Book Club of Desolation #18: Benighted (1927), by J.B. Priestley

Spookyween has come and gone, but Bookvember rises anew! We've gone fairly light on books this year, but this month we'll be making four stops to the Book Club of Desolation. Starting off our celebration of bizarre literature is Benighted. It was from Benighted that we got the 1932 film The Old Dark House, which everyone likes for reasons I'll never understand. The Old Dark House is, despite being the Trope Namer, a late addition to the Old Dark House subgenre; though the form would persist into and through the 1940s, the ODH film's peak was really in the late '20s. This year has seen me take a liking to these creaky old mysteries, and as such, I wanted to dip into the literary origins of this cinematic cluster; Benighted was one of those which was still available and which was actually readable. Mary Roberts Rinehart, I'm sure I will get to you at some point--but for now, let's just get the crap out of the way.

Indeed, Benighted is very crappy. That may be due to the fact that it bears a very close resemblance to The Old Dark House, only it manages to be less funny, more boring, and most damningly, it lacks Boris Karloff. But it was, however, readable, in a way that the original 1925 stage play of The Gorilla (for example) simply wasn't.* Our principle characters are Philip and Margaret Waverton, two travelers who are joined in their voyage through rural Wales by young Roger Penderel. The trio end up going through a heavy rainstorm, finding the sole shelter for miles in the form of mysterious old Femm Manor, ruled over by the bombastic, unbalanced Horace Femm and his religious fanatic sister Rebecca. The travelers are eventually joined by two other travelers whose names I can't remember. I do know that one of them is named Gladys, and she ends up as Penderel's love interest for all the jack diddly it ends up meaning in the end. For the rest of the book, the travelers endure the strangeness of the Femms and their disfigured alcoholic butler Morgan until events reach their violent pitch.

The primary issue which readers may run into concerning Benighted thankfully manifests itself right at the start. Simply put, the book is dull, with the opening driving scene which takes our three heroes to Femm Manor reaching Manos levels of absurd length.** Trust me, it makes you wonder about the literary audience of the late '20s when the first chunk of the book is just Priestley finding new ways of saying "It's raining." And this sets the pattern for the rest of the book in another way: too much of the material printed is wasted on re-summarizing what a ghastly storm this is. I would argue that most of the book is spent describing the weather or having characters talk about the weather. And when they talk--dear God.

This is yet another book which I have spent my precious reading time on this year which features a Party of Roving Twits. You probably know the kind, even if you haven't read any of the abominable thrillers of the '20s and '30s which feature the archetype (and which I keep reading because I'm an idiot with high hopes). Everyone who isn't a pretentious asshat is foppish and disengaged to the point of inducing aneurysm. I tried to find conversations between the protagonists that were both interesting and relevant, and was completely without luck. I hate books where all the women do is scream and all the men do is make faux-Wilde pithy observations on everything. Especially when both insist on using such unbearably Caucasian similes as "strange as a mandarin."

Which is sad, because there is at least some good stuff here. Our ostensible villains, the Femms plus Morgan the butler, are the ancestors of the Sawyers of Texas, the Merryes from Spider Baby, and all the other degenerate families living in isolation spread out over 90 years of horror fiction. There's a great part where we learn that Rebecca's religious obsessions may stem from the fact that when she was young she would witness her father and brother bring women home to conduct orgies! I guess I can hardly blame her after that. But too little time is spent with these folk, and this creates a sizable schism in the text. Really, it's almost like Priestley wrote two books--one, a spooky Gothic horror-thriller, and the other, a soppy romantic drama about idiots--and fused them together in layers like an Oreo mishap. Characters will engage in pointless dialogue...then be trapped in a flooding room...then, more pointless foppishness...then, Morgan attacks somebody...like I said above, I shouldn't have hoped for much when The Old Dark House was such a fitfully boring film.

If you distrust my opinion and want to read overlong accounts of people drinking gin, Benighted may be for you. But honestly you really should run away from it fast. I haven't entirely given up on the books and plays which inspired the ODH thrillers, but damn if this doesn't make me want to.

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* For those of you who mourn the loss of the first two adaptations of The Gorilla which predated the 1939 Bela Lugosi/Ritz Brothers travesty, don't. The original play's primary form of humor outside of the usual "cowardice is funny" shtick is making fun of black people. It was a repugnant read and I'm sure both the 1927 and 1930 versions preserved this rubbish, if I know anything about the films of the late '20s/early '30s.

** Quick! Someone remake Manos: The Hands of Fate as an old-time Old Dark House movie! You can add the gorilla from House of Mystery! It'll be great!

Image Source: Valancourt Books 

The Ghost (1963), by Riccardo Freda

It's weird for me to come back to The Ghost after some of the madness we've been touching on lately. After Gretta and The Telephone Book and all the rest, a middling Euro-Gothic memorable to me chiefly because I enjoyed it as a kid is hardly going to be a good link in our combo chain, to use a fighting game metaphor. Whatever--this is film criticism, and the only rule is that there are no rules. (That and that you must hate every remake without watching it.) The Ghost may be one of the most painfully non-crazy films I happen to like, but I know not everything needs to be the most extravagantly nutty thing on the block. Let's get stuffy.

Dr. John Hichcock has been paralyzed, but he and his friend Dr. Charles Livingstone are trying to use poison to cure that. The idea is that they'll expose him to an almost-lethal dose of curare, and then give him the antidote at the last second, so that, ideally, the shock will bring vitality back to his legs. On the side, Hichcock also indulges in seances and other spiritualist fancies with his medium housemaid Catherine. Most people, including Hichcock's wife Margaret, are opposed to such dangerous extravagances. But she loves him all the same...or so it seems. It's still several years before the good doctor would have the chance to read Lady Chatterley's Lover, but let's just say being the man around the house who can't use the lower half of his body is not a good thing when one is a fictional character. Margaret is a good actress, and not just because she's played by horror empress Barbara Steele; she and Charles are having an affair, and she hates John entirely, wanting only his money. You can imagine what happens next--it's just a matter of a little too much curare, or the cure delivered a little too late. Soon the treacherous couple are free, but in truth their troubles are just beginning. After all, this movie ain't called The Ghost for nuthin'. But what's really going on here?

I think what I like the most about The Ghost is that it's one of the most generic movies I can think of. What? No, I'm normal, I swear. I am captivated by The Ghost because it does the exact minimum an atmospheric Gothic spooker about adultery has to do to be a movie, while still being entertaining. Provided, as a kid, I was very much fascinated with horror that I wasn't scared by. I would try to find what people found creepy in horror stories I thought were mundane so as to better understand what scared people. For the benefit of my writing, of course--like I said, I'm absolutely normal. The Ghost touches on the usual Gothic fears: ghosts, obviously, as well as crypts and untrustworthy house staff. And deception, of course. I seem to remember this movie's twist actually getting me as a kid, though I also remember being pissed about the movie's final stance on paranormal activity. As an adult you will probably guess what's up before the finale, especially since there are a few other movies that have very similar premises.

One of them is 1965's Nightmare Castle, a movie which also tends to garnish the public domain collections that The Ghost has a tendency to appear on (and which also stars Barbara Steele). I only saw that recently, under the best possible conditions: a remastered HD print, in its uncut 100+ minute form. And I fell asleep three times. Maybe it was the absence of the nostalgia hook, but there was also the lurking sense that Castle director Mario Caiano was ripping off Riccardo Freda...especially since Nightmare Castle also rips off Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hichcock! (It's okay, they all rip off Les Diaboliques.) Incidentally, The Ghost is often listed as a sequel to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, even though the Dr. Hichcock in that movie is named Bernard, not John. I assume that Bernard and John are brothers and probably blood kin of The Awful Dr. Orlof, which, fittingly, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock shared a double bill with back in the '60s. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is pretty good as well, definitely more of a B-feature, but it features yet another amazing performance from Barbara Steele so it's worth tracking down.

How does this movie hold up as a trash film, then? Well, it's definitely more to the side of commercial products like Horror Safari than the material I usually like to cover, but there are still some classic bad movie moments. The movie opens strangely, in media res at the end of one of Hichcock's seances, as Charles says, "That's enough for tonight." Operatic music swells and the opening credits play as everyone files away. For years I assumed the public domain DVD I had was cut, but nope, the movie's supposed to play like that. I have no idea why they did this, aside from just having no clue on how to start the movie. But surely you could have had a creepy establishing shot of the house or something...?

This movie is also really melodramatic, sometimes beyond the call of duty required of a Gothic horror movie. Hichcock seeming never notices that his supposedly-doting wife wants to kill him, even when she freezes and stares murderously into the distance for several seconds while holding a straight razor up to his throat during a shaving session. People gasp at the movement of curtains or shadows, and someone actually says, "I had to do it. There will be no witnesses." And of course, everything boils down to a hammy cackling exposition dump at the end. I guess if you want to see Dungeon of Harrow made by Europeans, or a Jess Franco movie without even a hint of ass or pubes, this is the way to go. The Ghost is like a hard pair of shoes, and takes a good breaking in, but once you get it to fit it will bring you some good walking.

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