MOVIES MAKE GOOD

Ryan Baker  //  

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Oct 2 / 9:32pm

TV: Turner Classic Movies & Halloween Horror

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It was a simple enough decision to entirely cut cable television. A few months back, I took the opportunity to relinquish my DVRs and finally live without the timesuck of television's omnipresence, the inundation of advertisements, marketing messages and culture-shaping corporate memes. I realized there were too few times in my life where I'd lived free of television's influence and, in retrospect, nothing was lost in its absence - in fact, the contrary was true.

There were three points of hesitation: the first was PBS' programming, the last bastion of intelligent TV, the second was access to local news - more specifically weather reports given the often dire and dangerous situations Oklahoma's climate spawns. The third, of course, was Turner Classic Movies.

Always erudite, TCM has provided many an introduction to heretofore unseen classic films, frequently films I'd never thought to see or never even knew of; J. Lee Thompson's 1965 drama "Return from the Ashes" and Anthony Mann's "Reign of Terror/The Black Book," a 1949 noir about the French Revolution both spring to mind. TCM's Friday night "TCM Underground" programming specializes in bizarre genre fare and is a yearly prelude to the splendid October programming that surveys some of the best of classic horror.

So, whether you have cable television and the opportunity to see some of these on TCM or simply find TCM's taste to your liking and allow their choices to direct your rental or streaming decisions, here are the genre films Turner Classic Movies will be showing during the month of October in honor of Halloween.

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Filed under  //  Dracula   Frankenstein   Halloween   Hammer Horror   Lon Chaney   October   Robert Osborne   Robert Wise   Roger Corman   Schedule   Stephen King   TCM   TCM Underground   Tod Browning   Turner Classic Movies   Universal Pictures   Val Lewton  
 
Oct 1 / 8:00am

Music: "Hammer Horror," 1978

Happy October, friends, one of - if not the - most glorious of months. Fall is here, but autumn will soon creep in, taking the form of slate grey skies, the skittering of dead leaves, dying daylight hours giving way to a flesh-crawling chill that spreads through the night skies like the translucent wings of a bat. And as much as I love October, I love Halloween even more.

Since I was a child, I've been drawn to monsters. The fog-drenched, grave-strewn fields of a mysterious Europe still scourged by the specters of the Old Ways were Gothic doppelgängers to the fluffy, friendly, color-festooned realms of cherished childhood artifices like the Disney ouerve; the cycle of black-and-white horror films from Universal Pictures over the '30s and '40s were themselves inspired by the chiaroscuro aesthetic that emerged from Germany in the tumultuous period between the two World Wars, a period marked by economic failure, government instability and civil unrest; isolation and alienation, the themes of daily life in the Germany of the Weimar Republic, seeped into an Expressionistic body of culture and art reflecting the utter madness of a failed, crumbling society. As the Nazis ascended to power, many of Germany's intellectuals and artists fled, including more than a few that found themselves in Los Angeles, lensing chillers for struggling, neophyte studios like Universal Studios.

Those early films - made at the height of the Great Depression - are rooted in literary tradition, adapted from books, stories and plays; they're archetypal tales of the clash between modernity and tradition, hedonism and repression, religion and humanism. Figures like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster were at once horrifying, repulsive - yet strangely alluring, sometimes vulnerable. It should come as no surprise the decades have seen counterculture adopt the visages of these phantoms, as they are the ultimate embodiment of the outcast, figures of rebellion against the status quo. For the disenfranchised, they are power fantasies, totems of non-conformity around which those outside the mainstream can rally.

Of course, I didn't know any of this as a child. I just thought capes were cool.

Well, I can't think of a better way to begin October than Kate Bush's music ode to Hammer Films, a British production company that remade the literary Gothic horror film in the late '50s, '60s and '70s. Though Hammer adapted many of the same stories Universal had covered in their horror heyday, the small British studio's approach was markedly different, producing almost strictly period pieces peppered with then-controversial teases of titillation and blood.

Filed under  //  Dracula   Frankenstein   Gothic   Halloween   Hammer Films   Hammer Horror   Kate Bush   Universal Pictures