The holidays I love the most are Halloween and Christmas—as I’m sure many others would choose—and Easter, which gives the other two a competitive push. It’s also a day whose spirit I seek to keep in my heart all year round—as Scrooge learned to do with what became his treasured Yule.
The close of each day has a tinge of Easter in my life. Tomorrow, I may become anew because I can do better than I did with the day that is ending. I can be better. These things that I am free to do—if I am able to do them—in every aspect of my life, be it artistically, emotionally, mentally, morally, and spiritually. That is my goal with an outcome I can control: be better tomorrow than I’ve ever been. Work at it.
I think people who have known what Stephen Foster once called hard times—as he then beseeched them not to come again—are of a greater likelihood to take to Easter and embrace its essence. The flitters and shirkers aren’t cut out for Easter. But if you’re someone who believes it’s better to go up the stairs than down them in the larger schema of life, then Easter has to mean something to you.
As a kid, we’d go over to my grandmother’s house after the plastic eggs containing candy treats had been plucked from their hiding spots and a quantity of those goodies had been consumed–not a gorging worthy of Halloween night, but a solid few mouthfuls. I always remember this being later in the afternoon than it probably was. Or else the curtains were just drawn. Invariably, a religious epic would be playing on the television, to be followed by another, and another, such that when we finally went home again and Christ had been killed three times over, I would be uncertain as to whether or not there was a rule that these films all had to be many hours in length as well as frightening—more so, oddly, than actual horror films, which tended to be fun, troubled as I remained by Bela Lugosi’s face rotting away in The Return of the Vampire.
Seeing the man nailed to the cross wasn’t fun. The heavens were dark, and you’d get a crack of thunder as if this world within the movie possessed sufficient verisimilitude that whatever was going on in there was about to leak out of the set and shave some days off the real world where you sat, agog, and nearly forgetting to swallow that jelly bean that had turned to paste in your mouth.
Homes of these older relatives featured at least one painting of a saint. Often, it hung in the spare bedroom, so if your parents went away for a weekend and left you there, you were going to have to deal with this supernatural being—they had a halo, after all—staring at you as you tried to fall asleep, which was bad enough, and then doing God knows what (sorry) as you slept. This made for less than refreshing slumbers. In the morning, having survived, I pulled a Handel, declaring, “Death, where is thy sting? / O grave, where is thy victory?” By which I mean, I’d respond to whomever had asked that I was fine and eat the eggs that they provided as part of the breakfast.
Easter is a holiday in which death is central. Death happens, and it is not considered terrible—an idea that can mess us up in trying to process it. But that’s because with death—and the close of the day—comes the opportunity of tomorrow. We are talking metaphor here, but when, really—if we understand anything for what it is—are we not? That which is true is meant to be extrapolated. As for our lives: this over here needs to be cashed out so that we’re able to start again. The start is not a given. It doesn’t happen on its own. We must be conscious of the opportunity in order to realize that we should make the most of it and then set about whatever that entails.
None of this has much to do with religion, nor—gasp—does Easter, which would appear to be the most misleading thing we can say about the day, but anything that automatically leaves anyone behind—including those who are not religious—is not so good a thing as it can be, and I think Easter is pretty great. Scary, sure, but also uplifting—depending on how you process the information and the truths it wishes to give you, so that you may not only live better but become more alive each day. And when we become more alive, we become more human, and we help others in these imperative ventures as well. Also, you can make your latest attempt to convince yourself that Cadbury eggs aren’t disgusting, bewitched as you are for another season by the tourmaline foil and odd appeal of the chocolate/facsimile poultry by-product concept, only to pay the gastrointestinal price, then 365 days later give them another go, the lesson still not learned.
Better yet, there’s the watching of Easter-inflected horror films. Remember: at the core of Easter is a ghost story. A man is murdered. His body is put in a cave. A spirit makes a round of visits. Three days after his internment, the man comes back from the dead.
Are we not tasked with doing the same within the scope of our own journeys? Is that not how we expand the range of our possibilities? Certainly inwardly, as a person. You have to come back. You can’t give in or stay down. This isn’t about popping out of the coffin—it’s about carrying on and doing better than one had been previously. That takes strength and, yes, spirit.
So let’s consider some films rife with spirit—and spirits—and many returns from the land of the dead back to the realm of the living that we can watch in the home here at Eastertide.
The title itself could be the tagline for a movie of Christ’s reappearance if there were movies 2,000-plus years ago. Just when you thought he was all washed up… He’s back from the dead! Dick (Arthur Franz), his pregnant wife Mandy (Peggie Castle), and her sister Kate (Marsha Hunt) depart for a trip together to a coastal cottage that Dick has owned for some time that takes a detour toward the wicked when Mandy becomes possessed by Dick’s deceased first wife, Felicia, and is now her, who—well, let’s be frank—is not the nicest person.
We meet Felicia’s parents, who are also a handful, with the dad declaring that God is about to dish out some punishment. Whether one takes religious matters literally—that is, some man walked on water, and we’re not being figurative—or rates it all as bunk for the easily brainwashed, there was a man named Jesus who thought highly of love and believed it ought to be the orchestrating power of a person’s life, which makes it rather odd how many religious people speak in terms of fear and punishment. Words of wrath.
The movie is also about living with someone in your life who is no longer themselves or has lost themselves. We’ve all been there. What if we can’t reach them? What if they’re lost to us? Lost to themselves? Do we stay so that we can make sure they have someone? How long until we move on without them?
Among the trickier points—which is to say, the worst—of life is that we can only control what we can control, and that isn’t much. The person we are is within the reach of our control, but not in this film for Mandy. The movie may be a humble B, but it’s crisply shot and the coastal setting and photography will kindle memories of your favorite seaside locales.
The influence of 1944’s The Uninvited is palpable, but the films are in different leagues, meaning that Back from the Dead resonates as sufficiently original—or comfortable in its own skin, anyway, which is important whether you’re a movie or a person. There’s also a witch and a scene with a sleeping Kate who is nearly killed by the gas of a heater but rescued by a character who was about as offstage as offstage can be. The modern viewer watching said scene will be amazed how easy it was at the time to kill a sleeper just by shutting the window and turning a knob, which itself is shudder-inducing. The movie’s working title was The Other One, and I think that’s how the Holy Ghost was first known, but I could be mistaken.
An ostensibly stupid title does not mean that a film itself will be stupid, and what strikes us as a stupid title at first can actually be the right and worthy title of a film. Teenagers from Outer Space is like that. I first watched this film in high school, appropriately enough, having seen a reference to it in a book of Lester Bangs’s writings. I was always finding films to watch in this manner. An interview, old magazine article, hunting through TV Guide. That was—and remains—your best bet for locating gems like this one, and, yes, I will call it a gem. Not a diamond, mind you, but some crusted garnet you hammered out of a ledge on your hike and were happy to take home.
Aficionados of 1950s sci-fi horror adore this film, and well they should. Director Graeff also wrote the screenplay, produced the picture, and played newsman Joe Rogers, thus completing the Orson Welles–like star turn. A group of young aliens land on earth, seeking a place to raise creatures they call Gargons, which grow to dinosaur proportions and must be harvested from above for their meat, and that you’re going to think is a lobster in a little cage—simple human—but go with it.
Among their number is Thor (Bryan Grant), who has a heavy trigger finger when it comes to the old disintegrating ray gun. He immediately fries a cute dog, which creates a rift between Thor and his crewmates—who couldn’t care less—and the lone dissenting voice that belongs to Derek (David Love). He’s the son of the alien leader, who is back off in some other world and, as it turns out, is essentially here to save humankind. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, I give you teenage space Jesus.
The dialogue is stilted, but you suspect somewhat intentionally so in a movie that’s a mash-up of the honest look and feel of its times and the fabular. David falls for Betty (Dawn Bender), the girl who lives with her grandfather and has a room to let, and what remains of your teenage self—though hopefully it’s not too much—may as well. What stands out today, in a time when connections are rare and true connections all but extinct, is how readily it appears that connections were once made. It’s a nice watch for children and a film that at times hits home for adults in a narcissistic world that lacks for love, with its requisite selflessness and genuine concern for another person.
There was a time when Vincent Price’s name was synonymous with hammy acting. If you’d read about Price before watching his films, you’d have thought he did nothing but mug for the camera and sink his teeth into the scenery and then masticate exaggeratedly while dispensing winks.
All of that would be false. Price almost always classed up a picture, and you were drawn to and charmed by him in his most villainous roles. He was also adept at playing people who were bad but not totally bad, or pretty bad indeed but such that you understood—because of Price—why they’d gotten there. Plus: no actor—including formidable contenders like George Sanders—did urbanity so well.
Before he became the baron of horror, Price played shady characters of dubious motives in what have since become classified as noirs, whether they were true noirs or not. 1944’s Laura is the leading example, with Price playing a soft-voiced snake of a guy who is paradoxically empowered—because you never know what he’s up to—by being cuckolded.
It seems that any film with a crime in it from the 1940s gets labeled as noir, and that’s how it goes with Alfred L. Werker’s mid-decade Shock, which isn’t noir at all. A young woman (Lynn Bari) checks into a hotel to await the return of her lieutenant husband (Frank Latimore) from the war. While doing so, she looks out from her balcony and witnesses our man Vincent clubbing his wife to death with a candlestick, because he has a new lady (Anabel Shaw) and this earlier fusspot with her beliefs about in sickness and in health and until death do us part won’t take her leave graciously.
Seeing this slaying sends the new bride into shock. Her husband arrives and medicos are called in, including—wouldn’t you know—Price as shock specialist Dr. Richard Cross, who finds a bed for the patient at his country sanatorium, with the aim of drugging the memories out of her mind, getting people to think she’s crazy, or, as a last resort, doing what you can doubtless guess.
The film is full of the season of spring. Compositions double as homages to rebirth. Strolls are taken upon the grounds. We can practically smell the budding flowers and hear the buzzing bees. Visually, this isn’t a dark picture—save for a stormy night and a couple of evening visits to Cross’s cozy cabin-style home—which contravenes the noir designation. A tandem of mystery and horror are instead the joint drivers of the movie.
We also get a case study in the paradox that behavior in a film and that same behavior in real life are often two unreconcilable things. Kill your wife and then plot to kill again, you are bad through and through. But if you’re Dr. Cross in Shock, you’re bad, but you are also not completely bad. There is some moral fiber left within the character by the film’s close, which itself germinates into low-level—along the lines of a flowering weed—redemption. But redemption is redemption, no matter who you are—or Easter maintains, anyway.
Ruses are seldomly well-thought-out in mid-century horror films, when it became less about plausibility and more about turning the monster loose on the screen to bite some throats, stomp a few villagers, leap from coffins, menace the mountain-town citizenship. Still, if you’re Dracula—or his son (which, one presumes, means some man he bit, turned into a member of the undead, and then… adopted?)—there’s probably a less traceable way to go than writing your name backwards on your luggage as Alucard as if even Sherlock Holmes would be stymied in getting to the bottom of your insoluble ruse. Right…
But that’s how it goes in Son of Dracula, with a miscast Lon Chaney Jr. in the role of the Count. Chaney works best for beefy parts, and I don’t mean with more meat on them. He’s better cast as a lug, a lumberer—if he’s to be a baddie—or a sort of doughy everyman—dad bod galore—with a problem on his hairy hands, like what becomes of a man who turns into a werewolf when the autumn moon is full and bright and the self-help books he’s been reading have no suggested fix.
Dracula is a Christ-like character, albeit Christ in reverse. The blood is the life in Stoker’s novel and in every Dracula adaptation of every sanguine stripe since. It’s not cherry cola that keeps that fellow going. And now we have the son of the big guy, who is also the big guy, which is a bit like that whole God-Jesus deal, yes? The screenwriters must have thought the Alucard subterfuge was (un)dead clever because we get close-ups of the luggage tags and characters intone the word s-l-o-w-l-y, but it quickly proves to be something that everyone knows. Eh, it’s Dracula, but it could be one of those Draculas from the Newport ship-building clan. What’s in a name?
This Dracula has come to America for fresh, pure blood. The taste is off in Europe, but the States are newer. There is possibly a virginal metaphor in there. We are in the South, thus there’s the novelty of watching Dracula move through swamps, and the picture, to be fair, isn’t dreck. We’re not talking a classic, but you can understand how this would have been enjoyed by audiences in 1943, given that it remains worth a watch now. There is only one scene of unintentional humor, that being when Dracula’s coffin has been lit on fire and he demands that that the arsonist put it out, sounding like some whining child and definitely not worthy of the name of Alucard. You know what I mean.
Sticking to the 1940s Universals like sugary Easter-candy residue to the tips of your fingers, we have 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb, the third film in the studio’s cycle of the dexterously bandaged one if you’re keeping score in your sarcophagus at home. The movie isn’t the stately thriller that the original from 1932 with Boris Karloff was, but it contains the most shocking moment of any Universal horror film after the core classics of 1931-1935.
Once again, we have Chaney, and this time he lumbers as befitting his skill set, playing Kharis the mummy, who is essentially a hit man. This is the mummy of your Halloween costumes, what you think a mummy ought to look like, though if you’ve been to a museum where they’re on display, you know that’s not really true.
As for Easter: we have a tomb, and someone emerging from it, which is pretty on-brand. You can’t keep a good man dead, as they say, which, come to think of it, is also the thematic crux of the New Testament. Universal horror sequels—and so forth—of the 1940s can be awfully ropey. An adult who went to the movies to see 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein may have thought, “This is artfully done,” whereas that same adult seeing Universal’s latest 10 years hence would have said to himself, “This is for children, what am I doing?” Were he not, that is, one possessed by the horror bug. Poor soul.
But 1940’s The Mummy’s Hand—number two in the series—is actually solid, thanks to its ingratiating two main good-guy characters: Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford), a best-buddy archeologist team. Don’t you wish you had someone with whom to dig? There’s is a happy outcome in that picture, and then we find them again—30 years later in the chronology—living their lives within The Mummy’s Tomb. We’re glad to see them again, these hale fellows. And then—and I’ve never not found this shocking—Chaney’s mummy shows up early on for a couple of home invasions, and murders both. And you thought Hitchcock was all cutting edge in bumping off Janet Leigh closer to the start than the end of Psycho two decades later.
Christ was roughly 33 on the day he was nailed to the cross. Our time can come at any moment, which is why we must try to be the best that we can be every second. Or that’s among a number of myriad reasons, anyway. Easter isn’t as flashy as Halloween or Christmas, though the power of the latter is in its interstitial, quieter elements, and understanding the season’s true meaning, which is harder to do because that meaning is often at odds with how Christmas is presented, marketed, and treated. Easter requires thought. Presence. Like some music—an album by Nick Drake, a Grateful Dead performance of “Dark Star.” We have to sit and be and ruminate. Then we profit when we grow.
People don’t cry when they watch Universal horror films, save perhaps in the exception of this one when our friends—for they feel like friends—meet their most untimely ends. But what is time? What is the end? We cede those concepts enough power in our minds that we all but manufacture what we’re certain is a dearth of the former—you have time; breathe; focus; move forward—and are so scared of the latter that we banish it from our thoughts the best—or the worst, really—we can, and we don’t truly live, with all that entails, including helping others to do the same.
The Mummy’s Tomb will give you a leg up out of the figurative tomb. Shift that boulder a touch to the side in order to squeeze out of the cave a bit better and live within the light. That’s not a God thing any more or less than it’s a Kharis thing, or an Alucard thing, or a Vincent Price thing, or a possession thing, or a don’t fear the lobster thing. But you will see evidence of that thing in Easter—and these films—if you know how to look with love. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
FRESH BLOOD
Upon initial considerations, lovers of horror films might not strike us as romantics.
BY COLIN FLEMING | February 10, 2025
Were you to remark that the 1940s represented a peak in American pop-cultural horror, most people would automatically think you were talking about movies.
BY COLIN FLEMING | December 22, 2023
When it comes to ghost stories—the foundational texts, be they written or oral, of horror—the Irish are tough to beat. Fear is a spirit. A ghost may take the form of what we’ve allowed ourselves...
BY COLIN FLEMING | March 17, 2025
RAVENOUS
This pre-Code offering packs a lot of story into its typically brisk running time, with several plot threads weaving together a (not always successful) tapestry of spooky and criminal doings.
READ MORE >
BY ANN OLSSON | Month 00, 2021
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.
READ MORE >
BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
READ MORE >
BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021