FOREWORD
Gothica/Erotica, or, Of Sex and Horror
Forrest J. Ackerman
SEX—how, when, where, how much, etc.—has it crept into the crypts of horror fiction, added spice to the genre? Red-blooded erotica vs. blue-nosed puritanism in pulps, hardcover short stories and novels, art, motion pictures, every form of entertainment—what is the history of the infiltration of the sensual into the supernatural? How did the nature of horror, from fiction to films, come to nurture what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as curiosa? This is not a learned essay, fraught with psychological phraseology, but a lighthearted gambol through the erotic domains of de Sade and Masoch, Phil Farmer and Fay Wray, meant to be as enlightening as the tales that follow are frightening.
Books
Was a nineteen-year-old girl in 1818 the first to inject a subtle hint of eroticism into a Gothic novel? If so, the book was Frankenstein, its author young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Subtle hints and sexual innuendos are to be found in this legendary work.
Certainly by 1970, in Calga Publishers’ Adult Version of Frankenstein, eroticism unbound was at the core of the “updated” work. As the preface explained, “Limitations were imposed on the [original] book by the puritanical mores of the day. Powerful censors substituted uncovered for naked, extemity for leg, charms for breasts, strawberries for nipples, thing for penis, stones for balls, place for cunt, occupy for fuck.” But suppose, the preface postulates, that the restrictions of the time had been lifted, that the episodes, descriptions, adventures, dialogue and vocabulary—”especially where sexual in nature”—were no longer blue-penciled by a bluenose censorship. “Dr. Frankenstein, the creator of the monster, is himself beset by the dilemma of a bride-to-be whose erotic appetites are such as to provide him with the tortures of the damned.” Adapter Hal Kantor envisions:
Their lovemaking [Victor and Elizabeth] was as the storm that raged outside. Naked, she was like a goddess. First soft and gentle, they delighted to the sensations of each other’s flesh. And as the delights caught hold, it was wild and with a fury that neither knew they contained.
The storm was the stage for Victor’s initiation into the secrets of sensuality. Elizabeth begs him to touch her—all over, everywhere. He complies and “almost maniacally fell upon her body, moving his hands and lips and tongue and fingers down and around and across her flesh. Probing. Caressing. Touching. Tasting. Feeling, exploring curves and arcs and orifices as if born into a new universe.” As the storm increases in its intensity, so in direct proportion does the fury and the ecstasy of their love-making. “Bolt after bolt crashed and rocked around the castle, casting eerie and shaking shadows against the gloomy walls.” Gothicism cum cum!
Time and again in the 191 pages that constitute the sexually explicit retelling of Frankenstein, sequences of increasing kinkiness are described, eventually going far beyond the eroticism of lesbianism into the depravity of bestiality and child molestation (both latter acts by the Monster).
In 1897—Dracula. Irishman Bram Stoker, then fifty, offered the world its most enduring vampire novel. And his hot Irish blood boiled over in one sequence when eroticism conjoined with vampirism. The three vampire brides of Dracula approach Jonathan Harker, the guest in one of the bedrooms in the Count’s castle.
All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips…. The girl went on her knees and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my throat and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck…. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat…. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.
Now let us time-travel forward to that moment in 1976 when neophyte author Anne O’Brien Rice burst upon an unsuspecting world with the most alluring vampire novel of modern times, Interview with the Vampire, which quickly shot up to bestsellerdom (presumably by word of, er, mouth). Wendayne Mondelle, my late wife the university professor, quite an erotic lady in her heyday, was mesmerized by the power of this woman’s erotic passages. Example:
She was very like a child, though clearly a full-grown woman. Her breasts though small were beautifully shaped beneath her blouse, and her hips though narrow gave her long, dusty skirt a sharp, sensual angularity. Her beauty was heart-breaking.
And later:
And slowly he drew the loose string from the gathers of her blouse. The cheap fabic opened, the sleeves slipping off her narrow, pink shoulders; and she clasped it, only to have him take her wrists and thrust them sharply away. The audience seemed to sigh in a body, the women behind their opera glasses, the men leaning forward in their chairs. I could see the cloth falling, see the pale flawless skin pulsing with her heart and the tiny nipples letting the cloth slip precariously … tears coursing down her blushing cheeks, her teeth biting into the flesh of her lip … The blouse slipped to her waist. A murmur moved through the titillated crowd as her small, round breasts stood exposed…. On the warm, rising air I could smell the perfume of her skin, hear the soft beating of her heart…. She was looking into his eyes now, and her pain bathed her in a beauteous light, a light which made her irresistibly alluring…. I could feel her skin, feel the small, pointed breasts, feel my arms caressing her … the drawstring of her skirt as she inclined towards him, her head back, the black cloth slipping over her hips, over the golden gleam of the hair between her legs—a child’s down, that delicate curl—the skirt dropping to her feet … His white hand shone on her florid buttocks.
And so it goes. This was only a warmup for the continuous corruscating carnality in her trilogy bylined A. N. Roquelaure, which made the sensually sex-charged sufferings of O read like Little Bo-Peep shearing sheep.
I have (according to the count of four Los Angeles librarians sent over by the mayor’s office) 50,000 books. Don’t ask me if I’ve read them all—I’ve read every last word. (When I get a new book, I turn to the last page and read the last word.) But seriously: Though from 1929 till now I can’t be expected to remember every book I’ve ever read, I seem to remember that in Dream’s End by Thorne “Topper” Smith, 1927, and in Tiffany Thayer’s One-Man Show, 1937, there were some steamy sequences augmenting the Gothic atmosphere. Eroticism and atmos-fear.
Weird Tales and the Pulps
I do believe it was in the pages of Weird Tales magazine, which began in 1923 and is being published to this day, that eroticism first raised its lovely head in the Gothic genre. Lo and behold, on the cover of the January 1931 issue is a vivid depiction of the following paragraph from the story “The Lost Lady”:
Nude and fainting, a young girl was lashed face-forward to a pillar in the floor. Her feet were raised a foot or more above the cement, and round the pillar and her ankles was passed turn after turn a finely knit silken cord, knotting her immovably to the beam and forcing her entire weight upon the thongs which bit so cruelly into her white and shrinking flesh. Her arms were drawn around the post, the wrists crossed and tied at the farther side, but this did little to relieve the strain upon the cords encircling her.
A vicious whipping ensues, erotically arousing to all flagellation fans among the readership—of which there must have been many, as this was but the first of numerous whipping scenes to appear in the “Thrashing Thirties.”
Apologies, anti-chauvinistic feminists, the readers of WT seemed to enjoy the erotic thrill of a woman being whipped.
In September 1934 Weird Tales, Hollywood writer Mindret Lord told it like it was in “Naked Lady”: “In this jaded age, sex appeal is important. Important? It is everything! The public waters at the mouth at the very mention of nudism or Mae West.”
September 1935 featued a cover that will live in infamy—the anti-erotic Canadian cover of Weird Tales on which the breast of the naked “Blue Woman” had censoriously been removed by air-brushing, leaving her as flat-chested as a man! The first time a mastectomy was ever performed on a magazine cover!
In January 1936 Weird Tales treated its lesbian readers (and the many closeted men who enjoyed words about or pictures of women with women) to a cover featuring two beautiful 99-percent-naked women in a wrestling match. The text that matched:
Birth-nude, across the prostrate body of the man they faced each other…. Agnes’ lissome body was perfection’s other self. From slender, high-arched feet to narrow, pointed breasts and waving golden hair she was without a flaw, as sweetly made and slender as a marble naiad carved by Praxiteles.
The Return of Frankenstein: 1940, and a sex-charged horror periodical called Terror Tales was in its twelfth volume. It had been spewing forth bust and lust tales of horror for several years, and in its May issue one of its regular contributors titillated readers with “Test-Tube Frankenstein.” A couple of chapter heads set the scene: “Abomination in the Boudoir,” “A Moon and a Girl and a Horror.”
Her hands loosed the belt of the sheer, wrap-around negligee, began slipping the garment from one shoulder. In spite of me, my breath caught in anticipation. This utter loveliness—I must concentrate all my attention on the pale dream of June’s nearly unrobed figure. Here was heaven, however narrowly saved from the taint of hell. With some quirk of modesty she had half turned her back while slipping the pink negligee lower. It crumpled about her waist. I gasped with near pain at the beauty of her.
Twenty-seven years later the principal reason to view Terence Fisher’s Hammer film Frankenstein Created Woman was to appreciate in action the curvaceous star Susan Denberg, who, if I recall correctly across a gap of a quarter century, was at the time a recent Playmate.
In the same 1940 issue of Terror Tales, Russell Gray’s “Mistress of the Dark Pool” was accompanied by illustrations featuring one completely clothed woman menacing a totally naked one on a cliff. The story delivered what it promised in the way of erotic scenes. In “The Book of Torment” by Harrison Storm, sexual sadism was excused in the name of witchcraft. Madame Louise de Guibourg, a tall, proud, brunette beauty accused of being a witch, was stripped naked and subjected to the usual painful pleasures pleasing to a torture-happy inquisitioner. And so it went, story after story, issue after issue, year after year. The magazine might more rightfully have been titled Sadistic Sex Stories.
But wait! In order to sate the appetites of the erotically aroused readership of the forties, there was a companion periodical: Horror Stories. The February 1941 issue, volume 10, touted “Dracula’s Brides” on the cover. The blurb in the table of contents told that the ever-popular Wayne Rogers, who had tackled the subject of Frankenstein in Terror Tales the year before, was back for an erotic bout with the King of the Vampires. “Every night hundreds of jaded thrill-seekers flocked to the Club Dracula to witness the impersonation of the famed vampire seeking the blood of a young maiden.” In the midst of the story is an announcement, “In the history of Mystery-Terror fiction, there are two outstanding names—Dracula and Frankenstein. You all know Dracula; but don’t miss ‘Spawn of Frankenstein,’ appearing in next month’s issue of Horror Stories. ”
But the end was not yet. The literary (?) appetite for blood and bosoms, castles and cringing maidens, helpless ladies and the lash, erotic lovers and naked nymphos, ghosts and gossamer-gowned girls, un-draped and violated virgins—this fictional hunger for fear-fraught sexual adventures was not completely fulfilled by the two perversion-pandering periodicals. How does Spicy Mystery Stories grab you?
It grabbed a feverish following in the forties with exotic covers to match the erotic interiors. It continued—and its companion, Spicy Adventure Stories—until its contents reached Fahrenheit 452 (the temperature at which blood boils) and it became too hot not to cool down and morphed into a somewhat less racy Speed Mystery.
Today that erotic era of horror fiction magazines is one commanding premium prices among pulp collectors. Three-figure quotes are not uncommon for the more desirable issues.
Movies
Let us turn now to the erotic in horror films. This is a subject with which I must be about as familiar as a witch’s familiar, having been a devout cinephile from the age of five and a half in 1922. The first time I remember anything erotic in a horror film was in the Rouben Mamoulian/Fredric March Academy Award-winning Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of 1932. In Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (McFarland), the author, David J. Hogan, describes the sequence in that film that gave sixteen-year-old me wet dreams. He speaks of Dr. Jekyll’s great attraction to Champagne Ivy (Miriam Hopkins), a sexy prostitute. After, as a doctor, he has examined bruises on Ivy’s back inflicted by another man, she “coyly suggests that Jekyll turn his back so that she may undress. In a moment she is sitting in her bed, barely covered and obviously naked. One bare leg is provocatively thrust from beneath the covers. Jekyll sits next to her and they kiss….” This was highly charged stuff, the scene’s sexual electricity. Yes, across a gulf of more than half a century and three years, four months, and twenty-nine days of World War II army service in between, I still cherish that scene. “Come back, woncha?” invites Champagne Ivy. Anytime, Ivy, for either sham pain or, as Theodore Sturgeon put it, real pain.
A year later, before the censors got to it, comely Fay Wray was getting peeled like a grape by a naively curious King Kong, and the same year, a love captive of Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) in The Most Dangerous Game narrowly escaped rape at the hands of the mad hunter whose philosophy went something like “First the kill, then the woman.”
The same year that Fay Wray became the sexual pawn of Kong, the king of Skull Island, Charles Laughton was up to skullduggery on the Island of Lost Souls. There (inspired by H. G. Wells) he scientifically sped up evolution to the point that animals became the manimals they might have become naturally after millions of years of mutations. And among the males was one womanimal, Lota the Panther Girl. The feline femme of futurity was the late Kathleen Burke, the subject of a nationwide search to find a believable woman to play the part. While I personally preferred a runner-up, Lona Andre (i.e., I found her more sexually attractive), Kathleen admittedly exuded an aroma of a pantheress in heat.
The year 1935 brought The Hands of Orlac (original: Conrad Veidt) to the screen in its first talking version as Mad Love, introducing Peter Lorre in his first American role (he had made an international hit earlier as the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s classic M, a movie about an amputated but still murderous hand). Pop-eyed and bald-headed, Lorre as the sinister surgeon Gogol had googoo eyes for Colin (Frankenstein) Clive’s wife, the beauteous brunette (with us yet and till the time of his death Fritz Lang’s next-door neighbor), Frances Drake. “Gogol,” says Hogan, “seems caught in a sexual trap,” suffering from unconquerable desires that have driven him insane. Forty-six years later the hand with a mind of its own was back in a variant version of the perennial Orlac plot. This time simply titled The Hand, the disembodied, murdering member belonged to Michael Caine. Director Oliver Stone’s script, adapted from Marc Brandel’s book The Lizard’s Tail, included some nudity amidst the gory crudity.
In 1936 the vampire theme surfaced again with the late Gloria Holden as Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula’s Daughter, repressing a bit of lesbian lust for nubile actress Nan Grey.
In 1946 France exported an enduring classic, La Belle et la Bete, with Jean Cocteau guiding Jean Marais as the Beast (himself the epitome of male beauty) through the mazes of this French fairy-tale fantasy of elegant irreality, diaphanous amour, and sexual subtlety. To quote the ubiquitous David Hogan, “Beauty (Josette Day) is able to come to grips with the Beast’s powerful sexualty, maintaining her composure after realizing that she is being observed in her chambers, and allowing the Beast to lap water from her cupped hands. The latter scene is so highly charged with eroticism that one is left breathless.”
In 1954 the first of Universal’s trilogy of Beauty and the Beast films, agua caliente style, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, introduced “Blacky LaGoon,” who constantly got cold water thrown on his erotic attraction to a heroine not of his species.
In 1955 Cult of the Cobra produced what Simone Simon’s Cat People promised. Faith Domergue (This Island Earth) portrayed a shifty snake goddess who changed her shape (a shape-shifter) into that of a beautiful woman whom David Hogan characterized as “every boy’s masturbatory wish-dream” (unfortunately I was thirty-nine by then), “lush of figure and wet of mouth, with sultry dark eyes and a sibilant way with consonants.”
Richard Matheson in his 1956 novel The Shrinking Man more poignantly examined in print the dilemma of his protagonist’s shrinking, er, manhood than he permitted himself the next year in his screenplay The Incredible Shrinking Man. Incidentallyd, there is a hilarious story concerning my late friend the director, Jack Arnold, and his solution for making huge water drops (as compared to diminutive doll-man Carey) photograph realistically. When the accounting department raised eyebrows over Arnold’s bill for a carload of condoms, with a straight face he explained they were “for the customary cast & crew party!” The comptroller, at first staggered by the enormity of the quantity, suggesting an all-night orgy at the studio, roared at the joke when it was described to him how Arnold, by experimentation, had discovered that water-filled condoms shot at slow-motion speed gave the perfect effect of giant water drops!
Dracula rose from his coffin in 1958 in the persona of Christopher Lee, who reprised the role seven times, six in the Hammer series. An examination of Horror of Dracula; Dracula, Prince of Darkness; Dracula Has Risen from the Grave; Taste the Blood of Dracula, et al., would be worthy of an entire chapter. Suffice it to say sex had come to play an important part in each picture, with lots of fleshly lust for lickable ladies in addition to bloodlust. In The Satanic Rites of Dracula, vampire Valerie Van Ost got done wrong when staked below her exposed bare breast. Dracula, the Lee way, enjoyed encarmined lips for thirteen years before turning in his cape, fangs, and bloodshot contact lenses.
In 1961 Oliver Reed crossed the Big Pond in Curse of the Werewolf and had the ladies in the audience swooning over his (wolf)manly hirsuteness. Same year The Mask arrived (with 3-D portions) from Canada, sex and death intermingled in intimate detail. The same year also saw Henry James’s famous novella The Turn of the Screw turned into an unforgettably subtle fright film of evil, The Innocents. Martin Stephens, the youngster who the year before scored a hit as the albino-haired Midwich Cuckoo with the huge dark eyes in Village of the Damned, returned as the adolescent who caused audiences to gasp when he planted a very knowing kiss on the shocked lips of his governess, Deborah Kerr.
In 1962’s Journey to the Seventh Planet the gimmick was something similar to what I devised for Catherine Moore’s “Yvala” (my title) in the February 1936 Weird Tales, whereby every man’s distaff desire was materialized by a sentient plant with evil intent.
Shirley Jackson’s famous novel The Haunting of Hill House became a classic ghostory in 1963 as The Haunting. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom shared a sapphic attraction for each other, their conduct being the catalyst for the creation of a psychic maelstrom within the walls of the house they inhabited.
In 1965 exotic Barbara Steele, age twenty-seven, was whipped on her bare back in Nightmare Castle, a genuine evocation of Gothicism.
Stephanie Rothman, female director, appeared upon the scene in 1966 with Blood Bath, a kind of Misery of the Wax Museum with female models getting murdered and desanguinized and then having their bodies painted.
French director Jean Rollin began rollin’ out a sex-vampire genre all his own in 1967 with Le Viol du Vampire (Rape of the Vampire, if my high school French serves me right), treating viewers to the sight of a semi-clad vampiress supine on the tiger-skin upholstery of her hot car. Sado-masochistic imagery abounded in the follow-up, La Vampire Nue (The Nude Vampire). Le Frisson des Vampires (The Shudders/Shivers/Thrills of Vampires) exhibited evil sexuality. Vierges et Vampires (Virgins and Vampires) I never saw, but I assume the virgins didn’t last very long.
One of the delights of my life was taking the Austrian auteur, Fritz Lang (Siegfried, Kriemhild’s Revenge, The Weary Death), to see Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. Like myself a fan of the female form, Lang had failing eyesight that unfortunately did not permit him to see clearly, even though we sat in the front row, the rape sequence with the nude figure of elfin Mia Farrow violated by the Devil.
I suppose it had to happen eventually. If so, 1969 was the year for it: Dracula, the Dirty Old Man. He did his dirty work with lotsa bare-breasted babes. The film that revealed the thirsty count was gay was 1969’s Does Dracula Really Suck? (co-billed with Hollow My Wienie, Dr. Frankenstein). And somewhere in the aarghives of vamporn lurks Gayracula.
Filmmakers discovered Elizabeth Bathory. Elizabath was a real-life woman with a hemoglobin habit which she indulged to excess from 1600 to 1610, during which time she kidnapped and killed hundreds of peasant girls and reputedly bathed in their blood, believing that between the ages of forty and fifty the literal bloodbaths would keep her young and beautiful. In Daughters of Darkness, 1970, Delphine Seyrig essayed the role of Bathory, who, together with a lesbian companion, lured a young honeymooning couple into erotic interactions, first voyeuristically and then as active participants. Bathory was back the next year as Countess Dracula, with Ingrid Pitt pittilessly murdering virgin maidens for her sanguinary Oil of Olay treatments. Admirers of feminine epidermis got their eyes full as ravishing Ingrid permitted herself to be photographed totally au naturel, baring a pair of the most beautiful breasts ever to grace the screen in any genre, topping a figure of most pulchritudinous proportions. Across a gap of nearly a quarter of a century, I express my personal gratitude for that treat, inspirational Ingrid!
For a second time in 1971 pneumatic Ingrid Pitt as Carmilla (from J. Sheridan LeFanu’s acclaimed novella of the same name) allowed loving looks at her luscious body in The Vampire Lovers, a smorgasblood of bare breasts and sapphic soul-kisses. The same year Jimmy Sangster’s sanguinary Lust for a Vampire sexposed the blood-dripping bare bosom of Scandinavian actress Yutte Stensgaard as Mircalla (Carmilla spelled sideways) who bit her way through a girls’ school. Before year’s end. Mircalla was back (in the vampiric vessel of Katya Keith) in a bitch-hunting spree by fanatical witch-hunters. Breast-beating was replaced by breast-biting and frontal nudity was brought to the fore before “The End” appeared upon the screen. The year 1971 also saw the return of Stephanie Rothman helming The Velvet Vampire, with vampiress Diane LeFanu (ooh!) attempting to initiate young innocents into the wicked world of perverse eroticism.
A soft-porn version of Oscar Wilde’s classic was imported from Italy in 1971, The Secret Life of Dorian Gray, starring luscious morsel Marie Lijedahl and offering enticing acres of naked female flesh to boot—if one was the kind of brute with a private passion for booting bare beauties.
In 1972 Martine Beswicke steamed up the screen in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. If memory serves me right (at seventy-seven I might have incipient Old Timer’s Disease), this version treated audiences to a glimpse of Martine’s magnificent mammaries.
In the extraordinary, perversely powerful Wicker Man, 1973, a paganistic island pulled all stops out in hedonistic celebrations of the body as naked teenagers cavorted uninhibitedly in fertility rites and a beautifully bare Britt Eklund drove a puritanical man up the wall as she bumped and ground against the thin partition separating his tortured flesh from her birth-naked body.
The 1974 British import Vampyres once again was heavy on the lesbian theme with kinky romance in an old dark manse. Same year Udo Kier, a latter-day Conrad Veidt, starred in Blood for Dracula, with four virgins awaiting his, er, coming.
In 1980 Stephen King’s The Shining reached the screen via the direction of Stanley Kubrick, and while not as erotic as A Clockwork Orange, it did have its moments, notably the glorious goddess arising naked from the bathtub. (‘Twas after the tub that the rub came in.)
Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) included one of my cameos but unfortunately as close to anything erotic as I got was a set of Tarot cards. However, Elisabeth Brooks as a licentious lycanthrope had a nice roll in the sand with a fellow werewolf. The orgasmic gasps on a scale of one to ten rated a ten. The only way the lycanthropic lay could have been more play-tonic was if it had been directed à la deep thrope.
The same year John Landis’s American Werewolf in London broke more werewolfic ground and also injected erotic elements. Jenny Agutter, who had been seen partially naked in Logan’s Run and totally buff in Equus, showered with David Naughton in the Brit bit-film, and the couple exchanged caresses and wet kisses and engaged in some fond fondling beneath the bed sheets.
The same year Ghost Story introduced Alice Krige, a South African actress with a singularly perverse brand of sexuality reminiscent of Barbara Steele and Martine Beswicke. Alice got her licks in at one point by seductively licking one of four young men on the face. With her they didn’t have a ghost of a chance.
It is one of my personal tragedies that the original Cat People was made before an R-rated film would have permitted a viewing of the undoubtedly pulchrinudinous Simone Simon in all her purry feline femininity. Alas, no celluloid legacy of Simone, Marlene, Sari Maritza. Danielle Darrieux, Lona Andre, Anna Sten, Arline Judge, Toby Wing, naked as Nature intended them … but we did get lucky in 1982 when Nastassia Kinski, ever ready, willing, and able in mundane movies to display her wares (though to date never in a were-wolfilm), graced and spiced the remake of The Cat People with her unclad beauty. The sight of this naked cat-woman ought to have been enough to make a catatonic snap out of his nap!
In 1983, Barbara Hershey graphically became the victim of The Entity, an erotic ectoplasmic rapist who pursued her from bathroom to bedroom and worked its wicked will upon her willy-nilly, palping her persimmons, tweaking her nips with what Claude Rains might have characterized as his “little invisible fingers.” This was the year that my discovery, Bobbie Bresee, shambled forth in horror raiment from the Mausoleum as a she-demon with a ferocious little sentient monster-head protruding from each breast … but not before her Monroesque mammaries and eye-tractive bod had been tastefully displayed in their non-monsterrific munchability. In the ensuing decade Bobbie has been in demand nationally and internationally as a Scream Queen at horror film festivals.
Other actresses who have climbed the ladder of sex-cess wrong by wrong (the Mae West syndrome) are today’s pre-eminent Scream Queens Brinke (Teenage Exorcist) Stevens, Linnea “Wiggly” Quigley, Michelle Bauer (“the most drop-dead beauty with a perfect body”—Joe Bob Briggs), femme fatale Monique Gabrielle and a dozen other doozies who are flat where it flatters and curved where it matters and don’t mind presenting a fair derriere for a spanking or a nude torso (and moreso) for a soaping in a shower scene or a rub-a-dub-dub in a hot tub, clad only in an aura of horror from the Gothique to the Grand Guignolesque.
Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm, 1988, contrasted breathtakingly beautiful nudes (queenly Princess Catherine Oxenberg? Amanda Donohoe?) with the squamous horror of the huge malignant non-human menace of the vermicular variety.
In most recent times, Anne Parillaud appetizingly paraded stark naked around her boudoir in the opening sequence of Innocent Blood (my 43rd screen cameo; as the main male vampire makes off with my automobile: “That’s my car!”). And I can’t tell you how candidly I envy John Landis when the script-tease required him to direct the most sensually seductive scene I’ve ever witnessed in seventy-two years of moviegoing (move over, O, And God Created Woman, Basic Instinct, Ecstasy, Lash of the Penitente, Sex and Zen), when the heavenly hell-girl in all her totally naked glory (even though not even a pubic hair or aureole is showing) kneels on the bed in a bondage position of do-what-thou-wilt-with-me-lover submission and presents her voluptuous and vulnerable body to the camera’s caressing eye. How many times did you have to rehearse that scene, John? And if you ever shoot a similar one, what would I have to pay to be a creative consultant?
Well, that about covers it. Or uncovers it. Sex appeal seems now inextricably interwoven with hex appeal, curiosa with cloven-hoofdom, eroticism with mysticism, lust with horror. While ghosts, goblins, vampires, werewolves, zombies, headless bodies and disembodied heads, phantoms and wraiths are wraithing the hair on your head, today’s purveyors of horror, whether in art, literature, or the cinema, seem by and, er, large dedicated to arousing that little “Herr” down there where manhood manifests itself, ensorcelling the male malevolence-fan with a bonus of erotic enticements, with an occasional wicked wink to the straight and/or gay female. If I have whetted your appetite to taste the terror-cum-titillation tales in this volume of the erotic cum the erratic, the terrifying thing in the attic, the frightmare of the beast cellar … well, that’s what wet-dreams are all about. Pleasant (s)creams!