As promised, here comes another DC Movie Comic adaptation of a creaky, old Universal fright film classic (see our previous post for Son of Frankenstein in case you missed it!) And this time it's a spooky detective mystery set in a haunted theatre --where murder hath taken the stage! From the August 1939 issue of Movie Comics #5, "The House of Fear" '39 film (not to be confused with the great Sherlock Holmes movie of the same name from 1945) was actually a silver scream remake of Paul Leni's "The Last Warning" from 1928, which was, in turn, an apparent follow-up to Leni's superb 1927 old dark horror house hit, "The Cat and the Canary" --whew! Fun stuff, and just like the Movie Comics version of Son of Frankenstein, hot pink House of Fear here contains the same condensed, cut 'n paste process of colorized, cropped film stills, combined with added artistic elements to keep things as comic book cartoony as possible.
5 comments:
I like the Son of Frankenstein a bit more. Better colors, better use of scenery in the stills. This job looks actually harder -- there's a lot of figures to x-acto out and they did and really solid job on it.
It looks like they traced over some images and I like the use of shadows, but they didn't take the time they did in the Frankenstein one to colorize it except for a couple spots. I like the work with the shadows, though.
Never saw this one so I can't comment on changes!
Can I say one thing about these old house movies -- how the hell are these detectives still on the job? To catch a killer they just throw a ton of civilians into the line of fire, and somebody dies here!
I wonder what the death mask effect looked like and why they all illustrated that? Didn't come out well in a still? Looked fake? I wonder!
This was a good story, the only problem was choosing pink for the background color. Pink just doesn't work well in horror, in humor (The Pink Panther) yes, in horror, no.
One good thing about this comic is it leaves out the dated humor found in the film.
I managed to find the non Sherlock Holmes version on youtube under the Groovy Movies channel if anyone is interested.
Thanks for posting this comic of this film.
It's entirely news to me that there was a Cat and the Canary Sequel that riffed on the Phantom of the Opera. That's really cool. I looked the movie up too--the one I found on the Internet Archive is worthless quality. Unwatchable. I'll have to check JMR777's YouTube version. I can't see that this has ever been on a legit DVD release even, so whatever we're all watching must come from a VHS rip. What a pity.
It's hard to pull off the old show-don't-tell thing using the limited images available from screen caps. And this one is shot in the foot by only using promotional stills from the press kit. At least it looks that way to me--it's easy to see different takes from the same photo sessions used from page to page in the story. Images that are just slightly varied from one another (cf., page two panel eight, page five panel two, and the last panel on page six). I assume these were the only materials available to use. But with that lack of visual latitude--and clearly not a lot of artistic ability to fall back on--this thing feels a little bit spare. Just the facts, ma'am. The well photographed portraiture and the fine half-toning sort of made me feel like I was reading the newspaper.
I have to say that I do like all the magenta, but I'll admit it's in a postmodern pop-art kind of a way that is unlikely to reflect the original intent of the people who made this. But what great band flyers! I particularly like page two, with its rosy-cheeked glamour shots and that crazy open balloon lettering.
But my feeling about the color here is that it's probably missing the original yellow, due to age-related fading and also the elimination of age-related yellowing. What happens is that paper and the ink both change color until they are indistinguishable. Then they yellow is remastered out entirely to make the paper look whiter (which we all appreciate). If my theory is right, all the solid magenta should actually be imagined as bright red, and all the magenta dot tones read as varying shades of orange. It would come off ruddy and similar to sepia (well, a comic book version of sepia, at least). I don't know if that would feel more like a thriller or not, but it would definitely feel more premeditated, and less outré, than it does right now. What a pity.
If its OK with you, Karswell, here is the youtube address for the movie so fans of THOIA to watch it for themselves -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeAlcsujEuM
Awesome, thank you!
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