Summer Solstice 201 9 ein Schlag ins Gesicht des Weltraums Zapf.punkt 2 Italian Horror Castles - Situationism - Jekyll & Hyde zapf.punkt jun 2019 Table of Contents 2 Castle to Castle in Italian Horror 9 On Situationism: An Interview 16 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1 886) 20 A Tragedy of Errors at Notre Dame cover: Margrete Robsahm from Castle of Blood, and background cutout by Roy Gold. Collage: Lex Berman, contents banner: Barbara Steele in Black Sunday (1 962), back cover: Collage: Lex Berman. Zapf.Punkt Quarterly, V.1 No.2, (Jun 2019) is published by Diamond Bay Press, PO Box 426028, Cambridge, MA, 02142. Editor: Lex Berman. Entire contents (c) 2019 by Merrick Lex Berman. All rights are herewith released to individual contributors. Nothing may be reproduced or otherwise distributed without their permission. Please send articles and LOC to [email protected] zapf.punkt page 2 half an hour into the film, when told directly to his face that there is a Zapf.pweurewolf onnthe looske, he cant't believe it. ein Schlag ins Gesicht desGyWpsye: lIt'lrl taelul ymou swhat a werewolfis: it's a human being possessed by a wolf! Quantum Physics - CthulWhhuen t-he eDvil heyeairs aonnyoiu,Cthue slavtasge Barbara Steele at Massimo Castle, Arsoli, Italy, from La beast somehow gets inside and controls Maschera del Demonio (1960) you. Makes you look and act like a wolf. Castle to Castle Makes you hunt down a victim and kill like a wolf. With fangs: like a wolf! in Italian Horror Cop: Why you're crazy! You better not My introduction to horror movies was let anyone hear you talk like that Pappy, or at the Saturday matinee in Chicago. you'll wind up in the booby hatch! The double bill usually featured one Werewolf! Come on! movie so terrible that nobody could remember it upon leaving the theatre, Of course, you would have to sit and other sub-standard movies such as through another merciless twenty I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), or Fiend minutes of preachy townies in denial, Without a Face (1958). If you are before they finally form a posse, tug on familiar with those films, you will their cowboy hats, and set off to hunt know of the trends that they down the lycanthrope. But to suggest represented. The first, are films what is perfectly obvious, as Pappy ostensibly about violent monsters does when he looks at the crime scene attacking ordinary people, which reveal photo, is to risk the most severe themselves as status-quo social reprisal. Offto the booby hatch! You’re commentaries under a thin veneer of not allowed to say that. You’re not panic. allowed to believe that. The point is that any degree of non-conformity, In the case of I was a Teenage Werewolf, even if your position is undeniably the film was a flat-out indictment of true, cannot be tolerated. You must be juvenile delinquency. The do-gooder insane not to be exactly like everyone police officer is so square, that even Spring Equinox 2019 else. Confo4rm0i0tycisonuotpans option. zapf.punkt page 3 Did the creators of I Was a Teenage telekinesis and thought projections Werewolfeven grasp the message of have been amplified by the radiation their un-ironic film? But to be fair, the from a nuclear power station, causing a posturing of “delinquent" movies such malevolent invisible life form to as The Wild One (1953), with Marlon emerge. These blood-thirsty alien Brando in his black leather biker jacket, beings multiply, killing people left and and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), with right, and then, seeking more energy, the infamous runaways James Dean, they crank up the reactor to its highest Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood, were no output level. Unexpectedly, this extra better. They were all projecting the radiation causes the monsters to same morality tale about delinquency become visible. The subsequent fight and conformity. between the humans and the flying, stop-action brains-with-spines has The other type of films you’d see at the become a B-movie legend! Saturday matinee (back when such things still existed) had genuinely Of course some attempt was made in creepy aspects. This creepiness was all these B-movies to find creepy their only virtue, and lacking both locations. At the very least the camera budget and talent, the directors, writers, and actors would all grope collectively to find the creep factor. The results, as can be expected, were uneven, at best. This groping around for the edge of fear is manifested in the British production of Fiend Without a Face; where people die mysterious deaths, screaming as if they were being choked. Autopsies of the victims revealed that their entire brain and spinal cords were missing, and only toward the end of the film is it revealed that a professor's experiments with Visible at last! Fiend Without a Face (1958) zapf.punkt page 4 would be driven out to Bronson canyon road every week -- even a Canyon with a car-load of bit actors, bland New England mansion looked hoping that some elan from all the other almost scary. To be sure, rainy days in movies shot there would rub off on Rhode Island can be awfully bleak, but their meagre productions. How could judicious camera angles in the filming they go wrong, following in the of Seaview Terrace at Newport, gave footsteps of classics such as Robot the t.v. series Dark Shadows (1966) a Monster (1953) or Attack ofthe Crab twinge of scariness that Hollywood Monsters (1957)? lacked. By the time that the caves in the In sharp contrast to these American B- mountainsides of Bronson Canyon movies, we sometimes encountered became the setting for Batman’s secret something completely different. Films hideout (1966), they were already with ravishing actresses and gruesome stereotypes of themselves. Thus, as a details, that were set in fantastic consequence of overuse, a film location castles, dungeons, and stone itself can provide fodder for satire, seen fortifications. These sexy and amazing for example, in Larry Blamire's The Lost films appeared and disappeared Skeleton ofCadavra (2001). without a trace for us miserable t.v. viewers in the pleistocene. In those When you have been indoctrinated days, we lacked the internet, and we with this fare -- the same townies had no access to encyclopedic surveys driving their trucks up the same desert of genre films, such as Roberto Curti's zapf.punkt page 5 amazing Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957-1969. So we had almost no resources to research popular culture artifacts. These fleeting images came and went like the dust blowing through the fence at the Cactus Drive-in. Sure, I could badger all my friends with vague questions such as: "What was that Grand staircase in I, Vampiri (1956) fantastic vampire movie on last Saturday night? With all the dungeons Those stone arches and parapets will and chains, vampires, bondage, and always remain, half in shadow, while those amazing castles. Doesn't anyone the people come and go around them know?" But nobody seemed to like flutters of silk on a moonlit night. remember. Even though the films in question often "You mean the movie that came on had some of the worst translations and right after Rat Patrol?" someone offered, worst over-dubs in human history, trying to let me down in a friendly way. nonetheless, with their heavy gothic "No, no, no! The movie with a ambience, and their vampires crawling beautiful woman laying in a tomb, who up from the tombs of giant medieval was brought back to life by a splash of stone castles, they left my adolescent fresh blood, and who kept coming back brain spinning. What were these to life as a zombie vampire, creeping movies, and more urgently: where around secret passageways wearing a were those castles? They didn't look diaphanous negligee in order to sink like the typical Hollywood sets with her fangs into everybody’s throat, until their unbelievable, overblown features. a whole pack of priests and townsfolk The Universal back lot -- used for lit her on fire and threw her off a cliff." filming all the classics from Dracula By that point of course, my friends had (1931) to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf mysteriously vanished, but it became Man (1943) -- were illuminated with even more crucial to find out about cloying and balanced perfection, giving those films and to identify their them a hollow, plastic quality. In intransigent architecture. Hollywood castles, even the shadows zapf.punkt page 6 glow, the dust is fresh, and the cobwebs biting continues, and the midnight sparkle. cravings of scantily clad actresses were slaked in scene after scene, you begin Those iconic Hollywood castles leave to warm to the idea that there is not you totally unprepared when you first actually a sense of righteousness in the lay eyes on Mario Bava's classic La need to stop these beautiful monsters. maschera del demonio [Black Sunday] Rather you get the feeling that it is (1960) where the castle speaks for itself. surrender to their demonic desires that In these Italian pre-giallo horror films, is the whole point of the movie. Maybe we were visiting actual landscapes. this has something to do with the The characters ride horses and centrality of the Church, with the long carriages through real gates, and the sweep of the Dark Ages, and horses are taken into the stables where modernity’s sweeping crisis of faith; you can smell the hay. Mountains drop but whatever it is that unleashed this off into canyons.