A couple of years ago I was invited to contribute to a neat-sounding book called THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR (which turned out to be not only neat-sounding but neat-reading). After I turned in my piece, I thought of the list I should have contributed… a list about horror movies about lists! Well, it was too late to make the change so I just had to put that notion on my To Do list… and today is doing day.

To many of my fiends and ghoul-pals, the torch-bearer for what I like to call Shit List Horror is THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971). Vincent Price stars as an horrifically scarred (and as such oft-disguised) musical/mechanical/philosophical/theological genius (the man is wicked smart) who makes life hard — and, in fact, ultimately impossible — for the top-flight London surgeons who could not with all their fancy talk and celluloid collars and pince-nezes save his beloved wife on the operating table. Following the model of the Biblical plague of curses levied upon the heads of the pharaohs in the Old Testament, Phibes and his sweetmeat helpmate Vulnavia begin winnowing down the list of  sawbones via bees, locusts, frogs, darkness, blood (read draining) and hail until there is only one name left: Joseph Cotten, as Dr. Vesalius. And then things really get freaky! Directed with bracing black humor by Robert Fuest from a script by James Whiton and William Goldstein and art directed to a stunning turn by Bernard Reeves, THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES is sophisticated fun and surprisingly invigorating for a movie about killing a bunch of dudes (and a lady). Price would follow PHIBES with an immediate sequel and then take another whack at similar material with THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973), as a downcast Shakespearean actor-manager who turns the tables on the London critics by offing them a la the Immortal Bard. I forget which of the tragedies had death by poodle bisque but the way Price serves up this too, too sullied flesh you’d forget there ever was a Shakespeare!

PHIBES‘ employment of an Egyptian curse is especially knowing as I’d wager the whole Shit List subgenre hearkens back to the opening of the tomb of King Tutankhamen in November of 1922. A month after entering Tut’s tomb, excavation sponsor Lord Carnavon suffered a mosquito bite that swiftly became infected, resulting in his death a month later. At the moment of Carnavon’s passing, the hospital lights went out… although rumor quickly spread that the lights had gone out all over Cairo at that moment. As the rumors escalated, the perceived violation of the eternal rest of the Boy King was said to have claimed a baker’s dozen victims. One account maintained that 13 of the 20 people present at the opening of the burial chamber died within the next few years. In fact, only 6 of the 26 present at the tomb-breaking ceremony were dead ten years later and in the same amount of time none of the 10 on hand for the mummy unwrapping had passed away. But who doesn’t love a good mummy curse? As such, the rumors persisted long after the facts had been made public knowledge. Universal Studios ran with the concept in their series of Mummy movies, sparked by Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY (1932) with Boris Karloff and its four sequels. While expedition members do fall victim in the early films, it was not until the second sequel, Harold Young’s THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1942), that a proper list was assembled. In what was then a grimly novel novel approach to a sequel, every surviving character from THE MUMMY’S HAND (1940) is killed off by Lon Chaney, Jr.’s undead Kharis as payback, pharaoh-style. Unlike the swell-headed medicos of THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, whom you don’t mind seeing hoist on the petard of their own hubris (and you may quote me), the victims in THE MUMMY’S TOMB are all nice… and old! Seriously, if you are at all close to your Nana and Gampy, don’t watch this movie!

A decade or so later, Universal would spin this basic set-up another way, with CULT OF THE COBRA (1955), in which a squadron of GIs unwittingly profane a sacred Hindu ceremony and wind up being stalked Stateside by comely shapeshifter Faith Domergue, who in her pique isn’t so much slinky as slithery. The roster of victims (potential and actual) includes a number of rising TV stars, among them THE FUGITIVE‘s David Janssen, MAVERICK‘s Jack Kelly, DAKTARI‘s Marshall Thompson, THE FBI‘s William Reynolds and THE BIG VALLEY‘s Richard Long. Domergue plays her leggy lamia with a measure of self-doubt not seen in these other movies but she ultimately rises to the challenge. “There’s things I have to do,” she tells a prospective suitor — and dumb stuff it aint!

If it weren’t for Boris Karloff and Vincent Price, the number of Shit List Horror movies would be appreciably smaller. These guys played characters with the thinnest skin known to man. One of my favorite SLH flicks is Universal’s THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936), which I first saw as a boy of 12 or 13. Predating THE MUMMY’S TOMB by several years, the Lambert Hillyer film stars Karloff as a brilliant but unorthodox (and, it probably goes without saying, touchy) scientist who harvests the Miracle Glow of a fallen comet, which he calls Radium X. The material proves to have restorative and even healing powers but contact with it gives Karloff the Uncanny the touch of death. (First victim: his dog.) His once fine brain turning to guava jelly, Karloff turns against the other five members of the expedition, killing them off one by one, his glowing hand prints on their lifeless bodies the only clue as to who is behind this spate of fiendish killings. Last on his list is ex-wife Frances Drake, who has remarried; the Luminous Man (as the film’s publicity called him) nearly has her in his incandescent clutch but his mother intervenes and puts paid to his rein of terror. A neat motif in the film’s second half has Karloff using a long distance laser device to destroy a series of cathedral carvings, one for each member of his ill-starred team. If the bit seems oddly familiar, it’s probably because you’ve read Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) or have seen one of the many movies inspired by it. In the book and in several of the film adaptations, ten guests (each guilty of some past wrongdoing) at a remote island/mountain/desert mansion are picked off one little two little three, their murders marked by the serial smashing of a collection of red Indian dolls.

Though it seems an influence, AND THEN THERE WERE NONE/TEN LITTLE INDIANS doesn’t really satisfy the criteria for Shit List Horror, as the focus is more squarely on mystery and detection than the more visceral emotions connected to fear and terror. The same criteria applies to John Huston’s THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963) but I’m inclined to offer a dispensation to the German language THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE (1960), whose original title is the delightful-to-say DIE BANDE DES SCHRECKENS.  (Say it!) Based on the 1926 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name (which predates the Christie novel by 13 years), the film is chockablock with Gothic imagery, graveyards, misty woods, hangman’s nooses, clutching hands and a creepy villain (Otto Collin) who returns from the grave (it seems) to ankle the members of the jury who sentenced him to death.

The central motif of death by hanging in THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE recalls an earlier Boris Karloff vehicle, BEFORE I HANG (1940), which the actor made for Columbia on a time out from his duties at Universal. Directed by Nick Grinde, the film attends the arrest and imprisonment of Karloff’s kindly physician for euthanizing a dying patient. While awaiting his appointment with the electric chair, Karloff develops a device for prolonging human life and restoring youthful vivacity; after his death, a colleague (Edward van Sloan) tries the miracle cure out on Karloff, who lives again… but with the blood of a killer in his veins. Paroled, he attempts to interest the scientific community in his discovery but is met with derision… sooo, he dons his murderin’ hat and sets off to settle the hash of the men who mocked him. A year earlier, Karloff and Grinde had made the similar THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939), which likewise involved a once kindly/now mad scientist who survives a state-ordered hanging to get even with the men who pointed him to the pokey. In the earlier film, Karloff invites his victims to his home, Agatha Christie-style, but in BEFORE I HANG he is more proactive, traveling door to door like some kind of hellish Fuller Brush Man, ticking off line items from the Shit List burned into his abnormal brain. The concept of a Hey-I-thought-you-were-dead guy wreaking havoc on those who thought they survived him has proved a long-leggity logline, used again in Columbia’s CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN (1955). The script by Curt Siodmak turns on the union of a vengeful gangster and an ex-Nazi who put their heads together to reanimate the bodies of the recently deceased for purposes of strangling. It all works out okay in the end but it’s really touch and go for a goodly share of that 69 minutes.

Probably my favorite from-Hell’s-heart-I-stab-at-thee movie is Hy Averback’s CHAMBER OF HORRORS (1966). A pilot for a proposed series about wax museum owners turned sleuths, the film was packed off to cinemas instead… but I first saw it on TV. (The circle of life.) Patrick O’Neal stars as Jason Cravatte, an awful fancy but oh-so-very-insane dandy who hacks off his own hand rather than go to prison and comes back to his native Baltimore with a Gladstone bag full of snap-on appliances with which to divide (and how) and conquer his enemies. Although never graphic in any way, this film is surprisingly nasty and I suppose the case could be made that it anticipates by nearly forty years the so-called “torture porn” subgenre of horror movies typified by SAW (2004) and its umpteen sequels, with sundry characters stretched out supine under Cravatte’s nose. Twenty odd years before Hannibal Lector took names and ate faces, Jason Cravatte was one of those villains who just had you — all you had to do was see him looking back at you to know that you were screwed and that it was going to hurt.

One of the great “I’ll get you– all of you” movies is Frank Henenlotter’s BASKET CASE (1982), in which a team of consulting surgeons is run to ground, its members picked, poked, jabbed and julienned one after the other by the vengeful brother act of a disturbed young man (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and the apparently still-thriving but wayyyy deformed Siamese twin he keeps in a wicker basket. It seems these two didn’t want to be separated all those years ago, thank you very much, and now they’re more than happy to take their displeasure door to door. Shot in and around Times Square back before former mayor Rudy Giuliani gave the Deuce the old Summer’s Eve treatment, BASKET CASE is a lumpy, grimy, dirty, angry sonofabitch of a New York movie, right up there with BLAST OF SILENCE (1961), TAXI DRIVER (1976) and MS. 45 (1941), for the sheer scorched earth policy of its unforgiving protagonist (and a half). When the marinara starts to spill here, not even Charlton Heston could part the resulting red tide. See it with someone you love! Invite friends — making that guest list will be so much more fun now.