Celebrating this morning my 'partial win' in the Hoofing Myself Repeatedly, Painfully in My Groin competition I started (I heard someone else was going to start their own before me, this might not be true) none of my friends want to join in with
A photograph of the book Frankenstein's Witch: St. Lizzie, Pray for Us (subtitled A Porter Down Hollywood Mystery) by Gregory William Mank on a wooden table top with a 'Haunted Bookmark' uh... bookmark... on it from Goosebumps showing the character The Mud Monster.
Post-work moment with a good book, in a cafe/bar, supported by one of my favourite bookmarks (yes, I have favourites)
Honourable mentions...
A Row Of Open Graves - Jamie Evans
Fulci's Inferno - Matt Rogerson
@vanjpes.bsky.social @1428publishing.bsky.social
📚🔥🤌🏻
🙏🏻 thank you, Al, you star 🖤
Psst! Don't tell anyone but there's now a pre-order link for the eBook:
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DC5PL7T4
Aside from being absurd and enjoyable, this is a goldmine of VHS-quality screenshots. What a find indeed.
I see we both watched the same dead-eyed stumble down a hill in the spirit it was (un)intended
Loved those Kasabian sketches on SNL:UK, brutally satirising unremarkable pub bands that get inexplicably famous, have close friendships with one of *those* comedians, implode internally, but somehow still get prime-time slots on a major channel's flagship comedy show. Great work, writers. Unless...
I'm glad people enjoyed it, just not for me. So it goes, lots more films out there.
BLOG POST: Instead of a newsletter, I do a blog post like this once in a while with notes on interesting books and films, and a glimpse into the various creative projects I have on the go.
precastreinforced.co.uk/2026/04/03/r...
A 'recent activity' block from Letterboxd shows four films, The Lucky Dog, Behind the Door, His Wooden Wedding and Superman
An agreeable and needed upswing after a poor start to this week's #lastfourwatched for an occasional #LetterboxdFriday post
It's solidly, occasionally excitingly directed, laying groundwork for later fucked-up Morris adaptations featuring Lon Chaney, notably the following year's The Penalty. One-time screen Dr Jekyll, Hobart Bosworth, does good work as its tortured 'hero'. Glad this one was restored as much as could be.
Behind the Door title card
Screenshot of a man in uniform, carrying a holdall, stood in a graveyard on a hill overlooking a bay. The man has his hand raised, looking out to a town further down the coast.
A man in uniform in a submarine setting, his face obscured by his hands holding a periscope he is looking into
A man, soaked through in a shirt, gesticulates at another man's face, barely visible through a small submarine window
Tonight's 📽 Behind the Door, (1919, dir. Irvin Willat), is an adaptation of a Gouverneur Morris short story. A mostly fine WW1-time drama of a couple struggling to stay together despite prejudice and duty, it takes a wild pivot into a *stunningly* unpleasant last 20 minutes that is still shocking.
Whenever I go church crawling, I obsessively look for graffiti. Recently, in All Saints Church, Claverley, I hit the jackpot when I found this fantastic little guy ✨️
#history #churchcrawling #churches #historicgraffiti #churchesoftheworld
And this one, from the later Dragnet 1969, 'Public Affairs', with Friday and Gannon appearing on a debate show trying to justify the existence of a police force, starting with answering “Property rights are all they care about, not human rights.”
youtu.be/W63vn4FGyoM
One of my favourite Dragnet episodes centres on a duel of wills between Friday and suspected murderer Henry Ross (a pre-📽 stardom Lee Marvin) and who will break first
youtu.be/FRpwwHjczw0
Jack Webb was BOTD in 1920, so here's something I wrote on the achievements of a television pioneer
arowofopengraves.co.uk/2025/03/11/j...
This is a great read on a forgotten horror series here, very much recommended:
"The few grainy episodes I caught haunted me for years, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what I had seen. Indeed... my memories of The Evil Touch were so blurred and uncertain, I wondered whether I’d just imagined it."
Chaney in hat and coat, sat on the steps of a building. He is being interrupted in his melancholy by a delightful dog who has rested on Chaney and elicited a smile. From The Ace of Hearts.
Molly and partner-in-crime Bill at the door to their apartment, Lon Chaney (in suit and tilted hat) surprising them. From Outside the Law.
Lon Chaney in a doctor's gown, with thick greyed hair, advancing towards the camera, an angry, sinister expression on his face. From The Monster.
Lon Chaney in stage suit, top hat and exaggerated moustache stands next to a coffin open to reveal a skeleton. From West of Zanzibar.
A brilliant, beautiful actor.
Poster for West of Zanzibar (1928, dir. Tod Browning)
Poster for The Unholy Three (1930, dir. Jack Conway)
Finally (though despite the huge amount of lost films, there's loads more Chaney), the thoroughly reprehensible West of Zanzibar (1928), an enjoyably unrestrained and lurid revenge melodrama-thriller, and the sound remake of The Unholy Three (1930), in which Chaney nails the transition to sound.
Poster for The Ace of Hearts (1921, dir. Wallace Worsley)
Poster for The Monster (1925, dir. Roland West)
Next up, anarchist-romantic-melodrama The Ace of Hearts (1921), in which a group of vigilantes decide which rich bastards need to be offed only for love to get in the way, and The Monster (1925), an effective, affectionate pisstake of old dark house tropes. Chaney has a grand time in both.
Poster for The Penalty (1920, dir. Wallace Worsley)
Poster for Outside the Law (1920, dir. Tod Browning)
A brief 🧵 of 📽 recommendations. Some of my favourite Lon Chaney performances, and some of the great actor's best, on this hallowed day (BOTD in 1883).
Starting with a great double bill of horror-informed crime thrillers in the excellent The Penalty and the very good Outside the Law, both from 1920.
Status report, "Metaphor Explanation" dep't: Just used the phrase "a long plate-spinning act" while replying to a question, and then realized I'd better explain it, on the off chance that the person in question had never heard of, or seen, this kind of thing... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb6N...
Which, as is often the case, reminds one of this recounting of the wild, wonderful Shecky Greene joke (from @classicshowbiz.bsky.social's peerless The Comedians, 2015) - don't get on Frank's bad side either
No fooling (groan) to say it's an excellent collection of tales that finds Ray experimenting in delightfully creepy and unsettling ways with form, structure, and story. Plus, what a great cover, too. Get it when it's out there (and of course there's two also-excellent collections already available).
Reynolds They sent a dummy over the waterfall and it looked like shit, like a dummy. So I went over the waterfall and hit a rock about a quarter of the way down and cracked my hip bone and my coccyx. They told me if I got caught in the hydro flow, swim to the bottom and it'll shoot you out. They didn't tell me that it would shoot me like a submarine torpedo! They couldn't find me for five minutes. A mile down the river, they saw this nude man stumbling, crawling towards them. I'd had on these high boots and they were gone, the pants were gone, the underwear was gone, the jacket was gone. I said to Boorman, "How's it look, John?" He said, "Like a dummy going over the waterfall."
Reading about the making of John Boorman's Deliverance and you know that scene where Lewis (Burt Reynolds) somersaults into the waterfall...?
It really is who you know sometimes, huh?
Enjoyed reading about how Johnny Carson got on the wrong side of a very angry mobster who put out a hit on him, only cancelled because Frank Sinatra intervened on his behalf
A grid of four images, on the top left Rik Mayall as Richie in Bottom smiling somewhat awkwardly as he speaks on camera in a dating video, to its right an orange box with 'A new version of Cape Fear with Javier Bardem as Cady' written in it. In the bottom left an image from the same video with Richie looking down with a melancholy expression on his face, to its right another orange box with 'It's ten episodes ...' written in it.
Daily Mail headline from the National Archives: MRS DUNCAN, ‘A HUMBUG’, plus photos of her, some where she is producing ‘ectoplasm’
It’s 82 years since the guilty verdict was given on the last person to be imprisoned for witchcraft in Britain. No, not 382; 82. Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium who toured the country producing ectoplasm and telling people she could speak to their dead relatives. You know: the usual bollocks 🧵