The artwork in this film was destroyed in a ritual.

This is the only record that they were ever here.

Harrington said this of the film’s subject, Marjorie Cameron: “Before I made the film I’d heard from Renate that Cameron had spent some time in the desert trying, through magical means, to conceive a child by the spirit of Jack Parsons without success.  Cameron never spoke of Jack directly, but I do remember feeling sometimes when I talked to her, of her going off into a realm that I didn’t understand at all. It was sort of an apocalyptic thing and it’s there in her poetry.”

So who was Cameron?

An artist. A poet. A muse. A cartographer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. A member of the propaganda machine. An occultist. An actress. Perhaps the Whore of Babylon.

And the love of Jack Parson’s life.

Parsons, the man who helped invent the rockets that got us to the moon, the man whose lodge housed numerous icons of science fiction, a devotee of Thelma and Crowley and the man who had just finished a series of Enochian rites with L. Ron Hubbard to invoke his elemental lover after Hubbard stole his wife.

When Cameron showed up at his home, red hair burning and blue eyes blazing, they ended up having sex for two weeks straight.

After Parson’s death, she started rituals to create a moonchild, which often involved slashing her wrists. As her mental state worsened — or improved, look I have no idea and my belief system is pretty wild myself — she came to understand his purpose in carrying out the Babalon Working that invoked her. On a diet of marijuana, peyote, and magic mushrooms, she proclaimed all the many ways that she saw the world would be destroyed.

Somehow, in a life beset by mental demons and intense drama, Cameron produced art. A woman making art in the male-dominated world of the 50s. She dated outside her race, which was illegal at the time, but she also ran a sex cult, so I don’t think the law mattered, outside of love is the law, love under will.

I’ve been fascinated by her for years and will be for the rest of my life. The Wormwood Star is one of the few ways to see her work and her up close. She’s absolutely terrifying in this film and I can’t even imagine what she was like in person. Similarly, she’s a force of absolute magic in Harrington’s Night Tide.

Life is filled with magic. Find it. Live it. Let it drive you wild, let is make you insane.

As another source of obsession, James Shelby Downard wrote, “Never allow anyone the luxury of assuming that because the dead and deadening scenery of the American city-of-dreadful-night is so utterly devoid of mystery, so thoroughly flat-footed, sterile and infantile, so burdened with the illusory gloss of “baseball-hot dogs-apple-pie-and-Chevrolet” that it is somehow outside the psycho-sexual domain. The eternal pagan psychodrama is escalated under these “modern” conditions precisely because sorcery is not what 20th century man can accept as real.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As we explore the movies of Curtis Harrington, let’s discuss perhaps one of his better known films. This was originally on the site on February 1, 2020.

Curtis Harrington had the thread of magic running through all of his films. One of the leaders of New Queer Cinema, he also directed Queen of Blood, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, the Sylvia Kristel-starring Mata Hari, tons of episodic television shows and the TV movies Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, The Dead Don’t Die, Killer Bees, The Cat Creature and How Awful About Allan.

His links to the occult, include the study of Thelema with his close associates Kenneth Anger (he played Cesare, the somnambulist in the magician/filmmaker/author’s movie Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), Marjorie Cameron — who is pretty much the nexus point of twentieth-century occult doings and appears in his film Night Tide — and avant-garde film pioneer Maya Deren, an initiated voodoo priestess.

Harrington was also the driving force in rediscovering the original James Whale production of The Old Dark House and — as a friend of Whale near the end of his life — advised the making of the movie Gods and Monsters.

His final film was Usher, based on a high school film he made of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the Hosue of Usher. He cast Nikolas and Zeena Schreck — the daughter of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey — who financed the movie by brokering the sale of Harrington’s signed copy of Crowley’s The Book of Thoth. Perhaps even more interesting is the theory that singer Taylor Swift is a clone of Zeena. No, really.

But hey — we’re here today to discuss 1977’s Ruby, a movie that brings Piper Laurie from Carrie into a story about possession and flashbacks.

In 1935, a lowlife mobster named Nicky Rocco is betrayed and executed in the swamps as his pregnant girl Ruby (Laurie) watches. The moment he dies, she goes into labor. Fast-forward sixteen years and she’s living with a mute daughter named Leslie (Janit Baldwin, Gator Bait, Phantom of the Paradise, Born Innocent, Humongous) and running a drive-in with several ex-mobsters like Ruby’s lover Vince (Stuart Whitman!) and Jake (Western actor Fred Kohler Jr.), a wheelchair-ridden man whose eyes were once cut out.

Ruby misses her days as a lounge singer, but the present has some nasty surprises. A poltergeist begins killing people at the theater, including the projectionist and a creepy guy who runs the concession stand (Paul Kent, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Prey for the Wildcats and the founder of the Melrose Theater). Before long, our heroine — such as it is — believes that Nicky’s spirit has returned and believes that she caused his death.

Vince is visited by Dr. Keller (Roger Davis, Dark Shadows, Nashville Girl and the first husband of Jaclyn Smith), who helped him get out of jail early. He’s a clairvoyant who believes that there’s something in the drive-in, which is true, because Nicky starts speaking Ruby’s name over the speakers at the drive-in. Before long, Ruby’s daughter is speaking with the voice of her dead father and showing the wounds he endured before his death.

The producer chose to change the ending, and both Curtis Harrington and Piper Laurie refused to be involved in the re-shoot. It was allegedly shot by Stephanie Rothman (the director of The Student Nurses and the writer of Starhops). This ending, where Nicky comes back from the grave and drags Ruby into the swamp, was part of the TV commercials for the film.

Keep an eye out for Len Lesser in this — he was Uncle Leo on Seinfeld — as well as Crystin Sinclaire, who appeared in Eaten Alive and Caged Heat.

I’ve never heard of the band Boy Harsher — the darkwave/new industrial duo of vocalist/lyricist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller — but their music is the inspiration for this 40-minute film, which goes along with their new concept album, The Runner, set for release on January 21 (preorder here or order from their Big Cartel page).

There was also a limited edition drone pedal that went with this, but that’s sold out.

Written, directed and produced by the band, it has performances by King Woman’s Kris Esfandiari, FlucT’s Sigrid Lauren, and Lucy’s Cooper Handy. It’s the story of a woman (Esfandiari) traveling to a secluded town where her violent compulsions are slowly revealed. At the same time, Boy Harsher performs on a public access channel and their music provides a sinister undertone to the woman’s descent deeper into darkness.

This short film definitely has style to spare and a look that recalls 80s direct to video erotic thrillers mixed with no small amount of blood. It also has somewhat of a making-of mixed in, which is pretty intrigiuing. It definitely did its job, making me research the band and take notice of them.

The Runner is streaming this month on Shudder.

You can learn more about Boy Harsher on their official site.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Originally running on our site on April 4, 2019, this is a movie that has obsessed me in the same way Marjorie Cameron, the occult, Crowley and Jack Parsons have for many years. Remember the words of Ms. Cameron, who said, “I shall plunge down into the abysmal horror of madness and death—or I shall walk upon the dawn.” Here’s hoping you find a new obsession.

Written and directed by Curtis Harrington — one of the leaders of New Queer Cinema and also the director of Queen of Blood, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, Ruby and so many more — this film was always one I wanted to see as it features Marjorie Cameron in a small role.

Harrington had also shot a documentary about her — The Wormwood Star — and I’ll forgive you if you have no idea who she is. Cameron was many things — an artist, poet, actress, and probably most essentially, an occultist. A follower of Crowley’s Thelema, she was married to rocket pioneer and nexus point of all things 20th century occult, Jack Parsons. In fact, Parsons believed that he had conjured Cameron to be the Whore of Babylon/Thelemite goddess Babalon as part of his Babalon Working rite, which he conducted alongside L. Rod Hubbard. No, really. It may have also opened our world to the aliens that have obsessed us since Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO in 1947.

After a suicide attempt and being institutionalized, Cameron gathered a group of magic practitioners around herself that she called The Children, whose sex magic rituals were to create a moonchild. She was now pregnant with what she referred to as the Wormwood Star, but that ended in miscarriage. Many of The Children soon left, as her proclamations of the future had grown increasingly apocalyptic.

Cameron’s orbit — much like her husband’s — unites both the worlds of art and the occult, straddling appearing in the films of Kenneth Anger, working with UFO expert and contactee George Van Tassel and appearing in Wallace Berman’s art journal Semina.

Why did I tell you all this? Because it fascinates me that she’s in Night Tide.

Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper!) is a young sailor on shore leave who meets Mora (Linda Lawson, who is also in William Castle’s Let’s Kill Uncle), a woman who makes her living appearing in a sideshow. They fall in love before he learns that her past boyfriends have drowned under mysterious circumstances. That may — or may not — be because Mora is a siren, a legendary creature who exists to lure men to their deaths. Adding to her suspicions is the mystery woman (Cameron) who calls to her and demands that she follow her destiny.

One evening, under a full moon, she invites him deep sea swimming, but cuts his hose, forcing him to surface so that she isn’t tempted to kill him. She then swims into the depths of the ocean, fulfilling the call of the mystery woman. And when he returns to the boardwalk, her dead body is still in the mermaid sideshow, now there for visitors to gawk at her dead eyes.

Despite a police confession as to who the killer is, the strange woman in black and her call to the sea is never explained.

Anton LaVey discussed this film in Blanche Barton’s The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. “There’s a whole genre of films that are just little evocative low-budget gems that I certainly wouldn’t call schlock but that are also being revived as a consequence of more attention in those directions. Director Curtis Hanington’s first movie, Night Tide filmed around the Santa Monica Pier and Venice. California in the late ’50’s, is a psychologically intricate story about a young sailor (Dennis Hopper) who falls in love with a mermaid It’s just wonderful to see these precious works of art being finally given the attention they merit.” This also appears on the Church of Satan film list.

According to Spencer Kansa’s Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Anger introduced Cameron and LaVey, who was delighted to meet the actress, having been a fan of the film.

You can download this movie from the Internet Archive or buy the Kino Loberblu ray. Or check out the gorgeous restored version at Nicholas Winding Refn’s ByNWR site. Refn also owns the film’s original print.

Dr. Bob Frankenstein (Mark Blankfield, who was also in Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again, The Midnight Hour, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, the TV show Fridays and took the role of Navin Johnson from Steve Martin in The Jerk, Too) has changed his name to Dr. Robert Frankenheimer and works as an intern at a Los Angeles hospital called, well, General Hospital.

A joke that lands is that Frankenheimer’s lab is in black and white while the movie is in color. And hey — that’s Leslie Jordan as Iggy the assistant and Irwin Keyes as the monster with the brain of a sex mad teenager. One of the doctors, Dr. Alice Singleton, is Kathy Shower, whose resume includes Commando Squad, Bedroom Eyes II, American Kickboxer 2 and The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck.

Keep an eye out for Bobby “Boris” Pickett, the man who sang “Monster Mash.” It’s a song I can’t sing too long, as if I do, I sing it all day for every single question that I am asked and yell things like, “I was working in the lab late one night” and “It was a graveyard smash.”

Director Deborah Sahagun’s only other directing job was Patients, a TV movie that she also wrote, so maybe she specialized in medical comedy.

But this one…don’t show up looking for this comedy to be funny.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Baron Osvaldo Lambertenghi (Renato Rascel, who represented Italy in the 1960 Eurovision contest and acted in several films) has sold his ancestral castle and stays on as a porter, which he does without complaint until the day that his uncle Baron Roderico da Frankurte (Christopher Lee) arrives.

Roderico is a vampire, in case you didn’t read the title.  Osvaldo tries to tell the guests, but they think he’s crazy, at which point he gets bitten too. This was made nearly instantly after Hammer’s Horror of Dracula and if he wasn’t a big enough box office star to get people to show up, Sylva Koscina from Hercules is here as well. So is Susanne Loret (Atom Age Vampire), Kai Fischer (The Hellfire Club) and Lia Zoppelli (who was in Toto and Cleopatra) are also on board.

Director Steno is mostly known for comedy films, like his films with Toto, Banana Joe with Bud Spencer, Dr. Jekyll Likes Them Hot with Edwige Fenech and Man, Beast and Virtue, which had Toto and Orson Welles in the same movie.

For Hammer fans, you can almost consider this a lost Lee Dracula, except that the humor and the horrible dubbing Lee got may take you out of the movie.

Better known as Dracula in the Provinces, this 1975 film was directed by Lucio Fulci four years before Zombi would change his fortunes and anoint him the Godfather of Gore. Made directly after The Four of the Apocalypse, which is as dark as it gets, this is an example of the comedic side of Fulci and would be among his favorite movies.

It was written by Sergio Corbucci’s brother Bruno (who directed The Cop in Blue Jeans and Miami Supercops) and Mario Amendola (who wrote The Great Silence), along with help from Pupi Avati (The House with the Laughing Windows, Zeder), Enzo Jannacci (a cardiologist by day and one of the most important creative forces in Italian rock ‘n roll by night) and Giuseppe Viola.

Costante Nicosia (Lando Buzzanca, who was in two James Tont movies) is a businessman who married for wealth, inheriting a toothpaste factory and a local basketball team. He’s also a horrible person, abusing his employees and taking particular delight in attacking Peppino, a hunchback whose hump is rubbed daily for luck. And he’s so superstitious that a black cat in his path means finding a virgin to urinate on broken glass, which I’ve never heard of before, but sure, I guess.

He also hates his wife Mariu (Sylva Koscina, Deadlier Than the Male), her family and her brother, whose lazy work ethic leads to a firing which ends up having an aunt curse Nicosia. This will come to haunt him, as a plane ride to Romania introduces him to Count Dragalescu (John Steiner), whose castle will end up where Nicosia will cavort with three of the count’s naked girlfriends and wake up in bed next to the naked noble.

Now, Nicosia is not only a vampire, he’s also become a homosexual. For an Italian man in 1975, this had to have been quite a curse. Not even a magician (Ciccio Ingrassia of the comedy duo Franco and Ciccio) can cure him. The only way that he can escape is to rehire the brother-in-law. But what happens if he accepts his thirst for blood?

Fulci also made another comedy, The Eroticist, with Buzzanca, in which he was a man compelled to punch women’s rear ends. This time, he just takes a bit out of Koscina’s.

Phil Rosen made a ton of movies — six entries in the Charlie Chan series alone — but this is his only East Side Kids movie, made for Sam Katzman and Banner Pictures.

There had been six films in the series since 1940 — yes, a year — and the movies before this balance comedy and social commentary on being poor in America. For the seventh film, Katzman got Carl Foreman (The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon — after which he was blacklisted for six years — and The Guns of Navarone) and Charles R. Marion to write a script that combined the two biggest stars of Monogram Pictures: the kids and Bela Lugosi.

How fast did this get made? It was still filming in August and in theaters for Halloween.

Muggs (Leo Gorcey), Danny (Bobby Jordan), Glimpy (Huntz Hall), Scruno (Sunshine Sammy Morrison), Skinny (Donald Haines) and Peewee (David Gorcey) are heading to juvenile delinquent summer camp in an area that’s being cursed by a monster killer.

Also on the way into town are Nardo (Lugosi), his hunchback assistant Luigi (Angelo Rossitto, whose career stretches from Freaks to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, with stops along the way in movies like Mesa of Lost Women, Dracula vs. Frankenstein and The Trip) and master detective Dr. Von Grosch (Dennis Moore, who was in serials all the way to the end, acting in the last Universal Pictures entry in 1946 and the last episodic shorts Columbia Pictures made in 1956).

Dave O’Brien, who was Knuckles Dolan in this series before, shows up as does his wife Dorothy Short, who plays the camp nurse. They met on the set of Reefer Madness.

Lugosi would return as a Nazi spy in Ghosts on the Loose, teaming him again with the East Side Kids and a young Ava Gardner. Sadly, this was East Side Kid Skinny’s last film, as he enlisted as an aviation cadet and was killed in action in two years later.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I mean, if we can have Dracula in a Women’s Prison and Werewolf in a Women’s Prison, I guess we can have this. Jeff LeRoy also made Giantess Attack vs. Mecha Fembot, so keep in mind that you aren’t getting a movie you can discuss with anyone normal out of this.

Victoria Frankenstein (Tasha Tacosa, who was also in LeRoy’s Predator World and Giantess Attack, which is a different movie than the one above) has taken over a prison and thanks to the bloody riot that just happened, she has a whole bunch of new bodies to experiment on. There’s also a reality show trying to expose all the human rights abuses, but are you coming to something with this title with anything other than hopes of shower scenes with bolts in nubile necks?

Victoria De Mare, Betty Boop from the Killjoy movies, is in this. So is Elissa Dowling from We Are Still Here and Girl on the Third Floor. And several others, like Diana Solis, Maggie Sanchez, Li Zheng and Carissa White appear in more than a few LeRoy movies. And hey — that’s Jin N. Tonic — playing Kat in this — who was Lilith in Amityville Vampire.

Truly, I have seen too many movies.

Karen Arthur worked with screenwriter Don Chastain to loosely adapt Eric Westphal’s play Toi et Tes Nuages, which she had seen in Paris in 1975, to create this movie that even today, nearly fifty years after it was made, seems unhinged.

Ellen Carpenter (Lee Grant, Valley of the Dolls) is an astronomer who shares her home — a ramshackle house in the Hollywood Hills that they inherited from their anthropologist father — with her sister Cissy (Carole Kane), an adult child devoted to her mafus, which are pet monkeys which she keeps in a cage in the living room. There’s a problem though. The mafus never last long as Cissy tends to kill them. And oh yeah — Ellen is in love, real love, incestual love, with her sister.

Now, Cissy wants another monkey and Ellen refuses. There’s been enough death. But then their godfather Zom (Will Geer, The Waltons) gets Cissy an orangutan from his zoo. And at the same time, Ellen is finally finding love — she’s as emotionally stunted as her sister is developmentally — with David, a fellow astronomer (James Olson, Amityville II: The Possession). She’s not ready to let him into her life, as when Cissy finds out, she beats the orangutan into oblivion.

When Ellen goes away on a work trip, David comes to visit. As she’s not there, Cissy lets him in and tells him how the mafu cage was brought into the house and used by her father to keep doing his research when he wasn’t in the jungle. She locks David in the cage and begins to study him as her subject, finally flying into a rage and beating him into the next life too. She buries him in the garden, but keeps painting him, which leads to Ellen locking herself in the bathroom and Cissy finally having a nervous breakdown.

I don’t want to ruin any more of this movie, which is surprising at nearly every turn. Arthur, unfortunately, dealt with some bad luck making films — Lady Beware is one example — and The Jerry Gross Organization tried to sell this an exploitation movie, changing the name to Don’t Ring the Doorbell.

Carole Kane is absolutely the greatest in this movie, playing a character quite unlike anything else she’d ever do in her career. Lee Grant is, as always, perfect. This movie is really something else, one I’d been waiting to watch and I was rewarded for my patience.

Kino Lorber’s blu ray release — along with Scorpion Releasing — of this film is a must-have. It has a 2K scan of the interpositive, supervised and approved by cinematographer John Bailey (who appears on a commentary track with editor Carol Littleton) and commentary with Arthur. There are also interviews with Kane, Grant, Arthur, Bailey, Littleton and composer Roger Kellaway. Plus, you get trailers and an image gallery. Grab it now from Kino Lorber.