Bad Santa

 

As Halloween approaches, let us pay tribute to the great Boris Karloff, who so chillingly brought to life--

Wait a second! Halloween's come and gone, hasn't it? So where does that leave poor Boris?

No matter the holiday, you just can't keep a good monster down.

Karloff, and, standing over him, Jones

Though we may associate him with an earlier era of pop culture, Boris Karloff still had a fairly busy schedule throughout the 1960s. He started out the decade as the host of the TV anthology series Thriller, kept on acting in horror films (most of which were low-budget drive-in fare) and narrated a series of children's records based on Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.  It was the last of these that caught the ear of animator Chuck Jones (best known for the Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.) Jones wanted to make a TV version of Dr. Seuss' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and was struck by how genuinely tender Karloff came across as he recited Kipling's tales of how the camel got his hump or how the elephant got his trunk or how Great Britian got India (OK, the last one never appeared in Just So Stories, though Kipling DID bring up the subject quite a bit in his works geared toward adults.) Jones thought such a tender approach would work quite nicely for Seuss' story. Not that Jones was oblivious to the fact that Karloff also could do wickedness extremely well. So both the yin and the yang of Boris' vocal talents were brought to the fore as he's the tender narrator as well as the wicked Grinch who disguises himself as St. Nick and robs the town of Whoville of all its presents and decorations and foodstuffs until finally he has a change of conscience and promises to honor Christmas in his heart and Tiny Tim doesn't die--Oops! I'm getting my stories of Yuletide redemption mixed up. Which remind me...

Don't you think Alastair Sim would have made a scary monster? Just imagine him with a couple of bolts in his neck.

Reflections of the Way Life (or the Undead) Used to Be

 

 

Basil Rathbone examines Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in this publicity still from 1939's The Son of Frankenstein. If that wasn't spooky enough, that very same year Rathbone had to contend with a Baskervilles hound!

Vital Viewing (Gothic Romance Edition)

 Actress Elsa Lanchester was born on this day in 1902 (she died in 1986.) With her good looks you might assume she played lots of leading ladies roles, or at least was the hero's romantic interest, in many a film. However, she was mostly a character actress throughout her long career, often playing eccentrics, which, while lacking glamour, no doubt kept her steadily employed when those good looks inevitably began to fade.  In twelve of her films made both in England (where she was originally from) and Hollywood, she appeared with husband Charles Laughton, one of the greatest actors of his generation. On her own Elsa had roles in--

You know what? Before I go any further, how about, for anyone who's interested, a lesson on the most efficient way to put on pantyhose? Pay close attention: 

That woman makes it look easy, huh? But remember, she's just a drawing. On actual flesh and bones it may be a bit more difficult, as Elsa explains to Dick Cavett in this 1972 interview:

Now you know why she played eccentrics. As for that poem she mentioned, we'll have to save that for some other day. Halloween is almost upon us, and I have a scary treat for all of you (no, it's not a chocolate-covered eggplant.) I said before Elsa rarely played the romantic interest, but one of the few times she did...

...she got to play the title character. Actually, she wasn't in the movie all that much, just a little at the beginning and a little at the end. Let's begin with the beginning, where she doesn't even play the title character, but rather, an aspiring novelist: 

At that point, Mary conjures up a Universal Pictures sequel for Percy Shelley's and Lord Byron's viewing-or-however-they're-taking-in-this-story-in-1818 pleasure. Along the way there's an old blind man in the woods and some little people in jars, both of which I'm going to skip so I can go right to the end. The very end. Like, the words "The End" on the screen end. You know what that means boys and girls, don't you? Something even more frightening than a creature stitched together from dead body parts. I'm talking about the dreaded SPOILER ALERT! So if you haven't seen the movie and want to, you better leave right now.

On second thought, why doncha stick around? Because what I'm about to show you is so giddily gruesome and so gleefully ghastly, with just a touch of piquant poignancy for all you romantic misfits out there who have no problem commiserating with a brokenhearted monster, that you don't really need an explanation as to how all these characters arrived at this particular moment. Just hold on to your pillows and feast your eyes on one of the greatest horror movie finales of all time:  

 Some people are just not made for each other.

Quips and Quotations (What--Me Scary Edition)

See the awful monster.
See the bolts in his head.
See how he kills people.
Kill, kill, kill.
The monster likes to kill.
Poor, poor monster.
The monster is sick.
Sick, sick, sick.
He wants to be cured.
The doctor cannot cure the monster.
The monster does not belong to Blue Cross.

--Larry Siegel, Mad magazine

1925-2019