FROM THE DEPTHS OF RETRO CREEP CULTURE COMES…
CRYPTOLOGY
No.2 FEBUSCARY 2025
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back with editor PETER NORMANTON and my horrible little troop of ne’er do wells, to inflict the dread of MARS ATTACKS upon you—the banned cards, model kits, and despicable comics, along with a few words from the film’s deranged storyboard artist PETE VON SHOLLY! The chilling poster art of REYNOLD BROWN gets brought up from my vault by STEVE KRONENBERG, along with a host of terrifying puppets from film, and more pre-Code comic books Dr. Wertham would prefer you forget! Plus, TIM LEESE spends more HAMMER TIME on that studio’s films, we run from another KILLER “B” MOVIE (1959’s THE MANSTER), and JUSTIN MARRIOT flips through obscure ’70s fear-filled paperbacks, and we dredge up still more HORROR COMICS EXCESS. It’s more retro-horror to satiate your sinister side!” (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99
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CRYPTOLOGY #1
CRYPTOLOGY #4
CRYPTOLOGY #5
Our debut issue exhumes the worst Horror Comics excesses of the 1950s, Killer “B” movies to die for, and the creepiest, kookiest toys that crossed your boney little fingers as a child! Plus: the House of Usher, and a skirmish between the Addams Family and The Munsters! Then gaze at Warren magazine frontispieces by cover artist BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and spend some Hammer Time with that studio’s most frightening films—but if Atlas precode covers or terrifying science-fiction are more than you can take, stay away!
Our fourth putrid tome treats you to ALEX ROSS’ gory lowdown on his Universal Monsters paintings! Hammer Time brings you face-to-face with the “Brides of Dracula”, and the Cryptologist resurrects 3-D horror movies and comics of the 1950s! Learn the origins of slasher films, and chill to the pre-Code artwork of Atlas’ BILL EVERETT and ACG’s 3-D maestro HARRY LAZARUS. Plus, another Killer “B” movie and more awaits retro horror fans, by NORMANTON, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, VOGER, and VON SHOLLY!
We dig up a few skeletons in the closet of our SKULL & BONES ISSUE! Ghost Rider from comics to movies, skeleton covers from Atlas Digests and pre-Code horror comics, HY FLEISHMAN’s 1950s skeleton covers and stories, Disney’s ’70s Pirates of the Caribbean models and Last Gasp’s Skull Comics, the films of William Castle, and Killer B films: House on Haunted Hill, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, plus our Hammertime section! It’s bone-chilling retro horror from NORMANTON, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, VOGER, and VON SHOLLY!
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Volume 1, Number 2 February 2025 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Peter Normanton PUBLISHER/ PROOFREADER John Morrow DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore EDITORIAL ILLUSTRATION Pete von Sholly
SPILLING MY GUTS: Editorial by The Cryptologist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 30 YEARS PAST: ROGER HILL IN CONVERSATION WITH DON HECK . . . . . . . . . . 4 Don Heck discusses his early days in pre-Code horror COMIC MEDIA (1952–1954) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A brief history of Comic Media and the wide variety of titles they published FORGOTTEN HORROR FILMS: The Midnight Monster and The Ape. . . . . . . . . . . 26 Regular Cryptology department featuring selected obscure horror movies HANDS OFF!: Severed Hands in Horror Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 From cinema’s silent era to the 1980s, those hands that returned to torment
COVER ARTIST Don Heck (Art originally appeared on the cover of Weird Terror #9, January 1954)
THOSE HYPNOTIC EYES: Christopher Lee in Cross-Roads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 An early supernatural appearance from the man who would become Dracula
SPECIAL THANKS Barry Forshaw • Don Heck Heritage Auctions • Roger Hill Steve Kronenberg • Tim Leese Frank Motler • Will Murray Michael Price • Pete Von Sholly
THE DARK WORLDS OF NIGEL KNEALE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 The Quatermass phenomenon from its creation at the BBC to its Hammer release
COPYRIGHTS: Shadow TM & © Conde Nast • Batman, Joker, House of Mystery TM & © DC Comics • The Unseen TM & © Standard Comics • Confessions of Love, Danger, Dear Lonely Heart, Dynamite, Honeymoon Romance, Horrific, Magazine Digest, Noodnik, Perry Como Album, Terrific, War Fury, Weird Terror © Comic Media • Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion © U.S. Pictorial • The Beast with Five Fingers TM & © Warner Bros. • The Midnight Warning © Mayfair Pictures • Not of this Earth, The Ape © Monogram Pictures • La Main du Diable, Mad Love, The Hands of Orlac (1924), The Terror in Teakwood TM & © the respective owner • The Hands of Orlac (1960) © Pendennis Films Ltd. • The Crawling Hand © Donald J. Hansen Enterprises • And Now the Screaming Starts! © The Rank Organisation • Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors © Paramount Pictures • Demonoid © American Panorama • Cross-Roads © Bartlett Films • The Man Who Laughs © Universal Pictures • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari © Goldwyn Pictures • The Quatermass Experiment/Xperiment, Quatermass II, Quatermass and the Pit TM & © BBC Enterprises Ltd. • The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Creeping Unknown, Enemy from Space, Five Million Years to Earth TM & © Hammer Film Productions • House of Hammer TM & © Quality Comics • Weird Mysteries TM & © Stanley P. Morse • Beware TM & © Trojan Magazines • Mysterious Adventures TM & © Story Comics • Suspense, Journey into Mystery TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • The Beyond TM & © Ace Magazines • Black Cat Mystery TM & © Harvey Comics • Chilling Tales TM & © Youthful
CONRAD VEIDT: The Man Who Laughs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 How a silent masterpiece influenced the image of DC’s Joker
KILLER B’s: Not of this Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Regular Cryptology department featuring selected horror and sci-fi B-movies SHADOW COMICS: The Horror Covers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Cryptology shows what evil lurks in Lamont Cranston’s comics of the past HAMMER TIME: The Hound of the Baskervilles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Regular Cryptology department featuring selected Hammer Studios films HORROR COMICS EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 A catalogue of atrocities from the crime and horror comics of the 1950s CRYPTOLOGY™ issue 2, February 2025 (ISSN 2997-416X) is published quarterly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Application to Mail at Periodicals Postage Prices is Pending at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Cryptology, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Peter Normanton, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: CRYPTOLOGY, c/o Peter Normanton, Editor-in-Chief, 619 Whitworth Road, Lower Healey, Rochdale, Lancashire, OL12 0TB, England. Email Peter Normanton: peter.normanton@btinternet.com. Four-issue subscriptions: $53 Economy US, $82 International, $19 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. All editorial matter © 2025 TwoMorrows Publishing and Peter Normanton. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.
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30 YEARS PAST ROGER HILL in CONVERSATION with
Above, Don’s cover for Horrific #3 (Jan. 1953) would have shocked, but how many readers would have realized he had cleverly manipulated the figure in his cover from the first issue of War Fury (Sept. 1952) shown below? Alongside, the drama from Danger #1 (Jan. 1953).
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t was in the early Iron Man stories of Tales of Suspense where I first laid eyes on the art of Don Heck. I wasn’t impressed. With talents like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko working on Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man, I didn’t have the attention span to appreciate the art and style of Don Heck. Once I discovered Tales of Suspense, with Iron Man, I never missed an issue. I enjoyed the character and the stories Don drew in those early issues. His style was a little too scratchy for my tastes back then but he was consistent, depending on who inked his work. Eventually Don wound up drawing almost every Marvel character at one time or another during the 1960s. At one point I started collecting the pre-hero Marvels, mostly for the Ditko and Kirby stories, and along the way discovered a lot of great Don Heck fantasy stories too. The years went by, and I really didn’t focus much on superhero comics or the work of Don Heck, preferring to concentrate on 1940s and 1950s horror comics. That’s when I discovered his early work for Comic Media. These books were like a slap in the face for me.
A youthful Don heck, then in his 20s, enjoying a productive period in the employ of Comic Media.
Not only was Don’s pre-Comics Code work well constructed and drawn, it was unique when compared to most other horror comics of that period. For Comic Media, Don created the idea of putting large monster portraits on the front covers. He put them right in your face, with eyes shooting straight out into yours. His imagination ran wild with a gamut of characters, including a zombie, witch-doctor, devil, shrunken head, ghoul, hunchback, gorilla, and a guy with a bullet-hole through his forehead. By the way, this particular cover— Horrific #3, January 1953—was spawned from Don’s previous Comic Media cover on War Fury #1, dated September 1952. The scene shows an American Soldier with a bullet-hole through his forehead, lying dead at the feet of a North Korean soldier who has just been shot in the back by an American G.I. The war comic collectors go crazy over this one and have made it one of their top wants during recent years. Don redrew a full cover-sized image of the soldier’s head only, with the bullet hole, for the cover of Horrific #3. This book is even more popular than the War Fury cover with horror comic collectors. In other instances, Don went beyond large horror portraits
by drawing great scenes of horror on the covers. Who else would have put you, the reader, inside of an oven, looking out at a man shoveling coal in on you? Or even more horrific, a close-up of the condemned man staring you in the face as the blade of a Guillotine plunges downward. These kinds of situations really grabbed the attention of potential comic book buyers of the early 1950s, and now over sixty years later, all of these iconic Comic Media covers for Horrific and Weird Terror have been pushed to the top of horror comic collectors’ want lists everywhere. By the summer of 1953, Don was working up preliminary drawings for horror hosts who would introduce the stories to readers. Don and Comic Media were aware of the success that EC horror comics were having with their “Ghoulunatic” horror hosts and producing some of the best horror comics in the business. It took me over twenty years to put together a complete collection of Don’s Comic Media horror comics. This was in the years long before the internet came along. I was so taken with his covers that eventually I decided I had to interview Don about this early part of his career. Don only gave three or four interviews during his lifetime and I’ve read them all. In every case, it seems, the interviewer almost ignored his early work, and jumped right into his Marvel Iron Man and other superhero books he had worked on. I’ve seen it happen many times when the interviewer doesn’t really have a good knowledge about an artist’s past work or they’re too focused on their own
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30 YEARS PAST: DON HECK
With these grisly comics now at their peak, the fiery cover to Horrific #11 (May 1954) would have excited these readers even more.
30 YEARS PAST: DON HECK
Above left, a page from “Hitler’s Head,” the opening story from Weird Terror’s premiere, an unnerving entree for this series, revealing Don to be a real talent as these horror comics boomed on the newsstand. His cover for this issue, to the right, dated September 1952, was a similarly disturbing affair, a fitting prequel for what was to follow. Below, Don’s contribution to his High School Yearbook in 1947.
interests. So in 2003 I went looking through my local library at the out of state phone books and found a listing on Don living in New Jersey. I wasn’t sure how much he would remember about those days, or if he would even want to talk about them. Some artists don’t like looking back at their past work. As it turned out, Don had fond nostalgic memories about those days and the people he worked with. So for two Saturdays in a row, I called Don in the early afternoon and taped the following interview with him. At this time of his career, work had slowed down a bit for him. Marvel and DC were not using him as much and so his income had fallen off somewhat from what it used to be. He told me he was doing cover recreations now and enjoyed having a little bit coming in from that. Most of the recreations centered around Iron Man, of course. During the interview, I asked him what had happened to all that original art he did for Comic Media and he answered that he really didn’t know. Don did manage to
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get back a few things, like a Danger cover or two, a Death Valley western cover and, oh yes... one horror cover. As you will read in this interview, it was the cover to Weird Terror #11, May 1954, which Don was very fond of and kept tacked up on the wall in front of his art table. I did eventually make Don a good cash offer on the cover, but he turned me down. I couldn’t blame him as it was his only horror cover, and he had a strong sentimental attachment to it, as you will read in this interview. I did ask Don to do me a cover recreation of one of my favorite Comic Media horror covers, which he agreed to do. More on that later. Don eventually told me he had kept record books on all his jobs since Day One when he started out as a staff artist at Harvey Publications on January 1, 1952. Out of all the artists I’ve talked to or interviewed over the years, Don is the only one I know who kept records from the very beginning of his career, and had not thrown them out yet.
RH: Well, I think most would agree that Caniff ’s style of work certainly had an influence on your work, perhaps more than anybody else. DH: Oh yeah, definitely. In fact, the first time I went up to DC Comics, everybody said, “Your stuff looks too much like Caniff.” [laughter] I said, “Well, what the hell is wrong with that?” you know. [laughter] So I didn’t get any work there and I went up to Marvel and did a job up there, and as soon as it came out, I got a card in the mail The abominations on the cover of Weird Terror #3 (January 1953) would have terrified those of a nervous disposition, as would his assured line in the tale “The Evil Ones!” published just one issue before, where Don introduced a soon to be familiar format for his splash pages.
THE INTERVIEW
Roger Hill: I’ll begin with the basic stuff Don, like where and when were you born? Don Heck: January 2, 1929, in Flushing New York. RH: At what age did you begin to realize a need to draw? DH: My aunt said to me once that I was scribbling since the age of five. At that time I was doing Donald Duck [laughter]... well, we used to go to my grandmother’s place and they took the Journal American which had all these great big funnies, and I would just peruse over those quite a bit. I always bought and read comic books too. I had a bunch of those at one time. Today they would probably be worth a fortune if I had saved them. [laughter] But, who the hell knew? When I was a kid I was always down at the local candy store. The store owner would always say, “Are you gonna buy or just look through those things?” [laughter] He was your typical type of fellow there, you know, and I’d say, “Hey, come on—I’m buying here all the time.” [laughter] He says, “Yeah, well, you know, you’re doing a lot of looking there!” [laughter]
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30 YEARS PAST: DON HECK
RH: What were some of your favorites back when you were a kid? DH: I can’t even remember. Just whichever ones had good artists working in them. There was Reed Crandall and there were several other good ones who you don’t even hear much about today. But you could spot good artwork, just like everything else. I mean, I was used to looking at Milt Caniff ’s stuff and I didn’t even know about Noel Sickles at the time. I had heard his name but I didn’t even know what he did.
COMIC MEDIA
(1952–1954)
by Frank Motler
A
lthough short-lived, the comic books from Comic Media published by Allen Hardy Associates featured terrific art, often graced by the covers of Don Heck. Their two horror titles, Horrific and Weird Terror, are particularly noted. Initially, Horrific and All True Romance filled in with stories intended for the earlier Artful Publications, Inc. (1950– 1952), before switching to a dedicated group of artists including Bill Discount, Marty Elkin, Pete Morisi, Rudy Palais, and Alberta Tewks. Artful Publications, Inc. was quite different stylistically, featuring the homogeneous S.M. “Jerry” Iger Studios art on each story, with two notable exceptions. More about these shortly. Iger Studios had strong ties to publisher Robert W. Farrell (1908-1986), who made able use of their studio art in his comics throughout, from 1947 through 1958. The 1953 Author and Journalist (one of several dedicated trade publications) listed H. Chipkin as Artful’s editor on All True Romance, Dear Lonely Hearts, Horrific and Noodnik. In truth, H.
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Chipkin was one of the pen names used by Iger’s premier editor and writer Ruth Roche (1917-1983). Otherwise, Artful were a little circumspect in their supply of managerial information and their address, 342 Madison Avenue offers no further clues. As both Farrell and Hardy would feature their names, we have to
Allen B. Hardy in 1959
consider the possibility Artful was a publishing venture by Iger Studios itself. Wallace Wood’s nine-page romance oriented, “I Crashed into Heartbreak” appeared in Artful’s All True Romance #6, July 1952; while his “I Was a Shrew,” another a nine-pager, appeared in its companion, Dear Lonely Heart #7, August 1952. The latter also appeared in the Star Publications title Popular Teenager #14, November 1952, despite being truncated by a half-page. Both bear similarities to the stories from the EC era and may well be Wood/Harry Harrison or Wood/Joe Orlando collaborations, making them worth seeking out. Prior to their comic books releases, Artful released two 68-page comics digests, Confessions of Love and Honeymoon Romance, 1950; each managing just two issues. Several publishers dabbled with the digest format, but for most, the hefty (for the time) 25¢ price tag means they were then uncommon and rarely ever seen today. Interestingly, the art for All True Romance #1 and Dear Lonely Heart #1 (both dated March 1951) look to have been prepared for the digest format,
using a two- to four-panel layout on each page, before publication as regulation comic books. The second issues of both titles weren’t released for a further seven months, dated October 1951. Allen Burdette Hardy was born Oct. 10, 1911, listing his hometown as Beatrice, Nebraska. During the early part of his career, he gained experience with Curtis Circulation, Hearst group distribution, Publishers Distributing Corp, Ziff-Davis, and Harvey Publications. Using Allen Hardy Associates or Harwell Publications, Inc. imprints and a “Comic Media” cover symbol, Hardy continued Artful’s All True Romance and Horrific, published the slightly re-titled Dear Lonely Hearts, plus War Fury, Weird Terror, Danger, and Dynamite. “The Cave of the Bats” text story in Weird Terror #1 (September 1952) was signed “BURR DETT” and is most likely the publisher’s handiwork. After the cancellation of War Fury (#4, March 1953) as with several other Korean War comics, the humorous Noodnik was launched; initially as a 3-D title, with 3-D Funny Movies (all reprint contents from Dearfield’s Red Rabbit #15, 1950). Both 3-Ds were priced at 25¢, which included a pair of 3-D
glasses. A companion, The Little Amigo: The Original Hot Tamale was advertised in Horrific #12 (July 1954) but never appeared. Death Valley #1 (October 1953) was a Ross Andru/ Mike Esposito western tryout, before continuing under Don Heck and company. With the impending arrival of the Comics Code Authority (the CCA formed on October 1, 1954), Hardy’s titles switched to a new Mystery Publishing Company, Inc. imprint. Horrific was renamed Terrific before making the transfer with All True Romance to Farrell. Dear Lonely Hearts also continued at Farrell as Lonely Heart, then Dear Heart. Meanwhile, Danger, Death Valley and Dynamite would resume under the Derby-based Charlton group. Noodnik was also taken on there,
as a back-up strip. Comic Media’s art would appear sporadically in the Charlton and Farrell lines until 1958. Unfortunately, Weird Terror had nowhere to go; it would cease publication with the September 1954 (#13) issue. The 2nd to 4th issues of Noodnik were published by “Biltmore Men’s Group, Inc.” at Hardy’s 500 Fifth Avenue, New York address. We can only wonder if this was a sly reference to the “Biltmore Men’s Bar” at the nearby Madison Avenue, Biltmore Hotel. Strangely, given some of the excess in his titles, Hardy would continue his involvement with comics as one of the Directors of the newly formed Comics Magazine Association of America (CCA) censorship body. Both Farrell and Hardy were
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COMIC MEDIA
On the right, Wally Wood’s saucy splash for Dear Lonely Hearts #7 (Aug. 1952), one of a variety of publications from Comic Media.
FORGOTTEN HORROR FILMS by Michael Price
Some Origins of Pandemic Cinema
S
carcely any menace appears more horrific than the arrayed herewith—a Black Plague trigger in Spencer Gordon unbroken thread of disease that winds through history. Bennet’s The Midnight Warning (also shown as Eyes of Mystery; The popular culture—history-in-caricature—has exploited 1932); and a polio-borne motivation in William Nigh’s The Ape such fears all along. The idiom of fictional horror accounts (1940). for a particular fascination with the incumbent realities of contagion: Traditional mythologies and commercial literature The Midnight Warning alike treat Mittel European vampirism, for example, as a plague, The foundation in urban legend—folklore, that is, or organic or epidemic, that transforms every new victim into a carrier. mythology—dates from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The Afro-Caribbean lore of zombie-ism, variously Alexander Woolcott had written the source-tale, “The Most ascribed to supernatural or hypnotic influences, found itself Maddening Story in the World,” for The New Yorker magazine. revolutionized into a state of pandemic in 1968: One audacious Mayfair Pictures assigned its takeoff, The Midnight Warning, motion picture, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, to scenarist Norman Battle. The same situation would inspire hinted at ascribing a mass resurrection to cosmic radiation. a 1947 novel by Anthony Thorne, which became a significant Such an influence has prevailed in a since-overpopulated genre British film, So Long at the Fair (1950). The basic plot also of reanimated-croaker movies. Its 21st-century culmination is fueled a Rocky Lane-series Western at Republic Pictures, a sweeping declaration from Robert Kirkman, source-author Marshal of Amarillo (1948). A similar premise figured in Alfred of a graphic-novel epic, The Walking Dead, and its dramatized Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), and in an installment of elaborations: “We are the Walking Dead”—in essence, vessels of the teleseries Alfred Hitchcock Presents. life awaiting rebirth as undead eating machines. The Midnight Warning is a rough-edged beauty, despite an One breed of plague literature stands apart in its historical and medical bearings. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Masque of the Red Death” in 1842. Poe’s Red Death, an imaginative stretch, may owe its inspiration to tuberculosis, to yellow fever, or to the 14th century’s onslaught of the Black Plague, as in “bubonic.” In any event, Poe anticipated the 20th century’s real-world surges of Ebola-borne fever. A Hollywood plague-thriller of 1995, Wolfgang Petersen’s naive but urgent Outbreak, stands as greatly in Mr. Poe’s debt as does Roger Corman’s 1964 filming of The Masque of the Red Death. Whether bacterium or virus, the effect is one of a population caught unprepared, not unlike the ill-managed persistence of COVID-19 in times more recent. Likewise deserving of regard as a backhanded inspiration to the horror-movie genre is the similarly decimating 20th-century plague of A lobby-card come-on for 1932’s The Midnight Warning, capturing Claudia Dell’s tense moment in a morgue. polio. Two striking examples are
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FORGOTTEN HORROR FILMS unevenness of soundtrack engineering and camerawork, from its fascinating and morbid puzzle to a wealth of macabre incidental touches. Dr. Stephen Walcott (Hooper Atchley) finds the remains of a human ear in his hotel-room fireplace at the Clarendon Arms. While discussing the discovery with investigator William Cornish (William “Stage” Boyd), Walcott is grazed by a bullet. Cornish captures Enid Van Buren (Claudia Dell) and her fiancé, Erich (John Harron), who admit they have been threatening the Clarendon in an attempt to force the owners’ hand regarding a mystery: At the hotel, where she and her brother had checked in a few hours beforehand, no one professes to remember the pair; the register shows Enid had arrived alone. Hoteliers Gordon (Huntly Gordon), Rankin (Lloyd Whitlock), Klein (Lloyd Ingraham), and Welsh (Lon Poff) imprison Enid in a mortuary. A disembodied voice taunts her. Cornish summons the police. Cornered, the hotel bosses acknowledge a conspiracy: They had destroyed the body of the brother, who had died of bubonic plague, and then sought to drive Enid insane. Having shamed the plotters, Cornish declares it better that the matter remain a secret, lest a panic result. Director Spencer Gordon Bennet had arrived in 1912 as a stuntman and occasional actor in the Edison company’s adventure pictures. An apprenticeship to director George B. Seitz led Bennet to a directing career, early in the 1920s. A specialist in serials until 1956—when he made the last American serial, Perils of the Wilderness—Bennett also handled feature-length thrillers. He told me during the 1970s that he recalled The Midnight Warning more fondly than his other non-serial efforts. One of the finer qualities of The Midnight Warning is William “Stage” Boyd’s grim efficiency. The nickname distinguishes him from another William Boyd. The Boyd of The Midnight Warning (and of Paramount’s horrific Murder by the Clock) had a stronger presence on Broadway. Upon the death of “Stage” Boyd in 1935, the other Boyd landed at Paramount Pictures as the star player of the Hopalong Cassidy Western series.
Enid Van Buren (Claudia Dell) given the third degree after threatening the owners of the Clarendon Arms, a hotel she wished she had never heard of.
“Stage” Boyd dominates The Midnight Warning. He takes forensic detection to an extreme by reading the lips of suspects from afar. (Such a tactic also figures in 1933’s The Circus Queen Murder.) Boyd taunts the culprits by explaining to them the flaw in their scheme: The ear cartilage, the film’s triggering clue, is the hardest part of the body to destroy, by fire or any other means. And he exhibits the practical, resentful sense to comprehend that the conspiracy must go unexposed. Boyd wields the cudgel of intimidation with daunting authority. More conventional scares figure in a morgue sequence where Claudia Dell finds herself surrounded by stiffs. Groping for anchorage after a stumble, she seizes a cold foot—a nice chill, that! Hooper Atchley plays against his usual crooked type as a Dr. Watson to Boyd. The pillar-of-society conspirators are sanctimonious to a loathsome extent. Huntly Gordon’s defiant riposte to Boyd, daring him to take their plot to the authorities, crystallizes the attitude of impunity. Miss Dell is rightly vulnerable as the tormented ingenue, but her inexperience shows in the mortuary scene: Spencer Bennet told me that Miss Dell “didn’t
know how to take a stage fall. So when she had to faint in the morgue, she hit her head on the concrete floor and was knocked unconscious.” The scene remains in the finished film; a retake would have been an extravagance for cash-deficient Mayfair Pictures. Miss Dell grabs her head when she strikes the floor, then goes limp. Bennet’s ability to work rapidly and shave costs by editing in the camera kept him in demand among the smaller studios. This rare talent, however, often cheated Bennet of opportunities to display creative flourishes.
The Ape
The centuried endemic paralysis of poliomyelitis—a halt-and-go plague, recurring in fits and starts and leading to a widespread and sustained outbreak of the 20th century—affords the nagging motivation behind The Ape. Boris Karloff, in a choice example of the Mad Doctor stereotype that he would court during the 1940s, proves less deranged than outright murderous. As such, he displays the good gumption to confine the killing urge to antisocial rotters, who might as well be contributing spinal fluids to his maverick campaign to conquer polio.
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HANDS OFF! Severed Hands in Horror Cinema
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by Steve Kronenberg
The Hands of Orlac (1924)
Severed hands were first reanimated in Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac. Screenwriter Louis Nerz adapted it for director Robert Wiene, who’d previously helmed the Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Conrad Veidt plays renowned concert pianist Paul Orlac, whose hands are crushed in a horrific railway accident. Desperate to revive her husband’s musical career, Orlac’s wife Yvonne (Alexandra Sorina) enlists the aid of noted surgeon Dr. Serral (Hans Homma), who transplants the hands of executed knife thrower Vasseur onto Orlac’s limbs. The distraught pianist becomes convinced that the grafted hands have a homicidal life of their own—especially when Orlac’s cruel father is found stabbed to death with Vasseur’s knife. Orlac’s paranoia is compounded when he encounters a blackmailer (Fritz Kortner), who claims to be Vasseur, fitted with grotesque mechanical hands. Amidst traumatizing psychological pain, Orlac must sift through the fog of delusion and discover whose hands he really possesses. As Paul Orlac, Veidt delivers what may be his greatest performance. He masterfully conveys Orlac’s physical and psychic torment, driven to madness by the belief that his hands are now disobedient deadly weapons. “I feel it comes from you!,” he tells an imaginary Vasseur. “Along the arms until it reaches the soul! Cold, terrible,
relentless, damned cursed hands!” Veidt turns the hands into vile, willful characters, holding them high, outstretched, squeezing them, thrusting them, nervously moving them along his face and body. Veidt’s Orlac is a man possessed, and his portrayal presages the “body horrors” created decades later by such directors as David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. Veidt’s kinetic, unhinged portrait is tempered by an unmistakable sadness, an aching fragility manifested in his sad eyes and horrified visage. “I discover how the character I play grows in me,” Veidt once said. “This state can only be described as one of being possessed.” Author Wheeler Winston Dixon labels Veidt’s performance “a tour de force of silent film acting... modern, immediate and utterly convincing.” Film scholar Lotte Eisner praised it as “... a kind of expressionist ballet, bending and twisting extravagantly.” Watch this film and try taking your eyes off him. The Hands of Orlac may be Veidt’s show, but the film’s twisted atmospherics belong to director Robert Wiene, cinematographers Hans Androschin and Gunther Krampf, and art directors Stefan Wessely, Hans Rovc, and Karl Exner. Echoes of Caligari resonate in the film’s cavernous, dark, and gloomy interiors, its moody lighting, its surreal and skewed exteriors, its hallucinatory imagery. Orlac’s visual highlight is the train wreck itself, photographed as a monstrous mass of twisted metal layered in smoke and debris, swallowing up the entire screen. The film is a superb amalgam of acting, photography, sets, and direction.
Mad Love (1935)
Wiene’s film has been remade at least three times, with varying success. By far the best redux is this Golden Age gem, directed by legendary cinematographer Karl Freund. The John L. Balderston script flips Renard’s original storyline, making Orlac’s surgeon the film’s centerpiece. In his American film debut, Peter Lorre is unforgettable as the renowned Dr. Gogol, obsessed with Yvonne (Frances Drake), the wife of concert pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive). When he’s not lasciviously eyeing Yvonne’s torturous performances in the Grand Guignol Theatre des Horreurs, Gogol avidly attends guillotine executions. Both pastimes consume him, but it’s Yvonne that he covets. When he learns of her marriage to Orlac, he plots to steal her for himself. He starts by purchasing her wax effigy perched outside the theater in which she performs. When a disastrous train wreck crushes Orlac’s hands, Gogol tries to win her The desperation evident in Conrad Veidt’s pose for The Hands of Orlac (1924) was reproduced to
extraordinary effect for the posters promoting Robert Weine’s Expressionist masterpiece.
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HANDS OFF! SEVERED HANDS IN HORROR CINEMA
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orget about idle hands. Severed hands are truly the devil’s playthings. Horror cinema is rich with tales of mayhem caused by malevolent manos. Whether grafted onto the limbs of an accident victim or slithering through a gloomy mansion, they’re willful and uncontrollable: throwing knives, strangling their prey, leaving remnants of murder and madness in their wake. Follow along for a history of how horrible hands have left their malignant mark on-screen.
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Conrad Veidt The Man Who Laughs by Peter Normanton
C
assablanca’s cold-blooded Major Heinrich Strasser endures as one of Hollywood’s most notorious villains. His go-to reaction, I can assure you, would never have been a laugh; it would have been a contemptuous sneer, and that would have been on a good day. As ever, Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was stellar in the role in Michael Curtiz’s film, but he can’t have been entirely comfortable with playing the synonymic Nazi, even though he did admit to quite enjoying making this film. Sadly, his time in Hollywood was all too brief, but in that short period, these stereotypical roles would, for many, become his lasting signature. Only recently arrived in Los Angeles, he was cast as the merciless General Kurt von Kolb in Escape, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, before going on to play a Nazi saboteur in Vincent Sherman’s All Through the Night, prior to stepping into the shoes of a Nazi diplomat in Jules Dassin’s Nazi Agent, in anticipation of his memorable portrayal in Casablanca—although he did have a dual role in Dassin’s thriller playing the honorable twin brother. However, in Germany, he was condemned as a traitor.
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CONRAD VEIDT
The Man Who Laughs may not be a horror movie, but the death of Gwynplaine’s father (Conrad Veidt) was the essence of nightmare.
Unwanted Questions
Having declared himself Jewish in a racial questionnaire, he further enraged the Nazi authorities in 1934 when he agreed to appear in the film Jew Süss, a British adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1925 novel Jud Süß, chronicling the life and trials of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, an 18th century German Jewish banker. Conrad was detained by the Nazis, who insisted he reject the role forthwith. He wasn’t about to let this happen, outright refusing to comply with their demands. Only when the British government and the Gaumont British Picture Corporation intervened did they capitulate, realizing this situation could become extremely embarrassing. For the Nazis to have escalated this standoff before an international audience would have invited a torrent of unwanted questions. They had only recently ascended to power; consequently, few beyond Germany’s borders were aware of their despicable lack of humanity. When he finally made it to Britain, Conrad was at last reunited with his third wife, Lilli. Her decision to leave Germany had been so much more simple; to have stayed would have meant a life of persecution owing to her Jewish parentage. While their love was truly profound, this never got in the way of his on-screen performances as the Nazi oppressor. Yet, as callous as he appeared in these films, he remained a vociferous adversary of the evil being perpetrated in Nazi Germany—so much so, five years after leaving his homeland, he became a British citizen. A version of Jew Süss also saw release in Nazi Germany
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in 1940. Veit Harlan was credited as the director of this shameful piece of antisemitic propaganda, although he would later claim the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was pulling the strings in the shaping of this abhorrence. Those who had been involved with the film were summarily questioned after the war. When Harlan stood trial for crimes against humanity, he laid the blame firmly with Goebbels, which resulted in his surprise acquittal. He would go on to make nine more films. The rest of the cast, however, didn’t fare quite so well, having fallen from grace, their careers ruined.
Expressionist Horrors
For those who had gone through the trauma of these years, it was almost inconceivable to think 20 years before Germany’s filmmakers were praised across the world. The inspiration roused by these silent treasures from this nascent period in film would reach further than anyone could have ever dreamed. Among them were several celebrated features starring Conrad Veidt. His acting career had been in the theater, until making his on-screen debut in Robert Reinert’s Der Weg des Todes (The Path of Death), released in 1917, where he attracted rather favorable attention. He returned just months later to make a fleeting appearance in his first horror picture “Furcht” (Fear), directed by one of the rising stars of the period, Robert Wiene. Wiene would endear himself to generations of filmgoers just three years later when he directed a feature considered to be the first, and maybe finest piece of German
Expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Weaving through the surreal props and strange camera angles, shimmied Conrad’s nimble figure, beguiling the audience with his disturbing portrayal of the sleep walking Cesare, an unfortunate cruelly manipulated by the deranged Dr. Caligari. Wiene’s film would set the standard for the horror films that followed. Principally, its mastery of the interrelationship between light and shadow went on to influence the horror films created at Universal as an antecedent to the evolution of film noir. Later that same year, the dark side once again came to the fore in the F.W. Murnau directed Der Januskopf (The Head of Janus), a re-staging of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” with Conrad now assuming the role as the misguided experimenter Dr. Warren. Prior to this he had also made appearances in three other unnerving features, Unheimliche Geschichten (Eerie Tales), Satanas and Der Graf von Cagliostro, each released in 1919. That same year he also produced, directed and starred in the horror Wahnsinn. Alas, it is now impossible to elaborate on this film, as it is thought to be lost. Fortunately, not every film from this period suffered in this way. After entertaining a variety of roles, Conrad returned to horror, to feature in two films released in 1924 that have not only survived through the years, but whose legacy can only be described as monumental. The first of these films has been mentioned elsewhere in this issue in Steve Kronenberg’s eye-opening reminiscence “Hands Off ”: Robert Wiene’s Orlacs Hände (The Hand
of Orlac). Once again, Wiene stood tall as a director of incomparable perception, who with his able team, conceived an appreciably aphotic visualization, with Conrad eliciting a performance that surpassed his eccentric portrayal in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Waxworks Extravagance
Towards the end of the year, Paul Leni’s extravagant anthology Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks) also premiered. Leni’s film shifted between stark terror and hilarity as the narrator recounted the stories of three effigies posed in this darkened wax museum. Conrad was cast as Ivan the Terrible in the second of these tales. This section of the film, along with the six minutes of Jack the Ripper, were the most frightening and would go on to inspire further waxwork related films. Among the more noteworthy of those that followed was the Amicus portmanteau Torture Garden, scripted by Robert Bloch, first screened in 1967. Certainly Waxworks, along with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Hand of Orlac, bolstered Conrad’s standing in the hallowed realm of German Expressionism and cinema macabre, but he would only appear in one more film tainted by its affiliation with horror, Henrik Galen’s The Student of Prague filmed in 1926. Galen’s film was inspired in part by the legend of Faust and the duality in Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” Conrad played the character of Balduin with considerable insight, elevating his stature still further across the globe.
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CONRAD VEIDT
Conrad’s portrayal of the sleepwalking Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari complimented the paranoia in these Expressionist sets.
the DARK WORLDS of
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NIGEL KNEALE
ho is the most imitated of all British science imagination—and it inaugurated Kneale’s career as Britain’s fiction writers? Obviously, the immortal leading writer of science fiction-based material. (Ironically, H. G. Wells has to be the premier recipient Kneale himself reportedly—and repeatedly—claimed that of that title, with the key SF themes he he was not enamored of the SF genre.) But who was this originated—or at least created the most groundbreaking, and sometimes curmudgeonly, writer? influential examples of—including alien invasion, time Actually, there was no Nigel Kneale. Thomas Kneale travel, invisibility, and tampering with animal evolution. was a Manx writer (born in 1922) who quickly became Few aficionados would argue with the notion of Wells’ entranced by his own ancestry, which (he claimed) went primacy in the field, but there is another, later, writer back thousands of years, the Isle of Man apparently being from the UK who has been massively significant—and the result of a massive chunk of earth flung by the Irish who continues to inspire (and continues to be ripped-off) giant Fionn Mac Cumhaill (or McCool)—and a fictional to this day: Nigel Kneale. legacy of the past was to be a recurrent theme in his work. In 1953, a television serial was shown which—without exaggeration—rocked the nation. The Quatermass Horror at Alexandra Palace Experiment was shown in six half-hour episodes from July As a young man, Kneale was attracted to a journalistic to August, and had much of the British population career (following his father’s example), although glued to their TV sets for this mesmerizing, and he had always been a sickly child, something frequently horrifying, creation from Kneale’s that left him with a legacy of cardiac prodigal imagination. Professor Bernard trouble. His love of fiction focused more Quatermass, in charge of the British on literary writers such as Chekhov Experimental Rocket Group, has sent and de Maupassant; he had a disdain the first manned mission into space, for crime novelists such as Agatha but with grim results. Only one of the Christie. His own short stories had crew returns, and—viewers were to little hint of the science fictional or learn—he has been altered in macabre, supernatural elements that were to otherworldly fashion. Needless to say, become his stock in trade, and his there were the complaints from the move to postwar London took him shockable about the gruesome nature into a more sophisticated world than of the proceedings, and the show was the superstitious Manx milieu of his perceived as proof of the moral laxity into youth. (He also realized that he had to lose his regional accent to be more accepted which Britain had fallen. However, in the capital.) The first published more balanced views realized that not Born in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, collection under his newly adopted only was Kneale’s creation a pulseThomas Nigel Kneale was a versatile writer, who bequeathed science fiction name was Tomato Cain and Other racing suspenseful account, it was also a fabulous legacy. Stories (1949), several of which touched written with notable intelligence and
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THE DARK WORLDS OF NIGEL KNEALE
W
by Barry Forshaw
KILLER B’s by Steve Kronenberg
NI ot of this Earth t was 1956, and future King “B” Roger Corman had an inspiration. After directing a handful of genre films, he finally understood how to market his product. America was top-loaded with drive-in theaters, meccas for teenagers looking to kiss, cuddle, and carouse in the privacy of their cars while watching monsters and madmen menace the world on giant movie screens. Corman enlisted his friend and frequent collaborator Charles B. Griffith to craft a script suitable for the teen drive-in trade. Griffith and co-writer Mark Hanna came up with a tale about an intergalactic vampire entitled Not of this Earth (1957). Paired with another Corman creature feature, Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Corman, Griffith, and Hanna were prepared to give the kids what they craved. Of the two films, Not of this Earth is arguably the better and more innovative production. Paul Birch plays the mysterious
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“Paul Johnson,” an extra-terrestrial vampire from the planet Davanna, ravaged by a nuclear war that has caused the blood of its inhabitants to evaporate into dust. Johnson is sent to Earth to teleport the blood and bodies of Earthlings to Davanna, thereby saving his home planet and initiating a global invasion. His sunglasses conceal a pair of deadly, dead-white eyes, which he uses to burn through his victims’ brains before draining their blood. He’s also able to read minds and hypnotize his targets into doing his bidding. His personal pet is a flying, batlike “umbrella monster” that envelops and crushes the skull of anyone Johnson commands it to attack. Johnson, whose own blood is slowly dissolving, begins his mission by visiting Dr. Rochelle (William Roerick) and mesmerizing him into administering a transfusion. Johnson also commands Rochelle to allow his affable nurse Nadine Storey (Beverly Garland) to provide him with full-time, live-in care. In addition to giving Johnson daily blood transfusions, Nadine tolerates Jeremy, her new boss’ leering manservant (Jonathan Haze). She soon becomes suspicious of Johnson’s weirdly robotic demeanor. When she objects to her bedroom door being locked, Johnson replies: “In the place where I come from, no one would dare sleep in unsecured quarters.” When Nadine asks him where he comes from, he merely bids her goodnight. In short order, she discovers who and what Johnson really is, leading to a frantic, fiery climax and an unpredictably twisted finale. The heavily-built, sonorouslyvoiced, sallow-faced Birch excels as the exsanguinating ET. His performance is icy and sinister, yet tinged with a touch of sympathy. Determined to save his home planet from extinction, he encounters a Davanna escapee (Anna Lee Carroll)
KILLER B’s who comes to Earth in need of human blood. Desperate to save her, Johnson accidentally kills her with a rabiesinfested transfusion. In these scenes, Birch briefly replaces his usual scowl with an expression of pity and pain—a grim reminder of his own dissolution. Throughout most of the film, he wears his solemnity on his sleeve, intent on tyrannizing and terrifying anyone who interferes with his mission. When he catches Jeremy spying on him, he quietly puts the nosy nerd in his place: “If I see you do it again, I will eliminate you.” In the history of fifties horror, no threat ever resonated so deeply. Beverly Garland is a perfect foil for Birch’s diabolics. She always excelled at playing tough, strong-willed women, a refreshing counterpoint to the distressed damsels who dominate early fright films. As Nadine Storey, Garland is solid and stalwart, easily shifting from affable to adamant, whether fighting off Johnson’s efforts to teleport her to Davanna or backhanding Jeremy for being too amorous. Her relaxed and confident style made her a natural for the big screen.
Taut, Tight and Tense
Birch and Garland receive solid support from Jonathan Haze, who plays Jeremy as spineless and subservient to Johnson, at least until he learns who he’s really working for. Haze soon became part of Corman’s repertory, gaining cult fame for his lead performance in the original Little Shop of Horrors (1960). He also became the stage manager for both his cousin, renowned jazz drummer Buddy Rich, and legendary chanteuse Josephine Baker. Dick Miller, another Corman regular, has an unforgettable scene as a persistent, jive-talking vacuum cleaner salesman who ends up burned and bled by Johnson. Miller drew on his own experience as a door-to-door peddler and was permitted by Corman to ad-lib his entire confrontation with Birch. The Charles B. Griffith/Mark Hanna screenplay is taut, tight, and tense, casually building suspense as Nadine begins to discover Johnson’s identity and intent. Despite the film’s 67-minute running time, Griffith and Hanna build in some significant character
The alien (Paul Birch) walks among us, as Nadine Storey (Beverley Garland) learns to her misfortune, in Roger Corman’s neglected Not of this Earth from 1957.
development: Johnson’s sympathetic side, Nadine’s mix of verve and vulnerability, Jeremy’s transition from Johnson’s subordinate to sworn enemy. More importantly, the script breaks ground by introducing cinema’s first interplanetary vampire, paving the way for such films as Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965), Curtis Harrington’s Queen of Blood (1966), and especially Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985). The Griffith/ Hanna screenplay was also the first to depict teleportation, predating both The Fly (1958) and the 1966 television debut of Star Trek. Griffith himself cut an interesting figure in 1950s Hollywood. In an issue of Video Watchdog, historian Tim Lucas described him as “an unpolished gem of a screenwriter, a beatnik/stoner/outsider who smuggled those crazed and (then) highly individual sensibilities into the mainstream via Corman’s commercial cinema.” Corman called Griffith “the funniest, fastest, and most inventive writer I ever worked with.” Not of this Earth owes much of its success to Corman’s technical crew. The film’s unnerving milieu is immediately established with title designer Paul Julian’s abstract graphics, which accompany the opening credits.
The movie was the last to be shot by cinematographer John Mescall, whose unerring eye graced two of Universal’s greatest releases: The Black Cat (1934) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Mescall shot the exteriors for Not of this Earth on the streets of Los Angeles, but with the camera adjusted several points darker than usual, giving the picture a moody, chiaroscuro quality akin to film noir. He comes in tight and close for the film’s interiors, lensed within the confines of Johnson’s home and lending the movie a claustrophobic intensity (the L.A. house was actually located at 1725 Camino Palermo, later demolished and replaced with an apartment building). Whenever Johnson removes his Ray-Bans to scorch a victim, Mescall treats us to jolting close-ups of the vampire’s dead-white eye pupils.
The Umbrella Monster
Master monster maker Paul Blaisdell devised both Johnson’s crudely illuminated teleportation device and the sublimely creepy “umbrella monster” that graphically dispatches Dr. Rochelle. Blaisdell was arguably Hollywood’s most reliable costume and prop designer, famed for constructing and occupying imaginative monster suits on
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T
by Peter Normanton
he Shadow began his crime fighting career as the narrator of the CBS radio show Detective Story Hour in July 1930, a guise conceived to revive the flagging sales of Street & Smith’s long established pulp Detective Story Magazine. As so often happens in life, events took an unexpected turn. Having latched onto this mysterious character, reams of listeners began to seek out copies of what they assumed to be the Shadow’s own magazine, rather than the intended Detective Story Magazine, a pulp introduced in October 1915, which ran through until the summer of 1949 after racking up a staggering 1,057 issues. Street & Smith’s response was swift, offering a contract to writer Walter B. Gibson to scribe a series of stories chronicling the adventures of this enigmatic raconteur—the first of which appeared in the inaugural issue of The Shadow Magazine on April 1, 1931.
Curiously, The Shadow’s own radio show did not air until September 1937.
Cunning Lure
With The Shadow’s radio plays now being broadcast across the country, Street & Smith looked to broaden their franchise still further. Having observed the popularity of the new fad for four color comics, they launched Shadow Comics on the January 12, 1940. The first half a dozen issues used reprints of Jerome Rozen’s covers from the original Shadow Magazine, thus keeping the set-up costs to an absolute minimum. The gruesome display terrorizing the cover to the fourth issue of this new series, dated June 1940, had first shocked the readers of The Shadow Magazine, on June 1, 1936. While it may not have startled in the way Johnny Craig’s infamous cover for Crime Suspenstories #22 (AprilMay 1954) had done, it was still a grisly tableau, calculatingly luring anyone who fell under its gaze. In the hope of satiating the bloodthirsty appetite of those drawn to this issue, a decapitated head was put on show within—just for good measure. However, let’s not get too carried away, because on this occasion, the severed head was revealed to be a wax effigy. Alas for the gore-mongers, disappointment would invariably ensue, as such revelations were commonplace throughout the entire run Across the page, Jerome Rozen’s gruesome cover for Shadow Comics #4, dated June 1940, was originally seen on The Shadow Magazine, June 1, 1936. To the left, Shadow Comics V2 #8. TM & © Conde Nast.
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SHADOW COMICS: THE HORROR COVERS
the Horror Covers
SHADOW COMICS: THE HORROR COVERS
Fiendish Villainy
Upon turning the page, Jack Binder duly followed with his “Horror House” splash. At first sight, this image said it all—well, not quite, for this was never really a horror story. There were, however, a few titillating panels revealing Margo Lane in the shower, scenes that no doubt had this teenage audience quietly tittering to themselves. But enough of that, for by now those readers with a lusting for the macabre would have realized neither Shadow Comics, or its pulp companion The Shadow Magazine, were ever going to step too far into this unholy domain—this was a world of action-packed adventure, where the threat emanated from an array of diabolically fiendish villains. Vernon coalesced this expectation for action with the ghoulish in his iconic Silver Skull cover for Shadow Comics Vol. 2 #10, dated January 1943; surely one of the most eye-catching images of the period. Of course, the presence of those gun-toting blackguards affirmed the true nature of this title, but once this issue had been put down, it was On the left, Vernon Greene’s fearsome skull cover for Shadow Comics V2 #10, dated January 1943. Below, a month later, Al Bare’s Devil Kyoti terrified on the cover to Shadow Comics V2 #11. TM & © Conde Nast.
of this series. The team of artists who were invited to apply their brushstrokes to these covers seemed to delight in deceiving with an inference of the macabre, leaving Walter Gibson’s sleuth to get on with solving the crimes at hand. By the time Shadow Comics Vol. 1 #8, dated January 1941, made it to the newsstand, newspaper strip artist Vernon Greene had assumed the position as cover artist, now well and truly established as The Shadow’s lead illustrator. With each passing issue his mastery of these mystery tales became more emphatic, his covers daring to tease every once in a while with the taint of something odious. He held off until November 1942, with the appearance of Shadow Comics Vol. 2 #8, before shocking with the first of these unsettling portrayals. On show that issue was a monstrous plant, plainly looking to consume everything in its path, almost a decade before John Wyndham’s apocalyptic shocker “Day of the Triffids.”
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SHADOW COMICS: THE HORROR COVERS
Above left, Devil Kyoti returns on Jack Binder’s cover for Shadow Comics V3 #1, April 1943. Sitting next to it, Vernon Greene’s diabolical presentation of Monstrodamus and his ravenous menagerie on the cover to Shadow Comics V3 #7, October 1943. On the right, Charles Coll took over with one of his murderous skeletons for Shadow Comics V3 #10, January 1944. TM & © Conde Nast.
the skull that lingered on in the mind. Deep down inside, those with a hankering for horror knew there would be nothing overly nasty in store, but with covers like this, the editors at Street & Smith knew they could ramp up the readers’ excitement, promptly ushering them into these nail-biting mysteries. True to form, Jack Binder followed with a skull splash page, again suggesting something unsavory awaiting in the wings. That was momentarily before the Shadow slipped in from the gloom; then those in attendance were treated to the kind of charged thriller they had come to count on. When Vernon enlisted in the armed forces, Al Bare, a member of Jack Binder’s studio, was chosen as the new cover artist. As with his predecessor, he demonstrated a penchant for the outlandish, painting a couple of vibrant Devil Kyoti covers for Shadow Comics Vol. 2 #11 and #12, with Jack Binder embellishing the cover to Vol. 3 #1. These striking images were the prelude to a series of stories which were to act as a rallying call in the face of the Axis, as war raged across across the Pacific.
Crash, Bang, Wallop!
Every once in a while, Vernon Greene managed to squeeze in a few covers for Shadow Comics, even though he was fully occupied in the service of the Air Corps’ medical division. His sinister cover for Shadow Comics Vol. 3 #7, dated October 1943, depicting the deranged Monstrodamus, captured the essence of the tale within,
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HAMMER TIME by Tim Leese
the HOUND of the BASKERVILLES
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he Hound Of The Baskervilles remains one of Hammer’s most enduring films, its script based on the famous novel penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, on its release in the UK in March 1959, as with its subsequent US premier in July 1959, there were serious misgivings as to how the public was going to react to a Hammer Film Production sans their regular monsters. Conan Doyle’s novel, featuring the author’s famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his trusted companion Dr. John Watson, had been serialized in The Strand
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magazine in 1901. By then, The Strand was an established monthly magazine, with a US edition set to follow in 1891, both published by George Newnes, the contents predominantly made up of short stories and general interest articles. This already popular periodical saw its sales soar in Britain when the Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in 1891, the circulation swiftly reaching a staggering 500,000 copies per month. Conan Doyle had “killed off ” his famous fictional detective some years before in the 1893 saga The Final Problem, burdened by the expectation that came with writing nothing but Holmes
HAMMER TIME
Nothing escapes the watchful eye of Sherlock Holmes, on this occasion played by Hammer favorite Peter Cushing. TM & © Hammer Film Productions.
and Watson, and his name having become synonymous with his celebrated creation. When he sat down to write The Hound Of The Baskervilles, it was the first time he had revisited these characters since that fateful tale. Such was the success of The Strand’s serialization of his story—followed by it being collected as a book in 1902—Conan Doyle brought his sleuth back for The Empty House, published in 1903, much to the joy of Holmes fans and the owners of The Strand magazine alike. Apart from two obscure Indian and German releases, Hammer’s 1959 version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles was the first time a major film company had set to bringing this story to cinemagoers since 20th Century Fox’s 1939 outing, starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson. Many now
regard this as the most outstanding film version of the story, with Rathbone cited as the definitive screen representation of the detective. Unfortunately, Bruce’s Watson is not so revered; his bumbling buffoonish manner strays some way from the ex-army doctor’s character of the Conan Doyle stories. When Hammer commenced work on this film, production duties were handled by one of their great stalwarts and co-founder, Anthony Hinds, with the screenplay assigned to former Hammer cameraman-turned-writer Peter Bryan. Bryan went on to write the screenplays for the classic Hammer movies Brides Of Dracula (1960) and The Plague Of Zombies (1966). The film was stylishly directed by the prolific Terence Fisher, whose savoir-faire would come to epitomize the company’s productions
throughout the 1950s and on into the 1960s. The music for this film was scored by another Hammer regular, James Bernard, who composed the music for many of Hammer’s films—his finale being 1974’s Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell. The impressive production design was provided by Liverpool-born artist Bernard Robinson, whose lavish sets for Hammer would be adapted for several films, thereby adhering to the constraints demanded by Hammer’s strict approach to budgetary control. The interior of Castle Dracula in the 1958 film Dracula (released as The Horror Of Dracula in the US to avoid confusion with the 1931 Universal film) was reused to provide the interior of Baskerville Hall. Similarly, the crypt in the Dracula film was remodeled for the laboratory in The Revenge Of Frankenstein (1958), while the same Cornish village set appeared in both The Plague Of The Zombies and The Reptile (1966). The casting began in early 1958 prior to the filming taking place in September and October of that year. The main cast comprised: • Peter Cushing – Sherlock Holmes • André Morell – Doctor Watson • Christopher Lee – Sir Henry Baskerville • Marla Landi – Cecile Stapleton • David Oxley – Sir Hugo Baskerville • Fancis De Wolff – Doctor Richard Mortimer • Ewen Solon – Stapleton • John Le Mesurier – Barrymore • Helen Goss – Mrs Barrymore • Miles Malleson – Bishop Frankland • Sam Kydd – Perkins • Michael Hawkins – Lord Caphill • Michael Mulcaster – Selden In keeping with Doyle’s original tale, much of the story is set on Dartmoor, a vast moorland now designated as a National Park in the county of Devon, down in southwest England. Now, just before we begin, a word of warning, for there is folklore aplenty regarding phantom black hounds on Dartmoor. One such legend refers to an evil local squire by the name of Richard Cabell, whose tomb was surrounded by a pack of fire-breathing hounds on the night of his internment. The mausoleum encasing his burial site can still be visited by those with the steel for such lore—in the
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