The ghouls Read online

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  Dedicated to the memory of

  BORIS KARLOFF

  (1887-1969)

  —gentleman of the cinema and the greatest Ghoul of all

  (following page 128)

  A rare still from one of the very first fantasy/horror films, Georges Melies' Devil in a Convent

  The Lunatics, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe

  Osgood Perkins and the scarecrow which is brought to life in Puritan Passions

  Lon Chaney in his classic portrayal of that tragic figure, the Phantom of the Opera

  Perhaps the most horrific of all horror films, Tod Browning's Freaks

  The outstanding terror film of hunter and hunted, Most Dangerous Game, with Joel McCrea

  The beautiful and sinister Gloria Holden in Draculas Daughter

  Peter Lorre in a dramatic moment from The Beast With Five Fingers

  Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher, based on Robert Louis Stevenson's story

  The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms on the rampage in the film version of Ray Bradbury's story

  Vincent Price and young companion confronted by The Fly

  Freda Jackson decomposing in the H. P. Lovecraft tale, Monster of Terror

  A human skull with unearthly powers in The Skull by Robert Bloch

  Barbara Steele under torture as a witch in the Italian film Black Sunday

  A moment of high tension from Robert Enrico's masterpiece, Incident at Owl Creek

  EDITOR'S FOREWORD

  'What is horror? Horror is a matter of taste—and I don't mean the Mood."

  ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  EVER since the first moving pictures flickered unsteadily on to a screen in the last days of the nineteenth century, the "horror" or "terror" film has been an integral part of cinema history. No outraged cries of protest (and there have been a good many) or screams of panic from audiences have ever succeeded in substantially denting the popularity of a genre that deals in nightmares, monsters and men of evil purpose. Indeed, its bloodstained progress has survived wars, censorship, banning, any amount of ridicule and even psychological investigation.

  Kingsley Amis, the distinguished English novelist and self-professed horror film fan, believes the reason for such enduring popularity lies in the fact that "the appetite for horror is a persistent but not very important strand in the cultural weave of the last couple of centuries, no more connected with an appetite for real horror, real blood, than an interest in the Theatre of Cruelty or the bullfight". Others less analytical may feel more simply that a damn good scare and a laugh afterwards (it can't really happen after all!) is just about the best form of relief in a world filled with strife and mistrust.

  However we choose to analyse this type of picture (my special contributors, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, will have more to say on the subject) it is interesting to note how the genre has consistendy drawn on literature for its inspiration. Such great classics of terror as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein and Dracula have reappeared numerous times over the past seventy years—with ever-increasing popularity—and will doubtless be remade again many times before we all blow ourselves into that great Valhalla of horror beyond the midnight skies.

  What to me has been even more interesting than this is the fact that short stories and novellas have played just as significant a part as the full-length novel in the development of the genre—indeed time and time again a new dimension of terror or a more sophisticated style of tension has been brought to the screen after initial conception in a short tale of horror. From my study of this facet of cinema history has grown the collection now in your hands.

  In The Ghouls I have attempted to bring together not only the best of the short stories, but also those which help illustrate the history of the horror film from its inception in the hands of the French pioneer Melies through to the present. Many of the original tales have been out of print for decades—despite frequent revivals of the pictures they inspired—and I hope that their reprinting here will prove valuable not only to the student of old films but also to the general reader who enjoys a good late-night thrill. It probably needs to be pointed out for the fastidious reader that some of the finished films—in the good old movie tradition—differed quite extensively from the stories on which they were based, but in very few cases could the inspiration or influence of the written word be denied.

  Because of the limitations on its length, the book cannot be as definitive as I would have liked (particularly in covering the period between the two world wars, certainly the "Golden Era" of horror films, or in having to overlook such important directors as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Alfred Hitchcock) but I hope the background notes on the films that are coupled with each story will at least do some justice to all the ghouls so many millions of us have come to know and love. I trust also that the illustrations will help to bridge the gap between the written word and the film.

  Finally, I must record my thanks to those who have made compiling this book such a pleasure: Vincent Price and Christopher Lee for their enthusiasm and contributions; my publishers, Sol Stein in America and Jeffrey Simmons in England, for their support given so readily to the project when it was little more than an idea; and the various researchers who have helped in the location of stories and film stills: August Derleth, Paulette Cooper, Laurence James, Richard Davis and Robin James of the Gothique Film Society. The living and the dead are forever in your debt.

  PETER HAINING

  Birch Green Essex May, 1970

  INTRODUCTION

  by VINCENT PRICE

  THERE is perhaps no more personal attachment between audience and actor than the identification of that actor with fear on the part of the audience. I could broaden that statement to include laughter, as these two very human emotions are closely allied in a commodity I sell, entertainment appeal. But the contents of this book deal with those stories that most successfully avoid making an audience laugh, to make them shiver with the kindred delight—fright. Fright makes actor and audience one, just as laughter does. It is something tangible that takes over the audience and makes it one in itself . . . and that is surely one of the, if not the most, important requirements of drama.

  This identity the audience feels for the fright-making actor (and the comedian) is a mixed blessing to him, for just to appear in tales of terror can lead to a certain anonymity that can sometimes further starve the actor's too often famished affection for identification. I laugh when I recall the number of times I've been mistakenly asked for Basil Rath-bone's or George Sanders' autograph, but it's a hollow laugh, even though I admire both those gentlemen unqualifiedly. When, as has happened many times, people have recalled with squealing delight my Frankenstein or Dracula, I have learned not to fight them off with hurt invectives, but to throw them a simple thank you and make off somewhere so as not to witness the blushing dawn of their confusion when they realize I never played either part, that I'm neither Boris Kar-loff nor Bela Lugosi. I once made the mistake of arguing with a teenager that I was not the man who was transmuted into a fly in a picture by the same name in which I did appear and ended up in defeat, harbouring the horrid wish that I could turn said teenager into a worm.

  What all this facetiousness boils down to is that the actor in thrillers has to admit, perhaps more than other actors are willing to, that the play's the thing, and then just go along for the ride. Happily for most of us, it's a long ride, as audiences seem never to tire of a good scare, and authors, bless them, the best of them, have always been challenged by the thousand different ways this effect can be achieved.

  It has been said that Edgar Allan Poe, in his immortal The Pit And

  The Pendulum, captured his readers in all the elements of human fe
ar. He did this without the use of anything "out of this world", but it will have to be admitted that the mind of the hero in this piece was hard put to stay in this world, for Poe threw the book of real and imagined horrors at him, and the only happy ending one can imagine is sanity retained. Yet, going off the deep end is the ultimate terror and in many of these stories insanity is achieved by "the outsiders". The Ghouls are "outsiders" in these cases: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Skull, Monster of Terror. There's no question that these creatures are terrifying, for they represent the unknown which everyone will concede is unthinkable. That the unliving can scare the living daylights out of you is of course the triumph of the undead, as in Dracula, but the real terror of Dracula is that he or it is or was a human being just like you and me. The element of "there but for the grace of God" is the key to the success of Phantom of tlie Of era, The Fly, Freaks, and to me those human monsters will always be more fascinating than the Bloblings and Goblins from outer space.

  The most fascinating man-monster I have tangled with was the mentally mutilated and visually violated mask maker in The House Of Wax. Tragedy in the dramatic theory of Aristotle and other subsequent playwright-philosophers is the highest element of terror, especially if we can identify with that tragedy. If it could happen to Dr. Jekyll, is it not only possible but probable that there is a monster in every man? What made the man who ran the House of Wax a monster was a tragic accident, a fire. It could happen to you, to me. He became Mr. Hyde, but he could still wear a Dr. Jekyll mask of his own making, and the audience was held in suspense because they knew that under that mask of good lay evil, and evil is always a threat, with unthinking evil being the greatest threat of all.

  This kind of split personality is the most challenging problem for the actor, and for the audience, too. With The Beast, there was no split personality because there was no personality to begin with, and personality is the actor's only problem. With Frankenstein's monster it was different. He was made up of human parts, and there was some humanity left over—so it was with the Golem. These are not monsters as such, for the trace of man that was left with them was their tragedy, it was outweighed by their inhumanity. This imbalance was also what terrified us. So it was, too, with The Fly, a man made into a monster; his sadness was that he could not be rescued back into the race fate had taken him away from. Is that not the ultimate fear of every man, that

  the end of life, Death itself, may be separation from his identity with man?

  Enough of my own preferences. All these stories contain elements of Terror, and if I as an actor and reader prefer the human monster to the monster monster, perhaps I can put it down to my belief that what man does to himself, or has done to him by other men, is the most terrifying thing in the world. There may be "more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies", but my nightmares are what can happen to me if my dreams are stifled, if my realities are thwarted, if my fellow man turns out to be inhuman after all.

  So wet your lips and lock up tight and read these famous tales of terror and suspense. Masters all are those who wrote them, winners they who bask a moment in their genius and escape the too real horrors of our weary world today. The illustrations are a bonus and show how the super-make-believe of the cinema has tried to bring them visually to life. They illustrate as well sometimes as do the writers what the inner eye can see if allowed to look freely and live in imagination's wonder.

  Los Angeles California

  May, 1970

  THE DEVIL IN A CONVENT

  FRANCIS OSCAR MANN

  (Georges Melies: 1896)

  For our first story we turn back to the very beginnings of the cinema at the close of the nineteenth century and the work of the amazing Trench film pioneer Georges Melies, whom many regard as the father of the fantasy and horror film. Melies, previously a stage musician, became fascinated with the newly developing art of cinematographe, but while other pioneers were experimenting with portraying reality, his vivid imagination and predilection for illusion and the supernatural led him towards the realms of fantasy.

  For his work he built a studio on the outskirts of Paris (the first of its kind in the world*) and fitted it with all manner of effects. His first productions, or feeries (fantasy films), were an immediate success and audiences from all over the capital flocked to see the work of the "Magician of the Screen", as he soon became known. He showed ghosts materializing and dematerializing, eerie underwater scenes and strange occult episodes—all of which were produced with unique and startlingly inventive techniques. Many of his productions were in colour—each frame was painstakingly hand coloured—and lasted from a minute to half an hour.

  Melies was also one of the first film-makers to appreciate the value of literature as source material and indeed created his masterpiece, A Trip To The Moon (1902) from Jules Verne's From Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon. A lesser known film was The Devil in a Convent which Melies based on a medieval tale retold by Francis Mann. The master himself played the "minstrel" who throws consternation into a convent of nuns, and during the course of the film he introduced a number of strange illusionary sequences and a dramatic climax in which he vanished into thin air! It is a sad postscript on this remarkable man that many of his ideas were shamelessly plagiarized and that ridicule and bankruptcy even-

  tually forced him out of the business to which he had introduced an entire new genre.

  BUCKINGHAM is as pleasant a shire as a man shall see on a seven days' journey. Neither was it any less pleasant in the days of our Lord King Edward, the third of that name, he who fought and put the French to shameful discomfiture at Crecy and Poitiers and at many another hard-fought field. May God rest his soul, for he now sleeps in the great church at Westminster.

  Buckinghamshire is full of smooth round hills and woodlands of hawthorn and beech, and it is a famous country for its brooks and shaded waterways running through the low hay meadows. Upon its hills feed a thousand sheep, scattered like the remnants of the spring snow, and it was from these that the merchants made themselves fat purses, sending the wool into Flanders in exchange for silver crowns. There were many strong castles there too, and rich abbeys, and the King's highway ran through it from north to south, upon which the pilgrims went in crowds to worship at the shrine of the Blessed Saint Alban. Thereon also rode noble knights and stout men-at-arms, and these you could follow with the eye by their glistening armour, as they wound over hill and dale, mile after mile, with shining spears and shields and fluttering pennons, and anon a trumpet or two sounding the same keen note as that which rang out dreadfully on those bloody fields of France. The girls used to come to the cottage doors or run to hide themselves in the wayside woods to see them go trampling by; for Buckinghamshire girls love a soldier above all men. Nor, I warrant you, were jolly friars lacking in the highways and byways and under the hedges, good men of religion, comfortable of penance and easy of life, who could tip a wink to a housewife, and drink and crack a joke with a good man, going on their several ways with tight paunches, skins full of ale and a merry salutation for every one. A fat pleasant land was this Buckinghamshire; always plenty to eat and drink therein, and pretty girls and lusty fellows; and God knows what more a man can expect in a world where all is vanity, as the Preacher truly says.

  There was a nunnery at Maids Moreton, two miles out from Buckingham Borough, on the road to Stony Stratford, and the place was called Maids Moreton because of the nunnery. Very devout creatures were the nuns, being holy ladies out of families of gende blood. They

  punctually fulfilled to the letter all the commands of the pious founder, just as they were blazoned on the great parchment Regula, which the Lady Mother kept on her reading-desk in her little cell. If ever any of the nuns, by any chance or subtle machination of the Evil One, was guilty of the smallest backsliding from the conduct that beseemed them, they made full and devout confession thereof to the Holy Father who visited them for this purpose. This good man loved swan's meat and
galingale, and the charitable nuns never failed to provide of their best for him on his visiting days; and whatsoever penance he laid upon them they performed to the utmost, and with due contrition of heart.

  From Matins to Compline they regularly and decently carried out the services of Holy Mother Church. After dinner, one read aloud to them from the Rule, and again after supper there was reading from the life of some notable Saint or Virgin, that thereby they might find example for themselves on their own earthly pilgrimage. For the rest, they tended their herb garden, reared their chickens, which were famous for miles around, and kept strict watch over their haywards and swineherds. If time was when they had nothing more important on hand, they set to and made the prettiest blood bandages imaginable for the Bishop, the Bishop's Chaplain, the Archdeacon, the neighbouring Abbot and other godly men of religion round about, who were forced often to bleed themselves for their health's sake and their eternal salvation, so that these venerable men in process of time came to have by them great chests full of these useful articles. If little tongues wagged now and then as the sisters sat at their sewing in the great hall, who shall blame them, Eva peccatrice? Not I; besides, some of them were something stricken in years, and old women are garrulous and hard to be constrained from chattering and gossiping. But being devout women they could have spoken no evil.

  One evening after Vespers all these good nuns sat at supper, the Abbess on her high dais and the nuns ranged up and down the hall at the long trestled tables. The Abbess had just said "Gratias" and the sisters had sung "Qui vivit et regnat per omnia saecula saeculorum, Arnen", when in came the Manciple mysteriously, and, with many deprecating bows and outstretchings of the hands, sidled himself up upon the dais, and, permission having been given him, spoke to the Lady Mother thus:

  "Madam, there is a certain pilgrim at the gate who asks refreshment and a night's lodging." It is true he spoke softly, but little pink ears are sharp of hearing, and nuns, from their secluded way of life, love to hear news of the great world.