Madhouse
VIEW CONTEXT: Austin Retard Redux
VIEW DATE: March 2020
This was produced by Amicus and distributed by AIP—and it really feels like the child of both. It carries the twin currents of the nascent horror-for-horror genre.
The Amicus factor
The first “horror” films were not really horror films, but tributes and unpackings of anglophone folklore. Now comes a new freshly made British horror. The witty-naughty-terrifying super-pain that is both (1) most horrible and (2) most deserved, usually because it involves of of the most painful woundings of all. The universal flavors of sexual rejection. Twisted class antagonisms. Poverty and alienation and a culture of surplus subordination to capital. (For example, see this tear-jerking story of the kind old man driven to suicide by his young rich neighbor’s spoiled son. It’s called “Poetic Justice” and is from The Haunt of Fear #12, an EC Comic.)
The AIP factor
Vincent Price and self-relishing hamminess.
Together, these currents produce a film that is a kind of climax of the horror genre’s own self-consciousness.
Note
Why did I view this film? Because Famous Monsters. That famous image of Dr. Death was in every issue.
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Natasha Pyne, Vincent Price, and Jenny Lee Wright on the set.
Acrylic by Basil Gogos, 1974. But it seemed that Vincent’s Dr. Death was in every issue.
The most reprinted image of the mid-1970s.
Here’s Vincent staring at you.
Fan art.