Sunday

Happy October first. The first entire October I'd spent abroad left me feeling homesick, last year, so now I plan to overcompensate for my 2005 lack of participation. Last night, after midnight, I inaugurated a month-long horror movie festival. I love Hammer horror. I love the baroque, oversaturated, and gilded, anachronistically nineteenth-century lushness of their sixties horror: thrilling raven ingénues clutching pastel nighties to heaving bosoms, bug-eyed before the foppish theatricality of some hissing villain. Brides of Dracula* is an excellent example of the subtlety that earned Hammer its name: though the master is dead, one member of his ratpack remains chained in the florid Meinster Chapeau amongst colorfully billowing curtains. Happenstance lures a nubile French teacher within his sphere of manipulation. Horror ensues. Is anyone more rakish than Peter Cushing's Van Helsing? How can he look great in blood-colored tweed (that's orange in a Hammer movie) and blue tie? How about that green Bavarian hat with snow brush? This movie has the most inspired burning windmill climax I've ever seen. Less inspired is Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf,* a convoluted soap operetta that begins when a beggar tragically encounters a rotten Spanish Marquise and is imprisoned, forgotten by all but the turnscrew's steadily-ripening daughter. Angering her monstrous master, she's imprisoned with the now-feral beggar, who immediately dies upon ravishing her. Later, she escapes to live like an animal in the woods, eventually rescued, inevitably pregnant, by a bachelor and his benevolent housekeeper. Thus, halfway into the movie begins the Omen-esque tale of a wolf-boy destined to grow into dashing wolf-man Oliver Reed. But why is Spain the color of sand? The Hapsburg's Imperial Romania was a riot of color in Brides; but Curse's Spain, usually a merrily hued locale, is presented like a drab legionnaire’s encampment. [Cavin]