| "Yet (Karen) Black insists that she is not a horror person. "Horror has nothing to do with who I really am," she claims. "It’s kind of a mistake, my being typecast like that."." |  |
| "Yet (Karen) Black insists that she is not a horror person. "Horror has nothing to do with who I really am," she claims. "It’s kind of a mistake, my being typecast like that."." | |
Karen Black's films (likely
an incomplete list): |
Guess who started her career with Herschell Gordon "Blood Feast" Lewis, starred with Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson in counter-culture films, and wrestled a Zuni doll? Yes, it's Karen Black. By the way, that Zuni doll is just one part of...
The lovely and talented Karen Black--star of such Seventies classics as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and Day Of The Locust--is also a veteran of numerous horror films. Yet Black insists that she is not a horror person. "Horror has nothing to do with who I really am," she claims. "It’s kind of a mistake, my being typecast like that." This is hard to square with the fact that Black served as the inspiration for a punk/Goth band called "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black," making her the only actress in history to have a rock band named after her. Black, an accomplished singer/composer, occasionally performs with the band.
Black is now making a comeback on the arthouse and independent film circuit (as actress, writer and director) and is writing the book for a Broadway musical. Her cinematic output since The Prime Time, her first film (made in Chicago for future gore filmmakers Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman in 1960) is staggering: 130 productions, of which 21 would qualify as "horror." She has also made many guest appearances on television, sometimes in spooky shows such as Ghost Story, The Hitchhiker and Worlds Beyond. Black was superb in The Pyx (1973), a macabre tale with religious overtones, set in Montreal, in which she played a doomed prostitute pursued by a cult of devil worshipers. Some critics said her performance was deserving of an Academy Award.
Black’s extraordinary versatility and chameleon-like ability to transform herself was showcased in the 1975 TV-movie Trilogy Of Terror, a trio of macabre tales by horror writer Richard Matheson, directed by Dan Curtis, in which she played four different roles. The standout episode is Prey--in which Black battles a killer Zuni fetish doll in her Manhattan apartment. Legend has it that Prey was so intense, network executives asked Curtis to cut back on some of the shocks. "I think what was not used were scenes where I’m trying to get out through a window and then a door," Black says. "I don’t know why those sequences were so scary, but they were cut. Trilogy Of Terror was certainly a big acting challenge. It’s one of the films I’m most remembered for, because there is a lot of me in it."
Burnt Offerings (1976) was her second horror film for genre director Dan Curtis. This haunted house movie has some spine-chilling moments--notably Black’s transformation into a frightening old woman in the horrifying finale. In this final scene played against a trembling Oliver Reed, Black was able to project an aura of utter evil. "We had problems with the makeup for that scene," Black recalls. "Dick Smith was called in and he sat down with me and said: "Karen, tell me what happened to your character." I said: "Well, my character isn’t present. She is gone. There is nobody home. She is out of there." So Dick Smith gave me smoky white lenses. He didn’t try to make me look old, because I wasn’t. My character just thought she was old and gray-haired. Dick gave me strange eyebrows – lumpy and blonde--a protruding brow that gave me a devil look."
Working with director Gordon Hessler (Murders In The Rue Morgue, Cry Of The Banshee), Black plays a housewife with a dual personality in the excellent made-for-TV movie The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver (1976), also scripted by Matheson. This is the engrossing tale of a woman who grows obsessed with a painting that resembles her; she finds out the history of the deceased lady who posed for it and gradually takes on her personality. The same year, she played a woman possessed with the desire for fine diamonds (at any price) in Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot. Almost a decade later, Black turns up in Cut and Run (also known as Straight To Hell), a 1985 gorefest directed by Ruggero Deodato, who had achieved notoriety with his Cannibal Holocaust in 1979. Black plays the mother of a missing TV journalist in this tale of drug smuggling, cults and savage tribal assassins set in Amazonia. Black then returned to Montreal to co-star in The Blue Man (also known as Eternal Evil), a mediocre tale of the supernatural in which a dissatisfied TV commercial director (Winston Rekert) is taught to astrally project himself by a mysterious woman (Black, looking very hippie-esque). He soon does it against his will as he sleeps, committing savage murders while astral projecting.
In 1987, Black co-starred with Michael Moriarty in Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive III: Island Of The Alive, about mutant babies. Black had wanted to work with acclaimed B-movie director Cohen ever since she saw a midnight screening of It’s Alive! in 1974. "I thought it was one of the great horror films. It has almost legendary stature. As a voting member of the Academy, I even nominated (It’s Alive! star) John P. Ryan for a Best Actor Award. So when Larry called me to do It’s Alive III, I said: ‘Oh my God, of course!’" Black then appeared in Out Of The Dark (1988), a routine comedy/horror picture with a sexy angle: beautiful young women working for a phone-sex company are stalked by a psychotic killer. In the Carrie rip-off Mirror, Mirror (1990), Black assumes her most sinister screen persona as the overbearing (and soon-to-be-skewered) mother of a troubled Goth girl who discovers an evil presence in a mirror, one that does her bidding.
Fred Olen Ray’s Haunting Fear (1990) is very loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial. This clumsy low-budgeter has housewife Brinke Stevens suffering from nightmares about being buried alive, while her husband and his mistress plot to get her money. Black plays a supporting role as Stevens’ doctor. In Evil Spirits (1990), Black stars as the owner of a boarding house who hears the voice of her dead husband telling her to kill her residents in order to cash their government cheques. In 1991, Black traveled to Wisconsin to star in Children Of The Night, about vampires taking over a small town. She was one of the few "names" in this movie which was produced by Fangoria magazine. "I enjoyed playing this larger-than-life character--a vampire who sleeps underwater. I looked yellow and purple with great big fangs and cheekbone prosthetics reshaping my face. They even made a mask of my face, which broke the surface of the water!"
In Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies (1993), Black essays the role of a devil-worshiping woman who sends out her four beautiful nieces to lure men back to her place so they can be killed, ground up and sold as meat pies. Black was again the epitome of evil in Ménage à Trois, a startling 1997 episode of the erotic thriller anthology series The Hunger. Black portrays Miss Gati, a wealthy and coldly manipulative paraplegic who switches bodies with her attractive young maid, in order to indulge in depraved sexual practices with the hunky butler.
In another homage to Ed Wood, Black appears in a cameo as a circus performer with a whip in I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998), based on an unproduced script by the legendary Z-movie director. This curiosity is basically a filmed nightmare or hallucination about the misadventures of the Thief (Billy Zane), a psychopath who escapes from an asylum, robs a loan office, loses the money, then wanders around killing people while trying to find it. None of the characters speak. "People love this film," Black says. "They go crazy when they see it!"
Black has a strong supporting role in Soulkeeper (2001), with Brad Dourif, Michael Ironside and Robert Davi. In this horror-comedy, two thieves down on their luck are hired to steal the Rock of Lazarus, an ancient relic capable of returning evil souls to earth. Black plays Magnificent Martha, a levitating clairvoyant who is possessed by satanic forces. "I saw the film and I’m very convincing when I turn into the Devil," Black observes. "It was a little like my transformation at the end of Burnt Offerings." Black has one of her best roles in years in House Of 1000 Corpses, directed by horror rock superstar Rob Zombie. She plays Mother Firefly, a nymphomaniac who lives in an old, abandoned house. Universal Pictures spent a ton of money on House Of 1000 Corpses, and then dumped it, because studio executives thought Zombie’s masterwork was too violent. He is still looking for a studio to buy the film from Universal and distribute it.
"Mother Firefly is a wonderful part," Black says. "She’s an attractive Okie who wears a long blonde wig and is scarcely dressed. She’s real sexy!" Other horror films in which Black has appeared include: Killer Fish (1978), Night Angel (1990), Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996), Light Speed (1998) and Oliver Twisted (2000). Thanks, Hank, for delving into the incredible "body" of work that comprises Karen Black's career and coming up with such choice "corpses." As Satch of the Bowery Boys used to say, Karen Black on film always makes a "corpus delicious." Article copyright © Hank Reardon |
