Interviews Too Shocking To Print!

By Justin Humphreys

Interviews Too Shocking to Print! collects conversations with some of horror and science fiction cinema's finest directors and writers, along with other outstanding talents. The interviewees' films range from the mightiest blockbusters to esoteric drive-in arcana, but they are united by the imagination. Their creations represent some of the freshest, most popular, vital, and inventive works in fantastic filmmaking.

The interviewees:
- Alan Ball- The author of American Beauty, whose True Blood has become a favorite of vampire lovers everywhere.
- Wah Chang- The sculptor and multi-talented f/x genius who created the monstrous menageries of “Star Trek,” “The Outer Limits,” and George Pal’s films, among many others.
- William Finley- The gangly, unforgettable cult star who essayed the title role in Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise and headlined Sisters, Eaten Alive, and other cult classics.
- Jack Fisk- Now one of Hollywood’s top production designers (There Will Be Blood), Fisk cut his teeth crafting the eerily unforgettable worlds of Phantom of the Paradise, Messiah of Evil, and Carrie.
- Gene Fowler, Jr.- Fritz Lang’s former editor, Fowler directed two minor masterpieces whose lurid titles barely hint at their high quality: I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Married a Monster From Outer Space.
- Chuck Griffith- A bizarre master screenwriter, Griffith wrote immortal low-budget favorites like The Little Shop of Horrors, A Bucket of Blood, Not of This Earth, and Death Race 2000.
- Stewart Stern- The author of Rebel Without a Cause recalls writing the role of Mr. Kurtz for Boris Karloff in his television production of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
- Herbert Strock- Strock discusses the making of his psychotronic gems I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, How to Make a Monster, and The Crawling Hand.
- William Tuttle- The head of MGM’s makeup department for decades and the first makeup artist to win an Academy Award, Tuttle’s make-up career stretched from Mark of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi and The Wizard of Oz to Young Frankenstein’s zipper-neck monster.
- Robert Wise- The director of two of the all-time most popular musicals– West Side Story and The Sound of Music– discusses his long and varied career, including editing Citizen Kane and directing the distinctly un-musical The Body Snatcher, The Haunting, Curse of the Cat People, and The Andromeda Strain.

Also included are several of Humphreys’s essays on the cinema of imagination.

Justin Humphreys is the author of Names You Never Remember, With Faces You Never Forget (also from BearManor) and the authorized biography of director/producer George Pal. A three-time Rondo Award nominee, he has sold over 130 articles, been quoted in magazines like The Virginia Quarterly Review, and interviewed for documentaries by the Starz Channel, Paramount, and others. He is also the Primary Research Editor of two-time Academy Award-winner Robert Skotak’s upcoming Retrospect magazine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Jul 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310501647

Justin Humphreys

Justin Humphreys is the author of Names You Never Remember, With Faces You Never Forget (also from BearManor) and the authorized biography of director/producer George Pal. A three-time Rondo Award nominee, he has sold over 130 articles, been quoted in magazines like The Virginia Quarterly Review, and interviewed for documentaries by the Starz Channel, Paramount, and others. He is also the Primary Research Editor of two-time Academy Award-winner Robert Skotak’s upcoming Retrospect magazine.

Book preview

Interviews Too Shocking To Print!

© 2014 Justin Humphreys. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.

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ISBN 978-1-59393-578-8

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Cover Design by John Teehan.

eBook construction by Brian Pearce | Red Jacket Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Darius James

Introduction: Claims Too Absurd to Deliver!

Directed by:

Gene Fowler, Jr: Braces on My Fangs

Nathan Juran: Out of the Age of Wonders

Herbert Strock: Tales of Frankenstein, Both Teenage and Cosmic

Robert Wise: He Made the Earth Stand Still

Written by:

Alan Ball: From Satires to Vampires

How George Garrett Met His Space Monster

Here Lies a Man Who Was Not of This Earth: A Eulogy For Chuck Griffith

Mistuh Karloff, He Dead! Stewart Stern on Boris Karloff and Heart of Darkness

Starring:

William Finley: This Side of Paradise

Visual F/X by:

Wah Chang: A Wry, Weird Sense of the Strange

Makeup By:

William Tuttle: From the Morlocks to Grace Kelly

Production Designer:

Jack Fisk: Architect of the Past

Essays

Ladislaw Starewicz’s The Mascot (aka: Fetiche Mascotte; The Devil’s Ball; Puppet Love)

The Mystery of the Wax Museum

Peeping Tom

Satiemania

Afterword: My Life as a Rememberer, or: Let Us Now Praise Old Men

Image19

For my mother, who read me Charles G. Finney’s unexpurgated The Circus of Dr. Lao when I was eight.

And to my late father, who liked George Pal’s movie version of it (probably because it was a western).

Acknowledgments

My deceased primary interviewees are owed many posthumous thanks: Wah Chang, William Finley, Gene Fowler, Jr., George Garrett, Chuck Griffith, Nathan Juran, Herbert Strock, William Tuttle, and Robert Wise. Just as much gratitude is due the others, who are very much alive: Alan Ball, Jack Fisk, and Stewart Stern.

Fabrice Lambot originally ran several of these interviews (Fowler, Strock, and Wise) long ago in his magazine Atomovision. He duly deserves credit for contributing heavily to them.

The following people graciously granted me permission to quote from their various works: Bob Stephens (from his essay, Science Fiction Noir), Bob Burns (from his book, Monster Kid Memories and It Came From Bob’s Basement), Irv Broughton (from his George Garrett documentary, News of the Spirit), Robert Skotak (from his interview with Irving Block in his Fantascene #2), and David Schow (from his The Outer Limits Companion).

Robert Skotak, Bob Burns, and Vincent Di Fate supplied me with some seldom-seen photos from Herman Cohen’s teenage monster movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and I Married a Monster from Outer Space. Vincent also beautifully scanned and blew-up some rare proof sheets. Ira Gallen and David Garcia also provided photos of Stewart Stern, Ray Harryhausen, and Nathan Juran at just the right moment.

Courtney Joyner was helpful in far too many ways to list. I am beholden to him.

For their input into the chapter on William Finley, I appreciate the help of his friends, family members, and fans: Susan and Dash Finley, Jared Martin, Brian De Palma, Bruce Joel Rubin, Bibbe Hansen, Marilyn Burns, Stephen Bissette, Edgar Wright, and Jessica Harper. And for their contributions to my chapter on Chuck Griffith, I thank Sharon Compton, Ron Fellows, Jess Griffith, Max Mendes, Annie Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Chuck Howerton, Frances Doel, Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, Kent Adamson, and Jeff Burr. To supplement my chapter on William Tuttle, I thank his colleagues Ron Berkeley and the late Charlie Schram. (Further material used in the Tuttle chapter includes quotations from various newspapers and magazines, and a 1975 oral history that Tuttle gave, which are indicated in the text.)

The following editors graciously gave me permission and/or blessings to reprint material from their periodicals: Fabrice Lambot (Atomovision), Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog), Hawes Spencer (The Hook), and Jovanka Vukovic (formerly of Rue Morgue).

I would also like to thank Darius James, Dennis Skotak and Dorothy Fontana (and Christie), Tim Campbell, David Pal, Zdenko Gasparovic, Jim Danforth, Billy Hendrickson, Stephen Chiodo, Tom Khamis (for traveling to Nathan Juran’s house with me), Tom Weaver (for helping me contact William Tuttle), Krista Westerlund, Cynthia Wall and J. Paul Hunter, Tina Romanus, Emily Westkaemper, John and Helene Rosenberg, Steve Wathen, Daniel Siegel and Janeane Skillen, Mark Silverman, Thomas Kuntz, Courtney Rocco, Maria McKee, and Leyla Bandy.

And to all of those people who, out of malice, greed, or stupidity, made my writing life at times miserable, I hope that something so truly horrible happens to you that it would be disingenuous of me to smile about it.

  — JH

Most of the interviews, articles, and essays in this magazine appeared previously in various forms in the following magazines:

Alan Ball: From Satires to Vampires with Alan Ball. The Hook. November 5, 2009. Reprinted in a different form in Rue Morgue #101. (Though I wasn’t properly credited in that issue of Rue Morgue, I conducted that interview entirely by myself)

Wah Chang: Wah Chang: Master of the Monster Macabre. Filmfax #92.

William Finley: William Finley: This Side of Paradise. L’ecran Fantastique. July/August, 2012. (France.)

Jack Fisk: Production Values: Jack Fisk finds days of heaven. The Hook. November 2, 2011.

Gene Fowler, Jr.: Atomovision #1. (France.)

George Garrett: How George Garrett Met His Space Monster. The Hook. #236. September 11, 2003.

Chuck Griffith: Here Lies a Man Who Was Not of This Earth: A Eulogy for Charles B. Griffith. Video Watchdog magazine #141. July, 2008.

Herbert Strock: Atomovision #2.

Robert Wise: Atomovision #4 and 5.

The Mascot: Classic Cut. Rue Morgue #73.

The Mystery of the Wax Museum: Classic Cut. Rue Morgue #54.

Peeping Tom: Classic Cut. Rue Morgue #51.

Foreword by Darius James

It started with the figurine of a bobble-headed Dolemite pictured in an ad I shared on Facebook. Within minutes, someone posted a comment: You insecure, rat-soup-eatin’ muthafucka! Don’t you know I handcuffed lightnin’ and threw thunder’s ass in jail? The comment was preceded by the name Justin Humphreys. He looked like Smilin’ Jack Martin in his profile pic; the movie-serial aviation hero, not the Gableesque comic strip character.

Who is this fool? It’s sometime difficult to discern a stranger’s intentions on Facebook. Unsolicited comments can be viewed either as acts of hostility or jests. I’ve had to contend with my share of stalkers and trolls on Facebook. Once, someone on Facebook accused me of stealing their dreams and publishing them as a novel. I didn’t have a clue where this Justin cat was coming from so naturally I was wary. I was about to retort I’ll beat your ass so hard blood pustules will pop all over your mother’s face in splatter patterns that will fetch more money than a Jackson Pollack original! when this Justin typed in some more smack beneath the text box of his previous comment.

Get the hell off Facebook, motherfucka, it read, ’fore they have to be pullin’ these Hush Puppies out your motherfuckin’ ass! Don’t you know — you no-business-bein’-born, insecure, jock-jawed muthafucka! Dolemite is my name and fuckin’ up motherfuckas is my game! I’m so bad, I kick my own ass twice a day!

No, Smilin’ Jack wasn’t trying to challenge me to a game of the dozens. He was trying to get my attention in the glut of comments on my Facebook page by demonstrating his knowledge of and affection for Rudy Ray Moore’s brand of chit’lin’-circuit buffoonery. And he succeeded.

Thereafter, Justin and I exchanged a few notes via the Internet and chatted by telephone. It was clear we had a rapport and became fast friends. The primary focus of our discussions was movies, writing, life in our respective cities (which we both regarded as ‘soul-crushing’), and the pathetic state of the publishing industry. I was excited to know he had written a biography, George Pal: Man of Tomorrow, and, as we both shared a special love for Vincent Price and Robert Fuest, that he was currently hard at work on a volume detailing the making of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Justin and I have considered collaborating on a screenplay — a mashup of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and zombie films. We are absolutely certain Tyler Perry will give us the financial backing and studio support we need to produce such a horrific and tasteless spectacle.

Over the passing months, Justin mailed some of the articles he had published, many of which you’ll find in these pages, such as his loving tribute to that black humor specialist, the singular Charles Griffith. What marks Justin’s portrait, flowing throughout the profiles found here, is the intimacy with which he brings his subjects to life. As a writer, Justin has the ability to empathetically project himself into the experience of another. Therein lies his secret.

Stir-crazy from his life in Virginia, Justin hopped a train to Manhattan en route to L.A. for some big city recreation. This afforded us the opportunity to finally meet in-person. After a few days in Manhattan, he boarded a train at Grand Central and paid me a visit at my home in Connecticut. My sister and I met him at the station and Justin was all smiles exiting it. He was carrying a bottle of wine. We hugged in greeting and returned to my home.

Justin proved a charming and splendid companion that afternoon. He was erudite, conversant, and remarkably well-mannered. He was almost Old World. I’ve spent a combined thirty years living in both Manhattan and Berlin, both pretty gruff cities, and was completely unaccustomed to this kind of behavior. Why I found it so surprising is that he was very sincere. Maybe you can characterize this quality of his as Southern Gentility. Personally, I can’t say. I was raised in New England. I’ve only visited the Deep South once in my life. And that was Mississippi. Scared the shit out of me. These are people who deep-fry Eskimo pies.

We finished the evening enjoying a Korean meal in my favorite local restaurant. As a final gesture before he returned to Manhattan, Justin asked me to sign a Christmas card to the great director Robert Fuest. Fuest received it a few short months before he passed away.

Stories of camaraderie and friendship are all well and good. However, you didn’t buy this book because Justin and I have become such great pals. You bought this book because you love film and all of its minutiae. You also want to be entertained. And I am happy to report Justin is an exhaustive and dedicated researcher; a meticulous writer; and, most importantly, one funny white boy.

Darius H. James is the author of Negrophobia and That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadassssss `Tude (Rated X by an All Whyte Jury).

Introduction: Claims Too Absurd to Deliver!

Outsized claims were once an integral part of the horror film experience, before taglines, like the movie posters they adorned, became essentially a dead art. Here are a few choice samples for the uninitiated:

A new high in NAKED SHRIEKING TERROR!

It will burn itself in your memory forever!

Mightiest shocker the screen ever had the guts to make!

The biggest thing since creation!

The scream that shocks the screen with 300,000 VOLTS of HORROR!

Twisting the emotions of women, distorting our men! It’s an adventure that will burst your blood vessels with suspense!

You’ll live a THOUSAND TORMENTS of SHEER SHOCK!

But this one tops them all:

Six million light years beyond believability!

At least some truth snuck in.

Since it was the goal of these films’ producers to sell the sizzle, not the steak, as is common knowledge, the more exaggerated the ads’ claims, the less the films usually delivered…in some respects. Though I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) is, in its way, a wonderful, entertaining movie — especially when you consider the frenetic pace it was shot at and its minuscule budget — touting it as The most amazing motion picture of our time! was laying it on with a very wide brush. Horror films weren’t alone in this, either: bringing new meaning to the word hubris, the trailer to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) promised viewers: Be prepared to live the most wonderful experience of your life. (This extreme ballyhoo lives on; The Evil Dead remake, circa 2013, was sold as The most terrifying film you will ever experience. How can any mere movie possibly live up to that?)

In the tradition of the usurious promoters’ marvelous purple prose in those intoxicating ad campaigns, I titled this book Interviews too Shocking to Print! Yes, I confess: none of the interviews here are really all that shocking. But, I mean, is there any writing left that’s too shocking to print? Maybe an academic book that anybody outside of academia actually wants to read? Or something enriching, charming, or worthwhile by Lena Dunham? (And, in those cinematic hucksters’ tradition of false advertising, the cover photo is from House on Haunted Hill, despite there being no further mention of that film in this book. The image did suit the title, though, and Carol Ohmart is always easy on the eyes.)

Don’t expect much dirt to get dished here. The creative folk being covered are not ranting martinets of the Otto Preminger school or hell-raising but brilliant lunatics like Sam Peckinpah. They are/were all hardworking professionals who more often than not did their jobs with skill and panache and frequently under duress…Sometimes not, but each of them made horror films or television series that remain loved and appreciated to this day. Moviegoers who have no idea that top-flight golden age directors like Preminger or Howard Hawks ever existed watch these interviewees’ films. Hawks and Preminger never made movies with titles that are as tantalizing to a certain breed of moviegoers as I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) or I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958) are.

I began conducting these interviews when I was fifteen, mainly for my old friend Fabrice Lambot’s French magazine Atomovision. This book marks several of these interviews’ first publication in English. Conducting the interviews was a joy — transcribing them was, and always will always be, sheer hell. Listening to tapes of yourself as a teenager, stumbling through your first interviews with people far older and wiser than you, is a humbling experience. However, I’m delighted that they spoke to me and that I had the opportunity to record their reminiscences.

Today, there are dozens of questions that I wish I had asked my early interviewees who are now, almost to a man, deceased. Foremost among them is Gene Fowler, Jr., whose excellent I Married a Monster From Outer Space I covered only peripherally. Fortunately, after doing several hundred interviews, the right questions found their way in more and more frequently, but I do regret not having pursued certain areas more fully early on.

This isn’t a collection of interviews focused on any one specific creative branch of the movie and TV business. I have separated each of my subjects according to their professions to help make the book a bit more cohesive for nitpickers. The thread that binds all of these interviews together is that each of these men has made significant contributions to imaginative filmmaking, usually of the harrowing variety. You will also find a focus on individuals whose work is distinctively unique — there will never be another Chuck Griffith or William Finley. Interviewee Stewart Stern is by no means a fantasist, nor did he create any great one-off cinematic fantasies, but he did work closely with one of horror royalty, Boris Karloff, in a distinctive, darkly literary, and properly uncanny role. Stewart is also a top-notch raconteur, making his anecdotes doubly welcome here.

Some of my interviewees may seem esoteric, but that’s partly why I chose them. Their work always connected deeply with me, and a filmmaker’s popularity seldom had anything to do with whether or not I interviewed them. I have never felt, for instance, that Chuck Griffith every got his due. Plenty of my youthful cinematic obsessions are on display in these interviews and they aren’t exactly canonical.

I have the deepest respect for any member of a film crew who delivers an ‘A’ job on a ‘C,’ ‘D,’ or ‘Z’ budget, and, as I said, that kind of conscientious trouper is heavily represented here. I hope that, to aspiring filmmakers and established ones alike, it will be somehow instructional. The fabulous sets that Jack Fisk managed to assemble for Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Messiah of Evil (1973) for pocket change, and the script that Chuck Griffith penned for a hastily whipped-up masterpiece like A Bucket of Blood (1959) are, to me, the stuff of legend. In Herbert Strock’s How to Make a Monster (1958), there’s a line that, at a comic book level, sums up this struggle between (and the symbiosis created by) limited resources and ambition. Just before he calls action, the director of a duel between the Teenage Werewolf and Frankenstein’s Monster tells his cast: "It’s got to be the greatest fight we’ve ever had on the screen… And I’ve got to get it in one take."

I hope that this book’s somewhat unorthodox structure, with interviews presented in various formats alongside some essays, won’t be off-putting. It also crosses subjects and eras, and the interviews aren’t confined to discussions solely of horror and science fiction films. Several of these have been expanded with supplemental interviews grafted onto them. More than anything, I hope that I have done justice to my subjects, some of whom became dear friends. This book is written with great affection for them all.

And unlike this book’s title, I mean that most sincerely.

Justin Humphreys

Directed by:

Gene Fowler, Jr: Braces on My Fangs

"So [Herman Cohen] gave me I was a Teenage Werewolf. And I read the damn thing, and I said to Marjorie, ‘Christ almighty, this is the worst script I ever read! I can’t do this!’ And she said, ‘What difference does it make? Who the hell will know?’"

The first time that I called Gene Fowler, Jr. — his number was listed — I told him how much I loved I Was a Teenage Werewolf. I’m glad somebody does, he replied. Naive as I was, I thought I detected genuine sadness about it in his voice, and there may have been, more or less. I didn’t realize how typical that was of Fowler’s acerbic sense of humor, though, which (along with his looks) he inherited from his father.

The son of newspaperman and novelist Gene Fowler, Fowler, Jr. (1917-1998) began his career editing films for some of Hollywood’s finest directors. Among them were John Ford, whose VD scare movie Sex Hygiene (1942) Fowler cut, and Fritz Lang, who Fowler considered his directorial mentor. Fowler edited Lang’s Western Union (1941) (without credit), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), While the City Sleeps, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

Gene Fowler, Sr. was a top-flight 1920s newsman for the Heart papers. He coined one of the single most apt descriptions of writing, which everyone from Rod Serling to Stephen King has quoted: Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. His books included Good Night, Sweet Prince, a biography of his drinking buddy John Barrymore; Schnozzola, about — who else? — Jimmy Durante; and Beau James: The Life and Times of Jimmy Walker. Fowler, Sr. was a faithful patron of any saloon that sold alcoholic beverages, according to director Samuel Fuller, and he mingled warmly with people on every level of social strata. His close friends included writers Damon Runyan and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, The Dirty Dozen). In the 1940s, Fowler, Jr. wed Johnson’s daughter, Marjorie, who was his assistant editor on several films and later became one in her own right. Fowler, Sr. wrote scripts, as well, including some uncredited work on Howard Hawks’s screwball masterpiece Twentieth Century (1934).

As kids, Fowler and his brother, Will, were surrounded by luminaries. (Fowler, Sr.’s chum W. C. Fields kidded — ? — that Gene, Jr. and Will were the only kids on earth that he would tolerate.) Will parlayed those experiences partially into a career as a Hollywood raconteur. The Fowler boys and their father all shared a deeply wry, sometimes cynical wit.

As an adult, when Fowler, Jr. was initially assigned to work with Fritz Lang, he recalled, "I became aware of the man I was to work with. He was the director of a score of silent pictures, including Metropolis, a picture I saw as a child and which affected me so strongly that to this day I can remember the impression it left on me. I saw it in 1927 at the Garden Theater in Jamaica, Long Island. I had a nightmare that night…

"After the picture got underway, I learned that Lang had a reputation for ‘eating cutters alive.’ This bothered me not at all, for in 1940 I was twenty-four and I knew then much more than I know today. This attitude led to some lively discussions in the projection room. Looking back, I am thankful that at times I stood on firm ground, for I won some of the arguments.

"This initial sparring led me to the first of my discoveries of what Fritz Lang is. I found that he is intolerant. Intolerant of unprofessional work. He expects all those people working with him (the word ‘with’ is Lang’s) to have the same dedication and drive for perfection that he has. This attitude, I am unhappy to report, has hurt his reputation amongst some film people whose standards are somewhat lower. In some circles of Hollywood the word ‘perfection’ is a ten-letter four-letter word.

"I learned three other important things from Lang.

"First: That I had much to learn.

"Second: That Lang was easy to work with — if you were a nut like me: dedicated and twenty-four.

Third: That the number of things you can make one piece of film do is endless — if only you bend it the right way…

Lang’s innovative use of crane shots obviously had a major impact on Fowler’s own cinematographic technique, as his later directorial efforts attest. One of the most crucial lessons that Fowler learned from Lang was that If one knows the mechanics and prepares for their effective use, it leaves the directors time to work with the actors and to perfect a performance. And time is the most precious commodity a director has. Obviously, these were not the words of a sloppy poverty-row hack, nor was Fowler one.

Fowler summed up Lang in droll prose that could have easily come from Gene, Sr.: I have worked with Fritz on many pictures… and he has become a teacher, advisor, and most important, my friend. As a person Lang is shy and arrogant; dogmatic and open-minded; a creator and a follower; a conservative and a liberal. He is an avid reader of Dick Tracy with a violent aversion to Moon Maid. But best of all, he is a true picture-maker.

Maverick auteur Samuel Fuller felt deeply indebted to Gene Fowler, Sr., who had fostered his reportorial abilities when he was a teenage crime reporter. It was therefore only natural that Fuller should lavish some favoritism on his son. Their association began when Fuller returned from shooting Run of the Arrow in Utah. I needed a good editor to work with me on the movie, Fuller wrote in his autobiography. Out of the blue, Gene Fowler, my old friend and mentor, dropped in at our RKO production office to visit me. I was thrilled to see the Grand Old Man again. It’d been a long time. His roguish sense of humor was as fresh as when I’d first met him in the twenties. By chance, Gene, Jr. was with his father, and Fuller asked him to edit the film. My life was full of happy coincidences, Fuller wrote, Fowler Senior had edited my writing, and now Fowler Junior was editing my movie. I couldn’t have been in better hands. Fowler, Jr. cut several more Fuller films from the director’s halcyon years, including Forty Guns and China Gate (all 1957).

When Fowler finally got his chance to direct features, his education in the Fritz Lang school of filmmaking served him extremely well. Unlike low-budget horror hack directors like Al Adamson or Larry Buchanan, Fowler was never a hit-and-run trash specialist. He shot and edited his films with care and imagination that are still vividly apparent. (For God’s sake, he had Joseph LaShelle as a d.p. on his I Was a Teenage Werewolf — the cameraman who began his career as assistant to cinematographic god Greg Toland and who later gorgeously shot Laura (1944) and Nightmare Alley (1947)!

Take Fowler’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf’s opening credits, which appear over rustling black silk, shot in gorgeous black-and-white, producing images resembling strands of smoke wafting upwards wildly, eerily, and stylishly. This kind of inventiveness on the cheap, born from Fowler’s obviously well-developed cinematographic and editorial sensibilities, makes the film a cut (a slash from a werewolf ’s claws?) above American International Pictures’ usual product. This was in spite of the fact that, to rein his budget in, he had to draft his pet police dog, Anna, to play the bundle of canine fury that attacks Michael Landon’s titular werewolf. (Anna returned for a similar role in Fowler’s sole science fiction film, I Married a Monster From Outer Space — fortunately, she was a decent actress.) His rarefied sensibilities made Fowler contemptuous of his peers’ standard grindhouse fare. I guess the other producers must have been spending just about the same amount of money that we were, he told Tom Weaver, but their pictures were such shit.

A shining example of Fowler’s directorial superiority, in many ways, to those peers is the difference in quality of the pacing, editing, acting, and even the use of sound effects in two fairly similar scenes from I Married a Monster From Outer Space and Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World. Both films feature sequences where ordinary-looking policemen, possessed by diabolical aliens, cold-bloodedly gun people down. In Corman’s film, the scene is shot in broad daylight, and is flat, rushed, and workmanlike — typical let’s-get-this-over-with early Corman. But in Fowler’s, the scene is shot in oppressive darkness, all part of that film’s generally bleak monochromatic look, making his scene far more atmospheric than the other. Its pacing is deliberate and careful. And though the character that dies, a cheap gangster, is obviously unsavory, by the time the cops blast him, Fowler manages to inspire a genuine revulsion at their act’s sociopathy. He conveys this through the cops’ unsettling cheeriness as the thug riddles one of them with lead and a sudden cutaway. (The cherubic, Tom Hanks-like normalcy of the grinning cop’s face makes the scene doubly disconcerting.) And instead of showing a character actor flop over bloodlessly as Corman did, Fowler uses a well-timed cut on the scene’s climactic gunshot sound effect, shifting his camera’s gaze to Gloria Talbott’s shocked response to the jolting blast in her bedroom.

Fowler lavished similar care on Teenage Werewolf, and, largely for that reason, it remains compelling. Michael Landon’s tortured, violence-prone Tony was a potent symbol of that era’s teenage angst. As if his having his hormones celebrating the Fourth of July wasn’t torture enough, Tony needs, to paraphrase The Cramps’ song named after the film, braces on his fangs.

Unlike James Dean’s whiny, spoiled Jim in Rebel Without a Cause, who lives in splendor compared to Landon’s Tony, Tony is motherless and his family is relatively poor compared to his petit bourgeois girlfriend’s, Arlene. His rebellion seems much more logical and sympathetic than Jim’s. In the scenes where Tony is confronted by stultifying adults, their surreally drab pronouncements are enough to drive the Dalai Lama to bloody murder.

Sometimes you just have to do things the way people want ’em done, says his defeated, broken-down father — a mechanic or tradesman of some sort. Sometimes you just have to do it the other fella’s way. His girlfriend’s parents are equally stimulating and encouraging: they want their daughter to go out with A young man who keeps busy with the right kind of things. Like sprinkle a lawn? Tony retorts. Take out a paper route? Haul boxes in the market? Ornery but still dispirited, her father tells him flatly, You’ve got to bow to authority. These scenes are epically heavy-handed, but also peculiarly truthful and effective because of that very forthrightness.

If the film shows an overwhelming distrust of adults, nowhere is it more intense than in Whit Bissell’s portrayal of Dr. Brandon, the warped psychiatrist who nurtures Tony’s natural violence. A trusted figure in the community, with the backing of the police department and Tony’s high school principal, the doctor is secretly a sociopath to whom Tony’s victims’ lives are as important as those of paramecium swimming in a petri dish, a point he repeatedly makes. The boy provides him (and this mad scientist’s requisite assistant, Hugo) the perfect subject for his experiment: Tony is physically fit, and offers the proper disturbed emotional background.

The doctor describes his central hypothesis in the wacky way that only characters in an AIP movie can: Through hypnosis, I’m going to regress this boy back… back into the primitive past that lurks within him. I’m going to transform him and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within… Then, I’ll be judged a benefactor. Mankind is on the verge of destroying itself. The only hope for the human race is to hurl it back into its primitive dawn… to start all over again. Like a ‘B’-movie Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the doctor is wronger than wrong. Guess he never read Lord of the Flies.

Even more so, his words, albeit inarticulately, echo the twisted logic of science fiction novelist J.G. Ballard’s characters in novels like High-Rise and Super-Cannes. Somewhat like Fowler’s, Ballard’s puppet-masters are intent on improving bloodless modern mankind’s lot by giving it much-needed doses of savagery. And, all cockamamie AIP-movie pseudo-science aside, in the twenty-first century, with quack psychiatrists routinely doling out anti-depressants and other powerful sedatives as if they were Skittles or Tic-Tacs and doing untold harm in the process, the film’s distrust of the mental hygiene community is well-founded, healthy, and inadvertently prophetic.

Are these comparisons strained? Almost definitely. And is this taking the film too seriously? To most. But it is much, much better than most conventional moviegoers would ever give it credit for. Many would dismiss it outright based on the title, but that title gained Teenage Werewolf a kind of immortality — it became shorthand for ‘B’-movies, part of the pop cultural lexicon. Clips from the film even popped up at a drive-in in Lonelyhearts (1959) starring Montgomery Clift, and what better movie to show at one? During the nostalgia wave of the ’70s, the rock ‘n’ roll performance movie Let the Good Times Roll (1973) featured a clip from Teenage Werewolf during a montage of quintessentially ’50s clips.

But in spite of the condescension heaped on the film by the unperceptive — the fate of a lot of solid ‘B’-movies — Teenage Werewolf is a very respectable film. What if those same critics who bashed movies like it had to go out and had to come back with a releasable movie shot in fiveand-a-half days, in 35mm, on a nominal budget, with a newcomer in a leading role that’s heavy on makeup, like Fowler did? The results probably wouldn’t be one iota as well-shot, well-acted (particularly by Michael Landon or Whit Bissell), or well-scored. (Composer Paul Dunlop may have been composing music for a ‘B’-movie but he did an ‘A’-picture job on it.) Take for example the cretins at Mystery Science Theater 3000, who gave it a shellacking — in spite of the fact that about three people came to see Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie… Physician, heal thyself.

And the odds are even slimmer that anything that those armchair auteurs made could become as big a hit as Teenage Werewolf or have it become a kid of perverse cinematic landmark. Teenage Werewolf was such a hit that it set the formula for producer Herman Cohen’s teen horror movies: a misunderstood teenager is created and manipulated to kill by an evil adult genius. The films inevitably end with the mad adult doctor’s death and, with one exception, the teen’s destruction. The Cohen teen monster movies’ attitude seems to be, if adults are insane enough to justify weapons that can incinerate whole countries, why are they making such a big deal over one teen’s delinquency? Besides, no teenager ever started a war.

Fowler took a decidedly more adult approach with his I Married a Monster From Outer Space. It’s an eerie film that becomes even stranger and more arresting when taken purely visually with its soundtrack muted. Gliding along sinuously, Fowler’s camera seldom stops, giving the film an uncomfortably fluid feel. Its camera work is in the best Old Hollywood tradition — panning and tracking smoothly, yet intensely and insistently truly natural in ways that were later replaced and betrayed by the jittery documentary-style naturalism of current cinematography. For what it is, the film is extraordinary and amazingly stylish, which is no doubt partly attributable to its champion editor, George Tomasini, a frequent collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock’s. Considering Fowler’s background, he probably easily recognized Tomasini’s brilliance.

Much of I Married a Monster… is set in a twilit netherworld — a world that combines the look of mid-budget films noir and Gothic horrors. This is a night world where pedestrians don’t exist, and with the sparsest of populations: the heroine, a briefly-glimpsed couple making out, cops, floozies and other barflies, and aliens disguised as barflies. Even the disguised aliens talk like thugs. (The bars where a sizeable chunk of the film takes place and the rummies who seem to do everything but bathe in them are akin to the lowlifes and lushes that Fowler’s reporter father — a heavyweight drinker himself — dealt intimately with for decades. This milieu was probably not unfamiliar to Fowler.)

But the film isn’t heavily tinged with noir-ish Expressionistic flourishes, but nearly everything is grey and dimly-lit — except for the heroine’s kitchen, it seems. Several key scenes are shot like a mid-budget Gothic, particularly when the heroine tails her husband through the darkened streets and woods to his destination: the alien craft. Clad only in her nightdress and an overcoat,