City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) (1960): written by Milton Subotsky and George Baxt; directed by John Llewellyn Moxey; starring Patricia Jessel (Mrs. Newless), Dennis Lotis (Richard Barlow), Christopher Lee (Professor Driscoll), Tom Naylor (Bill Maitland), Venetia Stevenson (Nan Barlow), Betta St. John (Patricia Russell), and James Dyrenforth (Garage Attendant):
The first entry in then-Vulcan Studios attempt to compete with Hammer's horror dominance of the 1950's, City of the Dead is an enjoyable, flawed mix of occasionally startling images and occasionally clunky writing and acting. It also criminally under-uses Christopher Lee.
Set in contemporary New England, City of the Dead begins with Professor Christopher Lee sending undergrad Venetia Stevenson to a small town to research her term paper on witchcraft in New England. Things deteriorate very quickly for Venetia's character Nan, signaled by a fog bank so impenetrable as she heads into the town that one wonders how she ever made it to the Horror Hotel in the first place.
A series of horrible happenings follow. The movie looks really good throughout, and a number of scenes have been carefully staged for horrific effect. Clunky acting and writing of Nan's brother and boyfriend occasionally bring things down to the accidentally comical, but not so much as to fatally flaw the film. A final confrontation between Good and Evil in a fog-shrouded graveyard starts as a marvel of mood and ends only a couple of steps short of Evil Dead-style monster-fighting. Recommended.
The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene (2005): Brian Keene enjoys ending the world. A lot. And while he's a very specifically American horror writer, many of his novels fall more comfortably into the disaster-horror sub-genre perfected by writers like Brit James Herbert, with his apocalyptic rats and fogs and crawling dark. Keene's scenarios tend to involve the supernatural far more than Herbert's, but their love of squishy, brutal scenes of ultraviolence -- and the occasional sex scene -- cause me to link them, if only in my own mind.
Keene's fictional multiverse contains many of his novels, along with a multiplicity of Earths, many of them under siege by the forces of darkness, all of them apparently working for one of several demon-kings exiled from the physical universe(s) eons ago by, I guess, God. Or gods.
It's a Lovecraftian set-up that touches at points upon real-world mythologies. Earth is under siege, anyway. A lot. And the cause in many of the novels (though not all) is generally hopeless. What the horror novels explore is grace, and the lack thereof, under supernatural pressure: the human heart in conflict with giant monsters, if you will.
In The Conqueror Worms, a seemingly supernatural rain devastates the planet. And it won't stop. Coastal cities fall to tsunamis; humanity flees to the hills. And then the mountains. And then, entire houses start disappearing into what look like sinkholes, but are not. While land-based humanity comes under siege by increasingly giant, carnivorous worms, sea-based humanity faces sea monsters that seem to have swum right out of mythology.
Keene keeps our sympathy throughout with his narrators -- an 80-year-old man whose West Virginia mountain residence has endured 41 days of rain when the novel opens, and a much-younger man and woman who endured the terrrors of flooded Baltimore for several weeks. Along the way, the reader can piece together the probable cause of the apocalypse, but there's never a moment of epiphanic exposition. This is a worm's eye view of the end of the world, not one from from the heights (or narrative centre) of understanding.
There's brutality here, and grandeur, and a lot of WTF? Boy, those worms are cranky. Recommended.
