Down the chimney St. Nicholas came... and came... and came...

The anxiety that can sometimes accompany holiday excess is perfectly captured in this uncomfortable little vignette from The City of Lost Children (1995).

It's a storybook-perfect Christmas Eve, and an unnamed little boy, perhaps unable to sleep in anticipation of Santa's visit, sits up in his crib.

Shortly, a magical visitor emerges from the chimney...

He presents the little boy with a tin toy.

But there's a shadow moving near the fireplace...

A second Santa appears and hunches down right alongside the first.

He is soon followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth...

A line of Santas begin entering through the doorway as well.

Soon the room is swarming with Santas wandering around aimlessly.

The horrified boy suddenly feels compelled to protect his teddy bear from the invaders.

A glimpse out the window betrays the full scale of the infestation, for it appears that even escape from the house itself will not save him from the stifling mob.

It is only after the situation reaches a suffocating crescendo that we realize the entire incident is the child's dream... a dream induced and poisoned by a mad scientist's experiment.



If you're into Brazil (1985) or Dark City (1998), you might also enjoy The City of Lost Children. Buy it here.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (1979, Bill Melendez)

I've previously posted rambling reminiscences about what a bigger deal TV shows and movies used to be back in the days before recordable media and on-demand streaming video made entertainment ubiquitous and disposable.

Well gather round, kids, and prepare to roll your eyes again as I tell you of a time long, long ago when cartoons and animation just weren't to be found in those magic evening hours known as prime-time, but were instead largely relegated to a few skimpy hours in the morning and after school.

A rare and recurring exception was during the big holidays, when animated specials like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown or How the Grinch Stole Christmas would be broadcast in the meaty television viewing hours between 7:00 and 9:00 PM. There was an accompanying excitement to these presentations... these special occasions when cartoons were allowed to get dressed up for a big night on the town.

So even though the original broadcast of the animated adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe did not coincide with any holiday, there was a similar sense of excitement when I watched it in two parts, spread across two nights, back in April of 1979.

Directed by long-time Peanuts animator Bill Melendez (he also directed the Christmas special Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus), The Lion... is a reverent and engaging version of the Narnia chapter that would go on to spawn a big-budget blockbuster some 25 years later.

Don't be mislead by the cutish character designs. This adaptation takes its story seriously, as it should. No attempt is made to dumb-down the tone, and at no point do any of the characters break out into song. Aside from perhaps the Rankin Bass adaptation of The Hobbit, this was probably the most serious piece of animation I'd seen by this time.

I was enthralled by scenes of the evil Queen, whose minions include all manner of monster.

Some scenes challenged the expectations I'd held as to the degree of evil that was allowable in an animated film. Scenes like this, in which the Queen has tied young Edmund to a tree and intends to sacrifice him with a knife.

The finale, in which a gleefully vicious mob of monsters ritually kills the noble lion Aslan, is powerful, and perhaps even more effective than the live-action Disney version.


Buy The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe on DVD here.
UPDATE: This cartoon landed on my list of Top-10 tearjerkers...

The First Thanksgiving (1962, Lou Rogers)

I'll be honest, readers, there just isn't that much Thanksgiving-related stuff in this dusty old Haunted Closet...and what is there isn't scary at all. But here's some charming images from The First Thanksgiving (1962, Lou Rogers, Modern Cirriculum Press. Inc.) Enjoy.

Woman Bites Head Off Snake! (Stanley, 1972)

With Thanksgiving fast approaching, I thought I'd share one (silly and frivolous) thing I can be thankful for this year, which is having finally tracked down the source of the above image of a woman biting the head off a live snake, an image that has haunted me since I first happened upon it on television one Saturday morning, at least 30 years ago.

I've made a little side-hobby out of tracking down pop-cultural artifacts (books, TV shows and movies) that made an impact on me as a child, either overtly or subliminally...often of the spooky variety. (Meanwhile the excellent site Kindertrauma has turned that same search into a full-blown philanthropic movement.)

While I've been fairly successfully in tracking down even the most obscure specimens (the haunted house oral hygiene film The Haunted Mouth and spooky anthology book Monster Tales, for starters) I had no luck identifying the film pictured above, in which an exotic snake dancer, under pressure from her manager to spice up the act, adds the gruesome climax.

But I finally stumbled on the film this month, through pure dumb luck, when it popped up on a five dollar bargain-bin DVD collection titled Gorehouse Greats. It's Stanley (1972).

The title, Stanley, doesn't exactly scream "snakes!" the way titles like Sssss or Rattlers do, which was part of the problem in tracking this film down. Stanley is the pet rattlesnake of Tim (Chris Robinson), a Native American Vietnam vet who just wants to live at peace with nature and it's crawling inhabitants. There's Tim now.

Tim lives in a shack at the edge of a swamp, respecting all of nature's creatures while plying his trade: capturing and milking poisonous snakes to make anti-venom. Tim takes his work home with him... literally. His house is crawling with snakes that he lets slither around freely. He even lets Stanley and it's... uh, "wife", Hazel, sit at the dinner table with him. Mouse under glass... bon appetit!

But Tim's little Eden is threatened by a comical villian, Thomkins (Alex Rocco), who not only hunts animals for their skins to make cool clothing and accessories (see vest and hatband, below) but had years earlier caused the death of Tim's father in a suspicious hunting accident.

In addition to selling venom to hospitals, Tim also provides snakes to Gloria, the snake dancer at a seedy lounge, "The Climax".

And this is where I wandered into the picture one Saturday morning (likely broadcast on the local monster-movie show, KPHO's The World Beyond). To fully appreciate the extent of the trauma inflicted on my grade school brain, you have to understand that prior to seeing this scene, the very idea that people might hurt, torture or kill animals for entertainment was completely alien to me.

At this point in my young life, I had never heard of a carnival geek (the sideshow attraction in which a person bites off a chicken's head), and thought a matador's sword was just for self-defense in case the bull got too ornery.

Now I was being confronted with an uglier side of humanity that I hadn't imagined.

The audience, a mixture of men and women, young and old, are a collage of eagerness, trepidation, and apathy. They are all guilty conspirators.

I always remembered the actual head-biting occurring in silhouette, but as you'll see, this was not the case. Perhaps some psychological defense mechanism manufactured that memory.

The act completed, with bloody evidence. I'd lost a little innocence that day.

Witnessing this atrocity along with me was Tim, who immediately switches from capturing poisonous snakes to distributing them to snake-dancers' beds.

He also makes a delivery to Alex Rocco's swimming pool.

So having finally reunited with Stanley after so many years, do I recommend the film? Well, unless you need to exorcise the image of a snake dancer with a bloody chin from your subconcious.... no! It's a poorly acted, ludicriously plotted mess that gains a few points for use of actual snakes, but then loses those points with scenes depicting actual (not simulated) animal cruelty, in which living snakes are swung, crushed or shot.

But at least I'll never have to type "Woman Bites Head Off Snake" into a search engine ever again!