Take One (Mar-Apr 1973)

Geuautliis, Beasts Ve Mele Despite all the stout strides, short steps and brave stumbles women have been taking in many areas of endeavor of late, there’s at least one area in which they've made precious little progress indeed — and that’s in the horror film. Check out the roster of horror film stars, the great personality monsters past and present, and you'll find Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Vincent Price, and sinister Britishers Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Journey further down the list and you'll run into the likes of former Frankenstein Monster Glenn Strange, hulking brute Rondo Hatton, hunchbacked henchman specialist Dwight Frye, George Zucco (perennial B-movie mad doctor famous for making unwanted house Calls) and many others. Still, even a moderately attentive reader will note a conspicuous absence of women on the list. In fact, if you, a normal-type person unpossessed of a voracious appetite for horror movies, were asked to name a female movie monster personality, chances are you'd be hard put to cite a single one. Fact is there is one — Barbara Steele by name — but she didn't join the group until the early '60s, long after all the male stars had already left their cinematic marks (usually in the form of a pair of small punctures in the vicinity of the throat or a trail of fiendishly murdered bit players). And even at that, Barbara Steele doesn't rank very high on that list, hardly enjoying the fame afforded a Boris Karloff or Vincent Price. An American actress, Barbara had to emigrate to Italy to get starring roles, usually as vampires or witches, in films like Black Sunday, Nightmare Castle and The Long Hair of The Plight of Women in the Horror Film . . . by Joe Kane SS Nes ae See ES Joe Kane is a New York-based freelance writer who has written for The East Village Other, The New York Ace, New Times, Inside Comics, Touch, Screw and Take One, and recently sold articles to Penthouse and The Village Voice. He is editor of The Monster Times — a horror and fantasy journal — and has just completed a novel of doubttul saleability. He is currently working on a second. 8 Death, where she rarely gets to speak the same language as her European co-stars. Her films and performances are known only to the most fanatical horror film followers. And even with fangs fully bared, nostrils expanded and eyes all of anger and hate, Barbara always seems a fetching fiend. How many of the male scare stars had to be handsome as well as ominous? A few happened to be, but most weren't and, more importantly, none really had to be. Though Barbara’s is a sinister sexuality, it is her sexuality nonetheless that has vaulted her to the lowly perch she presently occupies on the horror star roster. For all its glaring absence of female terror stars, the horror film has never lacked for female heroines/victims. There are plenty of these that immediately pounce to mind; they’ve come and gone in great profusion, sometimes never to be heard from again — Fay Wray in the thirties, Evelyn Ankers in the forties, Faith Domergue, Peggy Castle, Beverly Garland and other, lesser-known actresses in the fifties and sixties. Although Fay Wray is the woman most automatically associated with the monster movie (try to invoke the name without conjuring up images of outsized apes Climbing tall buildings with screaming beauties in hirsute hands), all of the abovementioned actresses have been ha Bride of Frankenstein MUSEUM OF MODERN ART rassed by their fair share of fiends. Evelyn Ankers holds the record as the most prolific horror heroine of them all, having spent the greater part of the ’40s being chased (though ever chaste) by just about every monster of rank on the Universal Studio lot, including the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.), the Frankenstein Monster (also Lon Chaney Jr.), and the Son of Dracula (Lon Chaney Jr. again). In fact, women have been at the mercy of monsters and madmen bent upon mauling, molesting, mutilating and murdering them for the better part of a century now. They’ve been menaced by monsters wanting only love and bitten by vampires lusting for blood. They've been abducted by aliens from outer space for the purpose of repopulating distant, dying planets or just to show the boys back home. They’ve served as the unwilling subjects of scores of vile experiments, recruited for spare parts to keep insane scientists’ wives alive, and forced into making generous flesh donations for skin grafts designed to restore other women’s lost beauty. They’ve been devoured by dinosaurs, driven mad by evil husbands and lovers, and generally defiled by every sort of unsavory fiend ever to lurk within a screenwriter’s overworked and usually underdeveloped imagination. And there’s no sign that the torment will be letting up either. On the contrary, the fate of the horror film heroine has been growing increasingly drastic. When Tony Perkins butchered Janet Leigh in the notorious shower sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960, it helped to escalate enormously the long-running celluloid war between madmen and women. Since that time, the deaths of women in the horror film have been dwelt upon with ever greater and grislier glee. Of course, woman-hating psychotics have never been strangers to the screen. The ever-popular Jack the Ripper has served as the subject of over a dozen different films over the last 50 years. Bluebeard, too, has seen service in several films celebrating his exploits, but he was