Welcome to Psychotronic Perspectives, a new blog feature brought to you by Daniel & David, which delves into discussion of some of the weird and obscure genre movies that we happen to see! We’re diving to find film trash gold, and will share our thoughts on what we find, strange and glorious.
Our first pick isn’t one randomly discovered, but inspired from last month’s Torture Cinema feature on the theme “Trouble at Lakes”: Joy N. Houck’s 1976 Creature from Black Lake. We both enjoyed this decidedly non-torturous picture enough to go back and watch Houck’s 1969 debut Night of Bloody Horror.
Night of Bloody Horror (1969) Directed by Joy N. Houck, Jr.
89 minutes
Written by Joy N. Houck, Jr. & Robert A. Weaver
Cinematography & Editing by Robert A. Weaver
Starring: Gerald McRaney, Evelyn Hendricks, Gaye Yellen, Herbert Nelson, Lisa Dameron, Charlotte White, Michael Anthony, & George Spelvin
Synopsis: Anyone who gets close to Wesley (Gerald McRaney) is brutally murdered. The evience points to Wesley as the guilty party, but the blackouts he suffers means he himself does not know if he is the murderer or not.
If you’d like to watch Night of Bloody Horror before reading on, it’s available streaming for free on Tubi, or can be found on a physical DVD release in the Frolic Pictures Grindhouse Series (available for purchase through Orbit).
DANIEL: We should begin by placing this film in a bit of historical context of what it is and who made it. In 1951 the director’s father, Joy N. Houck, Sr., got together with Ron Ormond and J. Francis White to found Howco, a production and distribution company for low-budget films, specializing in drive-in double features. Ormond was a producer/director, while Houck and White together owned sixty theaters throughout the South.
They were responsible for cult pictures like Herbert Tevos’ Mesa of Lost Women (1953, co-directed with Ormond), Ed Wood’s Jail Bait (1954), and Jacques R. Marquette’s Teenage Monster (1958). A young Joy N. Houck Jr. got his first acting credential in Ben Parker’s Thunder Mountain (1964) for Howco, the fourth film adaptation of Harold Bell Wright’s 1907 novel The Shepherd of the Hill.
Though Howco would continue to release individual films through the late 1970s — including relative hits like The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) and Winterhawk (1975) — Joy N. Houck, Jr. got his writing/directing start for one of their last feature pairs: Night of Bloody Horror (1969) & Women and Bloody Terror (1970.)
It would’ve been nice to watch both films together, but I don’t happen to own them and the latter isn’t currently available streaming. While I wouldn’t call Night of Bloody Horror a great film (nor even a great B film) it does have several factors going for it that I think argue for it being worth viewing. Chief among those for me would be its identity as a proto-slasher and the debut performances of Gerald McRaney (who would go on to be on shows like Major Dad, Simon & Simon, Deadwood, House of Cards, and NCIS: Los Angeles) as Wesley and Evelyn Hendricks as Wesley’s mother. Both of them also appeared in Women and Bloody Terror. While Hendricks unfortunately never again acted, McRaney also starred in Houck’s next film The Brain Machine (1972) before continuing on his long career in television and movies.
DAVID: You’re absolutely right about it being a proto-slasher. It looks forward to the body count movies to come, while also owing so much to Psycho that it basically takes all the key elements of HItchcock’s film and creates a remix. 1969 is rather late to be climbing aboard the Psycho imitation train — the screens had been awash with these in the first half of the decade, with the likes of William Castle and England’s Hammer Films being particularly enthusiastic. And let’s not forget Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 from 1964. So it takes some nerve for Night of Bloody Horror to trot out as much as it does — the apparent protagonist being offed (granted, only about five minutes in, but she feels like she’s going to be our POV character), the mommy issues, the kept-well-past-their-Best-Before-date-corpses and so on.
But the remix introduces just enough differences to hold my interest. And the more grotesque elements (the aforementioned corpses) are deployed in a way that feels less like the earlier Psycho imitations, and more like what we’d be getting with Deranged and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre five years later.
And in that vein, I do enjoy the gritty feel of the film. All the settings have a grimy, seedy sheen to them. It’s one of those movies that keeps the spirit of the grindhouse alive.
DANIEL: I didn’t come into knowing the Psycho similarities, so I didn’t notice them really until the movie’s end, but I also felt that the remixed nature of the elements kept this one interesting, with an influence of Hitchcock’s movie rather than a subpar imitation. There are also some influences from 1958’s Vertigo perhaps, though the more psychedelic aspects of Wesley’s dizzying episodes probably more closely resemble effects more contemporary movies of that era?
I had the exact same thought of Texas Chainsaw Massacre upon seeing those corpses and the room, as well as images of Betsy Palmer in Friday the 13th, which added a strange temporal remix into things.
Though we both mentioned proto-slasher, the grittiness that you mention in the movie also specifically calls to mind the giallo genre. The plot, atmosphere, and the kills (such as the opening one of the woman you might expect to be the protagonist) seem closer to giallo than the later pure slashers. One aspect of the grittiness that I appreciated was Houck’s use of shadows in the composition of many scenes. It’s something I noted in parts of his later Creature from Black Lake as well, and is perhaps the most ‘artistic’ part of Houck’s style.
The downside to the grittiness (at least in terms of the public domain version available on places like Tubi) would be that visual details are sometimes difficult to pick out. There were no subtitles available on the version I watched, so I also had a hard time comprehending a fair amount of the dialogue.
DAVID: I’ve been going back and forth in my mind about the giallo connection, I have to admit. (To the point that I deleted a half-formed thought about it from my previous commenets.) I do see what you mean about the opening kill, for instance. And there is a gruesomeness to the kills that certainly recalls that genre. And indeed that first murder really does have a lot of the feel of those films.
On the other hand, in 1969, the giallo was still finding its legs. It had been around for a number of years, to be sure, but the genre did not have its first big hit until the following year’s release of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. So hence my vacillation — are we seeing a giallo influence here, or simply a reflection of the ramping up of violence in American movies that was such a feature of the late 60s. Or both!
Point taken about the viewing difficulties. I found myself thinking that the transfer I saw really did not do the movie justice, that there were all kinds of moments that would look pretty fine indeed with a good scan of a good print. Or, dare one hope, the negative! It’s on my wish list (along with things like Blood Sabbath and Blood Beach) of films that I hope a boutique label like Vinegar Syndrome or Severin will restore.
DANIEL: It would certainly fit American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) who put out what I think might be the next movie we do…
The run time of Night of Bloody Horror keeps things focused enough to keep our attention, but the start and ending of it are the true highlights. I guess this fits well for grindhouse made for the drive in, as viewers might be otherwise occupied during the inner parts.
I’m unclear on when exactly the titular night in question occurs, as the trauma of the brother’s death occurs in the daytime if I recall, and the present-day murders occur across a longer span. Is it that final night? The night of the nurse’s demise? I guess drive-in logic doesn’t need to be so precise. Houck & Weaver do spend some time in the script foreshadowing that final night’s climax, enough that it doesn’t effectively pull off a surprise, but it’s bloody fun at least.
In the end I don’t know as if I’d want to rewatch this, except maybe to refresh memory to compare with some of Houck’s other films as I see them. Creature from Black Lake has a pervasive charm to it that this movie by its differing nature understandably lacks; the relatively simple gritty and cold atmosphere of Night of Bloody Horror reduce that rewatchability for me. However, I do consider this well worth the viewing for genre fans, at the very least for McRaney, the movie’s take on Psycho themes, and its historical position in the proto-slasher continuum.
DAVID: The title is completely vague, isn’t it? One of those concatenations of scary words that could apply to almost any horror movie, and why I sometimes get the film confused with the much more violent but equally vague Scream Bloody Murder (1973). And Houck’s later Night of the Strangler (1972) not only also gives us multiple nights to choose from, but also gives us killings using everything from snake to curare, but no actual strangulation. (A film well worth seeing, though, which also confirms the giallo strain in Houck’s work.
This was actually my second time seeing Night of Bloody Horror, and I enjoyed it much more than I remember having done last time. If this ever gets some kind of restorative sprucing up, I would very happily plunge into its grimy embrace again. It’s a film where you can feel the commitment of its makers to do the best work they can within a very limited budget, and that kind of vitality wins me over.
