In the years 1927–28, after directing a small number of films in Switzerland, France and the United States, Robert Florey interrupted his Hollywood career as a gag writer, publicist and assistant director to direct a quartet of non-narrative, expressionistic short films. The most famous of these remains The Life and Death of 9413 – A Hollywood Extra (1928), which Florey made with Slavko Vorkapich for the princely sum of $96. This expressionistic short caught the fancy of many of Florey’s Hollywood associates; Charlie Chaplin himself arranged for the film to play on Broadway, opening it to wider venues.1 Its success eventually attracted the attention of Paramount Studios, launching Florey’s mainstream directorial career. This included his aborted pre-production work on Universal’s Frankenstein (1931), before helming genre classics like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Beast with Five Fingers (1942).
Thirty years later, a young Californian underground filmmaker named Curtis Harrington made the more difficult move from the American avant-garde cinema to directing features in Hollywood. Like Florey before him and David Cronenberg, John Waters, David Lynch and E. Elias Merhige after, Harrington’s preoccupation with dark fantasy inspired him to use the horror genre as a generic bridge to mainstream filmmaking. After completing a total of nine underground short films from 1942 to 1955, Harrington made his feature directorial debut with the atmospheric Night Tide (first shown as an independent/underground effort in 1961, opening wider in 1963). Harrington continued directing feature films for over twenty years, mining his distinctive vein of stylish suspense and horror in any and all venues that presented themselves. His work encompassed the drive-in and grind-house exploitation circuit (Queen of Blood (1965), Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1971), The Killing Kind (1973), Ruby (1977)) and medium-budget projects with major studios (Universal Pictures’ Games (1967), United Artists’ What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971)), along with a brood of made-for-television features (How Awful About Allan (1970), The Cat Creature (1973), The Dead Don’t Die (1974), Killer Bees (1974) and Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978)).
Harrington also directed numerous television episodes for popular programmes like Baretta (1975), Charlie’s Angels (1977–78), Dynasty (1983) and The Colbys (1986). Some of his television output in this era were genre efforts, including Lucan (1977) and the final episode of Logan’s Run (1977). These credits extended to self-contained entries for anthology programmes like Tales of the Unexpected (‘A Hand for Sonny Blue’, 1976), Darkroom (‘Makeup’, 1981) and The Twilight Zone (‘Voices in the Earth’, 1986).
Thus, Harrington was one of the few true underground filmmakers to actively engage with mainstream media venues, savouring the occasionally rich opportunities to further explore his own particular visionary and thematic obsessions and interests for a much broader audience. As such, Harrington is one of the genre’s true pioneers, a stature that has not, as yet, been properly acknowledged. Whereas the ‘underground to mainstream’ careers of Cronenberg, Waters and Lynch are considered as equally vital components in their richly personal oeuvres, Harrington has not yet received such critical attention. To date, no one has considered his experimental films as vital, organic and integrated elements of his more commercial directorial vision and career.
HORROR UNDERGROUND?
Part of the difficulty with assessing the link between Harrington’s underground and commercial works remains the presumed cultural and critical gap between the narrative and non-narrative cinema. Specifically, the avant-garde and underground movements of the twentieth century in all their permutations, from the Surrealists to the recent ‘Cinema of Transgression’ – have cut the horror genre away from some of its most vital roots. Genre scholars are forced to acknowledge Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) as two landmark crossovers between the schools of underground experimental and mainstream horror. But between these landmarks lay many seminal works: Dimitri Kirsanov’s Menilmontant (1924) opens with a horrific axe murder that anticipates the very editing techniques Alfred Hitchcock wielded with such perfection for the shower murder in Psycho (1960). Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) was the first graphic, cold-blooded, calculated ‘Audience Assault’, and as such the forefather of all modern horror films. Equally, Maya Deren’s underground masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) can be seen as the true ‘midwife’ to a whole series of later horror ‘trance’ films. These have included John Parker’s Dementia (aka Daughter of Horror, 1953/55/57), Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976), as well as Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1991).
We have been denied – and denying – the full breadth and depth of the horror genre’s cinematic legacy, conceding to the artificial walls between perceived modes of intent, expression, production, marketing, distribution and exhibition. These differences are crucial to the artists and central to the very identities of the various avant-garde and underground movements, wherein the films are personal works of art, not industry-driven products designed for commercial exploitation. But it is necessary for film scholars and historians to consider the entirety of cinema as a cohesive, communicative medium, and the vital function of genre as language within that medium. Within the cinema and any given genre, it is the cross-pollination of ideas, content, approaches, images, kinetics and emotional textures between permeable ‘walls’ (defined, most often, by venues of exhibition, distribution and the respective industry issues) that must be studied and assessed.
Much of this process can be traced through popular culture’s voracious appetite for the ‘new’, prompting an interminable cannibalisation of richer resources from outside the mainstream. Thus, elements of Harrington’s Queen of Blood, Lynch’s Eraserhead and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) are digested and regurgitated into the mainstream via the example of, say, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). On a wider scale, the visionary personal cinema of prior generations has been distilled into either the meditative calm of the computer ‘screensaver’ or the frenetic kinetics of the music video form. This process is ongoing and organic, in its way.
The process is particularly compelling when embodied in an individual artist’s career. The exchanges between these perceived, permeable ‘walls’ are particularly revealing when an individual artist is actively, intimately and consciously involved with that ongoing osmosis, as was Florey, Harrington, Cronenberg, Waters and Lynch. Harrington is arguably the genre director whose deserved prominence remains most compromised by the unforgivable critical and scholarly refusal to mesh underground and mainstream cinema into a coherent weave. The half-a-century critical ‘blind spot’ between Caligari and Eraserhead remains sadly unilluminated, casting a shadow over the very period in which the young Curtis Harrington worked. Though the context is different, Amos Vogel’s statement that ‘the crucial importance of such filmmakers as Sidney Peterson, the Whitney Brothers… Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, and James Broughton remain unknown or unanalysed trivia in the ideological development of the new generation’ is as true today as it was in the 1960s.2 This can be attributed in part to the relative inaccessibility of Harrington’s underground work. Accurate descriptions of Harrington’s experimental films are difficult to find. Except for ready access to his 1949 film On the Edge, I only have the memory of seeing Fragment of Seeking (1946) in the early 1970s to work with. Indeed, the sketchy synopsis in some of the books and catalogues cited herein conflict with my viewings of On the Edge and my memories of Fragment of Seeking. Nevertheless, the effort must be made to contextualise this crucial body of creative work within its genre and the director’s subsequent mainstream feature productions.
EXPERIMENTATION AND EXCESS
Harrington emerged from the West Coast experimental film renaissance which began with Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s seminal Meshes of the Afternoon (a film properly revered by the underground, but still an unsung classic of the fantastic cinema) and continued for a little more than a decade. In Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren herself played the troubled dreamer, haunted in and about her own home by a faceless figure, a key, a knife and her own doppelgänger. Though inspired by the surrealist filmmakers before her, Deren’s precisely calculated structure of the waking dream that plunges into nightmare was a revelation. In At Land (1944), Deren played an almost elemental being who emerges from the sea, crawling over surf, sand and a banquet table to flirt with a game of chess and then follow one of its spilled play pieces over the rocks, back into the water.
Deren was a potent figure in the underground cinema movement, indelibly shaping its language and potential. Harrington subsequently struck up a relationship with Deren: ‘Whenever she’d come to Los Angeles, I’d throw a little party for her and provide bongo drums so that she could dance. Maya loved to dance.’3 Indeed, Deren was the first to make dance movement the absolute expressive focus of her films. A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Meditation on Violence (1948) and her final film, The Very Eye of Night (1958), established a fresh cinematic vocabulary for others to follow.
Vocabulary of another kind was problematic; throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the term ‘underground film’ did not even exist (the moniker was not coined until 1959, and at that time it had a much more specific meaning than it has in the title and scope of this book). Deren’s works, like those of her fellow filmmakers – including Harrington – were referred to as ‘experimental films’, a clumsy label implying amateurism, which at least signified such films’ daring nature and distinction from mainstream Hollywood fare. The European term ‘avant-garde film’ was also adopted, but the works of Deren and her peers were distinctively American. Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land had been shot in Los Angeles before Deren’s move to New York City. It was there in the City of Angels that Harrington and his friends Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos began to create their own stylised, personal 16mm works that were central to the experimental film renaissance.
Harrington, Anger and Markopoulos were a unique trinity in the history of avant-garde cinema, their childhood fascination with the artifice of Hollywood’s manufactured opulence and the medium of cinema blossoming into three distinctive, artistic voices. Harrington notes his formative readings of L. Frank Baum and Edgar Allan Poe – ‘I was very much into the imaginative fiction when I was a mere toddler’4 – and the first horror film Harrington recalls seeing was Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), though Harrington saw it during a later re-release.5 At the age of 14, Harrington made his first 8mm short film, The Fall of the House of Usher (1942), playing the dual roles of Poe’s doomed siblings, Roderick and Madeline Usher, himself; thus, the gender issues so central to Harrington’s work were manifest from the beginning. Usher was followed by two other 8mm efforts, Crescendo (1942) and Renascence (1944). Harrington later studied at the University of Southern California film school which, at that time, did not incorporate ‘the idea of really making student films, though it had been done at points in the history of the USC cinema school… [as] a standard part of the curriculum.’6
If Harrington sounds prodigious, consider his similarly gifted companions. Anger claims to have appeared in Hollywood features since he was a baby (boasting Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s delirious adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) among his childhood credits). He began making films at age nine, his ambitious early films including Prisoner of Mars (1942, shot with miniatures) and The Nest (1943), a tale of incest. Markopoulos shot his own 8mm films in Toledo, Ohio, beginning at age 12 (including a version of Dickens’ The Christmas Carol), and enrolled at USC in 1945, where he met and reportedly lived ‘across the hall’7 from Harrington, on whose Fragment of Seeking he later worked as a camera assistant. As Sheldon Renan notes, ‘All three had made films as children. All three made works that were obviously very personal. All three made works that were almost confessions.’8
These dreamlike ‘confessions’ were implicit and explicit expressions of male love and sexuality, both narcissistic and homoerotic. Harrington’s potently manifested, fearful images of female sexuality and matriarchy marked thematic obsessions which would remain essential to his later mainstream narratives. Where Anger’s literally explosive Fireworks (1947) overtly embodied the homoerotic tensions in a sadomasochistic beating, evisceration and implied rape – culminating in the titular image of a sailor’s penis as a sparkling Roman candle – Harrington and Markopoulos favoured less explicit expressions of their shared themes. Harrington’s first 16mm film was Fragment of Seeking (originally entitled Symbol of Decadence (1946, approx. 15 min.)), suggested by the myth of Narcissus. A youth (Harrington at age 17) urgently seeks the object of his own desire; the tension builds with his search, culminating in his embracing a young woman who is revealed to be a female version of himself, before dissolving into a grinning skeleton with a blonde wig.
Nevertheless, Fragment of Seeking and Fireworks were companion pieces, though they were not consciously designed as such. ‘They were virtually simultaneously made, within a month or two [of each other],’ Harrington later noted. ‘We really were embarking on similar projects at the same time.… But I don’t think there’s anything sensational about [Fragment of Seeking]; it deals with adolescent narcissism. But Kenneth Anger’s film was more explicit in its sexuality, and was very disturbing to people.’9
The overt homosexual content of Fragment of Seeking and the especially aggressive imagery of Fireworks was still quite taboo at the time of their production; Fireworks in particular later became a fixture of screenings of homoerotic ‘art’ films organised by the gay urban subculture of the 1950s and early 1960s. Recalling a 1947 screening for ‘the crème de la crème of Los Angeles artistic intelligentsia at that time,’ Harrington recalls: ‘I’ll never forget it, it was an extraordinary experience… when the screening was over, not a single person would even speak to us, they were so shocked by these two films. These people were truly shocked.… The irony is within one year of this incident, Kenneth left for France and of course was instantly hailed by Jean Cocteau as being the young genius of filmmaking in the world.’10
There is further irony in the fact that Harrington and Markopoulos were arguably closer in spirit to Cocteau. Anger (his name accurately conjuring the abrasive power of many of his films) initially embraced the ‘shock cinema’ tactics of Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. Applying the phantasmagoric vocabulary of Cocteau’s own The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un Poet, 1930) to their cinema, Harrington and Markopoulos created consciously mythic evocations of atmosphere and dread, which further linked their films with Deren’s fantastique poetics. However, Markopoulos was cinematically and kinetically closer to Anger, proposing ‘a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system… [that] involved the use of short film phrases which evoke thought-images’,11 while Harrington chose a more accessible, linear approach to his dreamlike shorts.
Harrington’s next 16mm effort was Picnic (1948, 22 min.), reportedly a satiric but nonetheless personal work, while On the Edge (1949, 6 min.) – Harrington’s personal favourite of his early films – was an authentic Freudian nightmare. Here, seething tar deposits steam and bubble beneath the titles. A dour, middle-aged man wanders a desolate landscape and arrives at what appears to be an abandoned dock or shipyard. He is drawn to an older woman sitting in a rocking chair beneath the ruins, knitting, the ball of yarn at her feet turning slowly in a glass jar. She is oblivious to him, but he seems mysteriously bound to her. The man bolts, now attached to her by a length of her yarn slung over his shoulder, and runs away. He plunges into the magma-like substance seen under the opening titles, the length of yarn protruding from the bubbling mass the only evidence of his passing. The final image is of the dispassionate matron rewinding her yarn.
The Assignation (1952, released in 1953, 8 min.), Harrington’s first colour work, was a matured refinement of Edgar Allan Poe’s source material, shot in Venice. Dangerous Houses (1952), filmed in London, was an overt return to the mythological realm. Specifically, it was a reinterpretation of the tale of Odysseus (specifically, his episode with Circe and subsequent trip to Hades). Harrington describes it as ‘the only so-called “experimental” short that I made out of will rather than inspiration’, because he was attracted to the romantic, bombed-out, post-war ruins of St. John’s Wood.12 At 18–20 minutes in length, Dangerous Houses is the longest of Harrington’s shorts, but was deemed ‘a lifeless artefact’ by its maker and never distributed. The Wormwood Star (1955) was also in colour, focusing on the mystical paintings of Cameron (Parsons), who later appeared in Harrington’s debut feature as ‘The Woman in Black’. She is cast here as an alluring figure that appears to sideshow mermaid Mora (Linda Lawson) and seems to beckon her back to the sea (she also appeared in Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1956)). The Wormwood Star reportedly offered a portrait of ‘painter Cameron and her work… achieving an alchemical transmutation.’13 Given the rich use of colour in Harrington’s later narrative works, this final underground effort is of particular interest.
MONSTROUS MUSINGS, MONSTROUS WOMEN
What is striking, even from blurred memories and descriptions, are the shorts’ visual and thematic anticipations of Harrington’s later narrative works, with their femme fatales, smothering matriarchs and alienated, androgynous ‘heroes’. The wan male leads of Fragment of Seeking and On the Edge and their tormented psychodramas of narcissism, troubled sexual identity and mother-fixation clearly delineate the tortured persona John Savage portrays in The Killing Kind (1973). Dominant female power is central to all Harrington’s works, with men trapped in or consumed by their orbit of that power.
The lead male characters in nearly all of Harrington’s features are passive, almost hapless figures. Indeed, these depictions reveal a pantheon of male victims (the spaceship crew which provide sustenance for the alien in Queen of Blood; James Caan and Don Stroud in Games; Anthony Perkins in How Awful About Allan; Savage in The Killing Kind). When not victims, Harrington’s males are, at best, kept ‘drones’. This is literally manifest as such in Killer Bees, with a quartet of drones led by Craig Stevens tending to every need of their ‘queen bee’ Gloria Swanson, and young Edward Albert accepting the role of ‘head drone’ once his fiancée Kate Jackson mystically assumes Swanson’s central matriarchal role. As Tim Lucas has asserted, even Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1966) ‘is surprisingly consistent with themes already evident with Harrington’s earlier films… [given] its emphasis on one cosmonaut’s obsessive reaction to the sound of an unseen female’s siren song.’14 However, Harrington’s creative participation on this ‘patch job’ for producer Roger Corman was minimal, dubbing and directing minimal additional footage for an American version of the Russian science fiction film Planeta Bura (Planet of Storms, 1959) under the pseudonym ‘John Sebastian’.
In fact, Harrington left the Russian film essentially intact. The director’s similar, but far more extensive and inventive, revision of another Soviet science fiction film, Mechte Navstrechu (A Dream Comes True, 1963), yielded another monstrous female figure: the fascinating Queen of Blood. The film stars the Slavic actress Florence Marley as an alluring, green-skinned alien who transfixes her exclusively male victims with a hypnotic stare, drinking their blood and secreting her throbbing eggs in the hold of the ship.
Any displays of male power prove to be either illusory and/or ultimately self-destructive (Caan in Games; Savage in The Killing Kind), with the exception of his surrogate ‘Hansel’ (Mark Lester) in Who Slew Auntie Roo? (aka The Gingerbread House, 1971) and those works Harrington had little creative control over: the pulp hero (George Hamilton) of The Dead Don’t Die, the put-upon patriarch (Richard Crenna) of Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell – both made-for-television movies – and the vengeful male spirit in Ruby (1977). Though Harrington practically disowns the risible Devil Dog, it too echoes the gender tensions at the heart of his best work. Namely, the satanic cult which sired the titular menace is led by Martine Beswick, and the first manifestation of its malignant influence over Crenna’s wife (Yvette Mimieux) is dramatised by the sudden, ‘uncharacteristic’ awakening of her sexual appetite. It is interesting to note that most made-for-television movies of the period reflected patriarchal unease with the growing feminist movement with surprisingly vivid scenarios in all genres; Devil Dog, The Cat Creature and especially Killer Bees snugly fit this mould, the latter most imaginatively.
The malicious male energy in Ruby – the restless spirit of a murdered gangster (Sal Vecchio) – is directed at and through female characters, notably manifesting (via possession) in the autistic daughter (Janet Baldwin) to lash out at her mother, another monstrous matriarch (Piper Laurie). The ensuing mayhem satisfies a dynamic common to Harrington’s work. Thus, the climactic spectacle of a young woman destroying a monstrous mother echoes similar eruptions in Queen of Blood (in which the sole female astronaut accidentally kills the haemophilic alien Florence Marley with a mere scratch) and Who Slew Auntie Roo? (Chloe Frank’s surrogate ‘Gretel’ also survives her encounter with surrogate ‘witch’ Shelley Winters), though it is more typical for the matriarchy to ‘devour’ its own (Simone Signoret/Katherine Ross in Games, Shelley Winters/Debbie Reynolds in What’s the Matter with Helen?, Gloria Swanson/Kate Jackson in Killer Bees and even the pack of felines which tear the mummy-cat-woman to shreds in The Cat Creature).
The links between Harrington’s underground short films and other notable genre works outside of Harrington’s subsequent features are also apparent. The derivations from Hollywood and Germanic femme fatale archetypes seem obvious, and it is tempting to suggest Fragment of Seeking’s subliminal shot of Harrington’s female surrogate over skeletal remains as a prophetic inversion of the double-exposure of Norman (Anthony Perkins) and Mrs Bates’ faces at the close of Psycho, 13 years later. A common source for this imagery may lay in Leon Frederic’s painting ‘Studio Interior’ (1882), in which the central figure is a seated, bearded male, propping a skeleton in his lap rendered suggestively feminine via the star-patterned dress it wears. Both Harrington and Hitchcock were connoisseurs of fine art, and the association with Frederic’s painting is evocative. More contemporary echoes can be found in Lynch’s own experimental short The Grandmother (1973), anticipated in both tone and substance by Fragment of Seeking and particularly On the Edge. It is a kinship Harrington once responded to, hopefully forwarding a video copy of On the Edge to Lynch with the aim of directing an episode of Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990–91).
Before his segue into narrative cinema – as an assistant producer to Jerry Wald at 20th Century Fox – Harrington played The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s Casare the Somnambulist in the second act of Kenneth Anger’s grandiose underground epic Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. ‘The inspiration for what I did came out of a party,’ Harrington recalled, ‘a “come as your own nightmare” party or something. I decided that my nightmare would be a scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Kenneth was so taken with that [it became] a part of his concept for the film, and he included me in that guise.’15
In white gaunt makeup and clad in black tights, Harrington’s Cesare struts zombie-like through one of the film’s most impressive tableaux. He is seen wandering past a row of glittering candles and into a dark wall embellished with Egyptian cats, and on into a dreamlike realm of silk and light (which, in the revised version, Anger embellishes with a superimposed sketch of Aleister Crowley’s face). In the sanctum within, Cesare pours an elixir for the gathered magical beings, and the film dissolves into a non-linear and progressively denser and frenzied hallucinogenic experience. This fascinating iconic conjugation of German expressionism, the West Coast American experimental film movement and the horror genre consummates one of the richest periods of American cinema with a consciously alchemical intensity.
AFTER THE UNDERGROUND
Harrington’s underground works were erratically distributed at best, but they were seen. Maya Deren, ever the heart of the movement, co-founded the first of many filmmakers’ co-operative networks in the 1940s, programming theatrical showings of their own works through New York’s Provincetown Playhouse, Amos Vogel’s ‘Cinema 16’ and others. In 1957, Harrington’s films found their first distributor in the Creative Film Society, founded by fellow West Coast filmmaker Robert Pike when he was unable to find a distributor for his own work;16 most of them remained available from the CFS and Audio Brandon well into the 1970s. The American underground cinema was introduced to Europe at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, followed shortly thereafter by New American Cinema Group representative David Stone’s presentation of ‘fifty-four independent productions to the 1961 Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.’17 This was a retrospective that included the works of Markopoulos and a print of Harrington’s just-completed first feature, Night Tide. Shortly thereafter, Markopoulos ‘publicly dissociated himself from the term “underground”’;18 even as vocal acolytes and advocates of the movement began to disassociate from Harrington’s Night Tide and subsequent works.
Harrington scripted and directed Night Tide, raising the necessary funding himself, much as he had before, though on a grander scale. Harrington expanded upon his own unpublished short story ‘The Secrets of the Sea’ and drew his title from Poe’s poem ‘Annabelle Lee’, and he is not idly boasting when he notes that ‘it has had an astonishing life for a little $50,000 movie.’19 Night Tide synthesised elements of the underground (e.g. Deren’s At Land) and the popular (through Jacques Tourneur’s celebrated The Cat People (1942)). The film tells the tale of a forlorn sailor (Dennis Hopper) who falls for Mora (Linda Lawson), an alluring young woman who appears in a beach side-show as a mermaid – and believes she is, in fact, a siren, responsible for the drowning deaths of her previous suitors. The similarities to Tourneur’s doomed shapeshifter Irene (Simone Simon) are obvious – including the fleeting presence of an enigmatic older woman to suggest the troubled heroine may indeed be linked to an ancient hybrid race. However, At Land’s elemental (played by Deren) is also a kindred spirit. Emerging from the ocean to engage in a procession of dreamlike encounters, she elliptically vanished into the sand dunes, an eerie predecessor to Harrington’s haunted Mora.
The fact that Harrington’s underground shorts were known among the Hollywood scene aided immeasurably in financing and casting the production. Harrington notes that Dennis Hopper had seen and admired the underground films, and as a result was eager to star in Night Tide. Equally, co-star Luana Anders similarly cited how Harrington’s reputation as ‘a director of what we used to call “art” films’ attracted her as ‘a rebellious young Hollywood actress wanting to be creative in what I felt was a climate of stifling conformity’.20 Roger Corman arranged for the film’s distribution via Film Group, aiding in post-production funding and deferrals while ensuring wider public exposure than any of Harrington’s previous work had enjoyed.
In Film Culture no. 21 (1960), critic Parker Tyler’s article ‘Two Down and One to Go?’ dismissed both Harrington and Markopoulos’ work, specifically reflecting the underground movement’s disdain for Harrington’s shift into independent theatrical narrative features. Jonas Mekas, the evangelical Village Voice critic for the underground cinema, passionately rose to Harrington’s and Markopoulos’ defence. In Film Culture, Mekas cited Night Tide as one of the films ‘which, in one way or another… have contributed to the growth of the new cinema, and… should be mentioned in any survey of this kind.’21
Note that both these articles predated Night Tide’s subsequent distribution into exploitation’s venues, primarily as a second-feature for Battle Beyond the Sun (1962), another of Corman’s patchwork dubbed-Russian science fiction films incorporating new footage (this time shot by a young Francis Ford Coppola). Many seemed suspicious of Night Tide’s overt genre trappings, despite its fidelity to Harrington’s personal vision and previous work. The mainstream ‘grind-house’ and drive-in venues Night Tide was consigned to, and its association with as exploitative an effort as Battle Beyond the Sun, only further alienated underground film purists and ghettoised Harrington’s breakthrough feature. Thus, the first ‘battle lines’ were drawn between subcultural perceptions of underground and exploitation films – a distinction this collection of essays blurs and explores, forty years later.
Some aficionados remained steadfast in their interest in, and defence of, Harrington’s work. Through interviews conducted by Mekas, Markopoulos himself defended Harrington’s work. ‘Sometimes, through sheer accident, I do come upon a very important commercial work,’ Markopoulos commented in Mekas’ 14 April 1966 Village Voice column. ‘I am thinking of Curtis Harrington’s [Queen] of Blood.… It is excellent, and fascinating, that Curtis Harrington was able to put so much of his own work into the science [fiction] motion picture. There must have been rapport between the producer and himself. And I do know from personal experience [Serenity, 1955–60] how difficult this is.’22
Harrington did indeed nurture his bond with Queen of Blood producer George Edwards, and together they carved a unique niche in the post-modern Hollywood Gothic that thrived for a time in the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly, Harrington’s fortunes dwindled under other producers; both What’s the Matter with Helen? and Ruby suffered from extensive re-edits by their respective producers, though Ruby went on to become Harrington’s strongest box-office hit. The Killing Kind suffered an abortive release theatrically and on video, and has become almost impossible to see today, though it remains perhaps the strongest of Harrington’s features. Television censorship further truncated Harrington’s best work, including made-for-television features like The Dead Don’t Die; the most compelling of Harrington’s television films, Killer Bees, remains in syndication, but it (along with The Cat Creature) has never been released on video in any form. Producer Steve Katz further tampered with the television version of Ruby (credited, after the final credits, to ‘Alan Smithee’), rendering it almost incoherent; unfortunately, this subsequently became the primary cut available on video.
Harrington directed his last feature, Mata Hari, in 1984, and his frequent television series work dried up shortly thereafter. He was unable to mobilise financing for his planned feature Cranium in the 1990s, though his friendship with James Whale led to his acting as an unofficial consultant for Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998). At the age of 72, Harrington returned to his personal filmmaking roots to remake The Fall of the House of Usher (2000, 36 min.) As he stated, this was ‘simply to make a film, just like I made the short films at the beginning of my career.’23 Once again, Harrington played Roderick Usher.
Today, Harrington’s underground work is long out of circulation and nearly forgotten – the underground movement disowned him in the wake of his commercial features, just as the mainstream critics’ vehement rejection of the underground shorn Harrington from his own creative roots. Harrington remains a ‘man without a country’, an important genre director who has rarely enjoyed the critical attention and acclaim he long ago earned. Like Edgar Ulmer, Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava, Harrington created imaginative, visually rich, even lavish, masterworks of the genre within the parameters of often ridiculously tight budgets and schedules, a skill he had refined with his underground efforts.
The renewed availability of Harrington’s underground films is essential to the recovery of his identity as a filmmaker, and his historic identity as an innovator. Attempts in the late 1980s to release Harrington’s short films through Mystic Fire Video sadly evaporated. The majority of his features have been released on video (though often in substandard transfers from dubious labels) and a few have appeared on DVD. However, they are still unfairly dismissed as being overly derivative of Psycho and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) rather than the vital culmination of his own formative, thematic obsessions which – as these 1940s experimental films prove – predated their mainstream ‘archetypes’ by over a decade.