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Director / Screenwriter: Curtis Harrington

By Roderick Heath

When I was a young boy, no more than six years old, my mother and I visited a funfair built on a pier, a place of fascinating if weary fantasias that would demolished just a few years later. We ventured at one point into the hall of mirrors and after a while realised we simply couldn’t find our way out. Eventually we did locate a door, which proved to emerge on the narrow gangway at the pier’s edge, green seawater lapping around the pylons beneath, and we traversed that path back to the world. That incident has remained intense in my memory ever since. Only a couple of years later the pier would be demolished, replaced by nothing that would so thoroughly infiltrate a child’s imagination. It is one reason I nonetheless feel a powerful personal connection with Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide.

Harrington, born in Los Angeles in 1926, made his first short films when still a teenager. Around the same time he had his first sexual experience with a fellow, male student, a footballer, and in Harrington’s art meditations on love and eroticism were so often to be wound in deeply with his art. Harrington’s early work included a version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher (1942), a subject he would return to with his last completed work, Usher (2000). After graduating college with a degree in film studies he immediately deepened his credibility as a cineaste by publishing a book on Josef von Sternberg at the age of 22, and he would retain his stature as an archivist through helping preserve James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932). He served as cinematographer on Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1948) and later played a role in his Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). In this period he also became connected with the mystic Thelema movement founded by Aleister Crowley, which Anger was deeply involved with, and he encountered another acolyte, Marjorie Cameron, an artist and performer who would eventually have an important onscreen role in his feature film debut. Cameron had been married to Jack Parsons, a senior figure in the movement and also a rocket engineering pioneer who had helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Harrington made Cameron’s artwork the subject of one of his documentary The Wormwood Star (1956).

Harrington also met and worked with fellow experimental film pioneer Maya Deren, who had her own esoteric religious creed as a practicing voodoo priestess, and spent a period working as an assistant to high-profile producer Jerry Wald, before venturing out to announce his emergence as a director of full-length films with Night Tide. Harrington’s original screenplay for his debut, based on a short story he wrote and initially called The Girl From Beneath The Sea, was sold to Roger Corman in 1956, but also reportedly had a meeting with interested financiers connected to the gangster Mickey Cohen. The film was eventually produced by Aram Kantarian on a stringent budget of $75,000. Completed in 1961, Night Tide had its premiere and appeared at film festivals, gaining plaudits in many quarters. But proper release was delayed for several reasons, including, according to star Dennis Hopper, the lack of a Hollywood filmmakers’ union seal of approval, and because the production entity, Virgo, couldn’t pay Pathé Films for their lab processing work, and it wasn’t until Corman stepped in to negotiate a deal with Pathé and the film was taken up for distribution by American International Pictures, that it finally entered general release in 1963. Hopper credited the film’s unusual journey as helping spark the American independent film movement, in proving that movies could be made and released outside the nominal system, leading on to the likes of his own Easy Rider (1969).

On the back of the film’s modest success, Harrington signed a deal with Corman that saw him fashion two films, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) and Queen of Blood, built around footage repurposed from Russian sci-fi films Corman had bought the international rights to. In this venture he followed Francis Ford Coppola, who had concocted Battle Beyond The Sun (1963), and preceding Peter Bogdanovich’s foray with Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1967). Harrington’s small but fascinating oeuvre has long been a secret trove for movie lovers, not least because he rode at the vanguard of a generation of American filmmakers defined by an obsessive film buff background and not spawned by the studio system, laying groundwork for the emergence of the New Hollywood, Movie Brat, and later Indie Film movements. As a queer filmmaker, Harrington became a defining figure for a cinema overtly inflected with a camp sensibility. Night Tide meditates in a subtle way on the problems of finding love and contending with an inner nature that feels alien and aberrant in a world without guidance and care. His more overt works in that mode include Queen of Blood, which essentially depicts a monster drag queen from outer space. What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) emerged as a diptych extending a brand established by Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1963), built around diva turns by aging star actresses, with Harrington adding his own, specific edge of absurd fetishism, fuelled by the screeching friction between a decayed age of Hollywood glamour screeching and fetid landscapes of small-timers and small-towners. Games (1967) began as a mischievously decadent and colourful portrait of a threesome enjoying sexual adventures and dangerous thrills, before devolving into a variation on Les Diaboliques (1955) in its second half. Harrington also did much work in television, whilst his last feature was 1985’s Sylvia Kristel vehicle Mata Hari.

Even if Harrington’s career was ultimately disappointing given his initial promise, few horror films wield the inscrutable allure and nigh-perfect exploration of a very specific mood as his early work, Night Tide in particular, a portrait in eerie disquiet and forlorn romanticism, with a lilt of fairy-tale charm. It can be easily described as a film nerd’s remake-cum-personal assimilation of the Jacques Tourneur-directed, Val Lewton-produced Cat People (1942), offering a variation on that film’s basic proposition of a lonely young woman obsessed by a monstrous identity she fears taking her over. But that doesn’t entirely do it justice, as Harrington also renders it a portrait of a time, a place, a culture, a way of thinking and feeling. Night Tide is infused with a quality that, like much of the best low-budget genre film, adapts to circumstance to imbue happenstance realism with a carefully wrought stylisation, recorded in lucid black-and-white that edges into the suggestive and the surreal at calculated moments. By contrast, Queen of Blood is a cobbled chimera of a movie, one that can indeed be likened to the kind of sideshow attraction the mystique of which Harrington celebrated in his previous film, this one seeing Harrington move to a freaky fantasia of space exploration loaded with elements inescapably prefiguring Alien (1979) and charged with a sickly eroticism registering in its fervent colour photography. Both films nonetheless are charged with a virtually unique signature of dreamy atmosphere and perverse obsessions laced into their narratives.

Harrington’s semi-underground connections are apparent in Night Tide not only in his visual textures, but also in the ideal poetic-realist locale he chose, the authentic-feeling evocation he offers of the seamy beauty and tacky magic of bohemian atmosphere of Venice, California, circa 1961. A housing development and resort locale built on the coast on the fringes of Los Angeles in the early 1900s, Venice was created in deliberate mimicry of the Italian city, complete with dug canals and manifold bridges. After being annexed as a suburb of LA in the 1920s, Venice fell upon hard times, and the cheapness of the housing began attracting immigrants and bohemians in droves, leading to its slow renaissance: today of course it’s one of Los Angeles’s most famous and pricey locales. When Harrington made his movie the subcultural enclave mixed with the remnants of the two-bit carnival culture that had once been the town’s characteristic and the faux-Italianate architecture stood cheek-by-jowl with opportunistic oil drilling equipment and virtual slums, weaving an odd, more than faintly unreal atmosphere. That atmosphere had already been ingeniously exploited by Orson Welles as he had the town stand in for the fictional border town depicted in Touch Of Evil (1958), and Night Tide strongly suggests Harrington was working as much under Welles’ influence as Val Lewton and Cat People, although arguably its sea-salts-and-tall-stories atmosphere is closer to The Lady From Shanghai (1946) and The Immortal Story (1968) than that of Touch Of Evil’s sleazy virtuosity.

Hopper plays Johnny Drake, a young sailor from the Midwest who, on leave in Los Angeles, visits the Venice waterfront, and ventures into a coffee house called the Blue Grotto, where an excellent jazz combo plays. Johnny settles alone at a table and surveys his surrounds, the vista of his gaze filled with either couples out on dates or other solitary people, some of them looking a little scarily to a young man’s eye like warnings of aging alone. Johnny’s eye finally lights on Mora (Linda Lawson), a solitary, nervous young woman listening intently to the music. Johnny asks to sit with her on the pretext of a better view, and begins a fumbling effort to strike up a conversation despite her display of absorption in the jazz. A strange, haughty lady (Cameron) swans around the coffee house and addresses Mora in Greek, plainly disturbing her and causing her to leave the nightspot in a hurry. Johnny, bewildered, follows her out and walks with her to her place of residence, which proves to be an apartment over a funfair hall containing a merry-go-round, on a pier jutting out into the dark ocean. Johnny’s attempt to kiss Mora is rebuffed, but when he makes an anxious appeal to see her again she agrees and tells him to come around for breakfast the following day. Johnny, joyful at making a connection, climbs onto the railing of the pier and walks its narrow way.

Harrington quickly places his two essential young lovers in a context at once palpable and dreamlike, touched with ethereal romanticism but also with a faint tremor of disquiet beneath it. Mora seems like Johnny’s deepest fantasy made flesh at first glance, lovely and innocent-seeming, but curiously isolated, as distinct and adrift as he is despite being a familiar fixture in this place he’s gravitated to, available but also trailed by some indefinable mystery that soon starts to resolve into something concrete. Her encounter with Cameron’s strange woman recreates the scene in Cat People where Elizabeth Russell’s mysterious beauty abruptly addresses Simone Simon’s Irina as “Sister,” and with a similar suggestion of some binding identity, some otherness, a quality that only those who share recognise. Although Harrington’s variation has a slightly different emphasis, in part because Cameron is considerably older than Lawson and so there’s less the crackle of forbidden sexuality being grazed and more of a conspiracy of elders, a slant that proves relevant as the film unfolds and the strange woman’s role in the affair is left tantalising at the very end. Johnny’s attempt to draw Mora in for a romantic clinch resolves with a similarly furtive and agonised note even as Johnny tries to be bold, only exposing his desperation.

The next day, when he shows up for breakfast, Johnny is treated to a meal of fresh mackerel Mora purchased, and they eat together in the balcony of her flat, which commands views of the ocean and the Venice beachfront, with only the presence of the raucous merry-go-round below as a price to pay, which Mora doesn’t mind anyway. Johnny, when Mora asks what his story is, responds with heavy-footed humour, “I’m in the United States navy!” but then explains how he cared for his sickly mother until her death, and then joined the navy to see the world, but hasn’t gotten any further than a sojourn in Hawaii and his current posting at the San Piedro Naval Base. Mora meanwhile is cagier about her background, but starts to reveal it as she introduces Johnny later to her adoptive father, Captain Samuel Murdock (Gavin Muir), who is also her employer in a peculiar means of living. Mora poses as a mermaid in a sideshow attraction, reclining in serene stasis, wearing a glittering fake tail and resting underneath a tank of water pretending to brush the hair of a long wig in listless fashion, hair which later seems to transform into the entrapping tentacles of a great octopus. Harrington’s fondness for a fairy-tale like mood is further amplified by Mora’s Snow White-like touch with animals, a seagull that hovers around the balcony interrupting breakfast by landing and allowing Mora to pet it lovingly. The notion that both Johnny and Mora have been trapped in a sort of delayed development, one part adult, one part still child, is signalled in both Johnny’s sailor suit and Mora’s abode.

“I guess we’re all a little afraid of what we love,” Johnny comments when Mora describes her simultaneous attraction to the ocean and her anxiety before it, offering the essential theme of both Night Tide and Queen of Blood, films in which desire and need blend with a death-urge as realised through alluring femmes fatale, and with the common quality apparent in both Mora and her alien counterpart in the subsequent film of being obliged through basic biological obligation to act in ways that may incidentally destroy others. With Night Tide Harrington found a perfect canvas to transfer over to commercial feature cinema ideas and preoccupations of the experimental film world he’d sprung from. The ticky-tacky wonderland of the fairground where Mora lives and works is a space where illusion reigns, falseness has its own reality, and childhood and adulthood can commune. Mora’s job is pitched exactly at the point where a childish delight in and need for transportation and simmering, nascent erotic longing converge in the image of the lounging mermaid, desirable and pathetic, alluring and amusing, fetishistic and untouchable, a vision resolving out the Jungian depths.

Similar in its sparse ambience and fetish for decaying public infrastructure, to Herk Harvey’s incidental companion piece Carnival of Souls (1962), Night Tide is different to that film in its warmer, less moralistic tone. It also anticipates later work by George Romero, including The Amusement Park (1972) and Martin (1976) – particularly the latter, in explicitly contrasting the alienated anxieties of youthful characters with a repressive, imposed dread of their inner selves, creating a homicidal impulse in an otherwise innocent protagonist who can’t find any other way out of their obsessions – a cunning metaphor for the way the past is always inescapable when the present is devoid of coherent alternative. In Night Tide this anxiety slowly coaxed out of Mora as she and Johnny draw close, but only becomes clear when Murdock finally tells Johnny that he found Mora as a child on a tiny Greek island, and believes she belongs to the race of legendary sirens, and, despite her superficial innocence inevitably gives in to urges to lure in and then kill men who want to be her lover. Johnny finds this idea offensively absurd, but quickly confirms Mora believes it to be true, wearing away at the fabric of her essentially placid psyche, even believing that the oceanic sound within a seashell is proof of her otherworldly connection.

Harrington pays tribute to Lewton’s films not only in atmosphere and psychological tone but also in a humanist theme, with the eclectic swirl of weird but decent characters who Johnny encounters, essentially adopting the young man, and the evoked fragility of the psyche and the innocence of young people: small acts of kindness and cruelty count for a lot in this landscape. The villainy, which proves to stem from a distinctly earthly and immediate source, stems from a desperate desire to not be abandoned, but finally creates a situation that destroys exactly what it seeks to control. Harrington’s sexuality offers a constant undercurrent, mediated and universalised through the threat of the younger man to the older in stealing away his object of adoration, and the dogged threat of total abandonment that haunts all. Another detectable influence on the film is the French artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, with his crisp yet treacherous visions of beautiful demon lovers and numinous portals riddling the mundane as expostulated in Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orphée (1949), and Harrington even got a chance to make the connection plainer with a cameo in the Blue Grotto scene by Barbette, a former circus star who had appeared in Cocteau’s debut, Blood of a Poet (1932). Hues of the surrealist interest in the dreamscape’s horizon point where sex and death blend and unify, which Anger in particular had delighted, and the fascination with dark doubles and mysterious pursuers Deren had conjured in Meshes of the Afternoon (1944), are repurposed as narratively functional by Harrington.

The figuration of Mora as a cursed destroyer of men is part and parcel with her unique awareness and connection to the natural world, the girl who can coax seagulls into her arms also claims to hear the denizens of the ocean calling to her. This in turn provokes Johnny to determined but ineffectual efforts to break this absurd chain of thinking. Johnny first hears hints of this enigma through people who know Mora, including the merry-go-round operator (Tom Dillon), his shy but helpful and slightly gossipy granddaughter Ellen Sands (Luana Anders), and charmingly batty fortune teller Madame Romanovitch (Marjorie Eaton), a trio he encounters one afternoon gathered in the hall below Mora’s apartement. Ellen, perpetually helpful, brings coffee and tea – the latter for Madame Abramovitch, who laments the popularity of teabags impacts on her ability to read the leaves – whilst a friendly but dogged detective, Henderson (H.E. West), hovers around the pier, quizzed over an ongoing investigation. His visit finally gives the others an excuse to tell Johnny about how Mora’s last two boyfriends, both young, pleasant men like himself, vanished without trace. When Johnny and Mora attend a beach party thrown by the local bohemian crowd, Mora’s love of dancing is coaxed on by the encouraging musicians, her performances plainly a fixture of such gatherings.

This sequence is one Harrington’s little treasures of mood-setting and style. Mora, with her delight in trance-like, almost incantatory dancing, her own pagan paranoia finding temporary shelter within the sensual, life-loving undercurrents in the bohemian nightlife as recorded by Harrington, Mora’s alternations of spasmodic and elegant movements move from a steady, dreamy lilt in accord with the gently rapped bongo drums before building to ecstatic crescendos and back again. Harrington’s camera adopts her point of view as she spins around. The strange woman appears in the distance on the beach, licked at by the bonfire light, and then suddenly close at hand like a taunting memento mori amidst the life and pleasure, scaring Mora out of her fugue and causing her to faint. Another illustration of Harrington’s capacity to weave an uncanny atmosphere follows the scene of Johnny learning about the missing men from the trio by the merry-go-round. As he listens with extreme dubiousness to their accounts, a phone call comes through for him, who’s surprised as nobody knows where he is, and the call cuts out as he answers.

But he then sees the mystery woman, wearing as always a black dress with a gossamer wrap and veil, walking swiftly and stiffly along the street outside, and begins tracking her. The woman’s progress takes her into the decayed and industrially marked zones behind the waterfront, where the woman’s silks swirl in the wind as she traverses a landscape of wooden canal bridges and oil derricks, entering a slum of whitewashed walls, unnervingly self-motivated rocking chairs, and fearful, unspeaking children, transforms an everyday landscape into something charged with exotic threat and ambiguity. She vanishes just as Johnny halts outside a large, quasi-Italianate house, plainly a relic of the neighbourhood’s better days, that rocking chair still moving on the porch, a shadowy figure hovering in a high window, a young Latin girl playing nearby on the rubble-strewn ground who did not see the woman. Johnny knocks on the large house’s door and finds to his surprise this is Murdock’s house. The aging captain is glad to see Johnny and, inviting him in, starts knocking back stiff drinks with him, and then well ahead of him, as he explains how he encountered Mora and what he believes to be the truth of her.

Murdock’s house, with its fake old world charisma and fortress-like affectation without and the old sea dog’s trove of anecdotal experience, cherished mythos, and bizarre keepsakes within again, like Harrington’s feel for the Venice fairground, captures a frisson welling from things draped in a folkloric and fantastical mystique, finding glee in what’s improbable and tacky about it all, as well as what seems to withhold some actual, genuine, enticing mystery, that connection with a legendary pass when, without media to process and transmit it for us, the world really was as large and myth and the truths it contained were as variable as the minds that passed through it. Johnny recoils in shock and continues to squirm in disgust after finding a severed hand in a jar, a gift Murdock claims was given him by the Sultan of Marrakech as a curio, and came from a thief. Murdock’s increasingly tipsy admonitions against getting close to Mora finally see him fade into boozy snoozing, after Murdock has pointed out the door of what used to be Mora’s bedroom. Johnny ventures up there and finds the stuff of his lover’s childhood – a mattress, a dangling fishing net, and an open window with billowing drapes, imagery straight out of surrealist art, with Harrington’s camera moving forward into the darkness beyond the window and into the dreamy nothingness.

Harrington delights in compositions encompassing crude artworks painted on fairground walls and sprawling, intricate wallpaper patterns, carved motifs on furniture, and the pretentious yet run-down architecture and décor of the locale, all charged with a sense of awareness of the charm in seemingly the most casually noted and ephemeral expressions of finely detailed expression and a need for wonder – all qualities presented as a basic, binding aspect of the human story. The bric-a-brac scattered around Murdock and Mora’s homes are keepsakes of lives lived in both roaming interest and biting solitude, filled with signifiers of another demi-world that haunts them at night, the call of the sea and ports beyond. The world under Harrington’s eye is a place constantly defined and redefined by the finite delights of the human eye and soul at war with an entropic power eating away at the edges of this city by the sea. Madame Romanovitch, who tries to warn Johnny about ill-omens in his future, is worth comparing to the equally bogus figure Marlene Dietrich played in Touch of Evil in paying tribute to the delight inherent in such dubious mysticism: whilst Dietrich’s character is all lazy-eyed, exotic sexuality and Eaton’s is a chipper, tea-swilling bohemian, both present the notion that their flagrantly inauthentic magic contains something ever so teasingly real. Romanovitch, telling Johnny’s fortune, identifies him with the Knight of Cups in the tarot, and like many a knight-errant out of myth, he is defined by his simultaneous purity and drive to penetrate the mysterious female at all costs.

Night Tide was a vital career moment for Hopper, as his first film acting work after being virtually blackballed by Hollywood following butting heads with veteran director Henry Hathaway on From Hell to Texas (1958). After spending time deepening his study of Method acting and plying his alternate trade as a photographer, Hopper was handed his first lead role by Harrington, and for an actor later so associated with displays of bravura ranging from earthy passion to livewire instability to arch monstrosity, his performance here is a thing of quiet, reflective, and empathetic beauty, projecting a naïve and vulnerable charm whilst also investing Johnny with a degree of angular eccentricity and protean awkwardness. His dialogue is delivered with a spasmodic lilt that suggests the lack of experience Johnny has communicating, his eyes alight with bewilderment and eagerness before the world even as he begins to develop a sense of determination in contending with the perversity presented to him, his instincts steering him true, but also contending with a situation he cannot entirely understand until it’s almost too late. Brilliant flourishes abound in his performance, from the tiny double-take he does when laying eyes on a beautiful, solitary woman, to the panting, hysterical ball he folds into after surviving a near-homicide.

Harrington employs two striking dream sequences late in the film. The first sees Johnny, becoming discernibly paranoid and credulous with all the small, silly but niggling facts piling up about him, waiting in her apartment for Mora to come out of her bathroom. He falls asleep, and dreams of her emerging from the bathroom and approaching him with a decorous intensity to embrace him on her couch, but then transforming into her mermaid guise, her legs become a glittering, twitching mermaid tail, and then into an octopus that folds him a deadly,s mothering grip, long tendrils of hair becoming entwining tentacles. Later, he dreams of a rendezvous with Mora in mermaid guise, seated on the rocks above surging surf, brushing her hair and regarding herself in a hand mirror with monstrous narcissism, becoming Johnny’s own as he sees his own face in the mirror, before Mora is taken by a wave and swept out to sea despite his attempt to hold onto her hand, Mora laughing mockingly as she vanishes. Here Harrington gets to shift entirely into the realm of dream logic and a particular brand of cheapjack surrealism whilst effectively drawing out his deepest themes of the simultaneous danger and thrill of encountering a lover, the feeling of at once being completed and being annihilated in getting close to another being, a note he’d reiterate in a different tenor in Queen Of Blood.

Awakening with a scream from the first nightmare, Johnny finds Mora missing, and tracks her down below the pier where she stands against a pylon under the wharf, being swatted by the surf, gripped by hysteria in believing her seaborne sires and siblings are calling for her: Johnny dashes down to fetch her out. Harrington grazes explicitly queer territory with a sense of allusive humour as Johnny decides to head to a bathhouse whilst Mora sleeps off the ordeal, discovering another curious abode of twisted veils and winding sheets and shadowplay on walls. “Girlfriend ain’t treatin’ you all right?” the masseur Bruno (Ben Roseman) asks as he works over Johnny and notices his tension, before Murdock appears, and the masseur proposes to the older man, “Hello Captain – do you want me to pound you later?” Murdock questions Johnny about Mora’s behaviour, noting with foreboding import: “You must be especially careful now at the time of the full moon – because that’s when the tides pull the strongest.” Johnny is, despite his refusal of credulity, perturbed when Mora, after resolving to ignore her fit and attendant anxieties, proposes they go scuba diving together at a spot along the coast, but eventually she wins out.

As they swim together and inspect a shining object on the seafloor, Mora suddenly attacks Johnny, cutting his airhose with a knife and ripping away his mask. Johnny manages to flee to the surface and climbs into to their dinghy, whilst Mora swims away. Johnny, after recovering from a spasm of profound shock, waits for ages in the dinghy, but Mora doesn’t return. Johnny retreats to a hotel in Venice where he squirms in his bed. The next morning, Johnny is puzzled when he sees in the paper no report of Mora being missing and the ad for the mermaid show still included. He heads to the carnival and finds Murdock still spruiking if without his usual zest, but upon venturing insides the show finds Mora’s pathetic, staring corpse lying in the water of the tank. Murdock confronts him with a pistol, commenting, “The murderer always returns to the scene of his crime…You had to see the result of your monstrous act!” “But I loved her,” Johnny murmurs, before ducking and shoving over the tank, which crashes against Murdock and disarms him, his wildly fired gun attracting two cops who intervene whilst Mora’s body lies at the feet of both men who contended for her possession, but fatefully sprawled on her paltry fake patriarch.

The meaningful upshot of Harrington’s little mythos here is the reveal that Mora eventually became entranced and convinced by Murdock’s lies, which were intended to keep her close to him – Harrington’s final, cunningly conceived metaphor for the way so many social paradigms are constructed. A postscript scene sees Murdock confess to inventing the whole siren story to keep Mora under his control and having killed her previous boyfriends, is reminiscent of the deflating tone of the psychiatrist’s explanation in Psycho (1960). Like that scene, this one lets in the cleansing light of rationalism whilst still leaving the identity of the mystery woman unclear – most likely she was someone Murdock hired to help enforce his illusion, but nobody else remembers seeing her, contriving to retain an ever so slight note of lingering, oneiric threat. It’s as if Harrington was paying heed to fashion but still giving a hint as to his truest faith. The authentic touch of romantic tragedy offered is leavened slightly by the promise Johnny faces a future with Ellen, who, with her more solicitous and practical touch, comes to the police station to give him a cup of coffee.

In his first work for Corman, Coppola had refashioned the Soviet film Nebo Zovyot (1959) into Battle Beyond the Sun (1962), a partial remake-cum-adaptation: Harrington was given Planeta Bur (1959) and did more or less the same thing, inserting new scenes with Faith Domergue and Basil Rathbone but following the original film. Harrington didn’t think it worth putting his name to, instead crediting himself with the pseudonym John Sebastian. With Queen of Blood, Harrington grew bolder: utilising footage from Mechte Navstrechu (1963) as well Nebo Zovyot once more, he followed a similar procedure in the first half but then swerved into his own storyline. Queen of Blood, whilst inevitably fractured as an artefact, nonetheless proves eventually to achieve a strikingly similar mood of dreamlike immersion and near-subliminal strangeness to Night Tide, assimilating the inherited footage into itself as Harrington’s new footage mimics design elements of the original but also submits the existing material to his audio effects and careful editing. Harrington applied a lush approach to making a colour film, more than a little strongly reminiscent of Mario Bava in the war of drenching, uncanny hues, suggesting Harrington had likely watched some of the Italian maestro’s work. That said, Queen of Blood came out at virtually the same time as Bava’s Terrore nella Spazio (1966), with both films often cited as evident influences on Alien, revealing how both directors came up with strikingly similar ideas for how to transfer the allure of Gothic horror into a science fiction setting independently.

Queen of Blood also takes on the basic notion of a literal femme fatale more directly than Night Tide. The plot involves humanity responding an overture from an alien race in the year 1990, a time when, in the film’s timeline, space travel has become advanced and missions are increasingly far-flung. The International Institute of Space Technology provides a thriving hub for the assembled mental might and capability of the Earth, under the administration of Dr Farraday (Basil Rathbone). Astronaut and communications specialist Laura James (Judi Meredith) is the first to pick up the alien signals, which she lets her boyfriend and fellow astronaut Allan Brenner (John Saxon) listen to, resolving at first only as rhythmic noise. Farraday however successfully translates the signals, and informs the assembled personnel of the Institute of the nature of the aliens and their friendly intentions. The aliens successfully launch a probe to the Earth which streaks through the atmosphere and lands in the ocean, and soon after announce their intention to send an ambassadorial mission. Laura picks up a transmission from the ambassadorial craft however that reveals a disaster en route, forcing a crash-landing on Mars. Farraday elects to send the Oceano I and II craft on the mission of rescuing the ambassadors.

Farraday, Laura, and Allan all travel to a moonbase which controls the various deep space missions, along with the appointed commander for the Oceano I, Anders Brockman (Robert Boon) and crewman Paul Grant (Hopper): Laura is assigned to go with them by Farraday, whilst Allan is assigned to the Oceano II, which will set out several days later as backup. After weathering a sunburst, the Oceano I, lightly damaged, still makes it to Mars and lands, but upon finding the crashed alien ship only find one being aboard, and theorise others likely ejected on an escape craft. With the Oceano II unready for launch yet, Allan and Tony Barrata (Don Eitner) volunteer to take the smaller craft Meteor, which is ready, to deploy the satellite more quickly, but the Meteor’s lack of fuel means they’ll have to effect a crossing from Phobos to Mars with their own escape shuttle and return on the Oceano I. The two men reach Phobos and launch the satellite, only to find the alien lifeboat is actually marooned on Phobos. They rescue the one survivor on board, a weirdly beautiful woman (Florence Marly), and given their own escape shuttle can only take two people, one of the men has to stay with the Meteor to be picked up later by the Oceano II. Allan initially intends staying, but Tony demands they flip for it and loses, so Allan takes the woman down to Mars. He carries the alien woman across country to the Oceano I, met along the way by Anders and Paul after they weather out a storm. Finally, reassured that Tony will be rescued by Farraday, the Oceano I sets out for home.

Some of all this is definitely narrative make-work to utilise the inherited footage, and the film doesn’t really, properly find its proper path until half-way through. Most of the work Coppola applied to Battle Beyond The Sun was hiding the Soviet markings and imagery in the movie he was revising; Harrington is much less fastidious, letting the Soviet red star appear on tail fins now and then and keeping a wide shot of a meeting, supposedly at the Space Institute, with Sputnik in a mural. But then again Harrington’s vaguely internationalist governing setup perhaps isn’t so averse to a bit of Commie influence. The disparity between the elaborate beauty and design care of the Soviet films, which were major productions for the time and place, and the cheap infrastructure of Harrington’s footage, is amusing, but also tapped for interesting contrasts. The visions of the alien environs and personnel Harrington extrapolates from the older film, with their bold, flowing, spherical designs and buildings, their lush look with smoky greys and suturing reds, have a baroque flavour sharply different to the functional technocracy (and blatant cheapness) of the Earthlings’ places and craft. The uneasy mating of harvested Soviet epic spectacle with ramshackle Hollywood make-do can be taken as its own subtext, a clash of cultural opposites, ironic given how usually it’s seen the other way around, with other film cultures anxiously emulating the grandeur and slickness of Hollywood product: rather the Soviet films Corman was making use were better-produced than a great deal of Hollywood sci-fi.

Nonetheless, Harrington does something creative and memorable with the intercut footage, the visions of blazing retrorockets firing in the void, a plastic Mars glowing above the crags of Phobos, and furious winds rummaging the red planet’s soil in seething waves. Harrington assimilates it all in a manner that renders it all similar to Johnny’s wanderings in Venice in Night Tide, evoking a restless poetic desolation, a search for meaning and connection that is only to be granted in a specifically cruel way, the toing and froing of all the anxious astronauts and their hardware a wild goose chase that does, at the end, prove to be in service of something, but that something isn’t what anyone but the aliens had in mind. Harrington’s experimental film background undoubtedly was of use here, given the way filmmakers in that realm often mined old movies, disassembling them shot by shot and recombining them for flashes of mysterious art, like Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936), or Anger’s use of footage from The King of Kings (1927) in Scorpio Rising (1963). Harrington manages to conjure an atmosphere similar to what Byron Haskin managed on his Robinson Crusoe On Mars (1964), finding a place where pulp adventuring and an elusive genre poetry mate. Harrington exacerbates the mood with the electronic sound effects and Leonard Moran’s pulsing, shimmering electronic music, reminiscent of Forbidden Planet (1956), applied over the spacefaring footage and the early scenes of the aliens communicating with the humans and sending out their emissaries. In a linked manner, Harrington’s film is preoccupied by cosmic ambition and the infinite possible, all heralded in the first half, giving way to a narrative that corkscrews inwards in portraying seething hunger, predatory desire, and the most primal truths of existence.

Harrington gets off on the arch joke of the two contrasting women at the film’s heart, both of them with frost-blonde hair, Meredith’s ice-cream-scoop bob sculpted within an inch of its life but rounded to a feminine planetoid, where Marly’s alien sports a thrusting beehive, queenly and vaguely phallic all at once. Amongst other things she’s camp culture’s ür-ancestor to the women in The B-52’s, the Coneheads, and the fake Martian woman in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996). Meredith, a former ice skating star who turned to acting, had previously most notably played the sweetheart princess briefly but memorably transformed into a cackling, spectacularly dressed witch in Nathan Juran’s Jack The Giant Killer (1962); here she’s handed the regulation role of the one girl on the spaceship, but she’s also gifted a reasonably unfussy role in the drama, with Farraday mentioning his confidence in her, and Allan not voicing any sexist qualms about his woman heading off into danger, the two merely being frustrated when they find Farraday’s assigning them to different ships. Allan displays his quality when he readily volunteers to help out the Oceano mission with the risky flight to Phobos, and then immediately desists from his immediate object of reaching Laura when the situation changes, establishing his readiness to put the mission before his needs. In contrast to Laura, Marly’s alien woman comes with green skin, rubbery-textured skin, blood-red lips, and bright blond hair jutting in a beehive crown: her eyes gain a phosphorescent glow when she asserts a powerful telepathic will that prove able to suborn the men around her, a marvellous actualisation of the metaphor for her sexual charisma and exotic allure.

Saxon, still relatively early in his days as an ubiquitous B-movie star, is called upon by Harrington to inhabit a quality very similar to Johnny in Night Tide, as Allan’s sense of innate disgust and scepticism when faced with a set of new, disturbing truths becomes blatant even as others insist on a cover story that runs counter to good sense. Tony for his part gets off lightly even when it seems he’s had bad luck in being stuck on Phobos, electing to spend his time taking and experimenting with soil samples. Anders and Paul are along, seemingly for scientific rationality and also for the presumed masculine variey, but actually prove to be food. In Harrington’s central coup of darkly humorous-horrific irony, the rescued alien, first revived in the company of the four humans who have laboured so long and hard to save her, beholds Paul with delight, then Anders with even more evident appreciation, and then finally Allan with beaming ecstasy – only to then wilt with bitchy aggravation when she sees Laura. “Our visitor doesn’t seem to get along too well her own sex,” Anders comments as he assigns Paul to tending to her needs rather than Laura, and Paul coaxingly gets her to try drinking water, Paul’s manner like a parent tending to a baby whilst the alien all but purrs with stirred quasi-erotic wont that’s inseparable from a different kind of thirst. Harrington fought hard with Corman to cast Marly as his interstellar vampire, in part because she was a friend, and because he felt she had just the right, exotic allure required for the role. Marly, a French actress who had appeared in René Clement’s Les Maudits (1947) nearly twenty years earlier but had suffered through accidental blacklist after coming to Hollywood, certainly had exotic allure in spades with her architectural cheekbones and eyes that almost seemed to glow like a big cat’s even without the pencil spots Harrington trains on them when the alien is enthralling her male prey.

Harrington finally puts over the icy-cold joke of his alien woman proving under the superficial humanity to be something different, as she waits for the right moment to get Paul alone. Paul, on watch with the other asleep, surveys his fellow astronauts and seeks out the alien woman in her room, a throbbing red beacon light bathing the set and a buzzing on the soundtrack that sounds suggestively like bees. Finally the alien woman emerges from the shadows, drenched in the blood-red light but the green of her skin undimmed as her hand climbs eagerly up his chest, her eyes glowing brilliant and cat-like, mesmerising her prey for an assault Harrington films as an intimate and eager clinch, but the next day Anders tries to wake Paul but finds him unresponsive, and realises he’s cold and dead. Upon finding the woman blood-glutted, tell-tale trickles of crimson leaking from her mouth still, the three remaining astronauts recoil in horror, but Anders quickly determines to deal calmly and understandingly with the problem: “How can we expect her to conform to our ideas of proper behaviour?” he rebukes Allan and Laura who immediately brand her as a monster: “Is there such a difference between blood and a rare beefsteak?” he prods further whilst mentioning the unknown factors of the aliens’ society and ideas of morality, given the woman might be as he calls her a “kind of intellectual insect,” or even more plant-like than animal given the high chlorophyll content in her skin.

Here Harrington mischievously explores the ambiguities of social expectation and moral codes as expected of the individual in ignorance of their true nature, a topic of ever-fraught meaning, but also gives it his own sarcastic twist, presenting characters who don’t have the good sense to realise their gut instincts are correct. Soon after Anders has his own deadly encounter with the alien, in one of Harrington’s most cleverly executed, effectively hallucinatory scenes. Anders, moved by an intangible feeling in the eerily quiet and lit crew cabin as the weird buzzing noise builds, looks through an open bulkhead door towards the alien’s chamber with the throbbing red beacon, as if perceiving something that refuses to resolve. At first he only seems to behold an empty room, but after blinking catches sight of the alien advancing on him in a sinuous prowl, with bright eyes and fixed, unsettling smile. Anders takes up his gun to defend himself, but with her mesmeric eyes ablaze he drops it and stands defenceless to her ravenous need, her hungry lips parting around her wickedly bared teeth. After finding Anders dead, Allan and Laura elect to try and hold the woman at bay for the rest of the voyage by tying her to a bunk, but she uses psychic power to burn through the rope holding her.

Queen Of Blood’s release in the same year Star Trek premiered is another suggestive coincidence: film and series both betrayed a compulsive fascination with a future of space travel where the primeval often lurks under the technocratic surfaces and monstrosities lurk within deceptive exteriors, as illustrated by an episode of Star Trek like its official debut episode “The Man Trap,” and illustrated with lurid, virtually fauvist colours that seem to be vivid and palpable but actually imbue everything on screen with the instability of surrealism. Queen Of Blood also connects to that other central fixture of modern sci-fi, Star Wars (1977), through the participation of Gary Kurtz as production manager: I can’t help but wonder if something of Harrington’s use of sound in specific to generate a weird and alien atmosphere might well have been transmitted on through Kurtz to the production ethos of George Lucas, who was, ironically, one of the relatively few Movie Brats to not spend a phase in the Corman apparatus. John Cline’s artwork under the opening credits recall Corman’s love for prefacing his films with paintings of a stylised modernist bent that helped announce his stripped-down textures, here promising outlandishly colourful blossoms on lunar landscapes under dark stars. Harrington’s penchant for including cameo performances from friends and fellow aficionados, or charged with an air of meaning in connection to the subcultures he loved, extends to an appearance by the legendary author and archivist Forrest J. Ackerman as Farraday’s aide.

As for Farraday himself, he’s gifted with the still-imposing and innately sensible tones of Rathbone, who at the age of 74 was looking gaunt and tired even with enough dye in his hair to stain a river (this would prove Rathbone’s second-last film), in playing the avuncular and wise authority figure, a status that suddenly comes into doubt right at the end. The Queen of Blood’s reign ends in an anticlimactic fashion but Harrington still manages another marvellously creep moment as Laura  awakens from a nap and searches for Allan, the spaceship interior weirdly quiet and deserted-feeling. At last she finds him lying prone and mesmerised in the control room, whilst the alien laps his blood with leisurely glee from a bite on his wrist. Laura grabs her and they have a tussle that Harrington wryly renders a catfight, Laura’s nails leaving long oozing scratches in the alien’s back, green blood leaking out. The alien shrieks in bewildering anguish and dashes away, and Laura revives Allan. They track the alien back to the crew cabin and find her dead, bled out from her seemingly paltry wounds. Allan’s best theory is that she was a haemophiliac, associating that trait as on Earth with royalty. Then Laura discovers the most disturbing legacy of their adventure: the queen has left the spaceship infested with her bulbous, throbbing eggs, laid in nooks all about the interior.

Like the sad meditation on the nature of love and the things it drives people to do that caps Night Tide, here Harrington offers his skewed and mordant take on biological essentialism and the results of the urge to go forth and multiply, bringing the film to a shuddering halt with a sickly evocation of a different kind of propagation that is nonetheless merely a variant. This is also where the similarities to Alien and its sequels come most sharply to the fore, opening the door as it does to a new age of fantastical cinema with a compulsive fascination for physical perversity and a new survey of metaphor for an age where the body lies at the nexus of so many anxieties. Laura and Allan anticipate the ship having to be sterilised laboriously, but instead find Farraday, like the late Anders before him Farraday, is overjoyed to have these specimens survive for study, and has them collected. Harrington fades out on the sight of a tray full of the eggs – realised however amusingly as throbbing rubber bulbs set in green jell-o – containing all their potential danger and wonder for a human race whose curiosity is too often stronger than its good sense.