Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  “The Wicker Man” (1973)   Imagine an idyllic island community, where the population and the lush green landscape are equally beautiful and music constantly fills the air. Where everyone is well-fed, happy, and encouraged to pursue their every pleasure without shame or censor. An Earthy, Idealized, Pagan, Utopia, able to keep the Bigotries and Judgments of both a stale Christian Church and uptight Modern Society at bay. The only problem is that sooner or later, there will be a Price to Pay. But this isn’t too much of a challenge for these Blessed people, because as all honest pleasure-seekers understand, the best way to settle a bill is have someone else suffer the cost.   It is one of the boldest Horror films ever made, as it challenges the Philosophical inconsistencies and Moral Hypocrisies of most Genre films. Overwhelmingly, Horror stories are tales of Good vs. Evil, with narratives that apparently side with Good, but most of the power derives from our attrac...

  When Michael Calls (1972)   Horror fiction, both in prose and film, changed in the 1960s and 1970s. I’d argue it changed in film earlier than prose, I remember walking into bookstores around 1979 was there was no “Horror” section, Author Stephen King was still shelved with the Mysteries, even though that match was obviously, increasingly, awkward.   The reason for that shelving is that Horror and Crime usually reflected each other in both Style and Story Structure; this is perhaps demonstrated in works like Dorothy Macardle 's novel “ Uneasy Freehold”  (1941, and now best known because its 1944 film adaptation, “The Uninvited”). Film, mostly, learned to exploit the most sensational potentials of Horror earlier, the Horror-boom of the 1950s film was mostly defined by teen-age Audiences, so less Ghost films structured as Mysteries to solve, more Monsters, while prose often kept to the older formats/assumptions. Author King was a child of that cinema boom...

  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962)   “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” is easily the greatest Heir to one of the most groundbreaking dramas in our cinema, “Sunset Boulevard” (1950). It takes the earlier film’s core Themes but shifts the style of telling away from the Noir and into straight-out Gothic Horror.   Both films treat Celebrity and the Business of Illusion as sick Addictions, it is taken to greater extremes here as the Cultural Addictions are treated like what Chemical Dependency should be viewed -- more a Disease than a Moral Failing, and once Infected you can enter a permanent recovery process but never be wholly cured.   This film gives us not one, but two Characters who, like “Sunset Boulevard’s” Character Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson), couldn’t be farther from recovery, and this pair eat each other’s souls away in toxic mixture of Codependence and out-right Sadism. Though “Whatever Happened to …” first half is full of delibe...