Macabre (1958)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Macabre |
| Original title | Macabre |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1958 |
| length | 73 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | William Castle |
| script | Robb White |
| production | William Castle |
| music | Les Baxter |
| camera | Carl Guthrie |
| cut | John F. Schreyer |
| occupation | |
| |
Macabre is a 1957 horror story by William Castle , who began his seven-year cycle of scary and horror films with this production.
action
Marge, the little daughter of the widowed doctor Dr. Rodney "Rod" Barrett is kidnapped on the day of the funeral of his sister-in-law Nancy Wetherby by an unknown maniac and buried alive in a spacious coffin, as the anonymous perpetrator Barrett's assistant Polly Baron announced. The doctor only has five hours to find the girl before she literally runs out of breath. Obviously, the mysterious felon also has the lives of Barrett's wife and her sister Nancy on the conscience. While Dr. Barrett and Polly do everything they can to save Marge's life and dig up all the freshly dug graves in the local cemetery, police chief Jim Tyloe begins to search for the culprit. He suspects that someone within Barrett's family or friends might be behind the insane act. Everyone is suspicious.
Meanwhile, the feverish search for the girl continues. Cemeteries with wafts of fog and dark crypts are checked and wrong tracks are followed. There is only one doll in a coffin, for example - another hidden joke or macabre hint from the unpredictable kidnapper? It soon turns out that Dr. Barrett is not at all the loving father and a doctor who cares for the welfare of others, but an extremely sly contemporary. Apparently, he personally murdered both his wife and her sister. And while his daughter sleeps the sleep of the righteous in his doctor's office all the time, Dr. Barrett only staged the whole booth magic to drive his equally heart-sick and wealthy father-in-law Jode Wetherby, who is the last in his way before the expected great wealth and whom he finally hopes to inherit, to death. When this plan fails, Barrett shoots himself.
Production notes
Macabre was filmed in just two weeks from July 29th to August 12th, 1957 and premiered in March 1958. The German premiere was on January 16, 1959, the Austrian on July 2, 1959.
The film is said to have cost only about $ 90,000 and grossed around $ 5 million. In light of this great commercial success, Castle decided to continue producing or directing horror stories and horror films.
As is customary with William Castle's horror film productions of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the producer and director worked with gimmicks to keep the tension high and to give a pleasant shiver just before the story was resolved. This time, when the movie ticket was sold, he had Lloyd's of London offer a so-called fear of death insurance , which would pay the descendants of an insured $ 1,000 if the moviegoer died of shock. Mocking critics said it should have been better to offer insurance against death through boredom.
Reviews
The ratings were quite poor. Here are four examples:
The Movie & Video Guide said that the film "promises a lot, but delivers little".
Halliwell's Film Guide found the film to be "an unadulterated but also unsuccessful attempt to create a horror comedy". The script is "incredibly cumbersome" and the "direction and performance do the rest".
Paimann's film lists summed up: "So Grand Guignol in USA with the appropriate locations and the creepy situations that often go too far ..."
"Small, macabre horror piece between graves, coffins and corpses."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joe Jordan: Showmanship: The Cinema of William Castle (2014) on books.google.de
- ↑ Kay Less : The large personal dictionary of films , Volume 2, p. 19. Berlin 2001
- ^ Leonard Maltin : Movie & Video Guide, 1996 edition, p. 797
- ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 628
- ↑ Movie & Video Guide, p. 797
- ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 628
- ↑ Macabre in Paimann's film lists ( Memento of the original from August 28, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Macabre. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 28, 2018 .
Web links
- Macabre in the Internet Movie Database (English)