The City of the Dead (1960)

 

    There are exactly three interesting things about this movie, four if you’re generous and include all the inexplicable references various musicians have made to it over the years.  None of these interesting things include the plot, acting, or set design.  One kinda involves the cinematography, I guess.

Y'know, 'understated' is a polite way of saying 'boring.'

    The first thing of note is that, despite my absolute conviction that it was, this is not a rip off of ‘Psycho.’  By itself this doesn’t seem that striking, most movies aren’t rip offs of ‘Psycho.’  However, consider: the main character is a young woman who travels to a remote location, checks into a hotel, and is killed about halfway through the movie.  The rest of the movie then follows that character’s sibling as they investigate the death and discover the horrible truth behind her murder, ending on a spooky reveal shot of the killer.  They both even had television roots, with ‘Psycho’ being filmed by the crew handling the TV show ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ and the script for this starting as a pilot for an unproduced horror TV show starring Boris Karloff.  But since they came out in the same month and were in production on different continents at roughly the same time the claim falls apart.  If the production histories weren’t so clear and they hadn’t come out so close together it would be almost impossible to argue that one didn’t rip off the other. 

    I guess the people behind the production are almost interesting as well.  The film was the first produced by Vulcan Productions, headed by Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, which would quickly become the much better known Amicus Productions, a rival to Hammer Films, and probably most famous for the two theatrical Doctor Who films starring Peter Cushing.  Although they shared many of the same actors with Hammer Films I don’t consider movies such as ‘The Deadly Bees’ as putting up too much of a fight for the title of king of British horror.

    To the plot, such as it is.  I want to get to interesting thing number two as quickly as possible so here we go: after an opening witchburning scene that explicitly lays out that yup, this woman is a Satan-worshipping witch and also Satan is very real, a young student at a nondescript college who is really into witchcraft asks her professor (played by Christopher Lee showing exactly no evidence he would go on to become, well, Christopher Lee) for advice on research for her thesis.  He directs her to the small town of Whitewood, over the objections of her brother and her boyfriend.

    She proceeds to the small town where, very slowly, obviously spooky things start to happen to which she reacts with general indifference.  She picks up a hitchhiker who disappears from her car to her blithe unconcern, as she wanders the small town villagers stop dead in their tracks and stare spookily at her which she also shrugs off, the blind priest warns her directly to leave before kind of wandering off, she sees a scene of strangers stiffly dancing in the middle of the hotel lobby and decides that looks like a swell scene and changes into party clothes to join them only for the crowd to vanish the second she steps outside, is mildly concerned when a murdered bird appears on her dresser, that sort of thing.  I’m slightly surprised that she’s so upset when, after descending into the spooky trapdoor in her room to see what all the chanting is about, maybe something to do with all those robed figures filing through the graveyard in the middle of the night she’d just watched, she’s grabbed and stabbed to death on an altar.

    And here’s where that second thing comes in because the town is very, very foggy.  No, I mean foggy.  Even foggier than that.  I mean, look:

It never gets less silly.

     This is a downright silly amount of fog.  The budget was apparently something like £45,000, or a bit under $1,500,000 in today’s dollars, and if a third of that didn’t go into the dry ice fund I would be shocked. 

    I understand the desire for the fog, I can even appreciate the need for the fog.  Spielberg couldn’t make a movie if you took away his fog and hazing machines, that light ain’t gonna diffuse itself.  But that amount of fog in that small a set makes me seriously worried that if any children had wandered onto the production they would’ve been close enough to the ground to be in serious danger of carbon dioxide poisoning. 

    This amount of fog, in addition to apparently not causing any concern in our main character, also underlines how little this town makes sense.  Sure, it’s been cursed by the witch who was burned at the stake in the beginning and whose actress is now operating the only inn in a town comprised of a cemetery and like six buildings (the movie is incredibly unsubtle, at no point does it even pretend there is a whiff of ambiguity around any of the supernatural shenanigans, it tells you exactly what is going on and who is doing it at all times) so yeah, the villagers are all Satan-worshipping dead-eyed shamblers, but there are a couple of normal characters who also live there and Christopher Lee’s character managed to find gainful employment in the real world despite being born and raised there and there is not a hint of how this town operates in any meaningful fashion.  There is a working electrical grid and at least one functioning telephone, people in the neighboring towns don’t go there but they know the directions, there’s a bookshop run by the local priest’s granddaughter which seems pleasant enough even though there is literally no way it has any customers at all much less enough to be an ongoing concern.  There is no economy to be had but it’s not like it’s this faerie realm cut off from the outside world, it would just make so much more sense if it was.  And our heroine just merrily traipses through all of this then has the nerve to start screaming when they hold her down and start the stabbing, if she’s going to be upset about this sort of thing she should have started well before that.

I guess there were no signs of danger.

    The third interesting thing is the character who was obviously inserted into the story to expand the script from beyond its TV pilot origins and to make it feature length.  Although the ultimate main character is our heroine’s brother and the secondary character is the priest’s granddaughter we somehow also have the heroine’s boyfriend who, outside of the climax (which we’ll get to) serves no actual function in the script.  His role is to be against her going to Whitewood, be concerned when she doesn’t come back, then go to the town to find out what happened to her.  Which is all useful enough, plot-wise.  Except, and this is important, that’s literally the exact same function the brother serves in the story and it’s quickly established that he’s the one who the movie is going to follow.

    Every time there’s a typical story beat, such as “You shouldn’t go to that town,” or “She’s been missing, we should call the cops,” or “I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” he’s in that scene watching the brother say those lines and take those actions.  When the priest’s granddaughter comes to return a locket his sister left behind while she was getting stabbed to death the boyfriend is in that scene, sure, but he’s just watching the two actual film characters have a conversation.  When the brother drives off to investigate the town he sneakily follows in his own car, secretly going to investigate on his own despite it being perfectly reasonable to ask to go along as well.

    Then the movie twists itself around to kind of backwards justify the climax of the film and the inclusion of the boyfriend in the first place.  So the big final scene is in the cemetery where the coven of witches is going to sacrifice the priest’s granddaughter at the thirteenth tolling of the bell, it’s a whole thing.  The brother is being restrained by the coven, the only other established non-coven character was a mute girl inexplicably working at the inn who was randomly strangled earlier because the movie needed to set up a jump scare when her corpse was discovered, so they need another character to bravely stop the ritual and in doing so sacrifice his own life.  This ends up being the boyfriend.

    Now, how did he get to this point?  Well, after following behind the brother on those foggy, foggy roads he sees a vision flash in his windscreen of the opening witchburning scene and violently crashes his car.  We see him crawling bloodily from the car and collapsing against a tree.  Many scenes later the brother has just found out the priest’s granddaughter has been seized by the cult for sacrificing reasons when the boyfriend grabs his shoulder from out of frame then immediately passes out, apparently having slowly crawled there through the woods.

    The brother carries him to his car, pieta style, then dashes off to the cemetery to utterly fail at rescuing the priest’s granddaughter.  During this the boyfriend gets out of the car and staggers over to the cemetery.  It was technically established that the witches can be defeated by a cross, and despite the sacrifice taking place in a cemetery absolutely covered in crosses and it not having been a problem for them up to this point the brother shouts at him to grab a cross.  While he groggily starts doing so one of the coven throws a knife into his back.  Unwilling to exit the film quite yet the boyfriend manages to rip a huge cross out of the ground and stagger towards the witches.  When he gets close enough bolts of fire zip out of the cross and burn the witches to death.  He drives them off before finally collapsing, after which the brother checks on him just long enough to confirm he’s dead before chasing after the final witch.

We'll never forget you, main character's sister's boyfriend.

    The function of this character baffles me, and it must have baffled the script as well because he’s so transparently superfluous that after the car crash (which happens about three quarters through the movie) he doesn’t have any dialogue at all, and before that all of his dialogue was basically echoing whatever the actual character in a scene was saying.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial rough draft of the script was around ten pages too short and they decided to stick in another character just to have some longer dialogue scenes.

    I have to say I was pretty disappointed in this one, especially coming after ‘Black Sunday.’  You can certainly say things against that film but boring isn’t one of them, and that’s my main complaint against ‘City of the Dead.’  For a 78 minute film there was a whole lot of padding and overly long shots.  Scenes would basically repeat (there are three separate and nearly identical scenes of characters asking for directions) or exist for the sole purpose of taking whatever tension or ambiguity might exist and slowly and thoroughly grinding them out of existence.  There are at least two scenes where the two main villain characters have conversations where they confirm what they did, why they did it, what they plan to do next, and why.  Unless you are a fan of dry ice, British people doing decent American accents, and watching a film utterly squandering Christopher Lee you can safely give this one a pass.

    Oh, right, those musical references I mentioned.  Clips from this film were used in music videos for bands such as Iron Maiden, King Diamond, and UFX, and at the beginning of the rock classic “Dragula” by the director of the worst of the movies titled ‘Halloween’ you can hear Christopher Lee intone the immortal line “superstition, fear, and jealousy.”  I still prefer Kate Bush.