Month: October 2022 (Page 6 of 7)

* (Halloween countdown post #10)

 

‘Edward L. Cahn was an American second-feature director of Polish ancestry. His brother Philip Cahn worked in the industry as editor. Edward worked in films from 1917 as a production assistant. He later joined his brother in the cutting room of Universal, eventually becoming one of the studio’s top editors (he did the last-minute re-cuts of the prestigious war drama All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)). From 1931, Cahn assumed the director’s chair, turning out cheap and cheerful crime melodramas and comedies. He became a mainstay of the MGM shorts department from 1935-49. He is best known for directing Our Gang comedies from 1939 to 1943. Having gone pretty much unnoticed, his directing career began to pick up in the 1950s. Ever conscious of public demand, the imperturbable pipe-smoking Mr. Cahn turned his attention to trendy teenage rebellion films and schlock science-fiction (with a special penchant for zombies).

‘His films during this period range from the sublime to the absurd, from the inspired to the ridiculous. Some are bad enough to be (almost) enjoyable (particularly after a glass of wine or two). Point in case: Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), which somehow manages to combine mobsters, Nazis, zombies and atomic power, all in one package. Just as awful was The She-Creature (1956), featuring the lovely Marla English reverting into an extremely silly looking anthropomorphic sea monster (Cahn was able to re-use the same papier-mâché-and-plastic creation for the equally inept Voodoo Woman (1957)).

‘Rather more fun (though little more than a pastiche of The Mummy (1932)) was Curse of the Faceless Man (1958), in which a 2000-year-old calcified creature found near Pompeii returns to life to claim a lost love. Invasion of the Hell Creatures (1957) was unintentionally funny, but at least featured decent creature effects. Sadly, dialogue and script were corn straight off the cob. It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) was arguably the best of Cahn’s offerings (it was said to be the inspiration for Alien (1979)). It was tautly directed and (as so often happens) only let down at the end by the monster being revealed as just another guy in an unshapely rubber suit. The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959) resumed Cahn’s preoccupation with zombies and voodoo. At the center of the plot is an evil head-shrinking Swiss anthropologist (a suitably sinister performance by the brilliant Henry Daniell) who just happens to be a reincarnated Ecuadorian witch doctor. Unfortunately, though there is some visual style to the enterprise, the film as a whole can only be described as tame.

‘Cahn maintained an extremely prolific output through the early 1960s, working for AIP and United Artists on westerns and teen exploitation dramas right up until a year before his death at the age of 64.’ — I.S.Mowis

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Edward L. Cahn @ IMDb
The Films of Edward L. Cahn – by Michael E. Grost
ELC @ MUBI
“Fast Eddie” – the Films of Edward L. Cahn
ELC @ Letterboxd
Edward L. Cahn | The Invisible Man
EDWARD L. CAHN: L’Empereur du Drive-in
Bertrand Tavernier on Edward L Cahn’s ‘Afraid To Talk’
The Road to Hell: Three Early Films of Edward L. Cahn
INVASION OF THE SAUCER-MEN

 

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5 Our Gang Comedies directed by Edward L. Cahn

Fish Hooky (1933)

Our Gang Follies 1935

Our Gang Follies of 1938

Waldo’s Last Stand (1940)

Our Gang Follies of 1942

 

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The Doomed and The Damned: When The Clock Strikes and the Films of Edward L. Cahn
by Winston Wheeler Dixon

 

“Sitting in his chair, waving his pipe, he came on like [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt with a cape. He was the first one who gave me a cold chill of what it must be like to be a has-been.”
— Charles B. Griffith, screenwriter (as qtd. in McGee, 51)

“Eddie Cahn was the kind of a fella, especially on a small show, that wanted to show how fast he could go. So he’d start a scene and then step in front of the camera and yell ‘Cut!’ and then point to the next place where the next set-up was going.”
— John Agar, actor (as qtd. in McGee, 51)

“It isn’t what I want — it’s what I must do.”
Henry Daniell as Dr. Emil Zurich in Cahn’s The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)

I’ve never met Dave Kehr, who writes a column on DVDs for The New York Times, regularly contributes to the journal Film Comment, and also maintains a blog on the web, or even corresponded with him, but it seems that we have similar tastes. I write on Josef von Steinberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), and so does he; I praise noir director Bernard Vorhaus in a post in my Frame by Frame blog, and in the pages of Film Comment, Kehr weighs in on Vorhaus’s career as well. I’m not implying any “cause and effect” pattern here — it’s simply obvious that we both admire the same sorts of films. So I was pleased to read Kehr’s excellent essay, “Shadow World,” published in the November / December 2011 issue of Film Comment, on the maudit director Edward L. Cahn, one of the truly damned and doomed figures of the cinema. Not that many people appreciate Cahn’s work – he’s hardly a household name, for many reasons – and Kehr’s piece came as a welcome surprise. As Kehr wrote of Cahn,

With remarkable consistency for so prolific a filmmaker, he portrays a world of relentless cruelty and callousness, where even cowboy heroes kill without compunction and where betrayal within a couple is simply something to be anticipated and planned for. His characters move through a half-formed shadow world of flimsy surfaces and generic, impersonal objects; they lurch along seemingly sapped of all independent volition. At best, they are impelled by greed (the crime films are frequently centered on a treasure hunt), rage (Cahn’s Western heroes are almost always out to avenge the murder of a father or brother), or sheer, mindless destructiveness (embodied by the many different varieties of zombies that inhabit Cahn’s horror films). But in the end, all they know is that they must keep moving — it’s that or cease to exist.

Yes, they didn’t call him “Fast Eddie” for nothing. Despite his considerable bulk, Cahn could move through a script at lightning speed, knocking off setups with an inspired, manic precision that only the truly gifted — or cursed — possess. In his lifetime, Cahn directed no fewer than 71 features and innumerable shorts before his death in 1963, and his distinctly detached visual signature, coupled with the unremitting bleakness of his personal vision, is present in nearly all his work. Born on February 12, 1899 in Brooklyn, NY, Cahn attended UCLA and broke into the film business in the mid 1920s as an editor at Universal, working at night to pay his college tuition. This apprenticeship served him well in his later career, as Cahn early on learned how to piece a scene together with minimal, yet efficient coverage, and by 1926, Cahn was head of the Editorial Department at Universal. So, for the moment, his career seemed on track. …

Finally, in late 1955, Cahn got his break, directing the astonishingly graphic and bizarre horror/crime/science-fiction thriller The Creature with the Atom Brain, in which the reanimated bodies of dead gangsters, remotely controlled by an unscrupulous criminal mastermind and his assistant, a renegade ex-Nazi scientist, wreak havoc by pulling casino robberies, committing murder, and thus amassing a “war chest” of stolen funds with which to take over the United States government.

Some measure of the sheer viciousness of The Creature with the Atom Brain can be gleaned from the film’s opening moments, in which one of the revived corpses, possessed of super human strength, breaks into a mob-run casino, lifts a mob leader over his head, and without a moment’s hesitation, snaps the hood’s body in two like so much firewood. Made for Columbia in a mere six days, under the notoriously penurious producer Sam Katzman, The Creature with the Atom Brain managed to do what all of Cahn’s other work had not — it put him firmly on the map as a feature director, but with one qualification — his films were now mostly 6-day affairs, with budgets in the $100,000 range, and he would never again have a shot at the true “A” feature.

But there was plenty of work, and suddenly Cahn was in demand. The then-fledgling American International Pictures grabbed Cahn and put him to work directing lurid teen exploitation films such as Girls in Prison, The She-Creature, Run Away Daughters, Shake, Rattle and Rock (all 1956), and then Voodoo Woman, Dragstrip Girl, Invasion of the Saucer Men and the bluntly named Motorcycle Gang (all 1957). By this time, Cahn had established himself firmly as a “speed artist,” someone who could bring in any picture, regardless of genre, in on time and on or under budget, but paradoxically, his work never betrayed the haste with which it was made. As Kehr accurately observes,

[. . .] Cahn seemed to embrace the aesthetic of speed with a passion and personal commitment not always apparent in the work of his more feverishly productive Poverty Row peers. On a level of production where simple coherence is rare, his work seldom if ever seems sloppy or indifferent. The framing is careful and varied, the lighting studied and expressive, the eyeline matches execute with classical precision — all evidence of the extensive planning that Cahn (who began in the silent era as an editor) invested in his work, and which reportedly allowed him to film an astonishing 40 setups a day.

Indeed, although their subject matter was very different, Cahn’s late films remind me inescapably of the work of Robert Bresson, the idiosyncratic French director known for his assured, measured style, in which each shot follows the one before it with almost mathematical precision. And, like Bresson – director of the noirish existential thriller Pickpocket (1959) and other equally dark films – Cahn seemed to identify with his protagonists; they’re society’s outcasts, the losers, the ones who can’t win. They’re Cahn’s people; he knows them, and they know him.

Then, in 1958, stepping way from AIP, Allied Artists and Columbia, Cahn found the perfect partner for his brutal, unrelenting, hyperdriven vision: Robert E. Kent, a producer and screenwriter so prolific that he scripted his films under not only his own name, but under a variety of pseudonyms as well. In Edward L. Cahn, Kent found a soulmate — someone who wanted to make genre films quickly and efficiently, and at the same time, bring their own mordant worldview to the screen, in the guise of genre entertainment. Working under a variety of corporate banners, such as Vogue, Zenith, Harvard, Peerless and Premium, and releasing their films, astonishingly, through the rather upscale company United Artists, Kent and Cahn formed a team that would create a blistering barrage of films that form the bulk of the director’s true legacy. Cahn’s bleak worldview – fatalistic, stillborn, embracing nihilism as its guiding light, was at last allowed free reign.

Starting with It! — The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), which famously served as the template for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) 21 years later, Cahn and Kent began knocking out a wild series of outré, violent noir/crime thrillers, of which the title usually tells all — Curse of the Faceless Man (the dead return to life); King Kong Confidential (exoticist crime in Asia); Guns, Girls and Gangsters (is any explanation needed?), Jet Attack (got it?) and Suicide Battalion (again, a war picture with a pretty obvious narrative trajectory). Astonishingly, all these films were made in one year — 1958.

(cont.)

 

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Edward L. Cahn’s 11 horror films

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The Gas House Kids in Hollywood (1947)
‘The last of the three Gas House Kids films, the very poor man’s Bowery Boys, is a threadbare comedy/spooker with Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer and a trio of chums visiting Hollywood to meet a star. Instead, they cross paths with a mad scientist, a dead body, a gruff cop and gangster Douglas Fowley = not good. One for Edward L. Cahn completists and/or fans of BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA (1952).’ — DFvideodiary

 

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Creature With The Atom Brain (1955)
‘HERE IS HORROR THAT CAN HAPPEN NOW… TO YOU! Murders, with victims dying from spines broken by brute strength, erupt in the city and the killers, when encountered, walk away unharmed by police bullets which strike them. A police doctor’s investigation of the deaths leads to the discovery of an army of dead criminal musclemen restored to life, remotely controlled by a vengeful former crime boss and a former Nazi scientist, from the latter’s laboratory hidden in the suburbs.’ — Letterboxd

Trailer

the entirety

 

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The She-Creature (1956)
‘Propelled by a dynamite poster, The She-Creature is a prime example of a ’50s monster movie. This one can boast a terrific, fairly original concept that’s never allowed to achieve its full potential. The idea comes straight from the culture buzz surrounding the contemporary Bridey Murphy controversy. A carnival mountebank keeps a beautiful young woman under his hypnotic control, combining the Bridey Murphy reincarnation-regression hokum with visual opportunities from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Svengali. The script might remind people of MGM’s Forbidden Planet as well: the primordial monster in this show is basically an “Id Demon” set loose from a female soul. “Hell hath no fury,” the saying goes.’ — Glenn Erickson

the entirety

 

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Voodoo Woman (1957)
‘From Edward L. Cahn and American International Pictures comes the pulpy horror stuff of Voodoo Woman.

‘Somewhere in the depths of Africa, an American mad scientist attempts to mix “black voodoo” with “white” science with an eye to creating a superhuman. When his experiments on a native woman fail to bring sustainable results (she’s too nice, won’t kill on command), he turns to black-hearted treasure hunter Marlilyn (a vampy, oozy, and excellent Marla English), who has no such qualms.

‘The stereotypes of the black characters depict a deeply baked in racism. Not that Voodoo Woman is any worse than many others, but rather that these were pretty standard caricatures common to popular culture of the day. Marla and her nasty lowlife chums add a seediness that gives this otherwise unimpressive monster movie grit and teeth.

‘“What’s in it for you, Doc? The usual?”
“The…very unusual.”’ –– Ken Coffelt

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Zombies of Mora Tau (1957)
‘A young woman returns to her grandmother’s residence on a forgotten island. She has dedicated her life to being basic and forgetting her dark upbringing, where voodoo and zombies were part of her traumatic childhood. On the way to the house, her driver callously runs over a shambling, seaweed-encrusted figure. The woman is shocked to her core but the driver merely says, “It was nobody”. Wow. Quite an introduction.

‘My thesis is that producer Sam Katzman and director Edward Cahn were pioneers of the zombie genre, though hacks that they were. Katzman kept returning to zombie themes in his B movies and Cahn, even under other producers, did several of these films. Romero took the theme and made it iconic in 1968.

‘I would like to see Del Toro or James Wan take this script today and do their thing. There is a germ of a great zombie movie embedded in this slapdash Columbia production, but the puritanical self-imposed codes of the day wouldn’t allow the potential. Still, there’s something creepy here about the zombified crew of an old ship, cursed to spend eternity guarding the treasure of their sunken and decomposing hulk from greedy adventurers.’ — julianblair

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Invasion of the Hell Creatures (1957)
‘There is not a lot of plot to Invasion of the Hell Creatures as its 69-minute running time consists mostly of a bunch of idiots stumbling through the woods – this includes the stupid aliens – and we also get the standard generation gap conflict between teens and authority, with the police not believing Johnny and Joan about little green men, and the subplot concerning the military’s investigation of the landed flying saucer circles the drain for awhile before exploding in a burst of flames – apparently trying to cut through the hull of a flying saucer with an acetylene torch is not a good idea – because these aliens didn’t spend the extra money to get one of those invulnerable flying saucers found in The Day the Earth Stood Still, so even if our teen heroes didn’t defeat these little buggers they were still stranded on Earth.

‘I’ll give it that the aliens in this film are decidedly creepy, special effects technician Paul Blaisdel did a great job in creating this particular alien menace and the disembodied hand of the dead one roaming around gets bonus points for creativity, but while this film was originally intended as a serious science fiction/horror film it gradually developed into a comedy and the score by Ronald Stein sounds sound so much like a sitcom that you almost expect to hear a laugh track and it really comes across as weird and out of place.’ — Michael Brooks

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Motorcycle Gang (1957)
‘The title tells practically all in the American-International exploitationer Motorcycle Gang. The film’s main conflict arises from the rivalry between “good” cyclist Randy (Steve Tyrrell) and his “bad” counterpart Nick (John Ashley). Recently released from a jail term, Nick forces Randy (who received probation for the hit-and-run accident which landed Nick in the slammer) into a clandestine race. Despite the fact that he’s a “clean” cycle-hog who likes to keep on the right side of the law, Randy agrees to the race, with near-disastrous results. One of the featured cycle punks is played by Carl Switzer, who despite his raffish appearance still closely resembles the “Alfalfa” character he’d essayed in the Our Gang comedies.’ — Hal Erickson

Trailer

 

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It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)
‘Extremely influential sci-fi romp involving a blood gorging alien wiping out members of a spaceship crew headed back to earth. Obviously a huge influence on Alien (airlock, tunnels, etc) but also one of John Carpenter’s favorite films and an influence on The Thing as well. I couldn’t help but also get a Howard Hawks Thing from Another World influence here as well, just not as quick or snappy.

‘There’s a slight lag in the middle before it picks up again for a smooth landing. The It is pretty cool but definitely a little cheesy looking (awesomely cheesy tbh) and makes me appreciate The Thing from Another World’s realistic monster portrayel even more. Watched with my huge 50’s sci-fi fan Dad, a glass or two of J & B, and popcorn. We had a blast :)’ — Ian West

Trailer

Excerpt

John Carpenter on “It! The Terror from Beyond Space”

 

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Curse of the Faceless Man (1958)
‘A mummified gladiator recovered from a Pompeiian excavation gets energized by x-rays and takes a shine to a rock-jawed researcher’s comely fiancee.

‘The only things keeping this from being a straightforward mummy movie are the European setting (ably played by some California cliffs) and the fact that this undead lover is ensconced in stone rather than bandages (ably played by something far more flexible than any stone I’ve seen). It’s not gonna change the way you think about mummy flicks, but as no-frills shambling monster movies shot in six days go, this is pretty near the cream of the crop. The creature looks suitably creepy, the leads keep straight faces, and Edward L. Cahn does his usual solid job of sneaking in a few striking compositions while keeping things under budget and devoid of logic.’ — Ira Brooker

Trailer

the entirety

 

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The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)
‘The plot involves a curse placed on the family of our main character, Jonathan Drake. Seems that there was a Drake that was involved in a massacre of indigenous peoples in the Amazon two centuries ago…and every Drake male since mysteriously dies at age 60…and is beheaded! (Though no one knows who or what is doing the beheadings).

‘The actors move through the story as though they are in a dream…like a sepulchral kabuki play (sans the histrionics). This is very effective but one doesn’t know if this was intentional or the byproduct of a rapid shooting schedule and less than top-tier thesping.’ — julianblair

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Invisible Invaders (1959)
‘This was one of John Carpenter’s VHS’s sent to me. I was sent 9 random VHS along with an autographed photo after purchasing one of his “VHS mystery boxes” from Stormking comics.

‘Not terrible, but god this is cheap. You can tell it was shot in about two weeks on a budget of about $500. Very upbeat ending. The guns used to kill the aliens are annoying as hell when they fire.’ — BryceNeel/Comrie

Trailer

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Tea, Hi, Tea. I would trade my non-kingdom for 36 hour days, you bet. When I was a kid I made a walkthrough haunted house in our basement every Halloween. It wasn’t very gory, but I did shove the visitors in a big meat locker and close the door and not let them out for a while. I think anyone who didn’t choose infinite wishes as one of their original three would be a moron frankly. Yay, Pavement. Awesome, I love them to death. They played here recently, and at first I didn’t get tickets because the whole ‘reunion’ thing bugs me when bands do it, but then I realised I was being an idiot, but by them it was sold out. My favorite Pavement song is ‘Grounded’. What’s yours? ** tomk, I’m partial to that one too. Ouch: neck. Any better now? It’s so cool to see your book being so warmly written about and you talking all around the literary internet, man. So sweet. ** Jack Skelley, Eskelleyator! Why didn’t we do one of those in front of Beyond Baroque back in the day, I’ll always wonder. The 23rd is so plausible it aches. I wish my voice sounded like the Melvins. I know, who doesn’t. Cut you off at the pass. xo ** Dominik, Hi!!! If it exists, it’ll bathe in your eyesight. Ha ha, proofing the escorts and slaves sound actually be a challenge given that their poor English and misspellings are often the key to their beauty. Thanks re: ticket. I’m hunting everywhere. Good pick by Mr. love there. Me? I do think that I would pick that especially scary one with the safe dropped on the dummy’s head ‘cos I’m a sicko, don’t you know? Love making the people currently staying in the Airbnb apartment above mine realise that they actually hate Billy Joel, G. ** Regina Agutter, Well, hello there. If I’m not mistaken, it’s been a while since I last crossed paths here with you, and welcome back, if so. Oh my goodness, you’re too kind. I am merely horror’s obedient intermediary, but I will accept the compliment and endeavor to continue doing my job adequately. Maybe you could give my blog a nice review on Yelp if you have a second. ** Den Nilsen, Some of my friends call me Den. ** Jamie, Three wows! I’m humbled, maestro. Sadly, the US owns Halloween. It’s not fair, and it’s very impractical, but there we go. Is the Daney only in hardback? Yikes! Weird for Semiotext(e). It must be library-friendly move on their part. Great about your draft! Let it wander. Words should always be like lost children. At least in the early drafts. Interview Magazine is asking a bunch of ‘famous’ people to ask Bret Easton Ellis one question for an interview their doing with him, and they asked me, and my question was “A nerdy but sincere question: Please describe, if you can, what makes a sentence you write in your fiction acceptable to you? And same question about your paragraphs if you’re feeling ambitious. Thanks!” I asked because Bret hates talking about his process, and I want to try to corner him. We’ll see. My day was okay. Eileen Myles is visiting, and she and Zac and I went to opening of the Joan Mitchell retrospective last night at the Fondation Vuitton, and the show was unexpectedly great, and the trio stuff was fun. Otherwise, film stuff and this and that. Did you write all day today or what in world did you do? I’m thinking maybe ‘The Wolf House’ might have been featured in the fairly recent Werewolf Day? That’s a guess. I hope your day is stoking up the bong or doing blotter, I don’t know which … which … witch! (courtesy of Mr. Malkmus), Sinned backwards aka me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh my god, ha ha! I must pass that along. Everyone, _Black_Acrylic: ‘Kind of relevant to [yesterday’s] post, today this 1:25 mini horror scene was posted to Twitter featuring UK light entertainment icon Mr Blobby inserted into it the film of IT. Defo the scariest thing I’ve seen of late.’ Signing day! That’s big. Oh, man, oh, man, can you really almost be there at last? A billion votive candles. ** Bill, Agreed! Happy you liked ‘Event Factory’. She’s one of my really big favorites. ** Steve Erickson, Strange how people complain more about fake lynching Halloween displays than about the real thing. Or not strange. Nope, I haven’t creased the billy woods yet, but I intend to. Everyone, Steve has weighed in via Artsfuse about the execrable seeming BROS here and, in happier news, interviewed filmmaker and programmer Adam Baran about his “Narrow Rooms” series at Anthology Film Archives here. Bon day! ** T, Ha ha, yes, I see your proposition leading to a world of wonders. No, I haven’t been to Nigloland. I want to know. I do hope to go to the Parc Asterix Halloween makeover very soon, as it has proven very fun in previous years. Want to join? Saw your ‘e’. Getting to it today. Yay. Oh, for a day like the one your imagination portends or should portend. I hope your day makes cocaine seem like Shakira, xo D. ** Brendan, Big B! I should be in your neck of the woods smelling fog machines’ output very soon! Apropos, thank fucking god if the heat is subsiding, and go Dodgers, and I got your horror movies right here right in front of you today! Whoa! Love, me. ** Paul Curran, Thanks, bud! God knows you would know! I think I should have the post all polished off today, no sweat. News hopefully by the time your famous sun has set or soonish thereafter. Any Halloween shit of note taking over Tokyo or tiny pieces of it this year? ** Okay. Normally I try to give you a breather between Halloween things, but I just decided to transport you directly from cheap horrors to cheap horrors without a break today to see what would happen. So, … what happened? See you in the aftermath tomorrow.

* (restored, enlarged/Halloween countdown post #9)

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An Ohio woman’s Halloween decorations were so bloody terrifying and realistic, that she had to remove them out of fear for her family’s safety. Apparently the vibe in the neighborhood and the reaction she got for the gory décor made her a bit uncomfortable.

Vicki Barrett, the mother behind the gruesome setup, didn’t understand all the attention her yard was suddenly getting, considering this is the third year she went all out with her Halloween celebration.

Apparently parents thought it was inappropriate to have bloody dummies and bodies dangling from trees in the front yard, mostly because Barrett lives down the street from an elementary school.

 

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Nick Thomas’ Halloween display on Conan Doyle Road in Naperville has grown over the years, and now includes over 2,000 pieces with lights and synchronized music. Visitors to the cul-de-sac have also grown — he estimates about 8,000 people visited last year alone — which is why neighbors raised concerns about traffic and safety with the Ashbury Homeowners Association board. The board notified neighbors via its October newsletter that a “Holiday Decorations Rule” was voted on and passed at its Sept. 21 board meeting. The rule limits a person’s decorations to 50 percent of the yard, excluding lights, and restricts the display to 30 days before and after the holiday. For Thomas, that means his four storage units filled with decorations will remain unopened this year. The 600 bags of candy he buys each year will not be purchased. The donations he collected last year for Gigi’s Playhouse — in the amount of $6,500 — won’t be collected.

 

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A Halloween display created to gross out 12-year-olds is the talk of a St. Louis Park neighborhood. Some parents think the hanging “bodies” — next to Sunset Park, at a school bus stop — are too gruesome. The real-looking corpses dangle by their heels from a maple tree, trussed toe-to-head in clear plastic and dripping with fake blood.

The creatively creepy display was concocted by Kevin Amlee and his 12-year-old stepson, who wanted “to make something that would gross out his friends,” Amlee said. The gory display was a topic of conversation on a Facebook moms’ group this week. A member posted a photo of the dangling bodies, along with a plea for advice on what she could do about them. “I’m all about freedom of expression, but young children (including mine) live in our neighborhood and are traumatized by it,” she wrote.

 

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This video shares our western themed Halloween front yard for 2013. The theme was an old abandoned western mining ghost town called “Grave Rock Gulch” The haunted old west town was complete with an Undertaker Facade, Train Depot Facade, Dentist and Barber Shop Facade, an Old Spanish Mission Facade, Hotel and Saloon Facade, Southwestern Jail, General Store Facade, an Old Mine Shaft Facade, Water Tower, working Water Wheel, and Mining Area with Sluice.There are several static, motorized and animated props as well as pneumatic air powered props hiding around the town. There was a gold panning for body parts station for the little ones in the fully functioning mining area. We designed the haunt to make people feel as though they just walked into a little spooky ghost town straight out of a cartoon. All the scenery and many of the props were designed, handmade, modified, and painted by the two of us. Some of the props we had this year were a motorized kicking legs stuck in a wood coffin, a hidden air cannon inside a travel trunk, a pneumatic train station ticket stamper, a pop up dead customer of the town barber, several sculpted foam props like cactus, a giant tooth, motorized bell, working 3 tier fountain, working hand water pump, a detonating box for the mine, plaster castings of skulls, a pneumatic thrashing hangman, Several store goods like crates, jars, and supplies left and abandoned, and what western town isn’t complete with out a farting town drunk in the jail cell.

 

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A Brooklyn filmmaker has turned her porch into a surgical torture chamber teeming with mutilated baby dolls—a display gruesome enough to terrify kids and turn stomachs. Anyone strolling along Bergen Street in leafy Boerum Hill is in for a shock at her stoop: a collection of creatively butchered infant dolls and — their tormenter— a grinning, pumpkin-headed surgeon.

 

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williamson halloween house where your worst nightmares come alive

 

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One man lies on his stomach on the driveway. Blood is splattered along the garage door that smashed his head and presumably killed him. Another man lies a few feet away, run over by a truck.

The scene in a middle-class Oklahoma neighborhood made of single-story homes and well-manicured lawns seems out of a horror story because, well, it is. The two accident victims are in fact dummies, created as part of a family’s vivid Halloween display to shock and frighten. And it certainly has. At least one woman has called 911 to report that a man’s head had been shut into the garage door.

Jennifer Mullins, of Mustang, said she got the idea for the macabre scene from the social media site Pinterest and showed her husband, Johnnie, who was happy to scare up a display while he was on worker’s compensation and unable to work. Using Johnnie’s work clothes and blankets for stuffing, the couple first placed one life-sized dummy at the garage in early October and the next day, placed one next to the truck. A sign above the dummy in the garage door reads “you’re next.”

“People think we went too far, and you know, we’re devil worshippers and we must not be Christian folk,” the 32-year-old mother of two girls said. “They’ve said all kinds of stuff. But we’re normal. We love Jesus.”

 

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5 House Mappers

This is what our house will look like for Halloween this year. This was shot from the sidewalk in front of our house.

 

This is what trick-or-treaters were greeted with when they came to my house on Halloween, 2015. Only one, short-throw projector was used for this effect. I used Sony Movie Studio Platinum to compile and edit the video.

 

House Mapping for Halloween 2015. Used Multiple HD Download files of 6 “characters” from AtmosFear FX. Projectors used: Main housed used a BenQ MW817st , MX813st and MS504. The MW817ST does the “Heavy Lifting” . It handles the full house and garage doors. The woman in the upstairs window is actually the MX813st rear projecting on a white shower curtain. I tried having her projected by the 817st but the rear projection behind the window looked more realistic. The ms504 was for the pumpkins out on the side of the yard.

 

Creepy Halloween projection mapping on a home videoed live 2015 featuring devils, snakes, a Werewolf and more! Projection mapping created by Project Thelda.

 

Using 5 projectors we created a pretty scary scene.

 

Halloween 3D Projection mapping on our house, O Fortuna

 

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“I knew it was going to get some attention,” homeowner Matthew Warshauer said of his home’s display. “I didn’t expect how much. And this quickly.” Over the course of about 50 hours, Warshauer built a wall complete with a tiny-handed Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders “jailed by the DNC,” and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a star-spangled tutu and riding a donkey. Last year, Warshauer built a Huey helicopter replica and a grisly, war-torn landscape to depict the Vietnam War. The year before, a Roman coliseum with soldiers beheading their ancient leaders. “I’ve never been at a loss to come up with something…The ‘Trump Wall’ is a no-brainer. It fits with how I put the display together,” Warshauer said. “Friends will say, ‘You’ll never top that one.’ And you know what that does.”

 

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For a month now, Saint-Lazare resident Scott Trainor and his fiancée Ariana Pisano have been intricately crafting a massive, spooky display inside three tempos on the front lawn of their home. Each tempo represents a different, scary zone. Each has moving mannequins that speak. Zombie babies, a creepy scarecrow, and a small child imprisoned by a demon are just a few of the horrifying attractions. There’s a sanitizing station at the beginning and only one family is allowed in at a time. All the mechanical parts are triggered by remote control, meaning the families are alone inside. “There’s no doors, there’s no coverings or anything. There’s nothing that needs to be touched,” Trainor said. At the end, candy is given from a distance down a chute. Trainor says all the candy is quarantined for over a week before being given out.

 

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After a woman allegedly tore down a scantily clad set of Playboy Bunny-themed mannequins on a New Jersey dentist’s lawn, the property owner responded by erecting even more plastic figures. The second installment of mannequins wearing sexy lingerie includes men. “I heard some complaints that we only had women, so now there are two men with the ladies,” Wayne Gangi, a dentist in Clifton, said Monday. Last week, a New Jersey woman allegedly dismantled the display of scantly clad mannequins in front of several television cameras. Desiree Shepstone, also of Clifton, used garden shears last Tuesday afternoon to take down five mannequins on Gangi’s lawn.

 

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A bloody torso, mangled beneath a lawnmower along a road in rural North Carolina mobilized paramedics and an ambulance – until they realized it all all a Halloween gag. The decoration was so realistic, a passing driver saw the scene and called 911 to reported that someone was trapped beneath a lawn tractor. The lawnmower stood alone in a yard in Rowan County in western North Carolina. There were no other decorations or signs that might have given other clues that the scene was a fake. After the passer-by dialled 911, medics prepared to rush out to the home with the lawn tractor and make a rescue. Fortunately, someone who overheard the emergency radio traffic about the lawnmower called medics before they left to assure them their would-be victim was a lifeless dummy. It’s unclear who was responsible for the Halloween trick. The driveway where the lawn tractor is parked leads to several homes.

 

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A Halloween-obsessed homeowner is terrifying his small Pennsylvania neighborhood with blood-splattered dolls, severed plastic heads and even a cannibal bunny in his front yard. This year, his lawn is strewn with bloodied limbs, a skeleton in chains and hanging heads. Possessed baby dolls line cages – which he picked up from flea markets – while hanging along the fences are more plastic dolls with black eyes and signs across their chests reading: ‘Help me.’ Painted tombstones placed in the front yard show the names of his family and children. And sitting on the porch is a large pink stuffed rabbit – with blood gushing from its mouth.

 

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Halloween House, Bush Street, Mountain View, CA

 

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Colorado’s most extreme yard and garage haunt just got better! It’s out first year at the new location, and we’ve created a free haunted walkthrough the likes of which have never been seen! It took the average group about four or five minutes to complete the tour, which winded through three thematic areas; a canibal barbeque joint (Uncle Bubba’s BBQ), a repair shop owned by killer West Virginia hillbillies (Body Repairmen), and a creepy basement infested with serial killers (UNEARTHED: Into the Cellar).

 

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A Halloween-loving New Jersey family has their Bellmawr neighborhood more creeped out than spooked with a front yard holiday display of bloody babies hanging from nooses. They also just happened to be named Krueger.

Even the fact that the three young Krueger children spent hours on the unsettling creation isn’t enough to convince some unimpressed residents.

‘I like to see witches, you know goblins and ghosts, not hanging babies,’ creeped out neighbor Toni Flaherty told Fox 29 Philly. ‘It’s not scary, It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s horrible.’

 

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A Detroit woman decided there were scarier things in the news to put in her Halloween display than killer clowns. Larethia Haddon placed six dummies in her yard, each depicting a a real-life horror. With help from her grandchildren, Hadden dressed the dummies up to depict terrorism, police shootings, the Flint water crisis and other realities.

Last year, Haddon displayed one dummy that appeared to be a dead body laying face-down in her yard, which scared people and promoted calls to the police. This Halloween, Haddon and her family said they wanted to send a message.

“We’re trying to do something positive instead of just having a dead body laying in the yard,” Haddon told Michigan Live. “We need to stick together more. And if we don’t, this scene in my yard is going to be reality every single day.”

 

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Last year, Dallas based artist and engineer Steven Novak laid out used nearly two dozen gallons of fake blood to create the gruesome murder scene which featured a man killed by a chainsaw, a “body bag” and a wheelbarrow full of limbs. Another ‘body’ had its head pulverised by a fake safe on the front porch, which was covered in a large puddle of ‘blood’ that spilled out onto the footpath. The scene horrified his neighbours so much so that several 911 calls were placed to investigate the scene. “I made the body parts this year by cutting up mannequins then filling them with skeleton parts and Great Stuff insulation foam. There are lots of new gimmicks to this year’s caper. The wood chipper blood fountain being the clear centrepiece and easily the most challenging prop. It took me months to find an old wood chipper for sale. The sellers were not pleased with its new purpose.”

 

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Jenns Haunts Halloween Yard Daytime Walkthough and Video of yard haunt after five hundred kids went through my Halloween yard display!

 

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A man who put up a gory Halloween display of disembowelled corpses outside his home has been told by police to tone it down after a passer-by said it made their child cry. James Creighton, 25, has decorated the outside of his house with skeletons, bloodied corpses and cobwebs every year since 2009. But he had a nasty shock when two police officers knocked on his door to tell him a parent had complained it was frightening children.

Creighton said: “The police came round knocking on my door. They said they were sorry to disturb me but they had a complaint from a member of the public who walks past my house in the morning. Apparently their child starts crying every time they walk past my house. I was shocked – more to the point that the parent couldn’t come to the door themselves and speak to me personally, but had to get the police involved and waste their time.

“Police have asked me to put black tarpaulin along the fence so the kids can’t see it, but why should I do that? It ruins the whole rest of the display for everyone else. All the other kids love it. It is just this one who doesn’t like it.”

 

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Hawthorne, NJ man Antonio Rodrigues said his attraction of 190 dead body statues was dismantled on Saturday night when police warned him that his visitors would be ticketed if they blocked the road in front of his home. The “Dead House” is such a draw that visitors have traveled from as far as Vermont to see it, said Rodrigues, a native of Portugal. The appeal for adrenalin junkies is that Rodrigues dresses up like his dead statues to blend in among the walking dead. He then leaps out to scare the shit out of visitors when they least expect it. “I don’t want people to have tickets because of me,” said Rodrigues, 50. “I don’t want them to be mad.”

 

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Kyle Chen didn’t give one piece of candy to a trick-or-treater in 1998. Now hundreds stop by just to see his house. Chen moved to Wauwatosa in 1998 and flocks of trick-or-treaters would completely ignore his street on Martha Washington Drive. He found out they were headed to Two Tree Lane to see the decked-out houses and their Halloween decorations. He had to do something.

The house today is a macabre scene of ghouls, goblins and ghosts. Life-sized mannequins with melted faces fall out of broken windows on the home’s second story. Dozens of rats and crows infest his lawn, some perched as ghoulish sentinels. A spectre holds a flickering lamp, beckoning unsuspecting trick-or-treaters to the asylum.

The coup de grace, however, is Chen’s moving ghoul-suit — 12-feet tall, draped in black rags and is worn like a backpack. Since the suit doesn’t require stilts, the Chen family can run after trick-or-treaters, chasing them down the road.

Chen said he likes to stand motionless in his yard, waiting for unsuspecting trick-or-treaters to wander within chasing distance. The suit makes such a presence that, one Halloween, his wife told him firmly not to scare a little girl who wandered into their yard. “This is Halloween,” Chen whispered to her before tearing after the little girl, causing her to run squealing from the house. He was scolded by his wife until the year she wore the suit. Her personality completely changed and she wanted to instill fear in the children, he said.

 

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James Faulk from Dallas in Texas has decorated his home inspired from the city’s recent fear of Ebola virus. He is very fond of this sinister holiday so he decided to create an unusual Ebola-themed décor to create panic among his neighbors. Faulk spent about $150 on a hospital auction and four to five hours decorating the townhouse to make it look like a decontaminated building. He has enrobed his University Park home with red waste bags, brightly colored bio-hazard bins and yellow caution tape. The alarming house decorations were displayed last Sunday when Faulk’s neighbors called police in fear of the virus.

 

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Every Halloween for the past four years, 18 year-old Cleveland high school student Frank Mischen has taken over every inch of his family home, inside and out, to create what he calls “the slaughterhouse living environment of his dreams.”

 

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Miscellaneous

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I have seen Noel Burch’s ‘Noviciate’, but I had no idea that was her. From that to October Magazine. Crazy. Thank you! ** Dominik, Hi!!! And such a long year too. But all is forgiven. Gisele’s busy getting ready to head off for ‘Crowd’s’ US tour, but I’ll corner her in LA if nothing else. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a book fair that wasn’t inherently nice due to its nature but also sadly lacking in OMG moments. Well, I guess you could be proofreading documents consisting of nothing but soccer game statistics, so that’s an improvement? I’d pay you to proofread my escort and slave posts if I could afford it. I’m getting my plane tickets in the next couple of days, but I’ll leave around mid-month and be there for three or three and a half weeks is the plan. Lucky, saintly, fleet-footed love. Snails are sweet and innocent and deserve to live out their natural lives. Love making this young guy whose audition tape Zac and I watched yesterday agree to play one of the main roles in our film because he’s perfect, G. ** Jack Skelley, Jazz with a ‘k’! ‘NDA’, I’ll check it. I’ve heard of Jonathan Ames, yeah, but I don’t think I’ve read him. ‘What is?’ indeed! Oh, I might in fact and pretty likely be there for that reading on the 23rd! Awesome. Taylor Lewandowski is very cool. I had a great time meeting him over here. Excellent. He’s in LA? I thought he lived in, like, Montana or somewhere. Saw your email. Yeah, I’m just a bad emailer. I’ll write to Kim pronto. I’ve been meaning to for ages. Bonnest! ** Jamie, Hey, man. Oh, awesome, it’s a fantastic book. The problem is that there are very good books on experimental film, but nearly all of them are very out of print and very pricey. There’s a superb book by one of my two all-time favorite filmmakers, Hollis Frampton, but it’s so pricey that I don’t even have a copy. If I can think of affordable ones, I’ll let you know. The Michelson is def. good. Oh, it’s not exactly or rather wholly on experimental film, but Semiotext(e) just published a collection of essays by arguably the greatest ever French film writer Serge Daney that is surely incredible. Leaden sentences can become jaw dropping magicians if you’re patient with them and don’t expect immediate rewards. I think your draft revision counts as a very exciting day, abso-fucking-lutely. My day was alright. Zac and I finished revising the treatment of our film for a grant submission today. We watched a video audition by this young guy in LA, and we were blown away by how perfect he seemed to be to play one of our films main roles, a role that we have been anticipating would be very hard to cast because it’s a complicated character, so that was very exciting, and now we have to convince him to do it. And it was chilly and gorgeous out. No so bad. Ha ha, mistakes are where genius hides or something like that, I think? Love like the first drag on a cigarette after attending a screening of Rivette’s ‘Out1’ (which is very long). xo, DC ** Nick Toti, Hey, Nick. No big. Maybe it’s easiest if we just meet up in LA at this point because Zac and I will be there in a couple of weeks? But we can Zoom too. I hear you: at one point we thought about doing a gofundme for our film, but it’s so much work we nixed the thought. ** _Black_Acrylic, My great pleasure, Ben. How’s everything with you and your situation at the current moment? Will the govt. having scrapped that tax thing ease your progress at all? ** GusCaliGirls, Hi, Gus! Good to see you! Oh, man, that is a whole bunch of piled up roughness in your world. Fucking hell. Not the same thing, but I broke both of my wrists at the same time about 12 years ago, and, wow, things got difficult for a while on almost every level. You sound very cheerful though, so that’s a boon. And you’re watching great stuff. Still, high speed recovery vibes from Paris where the October air is really, really friendly so far. Gentle hugs, me. ** Robert, Sounds so great: your fall so far. My dad was a character and a half. Oh, that’s interesting how your therapist tried to put your judgements back on their launching pads. I don’t think mine did that, or else I just secretly rolled my eyes in judgement of her when she did, ha ha. Glad you’re writing and reading. I’m fighting to get those things into my goings-on right now too. We wanted (and still want) to shoot the film just after Xmas, but it’s starting to look like that might not be feasible, in which case it would start shooting between January and March. We have three performers in the film that are under 18, and one of them is a main character, and we either have to coordinate the shoot with her ability to not be in school, which is why we wanted Xmas vacation time, or find a girl whose parents are chill with letting her miss a bunch of school. Complicated, but we’ll sort it. Great day of unforeseen greatness! ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Awesome about the Sato post’s appropriateness! Great, I’ll go check my email and get back to you. Thank you so much, man! ** Right. Today’s Halloween venture is a restored oldie, but it’s been added-to so it’s almost a newbie too. Weird. See you tomorrow.