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Post by dem bones on Oct 24, 2016 5:21:43 GMT
Virgil Finlay .... but not by much. Even if we have a better than shrewd idea of what's coming, still the Poe-esque penultimate chapters are this novella's most horrific and suspenseful. That same night a crushed and broken Mordecai Westhorne makes his way to the Cemetery of the Madeleine. He accepts that his Susette is lost, his only purpose now to ship her body to America for decent funeral. The sexton is soon bribed to open the vault. There's a corpse strewn across across the coffin .... but it's not Suzette's. The old man raises the lid, and shines his torch direct onto the blood-smeared mouth of the deceased. Mon Dieu! Vampire! Only rough-handling from the bereaved American prevents him driving a spade through her neck (we ghouls shake our heads at another open goal missed). After the cemetery cliffhanger, the show is over for the nasty content, but it has been a whole lot of morbid fun getting here, and it would be churlish as it is pointless to begrudge Seabury his happy ending. Shame the day's film-makers weren't paying attention as Susette could have made for a great Gothic melodrama. Easily among my favourite non-De Grandin, non- Is The Devil A Gentleman Quinn's, alongside the similarly romantically inclined Rebel's Rest and Dark Rosaleen. You can download the entire April 1939 issue for free - and much else besides - via the eminently worthy Pulp Magazine Projects
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margot
New Face In Hell
Posts: 2
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Post by margot on Oct 30, 2016 21:05:09 GMT
Jac Avila's JUSTINE Review By C Dean Andersson Director Jac Avila has created a definitive film version of the Marquis DeSade's JUSTINE. The film, based on DeSade's famous novel about the misfortunes of virtue, is in my opinion true to the book's spirit and content in a way no other version has ever been. If, hearing this is a film of DeSade's JUSTINE, you expect "sadistic" scenes of beautiful women subjected to whippings and other torturous ordeals, Avila's JUSTINE pulls no punches and will fulfill your expectations. But you can also approach this movie hungry for a refreshing tour de force of artistic filmmaking and have your desires fulfilled. Avila opens JUSTINE with a startling close-up of Justine's face, beautiful and innocent, but with a haunted look in her eyes that suggests she has already been through more horrors than we can imagine and knows the worst is probably yet to come. Amy Hesketh achieves this effect by looking straight at you in a certain way that has to be experienced to be understood.
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Post by dem bones on Nov 15, 2016 13:30:49 GMT
Mueriére promised Piron to save his sweetheart from the guillotine - a weird story of the French Revolution Doak (Hugh Rankin) Harold Markham - The Falling Knife: ( Weird Tales, 1930). Dauvignon at the height of The Terror. When beautiful, innocent young aristocrat Roxalane de Tourneye is sentenced to the guillotine, her lover, Lieutenant Piron approaches his superior to beg a reprieve. Citizen Mueriére, friend and staunch disciple of the "Arch-terrorist" Robespierre, promises to give the matter his consideration. Piron takes this to mean a reprieve and parties the night away eventually awakening from his debauch at mid-day. Goodness, what a close shave! Sweet Roxalane would have met her doom along with the others two hours ago had not Mueriére pledged to save her! Greatly relieved, he reads the day's death notices .... It's a month on from Roxalene's execution, and Piron is fawning up to Mueriére for saving him from his own madness. Marry a she-aristocrat? Him? What was he thinking! He would surely have gone the same way as the baggage were it not for his judicious friend! So grateful is Piron that, as a special thank you, he's prepared to let Mueriére take all the glory for revealing a secret plot to kill Robespierre. Do you suppose the good citizen is ... up to something? This reader knows nothing about Harold Markham other than that he contributed two stories to the Not At Night's, one to the Creeps ( Dispossessed in Tales Of Dread) and three to Weird Tales. A CV to die for by any standard.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 21, 2019 16:40:44 GMT
Wilkie Collins - "Nine o' Clock!": (Bentley’s Miscellany, August, 1852). "But the sense of oppression was still as heavy on me as ever, when I approached the wardrobe to get out my clothes. Just as I stretched forth my hand to turn the key, I saw, to my horror, the two doors of the wardrobe opening of themselves, opening slowly and silently. The candle went out at the same moment, and the whole inside of the wardrobe became to me like a great mirror, with a bright light shining in the middle of it. Out of that light there came a figure, the exact counterpart of myself. Over its breast hung an open scroll, and on that I read the warning of my own death, and a revelation of the destinies of my father and his race."
30 June 1793, the last night on earth for twenty-one leading Girondins, condemned to the guillotine by the machinations of Robespierre. The doomed men keep up their spirits by speculating when they shall be carted off to the Place de Execution, dawn or mid-morning? Duprat, the youngest, assures his friend Marigny that: "Whatever the time when the execution begins, whatever the order in which the twenty-one Girondins are chosen for death, I shall be the man who kneels under the guillotine as the clock strikes nine." Duprat confides recent family history which saw first his younger brother Alfred, then their father pursued to their doom by the family harbinger of doom. Not sure if the background details are (accepted as) historically accurate but they certainly pile additional misery upon a very good supernatural horror story.
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