Know You Like the Sun: Jekyll and Hyde Get Real

The funny thing about the horror genre is how it serves to both comfort and discomfort. Certain “tropes” of horror—crumbling moonlit castles and graveyards, foggy cobblestone streets—now stimulate the same pleasure centers in our brain that are also tweaked by images of favorite childhood places, and are just as familiar and beloved.

On the other hand, a function of horror (as Braque once said about art) is to disturb, to strip away the comfort and safety of the familiar and leave us alone and unprotected in the company of our fears.

The remarkable thing about the production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Jeffrey Hatcher now playing at Center Stage Theater is how well it does both—-playing to our familiarity with Stevenson’s classic tale as well as the raw and disorienting fears the story can awaken.

The production opens with all the typical visual accoutrements of the era—a backdrop of the foggy London skyline, actors in top hats, bowlers, and waistcoats speaking in a variety of British accents—a deliciously rich and heavy gaslight-vibe, Steampunk-style, nicely stimulating all the appropriate genre-loving pleasure-centers of your brain.

Then, things get weird…and the weirder it gets, the more real it gets.

The most famously weird feature of Hatcher’s play—the choice of having five different Hydes played by five different actors, sometimes all onstage at once—is disorienting, but it’s a deliberate and powerfully effective disorientation that highlights the fragmented and uncontrollable nature of Jekyll’s experience. There is no one Hyde because, as the play shows us, all of Jekyll’s perceptions are tainted and cannot be trusted.

In one of the most chilling and imaginative uses of the “manifestations of Hyde”, Julia Rust, who also plays Sir Danvers Carew, the corrupt chief of surgery who Hyde has murdered, appears as a manifestation of Hyde to taunt Jekyll at the murder site. It’s a brilliant choice of direction, and Rust plays it with a kind of demonic coolness that’s all the more frightening because of its restraint. The deliberate slowness and ease with which she stalks and toys with Jekyll feels like a cat taking its time with a mouse whose blood it can already taste.

It’s been said that Jekyll and Hyde is a parable about alcoholism and drug addiction. It’s easy to see why. Hatcher’s play rings all the bells, with its discussion of alcohol and opium abuse and its frequent allusions to blackouts. Alcoholics in recovery speak of alcoholism as a “spiritual sickness” that is aggravated by alcohol but exists independently of it, which makes the process of recovery much more complicated than merely “stopping”. Jekyll “stops”—temporarily—but starts again when he decides it’s the only measure of control he has left over the unwanted changes that have started to come over him—a decision that any addict will be familiar with.

 

As Henry Jekyll, Elliot Robinson embodies a man who has so repressed and compartmentalized his own destructive urges that he can barely notice when they’ve started to break through. In the two scenes where he acts like Hyde without actually becoming Hyde (restraining Elizabeth in the hotel room, and later killing Lanyon in his laboratory), Elliot is all the more frightening by not acting like a monster, but instead showing us a man who is incapable of dropping his obsequious, civilized smile, even as he assaults a woman and strangles his friend.

Ultimately, Jekyll is a man who will not and cannot accept responsibility for his own actions. Does that make him more of a monster than Hyde? Hyde may be guilty of many horrific things (some of which we merely hear about, some of which we see onstage) but (the play seems to tell us) one thing Hyde is not is a liar.

Is it truly more monstrous to lie than to mutilate and kill human beings? Perhaps—especially if the lie is what enables those horrific crimes to occur, again and again.

In one scene, Hyde overhears Jekyll lying to the authorities about him, blaming him for things Jekyll himself has done  in order to seal his fate and be rid of Hyde forever. Tal Azevier, who plays Hyde like a man constantly trying to spit out the poison that’s eating him alive, rages at Jekyll, unheard by everyone else, calling him a liar. But the name he roars the loudest and for which he saves the most venom is ‘Actor! ’ As if there could be nothing worse.

When Lanyon later swears to Jekyll that he’ll never tell anyone about his  secret identity and horrific crimes, Jekyll seems to react with good natured joviality, complimenting him affectionately. “Good old Lanyon. Always doing the right thing. ‘Know you like the sun…”—seconds before he strangles him to death.

And that, in the end, is probably more frightening than any bogeyman with a top hat and a cane slinking down a foggy alley—the knowledge that the friend or loved one right next to you could turn on you at any second—the fear that, without warning, we might no longer be able to recognize the people closest to us—or ourselves.

Justified In the Necropolis: Mummies, the Book of the Dead, and What We Take With Us

When I took my daughter to the Brooklyn Museum last Sunday and asked her what she wanted to see, she told me right away. “Mummies.”

This both was and was not a surprise. After years of fleeing the room whenever something “scary” is on TV, my daughter—at the age of eleven—has started to take a personal interest in scary things. Her favorite books changed from ‘Henry and Mudge’ to R.L. Stein, and every Wednesday night she now plants herself on the couch next to me with a bowl of popcorn to watch ‘Ghost Hunters.’ At first I was egocentric enough to believe she was humoring me, knowing that her daddy writes “scary stories” and loves “scary movies.” Now I think it’s something more.

We enter the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian exhibit—one of the finest in the world—and almost immediately, my daughter begins explaining the exhibits to me. This temple guardian, she says, must be Sumerian because of the way his beard is styled. (In the ancient Middle East, as in modern Middle School, hairstyle is important.)

I see my daughter four days a week. Under these circumstances, being fully present becomes a serious thing. The usual haze of self-absorption I move around in every day becomes the enemy and as we walk through these rooms together studying the ancient statues and carvings, I’m also studying her.

She explains the hieroglyphics to me. This one, the one that looks like a bowl, is the letter C. This one, the one that looks like a hawk, is an A.

I follow my daughter as she hurries from room to room, looking about appreciatively but impatiently. “Daddy, where are the mummies?” she asks. At that moment I remember—the Brooklyn Museum has no mummies. Never has, and I start to explain, reluctant to disappoint her. As I start to speak, she says, “Here they are!” and rushes into a darkened room ahead of us.

The sign above the door says THE MUMMY CHAMBER. How did I miss this? A closer look and I realize it’s a new exhibit, one I’ve never seen before.

The darkness, in contrast to the other brightly lit exhibit rooms, feels deliberate and solemn, a feeling that makes sense. The dead are here.

When we are younger, we are drawn to mummies and their tombs, etc. because they remind us of exotic adventures and old movies, of Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney, Jr. (Imhotep or Kharis—take your pick.) Later, when we are old enough to look at mummies and see what they really are and what they mean, we may have a very different sort of reaction.

The darkness in here feels red, like the inside of an eyelid with a great light burning on the other side. That, I can’t help but feel, is something these ancient Egyptians would have understood.

There are four mummies here. A princess. Two priests. And what the exhibit refers to as “An Anonymous Man.” It’s this “Anonymous Man” whose name, occupation, or place in history we do not know who most of all makes me feel like we’re intruding on something private and sacred.

My daughter is disappointed that the mummies are not unwrapped. She wants to see their faces. In this place and at this moment, that seems not especially horrifying, but like a transgression. The curators seem to have felt this too. The only visible concession to morbid/scientific curiosity—CT-scan images revealing the ghostly outlines of preserved flesh and bone—are, remarkably, as small as playing cards and mounted inconspicuously at knee-level as if the people who put this exhibit together are slightly ashamed by them.

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No one knows what happens after you die. That’s a statement that people either find comforting or terrifying, depending—as so much else does—on the state of mind with which you receive it.

Some people do claim to know what happens after death, and their answer is nothing. Death, according to them, is extinction, pure and simple, like turning off a light switch. For proof, they point to the cold, hard facts of biology, the cessation of metabolic functions—brainwaves, heartbeat, etc. We are not conscious of anything after death, they say, because our consciousness ceases. And that is precisely where their argument breaks down. Because here is one more cold hard fact; no one knows what consciousness is.

Some people say that just because science can’t provide an explanation for everything, that doesn’t mean you are free to make up whatever fantastic story you wish. Actually, that is exactly what we are all free to do. And the value of the particular story you believe may not depend on whether or not it is true (which you may never know anyway) but whether or not it is useful.

This is not an idea that sits well with the scientifically minded. It is not the job of science, they say, to prove that heaven does not exist.  Fair enough. However, unlike heaven, pretty much everyone agrees that consciousness does exist, and to claim without proof that consciousness ceases simply because it appears to cease may not be that different than claiming the sun is extinguished forever when we see it set in the West. Even the ancient Egyptians knew better than that.

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I follow my daughter through the darkness, looking for more mummies. As we pass from one room into the next, I glance to my left and see a long, brightly lit passageway hidden between the two larger chambers. Against the wall there is a long, glass case containing an ancient scroll, the longest I’ve ever seen. The sign tells me this is The Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose, and that it contains the spells needed to bring the dead back to life for the journey to the afterlife. I stop to read the translations posted on the wall.

Earlier, my daughter had explained to me that mummies have all of their internal organs removed, except for one—the heart. For the dead to return to life and begin their journey through the afterlife, the first thing that must be revived is the heart. And it’s with the heart that the scroll begins.

SPELL FOR GIVING THE HEART TO THE GOLDWORKER OF AMUN, SOBEKMOSE, JUSTIFIED IN THE NECROPOLIS.

O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, I HAVE MY HEART AND IT IS PLEASED.

These are the first words I’ve ever read from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Everything else around me seems to fall away, and I stand there reading for a long time.

If you grow up learning about all the worldly things the Egyptians brought with them into the tomb—food, drink, money, books, tools, toys, chariots, even their pets—it’s easy to think of them as suffering from a massive and deluded sense of materialistic entitlement, like rich people who insist on dragging too much luggage on board cruise ships or airlines.

But that’s not the voice I hear speaking in these words in front of me. It’s not the voice of a crass, smug, consumerist mentality toward the afterlife This voice is not boastful—instead, it feels devout, earnest, and most of all, radically and overwhelmingly naked and alone.

BEHOLD ME, I AM COME. I HAVE BROUGHT TRUTH TO YOU. I HAVE REPRESSED WRONGDOING FOR YOU. I HAVE NOT DONE WRONG AGAINST ANYONE. I HAVE NOT IMPOVERISHED MY ASSOCIATES. I HAVE NOT DONE EVIL IN PLACE OF TRUTH. I HAVE NOT KNOWN THAT WHICH SHOULD NOT BE. I HAVE NOT DONE ANYTHING BAD.

I have not done anything bad. How to hear those words? How to even begin to say them?

We all say things we’re not really certain of in order to make them true. I’m trying as hard as I can. I am lucky to be alive. Everything will be alright. I am a good father.

I AM COME BEFORE YOU. NO SIN OF MINE EXISTS. NO DISPLEASURE OF MINE EXISTS. NO EVIL OF MINE EXISTS. NO WITNESSES AGAINST ME EXIST. THERE IS NO ONE AGAINST WHOM I HAVE DONE THINGS. I LIVE ON TRUTH. I SWALLOW DOWN TRUTH.

We say or think these things in order to carve out a space in the darkness around us so we can move and breathe again, a space where we can change. And the harder it is to believe, the bigger and stronger our words need to be.

For a modern society that mostly no longer believes in an afterlife, a whole culture devoting itself to preparing for it may seem like a colossal and tragic waste of time. But looking at the words on these walls, I start to feel that what these people were preparing for was not some mysterious future world but this one.

In Kadampa Buddhism it’s said that we don’t need to be afraid of death—what we should be afraid of is dying with an uncontrolled mind. Because that is something we can do something about.

Remembering this, I look around at the words on this scroll and the hundreds of statues, carvings, and objects around us, and I start to think of them not as a people’s deluded and pathetic attempt to control death, but as an imaginative and heroic effort to control their own minds.

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When my father was in the hospital dying, the moment my sister and I were both in the room with him, he drew us both to his side—me on his left, my sister on his right—and held on tightly to our hands. The feeling of relief and gratitude that came radiating off of him at that moment was nearly blinding. We were his, and in that moment he had what was his. I wondered if he wanted to take us with him. If I’d known how, I think I would have done it.

You can’t take it with you, they say. But what if you could? What would you take?

First you think, Take only what is most precious. Only what is absolutely necessary. Then you think, How can I leave this behind? Or this? Or this? Until, in the end, you see that what is precious, what is absolutely necessary is everything.

I look over and see my daughter taking pictures of the scroll and of the words on the wall, the same words I’ve been reading for a while now. She’s been reading them too, silently, and now she reads them aloud, her young voice echoing softly in the dark:

O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, O HEART THAT IS IN THE HOUSE OF HEARTS, I HAVE MY HEART AND IT IS PLEASED.

We are finished here for today. My daughter and I are both silent as we leave the museum. Walking beside her, I see how tall she’s grown. I’m hoping she’ll let me hold her hand, and on the way down the big marble steps, she does.

Out here the sun feels bright but not too bright—looking up I see that it has already set. There is a hollowed-out space inside my chest, but it does not feel empty. Not entirely.

For all the things I don’t know yet (and they are many), I do know this—we need to wake up. And we need the things around us to wake us up. Whether it’s the bare branches of the tree outside my window against the morning sky, or watching my young daughter’s fingers trace the words on a 3,000 year-old parchment and then slip into my hand—in these things and through these things, I have my heart. I have my heart and it is pleased.

The Tears of Charles A. Post: Horror and Mental Illness in Cinema

Ever since I began teaching writing to mental patients, I’ve become more and more aware of (and uncomfortable around) stories and movies that feature “crazy” people as villainous monsters. That’s no doubt due in part to how familiar I’ve  become with the behavior of schizophrenics and psychotics. Physical and verbal “symptoms” that most New Yorkers would cross the street (or change subway cars) to get away from, now just seem like part of the human landscape to me.

And yet, as a writer (and reader) of psychological horror fiction, I encounter mental illness again and again as a subject of horror and loathing, a source of danger and violence. In short, “good material” for the writer.

In film, mental illness typically occupies two ends of a broad spectrum. On one end, there are the spectacularly dangerous lunatics (Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter); on the other end, there are the tortured, brilliant innocents (John Nash, David Helfgott). You’re either a crazed killer or a misunderstood genius, nothing in-between.

Whenever a film grants a psychotic villain  a little sympathy, we’re usually called upon to empathize with the pain they suffer at the hands of the outside world. Quasimodo and Frankenstein’s monster—two child-like characters who could probably garner an ‘MR diagnosis’ at any mental health clinic—are both misunderstood and tormented by unfeeling mobs who they later violently turn on. The unspoken idea is that if these poor brutes were just left alone, if people simply let them “be themselves,” they’d be perfectly happy and everything would turn out fine.

There’s no doubt that the mentally ill have suffered and still suffer horribly at the hands of  ”normal” people. Still, for all the suffering caused by the outside world, I’d argue that it’s the inside world that causes the mentally ill their greatest pain. That’s why my favorite on-screen portrayal of a psychotic villain is not Tony Perkins as Norman Bates, or Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter—it’s Charles A. Post as Iscah Nicholas in the 1924 silent film, Wild Oranges.

The character of Nicholas is described as a “brutish man,” a “homicidal maniac” who has somehow insinuated himself into the household of an old man and his granddaughter. An outsider (the “hero,” John Woolfolk) arrives at the island, falls in love with the girl and decides to rescue her. Nicholas, as you can guess, doesn’t like this, and things turn dramatic pretty fast.

A large man, Post easily communicates the raw physical threat we feel in the presence of aggressive psychotic behavior. What’s so remarkable about Post’s performance is how he handles the character’s more fragile moments. When Nicholas asks Millie for a kiss, for instance, the kind of “child-like innocence” he exudes isn’t endearing or even readily sympathetic—it’s pure, painful awkwardness in it’s rawest form.

Equally raw is the moment when Nicholas later collapses in tears after a confrontation with the hero.  With other actors (or other movies), this would be a signal to “feel sorry” for the villain. When Post does it, it’s not an occasion  for “comfortable” empathy. The pain that this moment elicits is shocking, raw, and real.  We understand immediately that Nicholas isn’t weeping from sorrow or frustration over what someone else has done to him—he’s weeping because he’s being torn apart by the devils inside his own skull. Not even the final scene where Nicholas is mauled to death by a ferocious dog can compete with that.

The mental patients who I teach are not geniuses, nor are they monsters. They are human beings caught in a struggle with something terrible inside of them, and if they are brilliant or sensitive or creative at all, it’s in spite of their illness, not because of it.  We don’t need to demonize the mentally ill or deify them. What we can do is see them for who they are, bear witness to their struggle and honor it. That, I believe, is what Charles A. Post succeeded at doing on the screen all those years ago.

What’s So Scary About Peter Pan

I’ll never forget the first time I read J. M. Barrie’s own novelization of ‘Peter Pan’.

I was in fourth grade and it was reading-time in the library of my elementary school. I already knew and loved Peter Pan from the Disney film (and from an obscure audio version on vinyl with songs my sister and I had loved to sing) but I had never read Barrie’s novel. It was a short book; it looked small and unimposing. Easy. I took it from the shelf and sat down at the long wooden table and started to read.

Within the first few sentences, I realized I’d stumbled into something that was a lot deeper and darker than I could have imagined.

What hit me so hard was the level of powerful adult regret, longing, and shame that runs throughout that little book. There’s the love-hate relationship with children. And the Doppelganger-thing between Mr. Darling and Captain Hook that, onstage and onscreen, is too often little more than an excuse for a good actor to play a double-role, is—in Barrie’s book—an emotionally rich and devastating undercurrent that runs through the story. (The scene where Mr. Darling pours his medicine into the dog’s bowl and attempts to turn it into a joke in front of his family is still almost too unbearable to read.)

In Peter Pan, growing up is a kind of death sentence. Wendy seems more aware of that than anyone.

One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

That is why the scenes in which Wendy spends her final night as a child in the nursery feel like a condemned prisoner’s last night on death row.

Death has an interesting and prominent place in Barrie’s little book.  Tootles the Lost Boy baring his breast for Peter’s dagger (Strike, Peter! Strike true!), Wendy bravely walking the plank; all of these are full of the feeling of young children playing at death, rehearsing it, trying it on for size. Peter is not afraid of death because he cannot imagine the end of his own existence. Death will be an awfully big adventure, he famously says as he’s about to be swallowed by the rising tide—because, like all young children playing at death, he believes he will be there to experience it.

The primary terror that runs throughout Barrie’s little book is the terror of forgetting and being forgotten. Peter’s parents forget him. John and Michael forget their parents. Things (i.e. people) that matter enormously suddenly do not matter at all, as if they never existed.

The last word in Barrie’s little book is heartless.

‘…and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.’

It’s an amazingly unexpected ending, raw and real, and still has the power to shock me a little. Today it makes me think of the words of the Taoist philosopher, Lao Tzu, ‘Heaven and earth are not human-hearted / they treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs.’ Lao Tzu is presenting heartlessness as a kind of wisdom worth seeking and attaining; in Barrie’s utterance of that word you can hear both his own resentment and terror at the inescapable fate of forgetting and being forgotten, as well as the beginning of a kind of acceptance of it. He’s just standing on the threshold of it, not yet able to step all the way in. It’s a difficult place to be, and it’s called growing up.

Tremble and Shine: The Fearful Luminosity of Deborah Kerr

Like many of my generation, the first time I saw Deborah Kerr was in The King and I. And, also like many of my generation, I fell in love with her. Part of the appeal (both suggested and reinforced by the film’s sharp focus on cultural, class, and sexual boundaries) was the distinct feeling that I was not supposed to fall in love with her. Which, of course, only made the whole idea even more irresistible.

Kerr did not seem young to me. (Anyone older than twelve or thirteen seemed “old” to me at the time.) She reminded me of one of my teachers at school, the kind you don’t notice you have a crush on until it’s too late. Although she was, in fact, breathtakingly beautiful, I did not think of her as being especially pretty. I realize now it was because she did not act like a woman who is beautiful, or who wants the world to know she is beautiful, because, quite simply, her beauty was beside the point.

I wasn’t really aware of Kerr again until ten years or more later when some college friends and I decided to tune in to a late movie because the TV guide said it was a ghost story and that it was very good.

The Innocents contains a number of memorable frightening images. Quint’s face drifting closer and closer to the window, his ghostly breath frosting the glass. Miss Jessup standing on the far side of the lake, her face a hollow blur, drenched to the bone in her long black dress.

But the most frightening image in the film—to me, anyway—will always be the look on Deborah Kerr’s face.

A good actor knows that you never play drunk. Instead, you play someone who’s trying not to act drunk. Likewise, Kerr never played terror—she played a human being trying, desperately, not to give in to terror.

Anyone who has ever suffered from anxiety understands that it has two components. First, you are afraid of the thing that initially inspires the fear—then, you are afraid of the fear, afraid of losing control. Kerr communicated that experience better than almost any actor on film. Which is why her performances are capable of inspiring such immediate and empathetic terror in the viewer.

Fear is viral. And it spreads more quickly in confined spaces. In Black Narcissus, Kerr plays a nun stationed in a remote Himalayan outpost trying desperately to protect the nuns in her charge from the faceless dread that’s spreading among them. It’s a losing battle, compounded by the fact that Kerr’s character herself has also contracted the same nameless terror.

Of course, Kerr was not merely known for playing damsels in psychological and spiritual distress—she played any number of “strong women” during her career. But in Kerr’s portrayals, the strength of character feels both “natural” and like an effort. You somehow never lose the sense that Kerr’s characters, no matter how in (or out) of control they may seem, are fighting a battle against overwhelming forces both outside and inside themselves.

Other actors who are famous for their on screen portrayals of “strong women” (Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck) toss out moments of fragility for contrast and, one feels, to demonstrate their range as performers. With Kerr, the “fragility” is a given, a constant undercurrent, so that it no longer comes across as “fragility”, but is simply humanity.

The lesson that creators of horror fiction (both onscreen and off) can learn from Kerr’s performances is this—that it’s not enough to produce single moments of shock and terror. To ring true and cut to the heart, you must show a gradual and inexorable decline, the erosive power of fear. And, whatever the outcome, a little bravery in the struggle.

They Rise, They Walk Again

On Friday nights when I was ten years old, I’d borrow my parents’ black, heavy Big Ben alarm clock, set it for 5:25 AM and stuff it under my pillow. Usually, the anticipation alone was enough to wake me and I’d push the off-button before it had a chance to ring. Then I’d shuffle down the hall in the dark and into the family room where I’d kneel down on the faded Persian carpet, pull the power button on the big Zenith TV and listen to the pop and sizzle as the forces inside the picture tube gathered themselves.

To this day I wonder who was the person at our local TV station who decided that 5:30 AM on Saturday was the perfect time to show every horror movie from the Universal Studios vault. The ungodly hour and the darkness contributed to my vague feeling that there was something subversive, almost indecent about these films. It did not occur to me that they’d been ghettoized, that these movies were (at the time) considered not classics, but garbage, filler between fishing shows and the morning news. But to me, the hour was holy.

Laying on that scratchy old living room rug in the pre-dawn dark, I saw for the first time not only classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman and The Mummy, but also lesser-known treasures like The Black Cat, The Raven, The Body Snatchers, The Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Haunted Strangler, White Zombie.

Some of the films they showed us were worn thin as Egyptian papyrus, and the light threatened to burn right through them. The ancient, noisy soundtracks gave new meaning to the phrase “thunderous silence”—when the camera panned slowly through a castle’s empty corridors or when Lugosi crept across a victim’s bedroom, the silence literally roared like blood rushing through my skull.

The visual vocabulary of those movies etched itself into my brain—the wild and ragged black and white skies, the flat staging that had the angular beauty of hieroglyphics, the mannered performances that took on the slow and formal grace of kabuki theater.

It’s useless to argue that the old monster movies of the thirties and forties are more frightening than contemporary horror films with their realistic gore and computer-generated shocks. What they are is more beautiful. The crumbling castles, the forbidding forests thick with fog, the horse-drawn carriages and villagers in their bonnets and lederhosen all have more in common with the world of fairy tales than with the brutal realities of violence and terror.

When did I first become interested in these movies? Who told me they were worth seeing? What was it that first got me out of bed and in front of the TV at that ungodly hour?

I had a friend, Chuck Scoggins who lived, like all of my friends, within easy walking distance of my parents’ house. Chuck had a gun his father had made for him, a German Luger he’d carved out of plywood with a jigsaw in his woodworking shop. It was flat and one-dimensional, but within those limits it was as perfect a replica of a Luger as any piece of plywood could be, and was a thing of beauty that I coveted.

Another of Chuck’s possessions that had a different but equally powerful effect on me was a record with a garish blood-red cover featuring the image of the Frankenstein monster on the left and Dracula on the right. Although I had not yet seen the movies, I recognized the characters from Halloween costumes and lunch boxes. The images were common, familiar as Santa Claus. Chuck showed me the record but would not play it for me until he was sure his mother could not hear it. I think he enjoyed withholding it from me until the right moment.

The right moment came one afternoon when Chuck’s mother had gone out shopping and we were left alone in the huge rec-room that held all his toys and games in crazy, teetering piles. I watched Chuck slip the disc out of the worn cardboard cover, set it on the spinning turntable, then slowly lower the needle into the groove.

The first sound to come out of the speakers was not the rumble of thunder or evil laughter or a creaking door—it was the clattering of a typewriter. The narrator was a writer, a mortal man who had gone too far and seen too much and was now on a mission to communicate to all of us what he’d seen before it was too late. The writer’s voice  told us that he was marked for death by Count Dracula whose tomb he had discovered and whose secrets he was now revealing to us at the cost of his own life.

The rest of that side was the voice of Count Dracula, an impeccable Lugosi impression by the same actor who did the voice of the writer and the voice of the Frankenstein monster on the other side. The actor, Gabriel Dell, had been one of the original Dead End kids, the tall, handsome one who usually stood on the sidelines looking intense and flicking his long oily hair out of his eyes. The makers of the record did not print a photo of the actor on the back of the record sleeve, so when I tried to picture the real person whose voice I was hearing, there was only a blank, a darkness, and out of that darkness, pictures came.

The reason that Chuck’s mother did not want her son listening to this record was a scene where Dracula approaches a young girl on the streets of London, hypnotizes her and then drinks her blood. We did not get to hear the voice of the girl, only the sound of her footsteps, and a few light rustlings that may have been her clothing as she moved. Dracula’s voice whispers intimately close to the microphone, trembling with lust, Her throat….so soft…so warm…so full of life… Then the unmistakable sound of human teeth crunching through some kind of soft, resistant substance, and the owner of those teeth softly slurping some kind of liquid suddenly rising into his mouth.

I don’t know how many times we listened to that scene, or how many times Chuck must have listened to it in private, but I do remember that there were numerous scratches right at that place that crackled like static electricity, and we had to strain to hear those other sounds underneath.

One afternoon Chuck’s mother took the record out into their back yard and snapped it in two pieces, then four, like a communion wafer. I never saw the pieces of broken vinyl, but from the genuine sorrow on Chuck’s face I knew it was true and I never mentioned it again.

By the time I got my own copy of the record, the blood-sucking scene had already lost most of its charge for me. What had not worn off was the power of Dracula’s presence, the sense of utter self-confidence, of complete mastery and fearlessness. Wolves came when he called and bowed down at his feet, zombies and ghouls swarmed up from hell at his bidding, ready to kill for him. Dracula was at the top of the supernatural food chain and had no one and nothing to fear on this side of the grave or on the other.

Meanwhile, I had plenty to fear from the bigger boys at school who shoved me to the ground and pinned me down, laughing at my struggles until they grew bored. But in my dreams it was different. In my dreams, I did not make them gaze into my ring. I didn’t stalk them like a panther stalking a gazelle, never sank my teeth into their necks. In my dreams, the ones I had in my sleep and the ones I had wide awake, it was the sound of my voice alone that conquered my enemies, the first words Lugosi says when he appears onscreen. I am Dracula. The power of that voice, the power of those three words and what they meant was mine in the moment it took me to say them, and I said them as often as I dared, practicing, until it felt true.

As much as I’d loved Lugosi’s voice, there was something about Karloff’s that I loved even more. It was a rich British accent with upper-class patrician overtones, each syllable measured out precisely like spoonfuls of tea, but with rougher, lower-class undertones that I believed those carefully measured pronunciations were a way of keeping under control. There was also a very slight lisp, which may have been one more reason for those painstaking pronunciations. I tried to imitate Karloff’s voice and found, oddly, that what helped was putting the tip of my tongue between my teeth and my lower lip on the left side.

It wasn’t until I had my own children that Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein made me weep. Karloff first appears onscreen, sitting alone in a darkened tower room, still as a wax figure. His creator slowly raises the covering of a skylight high above, allowing beams of sunlight to touch the floor at his feet. He stirs, stands, stiffly, shuffles forward uncertainly, lifting his face toward the light, then slowly raises his arms over his head and begins to make little fluttering motions with his fingers, trying to catch the beams of sunlight as if they’re butterflies. When he realizes he can’t touch the light, can’t have it, he begins to whimper and whine, his hands moving more and more frantically. His creators then shut the window above, taking the light away, and he lowers his hands, then his head, then shuffles backward and collapses in his chair, defeated. Watching that scene as the parent of a small child, I can now feel the strong cross-currents of pity and guilt cut through me, so when that window above opens and shuts, it’s my own hand on the lever, giving the light and then taking it away.

By the time I discovered his movies, Karloff was already an old man, and much was made of his essential grandfatherliness in the articles I read that dubbed him “the gentle monster”, although it was hard to think of the living-dead giant in Son of Frankenstein who tears off a police chief’s arm and uses it as a club as “gentle.”

One of his films was called The Man They Could Not Hang, and that name, more than “the gentle monster” summed up a side of Karloff that felt very important to me.

Every actor whose character dies in one movie and then goes on to act in another “comes back to life.” Not every actor gets to come back from the dead within the same movie, but Karloff did, again and again. In all of his incarnations—Imhotep, Frankenstein’s monster, John Grey, the message was the same—we are born, we live, we die, we come back. But we are changed. There was something instructive, even reassuring to me about all of that dying and coming back to life. It made me feel that I could do that too—or that one day, Karloff would show me how.

Like all good character actors, Karloff did not hide his aging. As I devoured thirty years’-worth of his films, I watched the gaunt, spectral giant with the hollow cheeks turn into the solid, white-haired eminence with the shaggy glowering eyebrows. Lugosi, rightly or wrongly, had been pegged early in his career as an exotic lover-type—Karloff was never saddled with that kind of expectation and let us watch what time was doing to his body all the way to the end.

At the end, Karloff was acting from a wheelchair because of cancer and emphysema, doing his last movie with an oxygen tank by his side. I imagine him cupping the mask to his face with one hand, holding the script in the other, then rising stiffly and shuffling out in front of the camera, the way I first saw him do on that flickering black and white TV screen, on that Saturday morning so long ago.

One sunny morning when my mother was driving me to elementary school, she turned down the radio and calmly told me that Boris Karloff had died. I remember looking out the car window at the red brick school building, the green field and pond behind the fence, the cracked black asphalt bike-walk and the little brook that ran alongside it where minnows swam. As I gazed out the window at the high flying clouds and the gnarled trees standing in a silent circle around the old pond, I felt a smile slowly forming on my face, and thought, I wonder what he’ll come back as this time?

It’s now 2010 and I will be fifty-five years old in four months. The old Zenith TV on which I first saw those movies is gone, reduced to its component molecules of glass and metal. The movies, however, are still here. I have them right in front of me as I type this, in three beautifully packaged DVD boxed sets. I can watch them any time, pause and rewind them, see behind-the-scenes documentaries and listen to director’s commentaries. I own them now, but not in the way that I owned them before—I can control them, and that seems wrong.

Still, I want my son to see these movies. I want him to have what they gave me. But I don’t want to show him too soon. I want to wait until he’s ready, but I’m not sure when that might be.

Last week I called my mother to ask how old I was when I first started watching monster movies.

“You were ten,” she said without a moment’s pause, as if she had a written record open in front of her.

“Really?” I said, “Are you sure?”  I was disappointed, and I knew she could probably hear it in my voice.

“Oh yes,” she said, “He still has a few more years to go.” I listened to the sound of my mother’s voice coming through the earpiece, her strong Kentucky accent that always surprises me a little. I’ve always thought it was impossible to tell how old my mother was by listening to her voice, although now I can hear the inevitable sound of age creeping in at its edges; I wonder if she can hear the same thing in mine.

In my hometown there were two cemeteries I had to pass by on the way home, each one on opposite sides of Cemetery Road. I remember looking through the back-seat window at those crypts squatting under ancient nodding cypress, the sky summer-humid and full of haze, glowing with a pearly gray luminescence that etched every crooked tree in hard-edged relief.

I remember looking at all of those gravestones passing by, and instead of feeling fear, I felt anticipation, excitement. I will die, I thought. Then I will rise and walk again. I will fly, far above those gnarled trees in that pearly gray sky, then swoop down low over the passing cars whose drivers will glance up and wonder what they’ve just seen. I will touch down and stalk through the fields like a scarecrow come to life and find the homes of evil men. I will rap on their windows and wait for them to look out, then make their wicked hearts burst with fright when they see my face. Or perhaps I will find a child who is alone and friendless, and teach him to be unafraid, first of me, then of the world. He will tell people what he has seen, but they will not believe him and will shun him and call him crazy. Then I will rise up behind him like the moon rising over a parched horizon, that boy’s enemies will be torn and scattered like dry leaves and he will be justified forever. Because that is what the dead can do.

Will the Real Larry Talbot Please Stand Up: Putting the “Man” In ‘Wolfman’

Every Halloween I take out my boxed set of classic monster movies from Universal Studios and try to decide which one to spend my favorite holiday with. While I had a major Dracula obsession as a child, and Boris Karloff remains one of the film actors I love most, the film that I return to again and again is ‘The Wolfman’. For years I could never quite explain why. Now I think it’s because of the three major Universal monster franchises—Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman, the Wolfman is the most human.

When I heard that Universal Studios was releasing a new film called ‘The Wolfman’ it never occurred to me that it might be a fresh take on the original Curt Siodmak script about the tormented Talbot family. After all, in nearly seventy intervening years of werewolf movies, no one (no one I know of, anyway)  had used the original characters and story-line of the 1941 Universal classic, and there was no reason to believe that anyone was going to start now.

It was when I saw the two male leads that had been cast—Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins—that the alarm went off in my head. The difficult father-son relationship was a central element—perhaps the central element—in the 1941 film, and when I learned that the new Wolfman was, in fact, going to use the original characters and story-line, I couldn’t wait to see it.

Predictably, most of the discussion comparing the merits of the old and new ‘Wolfman’ focuses on special effects—CGI versus Jack Pierce’s makeup-box—and the new version’s more graphic maiming and bloodletting.

What’s really wrong with the new ‘Wolfman’ has nothing to do with special effects or CGI, nor with graphic versus implied violence. It’s about character—specifically, Larry Talbot’s character.

In the new film, Del Toro’s Larry Talbot is a brooding Byronic figure, a Shakespearean actor with a successful international career and (apparently) groupies. Del Toros’s Talbot has “family issues” too, but they haven’t stunted him—instead, they’ve simply made him even more darkly brooding and attractive. In some scenes he resembles nothing more than Heathcliff striding purposefully across the moors. (You can almost feel the latest “mash-up” novel coming—’Wuthering Heights and Werewolves”.)

Some critics have commented on the physical resemblance between Del Toro and Lon Chaney, Jr. There’s the bear-like physique, the mournfully haggard face—but the resemblance stops there.

I remember watching the scenes in which Chaney’s Larry Talbot attempts to flirt with Evelyn Ankers’ character in the antique shop, thinking that the discomfort I felt over Chaney’s stiffness was not what I was supposed to be feeling, that Chaney was simply failing as an actor to embody the suave leading-man quality that the script seemed to call for.

What’s perfectly clear to me today is that the wince-inducing cloddishness of Chaney’s attempts at romancing are a central part of who Larry Talbot is (or, more precisely and painfully, who he is not).

Chaney’s Talbot is a misfit of the first order, the lumbering tongue-tied doofus who never got a date in high school. Even as a grown man attracted to a woman, his first move is to buy a telescope and spy on her through the window of her home. Picture watching how a young Cary Grant would look handling this same material—stalking transformed into something gallantly comedic. When Chaney does it, there’s nothing gallant or comedic about it. It’s embarrassing, and more than a little disturbing.

For a real eyeful of Chaney’s mastery at embodying a horribly uncomfortable and uncertain man-child, just look at the way he holds his hat in his hands—has any actor ever held a hat more tragically?

Unlike vampirism, lycanthropy is not an empowerment fantasy. It’s an anti-empowerment nightmare. An ultimate and horrific loss of control.

The “morning after” scenes in most werewolf movies have always been reminiscent of hangovers, the aftermath of an alcoholic blackout—they have never looked so real as when Chaney did them.

Chaney’s portrayal of Larry Talbot is a walking embodiment of bone-deep discomfort and wracking guilt. The antithesis of the expression comfortable in his own skin. Chaney-as-Talbot is so uncomfortable in his own skin that he seems to want to tear it off and crawl right out of it—and, in a sense, that’s exactly what he does.

More than anything, The Wolfman is a story about a father and a son.

Being the black sheep of the family isn’t always a romantic, enviable role. Sometimes the bad things our families think of us turn out to be true—or, there is a place where they feel most true, where the adult egos we have carefully build-up for ourselves feel most fragile.

For many of us, that place is “home”, which is precisely why many of us leave that place and so seldom return. This is the place that Larry Talbot returns to, hat (literally) in hand, his failures unspoken, his sins unspecified.

From the moment Chaney’s Talbot returns to his ancestral home (and his father’s house), there is not a visible trace of rebellion in him. There is something broken about him, almost abject. Even when he attempts to act like an independent man-of-the-world, there’s something mildly pathetic about it. He’s like a child trying to act like an adult, just barely pulling it off.

Claude Rains, as Larry’s father, dispenses with the cliched mannerisms of the disapproving/domineering patriarch and plays Sir Henry Talbot as a long-suffering man of deep disappointments and sorrowful patience. His disappointment in his son is palpable, but so is his guilt over having these feelings toward his own son.

Rains’ Sir Henry seems to recognize from the very start that his son isn’t a dangerous renegade, but a wounded creature who is already beyond hope. One gets the strong sense that he has probably felt this way about his son long before the fateful wolf-bite—most likely since he was old enough to walk.

Still, watching Rains’ performance, you never doubt for one second that Sir Henry loves his wounded offspring. That “tough love” reaches its climax in the scene in which Sir Henry ties his son to a chair to prove to him that his werewolf fears are nothing more than fantasies. That Rains somehow makes this come off like a loving act is a testimony not only to his skill as an actor, but to Siodmak’s script and how it has brought these two men (and us) to this moment.

In the boxed set of classic Universal monster movie CDs, every jewel-box opens up to reveal an iconic image from the films, pretty much the ones you’d expect. For Dracula, it’s Lugosi standing alone next to his coffin in the subterranean crypt. For Frankenstein, it’s Colin Clive, Dwight Fry, and Karloff in the laboratory.

When I opened the Wolfman CD I was floored to see—not Chaney in full hairy makeup snarling from behind a tree, but the human Larry Talbot tied to a chair, Sir Henry leaning over him, father and son locking eyes, each one deperate to make the other understand, both of them knowing it’s impossible but both unable to give up trying.

Someone at Universal Studios had recognized that this was the film’s primal human image to honor and preserve. Who am I to argue with that?