Lianne Spiderbaby

BY LIANNE SPIDERBABY
Can you think of a better way to open a film than with Lon Chaney singing, “This cannibal orgy is strange to behold – and the maddest story ever told!” over rattling piano keys? Me neither. Jack Hill’s solo directorial debut, SPIDER BABY, or THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD (1968) has reached epic cult following heights, and filmmakers like Rob Zombie and Quentin Tarantino site it as one of their favorite films of all time. SPIDER BABY is a deliciously creepy tale about three orphaned, inbred siblings who suffer from Merrye Syndrome – making them demented, deranged, and dangerous. Ralph (Sid Haig), Virginia (Jill Banner), and Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) are in the care of Bruno (Lon Chaney), a naïve chauffeur who loses control over the overgrown children as they partake in mischief, murder, and complete chaos.

SPIDER BABY orphan actress Beverly Washburn began acting at a very young age, and although she was directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and she has worked with actors Jimmy Stewart and Superman George Reeves, she claims SPIDER BABY as the best experience she has ever had working on a film. FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND caught up with Washburn to talk about SPIDER BABY, her new book REEL TEARS, and what it was like to work with Jack Hill, and horror icons Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff.

LIANNE: Everyone loves SPIDER BABY. What was it like to be part of such an amazing film, and how were you cast as the role of Elizabeth?
WASHBURN: It was a bit odd the way that I was cast. I was at the grocery store doing my shopping, and this man kept following me. Every time I turned a corner, there he was. Finally, he came up to me and told me that he was working on a film with Lon Chaney, and he wanted me to audition for a part. After hearing that, of course I was exciting to audition, I had never done that sort of a role, and I knew it would be a lot of fun to play an insane young woman. Shortly after my audition, I was told that I could leave. I was so upset, because I thought I hadn’t gotten the part. However, I got a phone call and they cast me!

LIANNE: So you got the opportunity to work with Lon Chaney! What was that like?
WASHBURN: Lon Chaney is so terrific in the role, and it was just amazing watching him work. There is a part in the film where he cries on the front porch, and we all watched him produce real tears, he was incredible. He was such a dear man, very soft-spoken and really lovely. It was a great cast. Of course, Jill was killed in an automobile accident, and Lon has passed away, and it just makes me so sad that they didn’t get to see how popular the film has become. It’s amazing to me that after all these years the film has such a following.

LIANNE: What was or has been your favorite film to work on, our character to play in your career thus far?
WASHBURN: I loved working on OLD YELLER, but I have to say that SPIDER BABY was my favorite because it was so much fun, it was so quirky and different from anything that I had done. Working with Jack Hill was such a treat.

LIANNE: You worked with Jack Hill on the set of PIT STOP (1969), as well.
WASHBURN: Yes, both Sid Haig and I worked with Jack again on that film! Jack is so terrific and he so easy to work for. He knows what he wants, but he would allow us to interpret our characters. When he got in touch with me for PIT STOP, which is about drag car racing, I was thrilled. He’s a fantastic director, and he has a very distinct way of writing. I’m so happy that after all of these years, I’m still in touch with Jack and Sid, and I get to meet so many wonderful fans, as well.

LIANNE: You also worked with Boris Karloff in an episode of the television show THRILLER, entitled “Parasite Mansion”. What was it like working with him?
WASHBURN: The whole THRILLER series is out on DVD now, and I did some narration and commentary for the episode I was in. I was on set in this haunted house for the episode, and Boris Karloff was the host of the show. He was very tall, lanky, and frankly quite scary looking – but he was so nice! In the episode, I play the granddaughter to a witch who treats me horribly. In one scene, I’m sitting at the dinner table – I scream and hold my hands up, and bloody claw marks appear all over my face; this effect was created with sponges and chocolate syrup! When I pressed the sponges to my face, the syrup left marks on my face that looked like blood. Black and white filmmaking allowed for some really cool, budget friendly techniques like that!

LIANNE: You wrote a book recently, called REEL TEARS.
WASHBURN: The book is available now, and the title is a play on words. In so many of my films, I played the crier. Some of the proceeds of this book will be going to an animal charity as well, which is something I’m very passionate about. The book is an autobiography about my life story, and you can read more about SPIDER BABY and Jack Hill in it, as well!

For more on Beverly and to pick up a copy of REEL TEARS, head over to her official site.

More on Famous Monsters scribe Lianne Spiderbaby at www.liannespiderbaby.com.

One of the most iconic images in all of horror cinema, the Bride has haunted our nightmares for 75 years now, an eerily beautiful, hissing figure covered in gauze from head-to-toe, draped in a brilliant but inelegant white shroud, and with flaming white streaks shooting up a jazzed, Nefertiti hairdo.

The Bride’s part in the 1935 Universal classic The Bride of Frankenstein is a small one, but it burns instantly and indelibly into one’s psyche, as the radiant Elsa Lanchester and the immortal Boris Karloff enact the ultimate nightmare version of a blind date.

The Bride of Frankenstein has endured for 75 years, its reputation as one of the great touchstones of early horror movies – and of Hollywood’s Golden Age — only looming larger as the decades tick past. The absolute zenith of the original Universal Horror cycle, Bride effortlessly combines everything: ghoulish chills, sly wit, satirical winking, and deeply felt pathos, into one inimitable conglomeration. Never before and never since would a Universal monster film have such style (or production value, check out those sets!), and even the films that come close in visual terms (Son of Frankenstein surely rates high) can’t touch the emotional punch or cleverness of Bride.

Frankenstein was a huge hit in December of 1931, and the cash-strapped Universal — as hit by the Depression as any other studio — wanted to waste no time in developing a follow-up, especially as other studios began banking on the sudden, unexpected success of the horror formula. 1932 was a bonanza for horror films: Freaks, The Mummy, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Doctor X, White Zombie, just to name a few.

Universal boss Carl Laemmle, Jr. was desperate for a new Frankenstein, but James Whale, director of the original, would have none of it, instead moving on to pictures like the comedy/horror hybrid The Old Dark House (also 1932) and 1933′s special effects extravaganza The Invisible Man. Scripts for a sequel were developed without Whale’s creative input, and other directors attached, including Robert Florey (who had been attached to direct the original Frankenstein before James Whale entered into the picture; Florey’s conciliatory Murders in the Rue Morgue is viewed as an expressionist mini-classic) and Kurt Neumann (who would get his chance to portray monstrous-science with The Fly in 1958). But Universal only wanted one man for the job. As related by film historian Scott MacQueen in his insightful and entertaining commentary for The Bride of Frankenstein DVD: “Whale was developing an adaptation of Gallworthy’s One More River, a project that Whale was passionate about, but made the Laemmles yawn. A deal was struck: one for James, one for the Laemmles. Whale resigned himself to the sequel.”

Turning a burden into a blessing, Whale brought in screenwriters John L. Balderston (who had adapted Hamilton Deane’s Dracula for Broadway, which formed the basis of Tod Browning’s 1931 film version, starring Bela Lugosi, and who had since written the final screenplay for Karloff’s The Mummy) and William Hurlbut, and the two began whipping the script into shape.

Whale was fully aware he couldn’t top the shocks of his 1931 blockbuster, and allowed himself to craft the film as a witty, sexualized satire, built around the concept, originating from Mary Shelley’s original novel, of Frankenstein constructing a Bride for his creation. It was Balderston who gave the script structure, but it was Hurlbut who was able to translate the previous drafts and Whale’s ideas into a perfect blend of macabre fantasy and looney semi-farce.

Mary Shelley herself would open the film, portrayed by Elsa Lanchester, surrounded by soon-to-be-husband and poet Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, in a sequence depicting the famous Villa Diodati writing competition that first gave birth to the literary Monster in 1816. From then on, we find ourselves mere moments after the end of the first film, as the flames of the ruined windbill burn out, and the Monster rises again. The following hour and a half is a dizzy ride through the unreal, jam-packed with iconic moments and images, with our leading cast surrounded by zany supporting characters amid fantastical, stylized settings. A foreboding forest is filled with dead, featureless trees, as stark and as unearthly as the Monster who scrambles through them in terrified flight from the rampaging villagers. Frankenstein’s manor is a gothic chateau out of a fairy tale, with each chamber room bigger and more ornate than the last. The main laboratory set is a multi-storied masterpiece, jammed to the gills with Flash Gordon machinery beneath a Cathedral ceiling that (literally) sails into the heavens.

But the movie is neither driven by its stylistics, nor dominated by them. The true master stroke of Whale’s vision is the layer of humanity beneath the horror and fantasy trappings. Karloff, of course, returns as The Monster, the role that made him a star and a legend that endures to this day. Renowned for the cold menace he brought to often formulaic roles, here Karloff displays — to maximum effect — the pathos he’s also recognized for bringing to his more layered characters, none more so than the Frankenstein Monster. While Karloff was against the notion of giving the Monster speech in Bride, the ability for the Monster to articulate himself — however minutely — added a new, perhaps necessary dimension to the character, which by 1935 had already become an iconic pop culture figure. The Monster is at his tragic best here: beset, pursued and rejected by society throughout the entirety of the picture, constantly yearning for the slightest kindness and understanding.

The famous set-piece where the Monster encounters a blind hermit (played with beautiful warmth by O.P. Heggie), plays to the heart. Surrounded by such delirious, often over-the-top characters and scenes, this quiet, reverent passage of love and acceptance could have and should have seemed ridiculous or, at the very least, out of place. But there’s no hint of parody or of winking here, and Karloff and Heggie convey exactly the note of sympathy needed; when the Monster sheds a tear, we can’t help but do the same.

The film’s ace-in-the-hole is most definately the pinched, caustic figure of the acid-tongued, devilish Dr. Pretorius, masterfully portrayed by Ernest Thesiger. Pretorius is the axis that the plot of Bride swings on, the manipulator between the easily convinced Monster and his cowering, frantic creator. One of the screen’s greatest schemers, Pretorius’ experiments — “This isn’t science! It’s more like black magic!” Henry exclaims at Pretorious’ whimsical miniature creations — lead Henry to the creation of the Bride (not to mention kidnapping and threatening Henry’s fiancee Elizabeth as additional incentive). Much has been made of the homosexual subtext of the story, no doubt due to Whale and Thesiger’s own sexuality, and it’s hard to deny the striking details: the whole plot hinges, after all, on two men conceiving a life without the necessity for a woman… so, in Pretorious, we find the campy lynchpin of both Bride‘s plot and its themes.

Let’s not forget the Bride herself. It’s hard to believe Whale and make up maestro Jack Pierce could have possibly conceived of another design as iconic as Karloff’s Monster, but they certainly did. Stark, white and erect in look and somewhere between a reptile and a robot in her manner, Elsa Lanchester’s Bride is remarkable, a truly alien figure. Lanchester’s said to have based her hiss on the swans she and husband Charles Laughton used to feed at a London pond. Her dual performance as Mary Shelley sets the stage for the film perfectly: a delicate, playful near-child, with a demonic twinkle in her eye. “You know how thunder alarms me…” she coos, but we know that within her, darker forces crackle and roll. The beginning of the film finds her frightened, the film itself playing as both sequel and vivid daydream: “The air itself is filled with monsters…” she says of the night, and no one would know better than her.

With such a solid foundation in story, character and performance, the film’s breathtaking visuals only serve to heighten the already considerable impact. Shot almost entirely on interior soundstages, Whale and production designer Charles D. Hall (who designed nearyly all of the original Universal Horror films, starting with The Cat and the Canary in 1927) make the most of the artiface, crafting grand sets and mixing design philosophies to create a wholly unique, but now often imitated look.

The very setting of the film is like something out of a fever dream of the 19th and early 20th centuries: German peasants, drawbridges and dank dungeons play right next to modern telephones and dress styles, as well as futuristic machinery. By so definitively removing us from reality, and by creating in its place a meticulously detailed, expressionistic substitute, Whale and company not only give the audience the needed suspension of disbelief, but set the template for all fantasy films to come.

The film was met with good reviews upon its release, and was a significant success, if not the phenomenon the original film was, but it would be decades before critics and audiences alike picked up on the film’s complexities and eccentricities, and elevated it into the pantheon of not just great horror films, but great films.

To see The Bride of Frankenstein now is to truly enter another world, a gothic Eden of test-tubes, crackling lightning machines, foggy cemetaries and haunted villages, filled with some of the most incredible characters and performances ever captured on film.

The Bride turns 75 today, and we at Famous Monsters of Filmland wish her all the best. She’s come this far, and there appears to be plenty of life in the old girl yet. So, everyone, lift your glass (filled with gin, “my only weakness…”) and toast: “To a new world of gods and monsters!”

A delighted Forry meets his own creation, Vampirella, at a Playboy party.

It was only natural that he should eventually cross paths with the Dean of Mon-stars, Forry Ackerman. In fact, Hefner came to FJA’s rescue during a very vulnerable time. As Forry related…

“There was a time in my life when I was behind on legal bills. Knowing he was so rich, I threw myself on Hugh Hefner’s mercy and asked if I could borrow some money. The dear man obliged me and saved my life on that occasion. Well, bit by bit, ten, twenty, fifty dollars I was able to repay Hugh Hefner every penny that I had borrowed. The next time I saw him on New Year’s Eve Party, he took me by the hand and shook me vigorously and said, ‘Mr. Ackerman, you are the only man I ever lent money to who repaid me.’ I guess he’d loaned thousands of dollars to people only to have it ignored, figuring he was rich and wouldn‘t care. I was rather pleased with myself to hear that I was the only one who’d ever repaid him.”

I once asked Forry if he would ever like to revisit the Playboy Mansion. His response was surprising: although Hefner was very nice, he said, the loud rock music played during his parties was unbearable!

It should also be remembered that FM itself owes a tip of the hat to Hefner and his bunny-eared brainchild: publisher James Warren’s first magazine was the saucy After Hours, which Forry often described as a “poor man’s Playboy”.

When I was about 13-years old my mother brought home a number of science fiction digests from a local drug store. These were not quite in my line but I still perused them with interest, particularly the ads. Before Ebay, Amazon and Ioffer, this was the only way to locate unusual items otherwise unavailable in one’s area. I remember pouring over the full-page spreads hawking Hildebrandt-style fantasy art and bejeweled daggers – somehow those stark, simple images transported me to another world much more vividly than the purple prose that surrounded them.

I sent away for a number of the catalogs offered by various companies in the classified section. One was for something called Bud Plant. I almost forgot about it until one day something the size of a telephone book came in the mail for me. Bud Plant was a comics/collectibles dealer and their catalog was truly a Bible on the subject. I lost myself in page after page of illustration and description in black and white newsprint. Superhero comics, underground comics, reprints of those EC comics I’d heard about on The Horror Hall of Fame, Disney, Dark Horse and Dr. Octopus. Everything was there. I was, and am, not a comic book fan per se but the thrill of discovering this material for the first time was nevertheless exhilarating.

One listing was especially enticing. It was for Famous Monsters of Filmland # 201; the cover, as best I could make out given the blotchy printing, depicted the then-just-deceased Vincent Price in Masque of the Red Death. So somebody decided to re-launch this thing, eh? The description noted the issue’s contents and the fact that Forry Ackerman was at the helm. I decided to order immediately; at last I’d have a look at what I’d heard the likes of John Landis, Joe Dante and Rick Baker tout so enthusiastically.

Famous Monsters # 201, which I still retain after 16 years. It has since been signed by Forry and Jim Warren.

I’m fairly certain there was such a thing as First Class, if not Priority, mail in 1993 but neither I nor my mother were apparently adept enough to choose that option. It was, as I recall, two agonizing months until I finally received the package containing FM # 201, a copy of Stephen Jones’ excellent The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide (a book I‘d get much use out of for years to come), and an issue of Cult Movies that no 13-year old should’ve been reading.

It was an extremely fortuitous issue of FM to begin with. There was much coverage of Forry and his interests that further filled in the gaps in my knowledge of him. Also included was an extensive look at an FM convention held in Virginia to celebrate the re-launch of the mag. Many genre celebrities that I recognized took part and, from the photos, the dealer tables were stacked high with monster-related bric-a-brac. It would’ve been nirvana for me, if only I’d known such a thing was taking place – but then, it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway. I was in Kentucky to stay and my mother always made it plain that we were in no economic condition to go on trips.

I received the Bud Plant catalogs regularly thereafter. The next FM I got through them was 202, with a painting of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster on the cover. This was done by an artist named Osman Askin. Little did I know then that one day I’d be working in the name of the Forrest J Ackerman estate, cataloging examples of this artist’s work for one of the world’s major auction houses.

Sara Karloff (part 2) shares with us stories regarding her father, their relationship, and her thoughts on the legacy he’s left on the movie world.

Janet Ann Gallow was only five years old when cast for the role of little Cloestine in The Ghost of Frankenstein, but she vividly recalls her experiences on the set, working with Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr.

Video production and post by Ash, Constant, Ed, and Turtle.

One of the finest sculptors of scaled action figures, statues and busts working in the industry today is Ray Santoleri. You may not know the name but I am almost certain you have seen his vast and varied portfolio of work throughout the collecting world. He has sculpted figures and statues for companies such as Neca, Mezco, Diamond and McFarlane.

After graduating with an Associate Degree in Applied Science in Marketing Art and Design from Middlesex County Collage, Ray worked in graphic art and illustration. He then moved on to film and TV make-up where he was introduced to sculpting for make-up effects. Somehow he fell into the toy industry and the rest is history. His work has appeared in Lee’s Toy Review, Tomart’s Action Figure Digest and Amazing Figure Modeler.

A fan of classic horror films Ray has produced many fine art portraits of Boris Karloff and is currently working on a series of 5 quarter scale busts of Karloff from various roles throughout the 1930’s. Each solid resin bust stands 6’’ with base.

Rays work is impeccable. He truly is a master of his trade and the love he feels for sculpting and art shines through every piece he creates. To check out Rays work and purchase the first two busts in the series head over to his website http://www.rsantoleri.com/index.html and check out all the cool goodies he has to offer collectors of all genres and tastes.

Enter Amok Time and their new deluxe Boris Karloff 1/6^th scaled figure of Karloff as, well, Boris Karloff. This Karloff family approved collectible figure comes with three interchangeable heads from three distinctive points in the master of horrors life.

Being that my favorite Karloff picture is the Peter Bogdanovich directed Targets (1968) I was thrilled to see that one of the heads included with the figure is that of Karloff in his later years. The other two heads are of Karloff in middle age and as a younger actor, before Frankenstein and stardom. The figure includes a display stand and deluxe 4-color window box with fifth panel. Now I just have to get Amok Time to produce a young 1/6^th scaled Peter Bogdanovich, but I won’t hold my breath.

Check out Amok Time to pre-order this perfect addition to your collections.

Runtime: 25 min (episode length) 

Language: English 

Color: Black & White