Forry

What better way to celebrate Halloween than by paying a visit (and respects) to the world’s greatest monster movie fan? Forrest J Ackerman – whose friends affectionately refer to him as “Forry” or “4E” – lives in a cozy bungalow in Los Feliz and, believe it or not, still welcomes sci-fi / horror fans into his house every Saturday morning.

For those who don’t know, Forry is a writer, actor, producer and literary agent whose passion for the sci-fi and horror genres has defined fandom for half a century. In 1958, he published the first issue of the now-legendary fan magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, filling it with publicity photos from his own private collection of more than 35,000 movie stills. The magazine inspired several generations of future writers and filmmakers – many of whom have become fast friends with the editor-in-chief – before ending its run in 1983. Famous Monsters has since been revived… but under troubling circumstances, resulting in a 1997 lawsuit that eventually forced Forry to part with much of the movie memorabilia that he’d spent a lifetime collecting.

Forry has, however, managed to hold onto a few prized possessions – like a first edition hardback of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (published in 1897), autographed by Bram Stoker, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Vampira, John Carradine, Karl Freund, and others. He also has the top hat that Lon Chaney wore in Tod Browning’s legendary lost film London after Midnight (1927), the monstrous head from the conclusion of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and an assortment of other strange items. The walls are of his house are filled with movie posters and fan artwork, plus a lineup of masks moulded from the faces of legendary actors like Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney Jr., and Charles Laughton.

The best part of this collection is Forry himself, who vividly remembers all of those luminaries and doesn’t hesitate to share his memories. On Saturday morning, I was thrilled to find him sitting among his treasures, smiling and talking to visitors. There were a few other newcomers, as well as a couple who had been visiting him for twenty years. They knew just the right questions to ask to bring out his playful (sometimes even slightly bawdy) sense of humor. It wasn’t long before he was telling stories, singing and cracking jokes. At one point, he looked directly at me and casually asked, “Have you heard about the cross-eyed schoolteacher?” I said no. With wide eyes and an ultra-serious tone, he responded, “She couldn’t control her pupils.” Later, when I told him I was local, he instructed me to write down my address so that he could invite me to his 91st birthday next month. This is a guy - familiar to fans the world over – who had known me for all of ten minutes!

I suppose that’s one reason that Forry is so immensely popular… because he’s just as friendly and enthusiastic with other fans as he is with celebrities. Filmmakers, writers, publishers and casual moviegoers alike speak of him with reverence. I remember several times hearing his name invoked on the set of Virginia Beach’s late-night horror show, Dr. Madblood. Shows like Madblood, publications like Fangoria, Cinefantastique, and Video Watchdog, and countless fan conventions owe Forry a debt of gratitude for paving the way.

But I imagine that all this talk of gratitude is a bit too haughty for Forry. He’s just looking forward to Halloween night, when he will be able to gleefully tell a new generation of trick-or-treaters about his friends… the children of the night.

That same night, Dr. Madblood and friends will go live with their new website… the latest incarnation of a show celebrating its 32nd anniversary. Be sure to check it out.

If that isn’t enough viewing material for the un-hallowed holiday, let me refer you to John Kenneth Muir’s Top 15 Horror Films of the 1980s. The author recently justified his choices on Howard Margolin’s radio show Destinies, and Howard was kind enough to point out when and where you can catch those shows on TV in the upcoming week. You can listen to the interview here.



On the bottom shelf sits an autographed first edition of Dracula. I'm not sure what the thing above it is supposed to be.

A Cylon watches over Forry's collection

Forry meets Frankenstein

Zoom in on the names below the masks

Radiohead: In Rainbows

Some time ago, I heard an interview with Thom Yorke in which he reflected on the fact that his band was inspiring a generation of listeners in the same way that his favorite bands – The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Talking Heads, R.E.M., etc. – had inspired him when he was a teenager. The most gratifying thing about all of this, he said, is realizing that the music is a vital part of people’s inner-lives.

Radiohead made its first big splash in the States with their 1993 single “Creep.” The video was in constant rotation on MTV, usually playing back to back with that Blind Melon video featuring the fat kid in the bumblebee outfit. After the success of “Creep,” the band was poised to become a one-hit-wonder, and they knew it. The stress of crafting a follow-up single almost destroyed the band. Much to the record company’s dismay, they decided not to worry about creating another standout single and focused instead on creating a cohesive album, which they produced themselves. The result was “The Bends,” a brilliantly textured, guitar-driven rock album. Within a few years, critics were calling Radiohead the band of the future. Their third album, “OK Computer,” wore this moniker on its sleeve – mixing the usual guitar riffs and pop hooks with space-age electronica. (Band members were listening to DJ Shadow, Massive Attack, and Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” during their recording sessions.)

I remember driving around Charlottesville one night, and being suddenly struck by the complexity of sound – at once unsettling and intimate – on their song “Subterranean Homesick Alien.” I’d heard the song several times before, but on that night the tune nuzzled its way into my psyche. It was February – cold as hell outside, but warm and dry inside the car. Fluorescent lighting danced off of the dirty windshield, looking like reflections of light from an alien spaceship in the night sky. I listened to the song over and over until I got where I was going. I experience music that way sometimes… I’ll listen to something I know I’ve heard before, but suddenly – for no particular reason - it seems completely new.

I’ve had similar experiences with each of the subsequent Radiohead albums. I was confused by “Kid A” the first few times I listened to it. Then I took it on an 8-hour drive to New Jersey and, by the end of the trip, I couldn’t get enough of it. That night I sat in a bar, making the pretentious argument that the band had expanded its emotional range, the way Led Zeppelin did when they moved from the straightforward bluesy rock of the Brown Bomber album to the folk-inspired sounds of Bron-Yr-Aur. The comparison isn’t entirely unjust: Like Led Zeppelin in the early seventies, Radiohead in the late nineties was suffering from overexposure after “OK Computer.” The only way for the band members to survive creatively was for them to crawl back inside themselves. That’s how “Kid A” sounds – embryonic, like a dream sequence in David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” Sometimes, when I listen to it, I get an urge to paint abstract landscapes.

“Amnesiac” served as a companion piece to “Kid A.” It was even more experimental, suggesting that the band might go anywhere next. Honestly, I didn’t have high hopes for their sixth album – I didn’t know how much further the band could withdraw into themselves before they became incoherent and disappeared completely. “Hail to the Thief,” released in the summer of 2003, was a welcome surprise. It combined the distinctive sounds of all the earlier albums, from the hard-driving rock album “The Bends” to the sometimes-jazzy, sometimes-ambient, sometimes hopelessly abstract “Amnesiac.” With “Hail to the Thief,” I felt like I was listening to a band that had arrived at its fully-formed state.

A couple weeks ago, when I heard that Radiohead was about to release its new album, “In Rainbows,” I began to wonder: Can they pull it off again? The band has changed a lot since 1993. So has the music industry. So have I. Will their music still sneak up on me? Will this album veer off in a new direction, I wondered, or will it be like a visit from an old friend? I wasn’t sure which I’d prefer. In 1993, I regularly bought new albums out of sheer curiosity… These days, I rarely buy albums at all. I know what I like, and I don’t seek out new music as eagerly. At the same time, I see no need for an album that repeats what’s already been done. If the new music is derivative, I’ll stick with the old stuff.

While the marketing scheme for “In Rainbows” may be getting all the headlines, it’s the music that listeners care about… and, after a day with the album, I’m not sure yet how I feel about it. There are a few songs that already seem wonderfully familiar – the lush “All I Need” (especially its symphonic finale) and “Videotape.” The transition between the Beatles-esque song “Faust Arp” and “Reckoner” is also striking. But “In Rainbows” reminds me of R.E.M.’s melodic 1996 album “Up,” which I grew tired of within the first few weeks. Will it continue to live in my mind weeks from now – even years from now – the way Radiohead’s other albums do? Time will tell.

Antelope Valley

You’ve seen this movie before.

A pair of young city-dwellers drive out into “the country” to explore some remote curiosity. Maybe they’re on the way to visit a relative, or tracking a local legend, or – in the most hopeless cases – taking a “shortcut” to some commercial-friendly vacation destination. Whatever the case, the movie doesn’t end well. They make a wrong turn, pick up the wrong hitchhiker, get trampled by Lady Luck and/or Mother Nature before being tortured and killed by giant insects or an inbred family of hungry cannibals.

Oddly, this type of movie frequently gets shot in Antelope Valley, about sixty miles north of L.A. Driving through, it’s not hard to understand why. The high desert landscape is naturally forbidding. Strong winds stir up dust devils in the rocky sand and the only signs of life are Joshua trees – which don’t grow big enough to provide shelter from the sun. Here, a person is completely vulnerable to the elements. The population of the valley – concentrated mostly in the western cities of Palmdale and Lancaster – is growing fast, but settlements to the east still appear inhospitable. One gets a profound sense of loneliness on the empty roads, and hopes that this is not the day the radiator overheats or a tire blows out… because, as Hollywood has proven, this is the perfect place to disappear.

Four teenagers disappeared here in Rob Zombie’s directorial debut, “House of 1,000 Corpses." Their wrong turn landed them in Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen – better known as the Four Aces, on the corner of 145th Street and Avenue Q. The Four Aces is a shooting location with three distinct 1950’s-era sets: a diner, a gas station, and a motel. The motel was the main shooting location for the horror film “Identity,” starring John Cusack. This place looks so real that I have to wonder how many people have stopped here for gas, food, and/or lodging. At the same time, I can’t imagine that very many tourists wander by – the Four Aces is well removed from the main roads, and completely cut off from any other visible buildings.

Just down the road sits Club Ed, another shooting location made famous by Rob Zombie. Club Ed was built in 1991 for the Dennis Hopper film “Eye of the Storm,” and later served as the Khaki Palms Motel in Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects.” I think the motel section might have also been used in Quentin Tarantino’s “From Dusk Til Dawn.” When we pulled over to the side of the road to snap some photos, the resident/caretaker (who looked strikingly like John Carpenter) came out to protest. I remembered where we were – and that this is more or less how “House of 1,000 Corpses” begins, with nosy tourists annoying the locals – and we politely moved on to the next stop.

On Avenue G, we visited The Sanctuary Adventist Church – known to fans of Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” as Uma Thurman’s wedding chapel. According to my trusty tour guide (Harry Medved’s book Hollywood Escapes), the diner across the street was featured in the Jean Claude Van Damme action-thriller “Desert Heat”… which I shamefully admit I have seen, and rather enjoyed. Unlike the Four Aces and Club Ed, which have been maintained for future film work, the “Desert Heat” diner looks like any other abandoned building on the western edge of the Mojave Desert… in a word: dead.

A few miles to the southeast, we visited the sleepy town of Lake Los Angeles, named for a body of water created in the 1960s in anticipation of a real estate boom that never happened. Today, the lake bed is completely dry. On its southern edge is a brand new public park, complete with baseball diamond. Strangely, when we visited the park on a Sunday afternoon, not a soul was there. I felt like we had wandered into the Village of the Damned… perhaps, I thought, there’s some kind of taboo about being in the new playground on the Sabbath. But I had to take a chance because I wanted a photo of the nearby Lovejoy Buttes, where giant ants menaced the heroes of the classic monster movie “Them!”

We made one more stop, further east on 240th Street, at Belle’s Diner. This is where Kurt Russell lost his wife in the 1997 thriller “Breakdown.” If you don’t remember the film (and I can’t hold it against you if you don’t), it’s about a yuppie couple who are driving from Massachusetts to San Diego when a group of backwater boys kidnap the wife and hold her for ransom. The remainder of the movie is silly as hell, but I always enjoy watching Kurt Russell fighting for his life. We watched it on DVD a few nights ago and recognized Moab, Utah, from our cross-country drive around this time last year. The similarities to our own trip were eerie. Since I knew I would never survive the ordeal that Kurt Russell went through to rescue his wife, we decided to head back for civilization.

Some day soon, maybe we’ll venture further east into San Bernadino County – home to Dry Mirage Lake (where Steven Spielberg filmed the desert scenes for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), Victorville (where Jack Arnold shot portions of “It Came from Outer Space” and “Tarantula”) and Lucerne Valley (from the original “The Hills Have Eyes”). For now, we decided to stick with the movies…

Four Aces motel

Four Aces diner

Club Ed

Club Ed

Kill Bill

Desert Heat

Lovejoy Buttes

Village of the Damned

Belle’s Diner