christopher lee

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

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We are deep into Spooky Season now, folks.  We’ve officially reached the Halloween equivalent of whatever the I❤NOLA crowd refers to as “Deep Gras” in the last couple weeks of Carnival.  At least, that’s what occurred to me while I was taking an hour-long bus ride uptown to catch a long-forgotten Hammer Horror knockoff just because it was playing on the big screen.  After months of whining that there wasn’t much of interest screening around town, I had somehow found a new worthwhile horror movie to watch outside my house for seven days straight, bouncing back & forth between The Broad & The Prytania’s dueling repertory screenings of vintage #spookycontent.  Venturing out to see 1973’s The Creeping Flesh at The Prytania on a weeknight was the moment I realized how far I had slipped into Halloween Season mania.  The movie didn’t look especially remarkable, but the momentum of this month’s shockingly robust repertory programming made it feel like mandatory viewing anyway, and I ended up having a great time.  Whether it was my muted expectations or just the spirit of the season, The Creeping Flesh was exactly what I needed on that brisk October evening, praise be to the Great Pumpkin.

Whether Hammer, Amicus, or otherwise, 1970s British horror always makes for great Halloween Season programming.  They’re all decorated like creaky haunted houses and packed with lustful ghouls, but their low-key, faux-literary tone invites you to crawl under a giant Jack-o-Lantern patterned blanket with a warm mug of tea, more cozy than scared.  The same thing occurred to me the last time I saw Peter Cushing & Christopher co-headline a movie, watching the Amicus anthology The House that Dripped Blood in the lead-up to last Halloween.  The short-form EC Comics story structure of those Amicus “portmanteau” horrors is great for plowing through several single-idea tales of terror in a single go, where simple tale of evildoers being punished by their own wickedness can get wrapped up in just a few minutes’ time – like binging a season of Tales from the Crypt in a single sitting.  The Hammer films of that era are a little slower & stuffier in their delivery of the horror goods, dragging out their inevitable conclusions so they can spend more time lighting their haunted homes’ Victorian hallways with cobwebbed candelabras.  What’s genius about The Creeping Flesh is that it combines these two approaches to vintage cozy British horror in a single package: cramming several portmanteau-horror ideas into a single, messy narrative, so that you get to enjoy the narrative propulsion of Amicus and the atmospheric haunted house tours of Hammer at the same time.

While most Hammer Horror relics are buttoned-up, single-idea affairs, this off-brand equivalent (produced by the generically named World Film Services) is overstuffed with nutty, gnarly ideas on how to update the Frankenstein myth for the Free Love crowd.  Cushing & Lee star as rival half-brother mad scientists competing for industry awards & press, using ancient proto-human skeletons and their own children as pawns in their sick game of professional one-upmanship.  Cushing is presented as the Good mad scientist, one who’s recently excavated a missing link in the chain of human evolution in the form of the 12-foot Home Depot skeleton.  He quickly discovers that exposure to water causes the skeleton to regenerate its long-dormant flesh, giving re-birth to the embodiment of Pure Evil – confirmed under microscopes by the wicked behavior of its re-activated blood.  On the other side of London, Lee is presented as his Bad mad scientist brother, who attempts to isolate that same Pure Evil gene in the patients at his crooked asylum, mostly by torturing them with electrolysis & weaponized hypnosis.  These dual research projects get out of hand when the brothers’ respective wards escape from their care: Cushing’s manically horny daughter (determined to live a debauched life in her dead, adulterous mother’s footsteps) and Lee’s most violent patient (determined to smash & grab every woman within his monstrous wingspan).  Of course, this gets even more complicated when the ancient Evil skeleton is drenched in a rainstorm, after one brother attempts to hijack the other’s research materials.

The Creeping Flesh is low-key madness.  It’s so stately & faux literary from scene to scene that you hardly have time to register that you’re watching a dismembered finger writhe around on a lab table like a sentient pickle, representing Evil Incarnate.  The stop motion & practical gore effects of its titular regenerative flesh are fantastic but wouldn’t make for much of a movie on their own, especially since the film is reluctant to let the audience get a good look at the fully formed, rain-activated monster.  Likewise, its measurable, scientific explanations for supernatural evil don’t have much to say about the original Frankenstein myth beyond the follies of “playing God” that have been underlined in every adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel to date.  So, it’s a wonderful gift to the audience that the movie doesn’t settle for its simplest, most streamlined narrative, the one where Peter Cushing accidentally unearths an ancient monster and gives it new life.  Instead, there are two mad scientists to contend with, each with their own escaped maniacs and monstrously unethical research projects to answer for.  Because it was the style at the time, the film also feels it necessary to deliver the last-minute “Gotcha!” twist of an Amicus vignette while it’s at it, just to give the whole overstuffed mess a vague sense of purpose. 

On my way to the theater, I wasn’t sure why The Prytania programmed this particular vintage British horror over more recognizable, accomplished options (Asylum, The Vampire Lovers, The Curse of Frankenstein, etc.).  I think I get it now; it’s like watching several of those classics Frankensteined together into one lovably misguided monstrosity.  Or maybe it was just the cheapest to license, who knows.  Either way, it was a wonderfully lopsided delight.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Lisa and the Devil (1973)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1973’s Lisa and the Devil, is a supernatural murder mystery set in a haunted mansion full of creepy mannequins.  As usual with Mario Bava, it’s consistently beautiful & eerie while wildly inconsistent in its central mystery’s internal logic.  Parsing out what’s really going on in Bava’s films is always miles beside the point; they thrive on vibes and vibes alone.  So, what really sets this loopy-logic Bava mystery apart from the rest of his catalog is its haunted castle setting, which vividly contrasts the moods & tones of his filmmaking style against other Gothic horrors of his era from The Corman-Poe Cycle and Hammer Studios.  It’s in that contrast where Lisa and the Devil‘s twisty dream logic and harshly artificial color gels really shine as something special.

I knew I was going to use November’s Movie of the Month selection as an excuse to clear out a few of my Mario Bava blindspots.  What I didn’t know is that so many of those major blindspots would also be set in haunted castles (as opposed to the bloody couturiers of Blood & Black Lace or the eerie alien landscapes of Planet of the Vampires).  As I dug further into Bava’s catalog this month, I really started appreciating how his haunted castle movies boast all of the spooky atmosphere of Hammer Horror at its best, boosted with a lurid Technicolor sleaze that satisfies in a way Hammer rarely does – if ever.  Nearly every one is a Masque of the Red Death-level knockout, which is rare for the genre.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more Mario Bava classics set in haunted castles.

Black Sunday (1960)

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Mario Bava spent so much of his career playing with camera equipment in spooky castles, since that setting is exactly where he made a name for himself at the start of his career.  Bava’s debut feature credit as a director, Black Sunday (a.k.a. The Mask of Satan) crams in as many haunted-castle spooks & ghouls as it can possibly fit in an 87min runtime: vampires, witches, Satanic rituals, an overachieving fog machine, etc.  Even in black & white—devoid of Bava’s trademark color gels—it clearly stands out as the very best of the director’s haunted castle horrors.  If anything, the harsh black & white lighting offers a vintage Romero sheen that feels like a novelty in Bava’s larger Technicolor catalog.

If actors dress up in ritualistic costumes and repeat the word “Satan” enough, I’m automatically going to be charmed.  It still helps when it’s someone as electrically intense as Barbara Steele.  In her breakout, career-defining performance(s), she stars as both a vampiric witch who’s punished for her allegiance to Satan and as the innocent descendent she plans to drain of her blood & youth.  Steele’s haunting screen presence (conveyed most fiercely through her intense eye contact) is what makes the movie enduringly iconic, but Bava’s background as a cinematographer heightens every frame with a stark beauty & terror.  It’s not Bava at his most idiosyncratic (given that it’s drained of his usual indulgences in color & disregard for plot), but it might be Bava at his best.

The Whip and the Body (1963)

Barbara Steele is not the only horror legend who cut their fangs working with Bava.  Christopher “Dracula” Lee collaborated with the Italo-auteur on both the dark fantasy epic Hercules in the Haunted World and in the haunted-castle chiller The Whip and the Body.  It’s The Whip and the Body that really leans into the strengths of Lee’s sultry screen presence, casting him as a BDSM ghost who haunts a modest seaside castle (and the masochistic woman he used to adulterize with when he was alive).  It’s never much of an exaggeration to say that Christopher Lee was pure sex in his handsome youth, but in The Whip and the Body that statement isn’t even a figure of speech.  He haunts the castle as the personification of sadistic sex just as much as he’s the ghost of a cruel pest who even his mistress despised.

The ghostly psychosexual terror of Lee’s kink-ghost is the perfect mechanism for Bava’s usual indulgences in atmosphere & aesthetics.  It’s customary for haunted castle movies to feature menacing gusts of howling wind, but here Bava gets to mix in sounds of Lee’s leather whip to pervert that trope into something freshly upsetting.  The film haunts a lovely middle ground between the classic gothic horror of Black Sunday and the Technicolor fairy tale horrors of Lisa and the Devil (complete with a dagger in a bell jar as its fairy tale version of Chekov’s gun).

Baron Blood (1972)

Like The Whip and the Body, Baron Blood is about a craven misogynist who haunts his family castle as a menacingly horny ghost.  Like Black Sunday, it even dabbles in an undercurrent of witchcraft for counterbalance; the sexist ghost is resurrected from the dead as revenge from a witch who wants to see him tortured for eternity instead being allowed to rest.  Unfortunately, this late-in-the-game middle ground between those two classics doesn’t stack up to Bava’s usual standard.  It’s conveyed in muddy 1970s browns, and the stoney-baloney pacing of that era is in no rush to get anywhere. 

So yeah, Baron Blood is by far the weakest entry of this haunted-castle Bava set.  It has its own laidback 70s charms, though, including occultist rituals, rusty torture devices, and a fiendish ghoul with sopping hamburger meat for a face.  All it really needed to be a Lisa and the Devil-level stunner was a peppier sense of urgency and a few color gels.  Save it for a lazy weekend afternoon, so it’s not such a big deal if you take a nap in the middle of it.

-Brandon Ledet