As the days grow shorter, night encroaches and Halloween nears, thoughts naturally turn to horror. As far as Twentieth Century horror, the true mast IMHO was Robert Bloch. Unfortunately, even before he died in 1994, his biography was reduced to two simple facts summarizing his life; his teenage connection to H.P. Lovecraft and writing 'Psycho'. Bloch was much more than that, a complete writer who excelled in both the short story as well as the novel, who adapted to radio, television, and cinema. Most importantly, he put the focus on the psychological aspects of horror as well as mass murderers.
Bloch was born in Wisconsin in 1917, small and smart, finding himself bumped ahead in school. Lonely, 'Weird Tales' was his savior. He became a frequent and opinionated letter writer at a very early age, loving Lovecraft while particularly hating Conan the Barbarian. This put him in contact via letters to Lovecraft, a rabid correspondent. The two eventually went from exchanging letters to writing stories where they killed each other off. Lovecraft's was the last he wrote before he died, and it was a lurid, jokey minor piece, 'The Haunter of the Dark.'
'Weird Tales' was all too happy to print both, and Bloch started a career that lasted nearly sixty prolific years. He is seen as the extension of Lovecraft into the modern age. Nothing could be more wrong. Bloch had none of the pretenses of H.P. He was a complete professional, adapting to new markets, publishing so much that he needed to use pseudonyms to disguise his huge output. After conquering the pulps while still in his teens, he started copywriting for ad agencies on a freelance basis, even writing speeches for politicians.
His markets expanded; he dove into detective and mystery genres with complete comfort, often being compared to James M. Cain. During the war years, he was writing complete series of radio plays, all in a spooky vein. Bloch sold jokes to vaudevillians, a pretty good stand-up comedian when he needed. Check out the first ten minutes of his appearance as host at a science fiction convention, performing in front of 8,000 rabid fans.
Bloch was very prolific in radio, although a good deal of that material is lost now. He even wound up on a panel in a local Milwaukee quiz show, among his first forays into television. His fiction expanded as well, with his first novel in 1947, 'The Scarf'. This may be the first modern story about a serial killer. It is a psychological exploration of a kinky young writer who fetishizes over a scarf, killing any woman that excites him as he moves around the country.
Even before he branched into longer form, he had made a splash by writing a series on well-regarded short stories with ties to historical figures, all infamous. 'Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper' was first, constantly anthologized, turned into episodes of 'Star Trek' twenty years later. 'The Skull of the Marques de Sade' was made into British horror movie. 'Lizzie Borden Took an Axe...' looked at a famous American murder from late in the 19th century.
As Bloch became married and had children, he expanded his markets to science fiction. It paid the rent, but I always felt that his best work took place in modern settings. Television started picking up on his material. He had been writing pithy short stories for decades, perfecting the stinger at the end. Programs such as 'Thriller' led him to 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', both the television series and the monthly magazine. This in turn facilitated the merger of Bloch and Hitchcock in 'Psycho', the film that turned horror on its axis, changing it forever.
By now it should be obvious that Bloch was not an extension of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's fiction consist of paralyzed protagonists, phobias eventually becoming real, overwhelming them. Bloch was instead going back to the greatest American writer of short stories, Edgar Allan Poe, the man who discovered the psychological terrors inside the human mind, the imp of the perverse that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the obsessive/compulsive who turns fetish into death. Bloch was even asked to finish a story of Poe's, a minor thing but indicative of his standing among writers.
Robert Bloch wrote in a new territory, somewhere between mystery and horror. He had largely worked through both the Cthulhu Mythos as well as stock monsters, such as vampires in the story 'The Cloak'. There were hundreds of short stories as well as a growing collection of novels, all perfect for television and film. He was focusing on the new phenomenon of the mass murderer. Ed Gein, only 50 miles away in Wisconsin from where Bloch lived at the time, was perfect for fictionalization.
Robert didn't write the screenplay for the movie. While the plot follows the book, Hitchcock generously saying that everything in the film was already in Bloch's work, there were major differences. First, Norman Bates is not an attractive young man in the book, rather a homely weird middle aged creep. The violence, as shocking as it was in the movie, is much worse. The book is closer to 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'.
It was the pinnacle of Hitchcock's career. Block would forever be known as 'The Author of Psycho'. He didn't mind, capitalizing on it by moving to Hollywood and becoming a successful screen writer. After a shaky start with 'The Cabinet of Caligari', where the producer tried to steal his writing credit, Bloch teamed up with shlockmeister William Castle, a low rent Hitchcock. 'Straight Jacket' is over-ripe Joan Crawford, even by post-'Baby Jane' standards. It is a hoot, an absolute camp classic.
'The Night Walker' in 1964, another Castle concoction, has some of the most overwrought dream sequences outside of 'Confessions of an Opium Eater', curiously done the same year. Although a failure, the movie has a better reputation, as expertly described by Joe Dante below:
Bloch didn't slow down, instead starting to work with Amicus Studios in Britain. Amicus had to compete with the more established Hammer, who had a lock on the older Universal horror icons. The newer studio started with 'The Skull', an adaptation of a story from Bloch. Then they went straight to the master for five straight screenplays. Once they adopted an omnibus approach, collection shorter pieces together, Bloch's contribution to 'The Torture Garden', 'The House that Dripped Blood', and 'Asylum' were quite good.
With his name having marquee value, Bloch kept up both novels and short stories. The Lovecraft revival of the 1960s brought back into the public eye his earliest works, while 'Star Trek' featured a number of his scripts. Living in Hollywood, he became friends with Fritz Lang, Buster Keaton and Christopher Lee. He never stopped helping other writers, from Henry Kuttner and Leigh Bracket in the old days to Andre Norton and Harlan Ellison in the 1960s.
'Firebug' in 1961 was particularly good, a study of a man with an obsession with pyromania. Typically, it focused on getting inside the narrator's head, told in the first person. Cheap paperback editions of short story collections started to appear by the dozens, marketed as much for their suspense as their horror. Robert was becoming an Old Master, a sage with a history going back to Lovecraft, yet a future in television and movies.
By 1974, Bloch was turning another page, signaled by his excellent novel 'American Gothic'. It is a fictionalized account of H.H. Holmes' castle of murder, built near the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, where he lured in unsuspecting young women and gassed them to death. He had touched upon the history of mass murder and serial killers before. This book began a string of novels that explored that in greater detail and wisdom. Bloch was ahead of the curve, anticipating popular culture's fascination with serial killers by decades.
He had the rare honor of being both a Grand Master in science fiction, horror and mystery while working continually in television and the movies. He even went back and wrote a Cthulhu Mythos novel in 1978, 'Strange Eons', yet resolutely placing it in a contemporary world. He finally broke down in the 1980s and started writing 'Psycho' sequels. They were making sequel movies as well, so why not cash in?
Writers such as Stephen King and Peter Straub owed nearly everything to Bloch's style, his way of mixing the old with the new while keeping it based on sound psychology. He was getting old, still active through the 1980s. Newer people made a great deal more money while he gracefully stepped aside. His last great work was his 'unauthorized' autobiography, 'Once Around the Bloch', a detailed examination of his struggles to succeed as a working writer for decades in different medium.
So prolific that there has never been a true 'Collected Stories' series ever completed, he left a massive and impressive body of work behind when he died in 1994. Of particular merit are his short stories. Like Poe, he knew how to construct a tale so that every detail leads to a powerhouse conclusion - one that might not be where you thought it was leading, usually. He mastered every medium that he ever worked in. If they wanted shlock, he gave them shlock. Every once in a while, he snuck in a masterpiece.
Bloch was the great horror writer in America during the 20th century. In our modern age, where every book needs to be hundreds of pages long and part of a trilogy, is a wonderfully refreshing to go back and see how a good writer can achieve everything in a few pages. Bloch conquered every medium - radio, television and film - as his career progressed, all the while focusing attention back on 'Weird Tales' and H.P. Lovecraft. He is the bridge between the pulps and the splatter punks. He was so much more, deserving of your attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment