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A H;story of Canad;an Horror c;nema

Caelum Vatnsdal

A R B E IT E R RING PuBLI S H I NG
Copyriglu C 2004 Cadum Varnsdal

Arbeiter Ring Publishing

201£·121 Osborne St.

Winnipeg, MB
Canada R)L IY-4
www.arbcir�rring.com

Printed in Canada by the worken at Kromar Printing Ltd.

Book design by Steph Whitehouse/Public Image Co.
Narional Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Vatnsdal, Caelum
They came from within : a history of Canadian horror

cinema/Caelum Vamsdal.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-894037-21-9

I. Horror films-Canada-History and criticism. I. Tide.

PN 1995.9.H6V38 2004 791.43'6164'0971 C2004-902203-2

�arts�-
f{ C.nado Council
lor the Arts
ConHII des Arts
du C.nado

The publishers have made every effort ro conracr rhe copyright holders of all text and
images in rhis publication and believe they have mer all conditions of c opyright. If anyone
knows of these conditions nor being mer, they are urged to contact the publishers.
Tab.fe of Contents
FORWARD by David DeCoteau page 6

INTRODUCTION page II
TERROR ON THE TuNDRA

I. PuT THE MASK ON! page 21

(The Beginning to 1967)

II. I'M DREAMING OF A BLACK CHRISTMAS page 55

(1968- 1971)

Ill. "You SHOULD KNOW HOW BAD THIS MOVIE IS; page 95
AFTER ALL, YOU PAID FOR IT."
(1975- 1977)

IV. SLASH FOR CASH page 121

(1978- 1982)

v. MONSTER CHILLER
(1983 - 1999)

VI. IT TAKES A NATION O F HosERS To HoLD Us BAcK page 22I

(2000 and onward)

FooTNOTES pagr 232

BIBLIOG RAPHY AND REFERENCES pagr 234

APPENDIX: FILMS pagr 236

CREDITS pagr 248

INDEX pagr 249

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS pagr 256

 FORWARD

David DeCoteau

I'o WANTED TO BE IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS since J was a kid, and in Portland,
Oregon, working in a movie theatre was the closest thing to it-and I got free passes as
well. I worked in the Broadway Theatre--one of those Grand Old Movie Palaces that
typically populate the downtown centres of most major North American cities-bur I
could use my passes at any cinema in the Luxury Theatre chain.
I grew up in the multiplex theatres that dotted Portland. The Mall 205 played double
bills on the order ofScreams ofa Winter Night and Beyond Atlantis; or Zombie back-to­
hack withUp From the Depths; or even Tourist Trap paired up appropriately enough with
Wes Craven's classic The Hills Have Eyes. My favourite multiplex was the Rose Moyer
Sixplex in the Portland suburb of Gresham. It was brand new, and they played genre
Crash, Death Race 2000, The Young Cycle Girls, the black-and­
pictures like Charles Band's
The Fiendish Ghouls, And Now The Screaming Stops, The Day After
white British import
Halloween, and my personal favourite, Infra-Man. For this one, the theatre had to be
equipped with a special stereo sound system called INFRA-STEREO or something like that.
Since I saw these movies on the Saturday and Sunday marinee screenings, and the Rose
Moyer was so new and rarher remore, rhey usually had very few customers. Most of the
time I sar alone in these auditoriums, as my friends, who had no idea why I mighr wanr
ro sit and watch Eat My Dust back-ro-back with Crazy Mama, refused to join me. It was
like a private screening. I saw everything that came out-but I usually seemed ro dig the
B horror flicks the most. They were weird, creative and unpredictable.

'
 The Broadway, my theatre, was, naturally, situated on Broadway. Ir had lost irs lusrre
and was eventually renovated co become a four-plex. I was a projecrionist there for a few
years, and since it was a non-union job I also worked the candy counter. We had the bigger
Hollywood movies in the main auditorium, and the remaining screens usually played
curious double-bills like Attack ofthe Killer Tomatoes and Winter Kills. The fourrh audi­
torium played the most obscure of the B movies-Grave ofthe Vampire, for example, or
Garden ofthe Dead.
One week at the Broadway we played Mad Max. I liked the nifty poster art right
away, bur then, as I was building the print, I realized it was in 'Scope. I knew char if a
movie was in 'scope--that is, in a nice widescreen format-it was going co at lease look
good even if the movie itself was mediocre. I threaded the projector and starred the fUm,
and what I saw was one of the most original B movies I'd ever run across. Beautifully
photographed, dazzling action scenes, kick ass music and a very handsome leading man.
One thing weirded me our, though: the filin was clearly dubbed, even though the acrors
seemed co be speaking English. I figured maybe the film was German, so I watched the
end credirs and notice that the film had been produced in association with the Australian
Film Development Corporation. Australian? I thought_ Australia was nothing bur red
rocks and desert!
I starred co check out the credirs more often, trying co find our the origins of these
wild movies. The Broadway got The Brood and a co-feature called The Evil. Both of these,
I noticed, carne from a company called New World Pictures. Studying the end credirs of
The Brood, I saw that this film had been made in association with the Canadian Film
Development Corporation. Wait a minute--Canadian? I thought Canada was nothing
bur blinding white snow and Eskimos on the frozen tundra. It was then that I realized
how many other countries outside my own were either in or just getting into the
exploitation movie business. The USA made irs fair share, of course, bur since we played
just about everything in Portland, I saw South Africa's Kill or Be Killed and Kill and Kill
Again, Italy's gorefest The Last Survivor and The Tempter, Japan's Shogun Assassin, and the
Mexican animal-lovers' rrilogy Barracuda, Killer Fish and The Bees. I was beginning to see
that the United Stares didn't have the monopoly on weird flicks.
Christmas of 1980 was a big rime for me. I was 18 years old, and I moved down co
Los Angeles co give the movie business-the real movie business-a shoe. I starred
as a production assistant for New World Pictures, and on the weekends I worked as a
projectionist. I was a kind of an alternate with the local projectionist's union, so I might
get a lase-minute call co show up at the Sundown, a Spanish-language drive-in in
Whittier; or maybe at one of the many Pussycat (which is co say, hardcore) theatres. On
my nights off I wandered the Hollywood Boulevard screers watching the sidewalk freak
shows, often popping in co catch a triple bill at my favourite LA. theatre, the World.
Here my education in worldwide exploitation cinema continued.
Like everyone in Him production, I read the industry rome Variery, which reviewed
everything that carne out, from gay porn on down. Sometimes they would pick on one

7
of che little Canadian flicks, labelling it a "shoddy tax shelter movie from Canada." Tax
shelter movie? What did chat mean? I guessed-<:orrecrly, as it turns out-chat chere was
some kind of tax scheme in Canada chat was designed to help jump-start che country's
flagging film industry. On Hollywood Boulevard, we got 'em all: Curtains, Happy
BirthdAy To Me, Prom Night, urror Train, Humongous-all of chem. One night there was
a premiere ofScanners at che Hollywood Pacific Theatre. The director was going ro be
there, and they were going ro show three of his films. It was a packed house. I wasn't roo
familiar wich David Cronenberg yet, but he seemed friendly and very intelligent. He
handled the Q & A session well too, as when a woman stood up and said "I know you
make films in Canada because it's cheaper. When are you coming down to L.A. to make
your movies?" Cronenberg's reply was "I don't make movies in Canada because it's
cheaper. I make movies in Canada because that's where I live." That shut her up.
And he was right. These movies didn't cost less than the exploitation flicks made in
che States. Usually they cost more. They looked great (Kubrick's cameraman John Alcott
shot urror Train, for instance), and had very good performances and scripts. Maybe the
scores were a little lacking sometimes, but otherwise these were well-crafted movies that
couldn't have been made anywhere but Canada, because few governments outside of
Canada had chis kind of tax scheme.
The second feature that night was Rabid, which I had seen in Portland. At the
beginning, with chat cool tracking shot chat introduces Marilyn Chambers, the audience
screamed "Yeah!" She was really great in that movie, and should've had a bigger career.
After Rabid came Thry Came From Within, Cronenberg's first feature. A hoot! My
favourite Cronenberg film. What a night that was. It confirmed chat there was a whole
world making films I liked, and as a matter of fact, liked maybe a bit more chan most of
che stuff made in the States. Italy, Spain, Australia and Asia were making amazingly
unusual B movies to capitalize on the international market the US had been dominating.
Canada's ventures into exploitation filmmaking was particularly interesting to me. Most
of these movies tried to be "American" by pretending to be set in rhe US, and with the
Canadian actors trying their best to lose the Canadian accents. (Except Humongous­
whew!) Usually they cast an American star that was in reality a Canadian national: yes,
Glenn Ford is Canadian! Everyone in the movies seemed awfully polite and proper; more
British than American. I liked that.
After working as a P.A. for a few years, I started to direct and produce movies myself.
In 1986 I made a horror flick called Dreamaniac, and I was off and running. I cranked
'em out faster than anyone. My name was listed in numerous directories and industry
publications, and I would get occasional phone calls from Canadian producers
wondering if I was Canadian because my last name was French. I wasn't, but my grand­
parents were from Quebec. Bur the Canadian producers would tell me that, because of
Canadian content rules, either the script or the direcror had ro be Canadian, and the
scripts were always American. Why? "Because Canadians can't write!" the producers
cackled. I thought to myself, I guess you're not looking hard enough.

I
 1 n 1996, after many years of directing and producing B movies, I got a job making
a fairly big budget HBO feature called Skeletom. It starred Ron Silver, James Coburn and
the absolutely fabulous-and Canadian-Christopher Plummer. Chris only worked for
rwo weeks, but we got on wonderfully. He was friendly, professional and always concerned
that I was happy with what we were shooting. I told him I was a fan of his Canadian
films, and he was proud. I also told him I was chinking of moving to Canada because
work was slowing down in the States, and the calls for a Canadian director were starting
to happen more often. He said "Lovey, you should move up there!" So I started the
process of emigrating to Canada. I'd been in L.A. for almost 20 years, except for six
months living in Romania, where I made 8 movies. I was bored with L.A. and in need
of a big change.
It took about 17 months of intense scrutiny from the Canadian government before
I was approved and granted Landed Immigrant status, meaning I would qualify as a
Canadian for Canadian Content purposes. I was in Vancouver for a while, and then was
hired co direct Wishmaster 3 and Wishmaster 4, a pair of horror sequels that were being
made as Can-con and needed a Canadian director with horro� sequel credits, of which I
had a few. Vancouver was busy that summer, and so I suggested the shoots be moved co
Winnipeg, Manitoba, smack dab in the middle of Canada. That was fine, but the only
slot the shoot could fit into coincided with another job: making The Brotherhood back in
L.A. I had to leave the Wishmaster sequels, but by then I'd scouted Winnipeg and loved
it. It was clean, friendly, safe and, well, cheap.
Since the Wishmaster experience, I'd decided to start up my own company, Rapid
Heart Pictures. Shooting in L.A. had become more costly and difficult, and so I spoke co
Leslie Oswald, the line producer of the Wishmaster movies, and set up the shooting of
one of my Rapid Heart quickies in Winnipeg during the slow season. It was a sequel as
well: The Brotherhood Ill· Young Demom, shot in Cinemascope in 5 days 09 the prairies
of Canada in the dead of winter. kturned out to be the most fun I ever had on a movie.
The Canadian cast and crew was amazing, the city was very helpful and the movie turned
out great. Winnipeg was clearly the place co make my movies-so I moved there! I'd gone
from watching work by Canadian horror directors to becoming one mysel£
To this day, when I mention those fabulous Canadian tax shelter flicks that were
made in the late 70s and early 8os co the locals up here, people usually change the subject.
T hey're still a little proper up here in Canada, and those fllms are a bit of an embarrass­
ment to most. Not to me! I loved them. I hear our local rep house, the Cinematheque,
is going to show a bunch of them soon. I'll be the fmt in line.

DAVID DECOTEAU
june, 2003
www .rapidheart.com
 INTRODUCTION

Terror on the
Tundra

T ' S NO EXAGGERATION TO SAY thatrhe hisrory ofCanadian fictionfilmmaking

I
David Cronenberg
directs Shivers as
is, in the main, one of catastrophe, neglect and wasted potential. Cursed projects
Dan Goldberg
like The Viking (1931), in which the producer and many of the crew were killed in crouches behind
a boar explosion; the costly box-office failure ofCanada's flagship big-budget effort
Carry On, Sergeant! in 1928; a cinema fire in Quebec the previous year which killed a
number of children; a string of ill-considered decisions regarding trade and cultural
relations with a certain entertainment juggernaut ro the south; and much incidental
misfortune and poor judgment besides helped create an industry that has grown into
something crippled, wary, and dumbly resentful, like a puppy repeatedly kicked as it was
learning ro walk. The American film industry was most often wearing rhe boots, but it
was Canadians who allowed the booting.
The "documentary tradition" in which our cinema is rooted is itself very well docu­
mented, and the curious dearth of feature ftlmmaking in Canada from the beginning of
time up ro the late 1960s has been frequently remarked upon. When narrative features
were produced inCanada before that time, it was almost invariably by someone who had
served our an apprenticeship making documentaries ar rhe National Film Board of

11
Canada and rhe end result did nor stray far from the usual currency of that venerable
institution. Style and subject matter both were heavily under NFB influence in these early
days, so straight-ahead drama-the more rooted in everyday reality the better-was the
implicit, and sometimes the explicit, order of the day.
When the industry finally did kick in, in the early 1970s, the worth of its product
still seemed to be based on how likely it was that a given story might actually have
happened. Sure, went the received wisdom of the time, a movie about Maritime chuck­
leheads trying to make ir in Toronto must be worthy of our money and attention: after
all, it happens for real all the time. There's nothing wrong with that line of thinking, nor,
in theory, with the films that resulted; except char the corollary to it all was, of course,
that movies featuring subject matter nor so likely to have happened-horror movies,
say-were looked upon with a good deal less respect and affection. Federal funding was
certainly nor easy to gee. The very idea of a Canadian horror movie to this day invites
one of two responses: either the assumption that you must be talking about David
Cronenberg, or simple astonishment that such things even exist. Bur exist they do, and
moreover in a great enough number and variety to validate (or so I assert!) an entire book
on the subject.
The question of quality arises preny quickly in discussing Canadian horror movies.
The vast majority of them-as is the case with the vast majority of horror films in general­
simply aren't by any objective criteria very good, bur the good ones are good enough, or
interesting enough or compelling enough, to make up for that. Even many of the bad ones
have interesting or compelling or otherwise near-redemptive elements to them. The genre
itself has an angry, subversive quality to it: these are not movies intended to comfort or
reassure their audiences, or to put a smile on their faces and a song in their heans, and so
from the ourser they are greatly at odds with most ocher genres in popular fUm. "No
horror film is truly mainstream," David Cronenberg has said, and this outsider status
means that even the lowliest of them are worth at least some consideration.
I maintain, however, that Canadian horror films-as much because of the pleasurable
paradox of the phrase "Canadian horror" as anything-are something much better than
run-of-the-mill. Their imperfections often have a gloriously unwitting character, of the
sort that makes a subject much more attractive than it would be otherwise: the allure of
the underdog, the runt, the deformed cousin living in the attic. They are disparaged,
denied or ignored in their own country; they are hatched and just as quickly consigned
to a stateless bastardy, wandering the continent looking for an audience and maybe a little
respect, and, finding none, they curl up on the bottom shelves of the back rows of the
most disreputable video shops in the crummiest quarters of town, or else pop up late at
night on one of a dozen theme cable channels. My inclination as a Canadian is to be
proreceive of these misfits and to do what I can to help them along their way. Movies are
easy to anthropomorphize: they are complex, with identifiable goals (to be seen and
enjoyed by as many people as possible); and they are often draped in the personalities of
their creators to some greater or lesser degree. If Canadian horror movies were people

12
at a house parry, they'd be the graceless eccentric slouching in the corner of the kitchen
and drinking Extra Old Srock, their sodden woolen socks piled at their heels. Who
wouldn't want to hang out with a person like that?
.
Philanthropic urges and personal interest aside, the aim of this book is twofold: to
bring to light the curious phenomenon and colourful history of the Canadian horror
movie, and to explore any distinctive national qualities they may or may not possess.
Questions must be asked if we're to get anywhere: like, is there really anythingCanadian
about a Canadian horror film? What scares the average
Canadian, besides guns, de-socialized medicine, weak
beer and Americans? (Or to pur it more succinctly:
America?) What demons haunt the frozen fringes of our
dreams; what do we see when the lights go out? More to
the point, what do we in Canada make our horror
movies about, and why? One might argue that the same
things frighten anyone from anywhere. Put a Tunisian, a
Laotian and aCanadian in a room together, for example,
and none of them will care much for the idea of being
anacked by giant snails. Bur a mixture of more specific
with more ambiguous, primal fears (a giant snail on the
one hand, say, and generally being eaten on the other), once brewed up, is frequently My BloodyValrotine
constrained by borders and formed, or augmented, or brought more sharply into focus,
by a national character. The giant snail rhus becomes a metaphoric representative of
whatever irs real-world creators' country-mares feel most immediately threatened by-
colonialism perhaps, or despotism; a new technology or an unfamiliar ideology. Take the
Japanese: in 1945 they were made the object of the most horrifying bomb attacks in the
history of mankind, and ten years later, when the children of those firestorms had grown
a little older and some had become professional filmmakers, they were turning our
movies in which Tokyo is repeatedly crushed to powder by a two hundred foot, fire-
breathing nuclear iguana by the name of Godzilla. Or consider the United States, which
spent years-the Fifties, to be precise--expressing on film irs terror of the ever-immi-
nent Red Menace, lightly disguised in the movies as an invasion from Mars (cf. Invaders
From Mars, War of the Worlds, Mars Needs WOmen, The Angry Red Planet) or an attack
from some unnamed galaxy by crafty, relentless alien creatures who sought to pounce
upon and absorb unsuspecting Americans, either literally (like that damned
hungry pinko The Blob, which became a deeper shade of red-get it? get ir?-wirh each
hapless small-town Yankee it imbibed), or very slightly less so (as with the Invasion ofthe
Body Snatchers, who came smiling and waving, as theCommies no doubt would, in the
guise of a husband, a wife, a neighbour, a friend). The 2001 terrorist attacks on New York
and Washington did very little to curb the desire of Americans to watch buildings
crumble and planes fall from the sky on their movie and television screens-just the
opposite, in fact.

13
 The reason for this is elemental: we want to see bright lights shone upon our fears
(horror films, generally speaking, begin in darkness and end in light: the cleansing fire,
the flashing beacons of police cars, or simply the morning sun), and those fears subse­
quently dealt with by professionals, whether they be scientist, soldier or a team made up
of both. The more difficult questions come when we try to nail down exactly why we fear
what we fear and how it came to be that way. The problem will not be made any easier
just because it's Canada we're dealing with (because Canada is a nation of contrasts and
contradictions, and worse yet, is filled with people endlessly trying to designate and
define and glibly self-analyze these contrasts and contradictions, often using a lot of allit­
eration to do so, and very often doing so to the point where you just want to run around
in circles gabbling incoherently and tearing at your hair rather than listen to it for one
more single second), but it'll be made substantially more amusing. Canada, David
Cronenberg has said, is a country cursed with the abiliry to see both sides of an issue, so
conflict-the essence of drama or so we're told-is not our strong suit. This leaves us
with our poor frostbitten insecurities, which, as it happens, are always pretty funny.
And then there's Canuck-0-Vision: that peculiarly Canadian qualiry which infects
so many movies from north of the 49th. Energetic denunciation of this qualiry-a mixture
of slightly fuzzy, hollow sound; a blue cast or, sometimes, a milky fog over the picture;
several completely superfluous shots of a flapping American flag; a plaid shirt, the CN
Tower or a stray, accidental "Eh?" perhaps, and, often, a musical score by a composer
named Paul Zaza-is quick to come up in any informal discussion of Canadian cinema,
at least insofar as the discussion is between Canadians. Those from other lands tend not
to notice it as much. Whether or not you believe that Canuck-0-Vision exists in great
enough quantiry to warrant such discussion, it may be worth considering that perhaps
having a readily identifiable qualiry to Canadian films is really not such a bad thing.
Perhaps it ought to be cultivated somehow; that is, if the qualities that make it so can be
isolated, synthesized and applied to future productions without too much difficuJry.

A C E NTRAL BUT P O T E N T I A LLY T R O U B L ES O M E C O N C E P T ought tO be nailed

down before we go much farther into the subject of Canadian horror movies. Just what,
in this internationalist age of co-productions and foreign investment, constitutes a
Canadian film anyway? David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of The Fly is an instructive
example: the film was shot in Canada (in the famed Kleinburg studios located just north
of Toronto) by a Canadian director and by a mostly Canadian crew, but the lead actors,
the producers and the bulk of the financing were American. The ciry in which the film
is set goes unnamed, and skyline shots, which would unavoidably include that pesky,
phallic CN Tower-the bane of many a Toronto-as-New York production-are notice­
ably absent. So where does that leave The Fly? Cronenberg himself had to address this
question during a bar-room scene in which Jeff Goldblum, playing the doomed man-fly,
backs up an arm-wrestling challenge with a hundred-dollar bill. Should it be American
or Canadian money, the prop man asked? lt was decided that the bill would be an old­
fashioned American greenback, and not a brown Canadian C-note that might, in the
midst of a movie about a hideous man-fly, confuse and disturb U.S. audiences with its
alien unfamiliarity. But even this decision does not make The Fly an American movie:
Cronenberg's thorough rewrite of American screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue's original
reworking of the 1958 Fly (which, to add to the confusion, was an
American film explicitly set in Montreal) thoroughly Canadian­
izes the characters and themes with just the sort of details this \

......,..
'
book is dedicated ro exploring. And so, more on that later; suffice
' ) ) r-
it for the moment to conclude, by my perhaps as-yet obscure
reasoning, that The Fly is every bit as Canadian as the beaver pelts
and snowshoes hanging on your wall. Less Canadian, but still
...; \
.

enough so to warrant inclusion in this book, is the Golden

Retriever-vs.-monster movie Watchers: a 1988 film boasting an
American producer (Roger Corman) and source novel (by Dean
R. Koontz), but British Columbia locations and a largely
Canadian cast {yes, Corey Haim was born in Canada). Still, this
routine creature feature, with irs shaggy monster and reliance on
gratuitous boy/dog love scenes, could have been made anywhere
by anyone: it just happened to have been made in Canada, because
that's where the tax breaks are.
In illustrative contrast sir the seemingly endless horror franchises which have ended Makeup sketch
from TkFly
up in Canada like draft-dodgers, their true citizenship strictly a matter of opinion. The
horrors conjured up by the word "franchise" are usually more fast-food than film oriented,
and the cynicism in which the term is rooted when used to describe a film series appears
largely to have been forgotten. Bur there seems no end to the parade of horror sequels
which grimly troop their way north, such as the twin grandaddies of slash, Halloween
(the eighth chapter, Halloween: Resurrection {2002) was shot in Vancouver) and Friday the
13th (the eighth installment of that one had Vancouver standing in for New York, the
tenth, jason X was shot in Toronto and featured David Cronenberg in an extended
cameo, and the epic battle of Freddy Vs. jason (2003) was waged in the streets and sound­
stages of Vancouver once again), as well as an episode of A Nightmare on Elm Strut {the
aforementioned battle of the titans), The Amityville Horror {a rogue entry in that long­
running haunted house series, tided The Amityville Curse (1989), was shot in Quebec),
The Omm (part four, the last in number and by far the least in quality-and that's saying
something-was shot in Vancouver), and more than one of the Wishmasters (III and IV
were shot back-ro-back in Winnipeg), the Xtros (both sequels ro the original British alien
picture were shot in B.C.) and the Urban Legends (both were shot in Toronto, and
number two featured Terror Train veteran Hart Bochner as the killer). Still other serial

15
horror stories, such as the Witchboard, Night ofth� Dmzons and Brothahood tales, have
also had installments lensed north of the 49th. T here isn't much Canadian about most of
these movies besides their locations {as opposed to their settings}, many of their actors and
much of their crews, and consequently you may not read about every last one of them in
this book. Some popular series, however, are homegrown (Prom Night and Ginga Snaps,
for example), and a few, like the Watchas franchise, actually began in Canada before
drifting south to their spiritual and financial birthplace for subsequent episodes.
The preceding paragraphs may have muddied more than cleared the waters, but the
upshot is that the matter of whether a horror film is Canadian or otherwise can only be
decided on a case-by-case basis, and for the moment it may as well be done by me.
The defining borders of the horror genre are likewise fuzzy. Horror can mix freely
with science fiction, suspense, action and even comedy. Again, David Cronenberg-who
appears, like most intelligent people, to regard purity as the least interesting of virtues­
provides us with excellent material for defining our territory. Th� Fly, for example,
contains all the science and hardware of typical gearhead sci-fi, but also a hideous, ram­
paging bug monster and a welcome element of Gothic romantic-tragedy, and so on
balance seems more of a horror movie. Scannn-s (1981), on the other hand, may deal wi�
evil brain-bursting mutants, but is constructed much more along the lines of a science­
adventure story, and as a result neither it nor its innumerable sequels and spin-offs
(Scanna Cop et al) will see very much ink in this book.
Suspense movies, mysteries and policiers will occasionally intrude into this narrative
by virtue of their particular treatment of the suspense scenes, the particularly horrific
nature of rhe threat, or some supernatural element present in the story. Am�rican
Nightmar� (1983}, City in Panic (1987) and Matinu (1988) are all good examples of these
fine-line treaders. Even the pedigree of the film's makers might occasionally come into
play, as in the case of George Mihalka's Th� Watchtow�r (2001). That picture, while more
of a mystery-travelogue than an outright horror movie, was nevertheless directed by
Mihalka, one of Canada's premier horror directors (the man behind My Bloody Valentin�.
say no more; though he's made films in almost any genre one could name}, and so you
may find it mentioned, if not very enthusiastically dissected, in the pages which follow.
Horror is, along with pornography, among the most misbegotten of genres, and this
is perhaps triply true in Canada. Directors such as David Cronenberg and William Fruet
were practically disowned by the critical community of the nation afrer releasing their
first work in the genre. (Cronenberg has been energetically re-embraced, while Fruer's
career, sadly, never really recovered from his Amish-style shunning.) We Canadians lack
that conservative, puritanical core and troubled national upbringing which allows
Americans to make the most frivolous, exciting (and at times sneakily intelligent and
subversive} movies in the world, while at the same rime ensuring that not a penny of
public money will be spent doing it, lest moral values be corrupted somehow. So while
we are freer with our taxpayers' dollars, we have to ensure that whar gets put on the screen
by their grace is culturally defensible; which means that it has to be "artistic" in some

"
quantifiable way, or at the very least profitable. This means that our genre movies run the
risk of stifling themselves with superfluous or misguided conceptualizing on the one
hand, or pandering to whatever is-often wrongly-considered the current public
vogue on the other. A distinct national cinema has for both better and worse been
forged as a result of the situation, and it is in many ways most visible in looking at the
horror genre. There are movies in the Canadian horror canon that, in spite of (or
perhaps due to) their often desperate attempts to appear American, clearly could only
have been made in Canada.
Horror is perceived as dangerous, both because it travels on
the dark side of human experience and because, done well, it tends
to reveal things about that experience many might prefer to keep
hidden. Add public money to the brew and you have a potentially
combustive cocktail, whose flashpoint is hit whenever a particu­
larly controversial film is released, like David Cronenberg's first
feature, Shivers. Robert Fulford, writing in a September, 1975 issue
of Saturday Night magazine under the pseudonym "Marshall
Delaney" (a nom de plume he assumed every week for his movie
column) penned a querulous article about that movie entitled
"You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid
For It." The article essentially took Cronenberg and the Canadian
Film Development Corporation to task for colluding to use
taxpayers' money for a ftlm that was, to Fulford, a grotesque and
badly-made cavalcade of perversions unbefitting of Canadian
cinema. (The CFDC, now called Telefilm, is an organization whose mandate is Robert Silverman as
the creepy janitor in
contributing to the funding of Canadian ftlms.) But as Shivers is neither a mindless circus
Prom Night
of depravity nor badly made, it seems clear that Fulford's objections to it must have some
other source: one very possibly located within Fulford himself And that's what a good
horror movie can do-tap into these secret corners and produce reactions, whether they
be unexpected, objectively unsupportable or simply nonsensical.
But within the genre, quality horror movies make up the minority. There are more
interesting films than good ones. This goes for Canadian horror ftlms as well, probably
even, again, triply so. The factors against which the average Canadian horror movie must
struggle as it is conceived and made-principally a shaky sense of national identity; a
cinematic, not to say artistic, tradition in diametric opposition to horror; the paradox
suggested by those ftrsr rwo components, and a host of economic issues on top of that­
insure that most of rhem founder in their quest for greatness. But that hardly matters in
a book like this, as simple Hollywood competence is in my view one of the least impor­
tant and compelling qualities a Canadian horror ftlm can have. A bald-faced,
desperate grab for slickness, doomed to failure from the outset, is very often more inter­
esting than the slickness itself; which is after all something money can readily buy.
Canadian horror cinema is a cinema of moments, rich with unlikely imagery,

17
baffling storylines and bizarre narrative twists. It is the home of defiantly unpredictable
confluences (severed heads, disco dancing and Leslie Nielsen all in one movie, for
example!) and largely illegible, usually accidental subtext. With careful observation,
consistent, if strange, maple leaf-shaped patterns do emerge, but they sink back into the
gory mire the moment one's concentration lapses, leaving you to wonder if they were ever
there at all. The impression left is of some deeper meaning just out of view, perceivable
only if one is willing ro put in the work and adopt a mode of thinking that is in equal
parts nationalistic, broad-minded, elliptical and clear.
For those unwilling or unable to think in this way, the Canadian horror canon is,
simply, a whole lot of fun. Trolling around for those spooky or goofY gems with which
the Tundra Terror pond is well stocked is one of the most enjoyable endeavors I've ever
undertaken, and it is my hope that in reading this field guide, you'll be inspired to put
on your hip waders, jump in your blood canoe and join right in.

"
 'THEY CAME FROM WITHIN'' starnngPAUL HAMPTON· JOE SILVER
LYNN LOWRY and BARBARA STEELE as" BETTS"· produced by IVAN REITMAN
•

written and dtrected by DAVID CRONEN BERG· a TRANS-AMERICAN FILMS Release

COlOr pnnts
I I ...,_J!:¥�C�,
by Movielab
R
•
I
 I.

Put on the Mask!

(The Beginning to I967)

T
HERE WAS NO SUDDEN BARRAGEofCanadian horror films, crashing down Pe£er Roffman
c. 1960
like German Expressionism or the French New Wave to stun, delight and
inspire the world. The early history of horror in this country is made up of
timid lircle coughs and half-hearted clearings of the throat, and those belated
and infrequent enough as to make anyone who insisted that such productions even
existed appear to be a liar or a hallucinating drunk. In fact, movies of almost any identi­
fiable genre were rare in Canada until the late sixties, and movies of any kind at all, aside
from National Film Board of Canada documentary productions, were to say the least
sporadic. Accordingly, the first part of this horror film history must be a fairly cursory
history of why horror films were not made in Canada.
At the time of the invention of motion pictures, in the late nineteenth century,
Canada was largely a sparsely populated wilderness in need of workers and citizens who
might help it find its place as a world power. Cinema was not primarily seen as a form
of entertainment, but rather a handy tool for nation-building. Entertainment could wait:
there was work to be done. The Canadian Pacific Railway, a hard-working establishment
from way back, jumped on the medium and sponsored dozens of films from adventuresome

21
phorography buffs across the country char were designed ro anracr the immigration
needed to fill out the population. James Freer, an immigrant from England who upon
his arrival in the young and untamed country became a Brandon, Manitoba-area farmer
and die-hard prairie enthusiast, was the first such impressario. These films, with titles like
Th� Thresher At Work, were emphatically nor dramatic or narrative in nature, nor the
slightest bit entertaining to contemporary viewers; but they were dererminarely propa­
gandistic and even fantastical in their efforts to lure would-be settlers, as much in what
they neglected to show (namely, winter) as in what they did (fertile fields, glorious scenery,
affordable machinery and an eternal, resplendent summer of limitless opportuniry).
The result of chis line of film production was a healthy influx of manpower
(including a young Boris Karloff, who emigrated to Canada in 1909 to become a farm
labourer) and an appreciation for the effectiveness of documentary. So Canada kept its
head down and concentrated on the work at hand, while the United States, with its
established industry, strong economy and multitudinous cities, set about populating the
orange groves of Hollywood and harnessing the more diversionary aspects of cinema,
using the local scenery and climate to a perennially world-beating advantage.
There were to be no horror films out of Canada for a very long time. European
countries, their strong Gothic and folklore traditions coming quickly to the fore, were
producing horror-fantasy films as early as 1896, with the two-minute Georges Melies film
Le Manoir du Diable standing as the first horror movie ever made.' The U.S. joined in
the horror game in 1910 with Thomas Edison's production of Frankenstein, and soon
screen terrors were flowing from the studios of America, France and Germany, and at
least trickling out of Great Britain, Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Japan. Bur Canada was
a land of practical-minded people: the kind who wore animal skins draped over their
backs and had to work almost constantly simply to survive the howling, skin-blasting
winters. There was no room for fantasy here, and horror, well, horror was thin ice, or
snow blindness or a rogue bear. Vampires just didn't do it, and there were in any event
no old castles or ruined abbeys for them to live in.
There were the woods, of course, and those who had been living in them for centuries
had their own blood-chilling traditions and legends; but the superstitions were not yet
rooted as deeply in the European mind as was needed to build the proper cultural
foundation. The settlers had been hearing about Native monsters for years: the Wendigo,
for example, which was a spirit who could possess some unlucky passing warrior and turn
him into a frenzied, flesh-ripping cannibal, was as frightening as any Old World vampire
myth, but was not latched onto by the new arrivals. There was roo much work to do,
perhaps, and still too few people to do it. To this day a richly veined lode of indigenous
myth remains largely unexplored by Canadian horror filmmakers, Native or otherwise.
One exception, a small but echoic hiccup in the Dominion's film hisrory, is The
Werewo!J(r913), an eighteen minute long picture thought by many to be the first were­
wolf movie ever made. The claim seems likely; it's certainly the first werewolf picture
made in Canada. (Ir would remain just about the only werewolf picture made in Canada

22
until Ginga Snaps, eighry-seven years later.) The film is reportedly based on indigenous
shapeshifrer myths, and used the cinematic trickery of the times-that is, simple, abrupt
cuts, or quick dissolves-to show a young aboriginal girl, Waruma, transforming into a
wolf. A holy man puts an end to this heretical behaviour by waving his cross around. But
Watuma returns a century later, as wronged supernatural beings will do, and takes her
belated vengeance. Two different actresses played the separate incarnations of Watuma,
while a real wolf played her in wolf form. The film was directed by Toronto-born
Western picture specialist Henry McRae, and the avail-
able information suggests that the fum was effectively
destroyed in 1924 by a fire.
By the early teens Canada was adequately populated
with farmers and labourers from many lands, and ready
ro produce its first narrative features. T hese were gener­
ally wilderness dramas involving noble savages, crowds of
cutely Disney-esque animals, pisrol-brandishing for­
eigners and dogsleds. The sevenry-five minute
Evangtlint, filmed in Nova Scotia for $Jo,ooo.oo, was
the first. Others followed, with titles like Stlf Dtftnce,
The Marriage Trap and The Great Shadow. T here were
also the Ernest Shipman productions: a series of seven films over a period of four years &crtu ofChinawwn

or so, filmed in cities across the Dominion from 1919 through 1923. "Ten Percent Ernie"
was an entrepreneurial producer with a habit of prying back ren percent of his hirelings'
wages for supposed re-investment into the movie, and a wife, Nell, who was willing to
strip down and do a nude scene for her husband's first bigCanadian venture, Back to God's
Country. The profits from this picture started Shipman off nicely, and he bounced around
Canada making wilderness adventure films in cities from Calgary to St. John until the
squeeze tactics of the big American companies and the resulting lukewarm box-office
forced him more or less out of the business. (Nell, by this time divorced from the old ten
percenter, had her own acting and screenwriting career, and had moved to the United
States and imo film production.)

AM O NGST T H E WILD E R N E S S D R A M A S A N D WAR F I L M S (though not apart from

them), a few tremulous, almost unintentional steps towards the shadowy world of horror
movies were made by the Canadian motion picture industry. Satan's Paradise (1922), a
classic 1920s film title if ever there was one, told the srory of some fake spiritualists who,
through repeated seances, attempted to convince a mother that they could put her in
contact with her dead soldier son. The son does indeed materialire (in a scenario prefig­
uring Bob Clark's Tht Night Walk (1973; a.k.a. Dtathdrtam) by several wars and some

23
fifty years), but here he proves nor ro have been killed bur merely shell-shocked. The
spiritualists are thereby debunked, and retreat into the shadows never to prey on rhe
helpless war-bereaved again. This film was shot in Toronto for a reported cost of $2000,
bur suffered from an "unsuccessful release," meaning it probably never even made irs
paltry budget back.
Another near-horror was The Devil Bear (1928). This was nor, as one might assume,
or hope, a killer bear film along the lines of William Girdler's jaws-inspired Grizzly
(1976), bur rather a strange-sounding drama about a gorilla, kept as a companion by a
sea captain, who escapes from a boat docked in Halifax harbour after his owner is
thumped on the head, and whom the frightened locals at first rake ro be some sort of
monster. The gorilla wanders around Canada (specifically around the Thunder Bay,
Ontario area and the spectacular Kakabeka Falls, where the filin was shot} in the company
of the dazed, amnesiac sea captain, and the pair have all manner of wilderness adventures
before making friends, as the monster in Frankenstein (1931) would later do, with a cabin­
dwelling hermit. But ir was no horror movie; just an adventure-comedy about a stranger
in a strange land.
In 1927, a British quota legislation decreeing that a certain percentage of films exhib- .
ired in the UK must be of British origin (which is to say, produced in the British
Commonwealth, and with a hefty fraction of the salaries going to British subjects, which
at the rime included Canadians) meant that the industry in Canada was given a small
financial shot in the arm. "Quota Quickies," produced mainly in an unheated horse barn
in Victoria, British Columbia, included mist-shrouded mysteries like Secrets of
Chinatown (1934), in which sinister hooded figures, hopped up on opium goofballs, roam
the shadowy streets of Vancouver's Chinatown, kidnapping white women and worship­
ping the devil. Many at the rime of the film's release (or rather, many of the very few who
actually saw the picture) no doubt rook Secrets of Chinatown as a horror film, with the
Chinese as the monsters, bur it was in reality only a pallid and xenophobic detective­
mystery. Still, with its clutching hands, shrouded figures and unmotivated drifts of
smoke, the fUm freely employs the style and tone of horror, and so represents one more
small step towards the horror genre by Canadian producers, as well as a prophetic
indication of the ignominy to come in the tax shelter years of the late 1970s.
The 1930s were, according to Peter Morris's pioneering srudy of Canadian cinema,
Embattled Shadows, "a gloomy period . . . for Canadian film production . . . Even at their
best, the quota quickies are no more than efficient, routine B-movies." By all reports,
this may be a generous assessment of the overall quality of these pictures, bur they
nevertheless represented a filin industry, even if a slipshod, faintly sleazy one engineered
by foreign interests. As such, the quota quickie machine, if allowed by circumstance to
continue, might have provided a foundation for a truly indigenous, self-sustaining
cultural industry in Canada much earlier than was the case. But the host of American
producers in B.C. fled back to California when the British laws changed, leaving no hint
of infrastructure and little in the way of a positive imprint ro encourage Canadians to rake
up the torch; or, to overstretch an analogy, design, construct and light their own all-new torch.
These gasps of activity notwithstanding, Canada was in no position to build a film
industry. It was not in Hollywood's interests to allow it, and so, by aggressive acquisition
of Canadian exhibition space, the Yankee monopoly over Canadian film production and
viewing was assured. The results are still painfully evident today.

Horrific Canucks-Part I

Bv T H E M I D 1 9 3 0 s , without producing a single

horror movie of its own, Canada had nonetheless made
an impact on the horror movie scene. Halifax-born actor
David Manners, a kind of Colin Clive Lite, was acting
his heart out in several of the best known of the great
Universal Pictures horror cycle; or in other words, several
of the most famous horror movies ever made. He was an
effete Jonathan Harker in Tod Browning's 1931 Dracufa,2
was the highest billed un-bandaged star in Karl Freund's
The Mummy, and, joining both the respective great top­
liners of those rwo films, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, he played guileless young Tk Bloody Brood
husband Peter Alison in Edgar Ulmer's excellent The Black Cat. 3 He would, moreover,
play the eponymous role around whom all the mystery swirls in the 1935 version of
Charles Dickens' unfinished novel The Mystery ofEdwin Drood. Manners' acting sryle
jibes nicely with both his surname and his country of birth: he's generally open, friendly,
and very polite. These qualities, notoriously unhelpful when battling monsters, kept him
in emasculated, Ralph Bellamy-type roles for most of his short movie career. He retired
from the screen at the end of the thirties to write novels, died in 1998 at the age of 97,
and was not wrong in predicting to an interviewer that he would probably be best
remembered for his horror film roles.
Even more indelible a mark was made by Fay Wray, the girl in the gorilla's paw, who
was born in Alberta but raised in Los Angeles. After working in movies for ten years
(including stints for both the Vons, Sternberg and Stroheim), King Kong (1933) ensured
that she, her sheer white dress and her astoundingly powerful screaming lungs, would
achieve an iconic cinematic immortality for all time. Her horror career neither began nor
ended with King Kong, however: at the very same time she was shooting the big monkey
movie (which was made over a very long period of time due ro the endless, time­
consuming special effects involved), her trademark shriek was getting exercise next to
Lionel Arwill in the early Technicolor spookshow Doctor X (in fact, the very first
Technicolor horror film ever made), Mystery of the Wax Museum (which was the second)
and a monochrome Frankenstein rip-off called The Vampire Bat. She therefore stands as
perhaps the only Canadian ever to have acted in four horror movies at the same time-

25
five, if you count The Most Dangerous Game (that old chestnut about madmanCount
Zaroff hunting the most dangerous prey he can think of-humans!-across his private
island) as a horror movie, as many do. Wray was the original scream queen, a cinematic
trooper whose devotion to both her craft and her shriek set the bar for all who followed.
AnotherCanadian whose horror work, even though on the other side of the camera,
would be the foundation of his eventual wealth and acclaim was Mark Robson, who was
born in Montreal and whose trip up the Hollywood ladder began humbly, in a Twentieth
Century Fox properties room. After several years, by whatever capricious rwists of fare
and surges of ambition, cunning or luck the thumbnail biographies of such people
usually leave out, he found himself in the curring rooms of RKO Pictures. T here he
would assist in the editing of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons before
hooking up with RKO 's legendary in-house horror producer Val Lewton. After cutting
Lewton's production of Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur,4 Robson was
engaged to direct a fine, spooky thriller called The Seventh Victim (1943), which would
remain probably the best work Robson ever did as a director. Other Lewton spookfests
followed: The Ghost Ship (1943) first, and then a moody pair called Isle ofthe Dead (1945)
and Bedlam (1946), both of which had stories based on scary old paintings and featured.
David Manners' old co-star-and, briefly, fellow Canadian-Boris Karloff. Robson's
career moved uptown after this strong beginning, and he would never again recapture the
intensity of The Seventh Victim, ending his career by instead churning our entertaining
Hollywood tripe like Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Earthquake (1974). He was certainly
well off by retirement time, and whether he knew it or nor, he had horror ro thank for ic.
Known as "Hollywood's mosr-liked filmmaker" (trust aCanadian to snag that ride),
John S. Robertson, born in London, Ontario in 1878, made the John Barrymore version
of Dr. jekyLL and Mr. Hyde in 1920. Forgotten now, he was a big shot in hisrime, directing
such stars as his countrymare Mary Pickford, and working in Britain with Alfred
Hitchcock as his art director.
None of these people had much claim on Canada, however, nor Canada on them.
Certainly they never identified themselves asCanadians, or even ex-Canadians, as someone
like Mike Myers might occasionally do today. Bur they remain a part of Canadian horror
film history nonetheless, even if a tangential and largely uncelebrated one.
There were other actors, more readily identifiable as Canadian, who made appear­
ances in foreign horror films. Raymond Massey (whom I 've always thought might have
been a horror star to rival Karloff, had chance or inclination taken him further in that
direction) made an early appearance in the U.K. crime spook-fest The Face At the
Window (1932; not the later Tod Slaughter version), and, in the same year, as a David
Manners-like foil in James Whale's The OLd Dark House. (Massey could never muster the
reserves of jejune impotence so effortlessly spewed by Manners, however.) Donald
Woods, the Brandon, Manitoba-born journeyman actor, appeared in one of the earliest
revived-giant-monster pictures, The Beastfrom 20,000 Fathoms (1953), and in 1960 starred
in William Castle's "IIIusion-0 " gimmick film 13 Ghosts. Glenn Ford was another

26
Canadian who danced around the genre now and again in his career, appearing in
thrillers like Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror (1962) and, later, in one of the more
(relatively) high-class examples of the slasher movie cycle, Happy Birthday To Me (1981;
discussed at greater length in Chapter 4). He also appeared in the hugely expensive
Japanese medical thriller Virus (1980), playing the President of the United States while
shooting on location in Toronto. And Lloyd Bochner, born in Toronto and known from
his role as Old Mister Colby on Dynasty, showed up in films as diverse as William Castle's
The Night Walker (1964), Daniel Haller's The Dunwich
Horror (1970), the well-loved TV movie Satan's Schoolfor
Girls (1973) and, more recently, co-starring with Lou
Gossett Jr. in a bit of piffle called Bram Stoker's Legend of
the Mummy (1997). He also contributed to the world of
Canandian horror by siring Hart Bochner, who would
play a major role in Terror Train (1980).
Victor Jory, born in Dawson City, Yukon, showed
up in an episode of the ·horror series Kolchak: The Night
Stalker and in the 1978 Curtis Harrington TV movie
Devil Dog: Houndfrom Hell, in both instances playing a
Native character, as though being from up north made
him more aboriginal by nature. Who knows, maybe it did. Redface is still redface, Th� Mask
though, and there've always been plenty of talented Native actors to choose from. But
not for such niceties was Hollywood in those less sensitive days. Finally, London, Ontario­
born Hume Cronyn appeared in the 1943 version of Phantom ofthe Opera, and then much
later in a toxic-waste thriller called Impulse (1984). This hardly makes a horror career, of
course, but it's all part of the rich tapestry that is Canadian horror history.

IN 1 9 3 8 , AN EM PHATICALLY N O N - H O R R I F I C P E R S O N , the Scottish-born admin­

istrator John Grierson, was brought over from England to Canada to run the National
Film Board of Canada, the very creation of which indicates a decision made as to which
direction Canadian film should go. Grierson's appointment sealed the deal: he was very
much in favour of the documentary form over made-up drama, which he regarded as use­
less fakery and flim-flam. (So devoted was Grierson to the form that he had in fact
invented the very word "documentary" back in 1926.) "Although he proclaimed a
yearning ro liberate and extend filmmaking," reads David Thomson's Grierson entry in
his New Biographical Dictionary ofFilm, "he evolved a narrow doctrine hostile to many
other types of cinema, essentially bigoted and unintelligent and isolated by history."
Certainly insofar as Canadian film is concerned, it cannot be doubted that
Grierson's passion for the documentary form (already well-appreciated in Canada) and

27
his concomitant dismissal of staged and performed drama-and especially, one assumes,
any attempt at fantasy-was instrumental in shaping the entire nation's policies and
attitudes and the directions in which its cinema would travel. These attitudes would live
on, as would the National Film Board, long after Grierson's 1945 return to England, making
a man who had worked in Canada for barely six years "the single most important figure
in the development of a Canadian film culture," according tO his biographical entry in
Tak� Onls Essmtidl GuUk to Canadian Film.
The NFB has dipped the occasional roe into horror, though strictly for the purposes
of education. The 1950 driver's ed short Gentleman jekyll and Driver Hyde shows us the
dire consequences of road rage in the days before road rage had a name. An everyday
fellow goes driving, only to sprout horns, fangs and facial hair when faced with common
obstacles on the road. (This could be the first special effects monster makeup ever put on
film in Canada.) A child on a bicycle invites a growl of"Get out of the way, kid!" from the
enraged motorist; a woman barely avoids being run down (though her eggs are not so
lucky), and other drivers are invited by the irritable fiend to "go fry your fish!" Luckily
he learns the value of patience and calm before there's any real bloodshed. Of course,
Gmtleman J�kyll and Driv" Hyde isn't very scary as horror movies go. But it hinted th�t
somewhere in the bowels of the country's most venerable filmmaking institution, there
were people with an appreciation for the power of the genre and the will to use its
unique grammar.

Spooks Up North

TH E R E W E R E A FEW H O RROR F I L M S not made byor starring Canadians, not filmed

in Canada nor made with Canadian money, that were nevertheless set in Canada. Th� Fly
(1958) and its sequels, &turn ofthe Fly (1959) and Curse ofthe Fly (1965), were all set in and
around Montreal, with a character roll made up entirely of French names. This is strange,
particularly given that the remakes, nearly thirty years on, would both be filmed in
Canada and set in some North American no-man's land; but, as pointed out in an article
by Chris Fujiwara in Filmfax magazine, the Quebec location does serve a few useful
dramatic purposes. For one, Fujiwara theorizes, the question, potentially and dangerously
at the tip of every American audience member's tongue, of why the scientist in the movie
doesn't bother reporting his amazing teleportation discoveries to some government body
is easily answered by simply saying "Well, it's Canada. Who knows how they do things up
there?" In America the lab would most likely be under much greater scrutiny by meddle­
some Army brass, as in movies like Tarantula (1955). Other troublesome points, like the
behavior of the police, which is rather more laid back in The Fly than in most American
films of the period, may be explained by the same logic. The foreign-sounding names and
the slightly formalized, off-kilter manner of the characters is made both explicable and
palatable by the Canadian setting. It's foreign, but it's not too foreign.

21
Another recent Fly article, tided "The Disintegration of a Canadian Family" (by Erich
Kuersten, Scarlet Street no. 48), points out:

That the tale unfolds in Canada IS, m itself, telling . . . Canada's

national identity seems a molecular fusion of American, British and
French culture, a suitable place to loose the fused fly/man. Canada has
the British air of civility, the French sense of culture, and the
American "let's split the atom!" enthusiasm. On a purely
visual level, Americans may think of Canada as "up
there," in a sort of mysterious north, floating above the
United States like a buzzing cloud over a picnic.

Still, whatever the value of setting the series in Canada, the scientist
is teleported from Montreal to London near the end of the third
film in the series, Curse ofthe Fly, thereby ensuring that if further
sequels were warranted they could be set in a still more familiar
and easily recreated location. The audience's taste for flies was
well-sated by then, however, and no further fly-films were made
until 1986.
Fiend Without a Face (1958), the flying brain picture to beat
them all, was exotically set on a rocket base in northern Manitoba.
This was a British-made film from ex-cinematographer Arthur
Crabtree, the director of the later Anglo-shocker Horrors of the
Black Museum, and setting it in Canada meant he could use all the British-sounding Th� MaJk
actors he wanted while still providing a recognizable though remote landscape to the
American audiences for whom the picture was intended. On top of that, it's easy to
believe that the characters (under arrack by grotesque space-brains who jump around the
room like ticks and strangle hapless victims with their spinal-column tails) are well and
rruly far away from any possible aid. The cavalry might possibly make it to, say, northern
Montana if the situation demanded it, but they wouldn't have a clue how to find Flin
Flon. It's fun, for Canadian audiences at any rate, to witness the conflict between the
small-town Manitobans and the American air force brass-the locals initially believe the
brain-murders are the work of an insane Yankee G.I.--even though the actual actors
were neither Canadian nor American. When the alien nature of the threat is revealed, the
Canadians and Americans put aside their differences and work together to fight it, in the
process reinforcing the altogether fantastical nature of the plot.
Other ersatz-Canadian locations would come many years down the road. Ed
Ragozzino's Sasquatch (1977) was filmed entirely by Americans in the Cascade mountains
in Oregon, but it was explicitly set in the British Columbia interior. Clive Barker's
Nightbreed (1990), starring famed Canadian horror director David Cronenberg in full-on
creepy-guy mode as a murderous psychiatrist, was filmed in England but for some reason
set in Alberta. According to at least one review of Nightbreed, the Canadian setting
"works against true dementia and crowd frenzy, rhe Cronenberg tradition norwich­
standing . . . Bloodthirsry vigilantes, brutal sheriffs and deracinated rednecks armed with
shotguns seem so . . . American. They didn't call it 'Alberta Chainsaw Massacre'."� True
enough, but what the reviewer fails ro realize is that they easily could have, for what is
Alberta if not Canada's Texas? In any case, this comment demonstrates the common
perception of Canada being, quite simply, an un-scary place.
A counterpoint ro this attitude came in 1992. In David Lynch's theatrical prequel ro
his popular television series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, there is a scene in which
some hapless Twin Peaks residents go on an ill-advised trip north of the border, where
they find Canada itself-the entire country-to be an horrific, hallucinogenic place, and its
residents a pack of slavering lunatics. The barely-subsumed corruption and psychoses of
Twin Peaks have erupted into full-blooded everyday life north of the border: ro Lynch
this is the ultimate reward/punishment for a history of emotional repression, and a
warning sign for the residents of his little Washingron state mountain rown: loosen up or
your demons roo will come to life and take over, just as they have in Canada.

I N T H E 1 9 5 0 5 C A N A D A WAS NOT A N H O R R I F I C or hallucinogenic place filledwith

lunatics. In fact it sounds a little boring. The idea of a viable commercial film industry
in Canada appears to have been about on par with notions of walking on the moon. At
the same time, American companies were churning out low-budget science-fiction and
horror as though possessed: the likes of Roger Corman and American International were
trotting out wonderful new B flicks on a near-weekly basis. Hammer Films, in England,
had tapped a rich vein of Gothic horror. Wonderful, eerie genre flicks were being made
in Italy, Germany, France and Mexico, and in Japan the mighry Godzilla was being
hatched. In all of these countries the profits were steady as long as the costs were kept
low. So where was the Canadian entrepreneurial spirit and vision which had shown itself
in so many other areas? Surely there must have been some would-be producers north of
the 49th who would like to have joined in on the fun.
Indeed there were, but they were hobbled by the lack of an infrastructure, the
pauciry of available labour and the prevailing notion that Canada's forte was and ever
would be the production of documentaries. Bur as the National Film Board was turning
out its rock-solid documentary shorts and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was
teaching itself the television ropes, both institutions were providing experience and
instruction to technicians and creative personnel alike. Young directors such as Sidney
Furie and Harvey Hart were working for the CBC, while Don Haldane was cutting his
teeth at the NFB. AJl of these men were more than a little interested in creating a
self-supporting industry in Canada, but for the moment it simply didn't happen.

30
 Furie began his fearure career by writing and directing a drama of reckless youth
entitled A Dangerous Age (1958), which started life as a CBC production bur wound up as
a theatrical feature instead. The rub for Furie was that it was released in England, bur
couldn't find distribution in the country in which it had been produced. He tried again,
with a cool-daddy-o teen rebellion drama called A Cool Sound From Hell, which was
received in Canada with even greater indifference than A Dangerous Age. Throwing up his
hands in frustration, Furie moved to England, where he told reporters "I tried to start a
feature film industry in Canada, but nobody cared." His
first UK productions were in the horror genre: Dr. Blood's
Coffin and The Snake Woman (both 1960). Moving to the
United States in the mid-sixties, he would later make the
1982 ghost-rapist picture The Entity.
A friend and protege of Furie's from his CBC days
was an aspiring feature film director called Lindsay
Shonteff. Shonteff, seeing that Furie was working
steadily across the pond, took a page from his book and
relocated to England in the early 1960s, where he was
hired by producer Richard Gordon to make the cult
favourite The Devil Doll (1963) afrer Furie turned down
the job in favour of more mainstream work. The result, a moody, effective piece in the Tht Mask
"living doll" sub-genre, was nonetheless reportedly made under Furie's dose supervi­
sion. Shonteff then directed a supernatural jungle-revenge picrure called Curse of the
Voodoo (1964), which was in every respect much less successful than The Devil Doll. He
went on from there to a string of low-brow espionage thrillers and crime adventures,
including one called The Fast Kill, which, in a strange bit of circularity, would eventu­
ally become a kind of near-scriptural stylistic guide to the iconoclastic Canadian
director Guy Maddin during the making of his melodrama The Saddest Music in the
World (2003).
Harvey Hart and Don Haldane (later to direct, respectively, the Canadian horror
features The Pyx and The Reincarnate) continued slogging it out in Canada, though Hart
would soon head to the States, and in the meantime independent production companies
were springing up to provide product for the hungry medium of television. In the midst
ofall this, like some swaggering cowboy emerging from the purple sage to set things right
in town, came one of Canada's premier showmen, Julian Roffman.
Born in Montreal in 1915, Roffman began his show business career as a member of
McGill University's Red and White Players. He became discouraged with the limitations
of theatre upon realizing that you could only play to a limited number of people at any
one rime. Film, through which you could reach untold thousands with a single produc­
tion, was to Roffman dearly the way to go. Roffman himself was, in manner if not i n
physical stature, bigger than life, just like all the classic movie moguls, and the medium
of film matched his personality well. Hearing about some film courses in New York, the

31
young go-gerrer enrolled, picking up the know-how he needed while supporting himself
by sweeping floors at various Gotham film studios.
From janitorial duties, Roffman was promoted to assistant cameraman and assistant
director positions on a variety of short series made for companies like Universal and
Paramount. In 1935, the March ofTime newsreel films began production, and Roffman
joined the project first as an assistant director and then a director, making documentaries
on coal mining, doctors, and U.S. Senator Huey Long to play before the cartoons and
features. He produced a popular series of films whose mandate was to reveal misrepre­
sentations by advertisements (as big a problem then as it is now, evidently); based on a
book called One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs, the movies were released under the
blanket title Getting Your Money's Worth.
More documentaries followed: movies about art, aviation mechanics, hillbillies,
polio. In 1940, Roffman returned to Canada and took up with John Grierson's NFB, then
only just entering its terrible twos. "I was already a veteran compared to the neophytes
there who had never seen a camera cranked," Roffman remembered. "They were all
wildly engaged in making films, bur none of them knew which end of the camera took
the picture. It was a madhouse with people rushing up and down the corridors. "6
.
Roffman made a great number of army films through the Film Board, like the psycho­
logical study 13 Platoon, and a zany recruitment film for women called The Proudest Girl
in the World, which was wrinen by comedy Canucks Frank Schuster and Johnny Wayne,
and resembled nothing more than a full-blown Busby Berkeley dance routine. The army,
as might be expected, were leery of such an approach for what was supposed to be a stan­
dard-issue recruitment fUm, bur Roffman's vision was supported by Grierson, who told
the brass "This small young man is an excellent filmmaker. Let him do what he wants."
A grateful Roffman would thereafter keep a picture of Grierson hanging in his office
right beside one of his own father.
Wounded in the war, Roffman returned to New York and took up the documentary
camera once again, winning prizes for such short subjects as the very successful F.D.R.­
Hyde Park. Television beckoned, and Roffman began making commercials and television
drama. In New York he co-founded a company called Pioneer TV Films, which evolved
after his tenure into a massive company now known as Screen Gems; and then, returning
to Canada once again, he partnered up with an old NFB friend named Ralph Foster to
create Meridian Productions. Based in Toronto, Meridian turned out commercials and
television programs, and in 1959 became the first Canadian company to move into the
new technology of videotape.
Nat Taylor, meanwhile, was an Ontario film exhibitor and general showman who had
founded the trade paper Canadian Film Weekly in the early 1940s and wrote columns
exhorting any and all, especially the federal government, to fully commit to the task of
building a Canadian film industry. Taylor was an energetic player in the nascent industry:
he'd tried to help Sidney Furie market A Dangerous Age, and in 1959 had opened the
Kleinburg film studios (officially known as Toronto International Film Studios Inc.) just

32
north of Toromo.7 Kleinburg was for a long time the only film srudio in the area; perhaps
even in all of Canada. Taylor and Roffman formed a partnership called, naturally enough,
Taylor-Roffman (though the Taylor named on the incorporation documents was, for some
obscure business reason, actually Nat Taylor's wife Yvonne), and immediately embarked
on their first purely commercial feature project, The Bloody Brood.
While not a horror film, The Blo ody Brood is nonetheless a violent exploitation
picture which trades heavily on polite society's profound fear of beatniks. A pre-fame
Peter Falk stars as a nasty hep-cat named Nico whose
favourite pastime is feeding glass-filled hamburgers to
hapless delivery boys. Nico, it turns out, is not a real
beatnik but a calculating criminal for whom death is the
ultimate thrill show, and he gets his comeuppance at the
hands of the slain delivery boy's brother. The film was
atmospherically shot by none other than the German
special effects and cinematographic pioneer Eugene
Shuftan, invemor of the Schufftan Process• of matte pho­
tography. A year after filming The Bloody Brood, Shuftan
shot Georges Franju's fright classic Les Yeux Sans Visage;
and two years after that he won the Academy Award for
his work on The Hustler. TM Mask
The Bloody Brood was filmed in r6 days for a total budget of $8o,ooo. The budget
had come directly from the pockets of Taylor and Roffman themselves ("I nearly hawked
our studio to finance it," Roffman claimed), but the film did not make its money back
for the partners. "A distributor in New York was living off the revenues, bur we didn't
find out about it until later," Roffman says. "He was an old man and we let it go. What
could we have done?" Nevertheless, this taste of commercial filmmaking was heady and
appealing, despite Roffman's loftier inclinations. The school essay julian Roffman: Man
ofAction informs us of the filmmaker's very Canadian preference for documentary, and
the pressures and temptations which led him into a more mercenary arena. "He . . . like
many others, was seduced by a bigger canvas and more money," the essay reports. "He
should have continued making documentaries, he feels, but instead he started making
'tripes' . . . In the future, he hopes to apply himself to the issues of the unemployed, the
unwanted, and the elderly." So it goes: the father of Canadian genre filmmaking was, it
turns out, among the most committed, socially responsible documentarians Canada ever
produced. Such are the wonderful ironies of history. But what, one wonders, did
Roffman's hero John Grierson think of his protege's work in crime and horror movies? In
a "minor manifesto" outlining his thoughts on filmmaking, of which documentary was
the only valid kind, Grierson asserts that "the young director cannot, in nature, go
documentary and go studio both." Roffman was attempting to do just that, and at times,
under the great Calvinist administrator's hawk-like gaze, it must have been very hard. But
he persisted, and in so doing he made Canada's first real horror film.

33
It Begins: The Mask

M A D E I N A N D A RO U N D ToRONTO in the spring and summer of 1961, The Mask

would in fact set a number of Canadian cinema benchmarks: besides being the first
Canadian horror feature, it was Canada's first 3-D movie; the first Canadian movie to
make its money back before shooting had even completed; and the first Canadian ftlm
to receive wide distribution in the United States {and later, the world).
The financial failure of The Bloody Brood, insofar as Taylor and Roffman were
concerned at least, was forgotten at some point over the next year or so. Nat Taylor began
casting about for what he hoped would be an even more commercial property than the
killer beatnik story had been. After considering a number of ideas brought to him, he
decided to look into a proposal put forth by a pair of New York advertising men named
Frank Taubes and Sandy Haber.
The two men didn't have a script, exactly. It was more like an idea. One can imagine
a classic Madison Avenue pitch session: Taylor sitting there as the two excited gray flannel
suits spelled out their brilliant brainstorm. "What if, okay, okay, what if. . . we made a
3-D movie and a regular 2-D movie all at the very same time?"
"What?" Taylor likely would have answered. But Taubes and Haber were ad men
after all, and persistent, and they explained that, in their view, making a regular movie
with 3-D sequences would be a wonderfully exploitable gimmick, and cheap too! The
switch fro m two to three dimensions could be made an integral part of the story, like
dream or fantasy sequences around which the flat-screen drama would revolve. They had
gone so far as to make a little 3-D film as a test, and this they screened for Taylor. He
wasn't sure what to think, so he brought his partner Roffman in to have a look.
Roffman was profoundly unimpressed by the pair's test footage. Their 3-D effects
were, he says, "crap," and he couldn't tell what was going on in the story, of if there even
was a story. Besides which, to Roffman, 3-D was "just an exploitation feat that had had
irs run and nobody wanted to talk about it." The great initial boom of 3-D had peaked
in 1953, and two years later was nearly forgotten. As a gimmick it was laughably our-of­
date, and doing it badly and only half the time to boot wasn't about ro bring it back.
Roffman himself had sour memories of the 3-D craze, since the effect had done nothing
but give him headaches.
But in the face of Roffman's reluctance, the ad men turned on the waterworks. They
begged and pleaded with him to reconsider, saying that they had all sons of money tied
up in the idea already, and if nothing was done about it they'd lose their shirts. Roffman
relented, not so much because of the Madison Avenue blubbering, bur because he
remembered a National Film Board friend of his, the theoretician and technical expert
Raymond Sporriswoode, who had developed a three dimensional system some years earlier
for Grear Britain's National Research Council. In 1953, Spottiswoode had, in fact, liter­
ally written the book on 3-D. Roffman was quick to figure this had to be better than rhe
3-D he'd been shown by rhe ad men in New York.

31f
 Spottiswoode confirmed that indeed it would be, but achieving acceptable results in
3-D was at best difficult, and in his opinion better not tried at all. Still, he told Roffman,
he would be able to arrange for the rental of the equipment-which had spent the last
decade gathering dust in a warehouse-if indeed Roffman was still determined to go
ahead with the project.
He was, so the NRC refurbished the cameras and later sent them over to Toronto,
renting them to Taylor-Roffman for the very princely sum of 4,000 pounds a week. But
before all this there was the matter of a story and script-just what
was this movie going to be about? Taubes and Haber were no help;
despite getting screenplay credit on the film, they weren't writers,
just idea men, and aside from the 2-0/3-D brainstorm, even their
ideas weren't that good. To write the script that became The Mask,
Roffman hired some writers he knew from his television experi­
ence, a couple named Joe and Vicky Morhain. The Morhains
turned the notion into a story with which Roffman was perfectly
happy, but they proved unable to write the all-important halluci­
nation sequences, which were, after all, the central attraction to
the whole concept.
The story went as follows: Michael Radin, a high-strung,
sweaty archeologist, kills a woman while in the thrall of a pos­
sessed tribal mask he'd brought back from South America and
subsequently stolen from the museum which had sponsored the
dig. He tries to explain the power of the mask to his psychiatrist,
Dr. Allan Barnes, but is met with typical headshrinker patronizing and thinly veiled Th� Mask
skepticism. (Already we can see that the film contains more than one mask!) The highly
excitable Radin storms out and returns to his cluttered garret, where he prepares a
package for his landlady to pop in the post for him. After she's taken it away, he shoots
himself in the head.
Cops, including the stalwart Lt. Walker, try to puzzle out the strange suicide.
Naturally they have some questions for Barnes, but he's remarkably little help. As Walker
leaves, Barnes receives the package which, to nobody's surprise, contains the hideous
skull-like mask. The disembodied voice of Radin commands Barnes to "Put the mask on
now!" Barnes does, and is drawn into the first of the movie's 3-0 hallucination
sequences.
Like Radin before him, the button-down analyst becomes a sweaty, murderous
psychopath as the mask eclipses his far less interesting real personality. Law, personal
boundaries, simple decency-all are as nothing compared to the lure of the grotesque
visage and the smoky, surreal wonderworld to which it is the passport. Barnes, acting
entirely out of character, tries first to have sex with and then to murder both his girlfriend
Pamela and his sexy secretary Miss Goodrich. After a chase and a few scenes of jeopardy,
Lt. Walker and his men are able to restrain the frenzied shrink, carting him off to the

35
madhouse for the rest of his life. The mask is returned to the museum from which it was
stolen, but in the movie's final moments is clearly working its diabolical sorcery on
another hapless victim.
Few stories could be more appropriate for Canada's very first horror movie. What
could be more terrifying to a Canadian in the fifties (or a Canadian now, for that matter)
than an outside force which breaks down the barriers of social propriety, good manners
and basic politeness, and brings forth all the repressed demons from within? The xeno­
phobic angle of having the mask come from South America seems borrowed from the
American films of the time, but then again, it probably didn't need to be. (Imagine if the
mask had been of Native Canadian origin! How Canadian would that have been?) The
ethnic background of the mask is in any case secondary to the actual source of the movie's
horror-the repressed urges which, to polite society's shock and dismay, bubble and
churn within each of us, needing only the turn of some as yet unidentified key to achieve
release. The key itself is immaterial: even the science of David Cronenberg is just a
vehicle for the director's uue interests to make themselves manifest.
Of course, The Mask might be an appropriate tide for almost any Canadian film.
We're a nation of mask-wearers, after all: half British Bulldog, half Uncle Sam, :rnd a
thousand other guises besides. We'll wear whatever mask suits the occasion, pacifist,
peacekeeper or patsy. Help invade Iraq? No, thanks. Can't see the point. Join a ludicrous,
expensive and unworkable space-missile venture? Sure, why not. Sounds great!
But getting back to cases. The Mask needed dream sequences, and Roffman hit on
the idea of hiring famed montage expert Slavko Vorkapich to write, design and create
them. Born in Yugoslavia in 1892, Vorkapich had spent years in Hollywood as an art
director and special effects artist, bur was most famous for the montage sequences he
devised for films such as The Good Earth (1937), Broadway Melody o[1938 (1937), and Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He'd also produced short films, directed a feature called
Hanka in 1955, and, most recently and relevantly, executed some design work for another
atmospheric, low-budget horror picrure: Albert Band's spooky I Bury The Living (1958).
Roffman's plan was to hire Vorkapich and let the testy Serbian take care of the
hallucinations completely so that he, Roffman, like the Griersonite documentarian that
he was, could concentrate on the more real world segments. (Though there's nothing all
that real about the straight drama sequences in The Mask, which are graced with some of
the most stilted acting outside of a high school health film.) Roffman was eager to "get
the hell out of it and just do the story part, and then edit the whole film and finish it,
and go home."
This idyll was not to be, however. As the weeks leading towards the shoot raced on,
Roffman was concerned to observe Vorkapich do little besides "just sitting there." This
was certainly not the dynamic orgy of cinematic creativity he had hoped for! Vorkapich
had a few surprises in him, though: when his ideas for the nightmares did finally come
they were extravagant beyond all reason, involving thousands of frogs, mice and iguanas,
as well as gigantic and complicated sets decorated with such things as vast pools of black

36
ink. Roffman was startled and dismayed, though he admits he had been warned that
something like this might happen.
Vorkapich was fired with little delay. "''m sorry," Roffman told the profligate Serbian.
"Ifl indulge you we'Ll be our of business and we'll only have a few feet of film." Vorkapich
accepted his dismissal with little more than a wave of the hand and a demand that his
name be kept on the credits. Roffman couldn't imagine why-what if the film turned our
terribly? (Though Vorkapich lived until the mid-seventies, The Mask would be his final
screen credit, and as such, whether he knew it or not at the
time, would be a lasting legacy.) The montage expert told
Roffman simply "I trust you. You are a driven man."
That, then, was that for the great Vorkapich.
Roffman found himself about to shoot dream sequences
he'd never wanted ro go near, and which he had
absolutely no taste for or the slightest idea how to do.
The solution was to tackle everything as a group effort.
Ir was like the Magnificent Seven all of a sudden, with
artisans of different but complementary talents all riding
in for a common purpose. Roffman picked up a cam ­
eraman, Herb Alpert (not the leader of the Tijuana Brass,
more's the pity, bur he was the brother of Harry Alpert, who had shot several of Tht Mask
Roffman's NFB documentaries}, some special effects people, principally the Twentieth
Century Fox optical effects expert James Gordon-whom Roffman termed "a genius!"­
and floor effects people Herman Townsley, "Skin" Schwartz and Dick Williams, and a
sroryboard artist named Hugo Wuerrich. Everyone contributed ideas, and Wuerrich drew
them up as fast as he could. Many of the concepts discussed and drawn were never
actually shot: a sequence called 'The Tarantula Tunnel" in which giant spiders would
swarm the masked dream protagonist, was one such casualty. But in the end, three dream
sequences were conceptualized and designed to Roffman's satisfaction. He passed them
off ro a Toronto psychiatrist and film buff with the idea of having them vetted for some
semblance of psychological likelihood. Here again was the NFB professional cramming as
much reality and social relevance into the film as he could.
In the meantime, Nat Taylor had been working on the picture's financing. This
aspect roo was to be revolutionary in Canadian film history: the first Canadian film to
make money before it was even finished! Roffman had begun shooting the 3-0 dream
sequences, and as these were processed, Taylor invited executives from both Warner
Brothers and Paramount to have a look at the rushes. Initially skeptical about the
box-office appeal of 3-0, the studio suits became a good deal more interested upon
learning of the audience interaction element, wherein a voice on the soundtrack would
instruct the audience to don their tinted glasses at the crucial moments. Perhaps casting
an eye over towards Columbia Pictures, which was at this point still making money off
its William Castle gimmick pictures, the executives watched the footage and were excited

37
enough to talk terms with Taylor and Roffman. Sweetening the deal from the studios'
perspective was the fact that the particular 3-D process in which The Mask was being shot
did not require all manner of expensive equipment for exhibition, as other systems did.
The only extra cost would be the red-and-green glasses themselves. The Paramount exec­
utive offered $35o,ooo for the fum, lock, stock and barrel, bur Taylor decided to go with
the lower Warner Brothers offer on the basis that the Warner people "were nicer guys."
Shooting on the dream sequences continued. Innovative special effects techniques
(at least, innovative for Canada) were required at nearly every rurn, from the flayed-skin
makeup of the corpse-like demons who haunt the netherworld behind the mask, ro a
snake powered by magnets, ro the flames and puffs of smoke that were to leap our into
viewers' faces. "Skin" Schwanz was in charge of most of the physical effects, and,
Roffman says, "he was just great. Anything I wanted, I'd say ' "Skin", can I do this?' He'd
say 'Can do,' and he would do it." A mishap occurred at the end of the dream-sequence
shoot, in which the camera, shooting in slow motion, inopportunely ran out of film in
the middle of a complicated, one-take special effect involving a collapsing altar made of
Fuller's earth. Roffman nearly strangled the camera assistant responsible for the mistake.
But then it was on to the regular drama scenes, and they went as smoothly as s_i lk in
comparison. These were done over sixteen days, and were shot in Toronto and at the
Kleinburg studio. The museum interiors were done on location at the Royal Ontario
Museum. The cast was made up almost completely of Canadians, with the exceptions
being Paul Stevens, playing Dr. Barnes, and Claudette Nevins as his girlfriend, Pamela.
The mask itself had been commissioned from a Toronto artist by Roffman, who had
given her photographs of genuine native facewear upon which to base her work.
When the shooting was completed, Roffman went down ro Hollywood with James
Gordon to do the optical work on the film. Twentieth Century Fox, it turned out, was
looking for some income ro balance out their huge expenditures on Cleopatra, and was
happy to rent the entire optical department out to Roffman. With Gordon at the helm,
all manner of flames, spirals, smoke effects and other hypnotic trappings were laid over
the hallucination scenes. The opticals took longer than they otherwise would because of
the extra dimension involved.
After two months of work, by the end of August, 1961, the optical effects were
complete. Louis Applebaum, a Toronto composer who had scored many NFB documen­
taries in the early years, was writing music. The next thing to worry about was a
prologue, since-Roffman's hunger for reality showing itself yet again-it had been
decided to tie the movie's mask to real masks which existed in cultures around the world.
A promotional trailer would be shot at the same time, and both it and the prologue
would feature a real-life mask collector named Jim Moran, who would appear on screen
talking about his collection and about how the story told in The Mask could easily
happen to anyone. Moran, an American, had packed his mask collection in his car in
order to drive them up to Toronto for the prologue and trailer shoots, but was stopped
at the border by baffled Canadian customs officials, who, after inspecting his cargo,

31
demanded an arbitrary $175.00 in duty. When Moran explained rhar the masks were
going to be used to promote a Canadian film, the guards, their minds broken by the very
idea, relented and let him pass through without paying a penny.
Moran's preludial spiel, which emphasized the otherness of the film's central prop
and was accompanied by simple shots of him tal Icing along with a few insert shots of his
masks, went as follows:

My name is Jim Moran. I've just returned from

a trip around the world, collecting strange and
unusual masks. I think it's safe to say I'm some­
thing of an authority on rare masks-festival
masks, drama and religious masks, dance masks
and death masks from ancient tombs. Man's
desire to change his face-to assume a strange
or frightening disguise-to impersonate his
gods or to frighten devils-is a desire older
than the history of language. I've seen masks
unearthed from the ruins of crumbling tombs
and masks hanging in exotic temples to ward
off evil spirits. Bur nowhere . . . in my travels . . . have I seen anything to Th� Mask
compare with the power of this mask and the horrible curse it bears.
This is the mask around which the story you're about to see revolves.
And I can tell you that even though I am nor superstitious, I would
nor pur it on for all the wealth of the Indies. This mask was pan of an
ancient ritual so unearthly . . . so terrifYing. . . it has been wiped our of
the memory of man. Still it is a thing of evil. Still the dreadful power
clings to this mask.
You in this theatre are especially privileged to join in seeing
the terrifying sights rhar can only be seen through the mask. Each of
you has been given a mask. When you see the mask pur on the picture,
you pur yours on roo. Then, you will share an adventure into the darkest
hidden recesses of the human mind. You will see things never before
seen on any screen. Soon you will meet Dr. Alan Barnes, who meets
his other self when he puts on the mask. Then you will begin to follow
the threads that weave themselves into this gripping story. Soon you
will see him pur on the mask. Remember, when he puts on his mask,
you put on yours. It is the beginning of the ancient and forbidden
ritual of the mask.

There was rhus little chance that audiences wouJd fail to properly react to the movie's
interactive element. To promote the film in advance, Warner Brothers put together a

39
trailer also featuring Moran and his masks. From the script, the trailer sounds Like some­
thing Ed Wood might have used to promote one of his own ftlms, though likely with
Criswell performing the monologue instead of Moran.
It began with Moran sitting in a throne, wearing an elaborate mask and saying
nothing as the camera dollied in towards him and the Lights slowly came up. A narrator
intoned:

Here to tell you more is the supreme authority on all things weird. . .
initiate o f the strange and mysterious . . . the world's greatest connois­
seur and collector of masks . . . Mr. Jim Moran.

During this voice-over, Moran removes his mask, revealing not his face but another
mask. By the end of the Little introduction he's taken off the second mask as well, and
begins to speak a monologue that is, if possible, more purple and hyperbolic than his
speech in the prologue:

I have seen wonders. I have traveled to the remotest corners of the.

globe. . . tO dead cities . . . through savage jungles tO the inner sanctums
of esoteric cults . . . the temples of exotic rituals . . . to tombs and
caverns and palaces. The result: the most comprehensive collection of
masks in the world. Some are works of art; some are astounding and
horrifying; some reveal man's highest aspiration; others his unspeak­
able sins. But nowhere in my travels have I found a mask so absolutely
remarkable as this mask . . . T he Miracle Movie Fright Mask . . . the
mask that you will be invited tO put on when you see the motion
picture called The Mask!
T his is the mask that will open your eyes to such things as
man has never dared tO imagine. . . the mask that will make you part
of the sensations of the most staggering experience of your life. But,
be warned, the things that you will see when you put on this mask will
surely take you tO the very limit of your nerves . . . and tO the very
boundary line of sanity! Speaking as one who has seen things not
granted tO most men, I guarantee you that The Mask is incredible!

With a come-on like that, how could The Mask not be a success? T hat was the hope,
anyway. The fum was edited through September and set for release on Halloween, 1961.
In its November 1st issue (Vol. 26, No. 42), Canadian Film Weekly, the magazine run by
Nat Taylor, reported with great excitement and pride that " The Mask is the first Canadian
feature to get international distribution by a major company."
A premiere of the picture was held in New York City on a morning just a few days
before Halloween, and was attended by Roffman, music composer Louis Applebaum,

lfD
c
cameraman Herb Alpert, and the two American stars of the picture, PauJ Stevens and
z.
.. Claudette Nevins. The film critic for the Toronto Teugram, Clyde Gilmour {later a
beloved classical music radio host, known for his hearty intonation of the word "Hello!"
each week) , was also present, reponing afterward that "my initial reaction is that it's a
competent, fully professional hunk of horror-movie fiction." Gilmour's review may not
quire have been a rave, but that didn't stop him from joining Roffman and the rest for a
celebratory luncheon at the Forum Restaurant afterwards. Gilmour later went back to
the theatre (the Warner on Broadway} and counted 165 people in
line at the box office, presumably having been drawn by the
Moran preview or the advertising signs boasting of a new cine­
matographic process: "Depth Dimension."
With the Canadian Film Weekly watching very closely, rhe
American reviews began pouring in. How exciting it must have
been for Canadians to see the first American reviews of their fUm
product, and how galling that they were for a cheap horror fUm!
Bur the reviews were generally positive: "Sharply photographed,
and moves rather quickly within a highly melodramatic plot,"
(Howard Thompson, New York Times); "Roffman's direction gives
The Mask a kirid of Ingmar Bergman sort of light-and-shadows
effect. The dialogue is good and the players competent." Qames
Powers, The Hollywood Reporter); "If this kind of hair-raising
entertainment is your poison I think you'll have fun at ir . . . In the
gruesome division, this is really very good." (Ruth Waterbury, Los
Angeus Times). The Motion Picture Herald notice from November 8, 1961, must have been John Dunning
particularly gratifying to Roffman, and indeed to all of Canada: "Producer-direcror
Julian Roffman, former March ofTime director, gets the maximum effect out of the script
by Frank Taubes and Sandy Haber, using a documentary approach which is heightened
by a prologue featuring Jim Moran giving a brief history of a number of unusual masks."
On the other side of the coin came comments like this: "Welcome to low-brow
Surrealism . . The Mask has failed in its attempt ro imitate what Cocteau did in his
.

Blood ofa Poet and Beauty and the Beast." (Charles Stinson, also of
Surrealist fllms like
rhe Los Angeles Times); and Hazel Flynn of the Beverly Hills Citizen suggested merely that
Canadians "are not quite as hep on special effects as Hollywood."
The Canadian Film Weekly review was, of course, a rave, and in their November 22
issue they asserted that ''Awareness of Canada as the source of feature films is growing
thanks to The Mask and Arch Oboler's One Plus One. "9 But all was not roses for Taylor­
Roffman. According to Roffman's son Peter, some "creative bookkeeping" at Warner
Bros. resulted in the Canadian company losing our on profits they should have reaped
from the film's million-dollar-plus box-office take in the United States. As if that wasn't
enough, almost a decade later the film was apparencly picked up for college distribution
by Robert Shaye and his newly-formed company, New Line Cinema, who showed it on

IfI
campuses across America. It proved extremely popular, setting Shaye's company on the
road to {eventual) huge success. {New Line stayed in the distribution business for many
years, then turned to production and produced hits such as the Nightma" on Elm Strut
and Lord of the Rings series.) Warner Brothers re-released it more than once, though
under a new title, Eyes ofHell. This re-release earned it further critical denigration from
the likes of the Monthly Film Bulletin's John Gillett, who called it "a thoroughly
disagreeable exploitation picture, appallingly acted and haltingly scripted." Gillett was
closer to the truth than he knew in adding "Worst of all, one is never convinced that the
makers believed a word of it." The film showed up on television ten years after that with
the ride The Spooky Movie Show (during the same early-eighties 3-D boom that saw
broadcasts of such lovely dreck as Goril/4 At Large, and sales of 3-D glasses at the local
7- 1 1), and on video under its original tide as part of the Rhino Video series hosted by
busty Yvonne DeCarlo wannabe Elvira.
Roffman would never direct another feature film after The Mask, though he tried.
The experience had certainly soured him on the whole notion of making what he saw as
purely commercial products. Some may disagree, but I don't think it's stretching a point to
see in Roffman a microcosm of the entire Canadian ftlm industry through the rw�ntieth
century. Is that too heavy a metaphoric load to place across the shoulders of one "small
young man" (as John Grierson had called him)? Roffman was blessed with a deeply felt
social conscience, and it often pained him to work in the beloved, though frequently
superficial, medium of film in a corner from which he could discern no social value or
help to the needy emanating. He was a practical man and knew the value of a buck, but
commercial concerns were in the end secondary. He could have gone on making horror
movies, and made a very comfortable living at it-Paramount had apparently offered
him a rwo-picrure contract on the strength of The Mask's rushes-but he declined. And
yet he was not done with the world of horror films. Back and forth it went, this lifelong
search for compromise. Clearly, Julian Roffman was a conflicted man, and he very often
took a middle ground (as when he tried to plant the fanciful events of The Mask into
some realistic context) which ultimately satisfied few, least of all himself. Really, how
much more Canadian can you get?

As S U C C E S S F U L AS The Mask S E E M E D TO B E from a l J t h e coverage in the

CFW, it would be a full five years before Canadian horror activity would, at least

comparatively, heat up once again. I n the meantime, the global horror renaissance
continued, with great leaps taken in matters ofpermissiveness and taste over the first half
of the 1960s. Roger Corman's celebrated Poe series continued on; financially successful
horror films with fairly big budgets, like The Haunting (1963), made by Mark Robson's
old RKO colleague, Robert Wise, and the influential Whatever Happened to Baby jane?

lf2
 (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich, which spawned a long and profitable series of batty­
old-dame pictures. More important, as far as Canada was concerned, was the emergence
� of the regional horror film. Carnival of Souls (1962), made in Lawrence, Kansas by a
E company whose regular srock in trade was the production of industrial and classroom
0
... pictures, was one of these: a mini-budget film made far outside the Hollywood system in
.....
Ql every conceivable way, which relied on elements money couldn't buy, like atmosphere
E
ftl and imagination, for its success. And in Florida, director Herschell Gordon Lewis was
u
pushing boundaries with his gore films. Blood Feast
>­
QI (1963), a little splatter classic about a demented Egyptian
�
.... caterer, made for about $6o,ooo US, was the first of
them. It packed drive-ins across the South, and Lewis,
whose previous work had been in charmingly innocuous
nudie films like Lucky Pierre (1961), knew he was on to a
good thing. Bare breasts as marketable selling points
were on the verge of being co-opted by Hollywood
anyway, and Lewis, a filmmaker with the entrepreneurial
spirit of a P.T. Barnum, figured that extreme, if mani­
festly fake, violence would be a lucrative back alley down
which ro wander. He was right. And there was a won­
derful little movie made in Long Island, New York, caJJed The Flesh Eaters (shot in 1961, Andre Link (cenrre)
and friends
released in 1964), which swirled together gore, beatniks, mad Nazi doctors and giant
monsters into a bizarre concoction with a regional atmosphere of its very own.
European horror cinema was still going strong through the Sixties, with companies
like Hammer, Amicus and Tigon prodigiously turning out product in Britain, Antonio
Margheriti and the brilliant Mario Bava working out of Italy, and the less obviously
brilliant but still intriguing and prolific Jesus Franco making films in Spain, Germany
and France. At the same time, wonderfully weird horror cinema was emerging from
Mexico ( The Brainiac, for example, or the loopy Sanro fLims), Brazil (the insanity of]ose
Mojica Marins), Japan (the marvelous Kwaidan and Onibaba, both from 1964, or the
Majin series of 1966'0) and Argentina.
All this might have given aspiring Canadian film impressarios a hint that it was
possible ro cobble together a self-sustaining industry our of cheap B pictures, even given
the limited resources and infrastructure available to them. But there wasn't a prodigious
network of drive-in theatres (the chilly Canadian climate at any rate ensured an abbrevi­
ated drive-in season) or skid-row grindhouse cinemas (or the population to support
them) to be found in Canada, as there was in the States; nor an endless supply of easily
accessible neighboring countries as in Europe or Asia. For several years in the early sixties,
Canada would remain a country with the distinction of having turned out exactly one
horror film in its entire cinematic hisrory.
Nevertheless, events that would ultimately lead ro a later starburst of Canadian
horror were taking place, and the 1962 launch of John Dunning and Andre Link's

lf3
Cinepix ftlm distribution company into this nearly barren landscape was chief among
them. This company would later be responsible for helping David Cronenberg out of the
gate with his first few features, as well as backing early work by William Fruet (Death
Weekend) and George Mihalka (My Bloody Valentine}. Other Cinepix productions over
the years would include Jean Beaudin's 1972 devil-worship picture Le Diable est parmi
nous (which Dunning and Link also wrote, though under a pseudonym), Jean Lafleur's
lisa, Tigress of Siberia (1977), the big-budget slasher film Happy Birthday to Me (1981),
Jean-Claude Lord's robot-Frankenstein picture The Vindicator (1986} and the Dean R.
Koontz adaptation Whispers (1989). In short, their imprint upon the Canadian horror
ftlm scene is as vast as a Yeti's.
Dunning, a part-time screenwriter and relatively speaking the more creative-minded
of the rwo, was born into a family of cinema-owners in Montreal in 1927; while Link, the
businessman, was born in Budapest, Hungary, five years later. One of Link's early jobs
was in the service of a distributor, transporting film cans around his hometown. In his
early rwenties he moved to Montreal and became a film booker, a profession which led
him inevitably to Dunning. Cinepix was strictly a distribution company in its first seven
years, only turning to production in 1969, perhaps not coincidentally just around the.
time of the creation of the federal ftlm production funding body known first as the
Canadian Film Development Corporation and later as Telefilm Canada. Cinepix merged
with Famous Players in 1989, and the resulting company was named C/FP, and then, in
1994, Cinepix bought back the Famous Players interest and, so as to retain the brand
value of their acronym, though minus the slash, renamed the company Cinepix Film
Properties. CFP, in turn, was swallowed up in a $36 million sale to a Vancouver invest­
ment group in 1997. The company was ultimately appended to the Los Angeles-based
Lion's Gate Films.
"They were among the first to prove that it is possible to make movies for interna­
tional markets and be Canadian," says Serendipity Point Films president (and co-founder
of Alliance Entertainment} Robert Lantos, and that is of course true, providing that your
definition of"being Canadian" recognizes {as mine emphatically does} such endeavors as
kicking off the maple-syrup porn era of the early Seventies with such lyrical T&A
pictures as Valtrie, L1nitiation and Viens, Mon Amour. In addition, Dunning and Link
can claim to have brought over $40 million in production money into their home
province of Quebec. In the beginning, though, they stuck with distribution, and the
Canadian horror film remained embryonic.
Another critical event not to bear immediate fruit was the signing of Canada's first
co-production treaty, with France in October of 1963. This particular partnership--the
first such treaty of many with countries all around the world-would later produce
Canadian horror pictures like Cathy's Curse (1975) and The Little Girl Who Lived Down
the Lane (1976}. For the time being, though nothing much came of either the deal with
France or of anything else, Canadian influence on the horror world at large continued.
Horrific Canucks-Part II

LIKE RAY M O N D M A S S EY , rhough more than thirty years on, Donald Sutherland
began his film career in a horror film or two. Castle of the Living Dead (1964), a weird
Italian/French co-production reportedly directed to some degree by the prematurely
deceased British cult director Michael Reeves, featured Sutherland in a dual role as a
haggy old sorceress and an army sergeant; Dr. Terror's House ofHorrors (1964), the first of
the Amicus anthology horror films, in which the
Canadian plays a small-town doctor who unwittingly
marries a vampire, and Die! Die! My Darling (1965), a
Hammer whodunit which gave him the role of a retarded
gardener. 1 1 (The film was directed by fellow Canadian
Silvio Narizzano, an expatriate like Sidney Furie, who
would later return to his home and native land to make
Why Shoot the Teacher?) Here then, with his hollow eyes
and drawn, character-handsome face, was another
Canuck horror star in the making: a career direction
which was, sadly, cut short by the spectacular success of
M•A "S"H in 1970. Sutherland would, over the course of
his career, appear in a number of films that rather coyly flirted with the horror genre, Playgirl Killer

including Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Claude Chabrol's Montreal-set mystery
Blood Relatives (1978), Phillip Kaufman's wonderful 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, Bob Clark's Sherlock Holmes-versus-Jack the Ripper thriller Murder By Decree
(1979), and once more fighting body snatchers in Stuart Orme's The Puppe t Masters (a
passable adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein alien invasion story, filmed in Canada in
1994); and a crapshow called Virus (not the same one that Glenn Ford was in, but rather
a useless bit of electro-tripe made in 1998, all too obviously directed by a special effects man
out of his depth). But Sutherland never developed into the modern-day John Carradine
he might have been; though to be fair neither did Carradine until very late in his career.
So for optimists like myself there's still time.
William Shatner, in his final feature before taking off on his three-year mission
aboard the starship Enterprise (and years before appearing in the Canuck slasher spec­
tacular Visiting Hours), found time to make his own obscure mark on horror cinema
history. In 1966 he starred in the world's first and only all-Esperanto horror feature,
Incubus. Hearing Shatner's familiar cadence intoning reams of synthetic dialogue makes
for a curious viewing experience to say the least. Before that, in 1963, he'd played the role
of the terrified airplane passenger battling a wing-walking goblin in the Twilight Zone
episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet;" and later in his career he essayed lead roles in The
Devils Rain (1976) (which was originally to have been filmed in Canada, but wasn't),
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), and the Canadian-shot American Psycho 2 (2002) .
Vancouver-born John Ireland, the star of many Westerns and action pictures

lf5
throughout the 1950s, and an Oscar nominee for All the /(jng's Men (1949), jumped into
horror with both feet in the latter third of !tis career, though strictly speaking it was
unlikely a matter of choice. Still, he did so many of them that one might be forgiven for
assuming he developed an appreciation, or at least some sympathy, for the genre.
Beginning slowly, with a performance as a murderous psychopath in a William
Castle production called I Saw What You Did (1965), and playing the first of many
horror-movie cops the same year in a strange psychodrama called Day ofthe Nightmare,
Ireland went full-out horror-crazy in the Seventies. From an Italian cannibal-comedy set
in Vienna called The Mad Butcher in 1972, a performance as a horror movie director in
the Salt Lake City-shot House of the Seven Corpses (1973), and another cop role in
Laurence Harvey's directorial effort Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974), he descended into
ever-cheesier territory in films like Satan's Cheerleaders (1977, also starring Canadians
Yvonne de Carlo and Jack Kruschen}, the Italian curiosity Miami Go/em (1985}, and an
American cheapie called Terror Night (1987). Ireland's last few roles before his death in
1992 were in Anthony Hickox's zombie-western Sundown (1990) and the same director's
horror sequel Waxwork If· Lost in Time (1992). Along with Glenn Ford he was one of the
"secret Canadians" (to use David Cronenberg's phrase} ferreted out by producers looking
.
for a big-ticket star (or at least a once-upon-a-time big-ticket star) to headline their
tax-shelter productions; one of the results was the lowbrow demon-rapist film Incubus
(made in 1981, and not the same Incubus as Shatner's gobbledygook Sixties picture}.
Yvonne De Carlo, born in Vancouver, played Salome in the 1945 superproduction
Sa/om!-Where She Danced, and so was the poster girl for exotica in Hollywood for many
years before taking on the role of the matriarch, Lily, in The Munsters. She played the
kooky-spooky role &om 1964 to 1966. A number of horror roles came her way a&er that,
including The Power (1968) and La Casa tk los Sombras (1977). She appeared with John
Ireland in Satan's Cheerleaders, in the goofy disco-vampire flick Nocturna (1978),
the slasher picture Silent Scream (1980), a killer-pooch picture called P!d.y Dead (1981), the
fun monster goof-off Cellar Dweller (1988}, and was the den-mother to a clan of
maniacs in John Hough's British Columbia-shot backwoods-slasher-family picture
American Gothic (1989) .
And then there's Gordon Pinsent, the beloved Newfie thespian who at rimes seems
to define the Canadian film industry all by himself. He was never a horror star (though
like Sutherland, there's still time}, but he did play the honky cop on the trail of B!d.cu/4
back in 1972-at just about the same time he was acting in the most Pinsentian role of
his career: The Rowdyman.
Perhaps the most readily identifiable horror personality ever to come out of Canada is
Jonathan Frid, the vampire patriarch of the unaccountably popular soap-horror series Dark
Shadows. Frid joined the series in 1967, expecting to play the role of the urbane hemogob­
bler Barnabas Collins for only a few weeks. The show became a hit almost instantly,
however, and the Hamilton, Ontario-born stage actor was launched into a sudsy super­
stardom few could have predicted. He spent the next four seasons playing the 175 year-old

lf6
undead master of Collinwood, wading knee-deep in fog. pushing his way through cobwebs
and baring his pearly fangs in greeting. "It had this peculiar never-never land charm to it,"
Frid recalls of the show that made him famous. "I called it the gothic Brigadoon."
Frid's horror career did not end after his Dark Shadows run. He appeared, quite
naturally, in the feature-film spin-off House of Dark Shadows (though nor irs sequel),
and later in the fairly small role of a butler in a 1972 Rosemary's Baby rip-off TV movie
called The Devils Daughter. Still later, he played the lead in Oliver Stone's inaugural
feature, the Quebec-shot horror film Seizure, which will
be discussed in the next chapter. Frid, now retired from
acting, has kept busy over the last few years maintaining
his own web sire ("Jonathan Frid: Ongoing
Septuagenarian") and, to the delight of thousands of
Dark Shadows fans, making erudite, befanged appear­
ances at conventions.
Behind the camera there was director George
McCowan, whose experience had come from such work
as directing episodes of the big-budget CBC drama
Seaway. One of McCowan's episodes was the spooky,
though ultimately non-horrific "Ghost Ship;" and a
multi-part episode called "Don't Forget to Wipe the Blood Off" was repackaged into a Playgirl Killrr
feature and released to theatres. His real contribution to the world of horror was a 1972
eco-rerror feature called Frogs, made in Florida for American-International. Ray Milland,
later to travel to Montreal to take part in a killer-kitty thriller called The Uncanny. was
the star. The movie itself, while not in the least Canadian outside of irs director's birth­
place, is nevertheless pretty darn special in its own amphibious way.
John Coquillion was an unsung horror star behind the camera. He was a cinematog­
rapher, born in Montreal, who lent his considerable talents to British horror pictures like
The Witchfinder General Curse oftbe Crimson Altar, The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream
Again and Cry ofthe Bamhee before moving up the budgetary ladder to work with Sam
Peckinpah on Straw Dogs, Pat Ga"ett and Billy the Kid, and several others. He later
returned to both the horror genre and his native land with the spooky haunted-house
picture The Changeling.

The Vulture

I N 1 9 6 6 T H E R E WAS A S O RT O F N EA R - M I S S : a horror ftlm that was in many ways

Canadian, but perhaps nor in so many ways as it might have been. The Vulture was
written and directed by Lawrence Huntington, a Briton who had been making movies
since approximately the Iron Age. Huntington's script, then called Minotaur, made its
way across the Atlantic to a small-time American producer named Jack Lamont, who in

lf7
rurn approached a Toronto outfit called Robert Lawrence Productions. RLP made televi­
sion commercials, and John Ross, a producer there, and today the chairman of a
completion bond company, was intrigued enough with the story to take it on. Ross
hooked up with one of his competitors, Dean Peterson, and another friend and investor,
Ben Webster, to form Iliad Productions in order to make the film.
The production, which Ross and Peterson originally intended to film in the
Kleinburg studios just north ofToronto, was forced, for "financial reasons," to relocate
to Pinewood Studios near London, England. Iliad Production was reformed as "Homeric
Productions" at some point during the move, and location work was set to take place on
the Cornish coastline. Lamont had some kind of deal with Pinewood; the move to
England was encouraged partially by this, and also by the limited equipment and
personnel then procurable in Canada. Akim Tamiroff, a veteran actor who was to play
the movie's mad scientist, had but a small window available for the movie, and this too
was a factor in the shift across the pond.
Shooting began in the fall of 1965, with a final budget of US$18o,ooo, or about
$zoo,ooo Canadian. Thirty-five thousand of this came from Paramount Pictures in return
for the US distribution rights. The cast was a strong one: Robert Hutton (the star and
director of The Slime People, and a lead in many other genre efforts, from Invisible Invaders
to Torture Garden to Trog), Broderick Crawford (an Oscar winner for All the King's Men
and, prophetically, a co-star to Bela Lugosi in a 1941 comedy version of The Black Cat),
Tamiroff (who was a Russian, but effective as a Mexican crime boss in Orson Welles'
Touch ofEvil, and at one time or another in the course of his career, every nationality in
between), and Diane Clare, who had appeared in Hammer films like Plague ofthe Zombies
as well as chillers like The Haunting, Witchcraft and The Hand ofNight. The bright, high­
key and generally un-atmospheric cinematography is by Stephen Dade, who had shot
Sidney J. Furie's two Anglo shockers in 1960, Doctor Blood's Coffin and The Snake W0man.
An absolute mind-breaker is The Vulture, in its own modest way. Crawford plays a
"millionaire newspaperman from Canada" who has set up house in the Cornish coun­
tryside. His brother lives nearby and his niece, Trudy, has come for a visit with her
nuclear scientist husband (Hutton). Meanwhile a local schoolteacher has been frightened
so badly by an encounter with a birdlike apparition bearing a horrible human face that
her hair has turned chalk white. As any good nuclear scientist might do when faced with
an absolute lack of facts or evidence, Hutton comes up with a hair-brained theory
involving "nuclear transmutation" and mounts an immediate investigation, uncovering a
local legend involving a Spanish pirate buried alive with his pet vulture and eventually
meeting up with a black-cloaked Tamiroff in the Bela Lugosi role of the outwardly affable
and grandfatherly, but inwardly vengeful scientist.
Several dizzying and unscientific leaps of logic later, Hutton deduces that a homi­
cidal Iberian man-bird reanimate is targeting members of Crawford's family, whose
ancestors had evidently masterminded the premature interment of the pirate many years
before. Crawford spends the entire movie grumping and harrumphing in his drawing

lfl
room ; with good reason as it turns out, for the moment he steps outside it he is carried
off by a monstrous pair of rubber talons. Eventually Tamiroff flings back his cloak and
tosses away his walking stick to reveal that indeed it is he who has been flying around the
countryside snatching sheep, rabbits and burly, Academy Award winning actors. Hutton
shoots the poor ragged creature, and with a final cry of"Screee!" it tumbles off a cliff and
kites down to smash on the rocks below.
Tamiroff appears to be doing the best late-career Lugosi impersonation he can
muster u�ntirely appropriate to what might, but for
colour and locale, be a lost entry in the penurious PRC"
catalogue. {It must have seemed even more like an old
Lugosi vehicle that got re-released by mistake in the U.S.,
where for some reason it was shown in black and white.)
Every scene seems to take place three times, but in spite
of this, and such diversions as a creepy verger, an
intriguing backstory on the man-bird involving Easter
Island, and Hutton's constant, loopy theorizing, nothing
at all seems to happen for a great majority of the movie.
It's too bad we don't get to see more of the vulture: flap­
ping sounds and loose feathers are about it until the
(anti-) climactic "twist" at the end. At that point all we get is a very funny shot of Playgirl Kilkr
Tamiroff in bird-boots and cumbersome fake wings. Still, it's just crazy enough and
Canadian enough to warrant a look for those who can take it.
Ross and Peterson followed their investment over to Pinewood and Cornwall, where
they observed Huntington at work for a few days. Peterson was a cinematographer and
had a good deal of production experience, and so, after many frustrating hours of
watching Huntington and the crew struggle with the logistics behind a shot of a mechan­
ical vulture flying from a cave, he stepped in {with Huntington's permission) and
reconfigured the bit as a hand-held shot from the bird's point of view. "Everybody
clapped and cheered," remembers Ross. "Good old Canada taught the Brits a thing or
two, even in those early days!"
The Vulture was to be Huntington's final curtain; though his work would live on in
the form of the script for theJohn Coquillion-shot film The Oblong Box. But critics were
generally unkind to Huntington's directorial swan song: a review in the Monthly Film
Bulletin describes The Vulture as "a pitifully stilted horror film in which the characters
stand around either speculating, scoffing or helpfully disbursing yards of background
informacion." Most other critics rook the same tack, but a reviewer identified only as
"Whit." i n the January 25, 1967 issue of Vttriety, gave The Vulture a generally positive
review, calling it "a well-developed chiller" and asserting that the "technical credits
generally are first-rate." None of this is remotely true, and I find myself wondering what
film "Whit." actually saw that day, or, if he indeed saw The Vulture, just what he was
smoking and where I can get me some of that.

If!
Murder on the 'mount: Playgirl Killer

Playgirl Killer, S H O T A R O U N D T H E S A M E T I M E as The Vulture, was in contrast a

genuinely Canadian horror movie. Set in an undisguised Montreal (French graffiti and
other telltale signs are exotically rampant), the film tells of Bill, a mad anist-few sixties
movie artists were not mad-with a thing about twitchy models. Should they so much
as wiggle while he's trying to paint them (and they always do), he whines "Don't move!
Please don't move," then shows them the business end of a spear gun, or just closes his
sweaty palms around their antsy, restless necks. Hitchhiking through the rich Anglo
district of Montreal, he hooks up with a spoiled-rotten Westmount debutante, taking a
job as her handyman after the deb's sister, the sister's boyfriend (played by none other
than Neil Sedaka!) and their father go off to, respectively, college, college, and big-game
hunting in Africa.
It's when Bill rakes our his sketchpad that all the trouble begins, as it seems he has
some issues from a traumatic shipwreck incident to work through. The horrible event is
dramatized by Bill's voice speaking over a dreamy, exrravagandy fake shot of women
cavorting in the sea and a beautiful archer on the rocks above: an image Bill is obsses­
sively dedicated to recreating in his art. The horny deb goes for a nighttime walk in a
sheer nightgown and is soon dead, and rhe demented dabbler with his Green Arrow
beard sets up shop in the girl's Westmount mansion (whose interiors are suspiciously
downmarket, as though the homeowners who let the film crew on their land were
unwilling to extend their hospitality to the interior).
Other victims follow: a francophone chanteuse played by singer and sometime actress
Andree Champagne, a would-be nurse applying for a nonexistent job the artist has planted
in the classifieds as bait, and another woman who jusr happens by on a visit. This last
woman is saved by a helpful meter man, who has come to inform Bill that his power has
been temporarily shut down for maintenance. This comes as bad news to a man who has
carefully arranged a tableau of frozen corpses in the freezer room downstairs as a way to
exorcise his maddening shipwreck-inspired visions. Naturally a drawn bow-and-arrow is
part of the display, and the poor gibbering madman is shot by his own victim as she thaws
and relaxes her grip on the bow. His last words, gasped out through a bright crimson smear,
are, of course, 'Don't move! Please don't move!" The horrified, uncomprehending meter
man can only gape, stolidly unaware that he's the de facto hero of the piece.
The artist was played by Bill Kerwin, well known for his appearances in rhe
Herschell Gordon Lewis films Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs and A Taste ofBlood under the
moniker "Thomas Wood". Kerwin and his brother Harry wrote the original story, which
is hard to imagine being inspired by anything other than H.G. Lewis' own mad-artist
picture, Color Me Blood Red. Rumour has it that the movie was originally to have been
directed by Lewis himself, probably in Florida like any other H.G. Lewis film; but if this
ever really was to happen, it did not, and, in the summer of 1965 the production moved
north under the direction of Martin Green.

SD
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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could give would be against Philip and Joan. It was therefore
decided to make the voyage by sea, and a large fleet of sixty ships,
with a retinue of three thousand persons, was mustered in one of
the ports of Zeeland. In the meanwhile ceaseless intrigue went on
both in Spain and abroad. France having abandoned him, Philip
turned to England. Juan Manuel’s sister, Elvira, was the principal
lady-in-waiting upon Katharine, Princess of Wales, and through her
and Katharine secret negotiations were opened for a marriage
between Henry VII. and Philip’s sister, the Archduchess Margaret, the
widow of Juan, Prince of Asturias and of the Duke of Savoy, with an
alliance between England and Philip—though Katharine probably did
not understand at first how purely this was a move against her
father. So, although Henry VII. still professed to be on Ferdinand’s
side in the quarrel, he was quite ready for a secret alliance with
Philip and Joan against him and the King of France.
The King and Queen of Castile left Brussels early in November to
join the waiting fleet, but from the slowness of their movements and
the ostentatious publicity given to them, it is clear that their first
object was to prepare Castile in their favour. Philip, for a time,
scouted all idea of arrangement with Ferdinand. He knew that the
Castilian nobles were on his side, and that his wife’s legal right was
unimpeachable. The wily old King of Aragon saw that his best policy
was to temporise, and to do that he must seem strong. His first
move was to declare to the Castilians that Joan was sane, but was
kept a prisoner by her husband, and he proposed to send a fleet to
rescue her and bring her and her son Charles to Castile. Philip’s
Flemish subjects were discontented at his proposed long absence,
and also threatened trouble. Then Ferdinand hinted that he would
mobilise all his force to resist Philip’s landing.
This series of manœuvres delayed the departure of Philip and his
wife month after month; until Ferdinand, by consummate diplomacy,
managed to patch up an agreement with Philip’s ambassadors at
Salamanca at the end of November; which, though on the face of it
fair enough, was really an iniquitous plot for the exclusion of Joan in
any circumstances. Philip and Joan were to be acknowledged by
Castile as sovereigns, and their son Charles as heir; but, at the same
time, Ferdinand was to be accepted as perpetual governor in his
daughter’s absence: and in the case of Queen Joan being unwilling
or unable to undertake the government, the two Kings, Ferdinand
and Philip, were to issue all decrees and grants in their joint names.
The revenues of Castile and of the Grand Masterships were to be
equally divided between Philip and Ferdinand.
When once this wicked but insincere agreement was ratified there
was no further need for delay, and Philip’s fleet sailed for Spain on
the 8th January 1506 to engage in the famous battle of wits with his
father-in-law, which only one could win. All went well until the
Cornish coast was passed, and then a dead calm fell, followed by a
furious south-westerly gale which scattered the ships and left that in
which Philip and Joan were without any escort. To add to the trouble
a fire broke out upon this vessel, and a fallen spar gave the ship
such a list as to leave her almost waterlogged. Despair seized the
crew, and all gave themselves up for lost. Philip played anything but
an heroic part. His attendants dressed him in an inflated leather
garment, upon the back of which was painted in staring great
letters, ‘The King, Don Philip,’ and thus arrayed, he knelt before a
blessed image in prayer, alternating with groans, expecting every
moment would be his last. Joan does not appear to have lost her
head. She is represented by one contemporary authority[105] as being
seated on the ground between her husband’s knees, saying that if
they went down she would cling so closely to him that they should
never be separated in death, as they had not been in life. The
Spanish witnesses are loud in her praise in this danger. ‘The Queen,’
they say, ‘showed no signs of fear, and asked them to bring her a
box with something to eat. As some of the gentlemen were
collecting votive gifts to the Virgin of Guadalupe, they passed the
bag to the Queen, who, taking out her purse containing about a
hundred doubloons, hunted amongst them until she found the only
half-doubloon there, showing thus how cool she was in the danger. A
king never was drowned yet, so she was not afraid, she said.’[106]
 At length, mainly by the courage and address of one sailor, the
ship was righted, the fire extinguished, and the vessel brought into
the port of Weymouth on the 17th January 1506. Henry VII. of
England had been courted and conciliated by Philip for some time
past, but it was a dangerous temptation to put in the wily Tudor’s
way to enable him to make his own terms for an alliance. Above all,
he wanted to get into his power the rebel Earl of Suffolk, who was in
refuge in Flanders, and this seemed his opportunity. Philip had had
enough of the sea for a while. We are assured by one who was there
that he was ‘fatigate and unquyeted in mynde and bodie,’ and he
yearned to tread firm land again. His councillors urged him to take
no risk, but Philip and Joan landed at Melcombe Regis to await a fair
wind for sailing again. From far and near the west country gentry
flocked down with their armed bands, ready for war or peace, but
when they found that the royal visitors were friendly their hospitality
knew no bounds. Sir John Trenchard would take no denial. The King
and Queen must rest in his manor-house hard by until the weather
mended; and, in the meanwhile, swift horses carried the news to
King Henry in London.
As may be supposed, when he heard the news, ‘he was
replenyshed with exceeding gladnes ... for that he trusted it should
turn out to his profit and commodity,’ which it certainly did. But
Philip grew more and more uneasy at the pressing nature of the
Dorsetshire welcome. The armed bands grew greater, and though
the weather improved, Trenchard would not listen to his guests
going on board until the King of England had a chance of sending
greeting to his good brother and ally. At length Philip and Joan
realised that they were in a trap, and had to make the best of it,
which they did with a good grace, for they were welcomed by Henry
with effusive professions of pleasure. Philip was conveyed with a
vast cavalcade of gentlemen across England to Windsor, where he
was met by Henry and his son, the betrothed of Katharine, Joan’s
sister. Then the King of Castile was led to London and to Richmond
with every demonstration of honour. But, withal, it was quite clear
that Henry would not let his visitors go until they had subscribed to
his terms, whatever they might be. And so the pact was solemnly
sworn upon a fragment of the true cross in Saint George’s Chapel,
Windsor, by Philip and Henry, by which Suffolk was to be
surrendered to his doom, Philip’s sister Margaret, with her fat dowry,
was to be married to the widowed old Henry, and England was
bound to the King of Castile against Ferdinand of Aragon.
Joan was deliberately kept in the background during her stay in
England. She had followed her husband slowly from Melcombe, and
arrived at Windsor ten days later, the day after Philip, with great
ceremony, had been invested with the Order of the Garter and had
signed the treaty. On her arrival at Windsor on the 10th February
she saw her sister Katharine, though not alone, and Katharine left
the next day to go to Richmond. Three days later, on the 14th
February, Joan set out from Windsor again towards Falmouth, whilst
Philip joined Henry at Richmond; and soon after the King of Castile
was allowed to travel into the west and once more take ship for his
wife’s kingdom. The cynical exclusion of Joan from all participation in
the treaty with England,[107] and the fact that she was only allowed
to see her sister once, and in the presence of witnesses in the
interests of Philip, seems to prove that she was purposely kept in the
dark as to the real meaning of the treaty, which was directed almost
as much against herself as against her father, because, with England
on his side, Philip could always paralyse France from interfering with
him in Spain; and it is clear that, whether Joan was really
incapacitated at the time or not, both Ferdinand and Philip had
already determined to make out that she was.
Like a pair of wary wrestlers the two opponents still played at
arms’ length. Ferdinand, after celebrating his second marriage—as
he had celebrated his first, nearly forty years before—at Valladolid,
awaited at Burgos, so as to be near on arrival of his daughter and
her husband at one of the Biscay ports, as was expected. But
nothing was further from Philip’s thoughts than to land at any place
near where Ferdinand was waiting. His idea was to go to Andalucia,
so as to be able to march through Spain before meeting the old
King, and to gather friends and partisans on the way. Contrary
winds, however, drove the fleet into Corunna, on the extreme north-
west of the Peninsula, on the 26th April; and Ferdinand, when he
got the news, for a moment lost his smooth self-control, and was for
flying at his undutiful son-in-law sword in hand. But the outbreak
was not of long duration, for the circumstances were serious, and
needed all the great astuteness of which Ferdinand was capable. He
was determined to rule Castile whilst he lived for the benefit of his
great Aragonese aims.
He had, indeed, some cause for complaint against fortune; for,
with the exception of the kingdom of Naples, he had not yet
gathered the harvest that he had reckoned upon as the result of the
union of the realms. His son-in-law, now that, by the death of other
heirs, Joan had become Queen of Castile, was an enemy instead of
an ally, and his defection had rendered necessary the pact between
Ferdinand and France, which had stultified much of the advantage
previously gained by the Castilian connection. At any cost Castile
must be held, or all would be lost. If Joan herself took charge of the
government, as was her right, then goodbye to the hope of
Ferdinand employing for his own purposes the resources of Castile;
for around her would be jealous nobles hating Aragon; whereas,
with Philip as King, it was certain that his imprudence, his ignorance
of Spain, and the Castilian distrust of foreigners, would soon provoke
a crisis that might give Ferdinand his chance. Both opponents,
therefore, were equally determined to keep Joan away from active
sovereignty, whatever her mental state; and as Philip and his wife
rode through Corunna, smiling and debonair, gaining friends
everywhere, but surrounded with armed foreigners, German guards,
archers, and the like, strange to Spaniards, as if in an enemy’s
country, the plot thickened between the two antagonists.
Everywhere Philip took the lead, and Joan was treated as a
consort.[108] In the verses of welcome it was Don Philip’s name that
came first; and Joan showed her discontent at the position in which
she was placed by refusing to confirm the privileges of the cities
through which they passed until she had seen her father, though
Philip promised readily to do so. No sooner did Philip find himself
supported by the northern nobles, than he announced that he would
not be bound by the treaty of Salamanca, and generally gave
Ferdinand to understand that he, Philip, alone, intended to be
master. Ferdinand travelled forward to meet his son-in-law, making
desperate attempts at conciliation and to win Juan Manuel to his
side, but without success: whilst Philip tarried on the way and
exhausted every means of delay in order to gain strength before the
final struggle. To Philip’s insulting messages Ferdinand returned
diplomatic answers; in the face of Philip’s scornful rejection of
advances, Ferdinand was amiable, conciliatory, almost humble; he
who, with the great Isabel, had been master of Spain for well nigh
forty years. But he must have chuckled under his bated breath and
whispering humbleness, for he knew that he was going to win, and
he knew how he was going to do it.
Slowly Ferdinand travelled towards the north-west, sending daily
embassies to Philip soliciting a friendly interview, and at every stage,
as he came nearer, his son-in-law grew in arrogance. When
Ferdinand left Astorga in the middle of May, Juan Manuel sent a
message to him that if he wished to see the King of Castile, he must
understand three things: first, that no business would be discussed;
second, that Philip must have stronger forces than he; and third,
that he must not expect that he would be allowed to obtain any
advantage by, or through, his daughter, Queen Joan, as they knew
where that would lead them to. Therefore, continued Manuel, King
Ferdinand had better not come to Santiago at all. In the meanwhile
the inevitable discord was brewing in the Court of Joan and Philip at
Corunna. The proud Castilian nobles, greedy and touchy, who had
flocked to Philip’s side, found that Flemings and Germans always
stood between them and the throne, and intercepted the favours for
which they hungered. The Teutons, who thought they were coming
to Spain to lord over all, found a jealous nobility and a nation
convinced of its own heaven-sent superiority, ready to resist to the
death any encroachment of foreigners, whom they regarded with
hate and scorn.
 The Castilians deplored most the isolation of Joan, and
endeavoured by a hundred plans to persuade her to second her
husband’s action towards her father. Philip ceased now even to
consult her, since she had refused to oppose Ferdinand; and in the
pageantry of the entrance into Santiago and the triumphal march
through Galicia, with a conquering army rather than a royal escort,
Joan, in deepest black garments and sombre face, passed like a
shadow of death. As the Kings gradually approached each other,
Ferdinand, in soft words, begged Philip to let him know what
alterations he desired to make in the agreement of Salamanca. After
much fencing, Philip replied that if his father-in-law would send
Cardinal Jimenez with full powers, he would try to arrange terms.
The great point, he wrote, was that of Queen Joan; and the King of
Aragon knew full well that upon this point the issue between him
and Philip would be joined. Ferdinand had little love or trust in the
great Castilian Cardinal, Jimenez, though the latter was faithful to
him, not for his own sake, but for the good of Spain; but the
Cardinal went to Philip with full powers, and bearing a private letter,
saying that, as Joan was incapacitated from undertaking the
government, Ferdinand besought Philip to join and make common
cause with him, in order to prevent her, either of her own accord or
by persuasion of the nobles, from seizing the reins. This was the line
upon which Philip was pleased to negotiate, and Cardinal Jimenez
found a ready listener. Ferdinand, however, was ready with the other
alternative solution if this failed. If Philip would not join with him to
exclude Joan, he would join Joan to exclude Philip, and all
preparations were quietly made to muster his adherents at Toro,
make a dash for Benavente, the place where Philip was to stay,
rescue Joan, and govern, with her or in her name, to the exclusion
of foreigners.[109] But it was unnecessary. Jimenez’s persuasion and
Ferdinand’s supple importunity conquered; and, though with infinite
distrust and jealousy on all sides, the Kings still slowly approached
each other, stage by stage, whilst the negotiations went on.
The Teutons and Castilians were at open loggerheads now; Queen
Joan, reported Jimenez, was more closely guarded and concealed
than ever, and Philip less popular in consequence. But, at length, the
two rival Kings, on the 20th June 1506, found themselves in
neighbouring villages; and on that day at a farmhouse half-way
between Puebla and Asturianos they met. Ferdinand, in peaceful
guise, was attended only by the Duke of Alba and the gentlemen of
his household, not more than two hundred in all, mostly mounted on
mules and unarmed; whilst Philip came in warlike array with two
thousand pikemen and hundreds of German archers in strange
garments and outlandish headgear, whilst the flanks of his great
company of nobles were protected by a host of Flemish troops.
When Philip approached his father-in-law, with steel mail beneath his
fine silken doublet, and surrounded by armed protectors, it was seen
that his face was sour and frowning, whilst Ferdinand, almost alone
and quite unarmed, came smiling and bowing low at every step.
When the Castilian nobles came forward one by one shamefacedly,
to kiss the hand of the old monarch they had betrayed, Ferdinand’s
satiric humour had full play, and many a sly thrust pierced their
breasts, for all their hidden armour. After a few empty polite words
between the Kings the conference was at an end, and each returned
the way he came; Ferdinand more than ever chagrined that he had
not been allowed even to see his daughter.
For the next few days the Kings travelled along parallel roads
towards Benavente; Philip continuing to treat his father-in-law as an
intruder in the most insulting fashion. At length their roads
converged at a small village called Villafafila, at the time when the
long discussed agreement had been settled by their respective
ministers; and here, in the village church, the two rivals finally met
to sign their treaty of peace on the 27th June 1506. It was a hellish
compact, and it sealed the fate of unhappy Joan whatever might
happen. Ferdinand came, as he said, with love in his heart and
peace in his hands, only anxious for the happiness of his ‘beloved
children,’ and of the realm that was theirs: and, after warmly
embracing Philip, he led him towards the little village church to sign
and swear to the treaty. With them, amongst others, were Don Juan
Manuel and Cardinal Jimenez, and when the treaty was signed and
the church cleared, the great churchman took the arm of Manuel,
and whispered, ‘Don Juan, it is not fitting that we should listen to
the talk of our masters. Do you go out first, and I will serve as
porter.’ And there alone, in the humble house of prayer, the two
Kings made the secret compact which explains the treaty they had
just publicly executed. In appearance Ferdinand gave up everything.
He was, it is true, to have half the revenues from the American
discoveries, and to retain much plunder from the royal Orders and
other grants of money, but he surrendered completely all share and
part in the government of Castile, and allied himself to Philip for
offence and defence against the world.
The secret deed, the outcome of that sinister private talk between
two cruel scoundrels in the village church, allows us to guess, in
conjunction with what followed, the reason for Ferdinand’s meek
renunciation of the government. ‘As the Queen Joan on no account
wishes to have anything to do with any affair of government or other
things; and, even if she did wish it, it would cause the total loss and
destruction of these realms, having regard to her infirmities and
passions, which are not described here for decency’s sake’; and then
the document provides that, ‘if Joan of her own accord, or at the
instance of others, should attempt to interfere in the government or
disturb the arrangement made between the two Kings, they will join
forces to prevent it.’ ‘And so we swear to God our Lord, to the Holy
Cross, and the four saintly evangelists, with our bodily hands placed
upon His altar.’ And the two smiling villains came out hand in hand,
both contented; each of them sure that the best of the evil bargain
lay with him, and Ferdinand made preparations for departure to his
own Aragon, and so to his realm of Naples and Sicily, delighted that
his ‘beloved children’ should peacefully reign over the land of Castile.
It was more than two years and a half since Ferdinand had seen
his daughter Joan. During that time both he and Philip had
alternately declared she was quite sane and otherwise, as suited
their plans. Now both were agreed, not only that she did not wish to
govern her country: but that if ever she did wish, or Castilians
wished for her to do so, then her ‘passions and infirmities,’ so
vaguely referred to, would make her rule disastrous. It ensured
Philip being King of Castile so long as he lived, and Ferdinand being
master if he survived, and until the majority of his grandson Charles.
There is no reason to deny that Joan was wayward, morbid, and
eccentric; subject to fits of jealous rage at certain periods or crises,
and that subsequently she developed intermittent lunacy. But at this
time, according to all accounts, she was not mad in a sense that
justified her permanent exclusion from the throne that belonged to
her. Philip, heartless, ambitious, and vain, wished to rule Castile
alone, according to Burgundian methods, which were alien to Spain
and to the Queen. Ferdinand knew that, in any case, such an
attempt could not succeed for long; and by permanently excluding
Joan he secured for himself the reversion practically for the rest of
his life. And so Joan was pushed aside and wronged by those whose
sacred duty it was to protect and cherish her, and as Joan the Mad
she goes down to all posterity.
But old Ferdinand had not yet shot his last bolt, for symmetry and
completeness in his villainy was always his strong point. On the very
day that the secret compact was signed, he came again to that
humble altar of Villafafila, accompanied this time only by those
faithful Aragonese friends who would have died for him, Juan
Cabrero, who had befriended Colon, and his secretary, Almazan.
Before these he swore and signed a declaration that Philip had come
in great force whilst he had none, and had by intimidation and fear
compelled him to sign a deed so greatly to the injury of his own
daughter. He swore now that he had only done so to escape his
peril, and never meant that Joan should be deprived of her liberty of
action: on the contrary, he intended when he could to liberate her
and restore to her the administration of the realm that belonged to
her: and he solemnly denounced and repudiated the former oath he
had just taken on the same altar. And then, quite happy in his mind,
Ferdinand the Catholic went on his way, having left heavily bribed all
the men who surrounded doomed Philip, including even the all-
powerful favourite Juan Manuel.
 Philip lost no time. Before Ferdinand had got beyond Tordesillas, a
courtier reached him from his son-in-law giving him news of Joan’s
anger and passion when she learnt that she was pushed aside and
was not to see her father. What would Ferdinand recommend? asked
Philip. But the old King was not to be caught; he would not be
cajoled into giving his consent to Joan being shut up, but he sent a
long sanctimonious rigmarole enjoining harmony, but meaning
nothing. Philip then appealed to the nobles one by one, asking them
to sign a declaration assenting to Joan’s confinement. The Admiral of
Castile, Ferdinand’s cousin, led a strong opposition to this, and
demanded a personal interview with the Queen to which Philip
consented, and the Admiral and Count Benavente went to the
fortress of Murcientes, where Joan and her husband were staying. At
the door of the chamber stood Garcilaso de la Vega, a noble in
Philip’s interest, and Cardinal Jimenez was just inside; whilst in a
window embrasure in the darkened room sat the Queen alone,
garbed in black with a hood which nearly obscured her face. She
rose as Admiral Enriquez approached, and with a low curtsey, asked
him if he came from her father. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I left him yesterday
at Tudela on his way to Aragon.’ ‘I should so much have liked to see
him,’ sighed poor Joan; ‘God guard him always.’ For many hours that
day and the next the noble spoke to the Queen, saying how
important it was to the country that she should agree well with her
husband, and take part in the government that belonged to her. He
reported afterwards that in all these conferences she never gave a
random answer.
The Admiral was too important a person to be slighted, and Philip
was forced to listen to some plain warnings from him. He must not
venture to go to Valladolid without the Queen, or ill would come of
it: the people were jealous already, and if Joan was shut up their
fears would be confirmed. So Joan was borne by her husband’s side
to Valladolid in state, though her face was set in stony sorrow
beneath the black cowl that shrouded it. Near there one other
interview took place between the two kings with much feigned
affection, but no result as regards Joan. On the 10th July 1506, Joan
and her husband rode through the city of Valladolid with all the
pomp of Burgundy and Spain. Two banners were to be carried
before the royal pair, but Joan knew she alone was Queen of Castile,
and insisted that one should be destroyed before she would start.
She was mounted upon a white jennet, housed in black velvet to
match her own sable robes, and a black hood almost covered her
face.[110] Shows, feasts and addresses were arranged for their
reception, but they rode straight through the crowded, flower-
decked streets without staying to witness them; and this joyous
entry, we are told by an eyewitness, meant to be so gay, was
blighted by an all-pervading gloom, as of some great calamity to
come.
On the following day the Cortes took the oath of allegiance to
Joan as Queen, and to Philip only as consort, and she personally
insisted upon seeing the powers of the deputies. The ceremonies
over, Philip came to business. Great efforts were made to persuade
the Cortes to consent to Joan’s confinement and Philip’s personal
rule; and Jimenez did his best to get the custody of her.[111] But the
stout Admiral Enriquez stood in the way, and insisted that this
iniquity should not be, so that Philip was obliged to put up with the
position of administrator for his wife, since he could not be King in
her stead. Flemings, Germans and Castilians, in the meanwhile, vied
with each other in rapacity. Philip was free enough with the money
of others, but even he had to go out hunting by stealth to escape
importunity when he had given away all he had to give and more.
But of all the greedy crew there was none so rapacious as Juan
Manuel, little of body but great of mind, who, like the Marquis of
Villena forty years before, grabbed with both hands insatiate.
Fortresses, towns, pensions, assignments of national revenue,
nothing came amiss to Manuel, and at last his covetous eyes were
cast upon the fortress-palace of Segovia, still in the keeping of that
stout Andrés Cabrera and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness
of Moya, the lifelong friend of the great Isabel. Philip gave an order
that the Alcazar of Segovia was to be surrendered to Manuel.
Surrender the Alcazar! after fifty years of keeping! No, forsooth, said
big-hearted Dona Beatriz; only to Queen Joan will we give the
fortress that her great mother entrusted to our keeping.
And so it happened that Philip, with Joan still in black by his side,
rode out of Valladolid in August towards Segovia, to demand the
fortress from its keeper. When the cavalcade reached Cogeces, half
way to Segovia, Joan would go no further. They were taking her to
Segovia, she cried, to imprison her in the Alcazar, and she threw
herself from her horse writhing upon the ground, and refused to stir
another step on the way. The prayers and threats of Philip and his
councillors, whom she hated, were worse than useless, and all that
night she rode hither and thither across country refusing to enter the
town. When the morning came Philip learnt that Cabrera had
surrendered the Alcazar of Segovia to Manuel; and as there was no
reason now for going thither, they rode back to Burgos. As they
travelled through Castile, brows grew darker and hearts more bitter
at this fine foreign gallant with his fair face and his gay garments,
who kept the Queen of Castile in durance in her own realms, and
packed his friends and foreign pikemen in all the strong castles of
the land. When Burgos was reached on the 7th September, Philip
deepened the discontent by ordering the immediate departure of the
wife of the Constable of Castile, an Enriquez by birth, and
consequently a cousin of Ferdinand, in order that Joan should have
no relative near her, although they lodged in the Constable’s palace.
The Admiral of Castile and the Duke of Alba were also attacked by
Philip, who demanded their fortresses as pledges of loyalty; and
soon all Castile was in a ferment, clamouring for the return of the
old King Ferdinand, and the liberation of their Queen Joan.
The King, not content with conferring upon his favourite Manuel
the Alcazar of Segovia, now entrusted to his keeping the castle of
Burgos, where it was determined to celebrate the surrender by
entertaining Philip at a banquet. After the feast the King was taken
ill of a malignant fever, it was said, caused by indulgence or over-
exercise, and Philip lay ill for days in raging delirium. Joan, dry-eyed
and cool, never left his side, saying little, but attending assiduously
to the invalid. At one o’clock on the 25th September 1506 Philip I.,
King of Castile, breathed his last, in his twenty-eighth year: but yet
Joan, without a tear or a tremor, still stayed by his side, deaf to all
remonstrance and condolence, to all appearance unmoved. She
calmly gave orders that the corpse of her husband should be carried
in state to the great hall of the Constable’s palace upon a splendid
catafalque of cloth of gold, the body clad in ermine-lined robes of
rich brocade, the head covered by a jewelled cap, and a magnificent
diamond cross upon the breast. A throne had been erected at the
end of the hall, and upon this the corpse was arranged, seated as if
in life. During the whole of the night the vigils for the dead were
intoned by friars before the throne, and when the sunlight crept
through the windows the body, stripped of its incongruous finery,
was opened and embalmed and placed in a lead coffin, from which,
for the rest of her life, Joan never willingly parted.[112]
Joan, in stony immobility, dazed and silent, gave no indication that
she understood the tremendous importance of her husband’s death;
but courtiers and nobles, Castilians and Teutons alike, did not share
her insensibility. Dismay fell upon the rapacious crew, fierce
denunciations of poison,[113] scrambling for such plunder as could be
grasped,[114] and dread apprehensions as to what would happen to
them all when the King of Aragon should return. Joan had to be
forcibly removed from the corpse; and for days remained shut up in
a darkened room without speaking, eating, or undressing. When, at
length, she learnt that the coffin had been carried to the Cartuja de
Miraflores, near Burgos, she insisted upon going thither, and ordered
an immense number of new mourning garments fashioned like nun’s
weeds. Arriving at the church, she heard mass, and then caused the
coffin to be raised from the vault and broken open, the cerecloths
removed from the head and feet, which she kissed and fondled until
she was persuaded to return to Burgos, on the promise that the
coffin should be kept open for her to visit it when she pleased;
which she did thenceforward every few days whilst it remained
there.
The Flemish chronicler, whom I have quoted several times, gives a
curious description of Joan’s jealous amorous obsession for her
husband. Philip is represented as being libidinous to the last degree,
as well as being the handsomest man of his time; whilst Joan herself
is praised for her beauty, grace, and delicacy. ‘The good Queen fell
into such jealousy that she could never get free from it, until at last
it became a bad habit which reached amorous delirium, and
excessive and irrepressible rage, from which for three years she got
no repose or ease of mind; as if she was a woman possessed or
distraught.... She was so much troubled at the conduct of her
husband that she passed her life shut up alone, avoiding the sight of
all persons but those who attended upon and gave her food. Her
only wish was to go after her husband, whom she loved with such
vehemence and frenzy, that she cared not whether her company
was agreeable to him or not. When she returned to Spain, she would
not rest until all the ladies that had come with them were sent
home, or she threatened to make a public scandal. So far did she
carry this mania, that it ended by her having no woman near her but
a washerwoman, whom, at any hour that seized her caprice, she
made to wash the clothes in her presence. In this state, without any
women attendants, she kept close to her husband, serving herself
like a poor, miserable woman. Even in the country she did not leave
him, and went by his side, followed sometimes by ten thousand
men, but not one person of her own sex.’[115]
The frantic jealousy of her husband during life, together with the
knowledge that he was determined to confine her as a lunatic, whilst
ruling her kingdom at his will, turned into gloomy misanthropy and
rebellion at her fate at his death; and her refusal to sign the formal
documents presented to her as Queen in the first days of her
widowhood, made evident to the few nobles who kept their heads
that some sort of government would have to be improvised, pending
the return of Ferdinand from Naples. Juan Manuel, fiercely hated by
every one, kept in the background; only hoping to save his life and
some of his booty; but the stern old man in his coarse grey frock, to
whom money and possessions were nothing, though, next to the
Pope, he was the richest churchman in Christendom, Cardinal
Jimenez, who perhaps was not taken by surprise by the opportune
disappearance of Philip, had everything ready, even before the King
died, for the establishment of a provisional government; and on the
day of the death a meeting of all the nobles and deputies in Burgos
confirmed the arrangements he had made. All parties of nobles were
represented upon the governing council; but Jimenez himself was
president, and soon became autocrat by right of his ability. Order
was temporarily guaranteed, and all the members, in a self-denying
ordinance, undertook not to try to obtain possession of the Queen or
of her younger son, Ferdinand, who was in Simancas Castle,[116] the
elder, Charles, being in Flanders. Joan, sunk in lethargy, refused to
sign the decrees summoning Cortes; and the latter were irregularly
convoked by the government. But when they were assembled,
carefully chosen under Jimenez’s influence in favour of Ferdinand,
Joan would not receive the members, until, under pressure, she did
so only to tell them to go home and not meddle with government
any more without her orders. Thus with a provisional government,
whose mandate expired with the year 1506, a Queen who refused to
rule, and already anarchy and rebellion rife in the South, Castilians
could only pray for the prompt return of King Ferdinand, who, but a
few short weeks before, had been expelled with every circumstance
of insult and ignominy the realm he had ruled so long.
No entreaty could prevail upon Joan to fulfil any of the duties of
government. Her father would see to everything, she said, when he
returned; all her future work in the world was to pray for the soul of
her husband, and guard his dead body. On Sunday, 19th December
1506, after mass at the Cartuja, Joan announced her intention of
carrying the body for sepulture in the city of Granada, near the
grave of the great Isabel, in accordance with Philip’s last wish.[117]
The steppes of Castile in the depth of winter are as bleak and
inhospitable as any tract in Europe. For scores of miles over
tableland and mountain the snow lay deep, and the bitter blast
swept murderously. The Queen cared for nothing but the drear
burden that she carried upon the richly bedizened hearse; and with
a great train of male servitors, bishops, churchmen, and choristers,
she started on her pilgrimage on the 20th December.[118] The nights
were to be passed in wayside inns or monasteries, and at each
night’s halt the grisly ceremony was gone through of opening the
coffin that the Queen might fondle and kiss the dead lips and feet of
what had been her husband. At one point on the way, when after
nightfall the cortège entered the courtyard of the stopping place,
Joan learnt that, instead of being a monastery for men, it was a
convent of nuns. Instantly her mad jealousy of women flared up,
and she peremptorily ordered the coffin to be carried out of the
precincts. Through the crude winter’s night Joan and her attendants
kept their vigil in the open field over the precious dust of Philip the
Handsome, until daylight enabled them to go again upon their
dreary way. Such experiences as this could not be long continued,
for Joan was far advanced in pregnancy; and when she arrived at
Torquemada, only some thirty miles from her starting-place, the
indications of coming labour warned her that she could go no
further; and here, on the 14th January 1507, her youngest child,
Katharine, was born.
There is no doubt whatever that Joan was throughout carefully
watched by the agents of her father and Jimenez; and that, although
ostensibly a free agent, any attempt on her part to act
independently or enter into a political combination would have
promptly checked. Her mental malady was certainly not minimised
by her father or his agents; who were as anxious to keep her in
confinement now as her husband had been. Nevertheless, when
every deduction has been made, it is indisputable that in her morbid
condition it might have been disastrous to the country to have
allowed her to exercise full political power at this time, even if she
had consented to do so; though if Ferdinand had not been, as he
was, solely moved by his own interests, the unhappy woman might
after his arrival have been associated with him in the government,
and have retained, at least, her personal liberty and ostensible
sovereignty.
Jimenez, in the meanwhile, kept his hand firmly on the helm of
State. The great military orders, of which Ferdinand was perpetual
Grand Master, were at his bidding, and enabled him to hold the
nobles in check,[119] as well as the Flemish party, which claimed for
the Emperor Maximilian the regency of Castile as representing the
dead King’s son Charles. The great Cardinal, far stronger than any
other man in Spain, thus kept Castile from anarchy until the arrival
of Ferdinand in July 1508. His methods were, of course, arbitrary
and unconstitutional; for the Queen either would not, or was not
allowed to, do anything; but, at least, Jimenez governed in this time
of supreme crisis, as he did at a crisis even more acute on the death
of Ferdinand eight years later: and when Ferdinand eventually came
from Naples everything was prepared for him to govern Castile as he
listed for the ends of Aragon.
So far Ferdinand had triumphed both at home and abroad. The
death of Philip made it necessary for Henry of England to change his
attitude and court the friendship of the King of Spain. Katharine of
Aragon, the neglected and shamefully treated widowed Princess of
Wales, once more found her English father-in-law all smiles and
amiability. To please him further she consented to try to bring about
a marriage between Henry VII., recently a widower by the death of
Queen Elizabeth of York, and poor Joan, languishing by her dead
husband’s side at Torquemada. The proposal was a diabolical one;
for Joan’s madness and morbid attachment to her husband’s
memory had been everywhere proclaimed from the housetops: but
Katharine of Aragon made no scruple at urging such a match, in
order to improve her own position in England. Ferdinand gently
dallied with the foul proposal. It was a good opportunity for gaining
some concession as to the payment of Katharine’s long overdue
dowry, without which Henry threatened to break off her match with
his son and heir. So Ferdinand wrote in March 1507 from Naples,
praying that the proposal to marry Joan should be kept very secret
until he arrived in Spain, or Joan ‘might do something to prevent it’;
but if she ever married again he promised that it should be to no
one but to his good brother of England.
Whatever may have been Ferdinand’s real intention, and it would
appear very unlikely that he would have permitted so grasping a
potentate as Henry Tudor to gain a footing, as regent or otherwise,
in Castile, his agent in England was quite enamoured of this plan for
getting Joan out of the way in Spain. ‘No king in the world,’ he wrote
on the 15th April 1507, ‘would make so good a husband (as Henry
VII.) for the Queen of Castile, whether she be sane or insane. She
might recover her reason when wedded to such a husband; but even
in that case King Ferdinand would, at all events, be sure to retain
the Regency of Castile. On the other hand, if the insanity of the
Queen should prove incurable, it would perhaps be not inconvenient
that she should live in England. The English do not seem to mind her
insanity much; especially as it is asserted that her mental malady
will not prevent child-bearing.[120]
Whilst Katharine in England was, as she says, ‘baiting’ Henry VII.
for her own benefit with the tempting morsel of the marriage with
Joan, and the King of France was offering the hand of a French
prince, the Queen of Castile remained in lethargic isolation at
Torquemada, though the plague raged through the summer in the
over-crowded village. Joan had been told by some roguish friar that
Philip would come to life again there, and she obstinately stayed on
in the face of danger; saying when she was urged to go to the
neighbouring city of Palencia, where there was more
accommodation, that it was not meet that a widow should be seen
in public, and the only move she would consent to make was to a
small place called Hornillos, a few miles from Torquemada, in April.
[121]
She spoke little, and with the exception of listening to music, of
which she was fond, she had no amusement; but it is evident from
at least one incident that, however strange her conduct might be,
she was not deprived entirely of her reason. Jimenez had obtained
from her a decree dismissing all the Councillors appointed by Philip.
These favourites of her husband were naturally furious, and
demanded audience of the Queen at Hornillos. They were received
by her in the church where the corpse of Philip was deposited. ‘Who
put you into the Council?’ she asked them. ‘We were appointed by a
decree issued and signed by your Highness,’ they replied. An angry
exchange of words then took place, and Joan, turning to the Marquis
of Villena,[122] who was behind her, told him that it was his smartness
that brought such affront as this upon her. Then she declared in a
resolute tone that it was her wish that every one should return to
the office or position he held before she and her husband landed in
Spain; so that when King Ferdinand arrived he should find
everything as it used to be in his time. This, of course, was a victory
for Ferdinand’s party, but it is clear that Joan knew what she was
talking about on this occasion.[123]
At length, in the early autumn of 1507, came the happy news that
King Ferdinand had landed at Valencia; and, accompanied by a large
force, was entering Castile; being generally welcomed by nobles and
people.[124] As soon as Joan learnt that her father had entered her
realm, she caused a Te Deum to be sung in the church of Hornillos,
and set forth to receive him, carrying always the corpse of her
husband, and travelling only by night, as was now her custom. At a
small place called Tortoles, about twenty-five miles beyond
Valladolid, father and daughter met. The King approached,
surrounded and followed by great crowds of nobles and prelates. He
was met at the door of the house by Joan, attended by her half-
sister and the Marchioness of Denia; and as he doffed his cap she
threw back the black hood which she wore as a Flemish widow, and
bared the white coif with which her hair was covered. Casting herself
upon her knees she sought to kiss her father’s hand; but he also
knelt and embraced her tenderly; leading her afterwards by the
hand into the house. Every sign of dutiful submission was given by
Joan to her father; and after several long private conferences
between them, Ferdinand announced that she had delegated to him
the government of Castile.
 JOAN THE MAD WITH THE UNBURIED BODY OF
HER HUSBAND.

After a Painting by Pradilla.

A few days afterwards the whole court moved to another small

place, called Santa Maria del Campo, a few miles nearer Burgos,
Joan, as usual, travelling by night, accompanied by the coffin; and
here, at Santa Maria, the grand anniversary funeral service for Philip
was celebrated (25th September 1507), and Jimenez received the
Cardinal’s hat, though Joan would not allow that joyous ceremony,
as she said, to be held in the church that held her husband’s
remains. With infinite trouble Ferdinand at length persuaded his
daughter to accompany him to a larger town, where more comfort
could be obtained, and in early October they set forth, Ferdinand
travelling by day and Joan by night. Suddenly, however, Joan
guessed that they were taking her to Burgos, that dreadful city
where Philip had died. No consideration would induce her to go
another step in that direction; and she took up her residence at
Arcos, a few miles away, whilst Ferdinand established himself at
Burgos with his young French wife, whom Joan received politely.
At Arcos Joan, with her two children, Ferdinand and Katharine,
lived her strange, solitary life for eighteen months, broken only when
Ferdinand, going in July 1508 to reduce Andalusia to order, decided
to take his favourite little grandson and namesake with him. Joan
flew into a fury when she learnt that her child was to be taken from
her; and there is no doubt that the disturbance thus caused
aggravated her malady for a time, although it is said that she forgot
the boy in a few days. A curious idea of her life at Arcos is given in a
letter sent on the 9th October 1508 by the Bishop of Malaga, her
confessor, to the King. ‘As I wrote before, since your Highness left,
the Queen has been quiet, both in word and action; and she has not
injured or abused any one. I forgot to say that since then she has
not changed her linen, nor dressed her hair, nor washed her face.
They tell me also that she always sleeps on the ground, as before.’
There follow some medical details, from which the Bishop draws the
conclusion that the Queen would not live long. ‘It is not meet,’ he
says, ‘that she should have the management of her own person, as
she takes so little care of herself. Her lack of cleanliness in her face,
and they say elsewhere, is very great, and she eats with the plates
on the floor, and no napkin. She very often misses hearing mass,
because she is breakfasting at the hour it is celebrated, and there is
no opportunity of her hearing it before noon.’[125]
Before leaving to suppress the revolt in Andalucia, Ferdinand took
effective measures to prevent Joan from being made a tool of
faction. He had tried without success to prevail upon her to remove
to the remote town of Tordesillas, on the river Douro, where there
was a commodious castle-palace fit for her habitation, and the
climate was good; but he posted around Arcos strong forces,
commanded by faithful partisans, with orders that if the Queen at
last gave way to the persuasion of her attendants, and removed to
Tordesillas, the troops were to guard her just as closely and secretly
there. But Joan obstinately refused to move; and Ferdinand found
her still there when he returned from the South in February 1509.
Whilst he had been absent, the great magnate in whose district of
Burgos Arcos was situated, the Constable of Castile (Count de Haro)
had been coquetting with the Emperor Maximilian to displace
Ferdinand by his grandson Charles, now nine years old; and the
possession of the person of Joan was of the highest importance.
Ferdinand decided, therefore, that, either willingly or unwillingly,
Joan should be placed where she would be safe from capture by
surprise. When he visited her at Arcos, he found her thin and weak
with the cold, unhealthy climate.[126] ‘Her dress was such as on no
account could be allowed, or is fit even to write about, and
everything else looked similarly, and as if it would be totally
impossible for her to go through another winter if she continued to
live in the same way.’
The King stayed with her for some days, without broaching the
sore subject of removing her; but on the 14th February 1509, he
had her aroused at three o’clock in the morning—since he knew she
would not travel in daylight—and told her she must prepare to be
gone. She offered no resistance, but only pleaded for one day to
prepare, which was granted; and she consented to cast away the
filthy rags which she had been wearing, and don proper garments
before setting out on the journey to her new home; carrying her
little daughter, Katharine, with her; the corpse of Philip on its great
hearse drawn by four horses, as usual, leading the way. Although it
was evening when she started, great crowds of people had flocked
over from Burgos to see their Queen, who had been invisible for so
long, and was by many thought to be dead.
As the morning sun on the third day was glinting with horizontal
rays the bare brown cornlands that stretch for many miles around
Tordesillas on both sides of the turbid Douro, the wan and weary
cavalcade rode over the ancient bridge. Between the main street and
the river stood a fortress-palace with frowning walls and little
windows looking across the road at the convent of Saint Clara, with
its florid Gothic church and cloisters. Into the palace rode, by her
father’s side, with her face shrouded, Joan, Queen of Castile; and
thenceforward, for forty-seven dreary years, the palace was her
prison, until, an old, broken woman of seventy-six, but wayward and
rebellious to the last, she joined her long-lost husband in the
splendid sepulchre in Granada. From the windows of Joan’s early
apartment in the palace, she could see the coffin of Philip deposited
in the convent cloister, and in the first years of her confinement, she
kept her vigil over the corpse in most of her waking hours, as well as
on rare occasions, and closely guarded, attending commemoratory
services in the convent in honour of the dead, until her undutiful
son, the Emperor Charles, either overcoming her resistance, or
perhaps finding the dismal caprice outworn, transferred the
mouldering remains of Philip the Handsome to its last abiding place;
whilst Joan the Mad waited for her release with fierce defiance in her
heart, and revilings on her tongue for all that her oppressors held
sacred.
It would not be profitable, even if it were possible, to follow
closely the monotonous life of Joan during her long years of
confinement; but, at certain crises in the political history of her
country, her personality assumed temporary importance, and on
these occasions a flood of light is thrown upon her, which, to some
extent, will enable us to see the reality and extent of her malady,
and to judge how far her laxity in religious observance was the
cause of her continued incarceration. Mr. Bergenroth, in his
introduction to the early volumes of the Calendars of Spanish State
Papers, very forcibly urges the view that Joan was not really mad at
all, and that she was sacrificed solely to the ambition of her
husband, her father and her son, in succession. After carefully
considering all the documents adduced by my learned predecessor
as Editor of the Calendars, and many in the Spanish Royal Academy
of History which were unknown to him, I find myself unable to come
to the same conclusion. The separate accounts of her behaviour are
so numerous, and many of them so disinterested, as to leave in my
mind no reasonable doubt that after Philip’s death, whatever may
have been the case before, Joan was not responsible for all her
actions. She appears to have been able on many occasions to
discuss complicated subjects quite rationally, as is not infrequent
with people undoubtedly insane, but her outbursts of rage against
religious ceremonies, her neglect of her person, her persistence for
days in refusing food, and other aberrations, are not only clearly
indicative of lunacy, but were the symptoms repeated exactly in the
case of her great-grandson, Don Carlos, who was undoubtedly
insane. At the same time it is clear to see that there was no reason
for keeping her closely confined and isolated under strong guard,
except the dread of Ferdinand, and afterwards of Charles, that
leagues of nobles might make use of her to weaken the power of
the Castilian crown.[127] That this fear was not groundless has
already been shown, and at one point, as will be related presently,
the peril was imminent. That Joan did not seize the opportunity
when it was offered to her after her bitter complaints of her
treatment is, in my view, the best proof that she was not capable of
independent rule.
Ferdinand died in January 1516, leaving the whole of his realms to
his grandson Charles in Flanders, in view of Joan’s ‘mental
incapacity.’ He tried almost with his last breath to divide Spain for
the benefit of his younger son, Ferdinand; but was overborne by the
remonstrances of his Council. Jimenez was appointed to be Regent
until the new King arrived; and when Cardinal Adrian, Charles’s
ambassador, claimed the Regency in virtue of a secret authority he
produced, Jimenez accepted him as colleague, but made him a
cypher. Up to this period Joan had been under the care of
Ferdinand’s faithful Aragonese friend, Mosen Ferrer, the man whom
rumour accused of having poisoned Philip: whilst her principal lady
in waiting was the Dowager Countess of Salinas. The personal guard
of the Queen was entrusted to the incorruptible Monteros de
Espinosa, and there were some companies of Castilians on duty in,
and around, the palace. Mosen Ferrer was hated, especially by the
townspeople of Tordesillas and by the Castilian attendants of Joan,
because it was asserted that he had treated the Queen cruelly, and
had not attempted to cure her. He gave strict orders that Joan
should not be told of her father’s death; but such news could not be
hidden, for all Castile was astir to know what was coming next.
Many of the nobles were around young Ferdinand, and were
claiming Castile for him, in accordance with the old King’s
penultimate wish; and not a few were looking towards Queen Joan.
When she first heard the news she was disturbed to know that
Jimenez was not on the spot when the King died, but was
tranquilised to learn that he was on the way, and would promptly
assume the government. No sooner was it known in Tordesillas that
Ferdinand was dead than the townspeople and the Castilian guards
endeavoured to enter the Queen’s apartments and expel Mosen
Ferrer: but the latter and the Monteros de Espinosa[128] stood firm,
and for weeks the feud continued. The Guards brought an exorcising
priest to cast out the devils that afflicted the Queen; but Ferrer
would not let them enter the room; though they got into an ante-
chamber, where, quite unknown to the Queen, the exorciser
performed his futile incantations through a hole in the door. As soon
as Jimenez had established himself in the regency, he sent the
Bishop of Majorca to set matters right in Tordesillas. Ferrer, intensely
indignant at the accusations against him, wrote a letter to the
Regent, which, being read between the lines, tells us much. How
could he hope to cure the Queen when her own father could not do
so? and how could he be so bad a man as they say, if wise King
Ferdinand entrusted his daughter to his care? This does not seem
very convincing: but when he tries to excuse himself Ferrer makes
matters much worse. It was, he says, only to prevent the Queen
from starving herself to death that he had put her to the torture (dar
cuerda). He complains bitterly that though he is not dismissed he is
not allowed to go near the Queen, for fear he should injure her
health. Jimenez, probably recognising that Ferrer had thought more
of Aragonese interests than of the health of Joan, thereupon let him
go, and appointed the Duke of Estrada to be her Keeper.
The first instructions sent by the new King Charles, whose age
was barely sixteen, to the Regent Jimenez concerned Joan. Her
custody was so important, he said, that he agreed, in view of the
dissensions amongst Spaniards, that a Fleming should guard her.
Until one was appointed he directed that ‘whilst she was to be very
well treated, she was to be so closely guarded that if any body
should attempt to thwart my good intentions they may not be able
to do it. It is more my duty than that of any one to care for the
honour, contentment, and solace of the Queen; and if any one else
attempts to interfere it will be with an evil object.’[129] Nevertheless
many did attempt to interfere by whispering doubts to Joan of her
Flemish eldest son, in the interests of his young brother Ferdinand,
whom his mother and all Spaniards loved best; and when in
September 1517 one of the monteros approached her and said:
‘Madam, our sovereign lord King Charles, your highness’ son, has
arrived in Spain,’ Joan burst forth in a great rage. ‘I alone am
Queen: my son Charles is but the prince,’ and she always resisted
calling him King thenceforward.
Charles and his sister Leonora came to Tordesillas to see their
mother in December. Charles’s tutor and counsellor, Chièvres, first
saw Joan to break to her the news of the presence of her children;
and when, immediately afterwards, they entered the room and knelt
before their mother, she was overcome with joy to see those whom
she had left as little children twelve years before, now in the best
period of adolescence. When Charles and his sister had retired,
Chièvres lost no time in saying that in order to relieve the Queen,
and accustom Charles to rule, it would be well to entrust the
government of Spain to him. Joan made no great objection to this;
but it is clear that her intention was, that he should administer the
government for her and not rule on his own account as he
subsequently did; and when, a few months afterwards, Charles met
the Cortes at Valladolid they would only confirm his power as joint
sovereign, jealous as they were of Flemings, on condition that he
swore that if ever Joan recovered her faculties he would resign the
government to her.[130] Thenceforward Joan, though her name
appeared for years on decrees and proclamations, was politically
dead.
During his stay at Tordesillas, Charles was distressed to see the
sad fate of his young sister, Katharine, now aged eleven. Joan was
fiercely attached to her, and would hardly let her out of her sight.
The child’s rooms were behind those of the Queen, and could only
be reached with Joan’s knowledge; little Katharine’s sole amusement
being to look through a window which had been specially cut for her,
and watch the people going to the opposite church, and the children
playing in the side lane that led to the river, who were encouraged
by money to play there for her amusement. She never left the
palace, and was dressed in mean rags, such as the Queen herself
wore, and Charles, knowing that the Queen would never let the child
go willingly, somewhat cruelly planned to have her kidnapped. He
caused a way into her apartment to be broken through a tapestry-
covered wall from an adjoining gallery; and the girl and her female
attendants were carried away at dead of night to a large force of
horsemen and ladies awaiting her on the opposite side of the bridge
across the Douro; and thence spirited away to Valladolid, where,
dressed in fitting splendour, she was lodged in her sister Leonora’s
palace. When, in the morning, Joan discovered her loss, she was
inconsolable. She would neither eat, drink, nor sleep, she said, until
her child was restored to her, and after two days had passed, and
she still stood firm, the King had to be asked what was to be done.
He was loath to give up the education of his sister; for princesses
were valuable dynastic and international assets; but there was no
other way but to send her back. Charles accompanied her to
Tordesillas, and made terms with Joan; the girl must have proper
companions and attendants, she must dress suitably to her rank,
and she must be allowed some little relaxation and liberty outside
the palace. To this Joan consented, and Katharine lived with her until
her marriage with the King of Portugal six years later.
In March 1518, Charles appointed to the custody of the Queen,
the Marquis of Denia, who held her until his death, and was
succeeded by his son. Soon after his appointment, he wrote a letter
to the King which lifts the veil considerably on Joan’s condition. She
tried, he says, persistently and with artful words, remarkable for one
in her condition, to persuade him to take her out of her prison, and
to summon the nobles of Castile, as she was discontented at the
way she was being kept out of the government, and wished to
complain. He details the excuses with which he put her requests
aside, and evidently looks upon her blandishments as wiles to
escape; but assures Charles, as he did for many years afterwards,
that ‘nothing should be done against his interests,’ whatever that
may have meant. But even in this letter we see signs of Joan’s
undoubted madness. A day or two before she had thrown some
pitchers at two of her women, and hurt them; and when Denia went
with a grave face to her and said, ‘How is this, my lady? This is a
strange way to treat your servants; your mother treated hers better;’
Joan rose hurriedly, and the very act of her rising sent her servants
scurrying off in a fright. ‘I am not so violent as to do you any injury,’
she said; and so began again, and for the next five hours, to try by
wheedling to get him to take her out, ‘for she could not bear these
women.’
In reply to this, Charles warned Denia that his conversations with
the Queen must never be overheard by anybody, and that all his
letters about her must be strictly secret. Thus every few days news
of his mother reached the young King, sometimes reporting
improvement, sometimes the reverse; but always harping upon her
desire to get out, her dislike of her woman attendants, and her
extreme irregularity in getting up and eating, which she often did
only at intervals of two days. At this time, too, began to develop her
great repugnance to attend mass. The women seem to have been a
great source of trouble to every one. They were, it appears, always
gadding about the town, telling people of what passed in the palace,
and what the Queen said, especially about religion, and her desire to
go out, and to summon the grandees. What was worse, they defied
Denia to dismiss them, until the King gave him full authority over
them, and brought them to reason. In the autumn of the same year,
1518, there was a visitation of plague in the country, though
Tordesillas had not suffered much, owing to the scrupulous care
taken to isolate the place. The removal of the Queen, however, had
to be considered. ‘If it be necessary,’ wrote the Marquis, ‘we shall
want saddle mules with black velvet housings for the Queen and the
Infanta.... It will also be necessary to take the body of the King, your
father, and if this has to be done, we must put into proper order the
car in which it was brought here, as it is now dismantled. Charles
was against any removal if it could possibly be avoided, but if quite
unavoidable, the Queen might be taken to the monastery of St. Paul
at Moralejo, near Arevalo. If she refused to go, she must be taken by
force; but with as much respect as possible, and with every
precaution against her endeavouring to stay in the open on the way.
If she wanted the corpse of Philip to go with her, a dummy coffin
might be made up and carried, whilst the real one with the body
remained behind at Tordesillas.
The plague passed away, and the move was not made; and so
things passed with Joan as before. Squalid and unhappy, she
resisted as obstinately as ever the pressure put upon her to attend
mass, though more than once she was violently desirous of going
over in Holy Week, or other anniversaries, to the convent church of
St Clara, and on several occasions had her clothes washed in
preparation for the great event; which Denia himself was inclined to
allow, under strict guard, as people in the town were tattling about
her being kept a prisoner. Great efforts were made by Juan de Avila,
the chaplain, to bring Joan to a better frame of mind about religion;
and in June 1519 he writes a curious letter to the King, beseeching
him to do his duty by his mother; ‘especially for the salvation of her
soul.’ Perhaps in answer to this Charles ordered Denia to insist that
the Queen should hear mass. She had wished it to be said at the
end of a corridor, instead of in a special room adjoining her own, as
Denia desired, and, at last, rather than she should not hear it at all,
she was allowed to have her way; and an altar and chapel were
screened off by black velvet hangings at the end of the corridor. She
went through the service with great devotion until the evangelium
and the pax were brought to her, when she refused them, but
motioned that they should be administered to her daughter.
This attendance at mass continued for some time, to the immense
jubilation of Denia and the priests; but as the day approached when
Charles was to leave Spain for Germany to claim the imperial crown,
in consequence of Maximilian’s death (January 1519), the
effervescence and discontent in Castile at the prospect of an
absentee King drawing money from Spain for foreign purposes,
penetrated in some mysterious way the prison-palace of Joan the
Mad. For hours the Queen railed at Denia for not having summoned
the Grandees, as she had requested him to do so often. She was
being disgracefully treated, she said; everything belonged to her,
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