INTERVIEW WITH DR. STEVE HABERMAN FOR GOTHIC FOR RADICALS
1. Why did you write a book on the horror movies of Gordon Hessler and Christopher Wicking?
I write and narrate a lot of audio commentaries for classic horror movies on blu rays and DVDs. While doing research for one, I looked over the row of books in my library on horror filmmakers of the sixties and seventies. I had books on Terence Fisher, William Castle, Roger Corman, Mario Bava, Freddie Francis and even books on Michael Reeves who only directed three features. But I couldn’t find anything of any substance or completeness on Gordon Hessler. I realized that his four AIP horror movies were not held in the same esteem as those of the other directors I mentioned. But I didn’t really agree with that, and I was surprised that I might be alone in my opinion. I always felt that the four movies he made with writer Christopher Wicking were unique, personal and stylish. They had a seriousness of purpose and presentation. Three of them starred Vincent Price, and those three were unqualified hits when they were released in 1969 and 1970. I remembered seeing them at the time, and my friends and I liked them. They had wide releases, heavy promotions and even some good reviews. And I realized as I gazed at the imaginary space on my shelves where at least one book on them should be, that I would have to write that book - which was bad news because writing a book is a lot of work.
2. Your book is actually a user-friendly version of your PhD thesis, isn’t it?
Yes. I decided to get a doctorate from De Montfort University in Leicester, England because they hold the Hammer Film library of scripts and documents, and many of their professors are experts on British horror. I presented them with two ideas for my thesis, and they immediately chose my concept for an exploration of the four AIP horror movies by Hessler and Wicking. I contacted Christopher Wicking’s widow, Lily Susan Todd, and she very kindly sent me all of the scripts and treatments she had on the projects - and I mean, the actual documents, right out of Wicking’s typewriter. Film historian Tim Lucas contacted Gary Teetzel of MGM who sent me three drafts of The Oblong Box and summaries of inter-office memos from the AIP files. The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming gave me Tim Kelly’s original screenplay of Cry of the Banshee from their Tim Kelly Collection. Graduate student Kieran Foster made a copy of Wicking’s unmade script for Vampirella for me from the De Montfort University Hammer library. Even Mel Brooks helped out by arranging a lunch with one hundred year-old Norman Lloyd who generously answered all my questions about his working with Hessler, not to mention Chaplin, Welles, Hitchcock and Renoir. And Mel Brooks also gave me four tickets to the Garrick Theatre in London to bribe my professors by taking them to see the musical of Young Frankenstein. Apparently it worked because they liked my thesis and awarded me a PhD.
3. Are the four movies by Hessler and Wicking good?
They’re actually beyond good. Hessler and Wicking were auteurs who used their horror movies as personal statements on humanity, cinema, the genre and the politics of their time. The horror films of Hessler and Wicking came about because of the critical and financial success of Roger Corman’s eight Poe adaptations, as well as AIP’s selling of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General as The Conqueror Worm, yet another Poe movie starring Vincent Price. The Corman films competed at the time with the color gothics from Hammer Films directed by Terence Fisher. Hessler and Wicking would follow in the genre traditions of the films of Fisher, Corman and Reeves while completely changing the cinematic style and approach to the subject matter. Comparing the four horror films of Hessler and Wicking with the previous works in the genre from Fisher, Corman and Reeves reveals the superficial similarities while highlighting the more profound contrasts in meaning and technique in the Hessler and Wicking movies.
4. What is an auteur?
According to auteurism, as it developed in film criticism from the 1950s and 60s, film directors, supervising every artistic aspect of their productions, are the real creators, or “authors,” of their movies, even more so than the writers of their screenplays. American auteurist critic Andrew Sarris said that there are three premises of an auteur director. The first premise is his technical competence. If a director has no elementary flair for cinema, he’s automatically cast out of the pantheon. The second premise is the distinguishable personality of the director. Over a group of films, a director has to show certain recurring characteristics of style as his signature. The third and ultimate premise is concerned with interior meaning of a director’s movies: his personal and unique world view. You could label the three premises of an auteur director as technician, stylist and auteur.
5. So does Gordon Hessler fit those requirements for an auteur director?
He certainly qualifies as an auteur in Sarris’s first two premises. In terms of technical competence, starting as a film editor, a story reader and then a producer, Hessler learned the craft of directing from the bottom up. Editing is the foundation of cinema and the aspect of filmmaking that separates it from the other arts, such as literature, theater, painting and photography. Hessler mastered editing by cutting documentaries and then narrative shorts. His directed features are immaculately designed, blocked and shot to be assembled in cinematically sophisticated ways. As a producer, Hessler perfected professional scheduling, budgeting and set management, which taught him the practical priorities of directing. And as story editor for no less an auteur than Hitchcock on his television shows, Hessler learned to choose material with cinematic potential and to adapt it to the medium for maximum emotional impact. In short, Hessler’s professional background insured that he was a very good director, if only in terms of craft.
As for Sarris’s second premise, Hessler used his skill to develop a personal style that was both expressive and unique, especially for its time. Using a constantly moving camera, often hand held, he created the feeling of immediate realism and almost documentary-like intimacy that contrasted with the fantastic plots and nineteenth century period formality of most of his settings. It grounded his gothic tales in a real world, however remote from modern times.
In the case of the third premise, Hessler chose to collaborate with Christopher Wicking to rewrite every one of their four projects, working together to consistently express their shared cinematic, moral and political universe. Although he only got credit for additional dialogue, Wicking’s personal themes clearly emerge in the very first collaboration with Hessler, The Oblong Box, themes that will reappear and develop in the next three Hessler and Wicking films. Hessler stated that Wicking added not only dialogue but the context of British colonial exploitation to the plot of The Oblong Box. Wicking would continue to present authority figures as corrupt exploiters of youth and the common man. Wicking’s aging representatives of the establishment experience what Vincent Price’s character in The Oblong Box calls, “sin and retribution.” That sin originates from the decadence of a family’s older generation in three of the Hessler and Wicking films: The Oblong Box, Cry of the Banshee and Murders in the Rue Morgue. In Scream and Scream Again, the character’s sins result from his secret efforts on behalf of a military-industrial complex to create compliant soldiers out of the body parts of the young in order to forcefully grab political power. In all four movies, the transgressions of the older, patriarchal protagonist are punished by a cruel retribution, not from God, but resulting from the sinner’s own tragic moral flaws.
In stories examining how past sins cause horror and retribution for those in the present, Hessler and Wicking also gave symbolic voice to the revolutionary youth movement of the late sixties, a movement fueled by anger over the older generation’s positions on the Vietnam War and the fight for civil rights. After all, both of those national tragedies resulted from un-redressed historic transgressions from the past. Like the counter-culture of the late sixties, the horror films of Hessler and Wicking challenged the moral superiority of family, church and state. Along with Englishman Reeves and American filmmakers like George Romero, Hessler and Wicking deliberately went against the conservative strain in gothic horror represented by the works of previous directors like Terence Fisher, reversing the moral polarity of the genre.
6. You also include the writer, Christopher Wicking, as a dual auteur with Hessler.
Yes. Terence Fisher’s Hammer horror films were written by a small group of the company’s favorite scribes, mostly Jimmy Sangster, Peter Bryan and John Elder, which was the pen name for Hammer producer Anthony Hinds, with single film contributions from Wolf Mankowitz, John Gilling, Bert Batt, Richard Matheson and others. But Fisher’s cinematic techniques and stark Christian morality emerged from his concentration on his own personal interests within the scenarios, despite the range of writers. Roger Corman, as producer of the gothics he directed, completely controlled the creation of his screenplays whether they were penned by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Robert Towne or other of his chosen writers, insuring that they fit Corman’s narrative interests and unique style. Michael Reeves participated in the writing of all of his completed films himself, treating his subjects in a personal way from their inception. And as it turned out, director Hessler would insist on writer Wicking refashioning the original story material from AIP, working in concert with him on the style, construction and thematic concerns of all four of their horror films together. The pairing of Hessler and Wicking turned out to be a meeting of the minds that crystallized into collaborative works of horror quite distinct from what came before them.
7. What is your favorite of the Hessler - Wicking films?
The three best are The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream Again and Cry of the Banshee, which was their biggest commercial success. Murders in the Rue Morgue is their most daring narrative and stylistic experiment, but the story structure falls apart in the third act and the casting of Jason Robards is ruinous. Their greatest artistic work, and the movie that got the best reviews, was Scream and Scream Again. It’s brilliant in terms of structural complexity, political allegory and cinematic excitement. But my favorite is their first, The Oblong Box. Even though it could have been cut by as much as ten minutes in the second act during some superfluous scenes in and around a tavern, it is still the tightest, most atmospheric and most tragic of the four with a genuinely shocking and sobering ending. I also quite admire the AIP theatrical cut of Cry of the Banshee with one of Les Baxter’s greatest music scores.
8. Why do you think the Hessler - Wicking movies are not as admired as the Corman and Hammer gothics?
The four horror movies of Hessler and Wicking were very idiosyncratic reactions to a very specific and unique period in the genre. By the end of the sixties, younger directors like Michael Reeves attempted to expand the scope of the gothic to include issues that contradicted the earlier works of the decade such as the Hammers films of Terence Fisher. Extending this renaissance were the films of Hessler and Wicking, which were both more cinematically daring and more politically explicit than even the earlier examples of this new approach. But critically and historically, the four movies seem to have fallen between the cracks. They signal the end of period gothics without sharing their specific feeling or technique, at the same time announcing the beginning of more real, violent, and nihilistic modern horrors such as The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, again without being one of them. With the exception of Scream and Scream Again, they take place in a distant past but with decidedly modern views of violence, sex, power and protest. The Hessler and Wicking movies are warnings about corruption and power instead of melancholy musings or scare machines. And even though they were as successful at the box office as the best of Fisher, Corman and Reeves, they don’t so much initiate original story concepts as twist traditional narrative ideas in unique, personal and meaningful ways.
9. Some horror fans complain that the Hessler - Wicking movies underuse their horror stars such as Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, especially in Scream and Scream Again.
The horror films of Hessler and Wicking are primarily auteur works made by two artists who are simultaneously exploring the boundaries of gothic cinema and communicating their own morality and political perspective. One of the particular aspects of their films is a disregard for the genre stardom of their casts and a refusal to tailor the characters and narrative to satisfy the expectations of fans of their stars. The resulting disappointment from that very vocal group of viewers, both at the time of the films’ releases and in subsequent re-evaluations, has often blinded them to the unique value of the Hessler and Wicking movies beyond their function as genre commodities. Many reviews of Scream and Screams Again, from 1970 to current assessments, complain that Cushing has but one scene, that Lee has very limited screen time as a dull government bureaucrat and that Price, though well cast as a mad scientist, has only slightly more screen time than Lee.
Hessler and Wicking design narratives that fracture the story so that it’s told from the actions of many inter-related characters. They don’t construct the story solely around a single protagonist with a problem to be solved and antagonists to block him. There is never such a dominating character to satisfy the expectations of fans of their genre stars. Performances in Hessler and Wicking films, even by the stars, are merely stitches in the tapestry of plot lines, themes and set pieces that finally come together into an artistic whole.
Actually, Hessler and Wicking, the two creators themselves, could be regarded as the protagonists of their films. They, and not the protagonists of the stories, propel the movies, leading their audience through the inter-connected subplots and characters to a single narrative trajectory at the story’s climax.. Hessler and Wicking prove, like other auteurs, that cinema is the storytellers' medium. The chroniclers in cinema, the writer and director, use the ingredients of performance, narrative and style to create a synthesis that communicates their vision.
In The Oblong Box, Hessler and Wicking broke up the narrative by following the actions of several related characters, mostly the two Markam brothers and Dr. Neuhartt, but also including the stories of lesser participants such as Trench, Norton, Kemp and Inspector Hawthorne. Even though they all had scenes to themselves, the relationships of these characters to the main narrative was always obvious. This is not the case in Scream and Scream Again, which is told through a much more complex intercutting of subplots and is the next logical stylistic step from the story telling experiments of The Oblong Box. Scream and Scream Again builds its major narrative from other narratives, not obviously related until the very end. The following year, in Murders in the Rue Morgue, Hessler and Wicking attempt to do the same thing, not just with seemingly unrelated subplots, but with different perceptions of reality, utilizing dreams, memories, theatrical presentations and even premonitions. This was a story-telling strategy unique to Hessler and Wicking at the time, and more important to the two auteurs than building complex characters for genre stars.
In fact, in the baroque structures of Hessler and Wicking, secondary characters often attain dominance in the narrative. Because the subplots are not built around the characters of the star performers, these supporting parts gain prominence as the audience is asked to follow plot lines through their actions. Hessler and Wicking are never afraid to allow these supporting characters to take over the narrative for long periods, following their actions and dramatizing their goals and frustrations, without regard to time taken away from the genre actors advertised as the film’s stars. They employed this unique strategy consistently in all four films for AIP, and as much as it frustrated many fans, it became a signature story-telling style that differentiated their movies from any other genre efforts of the era.
10. How do you hope readers of your book will regard the films of Hessler and Wicking after they finish reading it?
I hope they can put aside their expectations of what gothic cinema should feel like based on the previous works in the genre and experience the four movies fresh, knowing what Hessler and Wicking were actually doing and saying. If they can do that, I’m sure they will not only recognize but celebrate the achievements of Hessler and Wicking in using the genre in original, consistent and profound ways.