Last month we looked at some horror movies from 1958 which were not The Blob, but were still pretty entertaining. Like many a protagonist in the films of the period, we screamed in terror, yet were somehow unable to tear ourselves away as our doom came skittering, or oozing, or stalking towards us. And so here we are once more, staring at that which we cannot stop staring at—more daughter of son of horror of 1958!

The Brain Eaters

The Brain Eaters is Invasion of the Body Snatchers done on a shoestring budget so low the filmmakers couldn’t afford the shoe, and barely the string. Shot in black and white for only $26,000 (about $234,000 in 2021 terms) with a runtime of just over an hour, the movie’s main innovation is that the brain-controlling parasites’ ship didn’t fall from space, but burrowed up from underground. The movie is not particularly suspenseful and is too staid to be campy fun.  But it is interesting to see how stalwart director Bruno VeSota (with an uncredited Roger Corman producing) manages to get his story told with virtually no resources.  There’s lots of people talking earnestly to the camera, and voice-overs to get you over bits of the narrative that don’t quite make sense. The camera carefully cuts away before you get a look at any of the parasites, so you never see them sink their whatevers into people’s necks. Even the big show-down with the army of nasties in the ship is drenched in eerie mist, so you can barely see that the evil mastermind is Leonard Nimoy—listed as Leonard Nemoy, because, apparently, they didn’t even have the money to proofread the credits.

Lake of the Dead

Norwegian director Kåre Bergstrøm’s Lake of the Dead has a Hitchcockian fascination with psychoanalysis, though with an incongruous innocence that never dappled the surface of Spellbound or Psycho. Lillian (Henny Moan), her fiancé Harald Gran (Georg Richter) and four friends head out to her brother’s cabin in the woods for a summer excursion. When they arrive, brother Bjørn (Per Lillo-Stenberg) is missing; they find tracks and a diary suggesting he threw himself into a lake near the cabin. They learn that Bjørn’s fate is in line with local legends about a one-legged man named Gravik who was sexually obsessed with his sister, killed her and her husband and then threw himself in the lake. Eventually they discover that Bjørn’s passion for his own sister Lillian is unchaste as well, and that, like Gravik, he’s less dead than he should be. The story isn’t told from his perspective or from Lilian’s, though. Instead, the main character is crime writer Bernhard Borge (Henki Kolstad), who frames the story in flashback and bumbles around good-naturedly, trembling at dark rooms and furrowing his brow. As a result, the movie often feels weirdly like gentle comedy, even as it stomps, with a wooden tread, through supernatural terror, psychic manipulation, domestic violence, and multiple murder.

Horror of Dracula

Of course, The Blob is always the best horror film of 1958 here at the Blob Blog. But the most critically acclaimed horror movie of that year is probably the British Hammer Studio’s Horror of Dracula, aka just Dracula. Unlike The Blob or Brain Eaters with their science-fiction chills, this movie is retro horror, returning to Bram Stoker’s sturdy legend of 19th century bloodsuckers in natty cloaks. Writer Jimmy Sangster and director Terence Fisher compress the story with some wit, but the real innovation of the movie is due to Christopher Lee, who plays the titular count with a suave brutality worthy of a Bond film. In earlier vampire movies like Nosferatu, the contrast between the repulsive Count and his prey was played up. But in Horror of Dracula, the unsettling bit is that you can see why the ravishing Mina (Melissa Stribling) is so eager to turn away from her boring husband and expose her throat.

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