MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > "Psycho" and A Few 50's Monster Movies (...

"Psycho" and A Few 50's Monster Movies (The Blob, The Thing, and More)

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
29 replies | jump to latest

I have reason to be stuck in front of a TV recently and saw that Turner Classic Movies was running a quick set of 50's "monster movies"

I watched them. I watched them in light of the memories I had of them from my youth. I watched them in light of their own qualities.

And...just a little bit...I watched them in light of how they led up to and informed(intentionally or unintentionally) Hitchcock's Psycho.

I'd say we are talking one "unknown title" and two "well known titles":

Cosmic Monsters(unknown title) (starring Forrest Tucker) 1958
The Thing From Another World(known title) (starring Kenneth Tobey; PRODUCED By Howard Hawks) 1951
The Blob(known title) (Starring Steven McQueen) 1958 (Paramount)

"The Thing From Another World", in my childhood, quickly became known in my neighborhood only as "The Thing," and thus, with "The Blob" we got two pretty basic-level intimations of monster-hood, yes? You wanna get killed by "The Thing" or "The Blob"?

I believe when John Carpenter made his incredible gooey-gorey remake in 1982, he just called it "The Thing." Which reminds me, somebody made ANOTHER gooey-gorey remake of The Blob in 1988 --- but it seems to carry none of the gravitas of the Carpenter remake.

The relevance of these three particular originals, however, is that they DID appear in the decade before Hitchcock made Psycho and while I don't think "monster movies" inspired him as much as Diabolique and House on Haunted Hill, there ARE connections.

Let's get "Cosmic Monsters" out of the way first. What tickled me when I saw that listing is that I was sure I saw that one as a kid...but couldn't remember a damn thing what it was about. Moreover, while both "The Thing" and "The Blob" played on one LA channel(KHJ-9); Cosmic Monsters, I am sure, played on another (KTTV-11.) Yeah, my memory is a curse.

I can get further specific: "The Thing" got "one shot" showings on Channel 9's "Strange Tales of Science Fiction" Saturday horror movie show, but "The Blob" ended up on Channel 9's Million Dollar movie -- playing 9 times in one week ala The Magnificent Seven, Dial M for Murder, Damn Yankees and Them!

Cosmic Monsters was over on Channel 11's Saturday Night "Chiller Theater."

OK. Cosmic Monsters took its long, long, LONG time getting to any horror action, but when it came it was creepy and I remember why it "bugged" me as a kid: the monsters are "blown up" insects: cock-a-roaches and grasshoppers, yes, but also the all-time scare: a big SPIDER.

In the very creepy finale of Cosmic Monsters, a pretty woman is trapped in a spider's web. The big guy appears(a real spider, photographed very close-up) and we're pretty scared for this woman. But luckily a big grasshopper shows up and the spider jumps on THAT, first. We are "treated" to real footage of a real spider killing and wrapping up a real grasshopper -- creepy for its real-life meaning, creepier still if they are "big"; ultra-creepy because that woman is still trapped in the web with the spider and then...she is rescued. Whew.

And then something happened that answered an eternal question of mine: "WERE the two murders in Psycho the most gory murders on film to that point in time?" No, not really. In Cosmic Monsters, one of those big bugs attacks and kills a British solder and we get a long lingering close-up of the dead soldier's bloodied face and head being eaten by the bug. (Its a mannequin dummy head, but still.) Complete with "crunch" eating sounds. So, yeah...I found this 1958 monster movie moment to be as grisly and gory as the killings in Psycho.

---

On to The Thing from Another World. Its from RKO in 1951, the year that Hitchcock was giving us Strangers on a Train(in full Warner Brothers echo-chamber Dimtri Tiomkin mode, and Tiomkin ALSO had time to score The Thing)...and the movies DO feel like they are from the same place: the beginning of the 50s(with the postwar forties just behind us), with a certain wise-cracking All-American brio to the characters.

Its pretty famous that Howard Hawks PRODUCED The Thing, its also possible that he directed it(though Christian Nyby is the listed director) but either way , it is a quintessentially "Hawks film." Men in groups --- plus one gal who can hang with the guys. An emphasis on professionalism of the individual team members. The film looks backwards towards "Only Angels Have Wings" and forwards to "Rio Bravo," and at one point , when a solider is asked if he can shoot a rifle skillfully at a firebomb to kill The Thing, he answers "Sure. I saw Sergeant York!"

Though it would take 31 years , an R rating and great special effects to go "full horror" with The Thing, the original at least captures the great claustrophobic entrapment of an "Artic station" that feeds both films. There's nowhere to run out of the smallish facility with its finite number of rooms and passageways. Outside is freezing. And snow. And ice.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Watching "The Thing" this time, I was intrigued by how much of it does NOT have The Thing on screen. Its a typical monster movie ploy, I know, to keep the creature "out of view" for much of the film(Jaws, Alien) and then to reveal it in all its glory. But with "The Thing," the monster is a fairly banal creation(Big James Arness as a Frankenstein's monster size alien who actually wears a uniform) and he's best talked about and not seen unless absolutely necessary.

Which brings to The Thing's most Psycho-esque moment. The men have been talking about seeking out The Thing, fighting it, and four of them creep up to a closed door to the outside of the arctic facility. The wait is long...seconds that seem like minutes...and finally someone opens the door AND BOOM! There's The Thing, angry and flailing out with one clawed hand. The heroes slam the door on the Thing's hand, but he gets it out and disappears from the screen.

I'm willing to bet that this moment got great big full-house audience screams in 1951...and I recall bracing myself for it during 60's kid showings (and I recall kids TALKING about this moment, too.)

Thus, in this moment, "The Thing" anticipates the Great Arbogast Attack in Psycho , which remains the most shocking of them all at the time because , as against here with The Thing(where the men are in a group and the Thing attacks no one)....Mother DOES make it to the lone and isolated Arbogast, to slash him and to kill him. (Note that both scenes are really about the same thing: "What's behind that door?")

Perhaps the greatest influence that The Thing might have had on Psycho is that here we have (in The Thing) a major studio director being willing to affiliate himself with a "horror movie." If Howard Hawks could do it in 1951, Hitchcock could do it in 1960. (And here was Dimitri Tiomkin committing to a SciFi genre score in 1951, the same year Herrmann scored The Day The Earth Stood Still.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

One downside to the Hawksian version of The Thing is that it really plays more like a drama than like a horror movie. So often The Thing is offscreen; so often the screen is filled with military men(in the main) debating what to do with/to The Thing. (Ah, but there's an "Egghead" scientist who wants to befriend The Thing; he'll get his chance.) Given how little time is given to actually seeing The Thing in The Thing, you are left with a movie that's almost all talk, no action.

For what its worth, while "The Thing" is the Howard Hawks Class Act of monster movies, a cheapjack thing called "IT! The Terror Beyond Space" from-- wait for it -- 1958 -- ended up being the much scarier "trapped with a monster" movie of the 50s' and 60's TV. Many have found "IT" to be the inspiration for Alien(same plot; spacemen trapped on ship with creature), but on its own cheesy terms, it was pretty scary. The monster's face was ugly; he moved fast to grab victims, chopping them with his hands and leaving blood around -- it was just a scarier movie than The Thing, and probably set the template better for both Alien and the 1982 Thing. AND: a couple of the attacks in "IT the Terror Beyond Space" at least anticipated the savagery of what Mother Would Do in Psycho(though in no way approaching the cinematic flair of the Psycho murder scenes.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And on to: The Blob (1958), which of the group of movies I watched that day, felt closest to the "Psycho" vibe, in various ways. Its from 1958 so it has that "era feel." The Paramount mountain comes on at the end -- so its like Vertigo (also of 1958.) But that Paramount mountain is rather a "falsity" -- Paramount picked this no-budget indie up from some guys in Pennsylvania who made the movie for about $150,000 and sold it for $300,000. And then watched as it made $4 million. (That's the "Psycho" story right there...Hitchcock, too, watched teenage audiences launch his $800,000 investment into the stratosphere. Horror EARNED back then.)

One thing to note about The Blob first up: its in color. This immediately separates it from the William Castle movies and the Roger Corman movies and the rest. The color isn't the GREATEST color, but its there. I have not read this, but my determination is that they made the movie in color to "play up" how The Blob, as it keeps eating people and intaking their blood, gets redder and redder and redder. Ick.

As with "The Thing" and , yep, "Cosmic Monsters," "The Blob" sure does spend a lot of time on people talking and doing things, with no monster in sight. I suppose this was a matter of budget. People talking scenes don't cost that much to do, with amateurs. Monster attacks DO cost. (And hey, its not a cost matter, but this is how Psycho plays, too -- many GREAT dialogue scenes, punctuated by MOTHER coming out to kill, only occasionally..)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Its "the aura" of "The Blob" that hooks me to this day. Like "Night of the LIving Dead," it was made by amateur filmmakers based in Pennsylvania, a state which, while certainly possessed of some grimy old big cities(Philadelphia, Pittsburgh), also bespeaks of crisp woodsy rural communities. The Blob comes to earth in a field next to an old man's shack; from that "country" beginning, it makes its way to a Small Town USA perfectly captured in terms of the police office, the single supermarket, the high school and -- best of all -- the community movie theater, which, near the end of The Blob, has been infested with a crowd of teenagers all there to watch a truly bizarre(REAL) film called "Daughter of Horror." The clips from that film are creepy enough to create that great feeling "midnight horror movies" can have: these kids have come out of their small town homes for a night's scare at the movies, good or bad, it don't matter.

I've held off a bit on the fact that the star of this is "Steven McQueen." The billing has been left that way on the titles and maybe its a clue as to how Steve McQueen made his move to stardom. Steve, not Steven. One looks at the 1958, low budget version of McQueen and its interesting: yes, that's his face; yes, that's his voice, and yes, that's even some of his cool manner. But its not nearly enough -- he's playing a teenager(too old) and has to play a lot of the movie "panicky"(that's not Steve.) And yet -- the McQueen cool comes through at the end, as he takes on leadership, orders others around, has the cool head while others have lost theirs. McQueen is, amazingly, only two years away from The Magnificent Seven, here. That's all it took to "get serious." Then The Great Escape to become a star. Then Bullitt to become a superstar...

And oh -- McQueen got offered $3000 cash or a percentage to make The Blob. He took the cash. The Blob made $4 million. OUCH.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

As to the monster that is the Blob, its a pretty scary concept, really. And to the extent I'm noting that there were some movies out there with brutal content BEFORE Psycho...here's another one.

The Blob first appears ina large egg -- it looks rather like the egg in the "Alien" posters, really. That old man cracks the egg with a stick -- and CLEAR goo starts to cling to the stickthe Blob ain't red yet, because it aint ate no blood yet). BTW, I have to give points to whoever devised the effects for The Blob. Whether it was silicone or jello or melted jujubes -- it looked REAL, and it moved with a murderous determination.

Like here, where the clear goo climbs up the stick onto the old man's arm and is clearly....DEADLY. Its a horrible sequence, one can feel the innocent old man's pain as the blob takes over his arm. Soon, McQueen's valant teengager and his girl are whisking the old man to the local doctor and nurse for help. But not too long after, the Blob eats(in sequence) the old man, the nurse, AND the doctor. And gets very big. And very red.

And now The Blob converts, for ahwhile, into a Hitchcock Movie: "The Doctor Vanishes." Nobody believes McQueen's story of this unbelievable blob, and the fact that he is a TEENAGER -- a potential juvenile delinquent - only compounds the trouble.

Its pretty slow going -- with some terrible amateur actors -- from the early "scary first attacks" of the Blob to its big move on Small Town , USA. I do like that when the Blob makes its big move -- it goes into that movie theater, first killing the projectionist(which "kills" the movie he is projecting) and then going after the crowd which runs into the street. (My research shows that the real Pennsylvania town stages a "Blob" showing and race out of that very movie theater on an annual basis. Cool.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

During the movie theater sequence, the movements of The Blob are pretty "cool" and visceral -- it slices through the slitted air vents of an air conditioner in 20 slices; it comes pouring out onto the street through doorways that make it look like the 100-Pound Scrotum as it fills the screen. (Sorry.)

But alas, when The Blob makes to entrap McQueen and others in the town diner -- they simply have the Blob attack a PHOTOGRAPH of the diner.

Famously, The Blob is not killed. It cannot be killed. But it can be FROZEN. So it is. Last shot of the movie: the blob as a little package being dropped at the North Pole(The Thing country), as "The End" becomes "?"

Of this group of monster movies I have described here, The Blob DOES feel closest to Psycho, even in color. Something about the quality control, the history of "big bucks from a small investment," and McQueen in the lead, but overall, I think, THIS: the small town that the Blob attacks in Pennsylvania is not all that different from the town Mrs. Bates haunts(from afar) in Psycho: Fairvale, California. Both "The Blob" and "Psycho" speak to the isolation of rural America, the banality of the people there, and -- circa 1958/1960 -- another time and place(dare I note the "whiteness" of it all? Shades of American Graffiti, too.)

And that's it. A misspent afternoon? Oh, I had nowhere else to be. I think I can drop any future viewings of "Cosmic Monsters," but "The Thing"(original) and "The Blob"(original) have their own role in monster movie history. You can figure that, as the fifties rolled on and more and more of these cheapjack horror movies kept making dough...Hitchcock HAD to cut himself in on the action. Boy, was he ready....

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

PS. Bonus points for the hip rock song -- first instrumental, then with lyrics , that opens "The Blob" -- with music by Burt Bacharach.

"Beware of the Blob --

It creeps
And sweeps
And crawls
And falls
Across the floor
And through the door
And all across the hall....

[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

It's really a nifty little piece.

A bouncy mambo that very much evokes (to my ear) the Champs' Tequila from January of that year: a strumming guitar lead-in, Latin percussion overlaid with hand-claps while a wailing sax carries the melody line, and a witty little pop at the rhythmic break (in place of the raspy, spoken "tequila"). The addition of lyrics in the final section places that irreverent wit front and center, signaling that this is to be a film about - and for - youth.

Story goes that the session musicians assembled for the recording by Bernie Knee ("Nee" on recordings where he's credited) were billed as The Five Blobs for release of the tune by Columbia. The "Nee" name was omitted from any credits, (it's also his multi-tracked voice performing the vocal), so he took out an ad in the trades to highlight his participation, and was promptly severed from his relationship with Columbia.

If there was a business more cutthroat than that of films, it may have been music.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

It's really a nifty little piece.

A bouncy mambo that very much evokes (to my ear) the Champs' Tequila from January of that year:

---

That's true....it certainly has some of that "Tequila" flavor... the occasional "finger pop" to somehow convey ...blobbiness?

---

a strumming guitar lead-in, Latin percussion overlaid with hand-claps while a wailing sax carries the melody line, and a witty little pop at the rhythmic break (in place of the raspy, spoken "tequila").

---

Ha, yes...it occurs to me that this song was the kind of "little something extra" that perhaps carried "The Blob" above the usual teenager monster fare of the time. Added by Paramount brass, perhaps?

--

The addition of lyrics in the final section places that irreverent wit front and center,

--

The fact that the song goes for quite some time as an instrumental and THEN finally kicks into the lyrics(sung by "some guys") perhaps also adds to the power of the credits...like The Blob itself, the song starts as one thing...and becomes another.

---

signaling that this is to be a film about - and for - youth.

---

I guess we can never forget that the monster movies/horror movies of the fifties catered to a "teenage market" that seems to have developed after WWII and Korea.

Hawks' The Thing is so early in the cycle I don't think it really counts that way, but I will assume that 1951 teenagers helped boost the take along with postwar adults.

I doubt Hitchcock had anyone do the research, but I'm guessing that both Psycho and The Birds had huge teenage ticket buying masses...especially Psycho, which seemed to require multiple viewings.

"Informally," one critic wrote of both Psycho and The Birds...."they were a private teenage reserve...nobody's parents approved."

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Story goes that the session musicians assembled for the recording by Bernie Knee ("Nee" on recordings where he's credited)

---

When is a knee a nee? Hah

---

were billed as The Five Blobs for release of the tune by Columbia.

--

I guess that's a way to be guaranteed One Hit Wonder status.

---

The "Nee" name was omitted from any credits, (it's also his multi-tracked voice performing the vocal),

--

Aha. A multi-tracked voice...The Five Blobs were One Blob.

---

so he took out an ad in the trades to highlight his participation, and was promptly severed from his relationship with Columbia.

--

Wow. Its like making sure you DON'T credit for your own work.

Which reminds me...where does Burt Bacharach enter in? The music, or the lyrics? I don't think his usual lyricist Hal David was involved...

---

If there was a business more cutthroat than that of films, it may have been music.

--

So I hear. I'm reminded of the character "Hesh" on the Sopranos. A Jewish-American pseudo-gangster who navigated Italian-American Mafia guys and African-American rappers in his quest for success.

[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"When is a knee a nee? Hah"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Indeed, and double-hah. It's tempting to track down an obit to see if any identified him as "Bernie Nee (née Knee)." Ristle-tee, rostle-tee now, now, now.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Which reminds me...where does Burt Bacharach enter in? The music, or the lyrics? I don't think his usual lyricist Hal David was involved..."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Close: it was Hal's older bother, Mack.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"When is a knee a nee? Hah"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Indeed, and double-hah. It's tempting to track down an obit to see if any identified him as "Bernie Nee (née Knee)." Ristle-tee, rostle-tee now, now, now.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I saw what YOU did there...

---
"Which reminds me...where does Burt Bacharach enter in? The music, or the lyrics? I don't think his usual lyricist Hal David was involved..."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Close: it was Hal's older bother, Mack.

--

Mack David was Hal David's brother? Well, I did not KNOW that. But did BB do the MUSIC for The Blob song? It kind of has his "bounce."

[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"But did BB do the MUSIC for The Blob song? It kind of has his "bounce."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Oh, yes, the music was BB's.

That was his only collaboration (such as it was) with Mack.

---

Aha..and confirmed...about Bacharach. And interesting "line of demarcation" between Mack and Hal.

About 20 years ago, I was gifted with a set of CDs with nothing but Burt Bacharach songs. It was a mixed blessing. Back to back to back Bacharach can be TOO bouncy. Still, I have some favorites: his instrumental for Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass "Casino Royale" and Alpert's amateurish singing of "This Guy's In Love With You," for two. "Arthur's Theme" for a later other. ("Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head?" not so much.)

But on the first disc of early songs ("What's New Pussycat," "Promise Her Anything" -- both by Tom Jones), was: "The Blob." And THAT's how I learned BB was connected.

BTW, and reflected on those discs, was the Utter Downfall of Bacharach and David. Their score of songs for the 1973 musical of "Lost Horizon" is filled with atonal dreck; evidently they were about finished as a team and couldn't concentrate. That said, I did like the title tune (it has a certain wistful beauty that fits the story) and I did like one called "The World is a Circle" that actually SOUNDS like a big musical number..but is atrociously sung and danced by Liv Ullman in the movie.

Burt Bacharach...he rose so high, he fell...sorta far.

PS. One BB instrumental I love -- and have on disc -- is "Nikki." That's the name of his daughter , but was the theme song for the ABC Movie of the Week. So when I played it for friends, I could intone a fake movie announcement: "The ABC Movie of the Week...a major motion picture created directly for television...tonight: Terror in a Small Town, with William Shatner, Lois Nettleton and special guest star William Windom." This is only funny if you play "Nikki" while you say it!

[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"I was gifted with a set of CDs with nothing but Burt Bacharach songs."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I've discovered that my knowledge of Bacharach-analia is both deficient, in terms of awareness of just which songs he wrote, and broader than I realized, from the number of his compositions with which I'm familiar but didn't know were his: Make it Easy On Yourself; I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself; Baby It's You, among others (and here I have a self-correction to make: Mack David collaborated on that one too).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Their score of songs for the 1973 musical of "Lost Horizon" is filled with atonal dreck; evidently they were about finished as a team and couldn't concentrate."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I tried to make it through that film a couple years ago, and no go. Living Together, Growing Together is the epitome of '70s musical insipidness, right up (or down) there with gems like Delta Dawn and Afternoon Delight.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"I could intone a fake movie announcement: "The ABC Movie of the Week...a major motion picture created directly for television...tonight...This is only funny if you play "Nikki" while you say it!"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The name meant nothing to me, so I sought it out, and it awakened dormant sensory memories of that and many other compositions that were excerpted for "movie show" intros: Miklos Rozsa's Ivanhoe for The Million Dollar Movie; The Land Of Make Believe for the Family Film Festival; Mancini's Experiment In Terror for one of the weekend fright film shows (can't recall which...or maybe it was the weekly Sherlock Holmes films on KHJ; not all sensory memories endure equally).

[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"I guess we can never forget that the monster movies/horror movies of the fifties catered to a "teenage market" that seems to have developed after WWII and Korea.

Hawks' The Thing is so early in the cycle I don't think it really counts that way, but I will assume that 1951 teenagers helped boost the take along with postwar adults."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
You're always so much better than I at observing trends and connections, and contextualizing their social trajectories as reflected in entertainment. I can work only from impressions, some of which may enter "Well, duh" territory.

The immediate postwar years of "the atomic age" - with its attendant connotations of jets, rockets, space travel and forward-looking futuristic idealism, tinged as it was with red-scare-era paranoia - provided fertile ground for the explosion and solidification of sci-fi as a bona fide film genre. As you say, I'm sure teen audiences helped to boost their popularity from the beginning, but the best of the early ones - TTFAW, TDTESS, Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M, When Worlds Collide - tended to be mature scientific and/or philosophical examinations, with no particular target audience in mind.

I suspect the rise of a youth market, or more specifically, an underage one, was fueled by the near-concurrent coalescence of be-bop and r&b into rock 'n' roll, and with the energetic postwar economy providing middle-class security along with some disposable cash to its youth, a demographic was born.

What generation was this? Too late for The Greatest one and perhaps even the Beat one; too early for the Boomers, they'd been born in the final (and immediately prewar) years. Do they even have a name? Whatever the case, it was off to the races for films, music producers, radio programmers, clothing designers and anyone else who could sniff out a buck.

Cont'd...

[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

By mid-decade, the purveyors of A-list entertainment were giving nods to serious consideration of - or catering to - that generation: Warners with Rebel Without A Cause; MGM with Blackboard Jungle, These Wilder Years and Tea and Sympathy; Universal with The Unguarded Moment; Paramount (they had Elvis) with Loving You and King Creole.

I'd suspect also that drive-in theaters, although they'd been around since the early-'30s, benefited greatly from a youthful generation with $$ in their pockets and leisure time (and gas-rationing forgotten).

Not to be discounted, I think, was the 1948 SCOTUS decision that forced studios to divest themselves of their ownership of theater chains, clearing the way for indie producers and distributors of low-budget product who could then compete on a more level playing field for bookings.

And, of course, there was TV, which could offer Captain Video and the like, but nothing approaching the comparative production opulence of even a $100k wonder made for theaters. And at home, Mom and Dad most likely controlled the tuning dial, at least in the evenings (the kids could probably squeeze in American Bandstand in the late afternoon hours between school and Dad's return home from work).

An autobiographical note at this point: among my earliest memories of that era are of my father, in his mid/late-30s at the time, arriving home from work on the occasional Friday with a stack of new 45s by the likes of Elvis, The Everly Bros, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Hamilton or Bobby Darin that he'd picked up at Wallach's Music City, firing up the blond-wood Kaye-Halbert hi-fi console, and dancing up a storm with Mom in the living room before dinner.

Can't understand it: before another 10 years had gone by, they'd both gotten so cranky, and Dad would do things like flip Life Magazine cover-side-down on the coffee table if the Beatles were on it. Go figure.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

By mid-decade, the purveyors of A-list entertainment were giving nods to serious consideration of - or catering to - that generation: Warners with Rebel Without A Cause; MGM with Blackboard Jungle, These Wilder Years and Tea and Sympathy; Universal with The Unguarded Moment; Paramount (they had Elvis) with Loving You and King Creole.

I'd suspect also that drive-in theaters, although they'd been around since the early-'30s, benefited greatly from a youthful generation with $$ in their pockets and leisure time (and gas-rationing forgotten).

Not to be discounted, I think, was the 1948 SCOTUS decision that forced studios to divest themselves of their ownership of theater chains, clearing the way for indie producers and distributors of low-budget product who could then compete on a more level playing field for bookings.

--

I think the "combo package" of elements above -- particularly the rock n' roll music and movies from about 1955 on...MUST have driven the teenage horror movie. We know the drill: "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," and "The Blob" with its teen heroes. Whether on the screen or in the drive cars watching...teens started to rule. And there were a LOT of them(all that postwar baby making.)

BTW, I once found a 1960 interview with Hitchcock, promoting Psycho, in which he said, "Well my movie isn't I Was a Teenage Brontosaurus." So Hitch was aware of trends...

---

Horror movies did their own mutating into the sixties, but over at Roger Corman's shop, the teenagers of the 50's became the hippies of the 60's, and the bikers, and the psychedelic drug takers and...the movies changed again.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

An autobiographical note at this point:

---

I like those!

---

among my earliest memories of that era are of my father, in his mid/late-30s at the time, arriving home from work on the occasional Friday with a stack of new 45s by the likes of Elvis, The Everly Bros, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Hamilton or Bobby Darin that he'd picked up at Wallach's Music City, firing up the blond-wood Kaye-Halbert hi-fi console, and dancing up a storm with Mom in the living room before dinner.

---

That's great!

----

Can't understand it: before another 10 years had gone by, they'd both gotten so cranky, and Dad would do things like flip Life Magazine cover-side-down on the coffee table if the Beatles were on it. Go figure.

---

Ummm...well generations were changing it seems, every five years....I came of age on The Beatles, that other music was "oldie but goodie" to me.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Hawks' The Thing is so early in the cycle I don't think it really counts that way, but I will assume that 1951 teenagers helped boost the take along with postwar adults."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The immediate postwar years of "the atomic age" - with its attendant connotations of jets, rockets, space travel and forward-looking futuristic idealism, tinged as it was with red-scare-era paranoia - provided fertile ground for the explosion and solidification of sci-fi as a bona fide film genre. As you say, I'm sure teen audiences helped to boost their popularity from the beginning, but the best of the early ones - TTFAW, TDTESS, Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M, When Worlds Collide - tended to be mature scientific and/or philosophical examinations, with no particular target audience in mind.

---
Likely so. Seeing "The Thing" back to back with "The Blob" I DID sense that 1951 simply didn't have the same target audience or ticket buyers available for The Blob. You can figure that Hawks felt the short story upon which "The Thing" was based was worth bringing to big screen, but in a "serious" way.

As for all that "SciFi" I suppose the combo of the Atom age and a desire for space exploration -- as a serious, academic, government-funded matter -- becamse the reason for those first early fifties flicks. And still not yet "seeking teenagers."

Nor, necessarily were teenagers necessary for the "big A-bomb hits of the early fifties": The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms(the A bomb raises a dinosaur from the deep); Godzilla(ditto); Them(the desert A bomb creates giant mutant ants.") All three of these films were BIG hits(even with Jack Warner hating his two Warners Brothers pick-ups) and "the big bug" movies were ON. (And remember what Newsweek said: Hitchcock's Godzilla was...The Birds. So he was watching that side of the horror movie template along with the Psycho side.)

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

Which reminds me, somebody made ANOTHER gooey-gorey remake of The Blob in 1988 --- but it seems to carry none of the gravitas of the Carpenter remake.

Trailer from Hell recently made a defence of Blob (1988) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxwhbQhHJqM
I want to see this film!

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Which reminds me, somebody made ANOTHER gooey-gorey remake of The Blob in 1988 --- but it seems to carry none of the gravitas of the Carpenter remake.

Trailer from Hell recently made a defence of Blob (1988) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxwhbQhHJqM
I want to see this film!

---

I DID. Back in 1988. At the theater. Part of my regular film-going experience. Some movie genres I dropped out of as I got older, but I think I never really stopped seeing horror movies with a link to my youth, and of course, the horror got more "adult"(violent, gory) with the 80's.

About those 80's horror movies. In certain ways, Psycho was in the lead position again. Once it was deemed "OK" to make Psycho II in 1983(what with Hitchcock conveniently dead since 1980), it seemed that REMAKES (rather than sequels) became all the 80's rage. We got a new Thing(1982), a new Fly(1986) and a new Blob (1988.) I suppose in the 80's, the reason nobody thought to do a Psycho REMAKE(as opposed to sequels 2 and 3) is that you could NOT really "blow up" Psycho to the kind of super-gigantic special effects mass gorefest that The Thing and The Blob could do. You had to stick to: two murders. Indeed, it reminds us again that for all of its horror tropes(the House, the swamp, the skeletal mother), Psycho still played as much as a plausible thriller as a horror movie, a human drama with no supernatural overtones.

Meanwhile, David Cronenberg's The Fly. On those private "Best movie of the year" lists I keep, The Fly WAS my favorite of 1986 at the time. I have over the decades dropped it and replaced it with Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I figured out why: whereas, practically any time Ferris Bueller comes on, I watch it(along with Uncle Buck, its my personal favorite representation of the John Hughes Canon), anytime The Fly comes on, I cannot BRING myself to watch it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The Fly was intelligently written(with Cronenberg by a guy named Charles Edward Pogue, who also wrote the very knowing Psycho III of 1986 too) and combined genres in a way that impressed me. Here was a SciFi movie with horror overtones and, as the strong spine...a love story. What Jeff Goldblum slowly becomes is a creature so repulsive that his lover Geena Davis MUST kill him, and the ending was powerful(great music), sad, and sickening(watching Goldblum "digest" another guy's arm with thrown up fluids...nope, can't watch THAT anymore.)

Indeed, if one "mixes and matches" the Psycho sequels and The Thing, The Fly and The Blob one sees the 1980's as a clear time of "borrowed movie horror vehicles," something at once to rebel against("how DARE they raid those golden oldies!") and to value("well, THIS Fly is certainly a better movie than the 1958 Fly.")

..meanwhile, back at the sixties, my movie trivia memory continues to do me well:

Wherea Hawks' 1951 "The Thing" got a lot of local Los Angeles airplay in 1961/1962(it was already TEN YEARS OLD by then), I think it took a few more years for the 1958 The Blob to reach TV....deep in that movie-rich year of 1967/1968 (what a PILE-UP of great and not-to-great thrillers and horror movies on TV!)

And this: Tim Burton grew up in LA in the 60's and 70's(he's a younger fellow than me), but he was around for some of those Saturday night local TV broadcast horror movies, and he's said that "its neat to think about the energy in the air as TV sets all over the Los Angeles valley basins were all tuned in to the same horror movie on the same Saturday night." You can figure that that "energy was in the air" the night Psycho was shown on late night TV in 1967, but it was likely the same when LESSER horror movies were broadcast like Cosmic Monsters...

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Also interesting: it seems that the horror movies of the 50's and early sixties became the TV staples of the 60's and then "jumped a decade"(the 70's, where The Exorcist and Jaws reigned A-list blockbuster supremes)...and rebuilt themselves in the 80's as the Psycho sequels and the Thing/Fly/Blob remakes. All this while the 80's were also the top time for Friday the 13th/Halloween/Freddy Kreuger slashers.

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

About those 80's horror movies. In certain ways, Psycho was in the lead position again. Once it was deemed "OK" to make Psycho II in 1983(what with Hitchcock conveniently dead since 1980), it seemed that REMAKES (rather than sequels) became all the 80's rage. We got a new Thing(1982), a new Fly(1986) and a new Blob (1988.)

I've always regarded the excellent 1978 remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which wasn't a huge hit but made a solid profit, as firing the starter's pistol for the rush of '80s remakes of '50s sci-fi.

Really, after IOTBS (1978) it felt like almost every half-decent '50s sci-fi or horror would be remade without compromises (Siegel had been forced to tack on the 'FBI are on it' ending to his the original IOTBS). Of course, the very best '50s sci-fi - Forbidden Planet, Day The Earth Stood Still - weren't compromised in any obvious ways, and probably couldn't be improved upon (Producers beware!). The Keanu DTESS that finally arrived in the '00s was indeed a debacle.

Spielberg's War Of The Worlds (2005) was in some respects the end of the whole cycle. The '50s WOTW was fairly limited in ambition/budget etc. to begin with, and was quite far away from the H.G. Wells novel, etc. - it was the biggest softball to try to hit from the '50s canon still out there. Spielberg 'fixed' those problems, esp. in the first hour or so - truly incredible set-pieces and sfx and sound design, but created new character arc problems of his own! No one said making a completely satisfying film was easy.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

About those 80's horror movies. In certain ways, Psycho was in the lead position again. Once it was deemed "OK" to make Psycho II in 1983(what with Hitchcock conveniently dead since 1980), it seemed that REMAKES (rather than sequels) became all the 80's rage. We got a new Thing(1982), a new Fly(1986) and a new Blob (1988.)

--I've always regarded the excellent 1978 remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which wasn't a huge hit but made a solid profit, as firing the starter's pistol for the rush of '80s remakes of '50s sci-fi.

---

And yet, again, I get to play one of my best roles around here. Making a "declarative statement" that can be softly rebutted ASAP.

Hah.

Yes, I'd say that the '78 Invasion of the Body Snatchers got things rolling, certainly...and it was well-reviewed, better budgeted than the original and cannily shifted from Small Town, USA to Big City San Francisco.

I suppose to salvage my reputation a little, I'll say it all seemed to take flight in the 80's. I DO think Psycho II allowed Hollywood to announce, "You know what? NOTHING is sacred from our past. If it earns, we're gonna make more of these.)

Also, I will note that the 1978 IOTBS feels very much like a "seventies" movie and all the 80's films feel like 80's movies. Duh.

Also: Invasion of the Body Snatchers got remade what, three more times after the original? A record? They even got sorta stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig to be in one.

---

Really, after IOTBS (1978) it felt like almost every half-decent '50s sci-fi or horror would be remade without compromises (Siegel had been forced to tack on the 'FBI are on it' ending to his the original IOTBS). Of course, the very best '50s sci-fi - Forbidden Planet, Day The Earth Stood Still - weren't compromised in any obvious ways, and probably couldn't be improved upon (Producers beware!).

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The Keanu DTESS that finally arrived in the '00s was indeed a debacle.

---

The original 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still premiered on a 1962 edition of NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. I remember getting to watch it and feeling like it was "cool." The opening where the robot came out and melted all the weaponry. Etc. Of course, I understood nothing else about the picture beyond feeling a sympathy for Michael Rennie's stranded space man. Over the years, I saw it as an older guy and started to find its ultimate message wry: "We are people of peace. Don't bring your wars to our planet. Or we will blow your planet up." Warlike pacificism. I was also intrigued by the idea of "cop robots" on Rennie's planet, who simply kill anyone who exhibits "aggression." A nice thought, isn't it -- you don't like the thugs down the block? The robot will kill them for you. But...who runs the robots? And just how much aggression is too much aggression before the robot kills YOU?

The original DTESS is a "keeper"(with its chilling Bernard Herrmann score). I've never seen the Keanu Reeves/Jon Hamm version(much as I like both actors) and there's something about the reviews that tell me I don't need to.
.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

One takeaway I'm getting from this whimsical thread is that "the fifties genre movie" ain't so simple to define...at least if you're in the arena that can encompass (1) outer space ; (2) monsters and (3) horror.

First of all you have the "genre within the genre":

"Outer space" takes in all those "Destination Moon" type serious films of the early 50's but....let the teenagers in and you have "IT The Terror From Beyond Space" and "The Blob" as menaces from outer space. (DON"T let the teenagers in and you have Howard Hawks' more adult contemplation, "The Thing from Another World.")

I''m also willing to take the original "Day The Earth Stood Still" and "The Thing"(both from 1951) as "prestige A budget studio genre pictures" -- these were probably not devised for a teenage audience. The B-list original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" rather strides the gap between prestige and exploitation, but it is about ADULTS, so I see it as adult material.

"Them" had a good budget, but once it hit big, we suddenly had a glut of Big Bug movies, and often with teenage protagonists. I recall a good scare out of a cheapie called "Earth Versus the Spider" in which a giant spider was gassed and put unconscious in a high school auditorium. The teens then staged a rock dance NEAR the "frozen" spider in the auditorium(yeah, I'd really relax dancing next to an unconscious giant spider!) -- and he came back to life and started eating students. It seems ridiculous now, but it was clearly a "teen driven scare movie."

Hitchcock from his perch as an A-list thriller director with a TV series that played a little "down market" watched all of this with care, I'd think. He waited for just the RIGHT type of horror to jump in on. And when he found the novel Psycho with its gory shower murder at an isolated motel -- he knew he had it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Interesting, though, that one film later, Hitchcock DID go to the well of the "monster movie" and we ended up with The Birds, a film which tried to inject "the monster movie" with a fair dose of "Psycho horror"(the farmer with the pecked out eyes; the attack on Melanie upstairs) but, which, in the end, played probably less to horror and more to "monster attack action."

Still, Hitchcock's two genre movies seem to stride two worlds too: (1) The "serious prestige" work of The Thing, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and (2) The teenage market horror cheapie -- William Castle division.

Although, as some critic noted, there are no teenage protagonists in Psycho at all. And only a pre-teen girl in The Birds, of that type.