Macabre (1958)

Directed by:
William Castle

Though far from a masterpiece, this remains a very important title nonetheless. Not only was it the very first Castle horror offering of many, but also the first film employing Castle's now-legendary showmanship and gimmicks. The director / producer mortgaged his own Beverly Hills home in order to finance it and formed his own production company, Susina Productions (which would later be William Castle Productions), in the process. Macabre was then filmed in the summer of 1957. After selling the picture to Allied Artists, Castle went all out to sell it the following year. He went on a promotional tour (which would often see him emerging from a coffin), nurses were sometimes hired to stand around in the lobby, hearses and ambulances were parked outside of theaters and, most famously, theater patrons were handed 1,000 dollar life insurance policies from Lloyd's of London in case they'd happen to succumb to “death of fright” while watching it. That is, for everyone “Except people with a known heart or nervous condition.” These promotional gimmicks gave the film a certain notoriety, word of mouth quickly spread and it went on to gross an impressive 5 million dollars on a budget of just 90 thousand. Its success led to many other fun films (perhaps most notably the following year's HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and The Tingler) and just as many memorable gimmicks, which smartly encouraged audience participation.

The first image in Macabre is of a clock as a narrator chimes in: “Ladies and gentlemen, for the next hour and fifteen minutes, you will be shown things so terrifying that the management of this theater is deeply concerned for your welfare. Therefore, we request that each of you assume the responsibility of taking care of your neighbor. If anyone near you becomes uncontrollably frightened, will you please notify the management so that medical attention can be rushed to their aid?” We're then whisked off to the small town of Thornton where strange and mysterious deaths and disappearances over the course of a few years have pitted many people against one another. Dr. Rodney Barrett (William Prince) has received a fair share of the blame considering he's failed to “save” anyone, including his own wife Alice (Dorothy Morris), who died giving birth while the good doctor was off having a glass of wine with young widow Sylvia Stevenson (Susan Morrow). Gossipers believe they were  having an affair and it certainly doesn't make either party look innocent since they're now set to be married.

Sylvia isn't the only one after the doctor as his loyal nurse Polly Baron (Jacqueline Scott) sometimes seems to forget she's just a nurse and has an obvious crush on him. Rodney's little girl Marge (Linda Guderman) even prefers Polly to her future stepmother. After work, Rodney and Polly plan to take Marge out to eat and return home only to find her nowhere to be found. While nanny Miss Kushins (Ellen Corby) stepped out a minute, someone came in and swiped the little girl. A creepy phone call follows from the abductor, who tells them Marge's funeral has just taken place and now she's with the dead. The man has buried her alive. He continues that they have about 4 to 5 hours max before she suffocates to death. This is all in line with funeral director Ed Quigley (Jonathan Kidd) reporting to the police earlier that someone had broken into his parlor and stolen a child's coffin.

Since local police chief Jim Tyloe (Jim Backus) hates Rodney for reasons we will later discover, Rodney figures he has to take matters into his own hands and sets about trying to locate his little girl before it's too late. The abductor leaves Marge's clay-covered teddy bear on the doorstep as a clue, so the doctor and Polly grab shovels and flashlights and head to a nearby graveyard looking for freshly-dug graves. They're able to locate a couple, but still no trace of the girl. Going off a tip off from the nanny, Rodney's father-in-law Jode Wetherby (Philip Tonge), who has a weak heart (uh oh), shows up there and we then learn a lot about many of the principles in a flashback that lasts seven minutes. A second later flashback reveals more information and the animosity between Jim and Rodney. Now get on those soap opera goggles, folks!

Jim loved Alice. Alice went on to marry Rodney instead. Then Jim fell for Jode's other daughter Nancy (Christine White) who, despite being blind, was something of a whore. Well, or a free spirit. Or an independent woman unashamedly taking control of her own sex life by 1950s standards. Either way, to her all men look the same in the dark and she's not interested in being a wife or a mother. She just wants to have fun... with Jim... and all the guys she met on her European vacation... and her studly chauffeur Nick (uncredited Robert Colbert)... and... Well, you get the idea. Nancy taunts Jim (“You're the last man in the world I'd marry because I don't want leftovers!”) but soon finds herself pregnant with no idea who the father is. After Rodney refuses to abort Nancy's baby, she's found dead. While it's never made quite clear how she died, one gets the impression she either offed herself or died with clothes hanger in hand.

While Macabre plays out more like a morbid mystery than an out-and-out horror flick, there's still plenty here to appeal to fans of classic horror. Clever ad campaign and amusing, partially animated closing credits aside, the movie itself isn't “fun” like many of Castle's later films. This is gloomy, serious stuff following shady and mostly unsympathetic characters around dreary locations like funeral parlors, dark forests and a foggy, rainy cemetery, where our protagonists climb in and out of graves and explore tombs. There's an expressive noir-ish / shadowy feel to Carl E. Guthrie's cinematography and a sparse score from Les Baxter. 

Robb White, who helped Castle form his company and wrote this and many of his subsequent films, based his screenplay on the novel The Marble Forest, which was authored by twelve different writers using one alias (“Theo Durrant.”) Personally, I found the mystery involving enough to easily keep my interest for 75 minutes and the final revelation surprising, so I ended up enjoying this overall. It was one of the hardest Castle horror films to find for a number of years but that all changed in 2010 when Warner finally released it on DVD.

★★★

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Directed by:
Roman Polanski

Rosemary's Baby is, simply put, one of the finest horror films ever made, and, as a result, sits right next to PSYCHO (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) as one of the genre's all-time most influential films. Aspects from this have bled over into hundreds - if not thousands - of later genre offerings; a ricochet effect we're still feeling heavily to this day. A huge critical and theatrical success upon release, it was not only directly responsible for the big 'devil' craze of the 1970s, resulting in THE EXORCIST (1973), THE OMEN (1976) and many other hit films, but also a film that removed audiences from the relative safety of period Gothic horror and fantastic monsters by setting its action in contemporary times and steeping its supernatural elements in the 'realism' of its audience's spiritual beliefs. Most don't believe in vampires, werewolves and giant atomic monsters, but they do believe in Satan. In Rosemary's Baby, you're not on the lookout for fang-sporting fiends, grotesque malformed monsters, crazed mad doctors or crackling knife-wielding madmen. Your friends, your neighbors and even your loving spouse are the real threat. Much of the true horror here lies in the idea that those you love and trust can be conspiring behind your back to do you harm... and doing it with a assuring, disarming smile on their face.

Mia Farrow has the title role; perhaps the finest in her entire career, and really one that was worthy of an Oscar nomination she didn't receive. At first, Farrow imbues the character with a bright-eyed innocence and sweet, delicate fragility, but that begins to slowly fall by the wayside as her character is subjected to various strange occurrences and begins to doubt both the safety of her surroundings and the intentions of everyone around her. Her Rosemary isn't a super-heroine. I've even seen people refer to her as being "stupid" and "annoying" and "weak," but those same people probably either cannot put the film in context to when it was made, cannot accept the fact not everyone is as cynical and world-weary about people as they are or don't get that this film is documenting Rosemary's journey from young, naive, sheltered, religious country girl to a more cautious, more guarded woman who comes to the grim realization that her trustworthy, non-presumptuous nature is being used against her. Rosemary must cast passivity to the wind and start asserting herself in order to save not only herself but also her own baby, whom she feels is being targeted for a ritual sacrifice by a coven of witches.

John Cassavetes portrays Rosemary's arrogant, self-serving husband Guy; a struggling New York City actor with loftier ambitions than the commercial work he's been landing. As we'll later find out, he'll also take the phrase "stepping on a few toes" to a whole new level. As the film opens, he and Rosemary move into a large and creaky old brownstone apartment building called The Bramford in Manhattan. Living right next door are Roman (Sidney Blackmer) and Minnie (Ruth Gordon) Castevet, who seem like mild annoyances at first; just another harmless, lonely, somewhat eccentric old couple who probably don't realize how intrusive and nosy they're being. After a private consultation with Roman, Guy suddenly starts spending a lot of time with the elderly couple. Rosemary becomes pregnant, the Castevet's and other elderly tenants in the building start showing an unnatural interest in the baby and Rosemary begins to believe that there's a conspiracy against both her and her unborn child. Through casual observation and a little help from her writer friend Hutch (Maurice Evans), our heroine starts seeing signs that the everyday people she's been associating with and normal events taking place in her new life may be anything but everyday and normal.

Rosemary's Baby is a film that is so entrenched in our movie-going subconscious that recapping the plot blow-by-blow is an act in sheer redundancy. The important thing to point out is that this does a superlative job drawing a sense of distrust and paranoia out of the mundane, and does so with an astounding amount of subtlety, black humor and attention to even the smallest of details. I've noticed on multiple viewings that nearly every scene, every line of dialogue, every action, seemingly incidental art direction and even the colors of clothing worn throughout are done with a specific purpose in mind. In fact, this movie is so detail-oriented and well thought-out that one can pick up on brand new things each and every time they sit through it, regardless of how many times they've sat through it. It's that good.

Legendary schlockmeister William Castle, he of the famous theatrical gimmicks ("Emergo," "Percepto," etc.) had purchased the rights to Ira Levin's best-selling novel. Instead of trying to take on this material himself, and to help secure funding from Paramount, he wisely handed the reigns over to Polanski, who'd by then already made his mark with his English-language debut Repulsion (1965). The same themes from both it and RB also seeped into Polanski's The Tenant (1976), which completed his lauded "Apartment Trilogy" of psychological horror films.

The entire cast, from top to bottom, is first-rate. There is simply not a weak link in here. Aside from those already mentioned, smaller roles are skillfully played by Ralph Bellamy as a doctor who discourages our heroine from reading pregnancy books, Elisha Cook Jr. as the building superintendent, Patsy Kelly as an annoying friend of Minnie's, a young Charles Grodin as another doctor, Playboy Playmate Victoria Vetri (billed as "Angela Dorian" here), Phil Leeds and Hope Summers. Tony Curtis provided an unbilled voice cameo and Castle himself can be seen outside a phone booth. Rumor has it that Joan Crawford and Van Johnson even filmed a scene (playing themselves) but it was removed from the final cut of the film to reduce the running time.

Rosemary's Baby would earn two Oscar nods; a nomination for Polanski's adapted screenplay (which sticks to the source material very closely) and a win for Gordon, who manages to be irritating, funny and menacing in about equal measure. The atrocious made-for-TV "sequel" LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976) is best left forgotten and same can be said for Levin's follow-up novel Son of Rosemary. A remake directed by Angieska Holland and starring Zoe Saldana (changing many details from the book and relocating the action to Paris) debuted on NBC TV May 2014.

★★★★