“What I like to do is write a lot of mythical scenes, like the history of the wars on Neptune and the reason Saturn’s rings are there. You can write your own mythology.” Jimi Hendrix
“He rarely had time off, but when he did, he read science-fiction books.” Charles Cross, Hendrix biographer
Jimi Hendrix was a fan. It’s true.
How biographies like Stone Free and Room Full Of Mirrors manage to sidestep the visionary guitar legend’s interior world is beyond belief. But an entire wave of evidence has emerged during the internet era to prove that the music and the sound world of James Marshall Hendrix, who died of drug-related causes in 1970, was inspired by the novels that inspire all of us.
Beginnings: Meet “Buster” Hendrix
When Jimi Hendrix was a child, everybody in his Seattle neighborhood knew him as “Buster.” While biographer Charles Cross contends that his nickname was from the cartoon character Buster Brown, other writers such as Jason Heller claim that the nickname came from “Buster” Crabbe of Flash Gordon fame.
And Cross does tell the story of young Jimi, who loved science fiction and doodled spaceships in class, and both Jimi and his brother Leo experiencing a UFO incident. But for some reason, Cross misses the importance of Jimi’s interior life.
Growing His Fandom: Jimi and Chas Chandler
So what evidence do we really have for Jimi’s fandom? It becomes evident when former Animals member Chas Chandler becomes Hendrix’s manager and brings him across the ocean to become a star in England. It turns out that Chandler and Hendrix bonded over science fiction. The guitarist had the pick of Chandler’s extensive collection.
Hendrix was said to be a big fan of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. Philip Jose Farmer’s Night of Light and its mind-bending reality fields supposedly inspired him to write Purple Haze. And as one fan to another, these obscure picks are pretty good evidence that Jimi had been reading for some time.
Other SF-related books or stories favored by Hendrix:
“Gulf” by Robert Heinlein
“Lot” by Ward Moore (F&SF, May 1953)
Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (edited by Brian Aldiss)
The Tibetan Book Of The Dead
The Urantia Book
Jimi As Slan: Exploding The Mind Through Sound
One puzzle that many rock historians have wondered about is how Jimi Hendrix suddenly introduced us to a remarkable world of sound all at once. As JHS Pedals’ Josh Scott said in his YouTube documentary The Technology Of Jimi Hendrix: “Every move Jimi’s making lines up with a significant technological creation in guitar—it’s wild!”
Given Jimi’s background as a science fiction fan, I think he was on a quest to combine his extraordinary skill with advancements in sonic technology to explore the mind through your ears. It was no mistake that Jimi was discovering the first fuzz guitar pedals on his own then combined his talents with sonic wizard (and fellow SF fan) Roger Mayer.
“Both Jimi and I had synaesthesia, where we would see colors in sound,” Mayer also told Music Radar in 2017. “We found that fascinating. It’s a useful ability as a sound designer. I was very interested in new sounds for guitars. We would talk about the vision of the sound. For instance: ‘This sounds like what you see when you hold two mirrors in front of each other.’ And that notion became the Octavia pedal.”
And when Hendrix began to reshape what rock could sound like—layering feedback, dissonance, new sonic textures, and strange alien voices—he wasn’t trying to sound “psychedelic.” It was to sound otherworldly. Because that’s where he’d always been looking.
Axis Rising: Science Fiction as Sound and Statement
Jimi Hendrix didn’t just flirt with science fiction—he built a whole album around it. Axis: Bold As Love is, in Hendrix’s own words, “science fiction rock ’n’ roll.” And it opens like a radio drama from another galaxy.
The first track, “EXP,” begins not with music but with a mock radio interview. Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, who plays the straight man interviewer, chats with Jimi as “Paul Caruso” about UFO sightings—before Hendrix’s voice begins warping and distorting, transforming into that of a saucer-being, complete with panned echoes, fuzz bursts, and a departure into cosmic noise.
“You can’t believe everything you see and hear… CAN YOU?”
“Now excuse me, I must be on my way.”
It’s tongue-in-cheek, yes—but it’s also a blueprint. Hendrix wanted to tear down the wall between Earth and imagination, between human and alien, between rock and pure sci-fi theater.
That spirit flows through the rest of the album. In “Up from the Skies,” Hendrix sings from the perspective of a disappointed alien visitor, one who once loved Earth and has returned to find it broken, confused, and violent. His voice floats through a gently swinging jazz-rock groove, curious but concerned.
“I just want to talk to you… I won’t do you no harm.”
Behind the scenes, Hendrix was working closely with Mayer. Mayer’s experimental circuitry helped Hendrix forge entirely new tones—sounds that had never existed before. Mayer later recalled:
“The sounds of [Axis] could be thought of as bunch of disks floating in space in front of you, like flying saucers with sounds coming from them and they’re moving around. ‘Castles Made of Sand’ was partly inspired by some of the books we were reading, like Dune by Frank Herbert. It’s a science fiction kind of fantasy, but really down to earth in a way. Jimi was very good at depicting imagery that people could relate to, but with a bit of a cosmic twist to it, you know?”
Even songs that feel grounded—like the aching beauty of “Little Wing” or the dreamy heartbreak of “Castles Made of Sand”—are laced with speculative wonder. Hendrix paints emotional truths using mythic, surreal, and cosmic brushes. The sky is always open. The stars are always listening.
When you listen to Axis, it wasn’t just a concept album—it was a cosmic transmission, a collection of sci-fi stories hidden in blues and feedback. With Mayer’s alien tones and Hendrix’s interstellar vision, it became a document of someone who wasn’t content with reality as-is. He had to build new ones.
From what I see, Hendrix didn’t see science fiction as “genre.” He saw it as spiritual architecture—a way of imagining new states of being, new worlds, new freedoms. Whether he was reading Penguin anthologies or trading paperbacks with Chas Chandler, Hendrix treated science fiction as a language of transformation—and he translated it through feedback and fire.
The Lost Opera: Black Gold and Afrofuturist Echoes
Before Space Is the Place hit screens, before Parliament’s Mothership Connection landed, before the term Afrofuturism entered the cultural lexicon—Jimi Hendrix was already sketching star maps in sound. And nowhere is that more clear than in his lost science fiction rock opera, Black Gold.
Written and demoed in 1970, Black Gold was a sprawling concept album built around a central figure: a cosmic drifter, part mystic, part outcast—a mirror of Hendrix himself. The fragments Hendrix left behind include lyrics and ideas filled with temporal shifts, alien visions, and metaphysical riddles. He recorded it solo, voice and guitar, a private message from deep space that the world never fully received.
The Black Gold tapes vanished after his death, only to re-emerge decades later in a collector’s hands. Despite rumors, retrospectives, and archival interest, it remains unreleased in full, suspended like a ghost satellite in Hendrix’s mythos.
But even in fragments, it’s clear: Hendrix was aiming beyond the charts. He was imagining a narrative arc, a world unto itself—Black identity transfigured through sonic myth.
And even without Black Gold, his body of work hums with Afrofuturist resonance. Songs like “Up from the Skies,” “Third Stone from the Sun,” and “1983…” aren’t just psychedelic—they’re visionary. They deal in alienation, rebirth, otherness, transformation. They speak from a place where the Black experience meets the universal unknown.
He didn’t write essays. He wrote waveforms.
He made the alien familiar—and the familiar alien.
Artists like George Clinton, Janelle Monáe, Shabaka Hutchings, and Moor Mother continue that trajectory. Hendrix didn’t invent Afrofuturism, and Sun Ra had already taken flight—but Jimi built his own vessel.
He joined the constellation.
The Signal Still Travels: Hendrix Beyond the Stars
Jimi Hendrix’s life burned bright and fast. But his ideas—his frequencies—are still traveling.
He was more than a guitarist, more than a songwriter. He was a cosmic cartographer, drawing psychic maps across the fretboard, turning fuzz and feedback into new ways of thinking. Science fiction wasn’t a pose or a metaphor—it was a worldview, one that let him see past the boundaries of race, genre, and gravity.
He found companionship in other sci-fi fans. He filled his shelves with strange books. He wrote alien voices into his music, flew his studio into the sun, and tried—right up to the end—to leave behind something bigger than a career.
That’s why Hendrix matters in the story of speculative fiction.
Not because he called himself a futurist.
But because he acted like one.
His journey—from Buster the Flash Gordon kid, to cosmic narrator, to the lost voice behind Black Gold—isn’t just a footnote in rock history. It’s a secret chapter in science fiction history, too.
A Poem: For Buster, Who Dreamed in Stars
He was Buster once, not yet the comet streaking across sound, but a boy with a head full of silver ships and Saturn’s whispered secrets.
In the shadow of city streetlamps, he looked up and imagined worlds that no blues guitar could yet shape, but would, in time.
Before the flames, before the wah-wah wails of war on Neptune, he carried galaxies in his pockets— tiny constellations stitched into denim.
They called him Buster,
but he was always reaching—
past fretboards, past fear,
into the wide silence between stars.
And when he played, myth became melody, and all the universe leaned in to listen.
By Chris M. Barkley: Novelist Meredith R. Lyons stopped in at the spacious Joseph Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio to promote her second novel, A Dagger of Lightning. She was hosted and interviewed by the Hugo Award winning writer John Scalzi. Soundcloud Interview Link: “Meredith R. Lyons Interview With John Scalzi”.
Cover: A Dagger of Lightning by Meredith R. Lyons
In the latest installment of Scalzi’s “The Big Idea” feature, “The Big Idea: Meredith R. Lyons” (which was published on April 3 on his Whatever blog site), Lyons explains what her motivation was for the new novel, which is the first in a new series.
“Why was it that only those twenty-one and under got to be ripped from their mundane lives, gifted immortality, and elevated to chosen one? Why not choose someone with some life experience and an appreciation for the frailty of our mortal coil?”
“With that in mind, I set out to write a forty-five-year-old woman who leaves for a morning run and never makes it home. I was so obsessed with the idea that I had ten thousand words in less than forty-eight hours. But I made the deadly mistake of sitting down and thinking about it, and subsequently worried that no one would be interested in a scifi fantasy protagonist older than thirty. I was even scared to show it to my writing group in case the concept ‘was stupid.’”
John Scalzi interviewing Meredith R. Lyons.
Her protagonist, Imogen, is a middle aged woman out for a morning run when she is abducted by what she takes to be an alien, but turns out to be a super powered alien fae looking for an ally, her, to help him wage war on his homeworld. Needless to say, Imogen is a less-than-willing protagonist in this adventure.
During the question and answer session I asked whether she would categorize the book as fantasy, romantasy or an anti-romantasy?
“I would describe it as a romantasy with a spaceship on top,” Lyons said with a mischievous smile.
Meredith R. Lyons currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and “two panther sized cats”. She is a former actor and current audiobook narrator for Onyx Publications and is a member of International Thriller Writers, Sisters In Crime, and the Women’s National Book Association. Lyons has a black belt in martial arts, has taught cardio kickboxing, owns several swords and has been known to knit scarves, enjoy gardening and visiting coffee shops.
(It should also be noted that she bears more than a passing resemblance to MSNBC news anchor Stephanie Ruhle.)
Her first novel, Ghost Tamer, was published in September 2023.
By Cora Buhlert: On March 22, 1985, the animated movie The Secret of the Sword was released in theatres in the US, introducing She-Ra: Princess of Power to the world. The full movie is available on YouTube here.
In 1984/1985, Masters of the Universe was at the peak of its popularity and Mattel‘s highest selling toy line, outselling in-house rivals Barbie and Hot Wheels. The Filmation He-Man cartoon, which had debuted in 1983, was watched by millions of kids and quite a few adults every afternoon.
To their infinite surprise, Mattel found that approximately forty percent of all Masters of Universe toys were sold to girls and their families – even though Masters of the Universe was marketed as a boy brand in the highly gendered toy market of the 1980s. Meanwhile, the He-Man cartoon was watched enthusiastically by both boys and girls.
In retrospect, this isn’t overly surprising, because Masters of the Universe featured several strong and complex female characters and particularly the cartoon was demolishing gender stereotypes right, left and center and gave us a female warrior who physically outperformed most of the male characters in Teela, a muscle-bound hero who was not afraid to show his sensitive side and was frequently shown engaging in female coded activities like baking, cooking and reading in Adam/He-Man, and a woman who chose a demanding career as Sorceress of Grayskull over motherhood; plus a loving single father who somehow managed to combine an equally demanding career as Man-at-Arms with parenthood; and – last but not least – a female NASA astronaut turned queen of an alien planet in Queen Marlena well before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.
Mattel might have been surprised that little girls were ignoring the gender stereotypes of the toy industry and clamoring for He-Man toys, but they were also quick to seize an opportunity to make even more money. So they decided to introduce more female characters into what had been a very male dominated toy line (by 1985, there were only two female characters in the Masters of the Universe toyline, Teela and Evil-Lyn. A third, the Sorceress, would not be released until 1987) and came up with the idea of creating a female counterpart to He-Man in She-Ra, the most powerful woman in the universe. Eventually, this idea turned into a whole a spin-off toy line as well as a sister show to the He-Man cartoon called She-Ra: Princess of Power.
Mattel and Filmation collaborated closely on the development of She-Ra, her world, her friends and enemies. The She-Ra series bible was written by Filmation writers J. Michael Straczinski and Larry DiTillio, both of whom would later go on to other great things, including Babylon 5. DiTillio also wrote the screenplay for The Secret of the Sword, together with Bob Forward who had penned some of the most memorable episodes of Filmation‘s He-Man cartoon.
Alas, the powers that were at Mattel still found it hard to let go of gender stereotypes and handed the Princess of Power toy line over to the girls’ group rather than the team that worked on the He-Man line. As a result, the Princess of Power toy line took a lot of cues from Barbie, such as rooted hair that could be styled, interchangeable clothes and a lot of pink, gold and pastel colors. Some characters had their designs changed at the eleventh hour, because a blue and gold and red and black outfit were considered “not feminine enough”. The vintage Princess of Power dolls have a certain beauty of their own, but even though they were in the same scale as the He-Man figures, they never meshed very well. What is more, the Princess of Power toy line only had two villainous characters – Catra and Entrapta – because it was assumed that girls did not like conflict and wouldn’t buy the evil characters. Meanwhile, all the male villains from the cartoon, including She-Ra’s archenemy Hordak, were released in the He-Man toy line, because it was assumed that girls would not want to buy monster characters. These outdated gender assumptions harmed both toy lines back then and continue to harm Masters of the Universe to this day.
The Princess of Power toy line was revealed at New York Toy Fair in early 1985, but the wider public first became aware of the character when The Secret of the Sword, a 91-minute animated movie, was released in US theatres on March 22, 1985.
When rewatching The Secret of the Sword as an adult, I found that I remembered several scenes, so I must have seen it at some point. However, I never saw the film in the theatre, because it was not released theatrically in West Germany until the fall of 1987, one and a half years after its US premiere, and also had twenty minutes of runtime cut, because it was believed that children could not handle a ninety-minute movie. The Secret of the Sword was also chopped up and rebroadcast as the first five episodes of the She-Ra: Princess of Power cartoon, so that’s likely how I first saw it.
The Secret of the Sword starts with a bang. The Sorceress of Grayskull is having one hell of a nightmare and sees a monstrous being – Hordak, though the audience doesn’t yet know this – stealing a baby. Hordak laughs and declares that he may have been defeated, but that his pursuers will never see the child again. Then he fires at the Sorceress, who is shielded by a young Man-at-Arms in an early hint that these two are secretly a couple (confirmed many years later), and vanishes through a portal with the baby to parts unknown.
The Sorceress wakes up – alone, by the way – to see a strangely familiar sword that looks a lot like He-Man’s power sword, only with a gem in the hilt, hovering in midair before her. The sword leads her to one of the many mysterious doors inside Castle Grayskull, which opens to reveal a glowing portal. “Could it be, after all this time?” the Sorceress wonders.
The Sorceress telepathically contacts Prince Adam a.k.a. He-Man, who is in the process of baking his “famous spiced bread” (I do want that recipe now) and asks him to come to Castle Grayskull immediately. Once there, the Sorceress hands Adam the sword and tells him go through the portal and find the person it is intended for. Adam even remarks that the sword looks a lot like his own.
The Sword of Protection, twin to He-Man’s Sword of Power, was first glimpsed hanging on the wall of Castle Grayskull in the He-Man episode “The Origin of the Sorceress”, which also introduced the Evil Horde in the form of a Horde scout ship that lands on Eternia, where its crew occupies a village and bullies the inhabitants. This sort of foreshadowing was rare in 1980s cartoons, especially syndicated ones, where episodes were often shown out of order.
Adam, understandably, has more questions for the Sorceress such as where the portal leads to and who exactly the person he’s looking for is. The Sorceress, however, won’t tell Adam anything except that the sword will guide him to the person he seeks.
Even as a kid, I thought that it doesn’t make any sense that the Sorceress doesn’t tell Adam who he is looking for. As an adult, it still doesn’t make any more sense, but then the Sorceress has a habit of withholding crucial information from others. For example, she won’t tell Teela either that she is her mother. Besides, if the Sorceress told Adam whom he’s supposed to find, it would ruin the reveal later in the movie. Coincidentally, the scene is also cleverly written, because the Sorceress never uses any pronouns when referring to the person Adam seeks, so neither Adam nor the audience knows that the intended recipient of the sword is female.
So Adam and his pet tiger Cringer a.k.a. Battle Cat step through the portal into a brand-new world named Etheria to encounter a whole new cast of characters, both good and evil. Adam’s quest takes him to a village inn, where he chances to observe three Horde Troopers, the foot soldiers of the Evil Horde who are occupying Etheria, harassing the locals. Always a hero at heart, Adam intervenes and promptly finds himself embroiled in a barroom brawl. Hereby, it’s notable that Adam does not transform into He-Man, but proceeds to deal with the Horde Troopers in his civilian identity. In the He-Man cartoon and the various mini-comics, Adam is often portrayed as something of a buffoon, but it’s also clear that this is an act to keep his civilian identity separate from He-Man and that Adam is a very capable fighter, if necessary, though he rarely shows it. However, on Etheria, Adam is free to show his prowess, because there is no risk of anybody recognizing him as He-Man.
Adam gets unexpected help from Bow, crack archer and mainstay of the She-Ra cartoon and toy line. Together, they make short work of the Horde Troopers and then escape together with their animal companions Cringer and Kowl, a rainbow colored flying critter. Bow takes Adam and Cringer into the Whispering Woods, a magical forest, which serves as the hideout of the Great Rebellion against the Horde’s rule. Though the name “Great Rebellion” is pretty much hyperbole, because – as the snarky Kowl points out – it’s actually a very small rebellion.
Here, Adam meets the other members of the rebellion who would become important supporting characters in the She-Ra cartoon. In addition to Bow and Kowl there is Glimmer, Princess of Bright Moon and founder of the Great Rebellion, the scatterbrained witch Madame Razz and her flying and talking broom imaginatively named Broom as well as the Twiggets, humanoid woodland creatures who live in the Whispering Woods.
However, The Secret of the Sword does not just introduce new heroes, but also a whole new faction of villains called the Evil Horde. The Horde is your stereotypical galactic empire hellbent on conquering anything in its path, only that all the main members are basically classic movie monsters with a Masters of the Universe twist. Hordak, the leader (well, deputy leader, since the supreme ruler of the Horde Empire is Hordak’s older brother Horde Prime, who would be introduced in a later episode of the cartoon) is Nosferatu, only that he can also transform his body into a rocket, a tank, a drill, cannon or whatever is needed at the time. The evil sorceress Shadow Weaver is every evil witch from every classic Disney cartoon ever. The cat shifter Catra is Irina from Cat People, The energy sucking reptilian Leech is the Monster from the Black Lagoon. The furry prison warden Grizzlor is the Wolf-Man. Mantenna, the alien with the pop out eyes, is every bug-eyed monster ever and the scorpion woman Scorpia looks as if she stepped right out of a 1950s B-movie or a drag queen show. Their base, the Fright Zone, is a Giger-esque industrial nightmare surrounded by a polluted and monster-infested wasteland, providing a strong contrast to the past-coloured woodlands of Etheria.
Finally, there is Force Captain Adora, Hordak and Shadow Weaver’s adopted daughter. Blonde and beautiful, Adora looks as out of place among the more monstrous members of the Horde as Marilyn Munster did among her family in The Munsters. However, Adora is just as ruthless as the rest of the Horde. When we first meet her, Adora is overseeing the population of an entire village taken prisoner and about to be shipped off to the Horde’s slave mines.
When the rebels attack to free the villagers, Adora comes face to face with He-Man (dealing with a squad of classic movie monsters is too much for Adam, so he transforms into He-Man) and they get embroiled in a sword fight. When He-Man drops his own sword and reaches for the Sword of Protection, the jewel in the hilt begins to glow, indicating that Force Captain Adora is the one He-Man had been sent to find. In true ruthless Horde fashion, Adora takes advantage of his momentary confusion to shoot He-Man in the back.
When he comes to again, He-Man finds himself chained up in the Horde prison on Beast Island, a fortress constructed from the bones of giant monsters. He is questioned by Adora who insists that the Horde are the rightful and just rulers of Etheria. He-Man replies that the Horde are cruel oppressors and asks Adora to see for herself how the Horde is treating the population. Adora scoffs at this suggestion, but she does go out on a mission to see the true Etheria. To no one’s surprise except her own, she witnesses citizens being abused and enslaved, their houses burnt down and their crops stolen. Considering that this was a cartoon aimed at children, The Secret of the Sword and the She-Ra series in general are quite frank about the horror of life under occupation. Later episodes of the She-Ra cartoon show the Horde destroying villages, burning books that do not teach approved Horde history and attempting to poison the Whispering Woods in an episode that’s eerily reminiscent of the deployment of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
In general, there is a remarkable amount of horror lurking just under the surface of this seemingly bright and cheery cartoon designed to sell toys to kids. When Adora confronts Hordak and Shadow Weaver over the atrocities committed by the Horde against the civilian population of Etheria, Shadow Weaver erases Adora’s memories of what she witnessed, brainwashing her into being a loyal Horde soldier again. In later iterations and expansions of the story, we learn that several of Hordak’s underlings experienced a similar fate, had their memories and even their entire personalities altered and erased and were brainwashed into serving the Horde.
After escaping from and thoroughly trashing the Horde prison on Beast Island, He-Man bids farewell to the rebels and decides to go after Adora. He steals a Horde Trooper’s armor (the Horde Troopers were portrayed as robots in later episodes of the She-Ra cartoon, allowing He-Man and She-Ra to smash them with impunity, but they are clearly living beings in armor here) and sneaks into the Fright Zone to confront Adora. But because Adora has been brainwashed by Shadow Weaver, she no longer remembers what she saw outside the Fright Zone. So she shoots He-Man in the back – again – and He-Man finds himself imprisoned by the Horde – again. This really isn’t his day.
But things are about to get even worse for He-Man, because Hordak subjects He-Man to his latest invention – a weapon powered by extracting the lifeforce of Horde prisoners. Continuing the overall horror theme, there is a lot of vampiric imagery associated with the Horde. Two Horde members, Leech and Mosquitor, have the ability to suck out the lifeforce of their opponents. Mosquitor never appeared in the cartoon, but Leech demonstrates his abilities on Bow and Glimmer in The Secret of the Sword. In the Masters of the Universe comics published by DC between 2012 and 2016, the Fright Zone itself even sucks the lifeforce out of the planet, which explains the polluted wasteland surrounding the Horde’s fortress. It’s a not very subtle metaphor for colonialism and imperialism.
It appears that He-Man is doomed, steadily growing weaker in Hordak’s extraction chamber. However, her contact with He-Man as well as the Sword of Protection have caused cracks in Adora’s conditioning that even Shadow Weaver could not completely erase. And so Adora is suffering from unquiet dreams, which drive her to visit the much weakened He-Man in the extraction chamber, where both the captured Sword of Power and the Sword of Protection are kept as well. The Sword of Protection is glowing, so Adora picks it up and the Sorceress appears before her and tells Adora that she was always destined to be a champion of good, that the Horde brainwashed her and stole her from her parents as baby. The Sorceress also reveals that Adora had a twin brother, He-Man, and that he needs her help right now.
Viewed through the eyes of an adult, Adora accepts that Sorceress’ words a little too easily, especially since she has no real reason to believe a woman speaking to her from sword. However, any lingering skepticism quickly evaporates when Adora holds aloft the Sword of Protection, speaks the magic words and transforms into She-Ra for the very first time. The moment is made even more powerful by the fact that by this point we never saw Adam transforming into He-Man for the first time, though later cartoons did show Adam’s first transformation.
Once He-Man and She-Ra have disabled Hordak’s weapon of mass destruction and escaped the Fright Zone on Adora’s horse Spirit who has been transformed into the flying unicorn Swift Wind, the Sorceress finally comes clean to both of them. King Randor and Queen Marlena of Eternia had twins, Adam and Adora, both destined for great things. When the twins were only babies, the Horde invaded. Hordak learned of the twins’ destiny and decided to kidnap the babies and raise them both as Horde members. So Hordak snuck into the royal palace with the help of his acolyte Skeletor.
But things didn’t go according to plan. Hordak managed to grab baby Adora, but Queen Marlena dispatched Skeletor with a judo throw before he could steal Adam. Marlena raised the alarm, Man-at-Arms and the Royal Guard burst into the nurseryand Hordak escaped through the window with Baby Adora, leaving Skeletor behind. To save his own neck, Skeletor revealed the location of Hordak’s base. The Sorceress and Man-at-Arms went after Hordak, but couldn’t prevent him from escaping with Adora through a portal to parts unknown as seen in the flashback at the beginning of the movie.
The whole thing is a retcon, of course, but a skilfully handled one. There’s even an explanation for why no one ever mentioned Adora before, namely that Adam was deliberately kept in the dark about the fact that he once had a sister to spare him the pain of losing her.
But the revelation of the Sorceress not only changes the status quo of the royal family of Eternia, but also gives us some backstory for Skeletor, who had very little up to this point. Some people feel that the introduction of Hordak as Skeletor’s former teacher and master diminished the Lord of Destruction, but I believe it gives Skeletor’s character more complexity and also explains why Hordak and Skeletor really, really don’t like each other – namely because each believes that the other betrayed him – with good reason.
Indeed, we get to see the first of many insult-laden confrontations between master and student shortly thereafter, when Hordak pursues Adam and Adora through the dimensional portal back to Eternia and teams up with Skeletor to recapture Adora. Not that Skeletor has any intention of keeping his end of the bargain.
The reunion between Adora and her family on the one side and Hordak and Skeletor on the other are some of my favourite scenes in this movie, especially because we don’t really see Adora interacting with any members of her extended family except for Adam in the regular She-Ra cartoon. The moment where the royal family is finally reunited is very sweet with hugs all around and tears on the faces of both men and women. Besides, King Randor finally tells Adam that he is proud of him, something Adam almost never gets to hear from his father.
Of course, the domestic bliss doesn’t last long before Hordak and Skeletor spoil the reunion to kidnap Adora once again. He-Man, Teela and Man-at-Arms set off to rescue her, but Adora has already managed to free herself, transform into She-Ra and thoroughly trash Snake Mountain in the process. “A female He-Man,” Skeletor laments, “This is the worst day of my life.”
Though Skeletor will not have to deal with both He-Man and She-Ra for long, because She-Ra elects to return to Etheria in the end to free the planet from the Horde’s oppression.
The Secret of the Sword is not a perfect film, but has its share of flaws. Because the script was designed to work both as a ninety-minute movie and five separate half-hour cartoon episodes, the structure is somewhat choppy and episodic, particularly when He-Man and She-Ra go on an almost episode-long side quest to rescue Queen Angella of Bright Moon from her captor Hunga the Harpy. Moreover, the rebels are very quick to accept Adora – who was after all a Horde Force Captain – as one of their own.
However, the story also handles the foreshadowing and planting of clues well, until the truth about Adora is finally revealed. And yes, Adam and Adora are again very quick to accept that they are siblings and never question the Sorceress’ word, but then neither does the viewer. From the moment that Adora hold up the Sword of Protection onwards, we accept that she is She-Ra.
The Secret of the Sword would change Masters of the Universe forever and introduce elements that continue reverberate through the franchise to this day. The relationship between He-Man and She-Ra on the one hand and Skeletor and Hordak on the other would be explored in many future versions of the story.
One of the greatest strengths of Masters of the Universe has always been that even though the situations are outlandish, the characters have always been relatable. Adam’s wish for his father to see him for who he is and be proud of him, Teela’s desire to always be the best to prove herself worthy of love and acceptance, Cringer being always afraid and yet wanting to be brave, Orko who can do everything in theory and always messes up in practice – these are issues that the young viewers can relate to. She-Ra introduces another story that is both relatable and empowering for young viewers, namely that of a child who grows up in an abusive home with parents who gaslight her and who manages overcome her abusive upbringing to become something greater. Justine Danzer, who created some of the earliest designs of She-Ra for Mattel, is an abuse survivor herself and has said that She-Ra was always intended to be someone who overcomes an abusive background.
Because She-Ra’s story is so powerful, it has been retold several times. The best known is probably the 2018 Netflix series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. The 2018 cartoon took several liberties in reinterpreting the characters and their world – most of which do have their roots in throwaway moments in the Filmation cartoon – but stuck to the basic story of Adora, a Horde soldier since childhood, overcoming her conditioning to join the rebellion, find true friends and true love and become the heroine she was always meant to be.
The biggest change is – no, not Adora’s sexual orientation – but the absence of He-Man. Because due to the problematic gender policies of Mattel in the 1980s, He-Man and She-Ra are considered two separate properties. Mattel fully owns the rights to He-Man, but the She-Ra rights were partially owned by co-creators Filmation. Now, several mergers and takeovers later, they are with Universal/Dreamworks. The result is that it is exceedingly difficult for He-Man and She-Ra to appear in each other’s stories and indeed the Eternian twins of power have not been seen together on screen since the 1980s. Masters of the Universe: Revolution, which aired on Netflix last January, did strongly hint at the introduction of She-Ra in its post-credits teaser, but so far no third series has been announced.
And so the only places where He-Man and She-Ra have appeared together are the various toy lines as well as the mini-comics and the 2012 – 2016 DC Comics run. The DC Comics also feature my favorite reinterpretation of She-Ra’s story. For while the Filmation cartoon depicted Adora as sticking out like a sore thumb among the various monstrous Horde members, in the comics Adora – now renamed Despara – fully believes herself to be the daughter of Hordak and Shadow Weaver and wears a mask of her “father’s” face. When first introduced, Despara is an out and out villainess. She commits war crimes, stabs Teela and slits the throat of her own brother (he gets better). Her road to redemption is a lot more rocky than Adora’s ever was in the cartoon, but the unwavering faith and love of her brother Adam and of Teela eventually turn her life around, making the moment when she finally transforms into She-Ra that much sweeter.
Both the She-Ra cartoon and toyline were not the huge success that He-Man was, probably because both debuted into a much more crowded market than her twin brother had three years before. But She-Ra remains an icon of female and also queer empowerment to this day. And it all started forty years ago with The Secret of the Sword, when Adora first uttered the immortal line “For the Honour of Grayskull.”
By Lee Weinstein: From the early days of Hollywood until the early 1950s the serialized chapter play enjoyed a heyday of popularity. Yet, of the countless films of this genre, very few are remembered today; it is a dead artform. The low-budgeted, low-quality Saturday afternoon cliffhangers no longer hold the general appeal they once did.
One of the notable exceptions to this decline in popularity, however, is the trilogy of Flash Gordon epics produced by Universal in the late 1930’s. In their own time, they were unique in being billed at theaters ahead of the features they accompanied. Even today, they remain popular among adult audiences. In the 1970’s, Flesh Gordon (1974), an X-rated parody of the films was released to immediate success and has become a cult classic of its own.
One reason for the lasting popularity of the Flash Gordon serials is the relatively high budget afforded them. The first, Flash Gordon (1936), cost about $350,000, making it the most expensive serial ever made, and its two sequels, while made for considerably less, still had relatively high budgets.
However, another reason for their unprecedented popularity might well be their appeal to mythic chords in our subconscious. Beneath the superficialities of good versus evil running through the plot lines, runs a more symbolic structure.
Sun imagery has been a common motif throughout the history of literature, including the works of Shakespeare. This motif, employed both visually and symbolically, also occurs in the three serials, but can be seen most strongly on the third and last of the series, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940).
From beginning to end of the twelve chapter serial, the image of the sun appears again and again in the sets and costumes, as well as the dialog. The chest emblem of Flash’s uniform, the emblem worn by the prince of the Rock Men, the alarm bell in Ming’s palace, and the sunburst designs decorating some of the palace doorways are all examples.
The reasons for this imagery begin to emerge when the substructure of the story is analyzed. The plot involves four kingdoms on the planet Mongo: Ming’s kingdom (also called Mongo); Prince Barin’s kingdom of Arboria; the icy kingdom of Frigia; and the “Land of the Dead” inhabited by the Rock Men.
It can be seen that these correspond to the four classical elements: Fire, Air, Water and Earth, respectively. Can it be a coincidence that the soundtrack of the serial consists, to a significant extent, of “Les Preludes” by Liszt? It was originally written as a prelude to “Les Quatre Elements,” a choral orchestral setting for a sequence of poems by Joseph Autran.
Ming the Merciless has become the symbolic fire-element by harnessing the sun’s power and using it to power his purple death dust, in his ambition to conquer the universe. This was actually foreshadowed in the second serial, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), when in an early chapter, Ming demonstrates his ability to walk through fire with impunity.
Charles Middleton, right, as Ming the Merciless
A steady progression in Ming’s ambition can be seen running through the three serials. In Flash Gordon (1936) he is in the process of conquering his own planet, Mongo. In the second, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, he has begun to take over other planets. And in the last serial, he is intent on conquering the universe.
It is in this final stage, then, that the fire element he represents becomes identified with the sun. His throne is ornamented by a sunburst-like backdrop, and sunbeams can be seen pouring through the throne room windows. Even his warning system of alarm bells are sun-shaped, remotely representing his authority.
It is no surprise, then, that in the first third of the serial, Flash discovers that they can only neutralize the purple death dust with “polarite,” a substance found only in the cold wastes of Frigia. Polarite is obviously a manifestation of the classic element water, to which is attributed the properties of coldness and wetness.
The attributes of the element air, hotness and wetness, are to be found only in the lush forests of Arboria. As air is the only element as subtle and invisible as fire, so must Arboria be the stronghold of the enemies of the evil Ming. The forest kingdom must regain control of the sun, usurped by Ming for his nefarious ambitions, for theirs is a kingdom of life, and life depends on the sun.
Symbolically, this can be seen in the neutralizing ray developed by Flash’s scientist mentor, Dr. Zarkov, in Arboria, to render Ming powerless. This weapon does not run on solar power and cannot be used within Arboria because it creates around itself a by-product of poisonous gas.
It is interesting that up to this point Flash has been garbed in the traditional Arborian uniform. Until now, he has been acting defensively, in saving the earth from the death dust. But now, he has taken the offensive, directing his attack against Ming, himself, and it is only now that he dons his sun-emblem bearing costume; the sun-emblem black, denoting opposition to Ming.
Flash Gordon with Sun insignia
The neutralizing ray, due to its poisonous nature, is taken to the Land of the Dead to be used, but its impotence becomes fully realized with the discovery that the land is inhabited. A race of Rock Men lives there, representing earth elementals. Both Flash’s party and Ming’s (represented by Captain Torch) [emphasis mine] are captured by them and held responsible for the disappearance of the Rock King’s son.
In reality, the boy has been trapped by a giant lodestone, uncovered by Capt. Torch earlier. It is Flash’s rescue of the boy that frees them from the symbolic earth-force and allies them with their former captors. It is especially significant that the boy wears on his chest a black sun emblem similar to Flash’s. It is the appearance of this sun-bearing boy that results in the alliance.
Now Flash has the backing of all three elements, earth, air, and water, against the tyrannical sun/fire figure. As the serial draws to its conclusion, Dr. Zarkov, barricades himself into Ming’s laboratory and discovers for himself that it has indeed been solar power that Ming has been using to power his weapons. Having been found out by his enemies, Ming threatens them with another weapon, a rocket ship loaded with explosive “solarite.” If he cannot use the sun in one way, he must use it in another.
Note here the similarity between the words “solarite” and “polarite.” The fire – water analogy is almost too obvious. It is this solarite-bearing ship that is to bring about Ming’s destruction, as control passes out of his hands and into the hands of Flash and his allies.
Yet beneath this elemental symbolic structure lies something considerably deeper. The sun is more than a mere representation of fire. As in Elizabethan drama, it relates to a philosophical and political ideology wherein the ruler of a kingdom is seen as the center of state, as the sun is the center of the solar system.
When Ming is told by Flash and his allies that they mean to save the universe from him, and he replies, “I am the universe,” it is merely an extrapolation of this idea. All the events of the story, and presumably the fate of the universe, are revolving around the pivotal character of Ming. When Flash conquers Ming, he has, in effect, conquered the universe, from whence derives the title.
Pervading this universe is the fifth element, ether, giving it coherent unity. This is represented by the simple sparking effect of most of the weapons used on both sides of the battle. The magnetic forces in The Land of the Dead, the rays from Flash’s gun, and the rays from Ming’s Annihilaton robots are all extensions of one and the same all pervading etheric force. Thus Ming, being part of the physical universe in this material sense, as well as the central sun figure around which it revolves, cannot rise above it.
Like the classical tragic hero, he necessarily brings about his own destruction by means of the symbolic solarite. But the real hero, Flash Gordon, rocketing back to earth at the close, leaves in his burning wake a new myth; a myth that has been with us since 1940 and may well last for centuries to come.
[This article first appeared in the fanzine The Hunting of the Snark #4, 1976 in a slightly different form]
“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”
— From The River Has Roots
On Friday March 7th, Joseph Beth Booksellers hosted the multiple award winning Canadian author Amal El-Mohtar at their Cincinnati, Ohio location to an audience of more than 50 people.
The stop in Ohio was the fourth of five stops on an abbreviated tour of North America for Ms. El-Mohtar in support of the solo debut of her new fantasy novel, The River Has Roots (Tordotcom, 144 pages, $24.99).
Author Amal El-Mohtar
Ms. El-Mohtar, who currently resides in Ottawa, remarked that she encountered remarkable good weather at her previous stops (in Brooklyn, New York, Portland, Maine and Chapel Hill, North Carolina).
That is, until she landed in Cincinnati, which was overcast for a majority of the day with a high of 48°F. But, she said, that the weather here was absolutely fine with her considering that when she left Ottawa it was -10°F…
Among the other things Ms. El-Mohtar imparted about her latest work that it was partially inspired by an old Appalachian murder ballad, an ambition to combine magical and musical elements together in a fantasy setting and, most importantly, her relationship with her younger sister, who is a very proficient musician in her own right.
Ms. El-Mohtar also was very enthusiastic about the audio version of the book, which features music performed by her and her sister Dounya El-Mohtar and singing by audio narrator Gem Carmella as well. Several audience members were observed listening to the audio version as they were waiting in line to have their books signed.
Kentucky sff author Gwenda Bond was scheduled to host the signing but was unavailable at the last moment. Joseph Beth bookseller Mike Yetter stepped in as the host and whose voice you will hear in the interview and question and answer session.
By Lee Weinstein: A man wearing a jet-pack and a bullet-shaped helmet emerges from a building, twists the dials on the front of his jacket, takes a running start, and blasts off into the sky in a perfect cinematic illusion of flight. The title of the show, Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe, appears, superimposed across the sky.
Commando Cody (Judd Holdren) and Joan Gilbert (Aline Towne)
I first saw Commando Cody in 1955 on Saturday morning television and eagerly followed it from week to week. I still remember my disappointment when I tuned in one Saturday morning at the same time and channel, but was greeted instead with the first episode of Fury. a show about a young boy on a ranch and his pet horse.
Commando Cody had come to a conclusion after a mere twelve episodes. As I discovered decades later, there was a good reason for this, but it had nothing to do with popularity or ratings. It was due to the unique history of the show, an experiment which grew directly out of movie serials. Specifically, it was intended to be a made-for-television prequel to the Republic serial, Radar Men from the Moon (1952). Movie studios were losing ground to a growing threat called “television” and Republic Studios wanted to cross over into this new market.
Modeled on twelve-chapter Republic serials, and with the same actors and production crew, it is often mistaken for a serial, but it was nonetheless a television series and varied in some significant ways from its serial roots. While serial chapters at that time ran for about 15 minutes, the Commando Cody episodes run for about half an hour, allowing for more dialog and plot development. While a serial would typically have the same directors and writers throughout, the TV show’s writers and directors varied from episode to episode. And instead of having cliffhanger endings, the episodes are self-contained, often ending in light-hearted humorous moments. However, as in the serials, it had an overall story arc with a beginning, middle and end. It was likely the first television series ever to have one.
As a television series, despite a low budget, Republic’s slick production values gave it a more polished appearance than such contemporary Saturday morning space operas as Rocky Jones,Space Ranger and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. This was due in part to the smooth incorporation of footage from previous serials and stock footage of natural disasters. The flying sequences were done by the special effects team of Howard and Theodore Lydecker, originally for King of the Rocket Men (1949). A realistic, life-sized dummy sliding along an invisible wire was filmed against the California sky with an under-cranked camera and played back at normal speed. Those shots were far more effective than merely having an actor in a harness matted against a back-projected landscape. A similar technique was used for the shots of the spaceships in flight.
Although it was made for television, union contracts obliged Republic to release the episodes in movie theaters first, which they did on a weekly basis in 1953, adding to the confusion about its nature.
The first three episodes follow the plotline of chapter one of Radar Men, but develop more slowly. At the beginning of the serial, Cody (played by actor George Wallace) responds to attacks on earth by taking off for the moon with his assistants Ted Richards (Bakewell) and Joan Gilbert (Aline Towne), where he finds and confronts the lunar tyrant, Retik (Roy Barcroft), and manages to escape, all in chapter one.
The television series, in contrast, has a similar plotline, but Cody (now played by Judd Holdren) doesn’t meet the alien tyrant bent on conquering the universe, “The Ruler” (Gregory Gaye), until the third episode. While subsequent episodes of Radar Men mainly focus, in true serial fashion, on fistfights and car chases as Cody fights Retik’s minions for control of lunar super-rayguns, subsequent episodes of Commando Cody deal with a new global disaster engineered by the Ruler every week.
In the first television episode, “Enemies of the Universe,” scientists Ted (now played by William Schallert) and Joan (again Aline Towne) arrive at Cody’s headquarters and meet him for the first time. They learn he is a brilliant scientist who is so important to earth’s security that he must keep his identity secret by wearing a black mask. He tells them that in response to enemy rockets that had recently landed on Earth, he has devised a “cosmic dust blanket” which causes anything approaching earth to burn up in the atmosphere. He then has them assist him in constructing a rocket ship capable of reaching other planets.
Holdren opined in interviews that the mask was to enable the studio to replace him with another actor if need be. He also wears a military-like uniform, as opposed to the business suit worn by George Wallace in the serial.
In the second episode, an alien agent gets through the dust blanket and with a henchman on earth attempts to steal Cody’s newly-built rocket ship. It is only in episode three that Cody discovers someone called “The Ruler” is behind the schemes and is on Venus. They travel there in his rocket ship, which he has equipped with a “dispersal ray” to penetrate the dust blanket, and he confronts the Ruler in a cavern on Venus. They escape after melting the entrance to the cavern and destroying the Ruler’s headquarters.
Things seem to have come to a logical conclusion, with the enemy apparently destroyed, but in episode four, “Nightmare Typhoon,” the Ruler, like Ming the Merciless, has inexplicably survived to attack earth again. Starting with this episode there are several noticeable changes in the casting. Cody’s assistant Ted has been transferred elsewhere and a new assistant, Dick Preston (Richard Crane), replaces him. He injects some comic relief into the show. (In 1954, Crane went on to play the lead in Rocky Jones, Space Ranger.) Lyle Talbot as Baylor is now the main enemy operative on earth and the Ruler has also gained a young, blonde assistant in his headquarters, played by former model and showgirl, Gloria Pall. His alien henchmen now sport new costumes with spiked helmets and zig-zag designs.
These changes were due to a long gap in the production schedule. After the first three episodes, filming was put on hiatus while Republic produced a movie serial sequel to Radar Men titled Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952). Filming of the TV series didn’t resume until Zombies was completed.
Confusingly, Zombies also stars Judd Holdren, but unmasked. His character is named Larry Martin instead of Commando Cody. He wears a business suit instead of the military-like uniform in the television show. But despite the name and clothing he is the same character. Supposedly, this was to prevent confusion with the TV series.
As the series resumed, the Ruler attacks the earth with increasingly destructive and progressively more scientifically improbable plans but with impressive-sounding episode titles.
In “Nightmare Typhoon” his agents seed earth’s clouds causing torrential rains and flooding. In “War of the Space Giants,” he attacks with germ warfare. In “Destroyers of the Sun” he tries to put the sun out with a ray beamed from an extra-solar planet. In “Hydrogen Hurricane” he blows the moon out of its orbit with an atomic explosion causing massive worldwide hurricanes. In “Solar Sky Raiders” he multiplies the sun’s heat by a factor of five, threatening to scorch the world. In “S.O.S. Ice Age” the Ruler’s men plant a device near the North Pole to link the earth’s rotation to Saturn’s, causing earth’s axis to tilt.
The final two episodes wrap up the series as Cody and his team lure the Ruler to the planet Mercury and with the help of the Mercurians, finally bring him to justice at the end. Although it is commonplace today, this is probably the earliest TV series with a definite conclusion, predating The Fugitive by a decade.
After its initial run on NBC in 1955, the series was occasionally repeated in syndication. This is highly unusual for a series of only 12 episodes, but perhaps not so unusual for a miniseries, although the term and even the concept didn’t exist yet.
It is also arguably the first science fiction series to be shot on film, rather than air live. Rocky Jones: Space Ranger, which first ran in 1954, is often credited with this, but Commando Cody, although it didn’t air on television until the following year, was filmed and released to theaters in 1952-1953.
Following Commando Cody, Republic produced a few other television series, little known today, including Stories of the Century (1953), Dr. Fu Manchu (1956), and Frontier Doctor (1958) but these failed to save the studio. Republic ceased serial production in 1955 and feature film production in 1958-9. These other series lacked story arcs and ran for full seasons of 39 episodes, with the exception of Dr. Fu Manchu, which was canceled after 13 episodes.
Although it had such a short run, the show did leave its mark on popular culture. His name was reflected in the name of the late 1960’s rock band Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen.
His iconic flying suit, originally used in King of the Rocketmen was an obvious inspiration for the graphic novel and later the film The Rocketeer (1991).
The miniseries format was reinvented years later and employed in such imaginative series as The Prisoner (1967), The Martian Chronicles (1980), and Dune (2000). Australia in the 1990’s produced a number of half-hour science fiction miniseries including The Girl from Tomorrow (1991-92), Escape from Jupiter (1994-95), and Spellbinder (1995), complete with cliffhanger endings.
While Republic’s experimental entry into television ultimately failed, Commando Cody was a pioneering effort well ahead of its time, and should be credited as television’s very first miniseries. It is still available today on DVD and Blu-Ray.
By Lee Weinstein: Way back in the early days of television, before such classic science fiction anthology series like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, and other adult science fiction on television, there was Science Fiction Theatre.
Yes, it was hokey by today’s standards. Yes, it is often badly dated. But in the spring of 1955, when the show premiered, it was quite innovative. At the time, science fiction was perceived as strictly for the kids. Contemporary genre shows included such fare as Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, and Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe.
Science Fiction Theatre was something different. It was aimed at adults. In addition, unlike earlier genre shows, it was shot on film and remained in syndication for decades. Its 78 episodes had no rocket ships or ray guns, and if some of the characters hinted at being of extraterrestrial origin, they appeared to be human. The series was, or at least pretended to be, well-based in real science. The credits at the end of the first season episodes list one Maxwell Smith as “scientific adviser on electronics and radar operation.” Several episodes did deal with such paranormal phenomena as telepathy, but at the time this was the subject of legitimate scientific inquiry.
As the show opened, the camera panned across a laboratory filled with electronic equipment, accompanied by the orchestral strains of the theme music, before coming to rest on the host, Truman Bradley, seated at his desk. He then introduced each episode by performing on-camera experiments to demonstrate the scientific principle relating to the story’s theme. At the conclusion of each show he would return to assure the audience that the story was only fiction, but that the principle involved could one day become a reality. Bradley, a radio announcer and sometime actor, lent such an authoritative touch to the show that most us grew up thinking he was actually a scientist.
Truman Bradley, host of Science Fiction Theatre
One of the earliest series to be shot in color (at least for its first season) it was the brainchild of Ivan Tors, who had written and produced science fiction films with an emphasis on science fact such as Magnetic Monster in 1953 and Gog a year later. He was later to produce such popular series as Sea Hunt, Flipper, and The Man and the Challenge.
Viewed today, one is struck by the extremely conservative approach to the subject matter. Such episodes as “The Phantom Car,” about a remote-controlled automobile, and “Signals from the Heart,” in which a policeman is given a heart monitor with a radio transmitter, have long since been bypassed by the progress of science in the real world. Other episodes anticipated robotic vacuum cleaners, space stations and infrared photography.
The teleplays often come across as somewhat static; the cinematography is simple and direct. The show was filmed on a low budget for syndication, often on just a few sets. Special effects were almost non-existent.
Rachel AmesRachel Ames, Walter Kingsford. DeForest Kelley.
Nonetheless, some segments hold up better than others, and many had truly imaginative ideas.
Scanning the credits reveals a host of impressive names, both in front of and behind the camera. Some of the more well-known actors to appear in the series were Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Barry, Howard Duff, and Dane Clark. Other familiar faces included Martin Milner, June Lockhart, Don DeFore, Warren Stevens, Skip Homeier, William Schallert and Jean Byron.
Marshall Thompson
Several early episodes were directed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came From Outer Space), and many more by Herbert L. Strock (Magnetic Monster, Gog, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein). One was helmed by that king of gimmickry, William Castle (The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill).
Although most of the episodes were written by screen writers, often working from treatments by Tors himself, there are adaptations of stories by Stanley G. Weinbaum and Jack Finney, as well as two original screenplays by Meyer Dolinsky, who later went on to write several classic Outer Limits episodes, a Star Trek episode, and a science fiction novel.
The series premiered in April of 1955 with “Beyond”. A test pilot bails out when he is pursued by a torpedo shaped UFO. The authorities convince him that he had somehow imagined his fountain pen to be a large object outside the craft. They have second thoughts, however, when they discover that the entire cockpit has mysteriously become magnetized.
Variety magazine said that the show had “…too much science and too little fiction…” complaining about the long Truman Bradley introduction cutting into story time, and the viewer being told rather than shown dramatically important parts of the narrative.
While the protagonist of the first episode was a test pilot, the majority of the stories featured a scientist of some sort as a major character.
The second episode, however, was an exception to this, and was one of the series’ best. “Time is Just a Place,” adapted from Jack Finney’s short story “Such Interesting Neighbors,” and directed by Jack Arnold, starred Don DeFore and Marie Windsor as a suburban couple, who discover that their new neighbors (Warren Stevens and Peggy O’Connor) are actually visitors from the future. While Finney’s story was light in tone, this rather dark adaptation, was called by Variety “…a spine tingler in the best flesh-creeping tradition.”
Another early episode, “No Food for Thought,” also directed by Arnold, demonstrates some of the series limitations. The story concerns a scientist experimenting with a synthetic food designed to alleviate world hunger. But the food is somehow linked to a deadly virus, and once on it, no organism can return to natural food. Arnold builds up a good deal of dramatic tension at the beginning with the mysterious death of one of the research team. The county health officer finally gains admission and meets the reclusive scientist in charge (Otto Kruger). The nature of the experiments, the problems that have ensued, and the resolution of the problems all happen in about ten minutes worth of dialog. There is enough material to make a full length movie. Robert M. Fresco, who wrote the teleplay, went on to write the screenplay for Tarantula (1958), in which he worked out some of the ideas at greater length.
In many of the episodes Bradley’s resonant voice narrates the events that transpire between scenes, “telling rather than showing” as Variety had put it.
Another memorable episode, “Beyond Return,” is based on Stanley Weinbaum’s “Adaptive Ultimate.” A young woman near death is given an experimental drug by a doctor that greatly increases her adaptability. After adapting to and overcoming terminal tuberculosis, she becomes a human chameleon capable even of murder to advance herself.
“The Hastings Secret,” has a plot line typical of many of the episodes. An older scientist who studies termites and has developed a new kind of solvent, mysteriously vanishes in Peru. His scientist-daughter (Barbara Hale) and her assistant (Bill Williams) travel to Peru to investigate. They discover that he has died, but determine to acquaint themselves with the materials of his research. It is implied at the end that they will continue with his research project.
The pair also co-starred in the similarly-themed episode “Jupitron,” which in some ways eerily anticipates alien abductions, as a scientist and his wife relaxing on a beach suddenly find themselves transported to a laboratory on a moon of Jupiter. In a dreamlike encounter with a long-missing scientist in a sealed off room, they are given a clue on how to solve the world’s hunger problem, which they then take back to earth. Williams and Hale, who were married in real life, had a son (William Katt) who went on to star in another science fiction series many years later (The Greatest American Hero).
A common plot device was the mystery. In some episodes a murderer uses a scientific advance either to commit the crime or to frame someone else in the process. In “One Thousand Eyes” a police detective, played by Vincent Price, solves the murder of a scientist who had developed an experimental form of photography that worked in darkness. Other examples are “The Sound of Murder” with Howard Duff, involving a voice synthesizer, and “Death at 2 AM,” about a drug that increases human strength tremendously.
Extraterrestrials make appearances in a number of episodes, normally in the form of ordinary-looking humans who either benefit or threaten us with some sort of advanced and unexplained technology.
A rare humorous episode that holds up rather well features Edmund Gwenn (Miracle on 34th St.) as an enthusiastic and eccentric scientist of alien origin, who is intent on bestowing super-scientific gifts on disbelieving scientists.
“Negative Man,” about a computer technician who has his IQ and sense of hearing boosted to superhuman levels when he is blasted with 90,000 volts of electricity, is interesting for a rare TV appearance of an adult Carl (Alfalfa) Switzer, of Our Gang fame, who supports Dane Clark’s lead.
“And the Stones Began to Move” with Basil Rathbone, better known for his film portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, concerns a rare type of gem, found in Egypt, that has the property of counteracting gravity.
“Conversation with an Ape” although primarily about a zoologist (Hugh Beaumont of Leave it to Beaver) teaching a chimpanzee to communicate with him using a keyboard, also discovers that the chimp can read his thoughts.
Hugh Beaumont, Barbara Hale
Halfway through its run, in the spring of 1956, some changes were made. While later series sometimes started out in black and white before going to color, Science Fiction Theatre did the opposite. The second season, beginning with the episode “Signals from the Heart,” was filmed in lower budget black and white. However, according to Variety, Bradley’s introductions were considerably shortened and the “scientific gobbledy-gook,” as the journal put it, was cut down as well, leading to “a considerable overall improvement.” Maxwell Smith was now listed as “scientific adviser on electronics and radiation.”
Meyer Dolinsky, who was later to write such memorable Outer Limits episodes, as “The Architects of Fear,” contributed two second season episodes. In “Bolt of Lighting” an older scientist has died in a mysterious explosion that destroyed an entire building. A young scientist is recruited by the government to determine the cause of the explosion. He manages to reconstruct the late man’s research, figure out the cause of the explosion, and at the end commits himself to carrying the work on.
Dolinsky’s other contribution, “The Sound that Kills,” is a murder mystery. A scientist at conference is murdered by ultrasonic vibrations and his papers stolen. The killer is found by means of a camera that can see through the hotel building by using mesons, rather than light, to form the images.
Another notable second season episode is “Operation Flypaper,” with Vincent Price again, a mystery involving missing time, the disappearance of scientific equipment, and a device that freezes people into a kind of trance.
The “Magic Suitcase,” one of the last episodes to air in January of 1957, concerns a mysterious stranger who leaves behind a suitcase capable of generating an almost infinite amount of power.
“Bulletproof,” with Christopher Dark, concerning a criminal with a metallic foil that can stop bullets, anticipates stories about the alleged Roswell UFO crash. It seems he found the metal at what appears to be a UFO landing site in the desert.
“Who is this Man?” directed by William Castle, stands out in its pacing. A psychologist treats an excessively shy and fearful college student by hypnosis. The student is regressed to a previous life as a criminal who was executed for murder in 1888. “The Unguided Missile” deals with a form of inadvertent telepathy mediated by microwaves.
Perhaps the most imaginative episode was “Living Lights,” which actually features a non-human life-form. A husband-wife team of scientists recreate the conditions on Venus in a large bell jar in their apartment, with borrowed laboratory equipment. Energy beings, in the form of the titular living lights, which resemble spotlight beams, appear in the bell jar and escape through the glass, creating problems for the experimenters. It bears some similarities to the Outer Limits episode “Wolf 359” a decade later.
The show definitely left its mark on later genre television. The one earlier adult science fiction anthology, Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), was done live, was not rerun in syndication and had no host to introduce the stories. The introductions and epilogues by Bradley became a template for later anthologies like The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, and others. The series likely had a larger audience than Tales of Tomorrow, because it was on film and endlessly rerun. Although not aired very often today, it did show that science fiction could appeal to a mass adult audience, and paved the way not only for anthologies like Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Amazing Stories, but also for adult series fare such as Star Trek and Babylon 5.
This article appeared originally at TheThunderchild.com in September, 2020.
By Steve Vertlieb: The irony of Brian DePalma’s seeming obsession with mayhem and graphic bloodletting is that the director is essentially a humanist. Throughout his work on the screen, there is a thread of humanity in search of acceptance. Unlike the Hitchcockian twists of plot with which his work has most frequently been compared, DePalma’s heroes and heroines are essentially lost and lonely victims of their own sordid self-destructiveness.
In DePalma’s nightmare world, violence and brutality are merely the window-dressing on a canvas of frustration and bitterness. The landscape of his vision perversely masks the tragic isolation of small, lonely people willingly imprisoned within the boundaries of their own psychological exile. Misfits and outcasts, DePalma’s characters watch life from the sidelines, experiencing joy only in the limited reality of those whose perception and awareness are themselves blighted and unimaginative.
These hapless marionettes struggle exhaustively to free themselves from the invisible bonds that tie them to irreversible tragedy. In the agony of their loneliness, they strike out passionately, inflicting a mirror image of their own grief upon whomever they perceive as causing their containment. They are incapable of penetrating the outer wall of their prison or of comprehending the nature of the puppeteer whose whims and fancies manipulate the strings to which they are irrevocably tied. For it is the director whose prejudicial conceptions of mediocre existence guide their fate to its ultimate and tragic conclusion. It is DePalma’s own sense of hopelessness and human suffering that sadly dooms the characters of his design.
For his emergence into the suspense/horror genre, DePalma chose as the vehicle a bizarre tale of sibling rivalry entitled Sisters. Like Hitchcock, DePalma chose the imaginatively visual theater of the fanciful with which to perfect his creative yearnings. Working within the limitless confines of a genre whose very nature encouraged the freedom of creative experimentation, DePalma began to explore the terrain of his own developing artistic maturity. In seeking to enhance his style and storytelling technique, he chose the most expressive of styles, the media offering the most exciting challenges to a young, gifted film stylist.
Released through American International Pictures in 1973, Sisters concerns the strange relationship of Danielle and Dominique, twin sisters whose disturbing affinity for one another seems to surpass normal familial affection. The film begins as Danielle, a French-Canadian model, is observed disrobing by Phillip Woode, a young newspaperman. As the action stops and lurid titles flash upon the screen, it immediately becomes apparent that we are watching a television game show entitled “Peeping Toms” in which the contestants are judged by the degree of their voyeurism. Woode (Lisle Wilson) invites Danielle to dinner after the show. During dinner they are disturbed by Emil Breton (Bill Finley) whom Danielle identifies as her former husband.
Danielle invites Woode back to her apartment where they make love. In the morning, Phillip awakens to the sound of offscreen voices arguing in French. Dominique has visited her sister on the pair’s birthday but is apparently angered over the appear ance of an intruder in Danielle’s bed. Danielle sends Phillip out on an errand to renew her medicine which is running low. While on his errand, Phillip decides to make peace between the twins by buying a birthday cake. Returning to the apartment, Phillip approaches the sleeping body of a girl he presumes to be his lover. Reaching for the knife on the cake plate, the girl plunges the blade into Phillip’s body, stabbing him repeatedly until the reporter’s lifeless form collapses on the floor.
The murder is witnessed by Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), another reporter whose apartment overlooks Danielle’s. When Danielle returns to the apartment, she realizes that Dominique has murdered her lover in a jealous rage. With Emil, who has now arrived at the scene, the pair attempts to hide the body of the slain journalist and protect the missing sister.
In the classic Hitchcock mold, Grace tries to convince the police that she has witnessed a murder. Since Grace has authored a series of articles on the police entitled “Why we call them pigs,” however, the officers investigating the case are rather reluctant to cooperate with her. It remains for the reporter to hire a private investigator (Charles Durning) who, with the determined witness, sets out to unravel the mystery. They discover that Danielle and Dominique were celebrated Siamese twins, separated as children. According to a Life magazine journalist who covered their story, however, Dominique died during the fateful operation, and only Danielle survived. It soon becomes clear that like Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Danielle Breton conceals a split personality, harboring an unbearable sense of guilt for the death of her sister and assuming both roles, thus negating the death. When Phillip entered Danielle’s life, Dominique flew into a jealous rage. In the battle for affection between the two struggling personalities, Dominique emerged the winner, and Phillip was made to pay a handsome price for his interference.
Danielle is a murderess, certainly, but, as played by Margot Kidder, a gifted and beautiful actress, she is a tragic doomed heroine. Danielle believes that her sister survived the operation. There is a horrible nobility in the efforts of the surviving sister to protect her sibling, not realizing that it is she herself who has committed a gruesome murder. Danielle is a helpless innocent, struggling valiantly to retain a sense of human dignity but devoured unknowingly by forces wholly beyond her awareness or control. Danielle is doomed from the start. She fights in the only world her consciousness will permit, but it is that very limited consciousness which will lead to her eventual demise.
Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera was to provide the inspiration for Brian DePalma’s next work. Phantom of the Paradise, released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1974, was a tragicornic satire rooted in the hereditary insanity of both horror films and rock and roll. Phantom of the Paradise is a mad, manic exercise in black comedy highlighted by Paul Williams’s demonic performance as the satanic dwarf Swan, a diabolical munchkin whose recording empire was derived when “He sold his soul for rock and roll.”
William Finley (Emil Breton in Sisters) is the sensitive young rock composer whose cantata is first coveted, then stolen, by the evil rock entrepreneur. Swan adopts the music of the young composer, Winslow Leach, as his own and plans to premiere the work at the opening of his new theater, The Paradise. Following. the story line of the Claude Rains (1943) and Herbert Lom (1962) versions of the classic horror tale, Leach invades the sanctuary of the evil impresario in order to retrieve his missing manuscript. Within the walls of Swan’s recording plant, Winslow tries to sabotage the machinery but instead finds his head caught in a record-pressing machine and horribly disfigured. This is the ultimate irony. The budding composer sees not his record pressed, but his head.
Adding insult to injury, Leach is shot by a security guard, escapes, but is presumed by all to be dead. Fate leads, however, to the new Paradise Theatre where the spectral presence of a phantom continues to sabotage plans for a gala rock opening. From a vantage point, hidden high in the rafters of the theater, Winslow observes the auditions for the premiere of Swan’s stolen rock cantata. The composer is taken with the lovely voice and gentle beauty of one of the singers, Phoenix (Jessica Harper), and conspires to blackmail Swan into casting the girl in the lead performance. Winslow worships Phoenix from afar, guiding her career anonymously and falling ever more deeply in love with her. Swan’s sadism continues unabated as he seduces Phoenix, knowing full well that Winslow is observing the pair through a rooftop skylight. His body and emotions terribly scarred, part of a world of ugliness whose jagged boundaries can never touch the sweet innocence of the girl he loves, Winslow screams in terrible anguish at the betrayal of love and beauty beneath the window. The awful fury of a raging storm blends its anguish with the primal agony of the captive phantom, tied by morbid fascination to endure his grief, unable to look away from a sight that mocks his soul.
Although Phantom of the Paradise is a brilliant, fiendishly funny satirical gem, there are moments of great poignancy. Phantom is comedy, to be sure, but despite its moments of hilarity, William Finley’s characterization of the beleaguered composer Winslow Leach falls well within the guidelines of DePalma’s doomed protagonist. Leach never has a chance to achieve the richness of life he quietly desires. Fame and financial success are robbed from him early in the scenario. Physical well—being is denied him when he loses his teeth during imprisonment inside the walls of a penitentiary, courtesy of the malevolent Swan. Finally, the love and tenderness of the woman he worships are forever denied him because of his ghastly appearance. Yes, even his once-handsome features have been decayed and corrupted by the clutches of a jaws-like record press intent on putting wax into his ears, rather than taking it out. Is it any wonder that Leach, the sensitive, artistic soul, becomes Leach, the revenge-thirsty Phantom of the Paradise?
The characters who populate DePalma’s scenarios are each, in their own way, smalltime losers. Their universe is a bleak, dreary ghetto wherein the inhabitants never seem to rise above the stench of despair. Survival is everything, and yet it seems the rarest commodity of all.
Survival in motion pictures may also have seemed a rather rare commodity to a young, struggling director searching for his roots. Sisters in 1973 was designed by its director as a deliberate imitation of the acknowledged master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, replete with all of Hitchcock’s traditional trappings, including a moody, bizarre musical score by Bernard Herrmann. If Sisters was a trifle rough around the edges, an imperfect salute from a technician largely inexperienced in the genre, then Obsession in I976 was a finely honed tribute from one artist to another.
In his attempt to recreate the experience of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo (Paramount, 1958), DePalma was inspired to create his own masterwork. Greatness rarely begets anything other than flattering imitations. Obsession was, however, an entirely different matter, for with this strange, haunting film, Brian DePalma achieved his own distinctly original claim to cinema posterity. With its painful, romantic imagery so delicately painted by Vilmos Zsigmond’s classical cinematography, its brilliant and complex screenplay composed by the powerful hand of writer Paul Schrader, its exquisitely ethereal, nearly overpoweringly beautiful musical score by Bernard Herrmann, the rnost provocatively gifted composer of Twentieth-century dramatic scoring, and the assured, spell-binding direction of an astonishingly talented director, Brian DePalma, Obsession seemed to equal the acclaimed magical mystery of the film it once aspired to impersonate.
Bernard HerrmannBernard Herrmann in later years.
Released through Columbia Pictures, Obsession weaves an intricate, fascinating tale of kidnapping, revenge, and obsessive love. On the tenth anniversary of their marriage, Michael and Elizabeth Courtland host a celebration attended by friends and associates. At evening’s end, the happy couple prepares to retire. Elizabeth leaves Michael briefly to check on their nine-year-old daughter Amy. When she fails to return, Michael (Cliff Robertson) goes searching for her and finds a note pinned to the bed which reads: “Do not call police. Be at home with $500,000 cash tomorrow if you want wife and daughter returned alive.” Turning to his partner Robert LaSalle (]ohn Lithgow) for help, Courtland raises the money but, despite the warning, notifies the police. The kidnappers are located, and a frantic chase by car ensues. In the pursuit, the escaping vehicle is destroyed, killing both Elizabeth Courtland and young Amy.
Years pass, and Michael Courtland, despite a halfhearted attempt at retaining his business affiliations, remains a broken man living in the ominous shadow of his tragic past. On a business trip with his partner to Florence, Italy, Courtland is encouraged to visit the legendary Church of San Miniato. There he observes a young woman restoring a priceless painting. As he catches sight of her, the world seems to stop, for she is the very image of his beloved Elizabeth.
Michael becomes obsessed and enchanted with the wonder of his second chance. He must win the love of his reincarnated wife, Sandra Portinari (Genevieve Bujold in both roles), and take her to their New Orleans home once again. Miraculously she agrees to marry him and returns to the home he shared with Elizabeth.
Michael is reborn. The scars and the awful pain disappear seemingly overnight along with the torturous deprivation that turned a loving, fulfilled human being into an emotionless shell. Shadows soon form, however, as Sandra herself feels a growing obsession for the portrait, clothing, and possessions of the dead Elizabeth. The young girl seems to lose herself in the identity of Courtland’s first wife. The pattern reaches its deadly and inevitable conclusion when, on the eve of their impending marriage, Michael searches the house for her, only to find the same terrible, familiar message pinned to the bed . . . “Do not call police. Be at home with $500,000 cash tomorrow if you want wife and daughter returned alive.”
Is it possible? Is he insane, or has the horrible scenario begun again? Frantic, out of his mind, Michael drives to the home of Robert LaSalle, awakening his partner and demanding a loan of another $500,000 in order to save Elizabeth/Sandra again. LaSalle? is in no mood to pamper Michael. Savagely, he taunts Courtland with his refusal, deliberately driving him to the very brink of insanity. It had all been a plot, in fact, to drive him insane. In Italy, LaSalle had recruited Sandra because of her startling resemblance to Elizabeth. Together, they had conspired to drive Michael mad and share his wealth. Enraged, Courtland murders LaSalle and then drives to the airport to take his revenge on Sandra who, he learns, is returning to Rome that night.
A shocker? Yes, certainly, but DePalma has held his greatest surprise, his master card, for the last. On the plane, Sandra sits alone while her own terrible memories come flooding back to her, as she recalls the mother and child being separated by the kidnappers. She remembers the awful explosion as Elizabeth Courtland is killed in the burning wreckage of the car, and herself, a terrified child, being led away to the airport by her “Uncle Robert” to be put on a plane bound for Rome. “Where’s my daddy?” young Amy Courtland cries. “Your daddy doesn’t want you anymore,” responds Robert LaSalle, himself grief-stricken and afraid of exposure. LaSalle had, in fact, engineered the kidnapping and ransoming of his partner’s wife and daughter. It was a plot to extort his partner, but the plan went awry. Elizabeth was never supposed to die. That hadn’t been part of the plan. After the accident, LaSalle had to cover his involvement. He couldn’t kill the child, so he packed her off to Rome, paid for her upbringing by an Italian family, and filled her young mind with hatred for her father.
The ploy worked. Sandra/Amy grew up despising her father. She still hated the father who had abandoned her, didn’t she? Didn’t she? But no. She’d come to love him during their brief reunion. He was, after all, her father. Consumed by remorse, Sandra steals into the rest room on the airplane and cuts her wrists.
In perhaps the film’s greatest moments, the airplane returns to New Orleans and a waiting Michael Courtland. Sandra has barely survived her attempted suicide and is being rushed in a wheelchair to the hospital. Michael, seeing the woman in the wheelchair approaching,‘ conceals the gun in his coat and walks toward her. Sandra awakens from her depression as she sees her father coming toward her. For Amy, it is a second chance to reclaim the love of her lost parent. For Michael, it is a second chance to kill the woman who deceived him. Amy leaves her wheelchair and races toward her father, arms outstretched, crying uncontrollably. Michael races too, but with revenge on his mind. Will he kill her? Will Amy have a chance to tell him who she really is, or will Michael lose his beloved daughter a second time? As she reaches his arms, they embrace and Michael points the gun at her head. He is about to pull the trigger when Amy cries out “DADDY!” Bewildered’, tears filling his eyes, Michael Courtland sees his daughter in his arms. Astonished, he holds her and says questioningly, “Baby?” It is a supreme moment of excrutiating drama, nearly unbearable in its intensity.
Courtland has suffered too much pain. DePalma, in his humanity, has allowed his creation to recapture his soul in a climax as daring and suspenseful as any cinematic moment ever committed to film. Recalling the lesson of the master, Alfred Hitchcock, that you musn’t lead an audience on and then cheat them, DePalma was able to wrench every ounce of suspense from his climactic reunion and still reward his audience with a fully satisfying. Emotional release. Without that all-important escape valve, Obsession might have lapsed into pointless cynicism and bitterness, but the hopeful, humanistic aspect of Brian DePalma’s cinema colored its conclusion, and Obsession is a far more powerful exercise because of it. The final imagery of father and daughter, forever lost then found, locked in a slow-motion dance of emotional intensity, is the most haunting and stunningly brilliant sequence in the complex cinema of this paradoxical director.
Perhaps Brian DePalma’s most tragic creation was the hopelessly sheltered, lonely high-school girl named Carrie. Based on the novel by Stephen King and released through United Artists in 1976, Carrie starred Sissy Spacek as the Cinderella whose magic wand concealed deadly telekinetic powers. Spacek shone as the fragile teenager, innocently unaware of her blossoming sensuality and savagely tormented by her classmates. This was truly a modern parable, an allegorical shocker based upon the classic story of Cinderella, replete with William Katt as the handsome prince, Piper Laurie as the wicked stepmother, and Betty Buckley as the kindly, understanding fairy godmother. Taunted by her peers, Carrie is magically transformed into the loveliest girl at school by a sympathetic teacher and escorted to the prom by the most popular boy on campus.
This is not Walt Disney, however, but Brian DePalma. Unlike the charmed and charming heroine of the fabled fairy tale, DePalma’s doomed Cinderella remains at the ball beyond the hour of twelve and must pay a terrible price. Happiness turns to horror as the wicked rivals drench Carrie in a pool of pig’s blood and crush the skull of her handsome Prince Charming. Innocence dies irretrievably, replacing youthful radiance with a newly awakened psychic power destined to decimate not only the wicked stepmother and her venomous “sisters” but Carrie’s fairy godmother and the entire magical kingdom as well. The school prom ends abruptly as blind hatred seizes Carrie, exacting a frightening payment from those who jealously coveted her crown. Carrie’s momentary castle, the high-school gymnasium, is consumed in a spectacular fire, claiming the lives of all who conspired to deprive her of her first chance for happiness.
Sissy Spacek is irresistibly innocent as Carrie White, a childlike waif with huge, alluring eyes and a guileless charm that radiates spiritual warmth and profound sensuality. She is a lovely, exquisite creature waltzing through an entrancing celluloid fantasy. It is this wide—eyed sense of wonder that the gifted young actress brings to the difficult role of the disturbed teenager.
Carrie is doomed by the awakening seed of her own pubescent self-discovery. As a troubled, friendless adolescent, she might safely have suffered in the shadows of peripheral life, assuming a benign invisibility. Forced into the dangerous arena of conspicuous social involvement, however, her peculiar vulnerability sets the ominous stage for her emotional assassination. DePalma’s sensibilities are obviously attuned to Carrie’s pathetic plight. Up until the predictable bloodbath that concludes the Stephen King story, Carrie is an unforgettable essay on teen-age cruelty and loneliness, a deeply sensitive commentary on societal alienation. The director, despite his personal empathy for Carrie, is forced to focus a bitterly realistic eye upon the fable. Fate, after all, had determined the course and brevity of her unusual life long ago. Carrie was always alone, always different. A well-ordered, structured society has little tolerance for those born outside its traditional mold. Carrie never would have fit in. She was unique. Therefore, she had to die.
Recharging his creative energies, DePalma would allow two years to elapse before unveiling his next motion picture, The Fury, released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1978. Remarkably similar in tone and treatment to the earlier Carrie, The Fury concerns the efforts of an ex-government agent to rescue his son from the clutches of a mysterious central intelligence agency bent on controlling the boy’s bizarre psychic abilities. Once again, a character’s fate is seemingly predetermined by an accident of birth and powers wholly beyond his understanding or control.
Peter, the boy’s father (Kirk Douglas), enlists the aid of a young girl with comparable psychic talents, and together they search for the captive youth. Amy Irving, the enchanting, sensitive young actress who played the single survivor of Carrie White’s wrath in the earlier film, portrays Peter’s confederate, Gillian, an impressionable psychic whose ominous visions portend impending tragedy.
It is difficult to distinguish between traditional conceptions of good and evil in The Fury. John Cassavetes as Childress, the determined American agent, is essentially amoral, a governmental clone unable to differentiate between right and wrong and lacking the basic ability to comprehend the difference. He walks somnambulistically through his assignments, neither knowing nor caring that he has become a corruption of the values he was sworn to protect.
Tradition has somehow undergone an ugly metamorphosis. Strict morality has polluted our concept of respect for authority and transformed it into a Hitlerian perversity. Representations of institutional justice have corroded conscience into amoral ambiguity. The federal agent we’ve been conditioned to admire has become a robot, a shallow descendant of the Third Reich obediently implementing the cruelest of directives.
The kindly research director at the psychic institute (Charles Durning) betrays his scholarly integrity by acting in frightened complicity with the federal agency. Dr. McKeever is a modern Caligari, a Kafkaesque caricature simply carrying out the will of the state. Tradition and trust have vanished quietly, frighteningly, without revolution or rebellion. DePalma has murdered our most precious illusions of natural order. In this dark society, we are the villains.
Despite Peter’s heroic effort to save his son, it becomes painfully apparent that it is an exercise in futility. It is too late. The boy (Andrew Stevens) has endured too much ugliness to have survived unscathed. The evil effect of his captivity has warped his fragile mind, expunging his conscience of all responsibility. Corrupted by his environment, he undergoes a terrible transformation. His powers channeled into negative energy, Robin becomes a frightening superbeing—a monster.
Kirk Douglas, as the concerned father, delivers his most restrained and intelligent performance in years. Accompanied by the brooding brilliance of John Williams’s masterful score, Peter and his only child are swept beyond salvation, engulfed by merciless tides of evil, in all-consuming intensity. Once again, the unsuspecting have lost their fight for survival in a game whose cards were already stacked against them.
In Dressed to Kill (Filmways, 1980) DePalma focused upon another kind of human frailty–sexual excess borne of a repressive society. Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is starved for affection, seeking male companionship in order to satisfy her needs. Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) is, on the other hand, a prostitute, reimbursed handsomely for her ability to satisfy the needs of her clientele. At either end of the spectrum, the judgments imposed by society on its inhabitants have created the climate into which both women were born.
Sexual yearnings, however normal, however human, are denied by vast segments of society intent on ignoring or invalidating their natural instincts and imposing their values on the remainder of an already confused species. The search for personal identity or the fear of what that search might reveal has, historically, negated our sexual birthright. “Sin” became an easy, simplistic catchphrase for burying our genitals under the sands of fear and ignorance. We protest too much, as someone once said, creating the seeds of emotional conflict and pain.
When pressure beneath the earth’s crust has been contained and suppressed for too long, it builds to a terrible climax and explodes. We are all products of this earthly terrain. Like the smoldering rock beneath the surface, the natural inclinations of human beings cannot be denied. When the pressure becomes too intense, people erupt as well.
Angie Dickinson
Kate Miller’s pathetic sexual escapades, like a deadly vacuum, pull her into a black, bottomless well from which there is no escape. In a handsome sequence apparently modeled from the museum interlude in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Kate plays a highly sexual game of cat and mouse with a patron of something more than the arts. Canvassing the canvases at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, her gaze lingers hungrily on the sight of an attractive man. Sensing that he is being appraised, the man turns to acknowledge the bidder. Discovered, Kate turns self-consciously, walking slowly, deliberately through a maze of twisting corridors, aware that she is being pursued and luring her admirer confidently through his moves. Tiring of the game, the mouse changes the rules. The chase is reversed, and now Kate retraces her steps, drawn to the irresistible bait through the same mad maze.
The scene is charged with sexual tension as the camera dances through the ever-winding corridors, frantically surveying every corner for evidence of the manipulative Mouse Who Would Be Cat. Kate’s heavy breathing intensifies, dominating the soundtrack with a desperate urgency. The entire sequence is literally orgasmic, an electrifying display of filmic artistry in which the mating of sight. and sound combines to create the illusion of passionate sexual foreplay without the luxury of the slightest physical contact. The tension abates momentarily as Kate loses the prey, as well as her glove. Frustrated, she walks down the steps of the museum, only to be greeted by the sight of the missing glove dangling seductively from the open window of a parked taxi. The scene reaches its climax as she reaches for the glove and is pulled into the cab by the cat, joyously exacting his pound of flesh on the back seat. Kate’s sexual abandon is complete. Her screams of ecstatic excitation are engulfed in waves of frenzied sound as the cab comes to a screeching halt in front of the man’s apartment.
The moment has been consummated, but the moment is gone. Now Kate must pay a horrible price for her altogether human indiscretion. Leaving the apartment in the middle of the being exposed, she is confronted by a crazy woman on the elevator, wielding a straight edged razor, and hacked to death in a nightmarish scene of “moral” retribution. Kate never had a chance of surviving her weakness, for this was the ultimate betrayal of trust. The murderess was in fact Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), her own psychiatrist who, like Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho, led a double existence as a man and a woman. Elliott’s masculine self was attracted to Kate. When his own longing for her became too strong, his feminine ego took control and, in a jealous rage, killed the girl. Despite her struggle to regain a foothold in the course and meaning of her destiny, Kate was a loser, and in this, the final game, the price was her life.
Michael Caine
With Blow Out (Filmways, 1981), Brian DePaln1a has reached a new level of artistic maturity. Filmed in its entirety in Philadelphia, this brooding, disturbing film tells the deceptively simple story of a politician and his female escort whose car races off a dark road, plunging its occupants into the murky waters of the Wissahickon Creek.
Written and directed by DePalma, the film is a darkly successful thriller about the underbelly of political intrigue out of control within the normally safe boundaries of civilized society. Utilizing Hitchcock’s familiar scenario of an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary circumstances, the director uses john Travolta’s boyish innocence as the unwitting bait that lures a crazed assassin from out of the shadows. Travolta, in perhaps the most understated performance of his career, seems content to surrender his notoriety to DePalma’s masterful manipulation of people, places, and events.
Jack (Travolta), a sound man for a small motion picture company, inadvertently records the sound of the politician’s tires blowing out just before the fatal accident. Did they blow out, however, or were they blown out by rifle fire? Sally (Nancy Allen) is the girl whose life and reputation are savagely compromised by the accident. Rescued from a watery grave by the technician, she wants only to fade into the background and escape the inevitable lurid publicity. The allusions to Senator Kennedy and his celebrated accident are obvious, except that in a novel twist it is the girl who survives the crash and not the politician.
A massive cover-up is under way when it becomes apparent that ]ack’s recording can prove that the “accident” was an act of political assassination. Since the public is unaware of either the girl or the murder, the pair must be silenced permanently. Burke, the killer (John Lithgow), is given the assignment of tying up the loose ends. Like Childress in The Fury, Burke is a machine devoid of values or compassion. He understands only that he has left a job incomplete and that he must finish his work.
Vilmos Zsigmond’s shattering cinematography succeeds in turning Philadelphia into an eerie, surrealist nightmare world in which every darkened corner seems to verge on the brink of exploding into violence. The City of Brotherly Love is presented in an astonishing panorama of stark and menacing set pieces that seem to recall Hollywood’s memorable cinema noir period of the 1940s in which the city preyed upon its captives.
De Palma and Travolta
Jack and Sally are captives within the walls that keep them prisoners. They struggle valiantly to survive, but their fate relentlessly succeeds in tracking them down. Along the way, however, DePalma infuses the picture with haunting, unforgettable moments of directorial brilliance. The city’s famous 30th Street train station is transformed into a dangerous den of cold and menacing mechanization, gazing with cyclopean eyes at the tiny, fragile form of a vulnerable young woman being stalked by the calculating killer. A parade celebrating long years of independence and liberty turns into a nightmare as Jack’s jeep races through congested streets in an effort to catch the subway train beneath his wheels and prevent Sally’s death. In a stunning tour de force of expert cinematography and direction, Zsigmond and DePalma capture the sequence from high above the city, looking down through the doors of a helicopter as Jack leads the police on a thrilling chase through the very grounds of City Hall courtyard. The daring stunt climaxes as the jeep crashes through the huge display windows of Wanamaker’s department store. Finally, in the most dazzling sequence of the film, Jack searches through the rubble of his ransacked studio in order to find the incriminating tape containing the murderous blowout. The camera surveys the room in a dizzying, continuous, circular panning shot, observing the destruction detached, without comment, as Jack floats in and out of camera range. It is a superb achievement.
Travolta and De Palma
Always a moralist, DePalma completes his essay in a profoundly moving finale that will haunt filmgoers for years to come. The bitter irony of the director’s vision is that life leaves no one unscathed . . . that the users are themselves finally used up.
At the last, Burke lures the innocent Sally away from the crushing crowds continuing their celebration into evening. Recovered, Jack tries desperately to work his way through the parade and find the killer before it is too late. Carrying his recording equipment, he eavesdrops once more on the sounds of a murder in progress. Grief-stricken, unable to locate the source of Sally’s terrible screams, Jack overhears the death agony of his lover.
Early in the picture, in a comedic interlude, Jack tries fruitlessly to simulate a convincing death scream from a series of hopelessly inept actresses to add to the soundtrack of a horror film. Now, in the final devastating moments of Blow Out, DePalma adds the last pathetic touch. Jack, ever the professional technician, uses the recording of Sally’s final, agonized screams to fill in the soundtrack of his picture. In this ironic symbolism, it becomes clear that DePalma has created a work of profound and enduring importance, a unique and wholly original film peculiar to his own developing style as a creative filmmaker.
Yet, Brian DePalma is essentially a purist, and the spectacular journey from opening credits to end titles is pure cinema, exciting and exhilarating. Blow Out is a major work from one of this country’s most shamefully underrated film directors. It’s time that the rating changed. A complex and serious talent, De Palrna’s ever-emerging flair for combining exuberant directorial genius with sober, provocative writing has already earned him a place of importance in modern cinema. In whatever guise, however, serious or sardonic, DePalma is always dressed to thrill.
[Appeared originally in George Stover’s CINEMACABRE Magazine in 1982.]
By Steve Vertlieb: Among actors of the golden age of horror, few performers were as visible as Bela Lugosi…except, of course, when confronted by Dr. Van Helsing’s handy pocket mirror. Lugosi and his on-screen rival, Boris Karloff, were the jewels in Universal’s crown of terror. As were Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing during Hammer’s subsequent, colorful reign. While Lugosi’s reputation has enjoyed both a critical and popular resurgence in recent years, his work in the initial decade of the sound era remains towering and commandingly impressive.
A captivating presence in his prime, Lugosi emigrated to America from his native Hungary, where he was well-known in Hungarian cinema. Born Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasko on October 20, 1882 in Lugos, Hungary, he was the son of a baker. Lugosi’s father, with other members of the small community founded a bank and, for a time, the family prospered. When his father died suddenly on September 11, 1894, the boy was forced to enter the work place, and became a locksmith.
Tending locks didn’t appeal to the young Bela and he turned, instead, to acting in 1901. In 1903 he joined the Franz Joseph Theatre in Temesvar under the direction of Hungary’s great director, Ignacz Krecsanyi. Lugosi had a fine singing voice and appeared in a variety of operettas during those early years. As he began to perfect his craft, he gained a solid reputation in the repertory company and was given increasing opportunities to play leading roles, including the coveted part of Jesus in an early local Passion Play.
Lugosi as Jesus
After years of playing leading roles in neighboring troupes, Lugosi joined the Nemzeti Szinhaz (The National Theatre of Hungary) in the early months of 1913. Still a young man, the actor was given minor roles in this expanded venue, but an assignment of a different variety was soon to place him upon an even larger stage. In June 1914, Lugosi became a lieutenant in the 43rd Royal Hungarian infantry and fought with his comrades in the trenches during World War One. During his eighteen months of service, he was wounded twice, first in action at Rohatin and later within the Carpathian Mountains. He left the military in April 1916 and soon resumed his career with The National Theatre.
It was in 1917 that the actor joined the Hungarian motion picture colony. His first recorded appearance in a film was in The Leopard for the Star Film Company in Budapest. Later that year he captured a small part in Az Ezredes (The Colonel) for the Phoenix Film Company, under the direction of Mihaly Kertesz who would later achieve success in American films under the name of Michael Curtiz.
Political unrest and Communistic upheaval forced Liberal activists such as Alexander Korda, Paul Lukas, and Lugosi to flee their native land in the summer of 1919. Lugosi found his way to Vienna, Austria. Finding no work, he moved to Berlin after several weeks. Among his early appearances in German Cinema was a role in a variation of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, Der Januskopf, directed by F.W. Murnau and photographed by Karl Fruend, with Conrad Veidt in the lead role.
Lugosi played a variety of roles during his years in Germany, including the part of the Indian guide, Chingachgook in an early rendition of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer.
Lugosi’s life in Berlin was hardly ideal. He found steady work, but he was unhappy. He had married Ilona Szmik, the daughter of a prominent Budapest bank executive on June 25, 1917. Her parents did not approve of their daughter marrying an actor. To make matters worse, they found Lugosi’s political affiliations with the fledgling Communist Party distasteful.
Struggling financially, Lugosi was forced to send his new bride back to her parents in Budapest, promising to send for her once more when his economic status in Berlin had improved. When the short lived Bela Kun regime was overthrown in Hungary, a cause to which Lugosi was passionately, if misguidedly, devoted, he found himself permanently exiled in this foreign land. Ilona was young, not terribly strong and easily manipulated by her parents who seized the opportunity to urge the young girl to divorce her controversial husband.
With nothing to return to in his native Hungary, Bela decided to make a clean break and head for American shores where he might begin again. In the summer of 1921 he secured a position as a third assistant engineer on an Italian cargo vessel, landing first in New Orleans and then working his way to New York City.
Lugosi needed to find theatrical work in America but could speak only Hungarian and German. With other emigre performers, he founded small acting troupes and continued working. Not comfortable being alone, he married his second wife, Ilona Montagh de Nagybanyhegyes, and gave her small roles to learn in his repertory company.
In 1922, a theatrical manager named Henry Baron approached Lugosi with an offer to play the role of Fernando in the forthcoming New York stage production of The Red Poppy. Lugosi wanted the part but confessed to Baron that he spoke no English. He convinced the manager that, with a tutor, he could learn enough English to play his role by time the production opened. Estelle Winwood headed the cast but, although the play opened to enthusiastic critical reviews, it closed after only fourteen performances.
In 1923 Lugosi was given his first part in an American film, The Silent Command, starring Edmund Lowe. There followed a succession of motion pictures shot in New York. Meanwhile, he continued to perform in the New York theatre. One of these plays, The Devil in the Cheese, cast him along side another struggling young actor named Dwight Frye who would later co-star with Lugosi as the mad Renfield in Dracula.
In March 1927, producer and publisher Horace Liveright saw the London stage production of Dracula and sensed the possibilities for success in America. He secured the rights to the play and hired New York World’s London correspondent, John L. Balderston, to adapt the dialogue for American audiences. So successful was Balderston’s adaptation that invitations from Hollywood producers led to a lucrative film career from which the journalist would contribute screenplays for The Mummy, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein and Mad Love.
In late July 1927, Lugosi read for the part of Dracula, and was given the coveted role. Rehearsals began on August 29th and, following a five-performance preview commencing on September 19, the American version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula opened at the Fulton Theatre on Broadway to enthusiastic public and critical response. The production played to packed houses for 261 performances, and Bela Lugosi had become a star. When the play closed finally on Broadway on May 19, 1928, Lugosi and the cast formed a road company and took the show on tour. Hollywood was slow to take notice of the Hungarian actor’s success on Broadway, however, and continued casting him in smaller, less significant roles.
In 1930, noting the success of continuing touring companies and revivals of the vampire saga, Universal Pictures, long the home of fright films, decided cautiously to take a chance on filming Dracula. Tod Browning, a frequent associate of Lon Chaney, was hired to direct the picture, while Karl Freund would become its principal photographer. Less definite, however, was the choice of an actor to play the starring role. If Lugosi was well known on Broadway, he was still an unknown commodity in films. Ian Keith had been mentioned as a possible choice for the film. It had even been rumored that Lon Chaney, Sr. might play the part and that the studio had originally purchased it for the star. Since Chaney was in precarious health at the time, too ill to work, it’s doubtful that there is any validity to that allegation. Chaney’s death by cancer on August 26, 1930, quickly ended any such speculation.
Universal began the filming of Dracula with trepidation on September 29th. The film had been assigned a six-week shooting schedule but the studio was hesitant to make a straight horror film. They feared that the public would recoil from its ugly themes. They hedged their bets by settling upon a safer advertising campaign, referring to their new production as a Victorian Romance, rather than a startling tale of the undead. The studio finally decided to give the part to Lugosi, but the resultant film is, in retrospect, a chaotic misrepresentation of a horror masterpiece, leaving Stoker’s terrifying narrative in utter shambles. Based upon the Broadway production, rather than the original novel, the film was made relatively cheaply with little imagination or flare. Only in its earliest sequences, as Karl Freund’s fluid camera shots capture the mystery and majesty of Dracula’s nightmarish Transylvanian countryside, does the film ever begin to capture the wicked fear or depravity of an otherworldly experience.
Tod Browning’s stodgy, uninspired direction yielded a deeply disappointing representation of, perhaps, the greatest horror novel ever written. Lugosi’s performance is commanding, as it was on the New York stage, but little else in this Universal production is worth remembering. Filmed concurrently with the Browning production was a Spanish version, shooting at night and utilizing the same sets, but with a Spanish cast directed by George Melford, and starring the beautiful Lupita Tovar. This supposed throwaway variation made exclusively for Latin audiences is a breathtaking Dracula, memorable and superior in every way to the Browning production, with the single important exception of the leading actor. Carlos Villarias had none of Lugosi’s presence or charm. Had Melford directed Lugosi, this celebrated vampire film might have had some strength and color. As it is, however, Universal’s Dracula is a frail, static, and anemic shadow of its haunting inspiration.
A POOR BUSINESSMAN. Lugosi was renowned as a pathetically poor businessman. He had no concept of how to market himself. He would typically go from the leading role in a major production to a minor role in much smaller production. This continuing stream of poor choices would eventually, and irreparably, damage his career.
Lugosi was supposed to play the lead in Frankenstein, following Dracula. However, Bela refused to play the role, as he didn’t want to appear unrecognized, covered by makeup and prosthetics. Enter Boris Karloff. The rest, as they say, is history. Here is the original poster for the Lugosi Frankenstein that never was.
After the unwarranted success of Dracula, Lugosi spent the next year appearing in four less than memorable films. The fifth film was another matter. Released in February 1932, one year exactly from the release of Dracula in February 1931, Lugosi starred in Universal’s Murders In The Rue Morgue, directed by Robert Florey.
While Florey’s direction, like Browning’s before him, is stodgy and static, Karl Freund’s cinematography is stunning, and Lugosi’s performance is electrifying. As Dr. Mirakle, Lugosi generously chews up the scenery as a brooding, decidedly mad scientist who uses a great ape to abduct female prey, bringing the horrified young women back to his laboratory where he determinedly experiments on and tortures them. A youthful Arlene Francis becomes one of his screaming victims.
The film is moody and bizarre, if dated, but Lugosi is brilliant. It remains one of his finest performances.
Yet another of his best roles followed in July of 1932 with United Artist’s release of the lurid melodrama, White Zombie. Directed by Victor Halperin, White Zombie starred Lugosi as the strange, charismatic slaver, “Murder” Legendre, whose army of undead servants work the plantation, and carry out his dastardly commands. In a Svengali-like role, Lugosi drains the life from a young, recently married woman he desires, convinces her grieving husband that she is gone forever, and attempts to force her to his nefarious will. Lugosi’s hypnotic gaze and clenched fingers convey the power and poetry of an actor whose gifts were all too often ill-used, and seldom realized.
October 1932 saw the release of the fantasy classic, Chandu, The Magician. Released by Fox and directed by Marcel Varnel and William Cameron Menzies (Things To Come and Invaders From Mars), Chandu starred Edmund Lowe in the title role and featured Bela Lugosi as the evil Roxor, a demented wizard plotting to take over the world. Lugosi is obviously enjoying himself playing the maniacal villain, which he does with exuberance and skill.
Lugosi’s next film was, indeed, a mixed blessing for the actor. Released by Paramount in January, 1933, Island Of Lost Souls, directed by Erle C. Kenton, remains among the greatest, most striking horror films of the decade, and yet Lugosi’s role is a relatively minor one in which he is covered from head to foot by wolf’s hair and is nearly unrecognizable as the leader of the apemen.
Charles Laughton easily steals the show as H.G. Wells insane Dr. Moreau, but Lugosi’s impassioned plea…”Are We Not Men???” remains a stunning, powerful indictment of man’s inhumanity to man, which burns unnervingly through the layers of makeup applied to his face.
After that, Lugosi continued on a self-imposed decline, appearing in a succession of minor parts in unimportant films. While Boris Karloff was an astute businessman, Lugosi never seemed to understand that moving from an important picture into an unimportant one was career suicide.
Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi
THE BLACK CAT. It wasn’t until May 1934, with the release by Universal of the first Karloff and Lugosi pairing that the actor’s star was to rise once more.
The Black Cat, directed by Edgar Ulmer, is a dark, erotic thriller that evenly matches the two stars in competitive, exhilarating performances. As Engineer Hjalmar Poelzig, Karloff is a sinister Satanist whose evil reign as commandant of a notorious prison for political prisoners turns his one-time friend, Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a renowned psychiatrist with an overwhelming fear of cats, against him.
Werdegast, as played by Lugosi, is a broken man, whose wife and child were stolen by Poelzig, and whose life is now haunted by the thirst for revenge. Karloff and Lugosi play off of one another in masterly fashion and their joy over working together at last spills off from the screen, creating another of the finest horror films of the period.
In April 1935, Lugosi recreated a role created at least in part by Lon Chaney, Sr. in the lost classic, London After Midnight, directed by Tod Browning. In the MGM remake, again directed by Browning, Lugosi plays the vampire essayed earlier by Chaney but, while Chaney played both the vampire and the detective investigating the gruesome murders in the original, Lugosi plays only the vampire in Mark Of The Vampire. Lionel Barrymore plays the remaining half of the split persona. While the film is enjoyable, Lugosi is regrettably wasted in the relatively minor role of the vampire.
His next film, however, is another matter entirely. The Raven was the second pairing of Karloff and Lugosi. Directed by Louis Friedlander, and released by Universal in July, 1935, this joyous reunion of the two great horror stars finally gives the upper hand to Lugosi as Dr. Richard Vollin, a mad surgeon whose fascination with the torture chambers conceived by Poe transcends mere fantasizing. Karloff is an ex-con, Edmond Bateman, lured into the spider’s web by the promise of plastic surgery to cure a hideously disfigured face. Lugosi delivers, perhaps, his most entertaining performance as the highly-strung surgeon, driven nearly mad by his lustful obsession for a young dancer whose life he saved.
In January 1936, Universal released the third fantastic pairing of Karloff and Lugosi, this time in The Invisible Ray, directed by Lambert Hillyer, a highly imaginative science fiction drama about a scientist, Dr. Janos Rukh (Karloff) who harnesses an invisible ray from outer space with wonderful healing power.
His colleagues, including Dr. Benet (Lugosi) urge caution and further study, and thinking Rukh mad conspire to steal the discovery away from him. Karloff becomes radioactive, emitting a greenish glow, as the ray begins to eat away his brain. A mere touch of the hand by the scientist means death to anyone unlucky enough to arouse his displeasure, and Rukh sets about dispatching his enemies in a most unpleasant manner until he, himself, is consumed by the radioactive disease.
January 1939 saw the release of the final Karloff interpretation of Frankenstein’s Monster in Son Of Frankenstein. In a last hurrah of sorts, Lugosi, now relegated to largely character roles, played the part of Igor, the doctor’s faithful servant.
His neck stretched in a failed attempt at hanging for his crimes, the mute hunchback loyally commits murderous acts against those who have hunted down and betrayed the creature. Even though hampered by the necessity for a gravelling, nearly unrecognizable voice, Lugosi still manages to convey determination and solicit sympathy as the crazed Igor.
In March 1940, Universal released their final pairing of Karloff and Lugosi, a minor gangster yarn, Black Friday, in which Lugosi steals the show once more in a highly publicized scene in which the gangster, Eric Marnay, is locked inside a closet. Terrified of enclosed surroundings, he screams for release… “Let Me Out! Let Me Out!”
It was suggested by the publicity department at Universal that Lugosi was actually hypnotized by a famous mesmerist into believing that he was dying, thereby creating a brutal moment of realism on the motion picture screen. It would be more flattering to Lugosi, one suspects, to believe that his artistry was due to talent, rather than the artificially induced suggestion of a licensed hypnotherapist.
Lugosi and Karloff parodied their screen personas in You’ll Find Out, a horror comedy starring Kay Kyser and his band, released by RKO in 1940.
He had a relatively minor role as Bela, the gypsy, in the film that turned Lon Chaney, Jr. into a legitimate horror star, The Wolfman, released by Universal, the studio that had, apparently, forgotten about him. In what appeared to be strictly a token gesture, Universal cast Lugosi as Frankenstein’s Monster, a role he had turned down after the success of Dracula, in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man in 1943. He looked bloated and uncomfortable in the massive costuming, and the role did nothing to recapture his fading career.
Columbia Pictures offered him an opportunity to reprise his performance as Dracula in Return Of The Vampire, but Universal owned the character so Lugosi played a generic vampire by the name of Armand Tesla in the inexpensively filmed 1944 release.
In February 1945, director Robert Wise offered Lugosi an opportunity to appear with his filmic nemesis, Boris Karloff, one last time in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher. The completed film, while moody and atmospheric, served more as vehicles for Henry Daniell and Boris Karloff, both of whom (particularly Daniell) shone in their respective star turns. Lugosi, however, was relegated to the thankless role of Joseph, a boorish servant who is quickly and deservingly dispatched by Karloff.
The final, surprising gem in Lugosi’s film career would come three years later from a most unexpected source. Universal, the studio that had seduced and abandoned their once great horror star was resurrecting the classic monsters one last time for a comedic tribute to the golden age. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the reigning kings of the studio, would cast their comic genius upon the waters of fright, and do battle with the likes of Frankenstein, The Wolfman, and Dracula. Lugosi was cast as the vampire Count. Glenn Strange would play Frankenstein’s Monster, and Lon Chaney, Jr. would reprise the role he created..the tragic Lawrence Talbot who, at the rising of the moon, becomes The Wolf Man. Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein, released in 1948, remains a comic masterpiece, a crown jewel in the annals of hilarity.
Both hysterically funny and genuinely frightening, the picture remains the quintessential horror comedy, with brilliant scripting by Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo, and John Grant, inspired direction by Charles T. Barton, and an unforgettably powerful musical score by composer, Frank Skinner. When Glenn Strange injured his back during the making of the picture, a double was needed to play Frankenstein in the climactic sequence in which the Monster hurls Lenore Aubert through the great plate glass window. If one looks very closely at that brief scene, you can see Lon Chaney, Jr. beneath the monstrous makeup, standing in for the injured Strange.
The picture was a huge success, and Lugosi hoped that this might signal the beginning of a whole new career. It wasn’t to be. Lugosi’s career continued its downhill slide with films that can only be charitably described as unfortunate.
Edward D. Wood discovered his idol in 1952 and longed to cast Lugosi in one of his films. The problem was that Wood was a hopeless incompetent with nary an ounce of talent in his bones. Wood was, however, sincere in his attempt to elevate the once famous star to his former level of public recognition, and Lugosi desperately wanted to work.
As filmic atrocities go, Wood’s Glen Or Glenda rates fairly high on the charts of mediocrity. Wood followed that embarrassment with a starring role for his mentor in the horror extravaganza, Bride Of The Monster, co-starring a former wrestler turned actor named Tor Johnson. As excruciatingly inept as this 1955 “shocker” was, Lugosi still managed to recapture just a bit of the old magic when he lamented his treatment by society, and by his colleagues. He might have been alluding to the shabby treatment he received from Hollywood producers in his impassioned speech, which, despite the budgetary limitations of the production, remains genuinely moving.
Sometime earlier, Lugosi had become addicted to pain medication and sought solace increasingly from drugs as unhappiness took hold of the tired old man. On April 21st, 1955, he voluntarily checked himself into the Los Angeles General Hospital’s Mental Health and Hygiene Department, requesting that he be given help for his condition. The Press learned of his condition and greedily printed the story. The resultant scandal necessitated his appearance before a judge at the Psychopathic Court. He said to the gathering reporters “I haven’t a dime left. I am dependent on my friends for food and a small old age pension. I am anxious to rehabilitate myself, and decided this was the only way to do it.” After a forty-five minute hearing, the judge was deeply sympathetic to the actor’s plight, and courage.
Lugosi was formally committed to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California for a minimum of three months, or a maximum of two years. Three months later, Lugosi emerged, free of his horrible dependency on drugs. During his stay in the hospital he had received a series of tender, encouraging letters of support from a young woman employed in a studio-editing department.
Bela married Hope Lininger on August 25, 1955. It was his fifth marriage. He had sired a son, Bela Lugosi, Jr. by a previous marriage, but his wife had ended the relationship, claiming that he was jealous and possessive of both her and the young boy. Bela, who had lost everything he had ever had, lived in daily terror of losing what little he had left. Perhaps now he might enjoy a scrap of happiness.
In August 1956, shooting commenced on yet another “horror” film directed by Ed Wood. Lugosi, as always, would be its faded star. During a break in the shooting, Lugosi returned to his apartment. Hope had gone shopping around seven o’clock in the evening. When she returned, she found Bela. She spoke to him in the darkness, but he didn’t answer. Bela had been terrified of death. He needed constant reassurance and comforting. In the evening of August 16, 1956, Bela Lugosi would fear death no longer. The screen’s original Dracula was buried in his vampire’s cape at Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles. He was seventy-three years old.
A proud and noble Count had fallen, but in the years since his death Lugosi had finally achieved the reverence and respect he had longed for over so many years. It would have made the old man happy at last.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki didn’t do the things author Erin Cairns accused in the opening line of her report published October 25:
I am reporting Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki for unethical practices. He submitted a story entirely written by me into a Black voices magazine without my name on the byline….
In fact, Cairns’ name was on the byline. File 770 has identified the publication. An anonymous source in a position to have direct knowledge has verified that when Ekpeki submitted the story (1) his cover letter identified Erin Cairns as the co-author, and (2) the manuscript had both authors’ named on the title page. File 770 has seen archived copies of the documents.
Furthermore, while the publication’s mission is “supporting Black, African, and African Diaspora creatives globally”, File 770 learned from the source that the magazine has published material by a white author before, and that a submission having a white co-author would not have been a barrier to publication there.
The characterization of the story as “entirely written” by Cairns is disputed by Ekpeki in his rebuttal “ODE Response to Accusations By Erin” for the following reasons.
…Ekpeki, telling her there was by now more demand for his work than he could satisfy, asked if Cairns was interested in co-authoring, which in this case would mean jointly revising a story she had already drafted: “[He] would change the story to reflect a more own-voice context, and give it more Nigerian spiritualism and culture, but distance it from the real world inspiration I’d had for the story (a Makonde mask I’d seen in the Dallas Museum of Art).”
But when [Editor S] solicited the story they had co-authored for [Market 2], a “Black voices magazine”, Cairns disagreed with Ekpeki about the ethics of allowing that to happen, and following some tense correspondence (reproduced in the report) she got Ekpeki to withdraw the story….
In Ekpeki’s rebuttal posted on October 31, he calls the story a collaboration:
I submitted a story, written entirely by her, that’s not true. It was a collaborative piece. She consented to it being collaborative, before and after. She was satisfied with my contributions and okay with me sending it out. I gave her updates, before, during and after.
Asked for specific examples of his contributions, Ekpeki told File 770: “I helped ground the story. Things like settings, location, world, cultural leaning, character names. Basically world building.” Here are screencaps of texts where he recommended changes to her. [Click for larger images.]
His rebuttal continues:
“Erin was fine with my contributions, name change, settings, grounding the story regionally. These things are valid contributions which she consented to, accepted and was happy with. That constitutes a collaboration.
“These are from Erin Cairns own screenshots on her document which show us deliberating on the story. The grounding and changes I suggested which were made. Which she was fine with. So it wasn’t solely written by her. It had contributions from me, which we agreed on. That it was solely written by her, is just not true. After we dropped the story, she reached out to ask me for permission to send out her version without my contributions.”
Whether or not the quantity of writing Ekpeki had done would satisfy everyone that it should be termed a collaboration, the screencapped correspondence between them in Cairns’ report shows they intended to treat this story as being co-authored.
THE BACKGROUND TO CAIRNS’ CHARGES. Reading the messages between Cairns and Ekpeki shows that she was frustrated by their communications, and suspicious about why she wasn’t in the loop with the submission process for the story. Cairns explained in her report:
…He sent me a screenshot of him telling the magazine that I was attached (after the story had been accepted), but they had never responded. To me, this meant it was likely he had removed my name from the byline of the manuscript.
He reiterated that [Editor S] knew who I was and had still solicited the story. But still refused to give me contact with them…
Nevertheless, her name was on the byline of the manuscript. Was he unable to document that at the time? Because Ekpeki seems to have created more doubt by trying to allay Cairns’ concerns. That was the reason why, on the day the submission was accepted, he wrote to remind the editors about the co-authorship, and Cairns’ background, then copied that message to her.
Then there still remained her second concern, whether her story should have been submitted to this market at all. After the story was submitted, other editors — not [Editor S] — were assigned to review it. Cairns became worried whether it was ethical for her, as a white South African, to have submitted a story to [Market 2]. She was aware of their mission statement about “supporting Black, African, and African Diaspora creatives globally”.
I didn’t know how to even answer all of that, so the conversation became about whether or not [Market 2] was a Black voices only magazine. I said it seemed like it was black voices only from everything I could see. He insisted it wasn’t explicitly stated.
…I tried to be non-accusatory, but after realizing that [Editor S] wasn’t involved in the story’s selection, and this was a black voices magazine, I was panicking.
Even File 770 required the input of an anonymous source to verify that a white author could potentially be published by the magazine. Whereas Cairns got no reply from the editors of [Market 2] when she contacted them about her concerns directly:
Dear [Market 2] editors, My name is Erin Cairns, your magazine is publishing a story I co-wrote with Oghenechovwe Ekpeki called “The Face of Our Demon”. I only learned about this recently, and I’m feeling a little out of the loop. Oghenechovwe has been understandably busy these past few months, and while he’s passed on some of your communications in recent days, I can’t help but feel that some lines of communication have been crossed for a while. I did not understand that [Market 2] was a primarily, if not entirely, black voice magazine. I am a white South African, and if I had known, I would first have asked through this portal if a contribution from me would have been welcome. From what I understand, the story was accepted mid-December, but you did not know I was attached until early February. This leaves me a little unsure about whether my name will make it to the byline, or even if you still want to publish this story. If not, I completely understand, and I would immediately withdraw the story with sincere apologies. If there is to be more communication about ‘The Face of Our Demon’, could you please cc me in on the emails with Oghenechovwe so that we both have the information? He’s cc’d me in on his last email, the one with the revisions, but it was in response to a [S]ubmittable reply that I cannot see or follow
(Note: As discussed above, Cairns was unaware the editors knew she was a co-author from the beginning.)
The editors did not reply to Cairns. Instead, she learned from Ekpeki that they had informed him about the message.
I asked him outright why they weren’t willing to talk to me. In response, he abandoned the pretense of the market being open to a submission from me and told me ‘It’s an African exclusive space’ and the ‘politics of white Africans is complicated’. But he’d just spent months obfuscating this issue between me and the magazine. He said he was ‘trying to make sure things went smoothly till publication’ though what me or the magazine were supposed to do in the rough waters after publication would then likely be up to me and the magazine, with me looking like I was a part of hiding my own involvement in a story I’d written in its entirety.
Cairns soon asked Ekpeki to withdraw the story from [Market 2] and he did.
Ekpeki’s Response characterizes the problems between them as miscommunication, misunderstanding, and mismatched expectations:
…Could I have communicated better? Of course. You always can. But you must remember that we are both disabled, chronically ill people. And one of them, me, lives in way worse conditions, in the poverty capital of the world, with little to no access to health care. If anything there’s a human being who is less than perfect, doing the best he can, which could yet be better. Not malfeasance or lack of ethics, or malice or an attempt at theft. There was a lot of miscommunication and misunderstandings and assumptions on both sides from two people in not great situations…
At one point he says, “I apologize for the pain that caused”, however, the statement comes in the middle of a paragraph focused on his extenuating circumstances.
OTHER ISSUES IN CAIRNS REPORT. Cairns also objected to not having received the credit she deserved for the work she did on Ekpeki’s behalf. For example:
We interacted on twitter for a while, exchanging stories for critique which I had done many times before. But this gradually shifted into me editing stories, which at the time I did not know was for his co-edited anthology: [Anthology D]. When he told me a story I’d worked on was going to be in the anthology, I questioned him about what I’d been doing. He told me that for my help and work, my name would be in the acknowledgments of the book.
When the book was released, I bought a copy, and my name was nowhere to be found….
…He hadn’t been transparent with me about his involvement with [Anthology D] when it was being put together, even while I was editing for it. And when I asked about the other stories I was critiquing or editing for him, he would give me vague answers like he wanted it to be a pleasant surprise…
Ekpeki’s response is that the only story she edited for [Anthology D] was his:
…She did not edit stories, not the plural which were for the anthology. She edited one story, mine, which appeared on it. How can I acknowledge you in a book that’s not mine, for one story I have in it? Do people give credits for one story being copy edited, in the whole book? I do not recall promising this….
People’s reaction in social media has ranged from expressions of empathy for Cairns to contending that she should have been given credit as a co-editor of the book.
We now know that Anthology D was Dominion, which on the cover says it was edited by Zelda Knight and Ekpeki, with Joshua Omenga also named as an editor in the Amazon listing. Silvia Moreno-Garcia has weighed in on Bluesky (relevant portion of the thread begins here). Her updated views are excerpted below. Knight and Ekpeki have posted counter arguments to the thread.
ADDITIONAL REACTION IN SOCIAL MEDIA. Cairns’ report prompted several people to comment publicly about issues involving Ekpeki that until now were known to a limited number, or to come forward with their own complaints.
Ekpeki has responded to several of these criticisms and allegations in a Bluesky thread that starts here.
CONCLUSION. Erin Cairns led her report with the most volatile charges – that Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki had submitted a story “entirely written” by her solely under his own byline, and with the added deception that the market was a “Black voices magazine” whereas she is a white South African (living in the U.S.) But it has now been established that both her and Ekpeki’s names were on the byline of the manuscript, that the editor who solicited the submission knew her background, and that it was not inappropriate for her co-authored story to be submitted to the magazine, which has published a white author in the past.
The result is a more accurate set of facts to discuss. That does not put all controversy to rest. Other issues in Cairns’ report still remain open and are the subject of debate. And its publication has created ripples of criticism against Ekpeki in social media from those with complaints of their own.
