Just Too Pretty

It is an indication of the intensity of the French-Italian production, Blood and Roses, that we find ourselves admiring the pretty color scenery. One yearns for the good old days. The pattern of the classic American horror film was always a simple one, and the spectator could sit back in comfortable awareness of what to expect. There were the standard opening shots of a demented scientist’s laboratory, complete with furiously bubbling apparatus and a scampering, slobbering assistant— then, amid an ear-splitting series of crackles and sputters, the electric current would snake up and down and across the room, finally hitting the electrodes above the operating table with an especially deafening blast, followed by a huge puff of smoke. At that point the thing under the sheet would begin to writhe, and we knew we were off and running. Next ensued the fiend’s escape from the tender hands of his creator, the inadvertent murder of a little girl in pigtails, and the march of townspeople to the unfortunate’s lair. Finally, of course, came the inevitable encounter between monster and maker in a deserted windmill or some other such eerie rook; and, for the last time, boy met ghoul.

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JC

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John Carden

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It is an indication of the intensity of the French-Italian production, Blood and Roses, that we find ourselves admiring the pretty color scenery. One yearns for the good old days. The pattern of the classic American horror film was always a simple one, and the spectator could sit back in comfortable awareness of what to expect. There were the standard opening shots of a demented scientist’s laboratory, complete with furiously bubbling apparatus and a scampering, slobbering assistant— then, amid an ear-splitting series of crackles and sputters, the electric current would snake up and down and across the room, finally hitting the electrodes above the operating table with an especially deafening blast, followed by a huge puff of smoke. At that point the thing under the sheet would begin to writhe, and we knew we were off and running. Next ensued the fiend’s escape from the tender hands of his creator, the inadvertent murder of a little girl in pigtails, and the march of townspeople to the unfortunate’s lair. Finally, of course, came the inevitable encounter between monster and maker in a deserted windmill or some other such eerie rook; and, for the last time, boy met ghoul.

ANY BOOK