The Horror Of It All (Interviews Only)

the horror of it [Music] [Applause] [Music] we grow up with a certain hunger not only for the bright things in life but for things that are fearful and and terrifying the filmmaker put something on the screen and each individual member of the audience adds something unto themselves to complete the process now if you wonder why the continual provocations with horror in motion pictures there's a reason people love to be scared but he understood Stevenson's play Stevenson mentioned that he was the personification of evil but it was the evil of his expression and it was not ashy by them or with makeup no the leading men are not remembered by the public it's the heaviest the remembered because there are the carriages in plays and in motion pictures who are the active organs the leading men are acted upon but the heavy is the villains are the ones who do things that's why the great actors of who ever since Betterton I preferred to play the heavies lute elegan was a leading man drosera Bernard for many years and he came to the States and I got to know him because we're both sculptors there's extremely handsome man with a magnificent physique walked like a panther at a cold gray Hydra could see a mile away and he once said to me I love my men our sin the Phantom of the Opera the important element is so much of it takes place in the semi-darkness of catacombs in a way the Paris Opera House is a symbol of the unconscious mind in which dwells monsters desire and this struck a resonant chord and many of the masculine members of the audience trainees performance because he spent much of the time wearing a mask was a matter of ballet he was a master of consummate master of pantomime Madame the Opera didn't have any overt supernatural implications but we had a man who slept in a coffin who lived in catacombs five levels below the Paris Opera House and whom asked himself to disguise a hideous face and in a way he pressed the buttons of an audience at that time was very unaware as a sexual symbolism involved but it registered nonetheless because in effect the character of Chaney has portrayed in the Phantom of the Opera was that of a man who is ashamed or afraid of his own sexuality who conceals his desire as it was turned in those days under a mask when is revealed the heroin recoils in fright from a kindly gentle man who's now revealed as a hideous mean the unique quality of the silent film in America once it did not deal with supernatural topics per se actually evil was personified by the ugly and the deformed as in the case of lon chaney and other actors and it took place usually in an atmosphere of darkness we knew of course that handsome people were almost invariably good and that deformed elderly unfortunates people were bad this we had learned in our fairy tales as children now we were seeing those fairy tales in darkness up there on the screen without benefit of Freudian psychology without benefit of special effects the important thing is we believed what we saw and it frightened the living blazes out of us mr. Joker the head of Paramount called me out and asked me if I would like to do a film of the famous Stevenson story dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde I saw the story as a conflict between not between good and evil as it used to be done before where Chico becomes an evil person a monster but I saw the story more as a conflict between the high aspiration of every human being and his law of baser instincts and that the whole idea was to have a young man very handsome whose whole intention is to free himself from all the evil impulses all the animal impulses really no legal animal and the idea what Frederick March was that he when he becomes Hyde he does not pick our monster but she becomes our common ancestor the Neanderthal man it's very interesting to compare these two films that were made almost at the same time in the early 30s in that they both dealt with the theme of death Dracula with an undead creature brought back to life living off of the the living and the Frankenstein monster a creature made from parts of dead bodies and perhaps doubly terrifying for that reason when I was much younger I knew the late James Whale and he told me a fascinating anecdote about the first sneak preview of Frankenstein which was held in Santa Barbara while he was sleeping in the middle of the night he was awakened with a phone call and the voice came on the line saying are you the director of that film that was previewed tonight and he said yes and the voice said well I can't sleep and I'll be damned if I'll let you sleep and James found this story to be very amusing and it was a characteristic of his horror films particularly that they were always very much leavened with humor because he felt and I think rightly so from a dramatic point of view and from the audience point of view that it was very important to relieve the tension that was built in a horror film with humor along the way it was 1932 and James Whale had just finished Frankenstein which was an enormous success with Boris Karloff who was the star of the old dark house - we had Charles Laughton in his first american film we had Raymond Massey we had Melvyn Douglas I was very impressed Boris was as charming and gentle a person off screen as he was horrendous and threatening on screen there was a great deal of thunder going and lightning and rain coming in and cobwebs and doors creaking as a leading lady it was my job to be very very frightened so mr. whale put me into a pale silk velvet bias-cut evening dress very decollete and I asked him why and he said because when Boris is chasing you through the corridors I want you to be like a flame going through the house and be very threatened and that was my role to be very threatened very frightened and to scream a lot you know actually I think that putting me in pale pink silk velvet added to the feeling fragility and and help helplessness that actresses needed in in horror films because if the beautiful young actress or lady is not threatened there's there's no horror make-up alone doesn't make best monster the best monster is one whom we as members of the audience can recognize through the makeup as having some of the qualities that are buried within ourselves all of us got some kind of Vic arias pleasure I'm sure out of watching King Kong go on a rampage and tear down the very symbols of blue York City that represented wealth and power and prestige which motives were denied because most of us were very poor during the Depression we paid a dime or 15 cents or 25 cents tops to see King Kong and the other monsters those of us who are adolescents got the same kind of satisfaction and gratification out of watching Frankenstein's monster because he in a way was a very symbol of adolescence lumbering inarticulate ugly unwanted in a society where age was deemed superior to youth it's hard to believe that it's turned around but it has never stopped for defining the image I created it started reading my work ruby-red hangs in my memory not only because I was the start of it because it had a depth of characterization which from that period in Hollywood was not often seen on the stream maybe James Rennell I could see got my curiosity nearly days of Hollywood pictures were in black and white that can write in more than one way not only in the in the character of the thought of the film material but in the in the plot lines everything was either black or white there were no Gray's the villains were just steeped in villainy and the heroes were just too good to be true Hollywood grew and now we have human characters on the screen that have shades of evil and shades of good and there are Grey's it took awhile for Hollywood to learn this when I first are making horror films that's because I made a film called crime of passion starring Barbara Stanwyck sterling Hayden Raymond bird we got great reviews and the picture of Evan died and I want to know what happened so I tour the country I got out of Hollywood and I saw what happened and what was happening and that was that was the teenagers that were buying the records it was the teenagers that were leaving the house getting away from that TV box in the living room the teenagers wanted to get away from the home they wanted to get away from their parents and they went to the cinema they went to the theater and they had fun with a horror picture because in my horror films where there was I was a teenage werewolf I was a teenage Frankenstein blood of Dracula the teenager was they were always against the culprit that was the adult and that's what the kids felt and that's why they really had a good time and they have fun with my pictures we had completed the picture over in England and had returned quite satisfied with the work we had done and much to our chagrin when we saw the picture the producer had put into the picture a mechanical device which had been concocted by the special effects English people and made a real demon which you could see walking through the forest [Music] and this was a tremendous shock to all of us because the the Oliver onions story had ended with the remark maybe it would be better not to know for me hammer was the beginning of a cut the beginning of a new era a new ear a new beginning of horror pictures hammer I think came out of the fact that perhaps on television they couldn't show a lot of blood they weren't allowed to show that they weren't allowed to show a lot of sexuality there was no nudity on television so perhaps hammer came out of that taboo and so I think a new color came blood came and a new sexuality a new sensuality of course because there was nudity but there was also a sensuality connected to the dark side and that's something I think that connected with people the dark side we all have it I've never been offered the role of a sweet person I think it has to do with the fact that perhaps they saw in the dark side and I do fit to the traditional pictures of the dolphin evil lady I think that's why moviegoers go to see these films they wanted to get in touch with that a little bit longer on the shot of his going under the table and then trim a little bit policy our stories have been popular throughout all of history I think there's a reason for that the experiencing of horror through a motion picture or a story is a cathartic experience it's a way in which the person can work out and express certain problems within his unconscious mind we all have had feelings of horror as a child these hope feelings have generally been buried they lay repressed or suppressed in the back of the mind and when you go to see a horror film and you scream and you scream with the audience you are easing some of the pressure now at the same time when you do scream you will very often smile afterwards smile or laugh because you know to a certain extent you've been had by the filmmaker you know that he has manipulated the tools of his craft in order to get the right emotion from you [Music] these are some of the new techniques were working with here in new world in our prosthetics Department we're capable of doing almost anything [Music] this guy's got a close-up tomorrow so John beekler is one of the best men in the business I think he's the head of our department and he's created the special effects the prosthetics for a number of our films push it over back back to the left a little bit in each one of these things what he's trying to do is to give the audience something to build upon from within themselves the brace is slipping try to mine on that hand I don't work but it's essential to remember that special effects are never an hand unto themselves special effects are a means to lead the audience into a fuller understanding and appreciation of the film the goal is not to dazzle the audience with the special effects although it's nice if you can do that the goal is to reach the unconscious of the audience and to let them experience through special effects emotions and visual sensations on film that cannot be achieved in any other way when I was doing the Poe films years ago we had to leave much to the audience's imagination and I don't think that was necessarily bad the audience should participate in the film going process the the tradition of the Grand Guignol theater which goes back to the turn of the century and before in France was always one of presenting gore onstage I mean showing it happen people having their throats ripped open and and having a hot burning iron placed on the side of their face or something like that with done with tremendous technical expertise and this this tradition of course has been carried over into the horror film the essence of enjoying a horror film is in the fact that you as a spectator are totally safe you are secure what's happening on the screen is not gonna happen to you some years ago I wrote a novel closed-cycle about a mass murder and Alfred Hitchcock made it into a film very effectively without using overt violence merely suggesting it on the screen but times have certainly changed in the last 20 years we have nothing but explicit violence in the so called spatter films today the real horrors a day is not horror films which are a lot of fun teenagers and adults love them because we never get rid of our fears of the dark and fears of the night the real horror is on the streets today and every city and every town it's on our television news if you see a body lying in the street and you've seen it on film as a child and as a young person and as a young adult and as a mature person it's not a great shock and it should be in recent times that I think that it has become so excessive and then it becomes a kind of pornography of blood for its own sake and of course that does become distasteful it's necessary to call a halt somewhere along line I feel and return to the prime virtues of the horror film the Wonder and the fantasy and terror that it evokes you're gonna hand somebody a glass of milk and if the music is right and the setting is right the audience would jump and scream a theater pet the very fact that you don't know was what makes it fearful and makes it mystifying and shocking and can scare the devil out of you I was orphaned when I was 3 years old my father died and I was sent to an Episcopal orphanage in Peekskill New York run by the Episcopal Sisters of st. Mary they're a very sensible women lights went out when it was time to go to sleep and they stayed out until the morning so I never learned to be afraid of the dark my mother told me that I used to have a Halloween skeleton made out of paper in my room and she was very amused because I loved that skeleton it represented my fears but she said that every night before I went to sleep I would take that and put it outside my room and closed the door so that I didn't have to have it with me in the dark I remember mama saying every night good night children my brother and I shared the same bedroom good night children I'll leave the light on in the hall and I must have equated that with dark not being good for me dark and light they exist together they coexist and they must must be dealt into the dark side must be and suddenly we heard these scratchy noises above behind the glass my grandmother went and opened the curtain and there pressed against the glass was this frightening face of this young woman with her nose flat against the glass her teeth scowling and her nails going like this on the glass well we're absolutely petrified with fear I forget how frightening that was so my grandmother said don't be afraid and she opened the door and I could see her as if it to happen yesterday she stood there and she made this gesture to the girl open her embrace and the girl the insane girl came right up to and she embraced how the girl put her head against my grandmother's shoulder you see she said you must learn one thing and that is that if you fill your heart with love there will be no room left in it for fear what you see now on the walls is an approximation of my devotion to the horror films of the 30s these particular frames always remind me of the old theaters where people could go in and lose themselves into another world where people can live for 500 years on human blood where fantasy reigns supreme these Ghoulies and ghosties creatures that go bump in the night the things that make you as a child whistle past the grave these flickering images of cinema thanks to Karloff Lugosi Chaney Fay Wray and the clutches of King Kong all the memories of our child the horror film these things are never going to die because in the horror film they are truly deathless and so are we all in every horror film there is a door and behind that door lurks that which we fear the most that were true fear in real life something that lurks behind the closed door in our own mind it's often the fear of death the fear of pain and yet that door must be opened we must face we must confront our own mortality our own feeling of inadequacy and in the best horror films that door is opened for us we glimpse the horror are able to confront it and walk away with the feeling that from then on we could live with the fear of death or the fear of suffering we can understand it a little better in so doing understand our own souls [Music]