Haunted house movies

[Snarky Oracle!]

Re-watching THE GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN on some broadcast station... Silly as it is (inspired by 1963's "The Haunted House" episode of THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW) this movie is still extremely popular amongst audiences (Jim Carrey, for example, loves it) and in demand.

And why? Aside from Don Knotts' trademark physical comedy (he essentially repeats his Barney Fife routine) there is precious little gore, no sadism, and the "scares" are preposterous. And yet it works for the viewer, even after three generations.

It's the atmosphere. It's the era. It's that twilightzone-y/end-of-the-world/ghostly funereal vibe from the early-'60s (okay, it's shot in Summer 1965, and released the next year) which is both weirdly innocent and simple yet ground-zero spooky. And, like that GRIFFITH installment (in which Opie loses his baseball in the haunted murder mansion on the edge of Mayberry, in black-and-white, managing to be both comedically ridiculous and absurdly creepy) THE GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN manages to do the same in color.

There's something about the film stock of the time (as in THE BIRDS from 1963) which adds to the atmosphere, and it's hard to delineate; my brother once described it as "the way the light hits the ground," and it's true. So even at high noon and in living color, the ghostliness resonates.

Even the interior scenes -- the brick in the newspaper office, the brick in the murder mansion, the woodwork, the organ loft, the blood on the keys... there's just a vividness to it all, a cozy immediacy, which invites an eeriness despite an intentionally stupid plot.

And that's probably it: a cozy flavor which is necessary for a "horror film" to really pull the audience in by getting inside their heads -- something filmmakers (certainly today, and probably even then) have little understanding of.

MISTER CHICKEN had a broad and leisurely script (Knotts is a nervous would-be reporter who spends a night in a Victorian house with a homicide-laden history, and then he becomes a local celebrity when his misadventure hits the newsstand) and Knotts spends most of his screen time mooning over a smalltown girl who seems oblivious to him but isn't. And a lot of chuckles are mined from lines like, "Attaboy, Luther!", and "And he used Bon-Ami!"

Universal Studios backlot sets and period sitcom character actors are all recognizable. But why was this communal flavor, facetious yet focusing, seemingly impossible to conjure after the mid-'60s...? It's not just cultural; it's also visual.

 

[Crimson]

One of my favorite sub genres is a classic comedy in a spooky house. It's an entirely extinct genre now; movies like GHOSTBUSTERS or Disney's HANTED MANSION are completely different in tone and pacing. THE GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN is the last relatively successful attempt at the genre. On the plus side, Don Knotts was better at comedic frightened dithering than anyone since Lou Costello. The film's biggest drawback is being in color; the genre really needed B&W. As such, I tend to regard the true last hurrahs of this minor genre being the aforementioned episode of TAGS and the similar episode of TDVDS. The early 60s and the winding down of B&W is the last time funny and spooky were perfectly matched.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

One of my favorite sub genres is a classic comedy in a spooky house. It's an entirely extinct genre now; movies like GHOSTBUSTERS or Disney's HANTED MANSION are completely different in tone and pacing. THE GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN is the last relatively successful attempt at the genre. On the plus side, Don Knotts was better at comedic frightened dithering than anyone since Lou Costello. The film's biggest drawback is being in color; the genre really needed B&W. As such, I tend to regard the true last hurrahs of this minor genre being the aforementioned episode of TAGS and the similar episode of TDVS. The early 60s and the winding down of B&W is the last time funny and spooky were perfectly matched.

Oh, the haunted murder cabin in upstate New York the Petries visited... And perhaps 1964 "Three Wishes for Opie" (although it's not set in a haunted house). And while B&W are usually preferable, why does THE GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN and the mansion-free THE BIRDS still work in color?? In TGAMC, the tones and shadings are part of the creepy charm.

I think organic earthtones add to a domestic flavor which invite the audience to "live in" a thing. The housing interiors from the early years of DALLAS and the first three seasons of FALCON CREST help makes those shows' living spaces cozy and therefore three-dimensional inside the brains of the audience. (And as the scripting deteriorated, the sets lightened up and began to look like what they were: studio sets). DYNASTY never had cozy sets (except perhaps for Blake's library) and KNOTS LANDING was never about a nuclear family to begin with.

But those series never had the simple, creepy color schemes (nor the same film stock) of THE GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN or THE BIRDS.

 

[Crimson]

And while B&W are usually preferable, why does THE GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN and the mansion-free THE BIRDS still work in color?

Well of course horror works just fine in color overall. The eerie dreaminess of THE BIRDS largely comes from the film's color cinematography, the entirety of which seems built around the vaguely unsettling green of Tipi Hedren's suit.

There's a necessary quaintness to the haunted house comedies; I think both the spooky horror and the slapsticky comedy worked better in B&W. Perhaps its related why nearly all of the 60s sitcoms lost their charm after transitioning from B&W to color. It's a quibble about MISTER CHICKEN. It's a worthy endcap to the genre and Don Knotts was the last great comic actor of that ilk. There's an autumnal quality to the colors of MISTER CHICKEN, so at least the movie doesn't have the harsh, flat TV-style lighting that cheaper movies of the era sometimes used.

Speaking of, when LAVERNE & SHIRLEY -- which came at least reasonably close to replicating that earlier style of comedy -- tried its own haunted house episode, it was done with the typical bright, flat lighting used by sitcoms. Zero atmosphere, which undermined the whole thing.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

The B&W from the '40s, silvery and lush, is different from that of the early-'60s (which is somehow starker). Two slightly dissimilar moods are created by both. And the two eras reflect something distinct (especially as it pertains to macabre cinema). Bookends, maybe? I dunno.

PSYCHO has been described as "a ghost story without a ghost," and that's exactly what the early-'60s and its material seems to evoke. Whether it's a B&W social drama, a horror picture, a mystery film, any episode of ANDY GRIFFITH (from the first five years) with Andy casually driving his Ford police car around Mayberry, or news footage from the period --- it feels as if ghosts are hovering just outside of camera range. As if the veil between this side and the "other" side is somehow thinner.

And it always has. It's always felt that way.

So what is it?? Of course, we can't know the definitive answer to that. (Some folks don't notice or care). But the '40s and early-'60s seem joined umbilically in some way.. The '40s had Hitler, WW2 and the advent of The Bomb; the early-'60s had the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first Kennedy murder, and the overall sense that everything was on the edge of obliteration.

Both zeitgeists suggested we were looking into the face of eternity. But the '40s stuff felt gargantuan and less personal; the early-'60s stuff felt more intimate somehow, a child's-eye perspective. Both portended global apocalypse.

And all that stuck to celluloid, regardless of the subject matter or the plot.

Like PSYCHO, a sacred pre-apocalyptic, supernatural atmosphere hovers over the early-'60s stuff, even when the storyline is concrete and earthbound, or even when it's silly. (In contrast to the post-apocalyptic vibe that came with the last-half of the decade, the previous protections -- whatever those protections were -- having been lifted).

So, what does any of this have to do with GHOST & MISTER CHICKEN?

Well, it's almost impossible to describe this sort of thing and not get exhaustingly wordsy. But people get it -- many film-fans identifying the 1960s as their favorite decade for horror. (Whenever they say "the '80s" is their favorite horror era, I smirk and feel superior. Then sad. Then angry. Then vengeful in ways I don't understand and am disinclined to analyze. Then I drink something. Then I fall asleep with that weird song from DRAGONWYCK wafting through my consciousness...)

As all of The End of The World stuff goes, the early-'60s is The End of The Worldiest.