The Aviary

One of my favorite experiences is watching a movie from the 1930s and coming away from it thinking, "Wow, that was super fucked up."

Tonight's movie was Murder in the Zoo, a delightfully nasty little horror film from 1933 starring Lionel Atwill. It starts with ( somewhat gruesome spoilers ), which would be a pretty damn bold way to start a horror film today.

Lionel Atwill is Eric Gorman, a zoologist who thinks every man in existence is trying to get with his wife, Evelyn, and that the only way to deal with this is not to give Evelyn the divorce she so clearly wants but instead to torture or murder any dude who gets too close to her. He does this with ( a very cool and original murder method that is worth waiting for the reveal ). Later, someone is eaten by alligators (in the worst designed zoo exhibit I can imagine) and someone else gets crushed to death by a large constrictor snake. The alligators are offscreen but the constriction absolutely happens on film. Pre-Code films, man! Atwill is great in this - he's completely repellent but magnetic at the same time.

Another way you can tell that this movie is pre-Code is that Evelyn is indeed having an affair and planning to run away with her lover but the film presents this not as a sin but as the only reasonable and intelligent choice. Evelyn in general is pretty great, especially in the scene where she escapes her terrible husband by sneaking out the window as he pounds on her door and then climbing back into his study to discover evidence of his crimes. She's played by Kathleen Burke, and I'm going to have to look into what else she was in, because she was delightful. The movie is only 62 minutes long, so all the other characters are fairly lightly sketched, but there's a very cute scientist couple who work at the zoo that were very enjoyable and wholesome - a nice contrast to the Gormans.

Caveats: There is, unfortunately, some period "comedy" throughout, courtesy of Charlie Ruggles, and it's as awful as you would expect, but since the film is so short, none of his bits last terribly long. Along with the horror content mentioned above, the film does contain a good bit of animal-on-animal violence and since it's from 1933, it's possible that some of that was real. (There are a few moments towards the end that I found fairly concerning on that front.) There are a lot of snakes of various kinds, so people with snake fear should approach with caution.

You can watch the whole thing over on the Internet Archive and if you have an hour free, it's totally worth it.

During October this year, I revisited a lot of my horror film collection in the run up to Halloween, ending with The VVitch, which has become my always-watch-on-Halloween movie. In doing this, I've realized that there is a significant gap in my collection - I have almost no movies about ghosts or hauntings. My horror collection is nearly all monster-based. This is understandable, as I love monsters very much but ghosts and witches are, for me, the most appropriate kinds of horror for Halloween viewing. Other things are great horror but they aren't necessarily Halloween horror.

Thus, I am embarking on a project. I'm going to make a big list of ghost/haunting/haunted house movies and watch them over the next year* till I find one that feels tonally appropriate to pair with The VVitch, and then I can have a yearly Halloween double feature.

Do any of you guys have a favorite ghost/haunting/haunted house movie you'd like to recommend? I am open to watching pretty much anything.

Things:

- My normal dinner is toast + cheese + raw fruits and veggies, but that is Too Cold for the current weather, so tonight I had toast and miso soup with tofu and veggies instead. This was an excellent idea and I am now planning to just continue making miso soup every night till it's too warm again.

- I'm rereading some of my John Bellairs books for the first time in a long time. You guys, they are still really great. I just finished The Curse of the Blue Figurine and it is delightfully spooky. ( Also I'm going to ramble about my experience of reading these books as a child now. ) Anyway, I'm starting another one tonight. I may have to start purchasing all the ones I somehow don't own.

- In other spookytimes news, tonight's entry on my movie schedule is Mad Love with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive and I'm terribly excited to rewatch this extremely goofy movie. So far in my revisiting-1930's-and-40's-horror journey, I have watched Black Friday, The Raven, and The Mummy. All good times.

- Next weekend, my siblings and I are getting together for a board game day. I have to figure out which is my spookiest boardgame.

Rewatched The Witch last night with Katie and Sean (who had not seen it before). I had previously watched it on Netflix but it is no longer available there, so we watched it on amazon instead. And we watched it with the subtitles on, because all of us prefer that as an option.

You guys, the amazon subtitles for The Witch are shockingly bad. Like, several moments where the meaning of the subtitles was entirely different to what the characters were actually saying - I mean, there's a moment where the character is saying "he hath entered the kingdom of heaven" and the subtitles are saying "he hath offended the kingdom of heaven". That is...that is not the same thing, oh my god.

The worst/best one, though? Was actually a sound effect. There's a bit where a woman gets pecked repeatedly by a crow. It's an extremely distressing scene for a variety of reasons. And the person doing the subtitling decided the horrible wet sound the crow was making would be best represented by a line of text saying (peck. peck. peck, peck, peck.) Way to destroy the mood, subtitle person!

I mean, we still enjoyed the movie a good deal, because it's a great movie. But damn. I had bought it on amazon because I figured, hey, this is my Halloween movie, I should probably own it somewhere, and I've slowed down a lot on buying physical dvds. But now I am considering purchasing a physical copy because surely the subtitles on the actual dvd must be better, right?

It is October! I love October - it has two of my favorite holidays (Halloween and Winternights), it gets cooler and darker, I can start wearing sweaters, I can buy a lot of candy and pumpkin-flavored things, and it's spooky time!

However. This year is terrible and I am actually feeling pretty depressed right now. But I refuse not to enjoy October as much as I can. In order to do that, I am planning to watch a whole bunch of horror movies this month.

I am making a list both of stuff I own or stuff I can stream but I would love input from other people. What are your favorite horror movies? What do you like about them?

I am good with any era of film and most subgenres of horror, though I prefer my horror to have a fantastical element to it. I don't mind gore. (While I'm specifically looking for movies right now, I am also happy to get recs for other media if you have them.) I'm looking both for new-to-me movies and good movies to rewatch, so feel free to recommend well-known films if they're things you especially like.

So, I realize Halloween is over and you guys may be out of the market for spooky, but in case you're not:

BBC Radio made a pretty cool audio adaptation of The Stone Tape and you can listen to it streaming for the rest of the month. And you totally should, because it's pretty great.

What is The Stone Tape, you may be asking? Originally, it was a made-for-tv BBC movie, written by Nigel Kneale, so you know it's going to be gorgeously unsettling sci-fi/horror. It concerns a team of researchers, set up in an old Victorian mansion, trying to develop a new recording medium. They discover that the house is haunted - the basement room occasionally contains a woman in Victorian dress who screams, runs up a set of stairs, and falls to her death. The head of the research team decides that this vision is itself a recording and the focus of the team's research shifts to investigating it. It is one of the best examples of cosmic horror I've ever seen filmed and it's wonderful.

And now there's a radio drama version! I like the audio version, and it's free right now (so you can start with that), but it's not quite as good as the original movie for two reasons. One of them deals with the climax of the story, and that shouldn't be spoiled, so don't click the cut unless you've seen it. ( spoilers )

Despite those two things, this is a fun and properly unsettling radio play. Highly recommended.

Today, I watched Son of Dracula for the first time in a while and now I want to talk to people about it.

You guys, this movie is so weird. And I don't mean that in terms of its subject matter - it's a fairly run-of-the-mill vampire story, to be honest - but the whole movie feels like the film makers thought they were making one film while the whole time they were, in fact, making a different one.

I spent most of today thinking about the film and trying to put my finger on what, exactly, felt so odd about it. And I think I finally figured it out. See, horror movies from this era are, as the author of the book I'm currently reading points out, like fairy tales or commedia dell'arte. You know who the characters are and what kinds of things they're likely to do before the story starts and the characters don't deviate from that - a wolf is always a wolf, a witch is always a witch, Jack is always Jack. It's the same with 30's and 40's horror film. Except in Son of Dracula, because there's no role that properly fits Kay Caldwell.

For convenience sake, I'm going to give you a brief plot synopsis of the film (because no one watches this movie). ( It's under here. )

Universal made two Dracula movies before this one. They both feature essentially the same cast of characters: the vampire, the young lovers, the wise old man, a few other intrepid vampire hunters, the vampire's minion, some comic relief, and assorted victims. Sometimes they get a little shuffled or a couple get combined - Dr Garth in Dracula's Daughter replaces both Dr Seward and Jonathan Harker - but the basic outline is there. (This is also the basic outline of The Mummy, btw.) But the outline doesn't work with Son of Dracula, because of Kay. Kay Caldwell doesn't properly fit any of these predetermined roles. She could be the young lover, but she marries someone else and her lover kills her rather than rescuing her. She could be the monster, but we never see her do anything monstrous and she's never presented as frightening. Honestly, the role she fits best - and even this isn't perfect - is the vampire's minion. But no one makes the vampire's minion the center of the film.

And that's why the movie feels so weird. The wrong character is in the spotlight and it warps everything else out of true. You can see where all the other players are supposed to go - you can almost tell what the movie would have been without that distortion. Frank and Claire are the young lovers, which provides a reason for Claire's existence in the film. Kay is Renfield, in which case Dracula has been a corrupting influence, or she's Sandor, in which case Dracula has a willing assistant. Either way, because he has control over her, Dracula appears more powerful, more of the monster we're used to instead of the soft-spoken passive milquetoast vampire the film gives us. Since Kay is either less rational or more evil, Dr Brewster seems more rational and less evil in his action towards her*. Kay and Dracula are more clearly antagonists, threatening Frank and Claire, and so we get the return of the status quo when the two of them are destroyed. Those characters fit into the framework we're familiar with.

But that's not what we get. Instead, we get Kay stepping forward, taking all the important actions, making all the important decisions. The movie still seems to think that Frank is the protagonist - his is the first name in the credits, he gets the last heroic shot - but it's clearly wrong. Kay is the character whose choices drive the film and one never really feels that the film makers meant for that to happen. It's really fascinating and is one of the major reasons that I love this movie far more than it deserves**.

I'd really love to learn more about the making of this film, because watching it feels like reading one of those stories where the author tells you that a character started making decisions on their own that the author hadn't planned. I want to know if Kay Caldwell was planned or if she just decided to happen, like she decides everything in the movie.




*Nope, never getting over the fact that Dr Brewster tries to get Kay committed for having a goth phase and wanting to marry Hungarian nobility instead of Frank.

**The other reason is Kay herself, who is splendid. Ladies get to be victims or monsters in Universal horror films and Kay chose monster. She chose. I love her for that.

Alas, my plans for Halloween weekend have fallen through! Katie and I were planning to go to our local Dystopia Rising game for the weekend but she just found out today that she can't get off work. Since they have game weekends every month or so, we will just have to wait till another time to pretend to be post-nuclear apocalypse semi-zombie people.

On the plus side, when we do end up going, sometime in the future, I will have all my clothes and supplies completely ready. So there's that.

So now I need new Halloween plans! I already have tomorrow off and I'm thinking that a horror movie marathon would be the best/easiest thing. Which means I need to pick some movies.

What are your favorite horror movies that can be watched online?

So I haven't had a story in my head for the past few days and I had a boring meeting this morning, so I started going through the old standbys to find something to occupy me. I started out with Renfield, because that is my default state, but actually ended up poking at the Countess Marya Zaleska/Kay Caldwell crossover femslash fixit story. Because that story needs to be told. And then I started an actual outline because someday I'm really going to write that one if it's the last thing I do.

I actually have Complicated Feelings about this story because I have Complicated Feelings about both of those movies and how they're both about women who go against the accepted patriarchal guidelines, either willingly (Kay) or not (Marya) and are punished for that transgression by the representatives of the patriarchy who are, in both of these movies, embodied in the figure of the heterosexual protagonist/love interest. I neither know nor care whether the creators of these films intended them to be read that way, but when I watch them they are absolutely movies about how our society punishes women who don't do Being Women correctly. Dracula's Daughter also explicitly links monstrosity and queerness - monstrosity is then figured as reaching beyond the mainstream patriarchal heteronormative demands of society to act as your true self. Which is a beautiful thought for someone like me who is queer and always wanted to be a monster.

But of course they both die at the end of their respective movies because Marya can't be a straight non-monster girl no matter how hard she tries and Kay outright rejects that, outright tries to become something else and of course we can't have that. And of course I want very badly to fix it. I want the story about how the two of them help each other - how Marya helps Kay become the thing she so much wants to be, how Kay shows Marya how to love her monstrous nature. I want them to be happy, I want them to be loved because they're monsters and not despite it, I want them to win. I want them to rip into everyone who stands in their way with their big shiny vampire teeth and I want them to own the night forever. Because I deserve a power fantasy too, right?

Also, I want them to kiss, because they are both very pretty and I like vampires. (And it would be nice, once in a while, to get some lesbian vampires who aren't there to titillate a male audience.)

Maybe I will actually write it and maybe it will be at least half the story I want it to be and I can be happy with it.

(And then I can move on to the story where the Bride of Frankenstein gets to do, I don't know, anything. Or Malita's amazing adventures in mad science. Or the story where it turns out that Asenath Waite is indeed the amazing fish-person witch-woman that she appears to be and it's awesome.)

And then I guess I didn't post for a week. Huh.

Things:

- I had Monday and Tuesday off from Kingston, which was nice. When I came back, I was told that someone (no names were given) had set fire to the microwave, so that the fire department had to be called, and that there was a mysterious beeping box in our break room. The box had been there since the room had been the office of the building's county representative, so we had assumed it belonged to the county. We called the county, to get them to stop the beeping, but they told us they had no idea what it was. So we didn't want to unplug it, because what if that would lock all of the doors to the building, or make it explode, or open a portal to another dimension. This morning, there was an email in my inbox saying that the beeping had been stopped, but still no information as to what the box actually is. So that's worrisome.

- My sister got a job! She's working at a pie shop in Fremont. It's all very exciting, and sometimes, she brings us pie. In fact, I have a macaroni and cheese pie waiting for me in the fridge at home, which I'm sure you are all jealous of. 8)

( - Of course, if my digestive system would cooperate long enough to eat the pie, that would be awesome. I've been having freaky stomach cramps and nausea for the past two days. It's not debilitating - I'm at work right now and doing fine - but it's deeply irritating.)

- I have no Halloween plans as yet, which makes me a little bit sad. I mean, I have the day off (and the day after), but nothing I'm planning to do as yet. It may end up just being a movie marathon - nothing wrong with that - but I'm struggling to pick a coherent theme. (There is a part of me that wants the theme to be "movies in which women's bodies are monstrous", and I could watch Ginger Snaps and Carrie and Jennifer's Body, but I'm pretty sure that would end up being really depressing.) Thoughts and/or suggestions?

I decided not to go to Rocky Horror tonight. It doesn't start till 11:15 and is half an hour away and I am sleepy. So, I am kind of a failboat but I am a failboat who will be spending the evening tucked up and cozy in her own bed.

Today, I did a lot of knitting and watched horror movies on Netflix. They have changed the horror subgenres list since the last time I looked - there is no Classic Horror subgenre anymore, which makes me a bit sad. There is, however, Deep Sea Horror, which is somehow hilarious.

Also today, my parents and I made pear butter. We have seven jars of the stuff and it is delicious. I'm quite happy about it. Tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to make pumpkin pickles, since I have a recipe and the idea is intriguing.

Not a bad weekend, really.

Things:

- I am mostly better! Not entirely - I still have a bit of a cough and more mucous than I'd like - but mostly. So that's good.

- I put the BBC radio production of LotR on my mp3 player today and started listening to it for the first time in a long time. It is still amazing and wonderful. It occurred to me today, as I was listening to it, that it was my very first introduction to audio drama. I was probably...11 or 12 when I first listened to it. I'd listened to audiobooks before - I nearly wore out my library's copy of Dragonsong, for example - and one day, the library had this set labeled The Two Towers. Which was (and probably still is) my favorite of the books in the trilogy*, so I snatched it and took it home. And it had sound effects! And music! And different actors for all the different parts! I hadn't realized you could do things like that in an audiobook** - it was seriously a revelation. I listened to The Two Towers and The Return of the King (the library never had Fellowship) so many times that there are entire sections of the book that I am not capable of reading without hearing those actors' voices in my head. It is still, for my money, the best adaptation of LotR there is. And although there are a couple actors I might quibble about (I've never really liked their Bilbo and I have reservations about Aragorn), it has the very best Sam. Which is, of course, the most important thing.

- Oh man, it has been years since I actually read those books, I should totally do that. I should buy it for my kindle - my copy is one of those all-in-one omnibus things which is too heavy to carry around. Apparently they are including materials from the appendices in the Hobbit movie? I should reacquaint myself with those.

- Tonight was movie night at Bainbridge. We watched The Wolf Man, which I had not seen in years. I have never been a big Wolf Man fan, I must admit. I do, however, very much like Claude Rains and he is lovely in it. And the yak hair is still hilarious, and I still find it charming that after his first transformation, Larry Talbot apparently decides to change his clothes before stalking the moors in search of prey. And I had fun during the discussion afterwards, because we got to talk about how much werewolf "lore" comes from this film, and about Werewolf of London (which is neat, because it was made before this movie and so doesn't use a lot of that "lore"), and about Universal monster films in general. There was a moment of I Have Opinions, when one of the guys who runs the movie night said that he thought that Dracula was the best of the Universal monster movies, because that is obviously wrong. Now, I love Dracula as I'm sure we all know, but I am fully willing to admit that it's not actually what you could call a good movie. The Transylvania bits are awesome and Mr Lugosi is lovely throughout, but everything that happens in London is so boring. And also incoherent and nonsensical. (What happens to vampire!Lucy, you guys? We never find out.) I vote Bride of Frankenstein for best Universal monster movie, but it's possible that I'm biased. What do you guys think?





*It has the Rohirrim, and Saruman, and Wormtongue, and the Ents, and Faramir, and the Uruk-hai, and Theoden, and Shelob, and Gandalf's return, and the Dead Marshes, and Shadowfax, and Eowyn, and did I mention the folk of Rohan? Look, I was a proto-heathen kid who was still really into horses the first time I read these books. The Rohirrim are the best thing ever. Anyway, Fellowship takes a while to get going (I used to skip straight to the Council of Elrond and go from there, after the first few times I read them) and Return is the depressing one, whereas Two Towers is nothing but awesome.

**Not that it's properly an audiobook, but as a tiny person, I did not really know that.