Few horror filmmakers manage to make the "A" list with both fright film fans and movie critics, but Curtis Harrington has achieved just that.  His quirky, polished, and darkly artistic little terror gems have won a wide following and he's now being "re-discovered" by fans who are learning to their relief that living horror directors aren't limited to Wes Craven and John Carpenter.  In fact, these fans are becoming quite intoxicated when they sample, thanks to VHS and DVD...

By HARVEY CHARTRAND

Master of the macabre Curtis Harrington has had a penchant for the strange and sinister ever since he was a toddler. In 1935, at the tender age of seven, Harrington coaxed his mother to take him to a screening of The Raven. The experience left a deep imprint on his psyche.

Through the early 1940s to mid-1950s, Harrington made several experimental shorts in 8-mm and 16-mm, including The Fall Of the House Of Usher, Fragment Of Seeking and The Wormwood Star. He acted in Kenneth Anger's classic 1954 avant-garde short Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (playing Cesare the somnambulist from The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari).

An assistant to producer Jerry Wald, Harrington became an associate producer in 1955, working on such pictures as The Long Hot Summer, Mardi Gras, Peyton Place, Hound-Dog Man and The Stripper. Harrington wrote and directed his first theatrical feature in 1960: the atmospheric fantasy Night Tide, starring Dennis Hopper as a sailor on leave, entranced by a mysterious lady who might just be a homicidal mermaid.

Elegant horror has been Harrington's forte since he embarked on his Hollywood directing career 43 years ago. His oeuvre ranges from horrific science-fiction (Queen Of Blood) to the demonic possession tale (Ruby) and the twisted thrillers Games, What's The Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo? and The Killing Kind.

Harrington also worked regularly in television through the '70s and early ‘80s, helming such acclaimed horror TV-movies as The Cat Creature, How Awful About Allan,  The Dead Don’t Die, and Killer Bees, as well as episodes of the TV anthology series Tales Of The Unexpected, The Twilight Zone, and Darkroom.

In 2000, after a 15-year pause, Harrington resumed his directing career, filming Usher, a 38-minute version of the classic Edgar Allan Poe tale, in which he himself stars as Roderick Usher. "This film comes mainly from the intense personal relationship with the works of Poe that I’ve had for most of my life," Harrington says.

"Usher is aimed at the Poe aficionado, because anyone who loves Poe will be interested in my take on the story." Usher has won plaudits on the European film festival circuit. (In November, Harrington will be a prime honoree at the 2003 Sitges Fantasy Film Festival in Spain.)

Harrington is now trying to secure financing for his next project — Cranium, based on Paul Bailey’s 1946 horror novel Deliver Me from Eva. Cranium is a classic mad scientist story, which Harrington would film in the style of one of his favorite fright films — Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat. Harrington envisions Cranium as a story imbued with the Gothic elements of horror, but unfolding in a super-contemporary setting.

Horror-Wood interviewed Curtis Harrington on July 5.

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Curtis Harrington: That’s a question I ask myself. I seem to have been born with this fascination, because from my very earliest memories, I was always fascinated by anything to do with the mysterious or strange or with a horror element. I remember I begged my mother to take me to a horror film when I was six or seven years old. She didn’t want to do it, but I finally managed to get her to take me to see The Raven with Karloff and Lugosi.

At the point where Karloff wakes up after his facial operation and the curtains are pulled aside and he’s surrounded by mirrors and sees how horrible he looks and takes a gun and begins shooting all the mirrors, I climbed out of my chair and hid under my seat. (laughs) And my mother grabbed me and took me out of the theatre! So that was my first experience with a horror film. Even before I could read, I remember being fascinated by a huge poster of The Bride Of Frankenstein. I remember saying: "I want to see that."

CH: I wrote that for Sight and Sound. I was in London at the time. By then, I had seen the one art film in the area of horror, which is the Carl Dreyer film Vampyr. Nobody at that point had ever written about horror films. I think Ghoulies and Ghosties was the first serious critical article about horror films. I could be mistaken, but no one has ever told me to the contrary. That essay came out of my enthusiasm for the horror film.

CH: She was billed simply as "Cameron," the name she went by. Marjorie Cameron was very involved in the world of the occult at a serious level.

She was a disciple of Alastair Crowley (a notorious necromancer--HC). At the same time, she had a huge talent as a painter. That was how I related to her primarily. I made a short film about her paintings called The Wormwood Star. It deals to a certain extent with her occultism by inference, but I wanted to commemorate her work as an artist.

I was happy with her performance in Night Tide. She was not an actress, but she was quite adequate for that part. The language she speaks at the beginning to the girl in the nightclub scene is Greek, which she learned phonetically. So the pronunciation to a Greek may be very peculiar.

CH: In 1967, I was under contract to Universal (where I was making Games) and I determined to use my position there to uncover the original materials of The Old Dark House, because I knew that the film would simply vanish, since the rights to the story had been resold and it had been remade by Columbia (the 1963 version starred Tom Poston and was directed by William Castle--HC).

I knew that Universal no longer owned the rights to the story. They simply owned the film and it would have no further commercial value for the studio. The Old Dark House was moldering somewhere in a Universal vault. So I set out to rescue it. All the costs of copying and restoring it were borne by Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

The head of Eastman House at the time was a man named James Card, who was a great supporter of the cause of film. I contacted him and the Museum of Modern Art film library. Card responded immediately. He was so thrilled that I had uncovered this material. He said Eastman House would bear all the restoration costs. Even once I had discovered it, Universal wouldn’t have bothered to restore it.

I’m very proud of having saved this film. If it weren’t for me, The Old Dark House would have been lost. When I found the negative, the first reel was already disintegrating. They had a lavender protection print (a fine-grain projection print from which a new negative could be struck--HC.). We had to make a new dupe negative of the first reel. So the quality of the first reel is not as good as the rest of the film, which is copied from the original negative.

CH: There is no "confusion" about Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. Since my name is not on the film, how can I possibly be associated with it? Some idiot film buff said: "Oh, Curtis Harrington worked on that!" I don’t know how the rumor got out, because I totally disavow any connection with the film other than the simple fact that I helped Roger Corman shoot three additional scenes with Basil Rathbone to put in the film so it would have an American name in it.

But 99% of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet is an old Soviet film dubbed in English (Planeta Bur/Cosmonauts on Venus directed by Pavel Klusantshev--HC.). So how could I possibly have anything to do with it?

CH: Queen of Blood is my film. We only used some of the special effects footage from the Soviet film that we could not have possibly filmed on the kind of budget we had. (The Soviet film was Mechte Navstrechu/A Dream Come True, directed by Mikhail Karzhukov and Otar Koberidze. — Ed.)

But I directed 90% of the footage in Queen Of Blood. When I saw Alien, I realized it was the same story but greatly enhanced and augmented on a high budget. I was in no position to sue Twentieth Century Fox, but I do think that the plot of Queen Of Blood was grossly stolen by Alien’s screenwriters. I’m sure they saw Queen Of Blood.

CH: Tony Perkins had just come off the very expensive Catch-22. I remember saying when I first met him, "Tony, you’ve just completed work on a major motion picture and now you’re going to do your first TV-movie on an extremely limited budget and a short schedule." He said, "Don’t worry, I understand that." I needn’t have worried, because Tony was a consummate pro. I never had any trouble with him and grew to like him very much. He had a wonderful sense of humor.

In How Awful About Allan, Tony plays a person who has hysterical blindness. Because he didn’t want to rehearse or act blind, he went to the bother himself (before we started filming) of having his optometrist prepare opaque contact lenses for him to wear, so that every time Tony was acting blind, he really was blind on the set. He had to be led onto the set by an assistant, and led away, because he couldn’t see.

CH: If you saw Ruby on the screen in 1977, you saw the original version. If you saw it on video, you did not see the original version. A great deal of the original footage, but not all of it, has been restored on the new VHS and DVD release.

For years, a completely truncated and ludicrous version that did not have my name on it was the only version of Ruby you could see. I was not fired from Ruby, as has been reported. I shot the entire picture. The producer, Steve Krantz, spread rumors and lies about me. The truth of the matter is that I shot and cut the whole film. The producer made some ludicrous and damaging cuts to the film before it was released, but it was all my footage. That’s what was released in theatres and that essentially is the version that is available now--finally!--on VHS and DVD.

Ruby was released in theatres by Dimension Films and it was the biggest moneymaking independent film before Halloween. So as an exploitation/horror film, Ruby did very well. Then the producer wanted to get a deal with the CBS network.

At that time, they had late-night showings of films. CBS’s Standards and Practices department went through the film and decided what was acceptable to the TV audience and what wasn’t. Since there was a great deal of violence in Ruby, S&P systematically cut out all those scenes. As a result, Ruby was now not long enough to be shown. So the producer decided on his own--I had nothing to do with it nor did he even consult me--to make a TV version for CBS.

He hired an inconsequential, unknown director to direct some additional scenes. Krantz didn’t want to pay for any of the principals, so he took a couple of extras who had been in a scene in a truck, and made them into characters. And he wrote all these new scenes himself. He was a terrible writer. So there are these utterly extraneous and meaningless scenes that are just stuck in there to add time to the footage.

That’s the version that came out originally on VHS, for some obscure reason. I don’t know why they didn’t release the original version, because they wouldn’t have had the same strictures as network television. When I saw that, I immediately went to the Director’s Guild and had my name officially taken off it. So it was released on VHS as a picture directed by Alan Smithee.

Ruby has been mostly restored, but there’s a lot of stuff missing from it still. They seem to have had a big problem finding all the proper footage. Steve Krantz was the worst producer I ever worked for. Whenever I’m interviewed, I’m very delighted to say what a bastard and a son of a bitch he was.

CH: I hope so. I had a very interesting experience just a couple of nights ago. An art gallery over in Venice shows films every week on a large projection video screen. They showed Usher and Night Tide (which was largely shot in Venice). There was an audience of about 50 people there in a small space filled to overflowing. There were people standing out on the street looking through the windows. We had a lively Q&A session after the screening.

I was very pleased at the number of thirtysomethings who would tell me that they discovered my films when they were 12 or 15 years old and realized that these films were different; they had interesting and eccentric characters. And then these thirty-ish individuals said they began to follow my work. So, a certain number of people through the years have singled out my films as something special and that’s very gratifying to me.

CH: Session 9 was good. I was very impressed with that film. It was really creepy. But overall I’d have to agree that horror is becoming a lost art in films. I think this is because of the onslaught of slasher films (all of the Friday the 13th series). Then we had the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween series. The first ones might have been fresh, but then they latch onto a stale formula. So I think the horror film has been diminished by all these series. Then we come to the mock slasher films that are funny, like Scary Movie.

It’s the same thing that happened to Dracula and Frankenstein. They started doing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Well, the whole medium went out the window at that point, because then it becomes a big joke. So I think the horror film today suffers from this. That’s why Session 9 was so good, because in its way, it was very fresh and it was really creepy. It was the real thing, and we get very little of that.

And although they aren’t strictly horror films, the films of David Lynch are the best thing we have today that is close to the genre, at least, because they are completely authentic, original and very creepy.

H-W: Any future projects you’d care to tell us about?

CH: I want to make a character-driven horror movie. I’ve had a script for a classical horror film that I’ve long wanted to do called Cranium. I’m going off to a Spanish film festival in the fall and I hope to meet with the people at Filmax/Fantastic Factory, the Spanish company that specializes in horror films.

(Note: The studio recently bankrolled Stuart Gordon’s Dagon and Brian Yuzna’s Beyond Re-Animator. We wish Curtis Harrington the very best of luck in his dealings with Filmax. --H.C.)

Thanks, Harv, for the great interview with Curtis Harrington.  It's wonderful to know that he's still working, still producing the high-water horror that's made him into both a cult and a movie critic icon.  For giving us a restored The Old Dark House, he deserves our undying gratitude, but, of course, he's done so much more.  He is truly a living master of the movie macabre.

Article and interview copyright © Harvey Chartrand

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