Robert Bloch - The Skull Of The Marquis de Sade (Pyramid 1965: Corgi 1976: Robert Hale 1975)
The Skull of the Marquis De SadeA Quiet FuneralThe Weird TaylorThe Man Who Knew Women
"Lizzie Borden Took An Axe..."
The Devil's Ticket
The Bogey Man Will Get YouThe Skull Of The Marquis De Sade: Christopher Maitland, a collector of morbid artifacts, is offered the skull of the divine Marquis for a knock-down £500 by down at heel Wapping-based dealer Marco who confesses he wants shot of it as the relic is playing on his mind. Maitland decides to sleep on it and, after a restless night in which he dreams vividly of being tortured by the Inquisition, consults his friend and fellow collector, Sir Fitzhugh Kilroy who once owned the skull and advises Maitland against making the purchase. "I'm not trying to frighten you, my friend. But I know the history of that skull. During the last hundred years it has passed through the hands of many men. Some of them were collectors, and sane. Others were perverted members of secret cults - worshippers of pain, devotees of Black Magic. Men have died to gain that grisly relic, and other men have been - sacrificed to it."
Despite telling Sir Fitzhugh that he's decided to give the skull a miss, Maitland calls on Marco at his Soho flat (Soho is, apparently a district of Wapping in this story) and finds him dead on his bed with a torn throat. Obviously, Marco's police dog must have contracted rabies or something because there's no sign of any break-in. Maitland shoots the dog and heads off home with his prize ....
"Lizzie Borden Took An Axe ...": Black Sorcery expert Gideon Godfrey is dead, his skull split in two by a blow with an axe. Godfrey was the legal guardian of young Anita Loomis and filled her head with so much mumbo jumbo that she believes herself to be the prey of an incubus. Boyfriend Jim is skeptical, but slowly he comes to the conclusion that Anita has been possessed by the same demon that drove Lizzie Borden to slay her parents ....
The Bogeyman Will Get You: Sixteen year old Nancy and her folks visit Lake Beaver for the second successive summer and she sets out to attract the hermit-like Philip Ames who lives in a neighbouring cottage, writing his thesis. All is going well until, on the evening of their first date, as the moon rises over the lake, he inexplicably cries off. As he disappears from view of the tearful Nancy, a bat flies out of the darkness and comes straight at her - after which Nancy becomes suspicious as to who and what she's taken a fancy to. "Yes, that was it. Tonight, after Philip left, she'd tell Laura. Tell her that Philip didn't eat and there were no mirrors and he was so pale and nobody saw him in the daytime and a bat flew out of the sunset. Tell her that Philip was ... a vampire."
One of only eight of his Weird Tales Bloch expressed satisfaction with in an interview with Graeme Flanagan in
Robert Bloch: A Bio-Bibliography (privately printed, 1979), the others being
Lucy Comes To Stay,
Catnip,
Sweets To The Sweet,
Enoch,
The Cheaters,
One Way To Mars and
Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper.
A Quiet Funeral: To avoid suspicion, Vetch calls at the Luigeruis Funeral Parlour to pay his respects to ace counterfeiter Charlie the Printer. It was Vetch who sabotaged his friend's car, causing it to run off the road and burst into flames with Charlie trapped inside screaming for help. Vetch doesn't like to think of Charlie dying like that. He doesn't like to think of death, period. And he
really hates to think about premature burial ....
The four - possible - five that went to make up
Asylum:
Frozen Fear: Walter Krass murders wife Cynthia with a poker, chops her up and stuffs her neatly packaged remains in the freezer. They refuse to lie down.
Lucy Comes To Stay: Vi is in rehab, drying out after a humiliating drunken episode at a party. Her friend Lucy convinces her that husband George and special nurse Miss Higgins are having an affair and they've no intention of seeing her released from the Asylum. In alcoholic and psychological meltdown, Vi is easily persuaded to make a desperate bid for freedom ....
"The Weird Tailor" was also filmed for the Boris Karloff hosted tv series "Thriller". The emphasis in this adaptation is more on Mr Smith than the tailor, with Smith buying his copy of The Necronomicon from a used car dealer. Also, the tailor is shown as an abusive alcoholic git. Apparently Bloch wasn't happy with Subotsky for softening up the character in "Asylum". -
LurkerThe Weird Tailor: For several years, the seedy tailor Erik Conrad's business has been going nowhere fast, but when he meets and weds the timid Anna at least he has the satisfaction of making her life even more miserable than his own, plus he can always beat and half-throttle her whenever an angry creditor calls. Driven half-insane by her unhappy existence, Anna confides her problems to Otto, the decrepit, one-eyed window dummy who reminds her so much of her dead brother.
It seems Erik's luck is about to change when the fabulously wealthy Mr. Smith approaches him with his convoluted design for a suit to be made from a strange fabric, the like of which the tailor has never seen. Smith insists that Conrad must only work at specified times, explaining that he has an unshakable belief in Astrology. The suit is to be a surprise present for his son and, should Erik promise to observe Smiths conditions, he can name his own price.
Well, this is all looking very promising for the odious Erik! But when he finally completes the suit and learns that, far from being rich, Smith is now all but destitute, having squandered his fortune on having his son preserved in ice until he can revive him with the magical suit, a fight ensues and the tailor bludgeons his customer to death. After ransacking Smith's lodging for saleable goods - his stash of black magic books - he returns home with the suit and tells Anna to destroy it. She hangs it on Otto instead ....
Mannikins Of Horror: Dr. Edgar Colin, former brain surgeon, is now a psychotic patient in Dr. Starr's asylum. He spends his every waking moment modelling perfect little clay figures, even fitting them with perfect clay brains. Colin discovers that, by projecting his thoughts into the minds of his models, he can manipulate them to do his bidding. Dr. Starr decides that all this toiling over little clay men is detrimental to Colin's mental health and threatens to confiscate them. Distraught, Colin - who has now decided that he's not Frankenstein but "God" - mobilises one of his mini-me's to find out the doctor's plans for him, but when Starr discovers it crawling up his trouser leg he crushes it, unwittingly crippling and deafening his patient in the process. So the next foot soldier is sent on a kamikaze mission ....
A Home Away From Home: Seems to be an early attempt at what would become the lunatics-have-taken-over-the-asylum framing story in
Asylum although Dr. Starr isn't name-checked.
Natalie Rivers has travelled from Australia to England's West Country to meet her psychiatrist uncle, Dr. Bracegirdle, for the first time. When she telephones uncle at the cottage where he lives and practices, there seems to be some kind of rowdy celebration in progress. Bracegirdle informs her that he's been called out on an urgent case but will send one of his nurses to pick her up at the station. Miss Plummer duly arrives and drives Natalie to the cottage where she's obliged to join the drunken revellers who are by now in worryingly high spirits. She escapes to her uncles study .... and discovers just who's "leaving party" this is ....
The following are the stories that were all adapted - some of them radically - for
The House That Dripped Blood.
Method For Murder: Charles' pen and ink sketch of a character from his next novel, Dominick "a strangler who has escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane", gives wife Alice inspiration for a plan that should see her rid of the old fool. With the assistance of her lover, Thornton, she convinces him that Dominick is alive ...
Sweets To The Sweet: Very different to the dramatised adaptation in that it's impossible to sympathise with the bereaved father, John Steever, a brutal drunk and child-beater who is so insistent little Irma is a witch, she comes to believe it herself. The voodoo dolly doesn't wind up in the fire either but never fear, the ending is equally nasty.
Waxworks: Paris, the fogbound docklands. Bertrand, "a poet, a very bad poet, with the sentimentally esoteric nature such beings effect", is the latest man to have become obsessed with the strikingly beautiful waxwork of Salome in the local chamber of horrors. The proprietor, a shabby, fat little grey haired man informs him that he moulded the figure in the image of his wife, a reputed witch guillotined for the decapitation murders of five young men. Bertrand notices that the head of John the Baptist she brandishes on her silver platter periodically changes, and the horror escalates when he recognises one of them as that belonging to a family friend, Colonel Bertroux ...
The Cloak: Henderson buys a cloak for $5 from a mysterious Hungarian in a costumiers. When he wears it to the Lindstrom's Halloween ball, he steals the show, attacking the host and generally causing a stir with his increasingly bizarre behaviour. Of course, little does he know it once belonged to a
real vampire. Henderson comes a cropper when he steps out onto the roof garden with beautiful Sheila, another frequent visitor to the same costumier.
There's a review of the movie with some excellent screenshots at:
dvd drive-in To be continued ...
