Inside the House on Haunted Hill

Through a bit of luck, I managed to get access to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Ennis House in the Hollywood Hills, which has been closed to the public for some time. Talk about a perfect Halloween present! Movie lovers may recognize this architectural masterpiece as the House on Haunted Hill (from William Castle’s 1958 shocker with Vincent Price), or as Harrison Ford’s apartment in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Steve Martin’s house in Grand Canyon, or Angel’s hideaway in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Certainly, this is the kind of setting that sticks in one’s mind. Even if it hadn’t been featured in countless films, TV shows and commercials, the Ennis House would still be instantly recognizable – where else can you see a modern-day Mayan temple juxtaposed with some of the biggest skyscrapers in the world?

A little history: The 1924 home of Charles & Mabel Ennis is one of four concrete block houses in L.A. that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Each of these houses appears to rise from the land, an organic extension of the mountainous landscape. The four corners narrow slightly at the top, adding to the illusion of ascent. The Ennis House also features quite a bit of “art glass,” including an original mosaic over the fireplace. According to our tour guide, the house was built as more as a showpiece than as actual living quarters. Over the years, some pretty wild parties have been held here – though nothing quite on par with Vincent Price's birthday bash.

These days, the Ennis house is more peaceful, having fallen into the custodial care of a foundation dedicated to preserving it for (in Frank Lloyd Wright’s own words) “lovers of the beautiful.” It is truly one of the most breathtaking sights in Los Angeles, and deserves to be saved for future generations to see.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

ELECTION '08: A New Deal?

This week, I have been struck by the following excerpts from Jean Edward Smith's biography FDR (Random House, 2007) - specifically, from the chapter on the 1932 presidential election between Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover and Democratic challenger Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

"Hoover's voice found little resonance. He was so unpopular that it was unsafe for him to appear in public without heavy police escort. Isolated and out of touch, he came across as a master of malapropism... The message of fear was all that remained. As Hoover would have it, Roosevelt was the precursor of revolution. Speaking in Saint Paul three days before the election, an exhausted Hoover equated the Democratic party with 'the same philosophy of government which has poisoned all of Europe... the fumes of the witch's cauldron which boiled in Russia.' He accused the Democrats of being 'the party of the mob'...

Roosevelt was elected on November 8. Inauguration was not until March 4. That four-month hiatus, coinciding with the fourth winter of the Depression, proved the most harrowing in American memory. Three years of hard times had cut national income in half. Five thousand bank failures had wiped out 9 million savings accounts. By the end of 1932, 15 million workers, one out of every three, had lost their jobs... Homeowners were being foreclosed at a rate of well over one thousand a day. Farmers lost their land because they could not pay taxes or meet mortgage payments... Violence simmered beneath the surface... Hoover's doctrinaire attachment to the free market precluded government intervention."

There are some striking similarities to our current political situation, but quite a few differences from our upcoming presidential election. We may be facing the nation's greatest economic upheaval since the Great Depression, but thankfully we will not be relying on an ineffective president for three more years before the next election. McCain and Obama are both spreading a message of hope about America's future. Both are presenting themselves as the champion of the common man. Both seem to have faith in the federal government's ability to regulate the economy. The difference is in their economic plans.

This past week, McCain compared Obama's tax plans to Hoover's, saying, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Senator Obama wants to restrict trade and he wants to raise taxes. And the last president of the United States that tried that was Herbert Hoover, and we went from a deep recession into a depression." Obama is at odds with FDR on the subject of free trade... but maybe that's because it's not 1932 and the global economy has changed. Free trade, Obama says, is no longer good enough. We need "fair trade." In July, Obama spoke in Germany about this "revolutionary" concept: "Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many. Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet."

More recently, McCain and Palin have been labeling Obama a socialist - just as Hoover labeled FDR a socialist - because of his attempts to "spread the wealth" through tax cuts. Obama's response: "John McCain thinks that giving these Americans a break is socialism. Well, I call it opportunity, and there is nothing more American than that."

What's interesting is that BOTH candidates supported the government's recent 700 billion dollar bailout. For all their arguments, both have shown the same faith in big government to stabilize the economy and protect the people. The difference is in their definition of "the people." From what I can tell, this election is largely about what portion of the U.S. population will actually benefit from the new deal that each candidate proposes.

It's gut check time: Are we united or not?

Ghosts of San Diego

Somehow we’ve managed to go two years without visiting San Diego, our neighbor to the south. This weekend, we took a whirlwind trip and hit a few of the highlights: Cabrillo National Park, Coronado Island and Balboa Park.

Cabrillo is a peninsula named for Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo – the first European to set foot on the west coast of what is now the United States, in 1542. On the southern tip of the peninsula stands the old Point Loma Lighthouse, completed in 1854 and abandoned in 1891. (It seems that the cliff on which it was built was so high – 422 feet above sea level – that the light was often obscured by coastal fog. The new lighthouse is halfway down the hill, just above the western coastline.) The building has been a tourist attraction since the mid 20th century, offering a historic glimpse into a rather lonely lifestyle. Today, the skyscrapers of downtown San Diego are visible from the promontory, but in the late 1800s the city would have been a day’s journey away and, as one of the tourist placards says, the lighthouse didn’t get many visitors. Today, Point Loma is just a short drive from the city… through one of the largest military cemeteries in the nation. Naturally, the Loma Lighthouse has a few ghost stories. Some visitors say they have sensed the presence of Robert Israel, the final lighthouse keeper, who lived here with his wife and children.

Between Point Loma and downtown San Diego is the island of Coronado – home of the legendary Hotel del Coronado, which allegedly has many of its own ghosts. In fact, the hotel’s ghost stories inspired Stephen King to write 1408. The hotel was also L. Frank Baum’s inspiration for Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, some of which he wrote while staying at the Coronado. It also served as the setting of Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return, the basis for the film Somewhere in Time. Perhaps the hotel’s most famous star turn is in Billy Wilder’s movie Some Like It Hot, starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. During filming, Monroe stayed at the Del with her then-husband Arthur Miller.

Our next stop was Balboa Park – home to the spirit of Charles Foster Kane. Balboa is one of the oldest and largest public parks in the U.S., and much of its striking Spanish Colonial architecture was used in the newsreel at the beginning of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, to establish the titular character’s “pleasure dome” Xanadu. Somewhat recognizable are the San Diego Museum of Man, Casa del Prado and the Botanical Gardens.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo

with downtown San Diego in the background

Old Point Loma Lighthouse

Tidepools at Point Loma

Hotel del Coronado (front)

Hotel del Coronado (beach side)

Citizen Kane - News on the March

Balboa Park

Botanical Garden to the right, San Diego Museum of Man in the distance

San Diego Museum of Man...

... posing as Xanadu

Casa del Prado

Classic Horror

If you haven't visited classic-horror.com lately, you really should. All month long, the site is profiling obscure international horror films -- shining a light on overlooked gems from beyond the U.S. Last week, I made a guest appearance to review the 1976 Spanish film Who Can Kill a Child? This week, the site is focused on German horror and I got into the spirit by watching two mid-century German exploitation films. I thought I'd post an "unofficial" review here....

In the late 1950s, Wolfgang C. Hartwig was West Germany’s answer to David F. Friedman – a slick exploitation producer with no artistic aspirations. That made him one of the most reviled members of his film community and a pioneer of Europe’s simmering cinema of sex and violence. Two of Hartwig’s early films have achieved long-lasting cult status among horror fans – the 1959 mind-bender The Head and the comparably mindless Horrors of Spider Island (1960).


The Head (the original German title, literally translated, is The Naked and the Devil) revolves around a mad scientist named Dr. Oog, played by the subtly menacing Horst Frank. Oog – like many a respectable mad scientist – spends his days in a darkened lab, talking to the disembodied head of a former colleague. After hours, he lurks in a sleazy nightclub, ogling a strip-tease dancer named Lily and hatching plans to graft a crippled nun’s head onto the dancer's voluptuous body. The film becomes especially twisted when Lily’s boyfriend unknowingly falls in love with the new hybrid, and the beautiful Monster (I like to think of her as “Re-Animatrix”) wonders aloud what she has become: “Which is my past – the past of Lily’s body or the past of my head?” It's a moment that's almost worthy of David Cronenberg.

One wonders what it must have been like to see this outlandish film in West Germany in 1959, when there was little to compare it with. Certainly there were antecedents: Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac (1924), Erle Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932), Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain (1953), Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), and countless mad science movies featuring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. But, as Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs point out in their book Immoral Tales (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), this was one of the first European films to mix flesh and blood so overtly – setting the trend for Hammer and its many imitators. According to the authors, “this demented epic totally revolutionized the severed head sub-genre.” While it might be a bit of a stretch to refer to a “severed head sub-genre” in 1959, the film undoubtedly paved the way for Eyes without a Face (1960), The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962) and They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1966), as well as a bevy of sordid Euro-horrors in the following decade. This influence alone guarantees the film some status among horror fans, but The Head also stands on its own due to a genuinely surreal atmosphere – part German Expressionism (the lab and the nightclub are both equally shadowy) and part erotic obsession (the camera leers at Lily’s body just as lovingly as Oog does). Watch it alone at 2AM and see if it doesn’t get your imagination wandering.


Less inspired, but no less memorable, is Hartwig’s Horrors of Spider Island (a.k.a. It’s Hot in Paradise). The film stars Barbara Valentin, “the West German Jayne Mansfield” who appeared briefly in nightclub scenes in The Head, as Babs. A sleazy Hollywood producer named Gary hires Babs and eight of her saucy friends to travel to Singapore with him, for some kind of “dance performance.” Fortunately for Gary, their plane goes down and they all become trapped on a remote tropical island. Unfortunately for Gary, the island is already inhabited by a giant spider creature that transforms him into a hairy - and apparently lovesick – mutant.

From the moment the weary female castaways discover a fresh water spring on the island – and begin moaning in ecstasy as they bathe themselves and each other – it’s clear that the film aspires to be nothing more than mindless male fantasy. Before long, the girls are complaining about the “frightful heat” on the island, and shedding clothes as they vie for the affections of the last man on earth. Gary, feeling morally challenged, wanders off in the middle of a thunderstorm, and gets bitten by a laughably cheap (but still somehow creepy) spider. What’s interesting is the way this story plays out. The “monster” begins stalking the girls, but he never attacks them – he is simply a hideous voyeur. Nevertheless, when Gary’s appearance causes one of the girls to fall from a cliff, the bikini-clad women hunt him down with torches – like the angry villagers in Frankenstein. Suddenly, all that sexual tension turns into violence.

For all of its potential, Spider Island is not as moody or as erotic as it could be. Only a handful of images (the thunderstorm; the angry villagers) will stay with horror fans and even fewer of the buxom women will make the intended impression. By far the most striking thing about the film is the horrific dubbing and the mind-numbing English dialogue (“A dead man in a huge web… Oh Gary.”). Still, the film is not without its own peculiar charm – for better or worse, they just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Chances are relatively good that any contemporary viewer who goes out of their way to watch a cheap 1960 monster movie called Horrors of Spider Island will get what they are looking for. Happy hunting.

Angelino Heights

I’ve been trying to come up with some day trips in Los Angeles that fit the Halloween theme. A quick Internet search prompted us to take a stroll through one of the city’s most historic housing districts – a neighborhood that everyone says “should be haunted.” Angelino Heights sits right on the edge of downtown, north of the 101 and Bunker Hill and south of Silver Lake. According to historical markers, the 1300 block of Carroll Avenue has the highest concentration of Victorian houses in the city – many of them dating back to the late 1880s, when moneyed Midwesterners started settling here. The housing boom in Angelino Heights was extremely short lived – a banking recession prevented it from expanding much beyond the 1300 block until the early 1900s.

The result is a short stretch of road that looks like a movie set. Indeed, walking down Carroll Avenue feels a bit like traveling back in time. It might not be so jarring if one were in New England, but here in L.A. Victorian architecture is pretty rare… which explains why there were so many other people spending their Sunday afternoon here, gawking. We had had barely stepped out of our car at the east end of the block before a local man stopped us and started gushing about the beauty of the neighborhood. “I’m sixty years old,” he said, “I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life, and this is the only neighborhood that hasn’t changed from how I remember it years ago.” Here are the pictures to prove it…

1300 Carroll Ave. / Philips House (1887)

1316 Carroll Ave. / Ford House (1887) & 1320 Carroll Ave. / Heim House (1887-88)

I read somewhere that 1320 Carroll Ave. (on the right) was used in Tobe Hooper's miniseries Salem's Lot. It's obviously not the Marsten House, so I'm not sure what to make of that claim. I guess I'll have to watch the miniseries again...

1330 Carroll Ave. / Sessions House (1888)

I love this one.

1325 Carroll Ave.

This haunted-looking house was recently transplanted to Carroll Ave.

1329 Carroll Ave. / Innes House (1887)

This house was used as the main location for the WB series Charmed.

1345 Carroll Ave. / Sanders House (1887)

If this house looks familiar, you might recognize it from Michael Jackson's Thriller video.

Historic Carroll Ave. - looking east

1343 Kelham Ave. (1890)

1347 Kelham Ave. (1890)

Echo Park

Equilibrium

A visual companion piece to John Kenneth Muir's review of Equilibrium. Stunt coordinator Rob Floyd and actor Craig Eckrich ("Brick") on the set of The House Between...

Halloween Movies

Well, it’s October. And you know what that means… Countdown to Halloween! For my money, the best way to celebrate is by watching your favorite horror movies… and this year there’s no better place to accomplish that goal than at The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. Just check out the lineup.

Silent Wednesdays offer a weekly tribute to Lon Chaney, “the man of a thousand faces” and America’s first horror movie star. You can catch two of Chaney’s best collaborations with the reliably morbid Tod Browning (who went on to direct Universal’s Dracula). The Unholy Three (1925) features Chaney as a ventriloquist who allies himself with a circus strongman and a midget to run an elaborate con. It’s a very offbeat picture – as funny as it is dark. Next comes a personal favorite, The Unknown (1927), a tragic story that illustrates Browning and Chaney’s love for the carnivalesque. Chaney stars as a killer who undergoes the amputation of his arms to win the affections of a woman. When she falls for someone else, he’s none too happy. The following weeks belong to Chaney’s better-known character dramas: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Thursday nights belong to the Living Dead. On the 8th, you can catch a double feature of the “lost” zombie film Messiah of Evil (1973) – introduced by the screenwriters, who also wrote George Lucas's American Graffitti – and Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves (1977). I’ve never seen Messiah, so naturally I’m curious. However, I can vouch for Shock Waves, which is the best Nazi zombie flick I’ve ever seen… high praise indeed for those who are into that sort of thing. The beautiful Brooke Adams stars. The following week’s double bill is the Japanese cult hit Versus (2000) and Tsui Hark’s We’re Going to Eat You (1980). (Zombies + chop-sockey.) The following week adds Eurohorror to the mix with The Etruscan Kills Again (1972) and Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971). When the hell will you have another opportunity to see Tombs of the Blind Dead on the big screen?! The theater's website adds: “We were lucky enough to find the rare re-titled U.S. version, Revenge from Planet Ape, featuring a bizarro sci-fi Planet Of The Apes-inspired prologue!” Rounding out the month in grand style is Lucio Fulci’s infamous zombie trilogy: Zombie (1980), The Gates of Hell (1981), and The Beyond (1982). Fulci films are not everyone's cup of tea – mainly because he’s an incoherent storyteller – but these three films, inspired by George Romero and hailed by Quentin Tarantino, have style to spare. If you like zombie movies, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Friday nights are divided into two themes: Japanese ghost stories and George A. Romero. Things get off to a good start tonight, with Ugetsu (1953) and Romero’s scariest zombie films: Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Day of the Dead (1985). Next week, Kuroneko (1968) is followed by Romero's socio-political horrors: Season of the Witch (1973) and The Crazies (1975). On the 17th, the director of Pulse grants us Retribution (2006), to be followed by Romero’s psychological horrors: Monkey Shines (1988) and The Dark Half (1992). On the 24th, you can catch the absolutely beautiful anthology Kwaidan (1964), a key inspiration for many of the recent J-horror hits, and Romero’s best/favorite film, Martin (1977).

Noir Saturdays belong to Val Lewton and bad children. Tomorrow night, Cat People (1942) is followed by Child of Rage (1995), a reality-based version of The Bad Seed. Next week, Lewton’s lackluster “lost” film The Ghost Ship (1943) is paired with one of his best – I Walked with a Zombie (1943). (For the uninitiated, it is perhaps worth pointing out that this is a zombie film in the traditional sense – the zombies are the products of a voodoo curse, and they don’t eat human flesh. In fact, I Walked with a Zombie is a far much more subtle and refined film than anything you’ll find in the Thursday night lineup.) This is followed up by David Cronenberg's unforgettable ode to divorce and child custody proceedings: The Brood (1979). On the 18th, Lewton’s The Body Snatcher – from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, directed by Robert Wise (The Haunting), and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi – is paired with the admittedly slow-moving but still underrated Isle of the Dead (1945), also featuring Karloff. They are followed by Devil Times Five (1974), which I confess I don’t know anything about. On the 25th, Curse of the Cat People (1944) and The Leopard Man (1943) – a rather tame double feature – is followed by the 1980 cult film The Children, about a post-apocalyptic world run by angry wee ones.

Sunday nights are a mixed bag. On the 5th, you can catch a Roger Corman double feature. The Masque of the Red Death (1965), the director’s most ambitious adaptation of material by Edgar Allan Poe, is paired with The Premature Burial (1963), a lesser effort that replaces Poe series regular Vincent Price with Ray Milland. On the 12th, Art Spiegelman presents Freaks (1932), the film that essentially destroyed Tod Browning’s career and didn’t find an audience until nearly thirty years after its initial release. Freaks is followed by a couple of 1980s alien creature features that cheaply but lovingly pay tribute to 1950s alien creature features: The Deadly Spawn (1983) and The Blob (1988). On the 19th, it’s a Jack Sholder double feature – the underrated sci-fi adventure The Hidden (1987) and the first (and arguably still the best) send-up of slasher movies, Alone in the Dark (1982). The former stars Kyle McLachlan in a surprisingly humanist variation on The Terminator; the latter stars Martin Landau, Donald Pleasance and Jack Palace as three different shades of crazy.

Monday the 27th belongs to filmmaker Wes Craven, whose films The People Under the Stairs (1992) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) will be shown on a double bill. In this horror geek’s opinion, Serpent is Craven’s true masterpiece… and would also make for an interesting double-bill with Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie. Last but not least, The Silent Movie Theater is screening William Castle’s interactive film The Tingler (1960) on Halloween night… presumably with seat-buzzers dispersed throughout the theater? One can hope.

For those who can’t make it to The Silent Movie Theater, check out this month’s Shocktober reviews on Classic-Horror.com. Nate Yapp and his merry band of misfits will be making rental suggestions (and possibly a few warnings) on an almost daily basis. Each week will focus on films from a different part of the world: next week Spain, followed by Germany and Southeast Asia, and then an ominous-sounding "miscellaneous" week.