Svengoolie horror TV shows – Page 5 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Movie: “Village of the Danged Eyeballs!”

OK, so the name of the film is actually Village of the Damned, released in 1960 and directed by Wolf Rilla. It stars George Sanders as Professor Gordon Zellaby and Barbara Shelley as his wife, Anthea Zellaby. It’s based on a British Novel, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. The gist of the story is that the whole village of Midwich falls asleep, wakes up a few hours later and things are fine until two months pass. That’s when all the trouble starts. You can see the movie on the Internet Archive.

It just so happens that the Great Mutato (Izzy) from the X-Files episode, “The Post-Modern Prometheus” is running around the village impregnating all the women. OK, so Izzy’s not part of the plot at all but it sounds cool.

One morning, all the people of Midwich fall unconscious in the middle of whatever they’re doing, which might have been a community wide orgy (usually prohibited by Homeowner Association rules) based on what happens next. The Midwich women do all get pregnant at the same time which raises eyebrows, and leads to the men raising many glasses of beer because they’re not thrilled about it.

According to an x-ray, which happens to be that of a man, the pregnancy outbreak is indiscriminate. Actually, Svengoolie let the cat out of the bag on that, revealing the goof of using an x-ray of a man by mistake. Of course, the doctors point at the film and sagely remark that the fetus is developing normally. One of the doctors is a smoker. Maybe the x-ray of a man was used to avoid using an x-ray of a pregnant woman, which is not the greatest idea in the world.

This reminds me of our freshman medical school radiology teacher. Dr. Bill Erkonen was the nicest guy in the world and he always reassured us that we shouldn’t try to memorize anything for the radiology exams. He would advise, “Just learn it.” Of course, we were medical students and we knew there was no way to learn anything in medical school; memorization was the only path. We loved him.

Anyway, they (meaning the women) all deliver at the same time and the whippersnappers mature at a highly accelerated rate (males learn quickly to stay away from dangerous things like vacuum cleaners). And their eyes glow. All they have to do is stare at the adults who immediately buy them expensive cars, jewelry, and designer sunglasses. They also teach adults to avoid the self-checkout aisles at grocery stores.

But they can also force adults to do scary things. This becomes a world-wide phenomenon leading to drastic actions by governments to do something about the kids with the danged eyeballs. The solutions don’t include hiring them to work for the post office.

I thought this was actually a pretty good movie. It’s probably a film inspired in part by the post-WWII, Cold War era and the threat of attack from some outside unknown, malignant force. The title of John Wyndam’s book “The Midwest Cuckoos” is based on bird behavior, specifically that of cuckoos laying their eggs in another bird’s nest leaving it to be raised by another bird at the expense of its own. Brown-headed cowbirds do the same thing. The X-Files extraterrestrial-human hybrid mythology is another way to express the idea. The violence in the film makes it unsuitable for younger or sensitive viewers.

Svengoolie Show “Son of Dracula”Spelling Bee Game!

I saw the Svengoolie show 1943 film, “First Cousin Twice Removed of Dracula” last night. Sorry, that’s actually “Son of Dracula.” You can watch it colorized on the Internet Archive.

It starred Lon Chaney as Count Alucard, and that name didn’t fool anybody because it’s just Dracula spelled backward. The goof everybody already knows about occurs early in the show when Dracula transforms from a bat in front of a mirror and his reflection is clearly visible.

You don’t see that much of Count Dracula and you never see his fangs. He’s well-spoken and mostly polite. He didn’t cry out “Bluh, bluh” even once, but then neither did Bela Lugosi.

Maybe I was just overthinking Dracula’s overall plan for taking over America. Was he supposed to suck the blood of hundreds of millions of people one by one or what? Even with the help of Enirehtak, the Southern belle he hypnotized into being his wife, that would be a long-term project even for the immortal vampires.

That approach is probably what killed the movie “Attack of the Vicious, Loathsome, Depraved but Suave Vampire Anteaters with Denture Fangs from Saturn!” The solution to save the planet was to ban Poligrip. Theater staff had to wake up the audience members, but only occasionally.

In spite of what you might think about the flying bat special effects, there were no strings involved—just a decrepit bat.

There were a few elderly gentlemen in the film, Dr. Brewster being one. He had a great idea about how to protect a little boy from another attack by Dracula. He drew little crosses on the kid’s neck where the fang puncture wounds were. See there? You don’t need to carry a crucifix around! Just cross your fingers at vampires.

And Dracula (no spring chicken himself) suffered a mishap while carrying his bride across the threshold after their wedding. He fell and broke his hip. Vampirism doesn’t protect men from osteoporosis. The action shots got a little shorter after that. Using a walker tends to slow chase scenes down.

On the other hand, Dracula was otherwise well preserved for being hundreds of years old. He got a little perturbed when somebody threw out his bottle of Serutan. Remember, that’s Natures spelled backwards.

Svengoolie Movie A Cut Above: “Strait-Jacket”!

I saw the 1964 movie “Strait-Jacket” directed by William Castle, starring Joan Crawford for the first time last night on the Svengoolie TV show, and I have to say that it’s one of the better films I’ve seen. Movies that have a psychiatric angle also get my attention because I’m a retired psychiatrist. There won’t be any spoilers.

The quick synopsis is that Lucy Garbin (Joan Crawford) plays a woman who was committed to a psychiatric asylum for 20 years after murdering her husband and his girlfriend with an axe after she found them together in bed. Lucy’s young daughter Carol (Diane Baker), sees the whole grisly thing. Lucy is released from the asylum to the care of her brother Bill and his wife and Carol. Then, the axe murders of several people seem to implicate Lucy might be picking up old habits.

That’s when all the trouble starts, including a lot of references to sharp objects, which is joke fodder for Svengoolie. The film lends itself to that, including a shot of the Columbia film logo with the statue of liberty’s head off and lying at her feet!

Dissociation is an involuntary mental phenomenon that leads to feeling disconnected with one’s environment or one’s self. Time is distorted and flashbacks and hallucinations can occur. This is frequently portrayed by Lucy, even in front of her former psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, who visits her while on some kind of vacation of all things. During his interview with her, he decides she’s not ready to live in the outside world and must return to the asylum.

This would not have been the procedure for readmitting psychiatric patients even back then, but you have to give Dr. Anderson credit for having a sharp sense of her mental state. He had a well-honed idea of what was happening to her clinically, especially while observing her fiddling with knitting needles.

Images of and references to sharp implements abound throughout the film. You get a sense of being on the razor edge of suspense throughout the film. This is especially evident in the interaction between Lucy and the seemingly dull-witted farmhand, Leo (George Kennedy). He offers her his axe to give her a try at beheading a chicken. You find out later that Leo is smarter than he looks. Carol describes typical work on the farm to Lucy, including name-dropping certain jobs like slaughtering hogs and butchering chickens.

I can mention gaslighting without giving away too much about the film. I never saw the 1944 movie “Gaslight” but the term gaslighting means psychologically manipulating someone into believing she’s insane so as to control her sense of reality. In “Strait-Jacket” the ingenious way this is presented made me think of psychopathy as well as dissociation.

I have to mention one interesting fact about the film which came to me about 3:30 am this morning. I swear this was before I looked it up on the web (see reference below). I noticed that the forty whacks rhyme for Lucy Garbin is taken from the Lizzie Borden rhyme in reference to the axe murders of her parents she was accused of in the 1800s, which is cited on the Encyclopedia Britannica website.

“The children’s rhyme chanted in the movie, “Lucy Harbin took an ax, gave her husband forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave his girlfriend forty-one”, is based on the famous rhyme about Lizzie Andrew Borden: “Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one.” The Grindhouse Cinema Database (GCDb). Strait Jacket/Fun Facts. Retrieved June 8, 2025, from https://www.grindhousedatabase.com/index.php/Strait_Jacket/Fun_Facts

Lohnes, Kate. “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax…”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Jun. 2017, Accessed June 8, 2025 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lizzie-Borden-American-murder-suspect

I found the film entertaining and, although I had a fairly firm idea of who was doing what for which reason, a couple of times I had my doubts. I give the film 4/5 shrilling chickens rating. I had a reservation about the ending. See if you can figure out who has the biggest axe to grind by watching “Strait-Jacket” on the Internet Archive.

Comments Without Spoilers on the Svengoolie Movie “The Haunted Strangler”

Last night I watched the Svengoolie Show movie, “The Haunted Strangler” (1958), starring Boris Karloff as Dr. Rankin, which had psychiatric overtones, along with hints at demonic possession. This was evidently a rerun of a previous Svengoolie episode.

Without spoilers, I can point to a time setting goof you can see in two copies of the film on the internet Archive. It involves a line by the character Dr. Kenneth McColl (played by Tim Turner, in which he attempts to explain Dr. Rankin’s behavior using the term “projective identification.” The problem is that as far as the time setting of the film’s story (from 1860 to the early 1880s), this psychoanalytic term for a defense mechanism was not invented until the mid-1940s by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.

The point in one of the Internet Archive copies of the movie “The Haunted Strangler” where “projective identification” is mentioned by Dr. Kenneth McColl (played by Tim Turner) as a way to explain Rankin’s behavior is at 1:03:28, added on 09/02/2019 by Amalgamated. It’s also at 1:28:44 on the Internet Archive copy “Creature Feature: The Haunted Strangler” which is actually a Svengoolie episode, added by “Uh? Want Entertainment” on 02/22/2022.

Another interesting feature pointed out on the Svengoolie show includes the lack of complicated makeup for the transformation of Dr. Rankin into a homicidal monster. Karloff just removed his dentures and grimaced. I’m pretty sure it saved money on production costs.

The other psychiatric connection of “The Haunted Strangler” to psychoanalysis is dissociation both as a mental disorder and a defense mechanism. It’s also connected to dissociative identity disorder. In fact, the character Dr. Kenneth McColl mentions “dual personality” in the movie “The Haunted Strangler.”

There’s an echo also to “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” which was a novella published in the mid-1880s by Robert Louis Stevenson, which was adapted from Freud’s concepts of the id, the ego, and the superego. And we got the 1920 film “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (which I’ve never seen) arising from the dual personality idea. I think Svengoolie showed “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which I’ve also not seen.

There were several warnings (more than I usually have seen) to viewers about the possibility some scenes in the movie might be too intense for younger or sensitive viewers.

The Svengoolie Movie: The Deadly Mantis

I watched the 1957 giant insect movie, “The Deadly Mantis” last night on the Svengoolie TV show, and Sena watched some of it. At times, it was a little hard to tell if this was a romantic comedy or a giant insect horror flick. The reporter Marge Blaine (played by Alix Talton) and Colonel Joe Parkman (played by Craig Stevens) had this fling going on which sometimes took precedence over the huge, deadly papier-mâché praying mantis.

There’s a lot of stock film footage of the military and important military radar dividing lines across the northern hemisphere including the DEW Line (standing for Distant Early Warning Line) which were real. There were a couple of shots of Greenland, which is important to you know which U.S. President—who was probably unaware at the time of the dangerous mantis unthawed from its icebound prison in the North Pole.

If you look carefully in the upper right-hand side of the frame at the 34:48-time mark, in the Internet Archive black and white copy of the film, you’ll see an important goof that Svengoolie pointed out (which I missed at first). It’s the shadow of the large microphone and boom which shows up as Marge and Dr. Nedrick Jackson are leaving the room (Jackson is played by William Hopper, cue Perry Mason music because he played detective Paul Drake on that TV Show). It’s interesting that the Perry Mason show was starting the same year this movie was filmed.

One detail never specified about the monster is its exact species. We can’t tell if it’s the European praying mantis or the invasive Chinese Mantis. That’s not important for the movie, but again, it might be important on the world’s current political stage. Most entomologists advise destroying the eggs of the Chinese Mantis. I don’t know if tariff escalation would work. I think it’s hard to distinguish different mantis species eggs apart and we also don’t know the gender of the giant mantis in the movie.

That’s an important detail, which is only delicately referred to in the film as Dr. Jackson reads aloud from a book about the insect’s mating process, which invariably concludes by the female biting off the head of the male and often eating him (called sexual cannibalism). In the movie, Dr. Jackson reads aloud a gentler description, “The female is larger than the male and invariably destroys her mate when he’s fulfilled his function in life.”

There are interesting parallels to the mantis in the way the male and female lead actors interact with each other in the movie. Colonel Parkman and Dr. Jackson both behave like typical male chauvinists, and Marge never bites their heads off. But the romance doesn’t go that far. Marge dances with the soldiers but there’s no scene with Elvis Presley dancing and singing “Heartbreak Hotel.”

And there’s no time for any of that because the giant mantis is too ravenous after being cooped up for thousands of years in an iceberg. All it wants is breakfast: “Two humans on a raft and wreck’em” or is it “Two humans, dummy side up”? Whatever.

Anyway, the ferocious mantis ends up sort of like the bad-tempered giant cockroach in the 1997 movie “Men in Black.” Agents K and J speed through the New York Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and have a showdown. The soldiers in The Deadly Mantis have their showdown with the monster in New York also, but it’s in what’s called The Manhattan Tunnel, which I found out doesn’t even exist.

But the parallels don’t stop there. Just before that, the terrifying insect climbs the Washington Monument (to get to the top, of course) and buzzes the White House. During the search for the bad bug, the military brass order that every U.S. citizen in the area report any “Unusual Flying Object,” in other words every UFO.

That means the sequel to both movies would need an extraterrestrial giant, bad-tempered female cockroach and mantis hybrid looking to bite the head off a suitable mate who crash-lands her UFO in the 51^st state (formerly Canada) leading to the emergency mobilization of Men in Black who partner with Red Green and the rest of the Possum Lodge members to use duct tape and bug spray to overcome the beast and finally ensure peace by neuralyzing everyone in the world using a souped-up satellite owned by Elon Musk. Svengoolie will tell jokes.

It just goes to show you, we’re humans, but we can change, if we have to…we guess.

Svengoolie Movie: A Lost and Found World Looks Less Than Marvelous

The title of the post is actually a clue to the solution to a picture puzzle riddle I made about the Svengoolie show movie last night, which was “The Lost World,” released in 1960. Svengoolie did one of his picture puzzle riddles which he calls “Too Drawn Out,” which uses a series of pictures to express something about the movie, often one of the actors. It was at the beginning of the show and shortly before that, I had made my own version. I wondered if we were going to be in sync on the riddle.

We weren’t. He drew a couple of pictures, the first one of which depicted a person being clawed by a bear. The second picture showed a cowboy holding the reins of a horse. That segues right into one of the stars in “The Lost World,” Claude Rains. Get it? No? Then have a look at the one I made, which is in a similar vein.

OK, did you guess? If you looked up who starred in the movie, one of them was the subject of a Billy Crystal meme in the 1980s on Saturday Night Live. For those who have seen “The Lost World,” another hint is this actor was often singing a song while strumming a bright yellow guitar, which never picked up any dirt from the land that time forgot in which he and a number of other explorers hunting for living dinosaurs were stranded for a while.

Still stuck? The first drawing is a kind of plant, a fern. I think ferns were around with the dinosaurs and outlived them after the mass extinctions. The second picture is a common symbol. It’s an ampersand, which also means “and.” The third picture shows a roller pin on rolled out dough. And the last picture is of South American animals related to camels—llamas, which pretty much gives the game away. The answer to the riddle is the guy in the movie who always looked “marvelous.” If you thought of Fernando Lamas, the actor who played Gomez in the movie, give yourself a hand.

So, what about the movie “The Lost World?” It starred Claude Rains as Professor Challenger, aptly named probably in part because people found it very challenging to get along with him. He never lost his umbrella (which he sometimes used to punish those who disagreed with him) during the whole trip through the lost world full of volcanic quagmires, giant dinosaurs, and cannibals, huge spiders, man-eating plants and whatnot.

Professor Challenger claims to a group of explorers in London that he’s discovered an island harboring living dinosaurs, which gives everybody a chance to laugh themselves silly, especially when he says he’ll need funds to cover the cost of the expedition, including tickets to Space Mountain. The editor of a newspaper puts up $100,000 to fund the trip, which somehow convinces leaders that this a good bet after all—money talks.

The group includes a reporter named Malone (played by David Hedison) who Professor George Edward Challenger (Claude Rains) bopped on the head with his umbrella, Sir John Roxton (Michael Rennie), Jennifer Holmes (Jill St. John) who wears bright pink stretch paints which was pretty dirt resistant the whole movie, Professor Summerlee (Richard Haydn, who among his film credits was in The Sound of Music), and Gomez (Fernando Lamas) who definitely believes it’s better to look good than to feel good.

When they get to the island, they encounter the dinosaurs almost right away. These are not the stop action models authentic-looking creatures which was the original plan because it turned out to be too costly for production, maybe because it would have cut into cigarette money for the actors.

It was cheaper to trick out big monitor lizards and alligators with horns and plates and then provoke them into a fight which got Fox studios into trouble with the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The group blunders around the island and eventually they find an old logbook which implicates Sir Roxton as a liar and a greedy cad who abandoned the members of a previous expedition (almost all of whom died) to find diamonds which he never found, which Costa (Jay Novello) another member of the group, gets pretty excited about. Costa tries to get Gomez excited about diamonds too, but he’s pretty mad at Roxton because one of the members of the previous expedition turned out to have been Gomez’ brother.

Pink pants, I mean Jennifer Holmes, who at first wanted to marry Roxton for his title and prestige, now snubs him and shows it by not accepting a cigarette from him. Jennifer brought along her kid brother, David (Ray Stricklyn) and her dog Frosty (which looks like an ancient creature itself, yet gets top billing for some reason: “Frosty, A Dog”). Frosty never gets killed despite being completely helpless and needing to be carted around in what looks like a picnic basket for the whole movie.

The group captures a native girl (Vitina Marcus) who takes a shine to David. Neither of them speaks the other’s language, and the native girl demonstrates her knowledge of how to shoot a rifle, which makes everybody wonder where the island gun shop is. It turns out that the rest of the tribe of cannibals, which later capture them to prepare for a ritual sacrifice, have been keeping one member of the previous expedition, Burton White (Ian Wolfe) alive because he’s blind and it is taboo to kill a blind man. I guess they don’t immediately kill Frosty because they don’t have enough vanilla for the recipe to make what would eventually become the inspiration for the world’s first Frosty malt.

Anyway, White gives the group the remainder of his guns, which the cannibals let him keep evidently because guns are hard to chew. The group takes off on the perilous journey through the volcanic path which turns into something like the Greek myth of Scylla and Charybdis (the devil and the deep blue sea. This is more like molten lava and a dinosaur who has a taste for humans, gobbling up Costa and Gomez (it is better to taste good than to feel good)), both of whom flop back and forth just like small GI Joe size dolls in the lizard’s mouth.

Eventually, what’s left of the group make it out to safety. They lament the lack of any good evidence for dinosaurs to take back with them to civilization—until Professor Challenger pulls out a dinosaur egg. He drops it and it cracks revealing the “Tyrannosaurus rex” iguana squirming around leading to a remarkably Svengoolie-like joke as the final lines of the movie:

Roxton: “…Will it be all right?

Challenger: “It’ll live long enough to grow as big as a house and terrify all London.”

David: “Then what’ll we do?”

Challenger: “Well, we’ll move out of London as fast as possible!”

And a good time was had by all.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Thing That Couldn’t Die”

The thing about this movie we saw last night on the Svengoolie show, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die,” is that it heads in the wrong direction from the start—with a woman who douses for treasure. Dousing or witching for water or other things employs a special stick or rods to find objects buried underground. I actually saw this many years ago when I worked as a land survey crew member and watched an old guy use dousing rods to find buried water tile lines in a field. I remember one guy in my crew mentioned under his breath that the guy was probably old enough to remember where the tile line was originally buried.

Anyway, this film was released in 1958 and the general idea is that a sorcerer named Gideon Drew was beheaded by Sir Francis Drake 400 years ago. The head was buried in a box and the rest of the body was buried somewhere else. This would ensure that Gideon would suffer for all eternity—as long as nobody used his head to figure out that if you reconnected Drew’s body and his head, he could again commit mayhem.

Jessica is a seemingly empty-headed woman who is really able to find important objects by dousing. She finds the box containing Gideon’s head and a special charm necklace that protects her (at first) from Gideon’s ability to get inside your head.

Gideon possesses the deadhead character Mike because he’s the one who first opens the box. He then kills his controlling buddy, Boyd, who yells his head off, waking up Peggy’s Aunt Flavia, the owner of the land on which the box was found. Aunt Flavia has a head for figures because she runs the dude ranch where all the characters are and realizes that the box contained something valuable, learning later that she could get $5,000 for it from an archaeologist.

Mike drags Boyd’s body around in the woods by the head for a while, eventually dropping it into the hole where the box was originally found, but then gets killed off early in the movie. The actor, Charles Horvath, was ticked off about it and later went on to form the well-known rock band, the Ungrateful Head.

Meanwhile, Linda, who earlier invited Jessica to a square dance who declined because she preferred head banger music, gets hypnotized by Gideon. Linda then puts Gideon in a hatbox, which she gifts to Jessica after Jessica’s wannabe boyfriend, Gordon, takes the charm away from her to get it cleaned up. When Jessica opens the hatbox, Gideon zaps her, causing her to become a bad girl. Linda slaps her boyfriend Hank in the head a couple of times, which leads him to head back to their cabin to tear up his painting of her portrait and get his head bad by drinking whiskey.

Linda, Jessica, and Hank all get pretty drunk, and eventually Jessica decides to witch for the body of Gideon Drew, which she finds and the action starts coming to a head—Gideon’s head that is.

Jessica replaces Gideon’s head on his body. He integrates into the consistency of grayish head cheese and his vocal cords start working. The gang’s all there and Gideon threatens everybody and starts to bully them. Gordon tries to shoot him but bullets don’t work, and he then gets his head on straight, remembering he has the charm necklace. Gordon points it at Gideon, who reacts like Dracula does to a crucifix and almost immediately jumps back into the coffin his body was buried in, where he disintegrates.

Gideon’s spell is broken and a good time was had by all with nothing left to suffer but a mild headache from the whiskey hangover.

The moral of the film’s story is lost in all the interpersonal drama, but it might be that if you’re having trouble with water witching for drain tile lines, you should not lose your head because you can probably find a map of tile line locations in the city engineer’s office.

Remarks on Svengoolie TV Movie Phantom of the Opera 1943 and More

We watched Phantom of the Opera (1943 version) last night. And then, just for good measure, we watched the Phantom of the Opera (1925 silent film) today. We watched the latter on the Internet Archive.

I’ll say one thing, the absence of commercials in the 1925 version is great. Even though I like cornball jokes on Svengoolie, it’s good to have a break from that too sometimes.

We’ve never read the novel by Gaston Leroux but there’s a pretty good Wikipedia article about it. We’ve never seen the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage version nor the 2004 movie.

That said, we’re struck by the differences between the 1925 and 1943 versions. It’s difficult to develop any sympathy for the Erik the phantom (played by Lon Chaney Sr. in 1925). He’s pretty much a monster from beginning to end. We tend to think that it’s easier to be sympathetic to Erique Claudin (played by Claude Rains in 1943) who has a rough path downhill after losing his job and a place to live early on, inability to sell his concerto or get a date with Christine and so on, after which he starts killing people left and right.

It’s worth pointing out that in Leroux’s book (according to the Wikipedia article), the phantom’s childhood was pretty traumatic because he was born ugly and deformed, which didn’t endear him to his mother. She was simply not good enough, which I think appeals to my training in psychiatry.

The 1943 film was pretty comical at times. For example, the two guys competing for Christine’s attention, singer Anatole (played by Nelson Eddy) and Raoul (played by Edgar Barrier) get stuck in doorways and eventually end up going to dinner together instead of one or the other going out with Christine. Their forced politeness with each other in front of Christine is priceless.

On the other hand, the 1925 version is a little more like what you’d expect from a movie on the Svengoolie show—it’s a horror flick, only classier. Lon Chaney’s makeup job makes him look like a proper monster, which made women faint according to some articles. Claude Rains’ makeup is barely suggested on part of his face.

The murders committed by the phantoms in both movies are bloodless, although the comedy in the 1943 version distracts you from what you expect; for example, after the Phantom drops the huge chandelier on the audience. No mangled bodies or gore, move along, nothing to see here. People continue to sing, dance and cavort, possibly hopping over any corpses lying about.

There was mostly dark music in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera film. However, in the 1943 version there was lullaby theme that ran throughout and was even a point of connection between Christine and the ill-fated Erique. Somebody found a full version of it years later, entitled Lullaby of the Bells. The one who posted it mentioned the composer and the performer.

Cataplexy and Catalepsy in the Movie “The Comedy of Terrors”

We watched the Svengoolie TV movie last night, “The Comedy of Terrors.” It was my third time seeing it. I wrote a blog post about it in March 2024 partly because the condition of catalepsy is mentioned. Mr. Black’s butler points out that Mr. Black had periods of catalepsy. Much to my surprise, I didn’t write anything about distinguishing cataplexy and catalepsy, but last night I thought about the differences. I finally found a summary of the plot today on the Svengoolie website and you can see it on Turner Classic Movies. You can still see the movie on the Internet Archive.

You see Mr. Black have his “cataleptic” attack about 39 minutes or so into the film. It appears to be triggered by shocked surprise upon discovering Mr. Gille in his house. A bit later, after the butler fetches the doctor, the first scene is that of Mr. Black’s wide-open eyes, which the doctor closes, at the same time saying that he’s dead. In that same scene you hear the butler asking for confirmation because it’s well known that Mr. Black has had fits of “catalepsy” before. The doctor obliges only to confirm, in his opinion, that Mr. Black is dead. However, he wakes up in the funeral parlor, where he has a fight with Trumbull and Gillie, then suffers another abrupt collapse, one of many that occur, always reciting lines from Shakespeare presaged by asking “What place is this?” often from inside a coffin.

This movie made me think about the clinical differences between catalepsy (specific to catatonia) and cataplexy (specific to narcolepsy). Because I was a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I saw many patients with catatonia. However, I can’t remember ever seeing patients with cataplexy. I had to review them by searching the web. I think the most helpful links are:

Catalepsy: Burrow JP, Spurling BC, Marwaha R. Catatonia. [Updated 2023 May 8]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430842/

Catatonic patients often will be mute and immobile vs purposeless agitation. Waxy flexibility can be one of many features. Catatonia can occur in the context of variety of psychiatric or medical illnesses. They may wake up and talk within minutes if given a Lorazepam challenge test, which is given intravenously. It can look miraculous.

Cataplexy: Mirabile VS, Sharma S. Cataplexy. [Updated 2023 Jun 12]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK549782/

Cataplexy occurs in narcolepsy and is the sudden onset of muscle weakness, often precipitated by strong emotions, usually positive but can occur with negative emotions like fear. Eye movements can be normal, and episodes usually resolve within minutes.

Mr. Black’s episodes look like a strange mixture of catalepsy and cataplexy. His episodes are precipitated by fear or anger. Quoting Shakespeare doesn’t occur in either catalepsy or cataplexy.

At the end of the movie, he is impervious to bullets—a feature not seen in either condition.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Crawling Eye”

I saw the movie “The Crawling Eye” last night. Sena gave up after about 15 minutes. It was almost 2 hours into the film before you see any of the giant eyesores—and they were in dire need of Visine treatment.

The movie was made in 1958 and it’s about an alien invasion of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland called Mount Trendelenburg, no wait, that’s an inclined position of a patient on an operating table; it’s actually Mount Trollenberg.

The aliens are giant eyes with pinpoint pupils. The hero, United Nations employee Alan Brooks (played by Forrest Tucker) manages to stab one with a secret weapon called a sty-letto. Brooks is apparently heavily invested in pushing cigarettes and booze on the various other characters, a few of whom for some reason get transformed into zombies, probably because they get so stoned on cognac. Brooks deals with them by blowing his whiskey breath in their faces.

Brooks has to be pretty stern to get others to cooperate to a new battle plan against the eyeballs after it becomes clear that dilation drops won’t work. I can’t remember exactly what he barked at them but it was something like, “Keep your eye on the highball!” Maybe it was “Do as your told!”

Brooks also directs them to make bombs, which look like Molotov cocktails, and that was a nice break from drinking the regular cocktails at the hotel bar. Brooks orders them not to fire until they see the whites of their eyes, but by now everybody ignores him. At first, they have a hard time hitting the creatures, I guess because they were eyeballing the distance.

When the crawling eyes get hit with the bombs, they get a severe case of floaters, which makes them realize that they’re now up against something even more irritating than the cigarette smoke Brooks blows at them. Unfortunately for the eyeballs, they left their safety sunglasses on their home planet.

The best part of the movie was the Sven Squad; their jokes were so cornea they saved the day.