|
Although the eyes can be the most expressive part of the face, the "face" of film fright has rarely focused on that particular pair of organs. Too bad, because when it comes to visceral horror in the movies, usually...
By J. KNIGHT I must say, I am shocked...shocked at the paucity of eyeball movies available to us fans of the genre, or sub-genre or whatever it is. You would think that the Fifties in particular would have been overflowing with eyeball movies. When it comes to eyeball movies on DVD and VHS, we should be, well, up to our eyeballs in them. But no. The eyeball has been sadly underutilized as a source of easy horror and cheesy special effects, unless there's a huge stockpile of these films that I've somehow turned a blind eye to. I've uncovered only a few items worth highlighting.
The apple of my eye is 1958's The Crawling Eye, also known as The Tollenberg Terror, Creature from Another World, The Creeping Eye and The Flying Eye. The term "high concept" hadn't been invented in 1958, but if it had, you'd have found The Crawling Eye (as it's most commonly known in the USA) hailed as a glorious example: "Giant, tentacled eyeballs from outer space use their alien powers to reanimate corpses and send zombies to murder telepathic earthlings!" That's enough concept to fuel at least three separate low-budget s-f thrillers, all mushed together into one gooey delight. As a bonus, the only man who can stop these alien orbs is...Forrest Tucker of F-Troop fame! But don't worry, he has help from the dishy Janet Munro (in her last film role before signing up with Disney) and Larry Storch is nowhere to be seen.
The chills build up nicely as scientists discover a strange cloud hanging around a mountain peak. As climbers begin to lose certain key pieces of equipment (namely, their heads), suspicion mounts that something evil lurks within the cloud. The tourist trade in the vicinity of the cloud drops to nothin, so the cloud must go on the prowl to find new victims, leading to the film's most effective sequences as the fog rolls in and the eyeball rolls out. The special effects budget for The Crawling Eye was well into the triple digits, but it probably wasn't much more. Still, the movie is tightly plotted and delivers some genuine chills along with the derisive laughs.
The Crawling Eye raises questions, though, about what precisely qualifies as an "eye" film. The cyclopean aliens in The Crawling Eye could almost qualify as "brains," and if we include them, as we must (after all, three of the film's five titles call the aliens "eyes"), then the strict guidelines of scientific categorization require us to consider other one-eyed aliens of similar ilk. For instance, there's the alien eyeball in 1959's The Atomic Submarine which could be the crawling eye's first cousin. Certainly it shares the crawling eye's malevolence and determination to wipe out the human race, and the notion that the alien is "bio-organic"—the ship and the alien are one and the same—fits nicely with the lack of visible spacecraft in The Crawling Eye.
I know: "bio-organic" is kind of like saying that a carrot is "veggie-carroty" and doesn't imply diddly about space travel, but the screenwriter, Orville Hampton (AKA Owen Harris) is better known for the quantity of his output than the quality. If we let The Atomic Submarine's alien into the eyeball club, we have to consider the monocular star of It Came From Outer Space. In this case, the screen time is so minimal and the alien so strongly resembles a giant thumb that I'd be tempted to tell It, "Sorry, but we've reached legal capacity, try again some other night."
Another movie I'd stop at the door is 1965's The Eye Creatures, AKA Attack of the the Eye Creatures directed by schlockmeister Larry Buchanan. Whoa, did you catch that "double the"? Yep, when The Eye Creatures was re-released and someone had the bright idea to add "Attack of the" to the title, an extra "the" crept in and movie history was made as either, a) no one noticed, or b) no one cared. Indeed, there's little reason to care about these eye creatures. To begin with, the movie is a remake of 1957's Invasion of the Saucer Men, a campy film even in its time but one that features makeup and special effects man Paul Blaisdell's classic bulbous-headed aliens and a crawling eyeball-hand that, by all rights, I should have included in my Horror-wood article "The Hand, Digits of Death." The multi-orbed eye creatures in Attack of the the Eye Creatures (I can't help rubbing their noses in it) are clumsy and uninteresting by comparison to the Saucer Men.
Still another film demands consideration only via its title: Roger Corman's 1955 chiller, The Beast with a Million Eyes. Beast opens promisingly enough with lightning and storm clouds that part to reveal...the Earth in space! A sinister voice declares, "I need this world!" An eyeball introduces itself as an alien from "millions of light years away," then goes on to brag about how it's going to take over the birds of the air, the animals of the forest, then the weakest of men, all of whom will do its bidding. "And because I see your most secret acts," proclaims the eyeball, "you will know me as...The Beast with a Million Eyes!" Some very cool title cards ensue and from this point on, it's all downhill thrill-wise. Beast was film #4 in a four-film deal and, like the runt pig who showed up last at the feeding trough, Beast's budget had already been consumed by the three prior films. Which is why the Beast's spaceship-in-flight looks to be footage from a 1920s Russian silent film, and why the spaceship-on-Earth looks like a step-pedal trash can with a whirlygig on top, and why all the action takes place on a ranch in the middle of the desert.
Corman must have hired screenwriter Tom Filer for a bottle of hooch and a place to flop for the night. To say that the writing in Beast is better than a sharp stick in the eye is going out on a limb. Filer went on to write the story, but not the screenplay, for 1958's The Space Children before wisely giving up the writing thing. For instance, one of the six humans in the story, a brain-damaged mute, is known only as Him...except when he's referred to as Carl. There is an explanation of sorts for this lapse, but it's as thin and fishy as the rest of the film. Characters walk into and out of scenes almost at random and the best performance is turned in by a mad cow. All in all, if you can miss only one low-budget horror film on television this year, make it The Beast with a Million Eyes.
Corman redeemed himself in 1963 with the release of "X" The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Ray Milland stars as Doctor Xavier, a dedicated scientist searching for a better x-ray. He finds it within the human eyeball , but only by breaking the prime directive of scientists throughout history, "Never experiment on yourself!" Xavier does what any sensible man would do given x-ray vision—he hangs around outside the women's locker room at the local health club. No, no...I made that up. Xavier is a man of medicine and behaves admirably. Well, until he shoves that guy out the window and has to go on the lam as a carnival mentalist.
A terrific story with a shocker ending, this is one of those films that cries out for a remake. Today's special effects would send this one over the top. Turning our eyes to the continent, we discover the 1959 French film Les Yeux sans Visage which translates as The Eyes Without a Face (or possibly, given that my high school French is a bit rusty, My Aunt's Pen is Stuck in my Ear). Along the lines of The Hands of Orlac, Les Yeux sans Visage tells the story of Professor Genessier, a brilliant surgeon—aren't surgeons all brilliant in these films?—who removes the faces of his victims in order to graft them onto the head of his disfigured daughter. The attempts fail, which means that maybe the professor isn't so brilliant as he thinks. Les Yeux sans Visage, AKA The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, is a genuine thriller and not for the faint of heart. Reportedly, audience members fainted at the premiere as Genessier coldly sliced the face from a living victim. The film's influence on cinema has been compared to that of John Carpenter's Halloween, an effective chiller that spawned the entire Serial Killer Stalks Horny Teens sub-genre.
Les Yeux sans Visage inspired a spate of medical horror films such as the 1962 Spanish rip-off Gritos en la noche (literally, Screams in the Night) released in the USA in 1964 as The Awful Dr. Orloff. None of the imitations could match Les Yeux sans Visage's haunting cinematography or Edith Scob's memorable portrayal of the disfigured daughter, Christiane Genessier. Also remade as the Italian Gli Occhi Dentro in 1994. Once again, it's stretching the definition to call Les Yeux sans Visage an eyeball film. Getting closer, though, is The Hypnotic Eye. Released in 1960 and weighing in at a slight seventy-nine minutes, The Hypnotic Eye is the story of a hypnotist with an eye for women. In this case, the eye is in the palm of his hand. It's a mechanical device in the shape of a human eye that flashes a hypnotic light at people. Okay, it's no Tollenberg Terror, but at least it's an eyeball of sorts, and the film sports some delightfully grisly deaths.
In the late seventies, John Carpenter wrote and Irvin Kershner directed and Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones and Brad Dourif starred in The Eyes of Laura Mars. Someone is killing models and Laura Mars (Dunaway) has a psychic link to the killer that forces her to witness the murders through his eyes. For a movie that seems to have everything going for it—director, screenwriter, cast—The Eyes of Laura Mars still manages to disappoint. But then, most of the seventies were that way, such as the 1977 Ford Granada I used to own that, like The Eyes of Laura Mars, just kind of lurched along until it blew up. I want to give special commendation to one of my favorite films, Village of the Damned (the 1960 British version, not the godawful remake), for its subtle yet unsettling use of glowing golden eyes to turn the sweet faces of innocent children into a haunting and enduring image of cold evil. Brrr. Followed by the inferior Children Of The Damned.
And that, sadly, is that. Tragic, isn't it, that this organ of terror, featured as a supporting player in practically every horror film ever made, has so seldom been given the opportunity to take center stage? Like an old character actor who can always been counted upon to show up, often sober, and deliver his lines, the eyeball is always there for us fans, glowing or gazing with reptilian malevolence or sometimes just all white and creepy. But the starring roles are few and far between. The eyeball deserves better. (J. Knight is the author of the supernatural thriller Risen. Risen can be sampled, along with many other worldly delights, on J's Website.) Thanks, J. Knight! Although there aren't a lot of "eye" horror flicks to cast your orbs on, there's enough to detect a theme..."seeing" is "believing," especially when what's staring back is of monstrous proportions. Article copyright © J. Knight |
