Oscar Horrors: Hush Hush Campy Agnes

[Editors Note: For today's episode of Oscar Horrors, I invited award-winning writer Manuel Muñoz ("What You See in the Dark" "The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue") to join us. I've gave all the contributors a list of every Oscar nomination from the horror genre and they chose their own subjects. -Nathaniel R.]

Here Lies... Agnes Moorehead in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is either Grand Guignol catnip or the most ridiculous Scooby Doo plot ever, depending on your level of generosity.  The film lacks the sustained camp thrills of its kissing cousins What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Strait-Jacket.  But it remains obligatory viewing, whether to fulfill your quota of the era’s is-she-crazy suspense vehicles starring Hollywood’s aging belles, or to check out Oscar offerings with peculiarly high nomination counts.  Charlotte picked up seven (yes, seven) Oscar nods and while you might shrug off most of them as applause for technical show, a major Supporting Actress bid (and maybe an almost-win) came with the fourth and final invite to the big dance for Agnes Moorehead as 

But first, the tawdry beginnings.  Set on a once sunny Louisiana estate in 1927, the film introduces us to a young Charlotte, whose father doesn’t approve of the news he’s heard from her secret suitor.  At an elaborate party (and in one of the most nimbly arranged sequences of the film), things get downright bloody, and Charlotte emerges from the shadows with one of the most conspicuously stained dresses ever to stun a crowd.

Fast forward decades later, and our fun begins. 

Click to read more ...

Oscar Horrors: 'The Virgin Spring'

Oscar Horrors continues with Beau and his favorite filmmaker.

HERE LIES... Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for 1960.

I'm not going to beat around the bush here. Let's just get right to it. Ingmar Bergman is my favorite filmmaker of all time. He's self-indulgent, woefully meandering, and I love him for it. I first watched The Seventh Seal when I was all of eighteen, and the imagery and gallows humor wowed me. I pursued the rest of his respective oeuvre like a feverish animal, devouring early works and late masterpieces with the rabid enthusiasm of a junkie who just discovered Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg on the same day.

That being said, The Virgin Spring was a strange one for me. A meditation on the convoluted, considerable blindness of faith at odds with the cold, ruthless foundation of nature by way of a virginal sacrifice? Oh no, Ingmar, no. Don't worry about imbuing levity here dude, we cool.

While all of his films have resonated since first viewing, The Virgin Spring was peculiar for the fact that you sensed he wasn't entirely being himself... 

Click to read more ...

Oscar Horrors: "Max Schreck"

HERE LIES... The actor-or-is-he Max Schreck, brought to vivid undead-or-is-he life by Willem Dafoe in 2000's Shadow of a Vampire, nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

JA from MNPP here. When I started rewatching E. Elias Merhige's 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire the other day for the umpteenth time I was convinced that we first see Willem Dafoe's Max Schreck is when he's first being filmed by Murnau & Company - when he emerges from his deep dark tunnel, aka the hole where Murnau says he found him. I was wrong. The first time we see Schreck is a few minutes earlier when Murnau leaves a caged mink sitting outside said hole as tasty bait and Schreck's hands - white as moles, fingers long and sharp as stalactites - appear in the background and snake their way around the bars, enveloping their innocent prey.

Now I'm not one to talk about how an actor uses their hands - it makes me feel like Guy Woodhouse telling Roman Castavet about that "kind of an... involuntary reach" - but Dafoe's performance demands it...

Click to read more ...

Oscar Horrors: For "The Hell of It"

HERE LIES... Paul Williams' rock opera score for Phantom of the Paradise, lain to rest by Nelson Riddle's nostalgia-drenched work on The Great Gatsby.

Andreas here with more spoooky Oscar Horrors, this time singing the praises of composer Paul Williams. His Oscar-nominated work on Brian De Palma's horror musical astonishes with its versatility, bouncing from one pop mode to another—surf rock to glam rock to piano ballad—all the while keeping tempo with De Palma's virtuosic visuals. The songs aren't hollow pastiches, either; Williams imbues them with surprising emotional depth, coloring the whole film with their underlying melancholy. In order to pull off such an operatic saga, De Palma needed big music, and Williams really delivers.

Phantom, after all, is a macabre tale of the music industry, filled with songwriters, divas, and wannabes (Williams himself even co-stars as the villainous Swan, a kind of Mephistopheles by way of Phil Spector.) The characters, like composer-turned-phantom Winslow Leach and his beloved Phoenix, speak the language of show-stopping musical numbers. The plot is driven by one such song, "Faust," written by Winslow and stolen by Swan, reprised over and over as the characters' relationships shift.

All my dreams are lost and I can't sleep

And sleep alone could ease my mind

All my tears have dried and I can't weep...

Like so much of the soundtrack, "Faust" is rich with longing and regret, paralleling the film's themes of love, fame, and sacrifice. Williams' music matches the rest of the film's mood so well: funereal and otherworldly, with a strain of twisted dark comedy. The jukebox-ready opening number "Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye" demonstrates this latter trait especially well, as does "The Hell of It." Perhaps the film's best song, "The Hell of It" plays over the ending credits, with Williams gleefully singing its damnation-centric lyrics: "And though your music lingers on, all of us are glad you're gone!"

Williams himself is not gone—as we're reminded by the new documentary Paul Williams Still Alive—but his music for Phantom of the Paradise sure lingers on, and on, and on.

Oscar Horrors: Terrifying Mrs. Danvers

Oscar Horrors, a daily series for October, looks at Oscar nominated contributions to the horror genre. Here's Jose to talk about one of the best villains of all time.

HERE LIES...Mrs. Danvers, played exquisitely by Judith Anderson who was nominated as Best Supporting Actress of 1940 for her work in Rebecca. She lost the Oscar to Ma Joad and vanished in the fire.

I grew up in a family where Hollywood classics were as revered as Catholic saints. I remember being a child and being freaked out by the black and white people uttering undecipherable phrases from what I assumed was some sort of TV grave. None however freaked me out as much as the wide eyed Mrs. Danvers (did she ever blink?!?) who endlessly haunted the poor new Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine).

The passing years didn't make Mrs. Danvers less creepy. In fact, the more I aged, the scarier she got. It must be due to the fact that she's not only a horror figure in the strict physical sense. Yes, her long black dress, severe hairdo and eerily seductive voice didn't help, but there was something else about her that made me fear the idea of marrying Laurence Olivier and moving to a mansion. 

Reading Hitchcock Truffaut I suddenly got what is it that made her so terrifying and the master himself explained it best:

Mrs. Danvers was almost never seen in motion. [The heroine] never knew when Mrs. Danvers might turn up and this in itself was terrifying. To have shown Mrs. Danvers walking would have been to humanize her.

So, there we have this diabolical creature, almost a human mausoleum, whose entire existence revolved around protecting the legacy of a woman who was never that nice to begin with. The director cleverly framed all of Mrs. Danvers scenes so it always appears that it's Mrs. de Winter who must serve her.

The heroine's submissive position and Mrs. Danvers' ominous presence make for one of the most complex relationships in any Hitchcock movie (the homoerotic and homophobic undertones contained in this movie have inspired countless essays of their own!). Though Hitchcock would go on to shape countless other fascinating character dynamics, Mrs. Danvers still looms large. She's inspired a myriad of characters since that range from the surreal (HAL 9000) to practical carbon copies (Mrs. Obrien in Downton Abbey) whose only purpose is to show their masters who's the boss.