I try to explain what this all is. Then: Paul Naschy and the Beginnings of Waldemar Daninsky
I introduce this newsletter and then take a look at a Spanish horror cinema auteur's early werewolf movies from 1968-1970
I don’t know what I’m doing. This is true of many facets of my life, as I struggle to make sense of myself and my place in this world on a daily basis. It’s also true in regards to this Substack. Will it magically “fix” some part of my brain where countless abandoned journals, message board projects and blogs before it have missed the mark? I’m a creature of repetition. After long periods of keeping to myself for too long I feel the unbearable urge to show off some part of myself in an attempt to connect. I then make a Thing. I share a piece of myself. ??? The thing is abandoned and I go back into hiding. I struggle with connections. As I’m sure the eclectic inconsistencies of what this 'stack may soon contain will only reinforce that I’ve never known how to “brand” or market myself. I could never pick a lane, and I certainly don’t communicate well in 280 character bursts. My relative failure on social media has largely been detrimental to my health over the years (I had more fun on message boards. I miss those days) but I’ve been feeling a little better since deleting my Twitter earlier this year. If you’re reading this you may have known me from there, or from insta or bsky which I only casually use and try not to stress over anymore. I love art. Movies, animation, literature, music, paintings, photography. It sometimes helps me crystalize my own feelings if I write it out, and if in the process I end up introducing some cool things to other people, then this will be worth it. I’ll also be sharing my own photography and watercolour paintings in this newsletter as well (I’m very much an untrained amateur in both of these arts, but I have fun doing it). I’m not really sure what sort of structure this newsletter may take over time, although I do have some rough ideas for various movie-watching projects I’ll be exploring. The bulk of this inaugural piece is about me watching some Spanish werewolf movies for the first time, and I may continue this thread in future posts. But each post will be devoted to more than just one thing. This isn’t just some movie journal (otherwise I’d be writing these on Letterboxd).
Melanie died early this year. She was the singer of timeless earworm “Brand New Key”. That’s a song that I’ve been thinking of often the last couple years, since it was used in the The Kids in the Hall’s rebooted (and underrated) Season 6. Dave Foley’s “Doomsday DJ” is probably not the most purely funny sketch in that season, but it might be my favourite. In it, Foley plays a DJ bunkered down in his basement radio station at the end of the world. The pipes above him leak water into pots and pans on the floor. There’s an ominous hum around him. Some global apocalyptic event has rendered the earth’s surface uninhabitable and we have no idea how many people are even alive besides poor Dave Foley. He probably has no idea. He could be talking into the void, with nobody to receive his rock-jock messages, as he talks into equipment that might not even be transmitting his signal. But he still has a mic and a working turntable, dammit, so he’s gonna rock on, and DJ his heart out, because it’s what he does. He’s gonna play some classic rock. Unfortunately, in whatever damage went down during the end-of-the-world event, our DJ only has one record left: a .45 of Melanie’s “Brand New Key”. There doesn’t even appear to be a B-Side. It’s the last song in the world, and he plays it on an endless rotation, in between his performative Motormouth announcements, which he performs with the candor one would expect from any run of the mill morning rock DJ, even as he’s talking about the “DNA bombs” that dropped on the planet five years ago wiping out any future for humanity. Each time the needle drops on “Brand New Key”, and we hear Melanie’s song, the camera pushes in close on Foley’s face as his facade breaks, and we’re witness to his despair; the broken, hopeless state of the world, and the helplessness of his own situation. Here is a man grieving all the life that’s been eradicated off the face of the earth, likely pondering the relative fruitlessness of his endeavor.
Now, I’m a big Kids in the Hall fan. Loved it since childhood, seen every episode (and the movie and concert movies and miniseries) and will rewatch it until I die. I think what Dave Foley does in “Doomsday DJ” is the greatest acting of his entire KITH career. I don’t care if it’s only a 3 minute scene in a sketch comedy show, it’s the most heart breaking hysterical melding of tragedy/comedy I’ve maybe ever seen. It’s the micro to Dr. Strangelove’s macro. While that film is concerned with the men responsible, “Doomsday DJ” hits closer to home, as it affords us an intimate uncomfortable glimpse at an artist struggling to create their work while seemingly everything around them goes to ruins. It’s an apt representation of what it feels like to engage in any artistic pursuit in our own ongoing apocalyptic event (the 2020s). With the larger external concerns of life worsening, the need to make art, no matter how small, feels more trivial. As the planet continues to burn up, as fascists are ruining everything with great fervor, and an active genocide approaches the one-year-mark with no signs of stopping, getting through each day intact on at least some level grows increasingly harder. I’m not a macro thinker or doer. I live a small life as it’s all I can handle. Art helps me get through whatever all of this is. I burn with a desire to express myself in some fashion; however small the influence of my expression, it’s better than nothing. As I sit underground in my bunker, terrified at the world around me, at least I can drop the needle on “Brand New Key”. Rest in peace, Melanie.
Welcome to Strawberry Penguin.
—————
If you know me even a little you probably know I love horror. As a child I loved to be scared, and I loved Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Goosebumps, and the Canadian YTV oddity Freaky Stories. And I’d always come back for more, even when those shows would actually give me trouble sleeping at night. I grew out of my scaredy cat phase, but my appreciation for horror has only blossomed with age. As a teenager I tried to soak up what I could, exploring the classics - and the trash - from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, and my love of the Universal monster movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s led me directly to England’s Hammer and Amicus studios and the delights those monsters - and Cushing and Lee - had to offer. From the English Gothic, I traveled southward to Italy and took in what I could there, from their gothic origins ala Bava to the giallo explosion with Argento and Martino to something far more hazy and surreal in Fulci. I’d frequently dip back into English and Italian horror movies over the last couple decades, but in my admitted limited imagination or scope, I didn’t explore much of the broader “Eurohorror” world outside of those countries. I wish to fill in this geographical blindspot and discover what I can from Spain, particularly from the late ‘60s to the early ‘80s. I’d already seen Del Toro’s early features and the [REC] series, but from the classic Spanish horror boom period, I’ve seen almost nothing: a few Jess Franco’s and Horror Express (1972), and I only came to that one because it was a UK co-production starring Cushing and Lee. I’ll begin with the legendary Paul Naschy, and his first foray in horror: The Mark of the Wolfman (1968). Let’s see what happens from here.
Prolific exploitation film generator Al Adamson’s attempted biker movie Blood Freaks was not to the satisfaction of its producer Samuel Sherman, who suggested it be reshot as a monster movie featuring a Frankenstein monster and a Dracula. It didn’t matter if this new story direction didn’t match up with Adamson’s originally shot rough footage; he was used to reworking rough cuts into radically different movies (his 1965 crime thriller Psycho A-Go-Go was later reshot into Blood of Ghastly Horror). Sherman got it in his head that Frankenstein movies would be a surefire hit in name alone, and promised his theatre distributors he’d deliver one. Adamson’s newly titled Dracula vs. Frankenstein was having difficulties, and when it looked like it wouldn’t be ready for release at its promised date, Sherman looked elsewhere for a Frankenstein movie he could recycle. He discovered the Spanish werewolf movie The Mark of the Wolfman (1968), Paul Naschy’s horror debut, which was a couple years old, but hadn’t been released in the US. Not bothered by its lack of Frankenstein monster (the cinemas that showed exploitation movie never watched their programming ahead of time, and were only concerned with titles and marketing), Sherman retitled the film Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, and inserted an opening narration explaining that the castle in which the movie is largely based was once the dwelling of Baron Frankenstein. The family name of his descendants was changed to Wolfstein as the generations passed. Adamson’s movie, meanwhile, did become available not long after, and both Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror were released in the autumn of 1971, and as a double-feature in at least one market.
A bodybuilder at the time who did minor acting and extra work in the movies, Paul Naschy was a lifelong horror fan. He credited his experience watching Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man (1942) as a child with creating the first spark that lit the flame for his love of the genre and in cinema as a whole. Lon Chaney Jr’s portrayal of the tortured Lawrence Talbot left a deep impression on Naschy, and decades later when his various career attempts had stalled, the 34-year old channeled his love of Chaney’s Wolfman into a screenplay about a werewolf. An inexperienced screenwriter, the concept of a Spanish werewolf movie was novel enough to attract a studio into funding it. Naschy did not aspire to be a lead actor in this production and had hoped they could even cast Chaney Jr, which was not practical given the aging actor’s poor health. Naschy entered into this film production as writer only but reluctantly stepped into the werewolf role because nobody else could be cast in time, and the producers were impressed with his physique, and figured he would look good on camera. The Mark of the Wolfman enabled Naschy to get his foot in the door of the film industry and carve out a place for himself making movies he would often write and star in (frequently in horror but not always) for his own production company, which flourished in the years spanning 1971-1975.
When his production company folded in the later ‘70s he reemerged with total authorship, creating movies throughout the late ‘70s to early ‘80s that he directed, wrote and starred in, making him one of the rare horror auteurs to hold these jobs across many titles. It was a prolific period for Naschy, with him directing on average one film or more each year from 1977-1984
[Sidebar: a writer/director of horror movies who also stars in at least a handful of their films has got to be a short list, right? I can’t think of many. Cameos don’t count. Trying to focus on ones who act in lead or co-lead roles. Paul Naschy, Ray Dennis Steckler, Shinya Tsukamoto, Coffin Joe. That’s an eclectic group!]
The Spanish horror movies made during the country’s 70s horror boom often get put in the Eurosleaze, Eurocult label, along with the Italian and perhaps the naughtier of the British horror movies. The Spanish ones are often regarded in less kinder fashion than their Italian and British genre peers; with a significantly smaller film industry that was still in the throes of a Fascist government’s censorship. Spanish horror movies are cheaper, and have been treated less well in their international distribution effecting their ability to be canonized alongside other European horror films.
“I am the spirit of evil. The devil in person,” Count Waldemar Daninsky announces to his date at a regal masked ball, dressed lavishly in a puffy Masque of the Red Deathesque costume. Naschy’s first words onscreen in a horror picture are quite fitting, a declaration of intent; a body of work that would entail him playing every movie monster under the sun. In Mark of the Wolfman, he starts off ordinarily enough as just a Count. The film moves along at first so recognizably as a riff on the Universal monster movies of the ‘30s-40s and Hammer monster movies of the late ‘50s, with emphasis on gothic castle architecture being so menacingly enveloped in shadows and fog (sometimes that all a movie needs to be). While the Universal movies of this type sat at around 70 minutes, and the Hammer successors at around 80, this one nearly hits 90. Its slowness in the first act can sometimes test the patience of the viewer, but things pick up when Daninsky is bitten by a recently resurrected werewolf from the Wolfstein family– a long-ago family of high standing who lived in an opulent gothic castle now abandoned who were undone by the family lycanthropic curse – and soon becomes one himself.
After Wolfstein murders the drunken gypsies who pulled the silver cross dagger from his heart and awakening him in the process - an incident which is interpreted as a regular wolf attack by the villagers - the movie signals its most blatant homage to the Universal classics. It’s a scene that plays out in James Whale’s Frankenstein and The Invisible Man movies of all the men in the town gathered together at sundown in their long coats and hats, sporting hunting rifles and accompanied by barking dogs as they try to find the dangerous creatures who are wreaking havoc on their village. What I have neglected to mention thus far is that this isn’t some 19th century period piece; Mark of the Wolfman is set in the contemporary mid 1960s, which is only obvious when Daninsky is driving his sports car and we see that the movie’s women are dressed in the hip fashion of the day. Much of this film looks and feels like a love letter to the black and white period horror movies that inspired Naschy’s nascent love of the genre, but it brushes up against the realities of modernity. In the hunting party scene and another early scene of two gypsies taking shelter in a storm which is reminiscent of Hammer’s Dracula movies, the aesthetics of Naschy’s world and the mannerisms and language of the characters who inhabit it are unmistakably old world. Elsewhere, when confronted with modern technology and fashion, the illusion breaks but we get something interesting occurring when his characters feel as if they’re misplaced in time. Naschy regularly had one foot planted in the old world and one in the new and his films are better and more bizarre because of it.
Paul Naschy is a charming rookie actor here, and he’s putting in the work, experienced or not. He impresses most in his agonizing ferocity as the werewolf, darting across the screen with tremendous athleticism, as well as scenes of great turmoil for Daninsky, where Naschy gets to do his best Chaney Jr. impression and let the existential anguish of his situation run wild.
This is not merely a werewolf vs werewolf movie, although that could have been satisfying enough in its own right. In the final 35 minutes we are introduced to a vampire couple who pose as supernatural experts but actually have more insidious ideas in mind for the two werewolves in town. They quickly win the trust of Waldemar Daninsky and his girlfriend and their friends, but end up chaining Daninsky in the dungeon close to where Wolfstein is kept, and use their vampire mind powers of seduction on the others. Through the actions of the vampires, Mark of the Wolfman leaves the territory of Universal homage and transforms into something perverse and modern, their nihilistic sadism takes this movie down a darker path, hinting at the ‘70s Eurosleaze to come. The vamps don’t seem to have much more in mind than torturing the werewolves and eventually pitting them against each other purely for their own amusement. In one memorable scene, Daninsky (in human form) is topless and sweating, chained up and screaming in agony with long rows of tall candles burning around him, tilting towards him, their wax dripping over his body, with the sequence shot under a red hue. The movie’s application of colours is not as constant as the dizzying delirium of Mario Bava or the psychedelic flashes throughout the Roger Corman/Poe cycle, but those do appear to be the palette influences for the neon colours emanating from the windows of the gothic castle in exterior shots, or the moody lighting throughout the castle’s corridors and dungeons.
For a movie starring and written by a guy nobody knew, in a genre that was not hot yet in its native country, The Mark of the Wolfman is a surprisingly handsome production, not an A picture, but a little nicer than a B movie too. It was given enough money to look appealing in its 70mm Hi-Fi film stock, and was also shot for 3-D exhibition (although for technical deficiency reasons it was seldom ever screened in 3-D). Despite the 70mm lavishness and pretty good photography, there are still some charming b movie flubs, as if the crew were sometimes working out of their depth with the resources at their disposal. A couple of the flubs include the lady vampire clearly being visible in the edges of a mirror not five seconds after the scene clearly communicated to the viewer and the other character in the scene that she cannot be seen in the mirror, and the exterior nighttime photography has inconsistent hues from shot to shot.
The Mark of the Wolfman is a movie I had fun with, and have watched twice over the last month. It’s a bit tame for a Spanish horror movie of the period, but it’s got a cozy autumnal ambiance and I can see myself revisiting it when the air gets crisp and the leaves crunch underfoot. The film was enough of a hit to enable Paul Naschy to continue writing and starring in horror movies. Initially, these were only werewolf follow-ups, and it would be a while before he could match the success of this first movie. The next three werewolf movies were all mired in production difficulties.
The Nights of the Wolf Man (1968) was filmed in Paris shortly after Mark of the Wolfman’s release, or so Naschy claimed. Nobody has ever seen it, and there appears to be no surviving footage. There is some doubt that it was ever filmed at all, as there is no record of it ever entering production. Naschy only mentioned a couple other people associated with the movie, and none of these names have any other film credits. It seems possible that while he did write a script and prepare a production it was likely shut down before shooting, even though Naschy claimed for years that it did exist, perhaps as an act of self-mytholoization. Many Naschy fans approach the fate of this film with a Print the Legend acceptance, and will even count it among the numbering of the Daninsky/Hombre Lobo Saga (this being #2 of 12; although in that case, I personally don’t acknowledge 2 or 12 [the last one being a Fren Olen Ray softcore porno from the 00s that shoehorns Naschy into a few scenes. Yeesh.] If you ask me it seems there are 10 worth discussing among the series proper).
Assignment: Terror (1970) is the next surviving - or real – Daninsky movie, although unlike the preceding The Mark of the Wolfman and the eight to follow, it’s not primarily a “werewolf movie”. In his final film appearance before his death in 1971, Michael Rennie (Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still) is Dr. Odo Warnoff, in suit and tie and disguised by all appearances as a regular human, but is actually a malevolent space alien inhabiting a recently deceased scientist’s body. With the help of his sexy lady staff, the evil alien will revive famous monsters from around the world - a vampire, a mummy, a Frankenstein monster and a werewolf (Naschy’s Daninsky) and use them to obtain world domination. The barebones story strikes a resemblance to Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla sequels Invasion of Astro Monster (1965) and Destroy All Monsters (1968), but through clunky exposition, poor editing, questionable creature makeup and stiff acting from much of the cast, Assignment: Terror is a lot less fun than those two kaiju outings. This is partially because the originally hired director, Hugo Fregonese, quit partway through the shoot and had to be replaced, by Tulio Demicheli. And Naschy, who wasn’t shy from complaining about past colleagues, has mentioned in interviews his dissatisfaction with the makeup artist assigned to the movie. The Frankenstein monster and vampire do look horrendous (although still not as bad as the Frankenstein and Dracula used in Al Adamson’s movie), Naschy’s wolfman is acceptable (but is a major step down from his appearance in The Mark of the Wolfman), and the mummy is surprisingly appealing.
In general, the movie shows brief signs of a pulse during the few mummy sequences. A major problem with Assignment: Terror is that it’s largely shown from the perspective of Michael Rennie’s evil alien boss, even though he spends the whole movie in a lab watching events unfold on a large television screen, where he’s somehow watching the action with the monsters go down (even though the matter of videocameras is never brought up). Whenever something that should be exciting is happening, the film cuts many, many times to Rennie’s bored face watching TV.
Naschy was still early enough in his monster movie career to be excitedly writing these movies with an adolescent-like glee and cherishing the opportunity to act out childhood fantasies. Assignment: Terror has one reason for existing, and that was so he could stage his own interpretation of the Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman finale, and actually execute a more thrilling action-heavy battle than the Universal movies of old would tease but never truly delivered. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman has the iconic poster of the two titans grabbing each other, engaged in combat, but the actual sequence at the end of that movie of the monsters coming face to face is over in seconds. Assignment: Terror has a fun series of sequences at its climax, with Waldemar Daninsky acting as the film’s reluctant hero, and fighting the Mummy and then the Frankenstein monster in sloppy drag out brawls, defeating the film’s other monsters, before he himself is also laid to rest at the hands of the woman he loved via a silver bullet.
The Fury of the Wolf Man (1970) is far more inept than Assignment: Terror and will have you longing for a return to that movie’s endearing clunkiness and adolescent monster mayhem. Like that movie, it also experienced a director switch during production, but under more chaotic conditions. Director Enrique Lopez Eguiluz filmed only a couple scenes before he was fired, and was replaced with Jose Maria Zabalza, a director that Naschy said in many interviews throughout his career was a lazy incompetent alcoholic, who worked drunk and didn’t care to do his job. Naschy claimed that Zabalza refused to direct certain scenes that were in the screenplay, sometimes bringing in his teenage son to do quick re-writes. When the shoot was finished and it was clear that Zabalza hadn’t shot enough sequences to make a movie, he decided to cut in several scenes from The Mark of the Wolfman. They were not presented as flashbacks, but passed off as new scenes, even though it was glaringly obvious that the footage never matched continuity. And when that wasn’t enough, the director brought in an uncredited double - without Naschy’s knowledge - to dress up as the wolfman and walk around in a stupor. So throughout this movie, during werewolf scenes, it frequently cuts back and forth between footage of three different werewolf interpretations: Naschy in The Fury of the Wolf Man, a double in Naschy’s werewolf makeup with body language that doesn’t match, and two year old footage of Naschy’s feral intensity in The Mark of the Wolfman.. The production on this movie was such a nightmare, and Naschy was so distracted by on-set troubles, that his performance is inert this time around. As a result, the footage of him in character across this and the earlier movie never syncs up. This is such a bad, boring mess of a film. Outside of the wild incoherence of the mis-matching werewolf shots, nothing else stands out.
The Fury of the Wolf Man was shelved for years, and not released in any significant way until a censored U.S. TV release in 1974. In Spain, and elsewhere, the film was released theatrically in 1975. This was probably a blessing. If released in 1970, it could have maybe damaged Naschy’s career, considering its awfulness and his relatively small filmography up to that point. Five years later, he had written and starred in approximately a dozen successful horror movies (including four more Daninsky werewolf pictures which were much better received than the earlier ones), which made it easier to overlook this dud. Unfortunately, The Fury of the Wolf Man somehow fell into a perceived public domain status in the United States (probably having to do with that ‘74 U.S. TV run) and became a staple of late night TV and poor quality VHS and DVD releases, and for a long time was one of the easier-to-find Paul Naschy movies in North America, which couldn’t have helped his reputation over here, and could be partially responsible for why it took (and continues to take) a long time for his work to be critically appreciated in a serious way in this part of the world.
The Fury of the Wolfman did not slow Naschy down. He had already written and was set to star in his next wolfman chronicle: The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman. This film introduced him to his two greatest director collaborators of the 1970s - León Klimovsky and Carlos Aured - and their work together changed the Spanish film industry going forward.