Happy Hammerween!

Films From Beyond's house has been transformed into the House of Hammer for Halloween. To paraphrase an old saying, "When all you have is a Hammer, everything looks like a horror movie."

So, what's your favorite Hammer horror?

Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

"What evil hath science wrought?"

Horror of Dracula (1958)

"The chill of the tomb won't leave your blood for hours... after you come face-to-face with DRACULA!"

The Mummy (1959)

"Torn from the tomb to terrify the world!"

The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

"Only The Lord Of The Dead Could Unleash Them!"

The Reptile (1966)

"What strange power made her half woman - half snake?"

"Mummy will make it all better": Boo-boos on Mummy Movie Sets

What can you say about Tutankhamun (King Tut to friends and fans)? He became ruler of Egypt at the age of 9, married his half-sister, erected a bunch of monuments (as Pharaohs liked to do back then), reinstated the god Amun to the top of the divine hierarchy, restored friendly relations with some nearby kingdoms, and then promptly died at the ripe old age of 19. He was buried in a relatively economy-sized tomb (probably because he inconveniently kicked off before something grander was ready) and was promptly forgotten, even by the ancient Egyptians, until he was unearthed by archaeologist Howard Carter and moneyman and English Lord George Herbert in 1922.

Tutankhamun, King of the Mummies!

Given that we live in a society where the vast majority of us don't know much about history and couldn't find Egypt on a map to save our couch potato lives, it's hard to imagine that the discovery created much of a stir... but it did. It was in all the papers (thanks Egypt, for giving us papyrus!), and artifacts from Tut's tomb have pretty much been traveling around the globe ever since. For those who think about these things, Tutankhamun's spectacular mummy mask is one of the most iconic, recognizable images of ancient Egypt in the world, and will probably stay that way. Pretty good for a skinny boy-king who was the product of incest and suffered from, among other things, Marfan syndrome, Wilson-Turner X-linked mental retardation syndrome, Fröhlich syndrome (adiposogenital dystrophy), Klinefelter syndrome, androgen insensitivity syndrome, aromatase excess syndrome in conjunction with sagittal craniosynostosis syndrome, Antley–Bixler syndrome or one of its variants and temporal lobe epilepsy. (Holy cow!)

But better yet, the frail boy-king is directly responsible for the classic mummy movies that horror film mavens like you and me enjoy to this very day (and no, I'm not talking about those despicable Brendon Fraser CGI abominations). It's pretty much guaranteed that when you put a Pharaonic curse on your tomb, and thousands of years later defilers of that tomb seem to drop like flies not long after raiding it, Hollywood will jump on the story faster than jackals on fresh meat.

For skeptics, here's what happened to the "flies" who defied King Tut's curse (from Wikipedia)

• Lord Carnarvon, financial backer of the excavation team who was present at the tomb's opening, died on 5 April 1923 after a mosquito bite became infected; he died 4 months and 7 days after the opening of the tomb.
• George Jay Gould I, a visitor to the tomb, died in the French Riviera on 16 May 1923 after he developed a fever following his visit.
• Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey of Egypt died 10 July 1923: shot dead by his wife.
• Colonel The Hon. Aubrey Herbert, MP, Carnarvon's half-brother, became nearly blind and died on 26 September 1923 from blood poisoning related to a dental procedure intended to restore his eyesight.
• Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid, a radiologist who x-rayed Tutankhamun's mummy, died on 15 January 1924 from a mysterious illness.
• Alexander King, an American promoter and exhibitor of some of the more valuable artifacts from the tomb, died on 18 October 1924 after being thrown down a flight of steps by a mysterious intruder.
• Sir Lee Stack, Governor-General of Sudan, died on 19 November 1924: assassinated while driving through Cairo.
• A. C. Mace, a member of Carter's excavation team, died in 1928 from arsenic poisoning
• The Hon. Mervyn Herbert, Carnarvon's half brother and the aforementioned Aubrey Herbert's full brother, died on 26 May 1929, reportedly from "malarial pneumonia".
• Captain The Hon. Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, died on 15 November 1929: found smothered in his bed.
• Richard Luttrell Pilkington Bethell, 3rd Baron Westbury, father of the above, died on 20 February 1930; he supposedly threw himself off his seventh floor apartment.
• Howard Carter opened the tomb on 16 February 1923, and died well over a decade later on 2 March 1939; however, some have still attributed his death to the "curse".

Okay, so I embellished the list with a rip-off from Hammer's The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964; know which one?), but it's still impressive in an avenging-bony-spectral-hand-of-death-reaches-out-from-the-tomb kind of way. As they say, truth is often stranger than fiction. Tutankhamun's curse clearly precipitated some of the more enjoyable Universal and Hammer horrors of the 20th century's mid-section. I'm not prepared to say that it's responsible for the mummy movie mishaps listed here, but are you 100% sure it's not?

"He nearly killed me! He took my breath away!"

Poor Creighton Tull Chaney! The son of the Man of a Thousand faces had big shoes to fill. Born into a tumultuous and fractured show business family, he spent his boyhood years living in an assortment of homes and boarding schools until his remarried (not to mention cold and distant) father could provide a stable home life. Led to believe as a child that his mother was dead, he discovered years later that she was still alive when Lon Sr. died in 1930. Quickly typecast by Universal in monster roles and dubbed Lon Chaney Jr. to take advantage of his father's mystique, Junior rode the long Hollywood slide from celebrated character and leading roles (Of Mice and Men, The Wolf Man) to such micro-budget quickies as Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) and Al Adamson's execrable Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) at the end. His legendary drinking on the set didn't help.

If in the space of a few short years you'd traded in your dapper leading man's suit and wolf's head cane for the tattered, Fuller's earth-splattered bandages of the mute, shuffling bottom-of-the-bill Mummy, you might have been driven to drink too. And you might even have taken it out on your fellow cast members:

"Okay Lon, you can stop now... Lon? Lon!!!"

"In shooting the scene where the Mummy strangles Prof. Norman, Chaney seized actor Frank Reicher's throat 'and squeezed so forcefully that Reicher nearly fainted,' [Director Reginald] LeBorg told us. 'Reicher was an old man and frail, and Chaney got carried away.' Reicher cried out, 'He nearly killed me! He took my breath away!' There is evidence of this in the film itself [The Mummy's Ghost, 1944]: In the few frames where Reicher's face is visible as Chaney chokes him, the pinched expression on the older actor's face looks uncomfortably real.

LeBorg told Greg Mank in Cinefantastique: 'Reicher very nearly was unconscious! He was moaning on the floor... Chaney had just become carried away-- he was putting everything he had into the monster. Luckily, Reicher didn't complain. ... We massaged his neck and gave him some water. But the next day, when I saw him again, I spied a look at Reicher's neck, and you could see he had spots there, from the strangling!'" [Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946, 2nd. Ed., McFarland, 2007]

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Where to find it:

Oldies.com

"Don't worry, it won't hurt your skin..."

Does the name Virginia Christine mean anything to you? (Virginia who?) Well, I'm a big fan, because Virginia represents two of my very favorite things -- mummy movies and coffee. She not only had the privilege of being in one of the creepiest scenes in all of classic horror, but she became the patron saint of coffee drinkers everywhere during her 21 year stint as the kindly Mrs. Olson in Folgers commercials. She was a newly minted starlet in 1944 when she played the revivified Princess Ananka in The Mummy's Curse. And what a way to come back from the dead-- deep in the muck of the Louisiana bayous! I hope there was lots of coffee and other amenities on the set, because few actresses would have put up with what she had to go through:

"We shot the film, and then came the last day of shooting when I change from a mummy to a lovely Egyptian princess. All through the picture, [makeup artist] Jack [Pierce] kept coming on the set, saying, 'I'm using something new on you, Virginia. It's going to be terrific! Don't worry, it won't hurt your skin.' I was very young and 'It won't hurt your skin' began to ring in my ears. I was a basket case the night before shooting. ... I was there at four or five in the morning, and sat in the makeup chair for five-and-one-half hours. He started with pieces of cotton dipped in witch hazel to fill in all the youthful lines. Then, he lined it with an orange stick to make the wrinkles. That had to be dried. And then came the Denver mudpack, and that had to be dried. He worked a little patch at a time. Unfortunately, we made a mistake in wardrobe because we left the arms bare, which meant that the arms had to be done, too, and the hands... every place the skin was exposed. It was a tedious, long process. And, of course the natural thing happened... I had to go to the bathroom.  ...  I couldn't smile, I couldn't laugh. I couldn't talk. And I got the giggles in the john. It was so ridiculous! ...

After 3000 years, Princess Ananka is done with her
mudpack and is ready for a stone massage.

After the full session, they put me in a cart and took me out to the back lot. Very carefully, they dug a hole, my height, right in the dirt. For any big star, they would have sifted the sand and done it on the stage, and had it cleaned. They laid me down in the thing and covered me with burnt cork which photographs like dirt. They turned the hose on so the dried cork got wet and looked like the earth around it. I laid there with this much of me exposed and thought, 'Oh God, how many creepy, crawly things are in this with me?'" [Ibid.]

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Where to find it:

Oldies.com

And he never played the Mummy again.

If you're a regular reader of this blog (and I hope you are), then you know that Christopher Lee's resume extends far beyond his work in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In fact, ol' Chris' film resume is very, very lengthy, extending all the way back to the late 1940s. This man does not know the meaning of the word 'retirement.' Discriminating film buffs are OK with that LOTR CGI-fest stuff, but really appreciate Lee's contributions as the greatest technicolor Dracula of all-time. Like Lon Chaney Jr., who played the Wolf Man, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy and Dracula for Universal, Lee was the go-to guy and master of monsters for Hammer's Universal horror reboots, playing the Frankenstein monster and the Mummy for Hammer as well as the immortal Count. Unlike poor Lon Jr., he only played the Mummy once, and that was enough, thank you very much:

Getting impaled was the least of Christopher Lee's
worries on the set of The Mummy (1959).

"In one sequence, Lee, in Mummy garb, smashes through a door which the production crew had mistakenly locked and bolted. Lee broke through the almost unforgiving door, but the impact dislocated his shoulder. This was not the end of his discomfort. Lee later broke through a window with real glass substituted for the commonly used, and relatively safe, sugar glass. The glass slivers from the collision pierced through his mummy bandages like needles. Lee also had some problems in a scene in which he carried actress Yvonne Furneaux over 80 yards at night. In a Scarlet Street (#8) interview, Lee described the incident.

'That was one of the toughest things, physically, I think I've ever had to do. I did things in that film that Mr. Schwarzenegger might have found difficult to do. I wouldn't have believed that I could literally bend down and lift somebody off the ground, but I did it when somebody said, action! Of course, I pulled all the muscles in my neck and shoulders...' " [John 'J.J.' Johnson, Cheap Tricks and Class Acts: Special Effects, Makeup and Stunts from the Films of the Fantastic Fifties, McFarland, 1996]

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Where to find it:

Oldies.com

Countdown to Halloween: Roy Ashton, Monster Maker

HAlloween MoVie Rating:
Monsters created by Ashton
are not for the squeamish

Makeup artist Jack Pierce is responsible for creating some of the most enduring, iconic monsters in all of popular culture-- Universal's Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy. After decades of exposure via television, videotape, and DVD, and with the monster likenesses on literally thousands (if not tens of thousands) of products, Pierce's concepts have become the de facto standard for what Frankenstein's monster, werewolves and ambulatory mummies are supposed to look like. Even kids who've never seen a single minute of any of the Universal classics know these monsters by sight.

Some years after Jack Pierce performed his last bit of wizardry for Universal, another extremely talented makeup artist and monster-maker extraordinaire appeared on the horror movie scene -- in the UK. Working strictly freelance, Roy Ashton helped Hammer Studios re-conceptualize and revitalize the look of all of the classic monsters.  In addition, he added more than a few terrifying creations of his own. Like Pierce and his iconic creations, it's hard to imagine Hammer's horror renaissance without the ghastly visages that sprang from the mind of this modest, unassuming artist.

Master Monster Maker Roy Ashton

I suppose you could say I was weaned on the old Universal black-and-white monsters, but the Hammer technicolor reboots of the classic horrors that I discovered in my teens cemented my love of cinematic horror. In contrast to the leisurely-paced, atmospheric Universal films, Hammer's products were manic and bloody and almost jumped off the screen and bit you in the neck. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were very worthy successors to Lugosi and Karloff, bringing energetic life to gothic horror at a time when audiences couldn't seem to get enough of atom age sci-fi mutants.

I had seen the name Roy Ashton in Hammer credits and in a handful of film magazine articles, but I only recently became fully aware of the man's contributions to Hammer horror iconography. A couple of years ago I was browsing one of my favorite used bookstores when I stumbled across an intriguing trade paperback, Greasepaint and Gore: The Hammer Monsters of Roy Ashton (Bruce Sachs and Russell Wall, Tomahawk Press, Sheffield, England, 1998). It was packed with production stills and drawings and all kinds of behind-the-scenes information from Hammer's golden era. I was hooked. One man's trade-in became my treasure.

I was amazed to find out just how many of the unforgettable creatures and frightful faces from Hammer films were the work of this one very talented man. The authors have very meticulously and lovingly documented Ashton's Hammer years through interviews, photos, and many of Ashton's original drawings. It's a fascinating account of a near-genius artist-craftsman working for one of the great, innovative film studios.

So, here's a suggestion for a Halloween night Hammer movie marathon featuring Roy Ashton's best, most terrifying creations (and as an added bonus, makeup "tips" from Greasepaint and Gore):

#4: The Mummy (1959)

After the successes of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), Hammer secured the rights to Universal's entire horror catalog. The Mummy was Hammer's third pairing of Cushing and Lee (why mess with success?). All of the familiar Universal characters and themes are in Hammer's re-make: the unearthing of Princess Ananka's tomb; an Egyptian fanatic determined to make the infidels pay for the desecrations; the resurrection of Kharis, Ananka's ill-fated lover; a modern woman who is the living image of Ananka, etc. In addition to giving the Mummy a much more intimidating physical presence, Lee -- in spite of makeup that obscured most of his features -- also managed to convey the sadness and tragedy of poor Kharis. You feel sorry for him even as he relentlessly mows down the tomb defilers.

Makeup Tip: Ashton made several trips to the British Museum to research mummies and mummification for the production. There was an actual mummy on display there, and he was able to examine it thoroughly and make numerous sketches. Christopher Lee remembered dealing with the final product: "It was very difficult wearing those bandages… I couldn't get out of them once they were on me. It would take too long to get out and get back in. …"  Roy came up with a kind of tunic with a zipper in the back that was easier to work with. The zipper was then concealed with wrappings that went over the shoulder and around the back. (Sachs and Wall, Greasepaint and Gore, Tomahawk Press, 1998)

The Mummy is available on DVD from Warner Home Video.

#3: The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

For Hammer's one foray into lycanthropy, the studio decided to dispense with Universal's story and character and draw fresh inspiration from Guy Endore's 1933 novel, The Werewolf of Paris. Rather than the relatively contemporary setting of The Wolf Man (1940), Curse is set in 18th century Spain, where a cruel and capricious nobleman invites a penniless beggar into his house during his wedding party, then gets him drunk and humiliates him before mercilessly consigning him to the dungeon for life. Years later, when a housemaid resists the advances of the decadent old nobleman, she's thrown into the same dungeon with the now haggard, bestial, and mindless beggar. She is raped, and before dying, bears a child (Oliver Reed) who grows up to be handsome and vigorous and animalistic -- especially when the moon is bright.

Makeup Tip:  I remember as a kid being deeply impressed with the werewolf in this one (okay, maybe scared is a better word). This is the creation that Ashton himself was most proud of. Among other things, he made use of walnuts and candles to create the fearsome makeup:  "I made an appliance which fitted underneath his (Reed's) eyes and went right over the top of his head and over the ears. I pushed out his nostrils with a pair of candles. I used walnuts first of all. You cut a walnut in half, punch a hole through the shell, and stick it up the nostril. It's a bit uncomfortable. But if you take a candle and draw the wick out of it, then that leaves you with a sort of hollow cylinder. I cut sections off of that and stick them up the actor's nose and the warmth of the nose adjusts the shape of the candle to the shape of the nostrils. Then you can breathe easily…" (Ibid.)

The Curse of the Werewolf is available on The Hammer Horror Series DVD set.

#2: The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

In a remote Cornish village, someone is solving the local labor shortage with strange Voodoo rituals. For a full review, see my post at Mr Movie Fiend.

Makeup Tip: Ashton's effective makeup for the Voodoo-created zombies in Plague provided a terrifying template for George Romero and all the stumbling creatures that followed in the wake of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Here's his advice for creating animated corpses on a low budget:  "Rotting skins can be suggested through a mixture of rubber and paper, then a careful application of cosmetics. By crumpling up tissue paper, coloring it with Fuller's earth and then covering it with liquid latex, one can create a very effective specimen. Areas on the face on which to demonstrate crumbling scabs or splitting skins include: the forehead, the bridge of the nose, or chin as natural starting points. I would suggest building up an excess of material and then shred the latex slightly by gentle tearing." (Ibid.)

The Plague of the Zombies is available on DVD from Anchor Bay.

#1: The Reptile (1966)

The Reptile was filmed back-to-back with Plague of the Zombies using many of the same sets and crew members. The setting again is a small country village. Harry and Valerie Spalding (Ray Barrett and Jennifer Daniel) move into the family cottage when Harry's brother mysteriously dies. They receive a chilly reception from the villagers, who are terrified by a mysterious, venomous thing that seems to strike at will and turns the skin of its victims grotesquely black. An eccentric neighbor, Dr. Franklyn (Noel Willman), and his beautiful but tormented daughter Anna (Jacqueline Pearce), seem to hold the key to the dark, murderous secret.

Makeup Tip: The Reptile was Ashton's last credited triumph for Hammer -- the uncertain nature of his freelance status, the short timeframes, low budgets and low pay finally motivated Roy to say goodbye to the studio. Many think he saved his best work for last. The Reptile is a truly frightening, repugnant female monster, and a fitting finish for the Halloween movie marathon countdown. Typically, Ashton did his homework:  "A lot of research went into the appearance of the Reptile. Again I consulted anatomical authorities, drew snakes many times and constructed a model adapting the plate-like build-up of reptilian scales to the bones of the human head. There is a clear similarity of the human head to the structure of a snake's skull. … To suggest the scales I took a discarded Boa Constrictor's skin and made a female cast of this in plaster. Into this I poured plastic and upon curing it gave me a perfect snake skin material with all the marvelous patterning intact. Sections of this I fitted wherever was appropriate in the head, the cheeks, the neck and so on, until the results took on a serpent-like appearance." (Ibid.)

The Reptile is available on DVD from Anchor Bay.