicit definitely not for the faint of heart. Just a month later, Harry Harrison sharpened his pencils to deliver a similarly graphic display in “The Clutching Hand” for the second issue of Trojan’s Beware, numbered
Roy Krenkel’s partnering with Harry Harrison for the cover to the second issue of Trojan’s Beware, numbered #14, set the mood, while Harry went even further in the tale “The Clutching Hand.”
