Reds! Official Fanfiction Thread (Part Two)
- Thread starter Miss Teri
- Start date
PNWKing
Banned
What might the following figures be up to in this world?:
Ann Curry
Muhammad Ali
David Foster Wallace
R. Kelly
Marcia Clarke
OJ Simpson
Robin Wright
James Taylor
Wayne Brady
Steven Spielberg
Steve Jobs
those two guys who were kind of Walt Disney's competitors
Hillary
MLK, Jr.
Bernie Sanders
Casey Kasem
Ann Rule
Ted Bundy
Martin Short
Samuel L. Jackson
Ann Curry
Muhammad Ali
David Foster Wallace
R. Kelly
Marcia Clarke
OJ Simpson
Robin Wright
James Taylor
Wayne Brady
Steven Spielberg
Steve Jobs
those two guys who were kind of Walt Disney's competitors
Hillary
MLK, Jr.
Bernie Sanders
Casey Kasem
Ann Rule
Ted Bundy
Martin Short
Samuel L. Jackson
A lot of these are spoilers, but for two that can be addressed in this timeframe (c. 1944)
2 year old Cassius Clay Jr. is raised with his siblings by both his mother and the Louisville Children's Creche following his father arrest for aggravated assault.
Michael King, Jr leads his local Pioneer cadre in Atlanta.
The Sr. was convicted under the Sedition Act during WWI and joined the Workers' Party after that. The Jr. is a Deputy Premier in Foster's government from DFLP.
The first People's Secretary for Agriculture in the UASR.
One of the famed Red commanders during the Battle of Chicago and later Deputy Premier in Reed's Government from DFLP.
Actually, one more, now that I see it
Kemal Kasam has just started as a sports announcer for Northwest High School radio in Detroit.
The militarised ultra-centrist front for extreme ambivalence and radical neutrality (By The Red Star Rising)
Because people love my joke parties; here's one for the FBU; unaffiliated with the International Union of Antics and Shenanigans
The militarised ultra-centrist front for extreme ambivalence and radical neutrality
Founded: 1963
Ideology: "The exact fucking middle of the road"
Political position: "Core of the Earth."
International Affiliation: The extremely serious people union
Official Color: Bland Grey
Youth Wing: Youth for mucking about.
Party Newspaper: "The absolutely reasonable and serious paper you must read if you don't want to be a stupid git."
Party of Government?: Would dissolve government if ever able to form a majority on the account of "we aren't interested in participating in jokes."
Description: The Franco-British Union has produced many joke parties, and the MUCFFEAARN is one of the most famous. Founded long before the International Union of Antics and Shenanigans, the MUCFFEAARN was formed by a Welsh Woman who was mostly looking to take the piss out of the Whigs who clung onto delusions of grandeur but ended up forming an enduring fixture of Franco-British satirical politics.
Capital Punishment: "The only sensible solution is to have the accuser execute the accused themselves with their bare hands to get them acquainted to the smell of death."
Cultural Stance: Bisexuality will be mandatory on pain of death. Fetuses will have the power to abort their parents. All imported Red media will be subject to a board of review by horny teenagers before approval.
Defense: Proposes halving the budget but allowing the Germans to recruit from the FBU and assume overall command of the AFS' military structure.
Drug Policy: Drugs will be mandatory at night and will be punished by imprisonment at day. The prison will be your existence, the sentence is for life.
Economy: "On weekdays the economy will be fully liberal, on weekends it will be run as a bordigist planned system, and on Wednesday we shall revert to feudalism."
Education: Will offer free university but abolish public and private grade schools.
Environment: Detonating enough nuclear warheads in the Sahara should send enough dust into the atmosphere to block out that nasty sun.
Firearms (instead of civil defence): The MUCFFEAARN has proposed that adults are too stupid to be trusted with private firearms but removing them entirely would clearly allow for the communist tanks to roll over. Therefore it has proposed; with the utmost dignity, that all children are to be armed with rocket launchers.
Foreign Aid: "We will launch invasions and wars of annexation to reconquer the colonies and force them to accept aid the way we want them to like the old days instead of all this faffing about with stipulations and interest."
Foreign Alliances: "The new world order shall be determined by games of musical chairs to determine whose our ally and whose the yank's allies."
Immigration: "We shall allow any immigrant from any nation to come to our shores, so long as they are not ugly or poor."
Law Enforcement: Believes that the Police are fundamentally corrupt but that the people are fundamentally evil, therefore the only reasonable solution is to go back to medieval law enforcement and re-introducing stockades for trouble makers.
Monarchy: The existence of the station of Monarch is a clear assault on the egalitarian principles of government but to abolish it would be to destroy a cornerstone of culture. Therefore the reasonable solution is to marry every man, woman, and child to her Majesty in a polygamous ceremony and thus making everyone Prince and Princess-Consort by default. This will also guarantee marriage rights for all.
Nuclear Armament: Suggests that the most efficient method of disarmament would be to launch the missiles now.
Opinion on the Entente: "Why not make it the entirety of the European Continental Federation?
Opinion on the ECF: "Why not make it just the Entente?"
Social Welfare (instead of civil benefits): "Welfare shall be provided to the attractive wealthy and denied to the unsightly poor who would surely squander it."
Organized Labor: To appease both business interests and workers, all labor will be mandatorily organised but the union will be run by an avowed national syndicalist loyal to the businesses.
Religion: Atheism and Christianity will be both banned and everyone will be forced to convert to Druidism as an inoffensive third option that is authentically French and British.
Taxation: Supports balancing the budgets with a regressive tax that gets lower the higher your income and higher the poorer you are; thus avoiding the taxation of those who could encourage irresponsible spending by actually having money to tax.
Trade: Advocates for the absolute fairness and freedom of trade by abolishing currency as an unnecessary middleman and returning to bartering.
The militarised ultra-centrist front for extreme ambivalence and radical neutrality
Founded: 1963
Ideology: "The exact fucking middle of the road"
Political position: "Core of the Earth."
International Affiliation: The extremely serious people union
Official Color: Bland Grey
Youth Wing: Youth for mucking about.
Party Newspaper: "The absolutely reasonable and serious paper you must read if you don't want to be a stupid git."
Party of Government?: Would dissolve government if ever able to form a majority on the account of "we aren't interested in participating in jokes."
Description: The Franco-British Union has produced many joke parties, and the MUCFFEAARN is one of the most famous. Founded long before the International Union of Antics and Shenanigans, the MUCFFEAARN was formed by a Welsh Woman who was mostly looking to take the piss out of the Whigs who clung onto delusions of grandeur but ended up forming an enduring fixture of Franco-British satirical politics.
Capital Punishment: "The only sensible solution is to have the accuser execute the accused themselves with their bare hands to get them acquainted to the smell of death."
Cultural Stance: Bisexuality will be mandatory on pain of death. Fetuses will have the power to abort their parents. All imported Red media will be subject to a board of review by horny teenagers before approval.
Defense: Proposes halving the budget but allowing the Germans to recruit from the FBU and assume overall command of the AFS' military structure.
Drug Policy: Drugs will be mandatory at night and will be punished by imprisonment at day. The prison will be your existence, the sentence is for life.
Economy: "On weekdays the economy will be fully liberal, on weekends it will be run as a bordigist planned system, and on Wednesday we shall revert to feudalism."
Education: Will offer free university but abolish public and private grade schools.
Environment: Detonating enough nuclear warheads in the Sahara should send enough dust into the atmosphere to block out that nasty sun.
Firearms (instead of civil defence): The MUCFFEAARN has proposed that adults are too stupid to be trusted with private firearms but removing them entirely would clearly allow for the communist tanks to roll over. Therefore it has proposed; with the utmost dignity, that all children are to be armed with rocket launchers.
Foreign Aid: "We will launch invasions and wars of annexation to reconquer the colonies and force them to accept aid the way we want them to like the old days instead of all this faffing about with stipulations and interest."
Foreign Alliances: "The new world order shall be determined by games of musical chairs to determine whose our ally and whose the yank's allies."
Immigration: "We shall allow any immigrant from any nation to come to our shores, so long as they are not ugly or poor."
Law Enforcement: Believes that the Police are fundamentally corrupt but that the people are fundamentally evil, therefore the only reasonable solution is to go back to medieval law enforcement and re-introducing stockades for trouble makers.
Monarchy: The existence of the station of Monarch is a clear assault on the egalitarian principles of government but to abolish it would be to destroy a cornerstone of culture. Therefore the reasonable solution is to marry every man, woman, and child to her Majesty in a polygamous ceremony and thus making everyone Prince and Princess-Consort by default. This will also guarantee marriage rights for all.
Nuclear Armament: Suggests that the most efficient method of disarmament would be to launch the missiles now.
Opinion on the Entente: "Why not make it the entirety of the European Continental Federation?
Opinion on the ECF: "Why not make it just the Entente?"
Social Welfare (instead of civil benefits): "Welfare shall be provided to the attractive wealthy and denied to the unsightly poor who would surely squander it."
Organized Labor: To appease both business interests and workers, all labor will be mandatorily organised but the union will be run by an avowed national syndicalist loyal to the businesses.
Religion: Atheism and Christianity will be both banned and everyone will be forced to convert to Druidism as an inoffensive third option that is authentically French and British.
Taxation: Supports balancing the budgets with a regressive tax that gets lower the higher your income and higher the poorer you are; thus avoiding the taxation of those who could encourage irresponsible spending by actually having money to tax.
Trade: Advocates for the absolute fairness and freedom of trade by abolishing currency as an unnecessary middleman and returning to bartering.
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Bookmark1995
Banned
LOL-LOL-LOL
This reminds me of the Neutral People from Futurama.
"I have no strong feelings one way or the other."
"All I know is my gut says maybe."
"If I die, tell my wife...hello."
I wonder if ITTL, centrists will be even more disliked and despised then OTL.
People who are centrist for their given country? Probably not.
People who try to find a line in between the Comintern and AFS. Yeah maybe.
Bookmark1995
Banned
The above joke post might be how extremists might view the concept of peaceful coexistence: patently ridiculous.
"You can't compromise tradition," says the right-winger.
"Either workers' own the means or they are slaves," says the left-wing extremist.
Lizard Woman (By The Red Star Rising)
Lizard Woman
Often held as the closest equivalent of Marvel's Spider-Man or AC/DC's Batman in the Brave Wind (popularly known as the Rubyverse), Lizard Woman/Girl was created in the 50s; somewhat before Stan Lee's famed character. Elizabeth Earl was not created by Samantha Waver herself but by one of her daughters; Sarah. Elizabeth Earl was a middle school student who got her abilities through interaction with a reptilian alien who had crash landed on Earth and sought to turn her into a super soldier for his own gain. At first feeling sorely tempted to make use of her newfound powers for selfish purposes and to do as the alien commanded; she eventually wisened to the Alien's ploy and overcame the invader in a battle in D.C. Adopting the alias of the Lizard Woman based on her reptilian powers, Elizabeth Earl has powers akin to many different kinds of reptiles through her transmogrification by the reptiloid as well as the technology she acquired and sought to understand herself with the help of the aliens' turncoat robot: Zanthios. She can regenerate injuries amazingly quickly, she can poison foes through touch at will or spray it through her hands, she can crawl on walls like a gecko, turn invisible like a Chameleon, glide with arm flaps her costume can create, or grapple around with the alien's twin cables that let her get some height to glide around.
She is also far stronger than the average person; having the Aliens' strength meant for higher gravity, and is also faster and has superhumanly tough skin beneath her well protected costume that let her shrug off most forms of fire arms. Finally, her costume also comes equipped with claws for close quarters combat when fists and gadgets won't cut it; as well as "fang" punch daggers. All this and more made her well suited to battling lower level problems well beneath the notice of the likes of Commander Columbia but are too dicey for people without powers of her magnitude to handle. She might not be able to slap a tank clean into orbit, but she can stop a thrown car from hitting her classmates. Elizabeth Earl is a cheery and happy go lucky person who relishes in her abilities but tends to prefer helping people to fighting bad guys. She liked to help people and embodied the creed "Live by the happiness of others, not their misery." And many of her media appearances would revolve around her trying to help someone through problems to the best of her superhuman abilities while trying to have fun for herself; even talking many people out of suicide and finding them help.
All of which certainly didn't stop her from acquiring a large and diverse rogue's gallery of foes from all corners. Perhaps the most famous being the British child soldier turned super agent "Jack Frost" (Real name Daniel Dayton); who was cruelly experimented on by the Franco-British Union to turn him into a cryogenic menace. The experiments drove him to becoming an increasingly bitter and harsh person to cope with the stress his handlers put him under; even to the point of threatening his family if he didn't push himself ever harder for the capitalist war machine. A product of Sarah Waver's rearing by her militarised internationalist mother; Jack Frost was essentially a living embodiment of the cold war. Which made his eventual redemption arc which featured him falling in love with Elizabeth and defecting to America after the two freed his family from British custody in South Georgia all the more surprising. Eventually the two would even seek an official civil union after becoming adults and have their own family.
Next would be her frequent rivalry with the Indian hero known as Wyzen; whose powers are based on those of monkeys, blessed by the Hindu Monkey King. Though Paraminta Upadhyay was not treated as a true villain; the two girls often came to blows and rarely got along due to Paraminta's selfish, glory seeking attitude and her condescending attitude towards Elizabeth's queer friends. Her arguable archnemesis however is probably the Blanc Don; a Mafioso by the name of Vincent Orlando who gained superpowers after an encounter with alien energies that turned him into a rail thin skeletal white monster with six arms, a head like a cackling saurian monster, and long, bony claws for fingers when he transforms into his monstrous form. The Don not only has a superhuman physiology, but the alien entity he has absorbed into his body and subsumed the energy of also gives him control over light in addittion to being able to turn him into a freak of nature.
However, unlike Amanda Aaron who is eternally a youth who never seems to go past her late teens and the revolution has been completed; Elizabeth Earl ages and while her reptiloid genes prevent old age and death from claiming her; her duties as a mother and a citizen eventually lead her to allow others to take up the mantle to make up for her inability to be present to the same degree that she used to. New people to bear her reptilian banner are not limited to just her children with Daniel Dayton, but also others who had been subjected to the Drakith transformation. Many ladies have claimed the title of Lizard Woman/Girl over the years, and many also claimed the title of Lizard Man/Boy. The most recent is a Vietnamese transgirl named Huỳnh Trúc Mai who is quite pleased to find that the Drakith transformation allowed her to transition so cleanly as well as live out her fantasy of being a superhero able to help whenever needed; who took on the mantle after the death of the Lizard Man Zog Gubaidulina at the hands of the supervillain Khraive.
Often held as the closest equivalent of Marvel's Spider-Man or AC/DC's Batman in the Brave Wind (popularly known as the Rubyverse), Lizard Woman/Girl was created in the 50s; somewhat before Stan Lee's famed character. Elizabeth Earl was not created by Samantha Waver herself but by one of her daughters; Sarah. Elizabeth Earl was a middle school student who got her abilities through interaction with a reptilian alien who had crash landed on Earth and sought to turn her into a super soldier for his own gain. At first feeling sorely tempted to make use of her newfound powers for selfish purposes and to do as the alien commanded; she eventually wisened to the Alien's ploy and overcame the invader in a battle in D.C. Adopting the alias of the Lizard Woman based on her reptilian powers, Elizabeth Earl has powers akin to many different kinds of reptiles through her transmogrification by the reptiloid as well as the technology she acquired and sought to understand herself with the help of the aliens' turncoat robot: Zanthios. She can regenerate injuries amazingly quickly, she can poison foes through touch at will or spray it through her hands, she can crawl on walls like a gecko, turn invisible like a Chameleon, glide with arm flaps her costume can create, or grapple around with the alien's twin cables that let her get some height to glide around.
She is also far stronger than the average person; having the Aliens' strength meant for higher gravity, and is also faster and has superhumanly tough skin beneath her well protected costume that let her shrug off most forms of fire arms. Finally, her costume also comes equipped with claws for close quarters combat when fists and gadgets won't cut it; as well as "fang" punch daggers. All this and more made her well suited to battling lower level problems well beneath the notice of the likes of Commander Columbia but are too dicey for people without powers of her magnitude to handle. She might not be able to slap a tank clean into orbit, but she can stop a thrown car from hitting her classmates. Elizabeth Earl is a cheery and happy go lucky person who relishes in her abilities but tends to prefer helping people to fighting bad guys. She liked to help people and embodied the creed "Live by the happiness of others, not their misery." And many of her media appearances would revolve around her trying to help someone through problems to the best of her superhuman abilities while trying to have fun for herself; even talking many people out of suicide and finding them help.
All of which certainly didn't stop her from acquiring a large and diverse rogue's gallery of foes from all corners. Perhaps the most famous being the British child soldier turned super agent "Jack Frost" (Real name Daniel Dayton); who was cruelly experimented on by the Franco-British Union to turn him into a cryogenic menace. The experiments drove him to becoming an increasingly bitter and harsh person to cope with the stress his handlers put him under; even to the point of threatening his family if he didn't push himself ever harder for the capitalist war machine. A product of Sarah Waver's rearing by her militarised internationalist mother; Jack Frost was essentially a living embodiment of the cold war. Which made his eventual redemption arc which featured him falling in love with Elizabeth and defecting to America after the two freed his family from British custody in South Georgia all the more surprising. Eventually the two would even seek an official civil union after becoming adults and have their own family.
Next would be her frequent rivalry with the Indian hero known as Wyzen; whose powers are based on those of monkeys, blessed by the Hindu Monkey King. Though Paraminta Upadhyay was not treated as a true villain; the two girls often came to blows and rarely got along due to Paraminta's selfish, glory seeking attitude and her condescending attitude towards Elizabeth's queer friends. Her arguable archnemesis however is probably the Blanc Don; a Mafioso by the name of Vincent Orlando who gained superpowers after an encounter with alien energies that turned him into a rail thin skeletal white monster with six arms, a head like a cackling saurian monster, and long, bony claws for fingers when he transforms into his monstrous form. The Don not only has a superhuman physiology, but the alien entity he has absorbed into his body and subsumed the energy of also gives him control over light in addittion to being able to turn him into a freak of nature.
However, unlike Amanda Aaron who is eternally a youth who never seems to go past her late teens and the revolution has been completed; Elizabeth Earl ages and while her reptiloid genes prevent old age and death from claiming her; her duties as a mother and a citizen eventually lead her to allow others to take up the mantle to make up for her inability to be present to the same degree that she used to. New people to bear her reptilian banner are not limited to just her children with Daniel Dayton, but also others who had been subjected to the Drakith transformation. Many ladies have claimed the title of Lizard Woman/Girl over the years, and many also claimed the title of Lizard Man/Boy. The most recent is a Vietnamese transgirl named Huỳnh Trúc Mai who is quite pleased to find that the Drakith transformation allowed her to transition so cleanly as well as live out her fantasy of being a superhero able to help whenever needed; who took on the mantle after the death of the Lizard Man Zog Gubaidulina at the hands of the supervillain Khraive.
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Lankershim Monsters (by Mr.E and Time Slip)
(Co-written by @Time slip , who I very much thank for helping extensively with this doc)
Lankershim Monsters
The Lankershim Monsters refers to a series of films produced by Universal and its post-revolution collective Lankershim Films, that often have a monster in it from 1921-1968. Most of these films were largely horror or science fiction in nature, as well as adaptations, though some original films were made with the theme.
The primary films listed as being the main canon of sorts for “Lankershim Monsters” include:
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1921)- Silent adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel of the same name. Starring Lon Chaney as the titular hunchback, and directed by Wallace Worsley.
Phantom of the Opera (1925)- Silent adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. Lon Chaney as the titular Phantom.
Frankenstein (1931)- Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, and directed by James Whale.
Dracula (1933)- Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, and directed by Tod Browning. Release delayed by two years.
The Mummy (1934)- Starring Boris Karloff in the title role, and directed by Karl Freund.
The Invisible Man (1935)- Adaptation of the 1897 novel by H. G. Wells. Starring Bela Lugosi, and directed by Tod Browning.
Dracula’s Daughter (1936)- Sequel to Dracula, starring Gloria Holden in the title role, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.
Frankenstein Rises(1936)- Sequel to Frankenstein, returning cast with the addition of Elsa Lancaster as the Bride of Frankenstein, and directed by Robert Florey.
The Murders at the Rue Morgue (1937)- Adaptation of the 1841 short story of Edgar Allan Poe starring Lon Chaney in the lead role. Originally to be made pre-Revolution, but stalled and eventually halted by Universal. Directed by Lambert Hillyer.
The Werewolf of Paris (1938)- Adaptation of Guy Endore’s 1933 novel. Starring Lon Chaney and son Creighton Chaney, and directed by Edward Dmytryk.
The Mummy Walks (1939)- Sequel to Mummy, though centered on an Incan mummy this time, played by John Carradine and Lupe Velez as the (eventual) love interest. Also starring Jon Hall and directed by Rowland V. Lee.
Frankenstein’s Journey(1940)- Starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster and Peter Lorre as Manfred Frankenstein. Also starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Erle C. Kenton.
Son of Dracula(1940)- Starring Evelyn Ankers and Creighton Chaney as a relative of Dracula, and directed by Victor Halperin.
Invisible Man in Baghdad(1941)- Set in the wartime Middle East. Starring Vincent Price and Turhan Bey, and directed by Ford Beebe. The monster movie sequels mostly take on a more B movie tone from this point on.
The Tell-Tale Heart (1941)- Adaptation of the 1843 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Starring Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, and directed by A. Edward Sutherland.
The Mummy Lives! (1942)- Set in wartime China. Starring Jon Hall (opposite a Chinese American cast) and directed by Harold Young and Esther Eng.
Phantom of the Opera (1943)- Remake of the 1925 adaptation, starring Claude Rains and Susanne Foster, with Chaney in a cameo as Franz Listz. Directed by Arthur Lubin.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1943)- Starring Ramsay Ames as the Bride of Frankenstein. Also starring Bela Lugosi, Elyse Knox, and Lionel Atwill, and directed by Dorothy Arzner.
Calling Dr. Death (1943)- Mystery-thriller starring Creighton Chaney, beginning of the “Inner Sanctum” adaptations.
Captive Wild Woman (1943)- Bizarre sci-fi film about an ape that turns into a woman, directed by Edward Dmytryk.
The Masque of the Red Death (1945)- Adaptation of the 1842 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Starring Bela Lugosi as Prince Prospero and Boris Karloff as the titular Red Death, and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Shot in color.
Dracula Meets Frankenstein (1946)- Starring Vincent Price as Dracula, Creighton Chaney as Frankenstein’s Monster, and John Carradine as a mad scientist. Directed by Reginald Le Borg.
The Werewolf of Berlin (1947)- A spiritual successor to Paris, this time set in Berlin between 1901 and 1945, starring John Carradine in the lead.
The Valley of Gwangi (1948)- Dinosaur monster movie, co-produced in Mexico, effects by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. Directed by Nathan Juran.
The Night of the Monster (1950)- Loose remake of Frankenstein, updated to an atomic age, and directed by Joseph Pevney.
The Foghorn (1951)- Story of a prehistoric monster affected by an atomic blast, directed by Jack Arnold, based on the story by Ray Bradbury.
At the Mountains of Madness (1952)- Adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s 1936 story. Directed by Nathan Juran. Co-Produced by Hyperion Live-Action.
The Meteor (1953)- Film about a crashed UFO, directed by Jack Arnold, based on a treatment by Ray Bradbury.
The Winter Wolf (1954)- Loose remake of The Werewolf of Paris, set in Russia before and during the Decemberist uprising. Mosfilm coproduction.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)- Tragedy centering on a fish creature found in the Colombian jungle. Reteamed Arnold and Bradbury (the latter the co-screenwriter)
This Island Earth (1955)- Adaptation of the 1952 Raymond F. Jones novel, about scientists preventing an invasion of the Earth.
Herbert West (1956)- Atomic age reimaging of HP Lovecraft’s 1922 story. Starring Kevin McCarthy in the titular role.
Attack of the Flying Saucers! (1956)- Invasion film about UFO observations gradually revealing a massive invasion (based on then-current WFRAAF investigations into the topic). Directed by Nathan Juran.
The Creature Returns! (1957) - Sequel to Black Lagoon, in which another Gil-Man is caught and held in a Bogota zoo, eventually gaining the sympathies of two zoologists.
The Thing (1957)- Alien invasion film starring Boris Karloff as a scientist involved in early manned space exploration dealing with an astronaut infected by an alien disease.
The Colour Out of Space (1958)- The story of a New England farmer witnessing the gradual decline of his community following a meteor crash. Based on HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name (with Lovecraft as a co-writer)
The Creature’s Revenge (1959)- Explorers in the Amazon find an ancient civilization, that is now inhabited by a group of Gil-Man.
War of the Worlds (1960)- George Pal adaptation of HG Wells’ novel. Featuring effects by Ray Harryhausen.
The Creature Takes Manhattan (1961)- A Gil-Man is set loose in New York City.
Haunter in the Dark (1964)- Adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1937 story, where a young writer quickly runs afoul of a cult worshipping a strange creature.
Nights of the Star-Vampire(1965)- Prequel and sequel to Haunter, based on Robert Bloch’s The Shambler in the Stars and The Shadow from the Steeple. Last film of Lankershim’s Yog-Sothothery Cycle.
Viy (1966)- Adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story, telling the story of a witch in 19th Century Russia, terrorizing a group of students. Mosfilm co-production.
Plutonia(1968)- Adaptation of Vladimir Obruchev’s 1915 novel, focusing on a prehistoric world found in a remote region of Siberia. Mosfilm co-production.
Lankershim Monsters
The Lankershim Monsters refers to a series of films produced by Universal and its post-revolution collective Lankershim Films, that often have a monster in it from 1921-1968. Most of these films were largely horror or science fiction in nature, as well as adaptations, though some original films were made with the theme.
The primary films listed as being the main canon of sorts for “Lankershim Monsters” include:
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1921)- Silent adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel of the same name. Starring Lon Chaney as the titular hunchback, and directed by Wallace Worsley.
Phantom of the Opera (1925)- Silent adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. Lon Chaney as the titular Phantom.
Frankenstein (1931)- Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, and directed by James Whale.
Dracula (1933)- Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, and directed by Tod Browning. Release delayed by two years.
The Mummy (1934)- Starring Boris Karloff in the title role, and directed by Karl Freund.
The Invisible Man (1935)- Adaptation of the 1897 novel by H. G. Wells. Starring Bela Lugosi, and directed by Tod Browning.
Dracula’s Daughter (1936)- Sequel to Dracula, starring Gloria Holden in the title role, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.
Frankenstein Rises(1936)- Sequel to Frankenstein, returning cast with the addition of Elsa Lancaster as the Bride of Frankenstein, and directed by Robert Florey.
The Murders at the Rue Morgue (1937)- Adaptation of the 1841 short story of Edgar Allan Poe starring Lon Chaney in the lead role. Originally to be made pre-Revolution, but stalled and eventually halted by Universal. Directed by Lambert Hillyer.
The Werewolf of Paris (1938)- Adaptation of Guy Endore’s 1933 novel. Starring Lon Chaney and son Creighton Chaney, and directed by Edward Dmytryk.
The Mummy Walks (1939)- Sequel to Mummy, though centered on an Incan mummy this time, played by John Carradine and Lupe Velez as the (eventual) love interest. Also starring Jon Hall and directed by Rowland V. Lee.
Frankenstein’s Journey(1940)- Starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster and Peter Lorre as Manfred Frankenstein. Also starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Erle C. Kenton.
Son of Dracula(1940)- Starring Evelyn Ankers and Creighton Chaney as a relative of Dracula, and directed by Victor Halperin.
Invisible Man in Baghdad(1941)- Set in the wartime Middle East. Starring Vincent Price and Turhan Bey, and directed by Ford Beebe. The monster movie sequels mostly take on a more B movie tone from this point on.
The Tell-Tale Heart (1941)- Adaptation of the 1843 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Starring Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, and directed by A. Edward Sutherland.
The Mummy Lives! (1942)- Set in wartime China. Starring Jon Hall (opposite a Chinese American cast) and directed by Harold Young and Esther Eng.
Phantom of the Opera (1943)- Remake of the 1925 adaptation, starring Claude Rains and Susanne Foster, with Chaney in a cameo as Franz Listz. Directed by Arthur Lubin.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1943)- Starring Ramsay Ames as the Bride of Frankenstein. Also starring Bela Lugosi, Elyse Knox, and Lionel Atwill, and directed by Dorothy Arzner.
Calling Dr. Death (1943)- Mystery-thriller starring Creighton Chaney, beginning of the “Inner Sanctum” adaptations.
Captive Wild Woman (1943)- Bizarre sci-fi film about an ape that turns into a woman, directed by Edward Dmytryk.
The Masque of the Red Death (1945)- Adaptation of the 1842 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Starring Bela Lugosi as Prince Prospero and Boris Karloff as the titular Red Death, and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Shot in color.
Dracula Meets Frankenstein (1946)- Starring Vincent Price as Dracula, Creighton Chaney as Frankenstein’s Monster, and John Carradine as a mad scientist. Directed by Reginald Le Borg.
The Werewolf of Berlin (1947)- A spiritual successor to Paris, this time set in Berlin between 1901 and 1945, starring John Carradine in the lead.
The Valley of Gwangi (1948)- Dinosaur monster movie, co-produced in Mexico, effects by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. Directed by Nathan Juran.
The Night of the Monster (1950)- Loose remake of Frankenstein, updated to an atomic age, and directed by Joseph Pevney.
The Foghorn (1951)- Story of a prehistoric monster affected by an atomic blast, directed by Jack Arnold, based on the story by Ray Bradbury.
At the Mountains of Madness (1952)- Adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s 1936 story. Directed by Nathan Juran. Co-Produced by Hyperion Live-Action.
The Meteor (1953)- Film about a crashed UFO, directed by Jack Arnold, based on a treatment by Ray Bradbury.
The Winter Wolf (1954)- Loose remake of The Werewolf of Paris, set in Russia before and during the Decemberist uprising. Mosfilm coproduction.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)- Tragedy centering on a fish creature found in the Colombian jungle. Reteamed Arnold and Bradbury (the latter the co-screenwriter)
This Island Earth (1955)- Adaptation of the 1952 Raymond F. Jones novel, about scientists preventing an invasion of the Earth.
Herbert West (1956)- Atomic age reimaging of HP Lovecraft’s 1922 story. Starring Kevin McCarthy in the titular role.
Attack of the Flying Saucers! (1956)- Invasion film about UFO observations gradually revealing a massive invasion (based on then-current WFRAAF investigations into the topic). Directed by Nathan Juran.
The Creature Returns! (1957) - Sequel to Black Lagoon, in which another Gil-Man is caught and held in a Bogota zoo, eventually gaining the sympathies of two zoologists.
The Thing (1957)- Alien invasion film starring Boris Karloff as a scientist involved in early manned space exploration dealing with an astronaut infected by an alien disease.
The Colour Out of Space (1958)- The story of a New England farmer witnessing the gradual decline of his community following a meteor crash. Based on HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name (with Lovecraft as a co-writer)
The Creature’s Revenge (1959)- Explorers in the Amazon find an ancient civilization, that is now inhabited by a group of Gil-Man.
War of the Worlds (1960)- George Pal adaptation of HG Wells’ novel. Featuring effects by Ray Harryhausen.
The Creature Takes Manhattan (1961)- A Gil-Man is set loose in New York City.
Haunter in the Dark (1964)- Adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1937 story, where a young writer quickly runs afoul of a cult worshipping a strange creature.
Nights of the Star-Vampire(1965)- Prequel and sequel to Haunter, based on Robert Bloch’s The Shambler in the Stars and The Shadow from the Steeple. Last film of Lankershim’s Yog-Sothothery Cycle.
Viy (1966)- Adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story, telling the story of a witch in 19th Century Russia, terrorizing a group of students. Mosfilm co-production.
Plutonia(1968)- Adaptation of Vladimir Obruchev’s 1915 novel, focusing on a prehistoric world found in a remote region of Siberia. Mosfilm co-production.
Were all of these horror/saucer alien SF movies produced OTL by one studio? I've seen a few and while obviously a single collective could host diverse styles, OTL anyway I think they had the stamp of different production companies with different connections. Of course also individual talents got around.
Anyway I'm just saying I'd think there would be several, more like five, six or even more, production collectives dabbling around with these genres. In fact, communism and sympathetic ties with Soviet culture should encourage futurism (in a generic sense, I know the Futurists of OTL were a specific clique that overlapped some pretty reactionary circles, some of them anyway--in the generic sense of "futuristic stuff is cool) and raise the general respectability of science fiction. Mind, if it is going to raise it very far certain stamps of the general OTL John W Campbell influenced Golden Age of Hard SF centered on Astounding Magazine should be quite transformed, and Hollywood SF could still have an arm's length relationship with written SF. When I was a prolific reader of SF as a kid I was pretty contemptuous of how Hollywood did things with it, and only now do I appreciate that different media call for different approaches, but some of the classic SF movies were really pretty good considering what they had to work with--and some of the most "serious" essays into the field screwed up the science background pretty horribly. I had to become an adult to become less of a nitpicker about the scientific plausibility and understand the idea is to explore what people do in weird circumstances. Part of that was that classic era SF suffered badly from restrictions on US respectably marketable stuff. Sexual prudery of course...Campbell at Street and Smith's Astounding offices had a lady, I don't know if she worked just on his magazine or a whole stable of S&S pulps, who ran through every accepted story and simply snipped out or marked for omission anything that in her judgement crossed the line of questionable moral content--I mean her no disrespect, or very little, and am trying to envision her as a person; my hunch is she was no prude herself, not by normal respectable classes American standards of the mid century anyway, and part of her competence was that she knew a thing or two about real life and therefore knew where the acceptable lines were for publication. And of course political prudery--to be sure I read some remarkable things in old mid-30s stories by people like Stanley Weinbaum (who died young and was not around by 1940) or even Willy Ley (a moderately sympathetic Soviet character...I think I actually was too confused by that to read the story so I may have misread). Basically the authors and the editors all knew where the lines were...the lady censor was just the last line of defense, presumably Campbell would stop reading submissions from someone aggressively pushing the lines persistently.
Race of course. The way that worked was, probably lots of stories could have been printed for say northeast coast city markets...but all the magazines strove to be marketed all over the nation, and had contracts with distributors who would be upset if they could only unload certain publications in restricted markets. So if certain assertions that might seem reasonable or perfectly unthreatening--just having a semirealistic African American minor character in the background saying words for instance--might possibly ruffle feathers below the Mason-Dixon line, that was out. Isaac Asimov edited a collection of stories called Before the Golden Age I read in junior high or HS, and there was some story, I believe about alien invasion in the nation's capital (or just a landing that was fraught with the potential threat it might be invasion) that had an African-American husband, wife and possibly kid as onlookers, and Asimov remarked on how extremely unusual and daring that was--never mind that you can hardly have a story about DC without African Americans in it! The censored reality of respectable fiction (respectable in the most limited sense--naturally many a teacher and parent and random onlooker found the pulps pretty dubious; all the more reason for the publishers to make sure nothing legally actionable or liable to bring on a political firestorm could be cited in evidence before a judge) and its relationship to lived reality is something I have wondered about...to what degree did people accept this cleaned up picture as reality itself, and to what degree was the art of inferring between the lines a highly refined game between authors (counting the whole corporate complex as such) and readers the vast majority played?
But pulp science fiction would be a world where the knowing grown ups moved very cautiously I suppose, precisely because of the youthful nature of much of the readership, and many an author was some young upstart like Isaac Asimov who got into print long before he could learn a lot of things. Being a "nerd" is a really different thing nowadays than it was when I was a kid--it was a category in the direction of being gay or something like that. Not respected! The generation of authors who flourished in the decade after the thirties included a fair number of people who had been around and knew stuff, but some of them actually were what much of the readership was, kids, many of them from relatively sheltered backgrounds, others not so sheltered but all the more desperate to escape the brutalities they did have to face. The net product was a certain shallowness in many dimensions that to many a non-fan critic pretty much defined what it was all about; these critics are blind to the peculiar thing that makes science fiction what it is, the engagement with otherly stuff--but of course quite a lot of engagement with Otherness would not be allowed at all.
I wasn't a big horror fan as a kid; I was impressed and quite creeped out by the movie The Haunting, and I read a lot of Stephen King in the early Eighties because what he does overlaps science fiction, and then lived for fifteen years with a woman passionate about film horror, so I have learned more than I might have otherwise but for me it remains acquired and easily dropped. Certainly when my partner got me into it a lot of what King wrote in Danse Macabre came to life for me and I started having Deep Thoughts about what the Deep Cultural Meaning of this stuff is; others too pointed out that one could read horror movies as having opportunities to talk about stuff that society does not allow one to talk about straight on. Joss Whedon in his commentaries on Buffy often remarks on how he sought to make the metaphors literal.
And Hollywood SF and Horror overlap quite a lot. The same artists would try their hand at both. Meanwhile back in print at Street and Smith, Campbell also edited Unknown for a while, even Isaac Asimov tried his hand at getting stories into that, and the SF fan community definitely overlapped with the horror community with many a Golden Age author taking pride in being published in the short lived but iconic magazine Weird Tales. The connections run deep actually, if horror and SF are not the same thing, they have kinship and interconnections, like siblings. But in Hollywood the boundaries are particularly fluid. SF made its way onto film mostly in the guise of horror actually, and the most rigorously SF stories would incorporate horror aspects. And of course even when horror is being its most authentic self it often takes on SF trappings with great glee--indeed some stories and authors are hard to categorize as one or the other.
But what is horror's place in Red America? If the power and function of horror is to prod with a sharp stick, or peek shivering through a crack in the closet door one is hiding behind, at painful, ugly facts of quotidian reality that most people pretend are not there or hide behind formulas and slogans, what happens to the genre if the working people rise up in wrath and organized desperation, and grimly fight and win a war to overthrow the bastions of oppression, and roll up their sleeves and get to work on a humane, rational, free, fair, reasonably tolerant but no nonsense that is really dangerous put up with New Jerusalem, and every time someone has a real and demonstrated grievance or major problem instead of saying "shut up, man up and take it, we can't fix the world for you!" a committee of concerned comrades comes and listens and agrees, yep, this is bad, and set about fixing it? For a time the task of cleaning up the mess is so gigantic that pain and suffering that could have been avoided happens anyway. Certainly the Great Crusade will provide bunkers full of nightmare fuel for generations to come...but there is a world of difference between a tragedy or setback or pain that cannot be stopped but you know people are trying, that at least your plight will not be forgotten and dismissed, that help is on the way even if it is not guaranteed to arrive in time...versus the kind of pain I think is the guts and metabolism of Horror, which is the inexorable, unstoppable, unappealable aspects of pain no one gives a flip about, no one who matters and can do something about it anyway. Pain that is inevitable because the people who could do something about it have decided not to be arsed, or even (quite a lot) are systematically creating it because that is their bread and butter to do.
It was precisely this, covered succinctly if not in the full portrayal of its breadth and depth, by the phrase "man exploits man." Sure, plenty of pain arises from inexorable nature but as I say, it matters the world then if one knows one is not cast out to suffer alone, that people will sit and talk with you and remember you when you are gone, that your time may have come but you are loved. The true depths of human misery emerge from betrayal, from cruelty, from the denial of the human bond of kinship. That was the worst punishment and if relentlessly maintained, the true death sentence, for our gatherer hunter ancestors, and it is in our blood. Not fear of being eaten by a bear or tiger...fear of being left to be eaten by either, and the people who left you don't care which. Or if you just starve to death.
So this is what Red Revolution rises up to do battle with. Not just capitalism, that is a species of a larger category of human betrayal.
If then the Red Revolution is successful, long before all the new apartments are built, before a full and balanced diet is quite available to all, before Gay Space Communism is perfected and everyone can live in plush, colorful comfortable freedom and safety, just knowing that ones comrades will do their best right here and now, that no one starves while another eats, that if the Nazis or Integralists shoot us all they'd better make sure they do get all of us because each one they miss will be back to even the score until they are no more...that will I suspect dry up and deflate the roots of horror. Free speech will drive the stake into its heart; when it becomes possible to speak of the unspeakable frankly and with a mind to fix it, and evasive metaphors are no longer needed, the whole thing will appear as a kind of masquerade theatre. People may continue to appreciate the artistry of its honest practitioners of the past, and admire how they got messages through the veils, but trying to write a new horror story would be like the little man behind the curtain pretending to be Oz the Great and Terrible.
That's my hunch.
So what I conclude is...for a time horror as such goes on momentum and the Great War II will give it a shot of adrenaline, but it will fall down flat like Hitler's speed freak army when it burns out, and die an honored death.
Meanwhile the many other dimensions that do come woven in the horror genre, especially its kinship with SF, will cause a sort of shift of SF--not so much a change of stand but a growth. The peculiar engagement with the Other as a mystery and an opening of doors will remain the root and the trunk that grows from it will grow taller and wider, but its breadth will grow toward where Horror once stood and incorporate a lot of stuff, stuff that as a young naive and callow kid reading SF would find kind of strangely gloppy and earthy and not all shiny and steely and bright, but soft and mazy. It was a world, a growth of Other, that people like Ursula Le Guin and Tolkien lured me toward, more organic, less mechanical, more mystic, less Promethean. And this will be the opening of a dialog and partnership between Apollo and Dionysus.
So it does make great sense that both classic silver screen horror and SF will come from the same film collective--or collectives. That question still remains open--will there be something about the UASR's Soviet approach to the arts that urges these people to all form one single collective? To what degree is the proliferation of little fly by night operators trying to get into it OTL a product of capitalist imperatives; indeed many a 50's movie seems to be far less an artistic expression and far more a cheap carnival show to get money from the rubes. That motive is gone.
This is why I have long predicted that the Red American popular culture will be very arty. Not everyone would be artsy of course, a big part of it is a big slab of recognizably like OTL simpled up, matter of fact, happy face mythos. But actually quite a lot of American pop culture does have some kind of arty edge to it, we just don't recognize it because it is the message The Man approved. Still that message is being delivered! My prediction is that quite a lot of people will unironically, with the kind of earnestness hipsters despise, get on the Red bandwagon in all sincerity and earnestly push something like an authentic and organic kind of Socialist Realism. That will be a major thing. But because art is truly free and truly supported, quite lavishly as communism clears the debris of the age of human exploitation away and follows through and there is surplus to spare, not in opposition to this normal Americanism but as an organic and continuous outgrowth of it, a wide range of very arty stuff will flourish, and while I predict some annoyance and peevishness and suspicion from many in the center of the norm, on the whole a much more relaxed and open dialog between the normal center and the arty fringes will be part of the healthy organic integration of the whole. The squares will be moderately hip, because they have no fear of losing their privilege for breaking ranks. People will like what they like, and being left free to their own cultural vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid, will not begrudge others their different tastes, and might even try it out a little bit themselves and jazz up their favored spot with a bit of decoration that challenges it.
In an arty lush jungle like that, I think pop culture will continue to rhyme with OTL, but the ATL version will be pretty different in many ways. More arty for one, at the same time more infused with a consciousness of what it is they are trying to say and not being shy about letting people see the machinery and learn the stage tricks.
Immersing oneself in story in any form, in theatre, in song, in reading a story, is an act of will, an agreement to let the rules and conventions followed by the creator stand in for a full elaboration of literal reality, a participation with the creator in getting the thing they offer.
So I fear that horror as such might be dead by 1950, despite living in a world under the Bomb. No one will react to stories about giant mutated ants or so forth as we would; perhaps such stories would be told but I think they would be quite different, more science fictiony, a lot less creepy. But maybe all the richer in subtle allusion and clever in jokes and cameos and so forth. Very many stories that haunt and linger in the mind OTL would not be even conceived of because the grim realities they allude to so hauntingly have been faced and largely banished. But the aspect of stepping into an unsuspected, hitherto unknown or perhaps avoided in fear other world will come forward instead. George Pal style extravaganzas with the premise of another planet swooping in to destroy us and what not might exist, but the story is about people doing their best to save everyone, and if they cannot, about making their choices and accepting them--like Strugatsky's Far Rainbow for instance. Not about "we the saved shall do our best to leave the pain of the lost billions behind us." More often the camera will linger on the doomed and show how they faced their doom, rather than just celebrate the ones who evaded it.
This is my guess!
Anyway I'm just saying I'd think there would be several, more like five, six or even more, production collectives dabbling around with these genres. In fact, communism and sympathetic ties with Soviet culture should encourage futurism (in a generic sense, I know the Futurists of OTL were a specific clique that overlapped some pretty reactionary circles, some of them anyway--in the generic sense of "futuristic stuff is cool) and raise the general respectability of science fiction. Mind, if it is going to raise it very far certain stamps of the general OTL John W Campbell influenced Golden Age of Hard SF centered on Astounding Magazine should be quite transformed, and Hollywood SF could still have an arm's length relationship with written SF. When I was a prolific reader of SF as a kid I was pretty contemptuous of how Hollywood did things with it, and only now do I appreciate that different media call for different approaches, but some of the classic SF movies were really pretty good considering what they had to work with--and some of the most "serious" essays into the field screwed up the science background pretty horribly. I had to become an adult to become less of a nitpicker about the scientific plausibility and understand the idea is to explore what people do in weird circumstances. Part of that was that classic era SF suffered badly from restrictions on US respectably marketable stuff. Sexual prudery of course...Campbell at Street and Smith's Astounding offices had a lady, I don't know if she worked just on his magazine or a whole stable of S&S pulps, who ran through every accepted story and simply snipped out or marked for omission anything that in her judgement crossed the line of questionable moral content--I mean her no disrespect, or very little, and am trying to envision her as a person; my hunch is she was no prude herself, not by normal respectable classes American standards of the mid century anyway, and part of her competence was that she knew a thing or two about real life and therefore knew where the acceptable lines were for publication. And of course political prudery--to be sure I read some remarkable things in old mid-30s stories by people like Stanley Weinbaum (who died young and was not around by 1940) or even Willy Ley (a moderately sympathetic Soviet character...I think I actually was too confused by that to read the story so I may have misread). Basically the authors and the editors all knew where the lines were...the lady censor was just the last line of defense, presumably Campbell would stop reading submissions from someone aggressively pushing the lines persistently.
Race of course. The way that worked was, probably lots of stories could have been printed for say northeast coast city markets...but all the magazines strove to be marketed all over the nation, and had contracts with distributors who would be upset if they could only unload certain publications in restricted markets. So if certain assertions that might seem reasonable or perfectly unthreatening--just having a semirealistic African American minor character in the background saying words for instance--might possibly ruffle feathers below the Mason-Dixon line, that was out. Isaac Asimov edited a collection of stories called Before the Golden Age I read in junior high or HS, and there was some story, I believe about alien invasion in the nation's capital (or just a landing that was fraught with the potential threat it might be invasion) that had an African-American husband, wife and possibly kid as onlookers, and Asimov remarked on how extremely unusual and daring that was--never mind that you can hardly have a story about DC without African Americans in it! The censored reality of respectable fiction (respectable in the most limited sense--naturally many a teacher and parent and random onlooker found the pulps pretty dubious; all the more reason for the publishers to make sure nothing legally actionable or liable to bring on a political firestorm could be cited in evidence before a judge) and its relationship to lived reality is something I have wondered about...to what degree did people accept this cleaned up picture as reality itself, and to what degree was the art of inferring between the lines a highly refined game between authors (counting the whole corporate complex as such) and readers the vast majority played?
But pulp science fiction would be a world where the knowing grown ups moved very cautiously I suppose, precisely because of the youthful nature of much of the readership, and many an author was some young upstart like Isaac Asimov who got into print long before he could learn a lot of things. Being a "nerd" is a really different thing nowadays than it was when I was a kid--it was a category in the direction of being gay or something like that. Not respected! The generation of authors who flourished in the decade after the thirties included a fair number of people who had been around and knew stuff, but some of them actually were what much of the readership was, kids, many of them from relatively sheltered backgrounds, others not so sheltered but all the more desperate to escape the brutalities they did have to face. The net product was a certain shallowness in many dimensions that to many a non-fan critic pretty much defined what it was all about; these critics are blind to the peculiar thing that makes science fiction what it is, the engagement with otherly stuff--but of course quite a lot of engagement with Otherness would not be allowed at all.
I wasn't a big horror fan as a kid; I was impressed and quite creeped out by the movie The Haunting, and I read a lot of Stephen King in the early Eighties because what he does overlaps science fiction, and then lived for fifteen years with a woman passionate about film horror, so I have learned more than I might have otherwise but for me it remains acquired and easily dropped. Certainly when my partner got me into it a lot of what King wrote in Danse Macabre came to life for me and I started having Deep Thoughts about what the Deep Cultural Meaning of this stuff is; others too pointed out that one could read horror movies as having opportunities to talk about stuff that society does not allow one to talk about straight on. Joss Whedon in his commentaries on Buffy often remarks on how he sought to make the metaphors literal.
And Hollywood SF and Horror overlap quite a lot. The same artists would try their hand at both. Meanwhile back in print at Street and Smith, Campbell also edited Unknown for a while, even Isaac Asimov tried his hand at getting stories into that, and the SF fan community definitely overlapped with the horror community with many a Golden Age author taking pride in being published in the short lived but iconic magazine Weird Tales. The connections run deep actually, if horror and SF are not the same thing, they have kinship and interconnections, like siblings. But in Hollywood the boundaries are particularly fluid. SF made its way onto film mostly in the guise of horror actually, and the most rigorously SF stories would incorporate horror aspects. And of course even when horror is being its most authentic self it often takes on SF trappings with great glee--indeed some stories and authors are hard to categorize as one or the other.
But what is horror's place in Red America? If the power and function of horror is to prod with a sharp stick, or peek shivering through a crack in the closet door one is hiding behind, at painful, ugly facts of quotidian reality that most people pretend are not there or hide behind formulas and slogans, what happens to the genre if the working people rise up in wrath and organized desperation, and grimly fight and win a war to overthrow the bastions of oppression, and roll up their sleeves and get to work on a humane, rational, free, fair, reasonably tolerant but no nonsense that is really dangerous put up with New Jerusalem, and every time someone has a real and demonstrated grievance or major problem instead of saying "shut up, man up and take it, we can't fix the world for you!" a committee of concerned comrades comes and listens and agrees, yep, this is bad, and set about fixing it? For a time the task of cleaning up the mess is so gigantic that pain and suffering that could have been avoided happens anyway. Certainly the Great Crusade will provide bunkers full of nightmare fuel for generations to come...but there is a world of difference between a tragedy or setback or pain that cannot be stopped but you know people are trying, that at least your plight will not be forgotten and dismissed, that help is on the way even if it is not guaranteed to arrive in time...versus the kind of pain I think is the guts and metabolism of Horror, which is the inexorable, unstoppable, unappealable aspects of pain no one gives a flip about, no one who matters and can do something about it anyway. Pain that is inevitable because the people who could do something about it have decided not to be arsed, or even (quite a lot) are systematically creating it because that is their bread and butter to do.
It was precisely this, covered succinctly if not in the full portrayal of its breadth and depth, by the phrase "man exploits man." Sure, plenty of pain arises from inexorable nature but as I say, it matters the world then if one knows one is not cast out to suffer alone, that people will sit and talk with you and remember you when you are gone, that your time may have come but you are loved. The true depths of human misery emerge from betrayal, from cruelty, from the denial of the human bond of kinship. That was the worst punishment and if relentlessly maintained, the true death sentence, for our gatherer hunter ancestors, and it is in our blood. Not fear of being eaten by a bear or tiger...fear of being left to be eaten by either, and the people who left you don't care which. Or if you just starve to death.
So this is what Red Revolution rises up to do battle with. Not just capitalism, that is a species of a larger category of human betrayal.
If then the Red Revolution is successful, long before all the new apartments are built, before a full and balanced diet is quite available to all, before Gay Space Communism is perfected and everyone can live in plush, colorful comfortable freedom and safety, just knowing that ones comrades will do their best right here and now, that no one starves while another eats, that if the Nazis or Integralists shoot us all they'd better make sure they do get all of us because each one they miss will be back to even the score until they are no more...that will I suspect dry up and deflate the roots of horror. Free speech will drive the stake into its heart; when it becomes possible to speak of the unspeakable frankly and with a mind to fix it, and evasive metaphors are no longer needed, the whole thing will appear as a kind of masquerade theatre. People may continue to appreciate the artistry of its honest practitioners of the past, and admire how they got messages through the veils, but trying to write a new horror story would be like the little man behind the curtain pretending to be Oz the Great and Terrible.
That's my hunch.
So what I conclude is...for a time horror as such goes on momentum and the Great War II will give it a shot of adrenaline, but it will fall down flat like Hitler's speed freak army when it burns out, and die an honored death.
Meanwhile the many other dimensions that do come woven in the horror genre, especially its kinship with SF, will cause a sort of shift of SF--not so much a change of stand but a growth. The peculiar engagement with the Other as a mystery and an opening of doors will remain the root and the trunk that grows from it will grow taller and wider, but its breadth will grow toward where Horror once stood and incorporate a lot of stuff, stuff that as a young naive and callow kid reading SF would find kind of strangely gloppy and earthy and not all shiny and steely and bright, but soft and mazy. It was a world, a growth of Other, that people like Ursula Le Guin and Tolkien lured me toward, more organic, less mechanical, more mystic, less Promethean. And this will be the opening of a dialog and partnership between Apollo and Dionysus.
So it does make great sense that both classic silver screen horror and SF will come from the same film collective--or collectives. That question still remains open--will there be something about the UASR's Soviet approach to the arts that urges these people to all form one single collective? To what degree is the proliferation of little fly by night operators trying to get into it OTL a product of capitalist imperatives; indeed many a 50's movie seems to be far less an artistic expression and far more a cheap carnival show to get money from the rubes. That motive is gone.
This is why I have long predicted that the Red American popular culture will be very arty. Not everyone would be artsy of course, a big part of it is a big slab of recognizably like OTL simpled up, matter of fact, happy face mythos. But actually quite a lot of American pop culture does have some kind of arty edge to it, we just don't recognize it because it is the message The Man approved. Still that message is being delivered! My prediction is that quite a lot of people will unironically, with the kind of earnestness hipsters despise, get on the Red bandwagon in all sincerity and earnestly push something like an authentic and organic kind of Socialist Realism. That will be a major thing. But because art is truly free and truly supported, quite lavishly as communism clears the debris of the age of human exploitation away and follows through and there is surplus to spare, not in opposition to this normal Americanism but as an organic and continuous outgrowth of it, a wide range of very arty stuff will flourish, and while I predict some annoyance and peevishness and suspicion from many in the center of the norm, on the whole a much more relaxed and open dialog between the normal center and the arty fringes will be part of the healthy organic integration of the whole. The squares will be moderately hip, because they have no fear of losing their privilege for breaking ranks. People will like what they like, and being left free to their own cultural vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid, will not begrudge others their different tastes, and might even try it out a little bit themselves and jazz up their favored spot with a bit of decoration that challenges it.
In an arty lush jungle like that, I think pop culture will continue to rhyme with OTL, but the ATL version will be pretty different in many ways. More arty for one, at the same time more infused with a consciousness of what it is they are trying to say and not being shy about letting people see the machinery and learn the stage tricks.
Immersing oneself in story in any form, in theatre, in song, in reading a story, is an act of will, an agreement to let the rules and conventions followed by the creator stand in for a full elaboration of literal reality, a participation with the creator in getting the thing they offer.
So I fear that horror as such might be dead by 1950, despite living in a world under the Bomb. No one will react to stories about giant mutated ants or so forth as we would; perhaps such stories would be told but I think they would be quite different, more science fictiony, a lot less creepy. But maybe all the richer in subtle allusion and clever in jokes and cameos and so forth. Very many stories that haunt and linger in the mind OTL would not be even conceived of because the grim realities they allude to so hauntingly have been faced and largely banished. But the aspect of stepping into an unsuspected, hitherto unknown or perhaps avoided in fear other world will come forward instead. George Pal style extravaganzas with the premise of another planet swooping in to destroy us and what not might exist, but the story is about people doing their best to save everyone, and if they cannot, about making their choices and accepting them--like Strugatsky's Far Rainbow for instance. Not about "we the saved shall do our best to leave the pain of the lost billions behind us." More often the camera will linger on the doomed and show how they faced their doom, rather than just celebrate the ones who evaded it.
This is my guess!
Yes, the Lankershim Monsters movies were produced by the Lankershim collective (formerly the employees of Universal Studios)
I didn't know he had communist sympathies (I know he fled Nazi Germany)
Horror is still around, but is increasingly more gory and nasty by the 50's (think Herschell Gordon-Lewis-style features) to take full advantage of the freedom to shock (though mostly low budget for the time), while Lankershim began to shift towards SF due to the increased interest in science post-war.
Many of the later films shown are more sympathetic to the creatures. The alternate Creature from the Black Lagoon plays out more like a romantic drama thanks to Bradbury's intervention.