Things You're Just Supposed to Know

Most of the time, Long-Forgotten assumes that readers are already familiar with basic facts
about the Haunted Mansion. If you wanna keep up with the big boys, I suggest you check out
first of all the website, Doombuggies.com. After that, the best place to go is Jason Surrell's book,
The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (NY: Disney Editions; 2015). That's the
re-named third edition of The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies (NY:
Disney Editions, 2003; 2nd ed. 2009). Also essential reading is Jeff Baham's The Unauthorized
Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion (USA: Theme Park Press, 2014; 2nd ed. 2016).

This site is not affiliated in any way with any Walt Disney company. It is an independent
fan site dedicated to critical examination and historical review of the Haunted Mansions.
All images that are © Disney are posted under commonly understood guidelines of Fair Use.

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Wednesday, February 21, 2018

More Shots in the Dark

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Updated March 13, 2018

Before we get started, here's a gorgeous example of a green-and-purple color scheme used to spooky effect (a topic previously explored HERE). This is a background painting from The Adventures of Ichabod Crane (Disney's adaptation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"). I'll probably stick it into that old post, but it's simply too nice to bury that way without calling attention to it.


Okay, attention called. Now, to the business at hand.

One of our favorite Long-Forgotten exercises is tracing the inspiration for things that wound up in (or in some cases almost wound up in) the Haunted Mansion. We do it gleefully, despite the hazards of claiming inspiration where perhaps all that is operating is coincidence. The key to retaining your self-respect, as we know, is to tread lightly in making any claims, resisting the temptation to push possibilities until they look like plausibilities, or plausibilities until they look like probabilities, or probabilities until they look like certainties. Today we have a couple more shots in the dark, things that could have been inspirations but . . . well, you decide.


"A Comedy of Terrors"

This 1964 horror-comedy is the sort of film the Mansion Imagineers would have wanted to see, and it falls neatly within the time-period we know they were doing such research. We know, for example, that a group of them had a private screening of the 1963 film, The Haunting, in 1965:


Being a horror-comedy, CoT would have been a natch. So . . . is there anything in the film that looks like it could have been influential?

Meh. Not much. There's been some speculation about the look of the Caretaker (the great Joe E. Brown in his last performance):


Sure, he looks a little like our Caretaker, but that's because the look of Caretakers had settled
into a stereotype by then. Mr. Dudley in The Haunting looks just as much like the HM guy.


And if we turn elsewhere we just keep running into the same man. Here he is in The Abominable Doctor Phibes:


Most of the other suggestions I've seen about possible influence from CoT fair no better, IMO. The one thing in CoT that does give me
pause, however, is the opening scene in the graveyard. It isn't difficult to find photos of the HM Conservatory that look a lot like this:




Furthermore, this is from the opening scene of the movie, so no story has unfolded yet, and it goes on for quite some time, so the atmosphere is pretty much all you're getting. At this early point in the film, then, it isn't hard to imagine someone like Claude Coats making a mental note of the colors and the set design, since there's little else to notice. But I'm not going to press the possibility of influence any harder than that. Filed as another "solid maybe."


"Thriller"

The late 50's—early 60's was the golden age of anthology shows on TV that featured the odd, the frightening, and the unexplainable. You've got The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One show in this group that I didn't even know existed until relatively recently was Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff. The show ran just two seasons (1960-61 and 1961-62) but still produced 67 episodes. If you've never heard of the show, get thee to youtube, where most of the episodes can be seen. Like all of the other shows named, there are some real clunkers as well as gems in the batch. I'm impressed with the production values and the often very intelligent scripts. The cinematography in particular often rivals what you might expect from a big-budget film produced at a major movie studio. Robert Bloch (he of Psycho fame) wrote a lot of the stories. Plus there's Boris as your host, and the man is simply irresistible.

So anyway, as I'm wending my way through all these Thrillers, my eye is ever on the lookout for Mansion inspirations. Can't help myself; it's what I do. And yeah, sometimes something pops up that's worth a second look. One such moment occurred during the episode called "The Weird Tailor" (which is excellent, btw). In one scene, a medium is looking into her crystal ball, and a death's head gradually appears.




This reminded me at once of a Marc Davis concept sketch of "Madame Z," the forerunner to what would eventually be Madame Leota.


Put 'em all side by side and stare at them long enough, and pretty soon you may feel the inner
needle moving in the "certainty" direction, even if you know it won't ever quite get there.


But beware. Here's a cautionary tale from another Thriller episode, "The Hungry Glass" (worth watching just for the fun of seeing The Professor and Captain Kirk chumming around while Elly May Clampett admires herself in the mirror). There's a creepy old attic in the house that looked familiar to me:


Yeah . . . reminded me of this Claude Coats concept sketch:


Same thing. Put 'em side by side and stare. The trophy head, the bird cage, the oval mirror . . .
seems too much for coincidence . . . keep staring . . . feel that needle a-twitching? 


Well, turn off the machine and sit down. There's virtually no possibility of influence here. See, I cheated. The top photo is actually my combination of several consecutive screen grabs. The attic is only revealed a bit at a time via the beam of a flashlight. At no one moment is the entirety of the scene visible:




So I guess the lesson to be learned is to be very skeptical of inner needles?

UPDATE. Reader "Stefano" calls our attention in the comments to another Solid Maybe. The 1964 Italian horror film Castle of Blood has a scene in which the protagonist, spending the night in a haunted castle, looks down from a balcony at an empty dining hall, when suddenly he sees ghosts from the past partying, including waltzers busy waltzing. Stef is right, it certainly is reminiscent of the Grand Ballroom in the Mansion and could be an influence. It'll get those needles twichin' fer sure.




Okay, not exactly a killer blog post, but fun anyway. At least my inner needle tells me so.


16 comments:

  1. Still, STILL! Even if not visually present in one shot, that an attic has those three specific items I'd say is strong evidence.

    Great post, btw!

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  2. Nice post! But one must ask: How is the exact same Caretaker in everything? It's almost as if... HE'S A GHOST! Or maybe it's just what a stereotypical Caretaker looks like. I don't know.

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  3. Great post! Thanks for the tip about Thriller. Love what you did to connect the flashlight beams on the trophy head, the bird cage, and the oval mirror. My inner needle is convinced! After all, true skepticism requires a skepticism of skepticism itself. :-) Thank you for not merely preserving this blog but renewing it now and then. You make my day every time there's a new post.

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  4. I'm surprised you didn't at least mention what I thought to me the biggest contender in Comedy of Terrors — namely, when Basil Rathbone is trapped inside a coffin and repeated tries to open it, with his hand in view pushing up the lid, screaming: "Let me out! Let me out of here!"

    I mean, how common can this particular image be?

    You're probably right on the Caretaker, though. The reason it seemed such a good connection to me was the identical color scheme (The Haunting's Caretaker is black-and-white, after all), but it's probably just a coincidence, at least unless a direct connection can be established between Comedy and the HM separately.

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  5. It's a dangerous game to play. I'm currently watching through the early episodes of Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, which is a tempting target to start looking for HM connections - except that's impossible, because the show was in development before the Mansion even opened! Still, some of the characters even look just like something Marc would have drawn, until you start snooping around, and discover that Scooby Doo's character designer, Iwao Takamoto, worked at Disney as an assistant to Milt Kahl - who was a good friend of Marc's - and Milt's style is very much evident in Takamoto's designs...

    As they say, once you have a hammer, everything starts looking like nails!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I often have those moments watching Dark Shadows.

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  6. A movie precursor to the television anthologies was the 1940s "Inner Sanctum" series, all B-pictures on spooky themes. Each episode was introduced by a distorted head speaking from within a crystal ball; the actor, David Hoffman, would end his career with a bit part in "13 Ghosts".
    The imagineers might have seen the Italian horror film "Castle of Blood", released in the US in 1964. The lead character, spending a night in the haunted castle, stands on a balcony and watches many elegant phantoms dancing to a waltz below him, a scene strikingly similar to the Haunted Mansion.

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    1. That "Castle of Blood" scene looks mighty interesting. I think I'll add it to the post. Thanks for pointing it out.

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  7. Don’t forget the dark comedy THE LOVED ONE ( 1965) Marc Davis directly told me that the Little Leotta idea came from the female hostesses at Wispering Glade Cemetary while I don’t think Marc implied he was the creator or Little Leotta , he was aware or her origin.

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    Replies
    1. That's pretty good authority. Thanks, Mike. I've heard the claim before, but not with Marc's own confirmation.

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  8. I love this website! Can't wait to read more

    ReplyDelete
  9. I don't know how to thank you for such great work and detail....I will just say...keep up the great work.

    ReplyDelete
  10. HBG2, a few months have passed, and I have finished reading your entire blog. I just wanted to let you know how much enjoyment I have gotten out of your mighty insight, research, photo-selection, and humor. Your love for the Haunted Mansion shines through, and has given the rest of us fans a real treat to enjoy over 8 years (and hopefully longer, if you still have more to share with us). I so appreciate what you have done here! Thank you so much!

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    Replies
    1. You're welcome, and thank you for the compliments.

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  11. To me, the Ballroom/Grand Hall scene is almost certainly directly ripped off from "Castle of Blood". Right down to the costumes of the waltzers and the general style of the dining room furniture.

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  12. Sorry for the double-reply. I also believe the look of the Caretaker may have come *directly* from that still of Joe E. Brown. Jacket, scarf, lantern, keys, etc. Even the facial expression. The other reference photos only seem to share the same style of hat, but otherwise do not look all that much like our Caretaker. I'd say Brown was a dead ringer for him [bad pun intended].

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