RIP Robert Cobert, Frank Jay Gruber

Robert Cobert films his cameo  in "War And Remembrance," 1985.

We're mourning two of our own today. News came over the transom this morning that Robert Cobert and Frank Jay Gruber passed away last week. My reflex was to publish seperate obituaries for each man today, but that felt somehow inappropriate. Cobert has been the topic of many conversations at this website over the years, but Gruber was a frequent contributor to our dialogues. I'm feeling his loss much more urgently and refuse to ghettoize his death as something other.

But there's a structure to this narrative and it begins with Robert Cobert. I awoke this morning to a message and photos from Jim Pierson, the marketing director and producer at Dan Curtis Productions, about Cobert's death. "He lived as long and joyful of a life as anyone I've ever known," Pierson said

Dark Shadows was obsessed with world building, and those worlds were mostly created by Cobert and the late scenic designer Sy Tomashoff. Tomashoff was responsible for building the body; as the show's composer, Cobert gave Dark Shadows its soul. And because of the way in which he worked, Cobert had an invisible influence over everything we saw. The rigorous production schedule meant the music had to be written independently of the show's taping. Much of what you saw on Dark Shadows was paced to meet Cobert's music. (I've heard that it was the first score for a daytime drama that used a symphonic orchestra, but couldn't find anything this morning to verify that.) By the time the series wrapped in 1971, Cobert had composed more than 600 tracks spanning almost 8 hours of music. Some are short "stings" last just seconds; others run several minutes.

Cobert with David Selby and Jonathan Frid.

By pure conicidence (or perhaps just due to the creative persistance of both men) Cobert and actor Jonthan Frid first came together in a 1961 television adaption of The Picture of Dorian Gray. You'll have to be paying attention to notice, though: Cobert is not credited for his work, and Frid's walk-through is so brief that you'll likely miss him.

Cobert continued his relationship with Curtis over the years, working on both House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler, Dracula, Trilogy of Terror, and the epic mini-series The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Not to be outdone by his own work on Dark Shadows, those two mini-series represent the longest ever scores written for a movie. Cobert received the Lifetime Achievement Award during the 41st Annual Saturn Awards in 2015.

Cobert died Feb. 19 of pneumonia at the age of 95.

Just as I sat down to write this piece, CHS contributor Nancy Kersey sent me a message informing me that Frank had died Feb. 23. He was 54 and had been battling Stage IV pancreatic cancer since last July. Frank had been with The Collinsport Historical Society from almost the beginning and was always there when I needed him for something, no matter how silly. This is a man who volunteered to pick me up at Newark Liberty International Airport, a place I'd politely describe as Blade Runner-esque. He was a good guy and I've missed him since he had to withdraw from social media a few months ago to tend to more important matters.

Below is a photo we took together at the airport af the 50th anniversary Dark Shadows Festival. I hate having my photo taken and had just declined a photo with Will McKinley for that reason. (Almost four years later and I still feel guilty about that.) But here we are together in 2016, just a few days after we first got to meet in person, and the last time I'd ever see him. I'm the one with the glasses.



Frank kicked in enough work to the CHS over the years that he's got his own hyperlink. I'd encourage you to spend a few mintues today reading some of his old pieces. You can find his obituary online here. Memorial contributions can be made in Frank’s name to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: https://giving.mskcc.org/

- Wallace McBride

A Collinsport Historical Society writer needs your help

Frank Jay Gruber has been contributing to The Collinsport Historical Society almost from the beginning, and is a founding member of what I jokingly call the "board of directors."

His first contribution was for our Grayson Hall Blog-a-thon way back in 2012, and he's since written about such movies as House of Dark Shadows, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Frank is also a great guy, and a fan's fan. When I attended my first Dark Shadows Festival in 2016, he offered to pick me up at the airport in Newark, N.J. and shuttle me to Tarrytown, N.Y. That, alone, should tell you something about his character. Whenever anyone asks me for a favor, I remember how far out of his way Frank went for me that weekend and try to live up to those standards. (If you've ever been to the Newark airport, you know he set the bar pretty high, ha ha.)

On July 31, Frank began chemotherapy following a diagnosis of Stage IV pancreatic cancer, which had already spread to his liver by the time it was detected. I don't have any profound insight into his situation. The word "unfair" keeps pushing my other thoughts to the margins. I'm struggling to complete this paragraph, but in the end it doesn't really matter what I do or say ... Frank doesn't need my platitudes right now. But he's a good guy and I hope he pulls through this.

On July 19, Frank's friend Chris Vignola launched a fundraiser to help cover his medical expenses. You can find it on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/donate/314209689322427/ and the goal is $20,000. Here's a snippet from the page's summary:

"Frank and his family, wife of 30 years Kathy, his two daughters Cristina and Melissa have had a series of bad luck. In 1989 Frank suffered a brain stem injury and has been permanently disabled in addition to 8 herniated discs from a car accident. I have asked for things thru the years for my special kids and vets but this one is even more personal to me. Please anything you can give. Give a little each time you can through out this fundraiser , it doesnt need to be a giant amount in one shot. Again he is one of our own please step up the plate for this avid Yankees fan and lets hit it out of the park for him!"

$20,000 for one family is a major expense, but The Collinsport Historical Society's thousands of readers should be able to make a sizable dent in that goal. Consider it the bill coming due for all the free content we've provided here over the years.

You can find the Facebook fundraiser online HERE. Please consider donating.

Dark Shadows: A 50th Anniversary Appreciation

Trapped in the House of Dark Shadows
By FRANK JAY GRUBER

Although officially a child at the time, I never ran home from school to watch Dark Shadows during its original ABC network run. I was a wee bit too young. The show premiered in 1966 and I premiered in 1965. While Barnabas had Willy renovating the entire Old House I was busy strategically piling multi-colored Fisher Price plastic donuts on a stick. My sister Sue, however, is ten and a half years older than me. She not only ran home from school to watch the show, but likely outran the practicing track team to do it.

She and my Mom, who was chain smoking herself into a crypt of her own, would perch on the edge of the sofa and watch the gothic goings on and frequent character swapping without a scorecard—no easy feat in the days before DVD, streaming and Wikipedia.

Me? I sat on our cheap carpet honing my future Scrabble skills with wooden blocks and leaving Lego booby-traps all over the floor, sipping my Bosco chocolate milk and trying to ignore the creepy music and dishwashing liquid commercials (“Palmolive? Your hand is soaking in it!”) I was used to being shushed and otherwise ignored for 30 minutes each weekday until I was almost six.

Sue not only watched the show, but she had the magazines (“Win a Dream Date with Quentin’s Sideburn Comber!”) and the paperbacks (Barnabas Collins and the Zombie from Bayonne, New Jersey) and I even recall a pink-bordered trading card or two pinned to the window frame or Scotch-taped to the edges of her mirror right next to Bobby Sherman. She was a fan.

Me again? My sole lingering critical observation from those hallowed early network days is “Boring. Too much talking, not enough biting. Is it over yet? Mom needs to get up and make me more Bosco.”
In any case, I was tangentially familiar with the show. Even though everybody talked ENDLESSLY, Barnabas the “vampire guy” still had neat bangs, Maggie was pretty for a girl, and witchy Angelique had big eyes and easy to draw cheeks. (Decades later I confirmed the loveliness of the two ladies at my first of many DS Festivals and stick to my youthful contention that Kathryn and Lara are worthy of a cavalcade of wolf whistles. I believe they hastened me into puberty, definitely by 2011.)

When my sister’s boyfriend invited her to the drive-in to see House of Dark Shadows I didn’t object. Sue had just recently started dating, and Mom and Dad frequently sent me to chaperone. They figured it was much harder for her to get in trouble with her kid brother in tow. Yes, at five I was a defender of righteousness and a staunch guardian of morality and virtue. Little did my parents know that all the guy had to do was hand me a dollar and I’d be at the drive-in’s snack bar and playground for at least an hour. Good thing my sister was basically a good kid or I’d conceivably (pun fully intended) have gone broke buying holiday gifts for 37 nieces and nephews over the subsequent years.

Anyway, when they putt-putted off to the Hackensack Drive-In one night in late October or early November of 1970 to see a double feature of House of Dark Shadows and Movie Title Lost in the Mists of Time, five year-old Frankie was peering over the back seat hoping there might be some biting. You know, at least on the screen.

After my snack bar run and fully sugar-fueled, I assumed my position on the roof of the car with a speaker of my own. I even brought my cuvvie blanket from home to wrap myself in to ward off the autumn cold. I had my popcorn tub and a can of Purple Passion soda.

I was all ready.

I was not at all ready.

First off, nobody told me this movie was in dying—er, living—color. Second, right behind the opening credits the story started with a missing kid. I fully contend there’s no better way to get a prepubescent viewer’s attention than to have a kid in the movie go missing.

As the next 97 minutes unreeled and rereeled I sat on the roof and reeled a bit myself. The vampire attacks were bloody and the staking was like nothing this almost six year-old had ever seen before. The fact that just about everyone who was anyone (SPOILER ALERT!) actually became a vampire totally traumatized me. I couldn’t even invade my sister and Junior Lothario of the Week’s privacy to beg more money for the snack bar. Why would I? The zit-encrusted kid behind the counter was probably a vampire himself by now. This was my last night on Earth. It was the end of the world as I knew it, but I certainly didn’t feel fine.

That memorable night in 1970 did not affect my sister and her date in the same way. This was probably because they were older, wiser, and also because neither of them likely saw the movie until it came out on VHS twenty years later. I was alone in the dark, a preteen pawn of Dan Curtis and money hungry MGM. If I had known the castle where they actually shot the movie actually existed a mere thirty miles away in Tarrytown my cuvvie blanket and little trousers would probably have needed to go in the garbage.

The movie ended. Sometime later, when my sister’s date finally noticed the climax had passed, he had to lift and stuff me back into the car. I was immobilized. I might as well have been chained up tight in a coffin or bricked up in a wall for all of the pliability I exhibited. My sister, in all of her sixteen year-old maturity, was suddenly in a state of panic.

She had broken her brother.

Even worse, Mom might find out he was relegated to roost on the roof for the whole movie. He might have caught a chill. He might get sick. You know, if he lived and didn’t die of fright. It was still touch and go.

She was doomed.

Of course she began a process of brainwashing and manipulation that Frankenheimered me more than The Manchurian Candidate. “You’re fine! It wasn’t that scary! It was actually kind of silly! Haha! Ha! I wouldn’t have taken you to see anything scary! You’re fine! FINE!” (repeat for five miles).

Here is the sum total of my side of the dialogue that night:

“……………………………………………….”

I arrived home whiter than Josette’s party shroud, still staring into the black abyss of a golf producer-turned-filmmaker’s soul. Although my catatonia passed, the next day my mother kept me home from school and called our faithful quack for an expensive house call. I have no idea what he thought I had, but he chased me around our living room with a needle. I kept screaming “It was just bloody!” Everyone present thought I meant the needle. Unconsciously echoing my sister, they kept telling me it was fine. FINE!

The next time my mother and sister put Dark Shadows on I ran shrieking to my room—which may have seemed a bit of an overreaction because the current storyline had a non-scary character named Leticia arguing with another non-scary character named Gerard and offering to take a mask into town to have it appraised (circa Episode 1120). I didn’t care. It was unquestionably safer in my room. People may start biting and gushing any moment.

A decade and a half later, after many years and at least a dozen late night Hammer films broadened my horizons, PBS reran the series. I was scared of this??

Even later, when all 1225 episodes were released on DVD (okay, 1224 and an afghan of fragments—you know, picture THAT afghan) I watched the whole run. As a community college literature instructor I this time appreciated subtle and sophisticated aspects of the show that bored me to tears in the late sixties. There were literary adaptations of varying quality and tenuous adherence to the source material—which I believe were Classics Illustrated comics consulted after writer Sam Hall’s dog ate the pages. The writers were truly skillful in keeping casual viewers in the loop while stringing regular viewers along until Friday with endurance-straining repetition and a glacial plot pace. The cast was to be applauded for some genuinely fine combat acting in the living merry-go-round hell of live-on-tape television. Over those 1224ish episodes there is much to love, to laugh at, to cherish and revel in. From Sy Tomashoff’s iconic Collinwood drawing room set and hallway to the exteriors that exist only in rumor after 1966, from Victoria’s endless confusion to Quentin’s silence for months, from time hopping with sticks to arguably the best bloopers in television history, it was a truly wonderful and unique program—one unlike anything else before, since, or likely to come.

The fiftieth anniversary of Dark Shadows is a time to rewatch and celebrate it all, from Alexandra Moltke’s arrival to Thayer David’s series-concluding monologue. Just let me know when you get to House of Dark Shadows.

I’ll visit the snack bar.

FRANK JAY GRUBER In addition to his freelance writing and editing gigs, Frank Jay Gruber teaches literature, composition and online course development at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. He sometimes covers New York and Philadelphia area events for TrekMovie.com, appears on convention panels and writes for genre websites like The Collinsport Historical Society. CNN interviewed him about Star Trek in his collectible-covered lair and consulted him about Dark Shadows after Jonathan Frid’s death in 2012. You can read his extremely infrequent musings atTheWearyProfessor.com and follow him on Twitter @FrankJayGruber.

Monster Serial: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE

By FRANK JAY GRUBER

Of all the classic monster archetypes, the one most dependent on the forms of belief is the vampire. Belief or disbelief in the creature’s existence is often pivotal to the plot, there is a realignment of each victim’s faith and allegiance after each new seductive attack, and the fiend suffers from its vulnerability to the religious iconography of the crucifix when backed up by strong conviction.  While, for example, the Frankenstein monster or the Black Lagoon’s creature just attack victims and are defeated in straightforward fashion, vampire movies usually deal with the interplay of credence and conviction. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in 1968’s DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, the third film in the Hammer series starring Christopher Lee.

The story begins with a flashback sequence set during the notorious count’s previous reign of terror in 1966’s Dracula - Prince of Darkness, which ended with the undead being’s plunge into the icy waters outside his castle. A young altar boy rides up to his village church one morning and discovers blood covering the bell pull as he attempts to sound the call for mass. The priest then visits the belfry and discovers a murdered young woman hanging upside down within the mouth of the bell, her life fluids draining and dripping down the rope. “Dear God!” he exclaims, “When shall we be free of his evil?”

In the narrative’s present day, one year later, the same priest says mass before his altar boy in an otherwise empty church, then quickly adjourns to the nearest inn to start drinking. The behavior of the landlord and villagers in the room indicate the priest’s morning visit and the early start to his imbibing are by no means unusual. Times are hard for the local parish. The events last year left their place of worship desecrated and the villagers are reluctant to enter. The deserted church sits metaphorically and literally in the shadow of Dracula’s mountaintop castle and the evil it represents.

The solid and curly mutton-chopped actor Rupert Davies arrives. He plays a travelling monsignor, the priest’s denominational superior, who quickly assesses the situation and chastises the man for his inaction. Now that Dracula is vanquished, why hasn’t the priest exorcised and spiritually cleansed both the church and the castle? The answer, we can plainly see, is that the man is paralyzed with terror of the supernatural evil. He is quaking in his cassock, shaking in his vestments. His frailty and fragility are character flaws which becomes integral as the tale unfolds.

“There is no evil in the house of God!” The monsignor insists sternly, before taking his cleric aside.

“You can’t imagine what it’s like,” the priest insists, pleading with his eyes.

Clearly there are different gradations of belief operational here. The older man’s clarity, moral strength and the forceful impregnability of his faith far outstrip the poor priest’s.

The monsignor orders his subordinate to meet him the next morning a half hour before dawn to begin what will be a daylong trek to the castle. Although it’s near enough to cast a shadow—and even though it’s accessible by horse and cart both in previous films and at the end of this movie—they must inexplicably journey all day through the fog-shrouded forest and climb the rocky mountain on foot to reach it. This is as much a symbolic journey as a physical one. The pilgrims must progress. The monsignor carries the church’s huge golden Gothic cross strapped to his back like a knapsack. The priest, out of shape from his year of depressed inactivity and drunkenness, can’t keep up with his superior even though the man appears 30 years older and as many pounds heavier. As sunset nears the cleric cannot go on. The monsignor takes pity on his weakness and continues up to the castle without him. As soon as he is out of sight, the priest pulls out a bottle and resumes his drinking.

Good use is made of echo as the monsignor stands at the castle door and begins chanting his Latin exorcism. Dark clouds roll in and lightning fills the sky. The priest, somewhere down the side of the precipice, is scared by the cosmic forces at work and starts to flee. He trips and tumbles down the mountainside, knocking himself out and cutting open his forehead. He lands atop an ice-covered stream, his impact cracking the surface and exposing the body of Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula. As the winds pick up and the monsignor attaches the giant golden crucifix to the castle door, far below the blood trickles from the priest’s forehead directly into the mouth of the hibernating vampire. Its lips start to move as it swallows.

Exorcism over, the monsignor descends and returns to the village. The count, meanwhile, has woken up and towers behind the priest as he regains consciousness. Oddly, the cleric first glimpses the vampire standing behind him by seeing its reflection in the water. This is an odd gaffe, since the undead cannot traditionally be seen in reflections.

Dracula discovers his castle has now been reverse-desecrated with a huge gleaming cross attached to the front door. He demands the priest, whose weak will he easily enslaves, tell him who perpetrated this atrocity. The vampire learns it was the monsignor and vows revenge.

 All of this, which transpires during the first 22 minutes of the film, is merely the setup. When the monsignor returns home to the township of Kleinenberg, the other main characters are introduced. His household consists of his dead brother’s wife Anna and his niece Maria (Veronica Carlson), a twentyish blonde with obvious endowments whose appearance virtually screams “Hammer Film vixen” from the moment we see her. It is through seeking to destroy her purity that the vampire will pursue his revenge on the monsignor.




Maria is in love with Paul, a young scholar played by Barry Andrews, who resembles The Who’s Roger Daltrey enough to make viewers uncomfortable. When we first see him he is dressed in his finest suit to have dinner at Maria’s and meet her mother for the first time (he doesn’t know that her uncle the monsignor has arrived back home yet). He foolishly allows himself be talked into playing a college boys’ bar game, where a tall glass of frothy ale is balanced on the handle of a broomstick so that the top of the glass touches the cafe’s dirty ceiling beam—because beer presumably tastes better with wood splinters and dust. The person clutching the handle must turn in circles and drink their own ale at the same time.  The inevitable happens and Paul spills the fragrant brew all over his suit. He has no time to change, so he ends up going to Maria’s birthday dinner this way.

Both this slapstick and the comic interactions with his irascible but paternal boss Max fall flat, but the beer dousing and resultant aroma do contribute to the young man’s uneasiness as he unexpectedly meets Maria’s prim and proper uncle for the first time and their worldviews collide. Paul is a second class pastry cook but a pragmatic scholar, and while the year the film takes place is never specified (although the date on the coffin Dracula steals is 1905), in the real world it is 1968—two years after Time magazine’s cover notoriously asked if God was dead. The youth is a fervent atheist, and Monsignor Ernst by nature and profession most assuredly is not. Paul is, however, a young man of noble and admirable character. We know this because in John Elder’s script he helpfully describes himself as “young, hard-working, good-looking (and) abstemious” in a conversation with his boss.
 
“What I don’t understand is what you hope to get out of those books of yours,” Max grouches amiably.

“What life’s about, something of The Truth,” Paul replies. He may not be on a magic bus, but we can call this Daltrey lookalike The Seeker.

The dinner party with the monsignor starts off pleasantly enough. The young man’s earnest manner impresses Ernst, who proclaims “Not enough people say what they really mean these days. Many people speak only to impress, not stopping to think if what they say is really true.”

When he is queried as to which church he goes to, Maria quickly tries to make excuses. She says he is very busy with his baking and studying. Paul, not carrying if people will try to put him d-d-down, will have none of it. He is forthright. The truth will set him free. “I don’t go to church, sir.”

He’s not trying to cause a b-b-big  s-s-sensation, but Ernst reacts with horror. “You’re not a Protestant, are you?”

No such luck. “I’m an atheist, sir,” says Paul.

“You mean you deny the existence of God?” The Monsignor is stunned.

“I don’t deny it. I just don’t believe it. It’s my own opinion, sir.” Paul replies, revealing both his heartfelt conviction and that he may not have taken a class in Logic just yet.

He offers to leave and the mother, Anna, understandably says that might be best. She doesn’t mention it, but we know this is Ernst’s first night back after a long trip hiking up and down mountains, exorcising the home of a vampire, etc. Putting a stake through an atheist may be his next instinctual act. Better he gets more rest and settles down.

Paul lives upstairs in Max’s cafe, where he also does his baking and beer balancing. He goes home from Maria’s and gets drunk. He’s completely frustrated, having simply spoken with honesty and still coming into conflict with not only the monsignor’s beliefs, but his very profession. Using the interconnected rooftops of Kleinenberg as a private highway, Maria visits him to make amends for her uncle’s reaction and see that he’s okay. Supposed hilarity ensues as she and the barmaid with a heart of gold (talk about archetypes!) help him into bed. “What have you done with my legs?” Wah wah.

The rooftops see a lot of traffic. Not only do characters use them to commute back and forth, but there is also a memorable chase and confrontation a reel or two later as the monsignor interrupts an attack by Dracula and pursues him. This is a very symbolic film, and the action operates on several planes, both physical and spiritual. All through the story the local residents of Kleinenberg have no idea anything supernatural is going on. The only people Dracula’s presence affects are those who work at the inn and those living at the monsignor’s house. As far as the rest of town is concerned, nothing out of the ordinary takes place. The great spiritual and demonic contest takes place beyond their awareness, at a different level. It might just as well be a normal Tuesday.

In brisk succession, Dracula and his corrupted priest arrive in town, the vampire bites and enslaves the kindly barmaid, and through her influence the priest rents a room at the inn and stashes the master’s coffin/bunk deep in the basement in a huge unused larder. Director Freddie Francis keeps things moving along at a rapid pace, and the action never slows down during the 92 minute film.

Although the barmaid is vampified and destroyed, Maria is only bitten once, in her own bed. The director manages a nice touch as she grabs the arm of her doll during the bite, but shoves it away a moment later before it ends—effectively pushing away her innocence. The monsignor later examines her neck and immediately realizes what is happening. He delves into his books to find out what must be done to thwart his undead foe. After interrupting the creature’s second attack he chases him across the rooftops and is waylaid by the priest. “You!” he exclaims, as the man strikes him down with a heavy object.

After crawling along the gables and awnings to get home, the monsignor has no strength left. Maria’s mother Anna helps him over the railing and back into the house, but it is clear he is dying. He entreats Anna to fetch Paul. She is amazed. Paul? The atheist? Yes, Paul. He obviously cares for Maria and may be her one best hope for protection.

Paul comes round at once. Unexpectedly and impulsively, he brings along the inn’s lodger—the enslaved priest who happens to be the enemy’s manservant. Monsignor Ernst tells Paul that Maria is being stalked by a vampire. Paul accepts this truth with a perfectly straight face. These books of the monsignor’s will tell him what to do, but he should swear in the name of the Lord that he will protect her. Paul cannot do this. His atheism again gets in the way. Instead, he says he will give his word. Ernst realizes that will have to be enough. Regardless of the disparity in their worldviews, the men are united in their love for Maria. The old man looks up, catches sight of the priest who attacked him standing in the room, and dies before he can utter a recrimination or warning.

Drafting the priest to help him by translating the Latin books aloud, Paul spreads garlic around doorframes and does the traditional things to ward off vampiric attack. It is not clear why the priest goes along with this at first, since he’s still under the power of Dracula. Surely he would not willingly aid in putting these talismans in place to ward him off. It is the first sign that the priest may be experiencing his own spiritual struggle. He knows helping perpetuate the evil is wrong, yet his will is so weak he cannot resist for long. This becomes apparent when he slugs Paul from behind and tries to remove the protective cross from Maria’s chest.

Only stunned, Paul wakes in time to stop him. He realizes the priest has been dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight, to employ a Jokerism. “What are you trying to do?...You, a priest!” He forces the weak willed man to take him to Dracula’s lair. Paul successfully plunges a large stake into the sleeping vampire’s chest, but it doesn’t kill him. “Pray! You must pray!” the priest exclaims. Belief, more than in any other film, is here essential to kill the monster. Paul still cannot do this. All he has effectively done is awoken his enemy. Dracula pulls out the stake and flees, dodging a shovelful of flaming coals from the bakery oven.

A nightgowned Maria seeks out Dracula on the rooftop. The priest takes her and the sleeping vampire by cart to his homeland. While the priest drives, the entranced Maria is in back literally fondling the coffin—another unusual but effective choice by the director. These touches combine to depict the moral corruption the creature’s power has. After it awakes they have to walk some distance through the woods and hills, and Maria’s bare feet are clearly cut up by the terrain, but they obviously ascend to the castle in considerably less time than it took the monsignor and the priest earlier in the film. The hours of night are shorter and no representational purpose will be achieved by drawing out the journey this time.

The vampire has Maria remove the giant golden crucifix from the castle door and hurl it over the stone railing. It lands upright far below between the rocks. Now its revenge is absolutely complete. Not only is the monsignor dead, but his beautiful niece is completely under its power and has restored its ability to enter the property. Dracula — and by extension evil — has triumphed.

This essay is one of dozens featured in our new
book, "Taste the Blood of Monster Serial."

Yet Paul is a man of his word. He vowed to protect Maria and has followed them from Kleinenberg. He shields Maria from the undead monster and Dracula grabs him. Together they tumble over the rampart, Paul grabbing a tree branch to save himself but his opponent falling squarely on the upper arm of the golden cross below. It pierces his back, protruding out of his chest. This may be the most memorable image of any Hammer Dracula film, as the impaled vampire struggles helplessly, blood dripping from his eyes.

The priest, in the same echo-enriched voice the monsignor used earlier to exorcise the castle, prays to the heavens in Latin and Dracula is destroyed. With yet another memorable visual flourish, director Francis shows us his cloak lying at the foot of the cross — a reverse evil image that might resonate with those who know what the centurions gambled over thousands of years ago. The cleric has found the strength to do what is right. Finally his faith has triumphed over his enslaved will. At last he has done what the monsignor asked him to do at the beginning of the film.

Paul witnesses all of this. Maria is free. As these two people bearing biblical names stand holding one another after evil has been vanquished, Paul can no longer doubt the spiritual reality of unseen powers. He now believes. This former atheist makes the sign of the cross and the film ends.

Peter Cushing, who often starred alongside Christopher Lee as Professor Van Helsing, found Hammer Films—for all their colorful gore and graphic evil—to be intensely moral. This resonated with his personal faith, and explained why he continued to make movies about monstrous events.

“It’s not His will that has caused disasters throughout the ages, but man’s disobedience and disregard. But he knows the human race will eventually learn what is right and what is wrong, suffering in the process,” Cushing said in the pages of Famous Monsters magazine. “Faith will sustain us during that journey...if we will let it.”

This is the key to his portrayal of Van Helsing, and indeed supplies the underlying message behind most Hammer horror tales. The filmmakers seem to suggest an ultimate good which shall emerge triumphant over evil — provided the protagonists display certitude and resolution.

The vampire is more dependent on, and vulnerable to, belief than any other cinematic monster. As this film tells us, and so memorably depicts, its evil can hardly be defeated without it. 

Belief — and vigilance, lest evil return.

FRANK JAY GRUBER In addition to his freelance writing and editing gigs, Frank Jay Gruber teaches literature, composition and online course development at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. He sometimes covers New York and Philadelphia area events for TrekMovie.com, appears on convention panels and writes for genre websites like The Collinsport Historical Society. CNN interviewed him about Star Trek in his collectible-covered lair and consulted him about Dark Shadows after Jonathan Frid’s death in 2012. You can read his extremely infrequent musings at TheWearyProfessor.com and follow him on Twitter @FrankJayGruber.

Monster Serial: DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, 1973

By FRANK JAY GRUBER

We never again get scared the way we do at age eight. At eight we’re old enough to know the world is a bit more complex than moral fables would have us believe, and there’s a growing suspicion in the back of our brains that maybe Mommy and Daddy don’t know everything. Maybe nobody does. It’s a few years more before we learn enough for this to be a certainty.

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October, 1973: Eight year-old me sits on the sofa in our suburban apartment’s living room, probably with mouth hanging open eagerly, definitely with legs tucked up under me—Who knows what might be scurrying along the floor, grasping at my legs with feverish strokes of tiny claws?

All week long I’ve seen commercials for a TV movie that my mother thought far too scary for her innocent son. I would not be allowed to watch it. Yet there she is, asleep in the chair, her crocheted afghan incomplete on her lap. Dad sits at the dining table on the other side of the room, working on a jigsaw puzzle and oblivious to the third-grader going insane with worry and fear about eight feet behind him.

First comes the ever-pompous ABC Movie of the Week tune—viewers know they’re going to see something intended to be important and great, even if it turns out to be total drek like The Mod Squad reunion movie (Solid, Link? I don’t think so).

A succession of images follow: The moon breaking through clouds, a black cat, a vaguely Gothic house, a gnarled tree, autumn leaves blowing—and this is all within the first minute. It’s a Halloween fantasia. Somewhere on the other side of the country Ray Bradbury is probably heaving with excitement.

Suddenly little over-processed voices start asking questions like “Will she come? Do you think she’ll come?” From the weird intonations and repetitions of parts of phrases you know two things: These are not normal people and there are several of them.

I wouldn’t have registered at the time that the opening credits listed John Newland as director. I didn’t stay up late enough to catch One Step Beyond on late night repeats. I’m glad I didn’t know Newland’s show dealt with creepy and inexplicable events and horrors that were reputed to be true. Yep. Glad I didn’t know.   

What follows is the first daylight scene. Like many horror pics, the film has an alternating structure between the normality of daylight scenes and the encroaching horror of the interiors and night.

The house looks different by daylight. It’s all pastel hues and soft colors. There are flowering trees outside. I often think Frankenstein’s Monster must have looked pastel green and sweet when the little girl met him for that flower throwing game that went bad. I’d love to have seen Karloff painted by Thomas Kinkade. All is peaceful and well this first morning.

Oddly, even the humans are initially heard in voiceovers:

“Alex, are you sure you don’t mind?” A woman’s voice.

“About moving in here?” A man’s.

We then meet Sally Farnham, an actress I instantly recognize as Miri from the Star Trek episode of the same name. You know, the one where the adults unleash some biological infestation upon the world, get a horrible skin disease, die in frothing madness, and all the children are left horribly alone. That one.

I identify with Sally immediately. Not only is she an adorable suburban housewife, but actress Kim Darby is really short and looks about fourteen.

Not only that, but the handyman she hired to fix up the place is Uncle Charley from My Three Sons. If he protected Chip and Ernie for years, what could possibly go wrong? Just as all the Halloween imagery beginning the film set a dark mood, the bright pastel morning and bringing in trusty Uncle Charley sends a different signal to viewers of all ages. How much does the terror increase later when even he can’t stop it? Sadly, William Demarest, clearly hired for his gravelly voice and ability to look worried, is to be no protection at all.

In a conversation with her interior decorator it comes out that Sally was left this house by her grandmother. She pulls him downstairs, fabric samples and all, to look at the basement. The door was locked, but they found the key among Grandma’s unmentionables. No, they don’t mention them. Stop thinking of Grandma that way. It was in an envelope in her desk.

Sally says she doesn’t think the basement room has been used since Grandfather died.

“How did he die?” I ask nobody. My father looks up, grunts, and goes back to his puzzle.

Not only are all the window shutters nailed tight, so as not to let in the light, but somebody bricked up the basement fireplace. The bricks are four deep and reinforced with iron bars. Grandpa clearly hated s’mores.
Turns out Uncle Charley—I mean handyman Mr. Harris —did this on Grandma’s instructions twenty years ago after Grandpa ... we won’t say.

“WHAT ABOUT GRANDPA?” I ask.

“We’re seeing him next month,” my mother mutters in her sleep.

“Some things are better left as they are,” Mr. Harris says, as if to answer me.

Okay, I think.  My imagination has Grandpa sucked into the fireplace by the owners of the weird voices and dear old Grandma and worried looking Mr. Harris hushing it up.

“Morris?” Grandma would have said to the detective. “He went to visit his sister. I think she’s with a travelling circus. No idea where he is.” Mr. Harris would nod in agreement, covering for her the way he did so effectively for Chip and Ernie.

But now Grandma was dead and the chimney vocalists are hungry again. Here’s my question: Knowing about the evil in the basement hearth, why would handyman Harris let the nice young family move into the house in the first place? Why not burn it down? Why not sell it to that charming family from Amityville? Why not do something?

“Some things are better left as they are,” he says again. Oh yeah. He has a policy of non-interference. In a textbook example of TV land cross-pollination, apparently Uncle Charley follows Star Trek’s Prime Directive better than Captain Kirk does.

Mr. Harris tries arguing Sally out of using the dirty old basement for an office. Her husband gets home in time to agree. It’s Jim Hutton, father of Timothy Hutton, about two years away from starring in his fondly remembered role of Ellery Queen. He agrees. The basement room is cold and damp. They should leave it be.

 
Jim Hutton’s character is a practical man, a thirtyish lawyer—which is probably just as well since he may be brought up on charges for marrying a fourteen year-old girl at any moment. He also towers over his wife by what looks like a foot and a half. He is the adult figure, the voice of reason and sanity, and is convinced everything inexplicable is in her mind. He’s also work-obsessed and driving hard for a partnership—which means he’ll be away much of the time, leaving Sally and her sotto voce midget friends to their devices.
Hutton’s Alex tells her to abandon her plan to open the fireplace. “See things my way?”

“I guess I’ll have to,” she responds. She should, after all, be a submissive housewife. Here are two men telling her to be sensible.

Sally, in a stubborn burst of decisive action—the results of which set women’s lib back about forty years—decides to not only defy the menfolk and use the basement as an office, but also unscrews the fireplace’s ash door and leaves it open. That’ll show them. “If only she had listened!” screenwriter Nigel McKeand seems to be saying. McKeand was later best known as a scribe for the Kristy McNichol series Family.
“Free! Free! She set us free!” cry the little voices. Is that a green glow?

Fade to black.

Commercial over, we pull back from a close up of the basement shutters bathed in an unearthly emerald glow for no particular reason. Not only no particular reason, but no explicable one, since this is the only window of the house shining at all. We expect a man with a goofy mustache to pop open the shutters and say, “Why didn’t you ring the bell? No, you can’t see the wizard!”

What follows is a truly disturbing sequence where the unseen critters—now free to crawl out the ash grate door—escape the basement by pushing the key from the other side, forcing it to fall on a piece of carpentry plans, and pulling it under the door—a crack illuminated by that same disturbing green light. Not only do they enjoy a good babble, but they’re deviously clever and apparently have access to old St. Patrick’s Day flashlights. This viridescent light and a scuttling sound are used to indicate their movement around the house.

The rest of the film is a journey into psychological terror that stands head and shoulders above any of my other childhood memories. Average rooms are turned into terror zones—and Sally doesn’t even have to get miniaturized like the guy in The Incredible Shrinking Man.

They first venture behind a trash can in the kitchen. We can see the hairy shadow of a tiny arm and a claw. Upstairs, as Sally sleeps, one is on her nightstand mere inches from her head. They call her name. Do they mean her harm? They do smash her glass ashtray, so apparently they at least want her lungs healthy.

Another pastel morning Sally is prowling an outdoor shopping mall with her friend Joan, played by Ironside’s Barbara Anderson.  The two women have been friends for years. After all, they both had crushes on Captain Kirk during Star Trek’s first season. At this point Sally thinks the place may be infested with mice. In yet another knock at the changing times, Nigel McKeand’s script has Joan reply, “I don’t care what women’s lib tells me. The very mention of a mouse drives me crazy.”

Our first full glimpse of the creatures comes as Sally is throwing a catered housewarming party. All of Alex’s co-workers are present. At a moment that you can imagine the screenwriter himself giggling over, Sally gets something to drink and spots one of the creatures staring at her out of a flower arrangement. That’s right: She gets a literal punch and a supernatural punch at the same time.

Something must be said about the gremlins themselves. They seem to be about a foot high, with claws, suits of fur and heads that look like dried out peach pits. One of them is played by Felix Silla, Cousin Itt of The Addams Family and Twiki the robot of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I hadn’t realized he was in this movie, so when I met him years ago I never knew to throttle him for scaring the heck out of me when I was eight.

Uncle Charley—Mr. Harris—revisits the house to pick up his tools. Earlier he tried resealing the ash door and was fired when the couple found it open again. The husband thought he was a practical joker. He tries to warn Alex, but only in the most general terms and without revealing any details. Even that was too much.

Uncle Charley gets his—ironically by three small fry—as they cut open his hand and chant “You told him! Why did you tell? You know what happens to people who tell!” He barely escapes with his life and is not seen again until the end of the film. Presumably he spent the time shivering under Fred MacMurray’s couch somewhere muttering “I’ll never moonlight again. Carpentry? Bah!”

The creatures also kill the decorator by this point, for reasons that remain unclear. He wasn’t planning on redecorating the basement. Perhaps they didn’t like that he was going to carpet the stairs in blue. It would clash with their evil green light. They do him in by that tried and true method of stringing a line across the top of the stairs. Down he goes, fabric swatches flying. A bizarre tug of war ensues, with Sally trying to snatch the cord away from the creatures.

“We want you! It’s your spirit we need! Become one of us! Live with us!” say the gremlins. Sally says nothing. In fact, her silent response to the creatures becomes unsettling in itself. Only in the final scenes of the film, when she is doped up, does she have an excuse for this strange silence. She only shrieks once in the film, when one of the critters snatches a napkin off her lap during the party scene. Other than that moment, she remains almost expressionless much of the time—as if she knows her inevitable fate.

After the decorator is killed and Sally is resting in her room comes the iconic shot of three gremlins hiding behind books in Sally’s bedroom bookcase. This is a strange perversion of something every reader who ever owned a cat has experienced. Sally refuses to take any sleeping pills, yet the box is open and two are missing—and there’s Sally’s coffee right next to the package.

At friend Joan’s insistence, husband Alex rushes off to see carpenter Harris to get the real backstory. The house was built circa 1880. The fireplace was bricked when Grandma and Grandpa moved in. One day he decided to unbrick it, worked in the basement for about a half hour, and started screeching. The basement had been trashed and Grandpa was gone into the fireplace. Why burly 1950s police officers with flashlights and long ropes never went down looking for him is never addressed. They could have brought in the guys from Them! They had spelunking experience and would have wiped out any giant ants they came across as a bonus.

The husband and Harris rush back to find Joan locked out of the house and the power cut. Apparently Grandpa, now presumably one of the gremlins, clued them in about how electric wiring works. Sally is in there with them alone, zoned out of her mind on the two missing sleeping pills. By the time they break in and get to the basement it’s too late.

This column is among those featured in
 BRIDE OF MONSTER SERIAL, a collection of 
horror essays written by contributors to 
THE COLLINSPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 
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The movie’s finale is probably the most memorable cinematic scene of my childhood. Drowsy Sally’s legs are tied and the gremlins pull her slowly down the stairs towards the basement. Luckily, Joan’s husband George left his camera behind at the party the other night. Sally snatches it off a table as she’s dragged past. This moment, where she only has a little 1970s camera and a set of flashcubes to ward off the creatures by blinding their sensitive photophobic eyes, is stunning even by today’s standards. It will live forever in my memory.

As will the film’s dark ending.

The resolution, if you can call it that, is bizarre in itself. Sally is dragged through the ash gate and into the fireplace. Her husband, Harris and Joan are too late to save her.

Sally is not dead. Instead she apparently becomes the mistress of the creatures—kind of a short Snow White with some really ugly dwarves—and we hear her conversing with the gremlins in the basement. The creatures want people to come and “set us free in the world!” She consoles them by saying, “Of course they will come. We know they will.”

They laugh gleefully.

As the credits roll, I am no longer on the couch. I am behind my mother’s chair, visibly shaking. My parents died years later without ever knowing I’d watched that movie—only that I developed a permanent aversion to both sitting with my feet dangling on the floor and the color green.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK would be all we talked about in our third grade classroom the next day.

But school was a long night away—and who knew what might be scurrying underneath the bed before then? I didn’t even have useless Uncle Charley.

FRANK JAY GRUBER In addition to his freelance writing and editing gigs, Frank Jay Gruber teaches literature, composition and online course development at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. He sometimes covers New York and Philadelphia area events for TrekMovie.com, appears on convention panels and writes for genre websites like The Collinsport Historical Society. CNN interviewed him about Star Trek in his collectible-covered lair and consulted him about Dark Shadows after Jonathan Frid’s death in 2012. You can read his extremely infrequent musings at TheWearyProfessor.com and follow him on Twitter @FrankJayGruber.

Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

Getting real tired of your shit, death.

ROGER EBERT died today. My feelings about Ebert are strong, if ill-defined. Anybody who loves movies has taken turns both loving and hating the man, watching as he eventually trashed a favorite movie while simultaneously admiring his devotion to a sometimes wobbly sense of aesthetics. He's absolutely correct when he said “No good film is too long and no bad movie is short enough," words that will surely be repeated often during the next few days. While the quote suggests a cavalier attitude to film, what he's really saying is "There's more to storytelling than putting actors on film." While it might not seem like a novel idea today, there was a time when film criticism never ventured beyond discussion of gross entertainment value.

Ebert was among the last of a generation of film critics that helped to move the very concept away from the empty egomania that had defined it for so long. Thanks to his generation, film criticism stopped being a way for writers to ingratiate themselves on Hollywood and became a worthy medium all its own. Because of people like Ebert, PAULINE KAEL and JON LANDAU, guys like myself have a road map on how to conduct ourselves professionally ... no matter what medium we're shooting our mouths off about.

But nobody's perfect, and Ebert didn't get where he was overnight. Here's what he had to say about HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS back in 1970:

"But supposing you're a vampire and you want to end it all. You're licked. W. C. Fields once observed that the only permanent cure for hangovers is death. But even death is no help if you're a vampire, because you're already dead. No, you've got to find some friends cooperative enough to flash crucifixes at you, whirl garlic around on a string and hold a mirror up to your eyes (so you can see you're invisible). And thus distracted, you can hope they've had the decency to bring along a wooden stake and put you out of your misery."

His entire review for HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS is like that, written in a snarky manner that doesn't suggest he actually watched the movie. By the next year, though, he was trying a little harder. Whether or not you liked what he had to say, his 1971 review of NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS provided insight into the film's mechanics:

"No effort is made to give the characters any human, or even inhuman, dimension, and toward the end of the movie not a lot goes on except for double takes, screams and lots of bleeding. There are, however, a couple of messy sex scenes that make the movie unsuitable for its GP ratings. Why do some producers insist on putting in unsavory stuff when they know the horror-movie audience has a lot of kids in it, and is easily satisfied with a few laughs and a few scares?"

Now, if you like either HOUSE or NIGHT, you're probably a little pissed off. Provocation is one of the functions of criticism, and I've made my peace with Ebert's less-than-glowing reviews of films like DIE HARD and BLADE RUNNER (not to mention his bizarrely favorable reviews of dreck like SPAWN and TOMB RAIDER.) Everybody's got an opinion, but so few of us understand the tapestry of personal experience that helped us to form those opinions. I'm not saying Ebert was better acquainted with his own perspective than you or I, but he wasn't afraid to conduct a little soul searching in public. It wasn't about WHAT we liked, it's about WHY we like it.

Starting in 2002, a series of catastrophic illnesses made life increasingly difficult for him. But the guy still went to work, attending screenings and sharing his thoughts on movies with yet another generation of film fans and writers. It's rather amazing that I'm acquainted with at least three people who've had some sort of positive interaction with the man (CHS contributors WILL McKINLEY, FRANK JAY GRUBER and PATRICK McCRAY) in the years since cancer took its toll on him. Ebert was a work horse who genuinely loved what he did.

Not only did he continue to thrive while seriously ill, he continued to thrive in an industry that has has been steadily laying off movie critics during the last 20 years ... if not closing up shop altogether.

Just so we leave no stone at Collinwood unturned (or unburned) here's what Roger Ebert had to say about TIM BURTON's 2012 film:

"We know we can expect a pitch-perfect performance by Depp, who plays Barnabas with a lasered intensity, and we know Burton's sets and art direction will be spectacular. I think the best use of Depp in a Burton world was "Sleepy Hollow" (1999). Here Depp seems to inhabit a world of his own, perhaps in self-defense. The others seem to be performing parodies of their characters. "Dark Shadows" begins with great promise, but then the energy drains out."