10 JANUARY 2003

Underground
U.S.A.

by Steven Jay Schneider
(Editor), Xavier Mendik (Editor)

Paperback: 224 pages

Publisher: Wallflower Press;
; 0 edition (November 15, 2002)

ISBN: 1903364493

[CHAP.
3] „Curtis Harrington and the Underground Roots of the Modern Horror Film,‰
Stephen R. Bissette (Fiction Writer & Illustrator)

From the introduction: „In
the year 1927-28, after directing a small number of films in Switzerland,
France, and the United States, Robert Florey interrupted his Hollywood
career as a gag writer, publicist, and assistant director to direct a quartet
of non-narrative, expressionistic short films. The most famous of these
remains The Life and Death of 9413˜A Hollywood Extra (1928), which Florey
made with Slavko Vorkapich for the princely sum of $96. The expressionistic
short caught the fancy of many of Florey‚s Hollywood associates; Charles
Chaplin himself arranged for the film to play on Broadway, opening it to
wider venues. Its success eventually attracted the attention of Paramount
Studios, launching Florey‚s mainstream directorial career (which included
his aborted preproduction work on Universal‚s Frankenstein before helming
genre classics like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Beast With
Five Fingers (1942).

    Thirty
years later, a young Californian underground filmmaker named Curtis Harrington
made the more difficult move from the American avant-garde cinema to directing
features in Hollywood. Like Florey before him and David Cronenberg, John
Waters, David Lynch and E. Elias Merhige after, Harrington‚s preoccupation
with dark fantasy inspired him to use the horror genre as a generic bridge
to mainstream filmmaking.

    As such,
Harrington is one of the genre‚s true pioneers, a stature that has not,
as yet, been properly acknowledged. Whereas the underground and mainstream
films of Cronenberg, Waters, Lynch and most recently Merhige (having just
completed his first mainstream narrative studio effort, Shadow of the Vampire
[2000]) are considered as equally vital components in their richly personal
oeuvres, Harrington has not yet received such critical attention or reevaluation.
No one has yet considered his experimental films as vital, organic and
integrated elements of his directorial vision and career.‰