Silent Scream Series: Hell's bells.

Welcome back, Screamers and Screamettes. This the third in ANTSS's special anniversary series looking at the primordial beginnings of fright flicks.

Today's soundless screamer is 1926's The Bells. Produced by the long defunct Chadwick Pictures Corporation (the company that produced the first adaptation of Wizard of Oz back in 1925) and helmed by silent film actor turned director James Young, this melodramatic suspense flick stars Lionel Barrymore – great uncle of Drew and member of the famed and infamous Barrymore clan – and features, in a small but noteworthy part, Boris Karloff. It was Karloff's 31st film in a career of more than 200 film roles – almost 40 films before Frankenstein – people cranked 'em out back then.

This whole thing starts a little soap opera-like, so those who have trouble keeping up might want to bust out a not pad or something.

Barrymore plays Mathais, a tavern and mill owner in a small European mountain near the base of what the title cards inform us is Mount Snowtop. I think that's near Running Water River just a-ways down Supports Traffic Road. Mathias is a nice enough guy. He likes to be liked by the townsfolk and he's hoping to be appointed Burgomaster. That's Austrian for "Master of the Burgo," or "mayor." To ensure he's got the popular support, he quick to extend credit and always ready to float tavern regulars a few free drinks. This drives his penny pinching wife and his father-in-law, the manager of Mathias's mill operation, crazy. It has also driven Mathias's family in debt. The man who holds Mathias's markers is Frantz, the village a-hole played to thuggish perfection by the unlikely named Gustav von Seyffertitz (a silent era character actor who you might recognize from Son of Frankenstein and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town). Frantz, being the village a-hole, let's Mathais know that he'll forget the debt if Mathais will arrange a marriage betwixt Frantz and Mathais's lovely daughter, the cutie-patootie Annette. But Annette's already got her heart set Christian, the new sheriff (or gendarme, as the Europeans like to call their new sheriffs) in town.

The domestic story takes shape over the first half hour or flick or so, then we come to our first set piece: the Carnival. The town throws a big party and Mathais, eager to take his mind off his worries, joins the partying crowd. There, among the various tent shows, is Boris Karloff as "The Mesmerist" – in costume and performance a clear lift from Caligari, the mad doctor of Cabinet of fame. After performing a few tricks, the Mesmerist offers to hypnotize Mathias, telling the audience that, once hypnotized, good men tell of their good deeds and bad men confess their crimes. Mathias is not down with that, so he breezes on to the fortune-teller's tent. Though that goes all pear shaped on Mathais when, on viewing his palm, the fortune-teller recoils in horror, refuses to tell him what's in his future, and refunds his money. Mathias should have known the moment a carny gave him his money back, that something was very amiss.

Jump to Christmas: Mathias, increasingly in debt, throws a party for the tavern regulars. At this party, Christian the cop proposes to Annette and there is much marry-making. Into this boisterous Christmas party wanders a traveling Jewish merchant who is looking to spend a few minutes out of the brutal storm raging outside. Mathais welcomes him in and, eventually, they end up the last men standing of the party. Several sheets to the wind, Mathias learns that the merchant is wearing a money belt full of gold. Shortly after the merchant leaves, the drunk and debt-ridden Mathias bundles up, grabs an axe, takes a shortcut to incept the merchant, and kills him for his gold.

Mathias ends up passing his sudden windfall of an inheritance from a rich uncle and pays of Frantz. But his problems are far from over. He is soon haunted, literally, by what he's done. As he was giving the merchant the business end of his axe, the merchant shook the bell-bearing reins of his horse. That sound haunts Mathias, like the heartbeat in Poe's Tell-Tale Heart. He's also haunted by visions of his victim, sulking around like a Hebraic Banquo whenever company shows up. To add to these worrisome events, the merchants brother shows up looking for the murderer – and he's brought the Mesmerist with him!

As much a domestic melodrama as it is a ghost tale, The Bells is effective entertainment if not always creepy. The exception to this being Karloff, who actually makes a better Caligari as a rip-off than the original did. This is a very minor role but Karloff fans will want to check it out. The style of filmmaking is interesting. The film makes numerous nods to German Expressionism, all while assimilating it into the effective and non-intrusive film narrative film vocabulary that is identified as American and is so universal that we tend not to think of it as an expression of artistic talent and intent. This is a solid flick on its own and a special treat for those who want to see early Karloff at work.

As an aside, the Image disc twins this flick with the French short film The Crazy Ray, an early sci-fi film about a group of air-travelers who arrive in Paris only to find everybody is frozen except them. This short has some amazing shots – especially of the group wandering through a deserted 1920s Paris. Some of the plot devices are contrived, but several scenes pack an uncanny punch. If you end up checking out The Bells, do yourself the favor and take a peek at the The Crazy Ray too.

NB: The disc cover makes the claim that the flick was inspired by a Poe poem. As far as I can tell, this is untrue. The film is an adaptation of a stage play, which was actually made into a movie several times during the silent era. Several Poe works did get turned into silent films – "The Fall off the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," "William Wilson" – but this is not one of them.

Movies: Island getaway of the damned!

In a previous post I reviewed the excellent two-films-in-one-disc I Walked with a Zombie and The Body Snatcher package that was part of the Turner Entertainment 5 disc/10 movie Val Lewton retrospective. Those flicks were absolutely fabu, so I've been digging up the other discs in the series.

Next up, a Karloff double header that stars with Isle of the Dead and ends with Bedlam.

To recap, Val Lewton was head of RKO's horror unit for about a decade in the late 1940s. While there, Letwon connected talented directors with smart, dramatic scripts to create a signature style of horror: a moody, melodramatic, classy approach to a genre often too comfortable with mediocrity. The flicks on this disc showcase that approach, though I think it is debatable just how much of a horror film Bedlam is.

Let's start with Isle of the Dead. Set in 1912, during the opening year of the Balkan Wars and an outbreak of the plague brought on by the conditions of war, the film opens with Karloff, a brutal Greek general known as "the Watchdog," ordering one of his officers to commit suicide for the offense of failing to get his troops to the front fast enough. And this even thought the battle was won! Apparently, the Greek military operates on the same management principles as the Empire from the Star Wars flicks.

After establishing that Karloff's character is a thoroughly unpleasant jerk, we follow the general and an American reporter embedded, as it were, with the general's forces to a small island where the general's wife is buried. There the general finds his family tomb has been ransacked and his wife's body is missing. Searching for the looters leads the two to a small house were a group of random folks have hid themselves away from the conflict and the disease. We learn that one of them, a scholar of ancient Greece, has been collecting artifacts and, in hopes of making some money, his presence has spurred the locals to acts of plunder. This sort of explains the missing corpse of a wife (though who thought they could fob off the body of a twentieth century Greek woman as an ancient relic is beyond) and that subplot is rapidly dropped.

The movie begins in earnest when one of the members of the household, a traveling salesman, drops dead of the plague. A doctor from the general's camp comes and quarantines the house and all its inhabitants. The plague begins claiming the members of the household one by one. Cabin fever and the strain of not knowing who is next starts to fray the nerves of the trapped characters. Eventually, an old crone of a maid convinces the general that the ravages of the plague are not an accident of nature, but the act of an evil spirit from Greek mythology who has possessed the hottie of the group, a feisty young woman who is making goo-goo eyes with our reporter.

Isle of the Dead is a solid example of Lewton's gothic, dramatic brand of horror, though it doesn't measure up to I Walked with a Zombie. This is partly due to the fact that Mark Robson, who directed the film, is simply not as strong a director as Tourneur. His work is fine, but never great. The story is excellent and the cast, apart from Karloff, who takes his role and runs with it, works well enough to keep the viewer watching.

The second film on the disc, Bedlam, is a bit of a head-scratcher. Though it does star Boris Karloff and begins with a premise that might have tipped into horror, it ultimately becomes a kind of period piece message picture. The story involves a decadent minor aristocrat who, after being turned on by his mistress (though the character swears she is not his mistress, the relationship they are supposed to have in the flick makes no sense and I assume this was just a way for the filmmakers to get around the issue of having to discuss the fact that she's basically a kept whore), gets Karloff, head of therapeutic services at Bedlam asylum, to lock her up with the crazies. Once she's locked up, she goes through a conversion and begins to work to make the lives of the lunatics better. Meanwhile, a she and a friend attempt to win her freedom.

Bedlam is a fine bit of melodrama. It is competently directed, again by Robson, and features some real standout scenes. In particular, there's a wonderful scene where lunatics are forced to perform a series of dramatic presentations for the amusement of the aristocratic elite. Still, I don't think it was intended to be a horror flick and its inclusion here is a bit curious.

Using my controversial Topics Covered in VH1's "I Love the 80s – 1986 in 3D" Movie Rating System, I'm giving Isle of the Dead an enjoyable Not Necessarily the News rating. Good stuff, especially if you're a Karloff fans or have a particular interest in pop culture representations of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 (and who doesn't?). I'm not going to rate Bedlam. Not because it is a crap film, which it isn't, but because I don't think it is a horror flick and horror is how we roll here at Screamin'.

FUN SCREAMIN' TRIVIA: The number of flicks inspired by books and plays is enormous. You get fewer flicks from poems. Even fewer, I'd wager, are inspired by pieces of visual art: paintings, etchings, sculpture, and so on. In fact, I can only think of two that I've seen. Bedlam is one. It is supposed inspired by one of the etchings in Hogarth's A Rake's Progress. The second is The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and Her Lover. Director Peter Greenaway has occasionally claimed that the inspiration for that flick came from the group portrait "The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia of Haarlem" by Frans Hals.

Movies: I walk the line. With a zombie.

Way back when, in the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system, even their cheapies seemed classier. At least, you'd think so checking out Val Lewton produced double-header I Walked with a Zombie and The Body Snatcher. Part of the 5 disc/10 movie Lewton retrospective released by Turner Entertainment, this two-for-one disc is a prime specimen of the top notch, classy, gothic film Lewton produced during his brilliant, but brief, four-year run as head of RKO's horror unit: a run that produced at least one certifiable horror classic a year and exploited the talents of several then-minor but soon to be famous directors.

A little backstory on Lewton before we hop into the two flicks. Born Vladimir Leventon, the future director came to America with his family when he was five. Though it doesn't seem to have done him much good, he was the nephew of the scandal-ridden silent screen vamp Alla Nazimova. Lewton spent most of his early career as a freelance writer. He cranked out copy for newspapers (he was booted from one paper for fabricating a story about a mass kosher chicken die-off during a New York heat wave), weekly magazines, the pulps, and even wrote a bit of pornographic erotica. Anything to pay the bills. The name Val Lewton was originally a nom de plume. Vlad used it on the cover of a few of his novels before picking it up semi-permanently for the movie biz.

In 1933, Lewton got a job work for David O. Selznick. He acted mainly as a story editor, but the job morphed into something more like a behind-the-scenes jack-of-all-trades. During this time, he famously contributed several scenes to Gone with the Wind - most notably the long crane shot of what seems to be endless rows of Confederate wounded, suffering and expiring under a waving Confederate flag. For nearly a decade he ran around the RKO lots, doing random chores and picking up the movie biz through osmosis. In 1942, he was appointed the head of RKO's horror unit. He was to crank out crowd pleasing theater fillers, in a hurry and on the cheap.

Funny thing happened, though. Lewton turned a steady profit and filled the theater seats with fare that was definitely down market – he once said, "You shouldn't get mad at New York reviewers. It is actually very hard for a reviewer to give something called I Walked with a Zombie a good review" – but, in hindsight, it is clear he also made some very good films. Lewton's horror flicks are literate, well shot, thoughtful, and steeped in a classic gothic sensibility. His movies were so much better than they needed to be that, even now, they can take the viewer by surprise. You settle down, expect some good old-school horror cheese, and, instead, you're pulled into the work of a man film critic James Agee claimed was one the three most creative figures in Hollywood.

I Walked with a Zombie is often considered Lewton's finest outing. Based on a series of "scientific" articles about the practice of voodoo in Haiti, Lewton decided the original story was weak on narrative drive and wed the zombie and voodoo trappings to a rough re-working of the plot of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In Lewton's hybrid, a young nurse is hired by a wealthy sugar plantation owner to care for his wife, in a coma like state since suffering a rare tropical disease. There she is pulled in the gothic family politics of the plantation and the hidden world of voodoo thriving outside the walls of the estate. Despite its European-gothic-by-way-of-voodoo-magic exploitation angle, the semi-anthropological thrust of the original articles was not lost on Lewton and the finely realized details of the film make it one of the few Hollywood horror films in any era to treat voodoo and the Caribbean culture that created with a modicum of sincere respect. Many of the most effective moments of the film deal not only with the horrors of voodoo magic, but with the enduring legacy of slavery and colonialism.

The film also benefits from the pairing of Lewton and one of his most accomplished regular directors: Jacques Tourneur, director of the horror classic The Cat People and the noir landmark Out of the Past. Tourneur's use of lighting and set and his smooth, polished professionalism, all conspire to give I Walked with a Zombie a classic look and feel that completely transcends its poverty row origins. You feel like your watching some strange, surreal A-picture.

In the second feature, The Body Snatcher, Lewton again benefits from an excellent director. This time the director seat holds up the talented ass of Robert Wise, who would later go on to direct The Day the Earth Stood Still, Run Silent, Run Deep, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles, and, one of my favorite horror flicks, The Haunting. (He also did the first Star Trek film, which isn't my cup of tea, but regular reader Screamin' Dave might get a kick out of the mention.)

The Body Snatcher, loosely based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story, follows the misadventures of two 19th century doctors who find themselves blackmailed by the murderous grave robber who supplies their medical school with cadavers. Wise's film is somewhat hampered by a too-chatty script, but it does boast something Tourneur's film lacks: a wonderful performance by Boris Karloff as the Gray, the sadistic body snatcher. It also features Bela Lugosi in a minor, but effective role.

Neither of these films is truly frightening by modern horror standards. Instead, it is probably better to think of them as gothic dramas, maybe even horror melodramas. Still both films are classics of the genre and well worth your time. Using the Lifetime Achievements of William Withering Movie Rating System, official movie rating system of the European Union, I give I Walked with a Zombie a superb "invention of digitalis" rating and The Body Snatcher a somewhat lesser, but still fine "first English-language botany text to use Linnaean taxonomy." A solid two-film package.