Tag: M. R. James

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Casting the Votes: Are These the 100 Scariest Movies of All Time?

Well, there’s no accounting for poor taste. That did not stop the Chicago Film Critics Association, apparently as desperate for attention as myself, from issuing a list of the one hundred “scariest movies.” Let’s have a look at the association’s choices, as they were published today, just in time to cash in on the Halloween business. Only in recent years, Halloween has become big business here in the UK and in my native country, Germany. Considering that the tradition is so ancient, it is surprising how slow marketers were to catch on.

I remember watching Spielberg’s E.T. upon its first release, being baffled by the costumes with which the children paraded on the streets. Dressing up, in my youth, was reserved for Carnival (or Mardi Gras). Nowadays, the pagan festival of Halloween is upstaging Christmas, probably because it does not pressure folks to spend on others the money whose power to shock and awe they’d rather display on themselves.

Even the small town of Aberystwyth, in mid-Wales, is having its own Halloween film festival, cheekily called Abertoir, which screens classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Roger Corman’s The Raven, as well as recent camp like Poultrygeist (by director Lloyd Kaufman, who is a special guest of the events).

Now, I appreciate the diversity of the Chicago Film Critics Association’s list of scary movies, which, topped by Psycho, includes must-sees like Nosferatu, Frankenstein (1931), and I Walked With a Zombie; and even though I doubt that anyone is likely to be terrified watching Creature from the Black Lagoon, it qualifies as a beloved late-night drive-in staple. Then there are beauts like Eyes without a Face, which I haven’t seen in ages, and Carnival of Souls (presumably the original). Also getting a nod from the CFCA are genuinely disturbing films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Blue Velvet, and Fritz Lang’s M. An eclectic list, in short.

Inexplicably, though, my personal favorite did not make the bloody cut. It is Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957), based on “Casting the Runes,” a short story by the aforementioned ghost storyteller M. R. James. On US radio the story was dramatized under its original title on the literary thriller series Escape. When it was shown on BBC 2 TV here in Britain a few nights ago, I seized the opportunity to go once more into that not so gentle Night. Much to my relief, I had not yet become immune to its powers.

Once again, I was startled by that hand on the banister; once again, my skin showed pimply evidence of the film’s workings upon my imagination. After the screening, my unimpressed partner, an incorrigible prankster who knows how to make me jump (which is not all that difficult), caught me unawares (which is easier still) and passed me a slip of paper with a runic-looking message. Upon closer inspection, though, it bore an inscription of three little words far more reassuring. Though constantly under attack, my heart is still beating for him.

In its two versions, Night (or Curse) is central to the debate about horror and terror—the former trying to shock by showing, the latter causing unease by the subtler force of suggestion. A curse on the CFCA for not casting their votes for it! Anyone got runes?

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Many Happy Reruns: Herman Melville and M. R. James

Well, August is coming across a lot like autumn. Fierce winds, cool temperatures, and short intervals of rain put an end to the July heat here in Ceredigion, Wales. Undoubtedly, I will return to hothouse climes next week, when I am back in New York City, where, on this day, 1 August, in 1819, a child was born that would eventually become one of the most celebrated authors of the 19th century: Herman Melville. Moby-Dick, his most famous work—a story everyone knows but a book hardly anyone reads—was filmed, starring Gregory Peck, not far away from here in the Welsh town of Fishguard, where, last summer, I had the misfortune to drown a cellular phone.

Losing a chance to keep in touch with humanity—that is not altogether un-Melvillian. Melville’s yarns, apart from his early Omoo and Typee, are not primarily seafaring adventures. They are stories of the forlorn, of friendlessness and frustrated ambitions. Teaching American literature in New York, I once assigned Melville’s novel Redburn, a devastatingly triste tale of a young man unable to establish meaningful and fulfilling personal relationships. It is a subject to which Melville returned frequently in his work, his Kafkaesque story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” being a prime example. It is also a fine example of literature being well served by radio; and such instances are quite rare.

Those adapting literature for the airwaves were often asked to synopsize popular pieces of 19th-century fiction, to produce hurried rehashes that rarely captured the varied aspects, let alone the experience of epic tomes like Moby-Dick. The far shorter story of “Bartleby,” however, was well translated for radio by the creative team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. As the host of the series, Ronald Colman, told listeners of Favorite Story back in the late 1940s (the series was transcribed and syndicated, rather than broadcast live on network radio), “The Strange Mr. Bartleby” was an obscure work of fiction. It was owing to actor Robert Montgomery, who allegedly chose it as his favorite, that the story was picked up by Favorite Story and dramatized starring William Conrad and Hans Conried (as Bartleby).

As a short story, it is far more suitable for a twenty-minute dramatization than the novels that were generally bowdlerized in the process. Despite the changed title (the word “scrivener” being deemed rather too quaint and alienating, no doubt), Favorite Story‘s rendering of “Bartleby”—a dark tale in which communication failure is having a “dead letter” day—is probably the most satisfying and faithful Melville adaptation heard on American radio.

A similar success in adaptation may be reported in the case of another author born on this day (in 1862), a spinner of a very different sort of yarn: M. R. James, who shares his first name with our terrier, Montague (pictured). Still somewhat outside the canon of western literature—a canon that now includes Frankenstein and Dracula—James is a highly regarded teller of antiquarian ghost stories.

A decade before it was adapted for the movies, his “Casting the Runes” was readied for radio by Irving Ravetch and John Dunkel. With a score composed by the recently deceased Cy Feuer (commemorated here), it was heard on the thriller anthology Escape on 19 November 1947. Unlike Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, which exists in two versions and points up the Curse of visualizing terror as horror, the sound-only adaptation is both literate and liberating, depending on the listener’s imagination rather than showy yet inadequate special effects.

was often and not unjustly accused of playing fast and loose with literary classics. It reduced novels like Moby-Dick to skeletons best left in the closets of those who were commissioned to strip the meat from the bones of such meaty fictions. Shorter works like “Bartleby” and “Casting the Runes,” concentrating on one central idea and exploring a key situation involving a few main characters, fared considerably better on the air. These two plays are worthy of the men who conceived them without a microphone in mind.