Sybil Bruncheon's "Hollywood's Hysterical History"...

THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)... starring an intimate cast (by 1930s Hollywood standards!) of Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, and the always fascinating Ernest ("Gods and Monsters!") Thesiger!...and directed by James Whale… (as flamboyant as ever!)

The title just about says it all, doesn't it? A weird and weirdly funny movie from the pre-code era, that sets a black & white horror mood rather brilliantly. Merrily macabre in so many ways, I often wonder how many takes some scenes took just because the cast broke out laughing especially with the extraordinary James Whale larking about behind the camera with Thesiger flouncing around in front of it! A Must-See, if you haven’t already!! Enjoy!!...

 …oh!... and did I ever tell you about the sequel? YES!! James asked me to star in it along with the reassembled Dark House cast! It was to be called QUEERISH CASTLE (1933 or so). James was getting more and more defiant of Hollywood’s closeted attitude about LGBTQ issues, so he decided to rub the big studios’ noses in it! No longer satisfied with only calling the lead character “Horace Femm”, the residents of Queerish Castle were to be Humpmey Bogart, Beulah Bondage, Finger Rogers, Poosile Ball, Orson Smells, Spencer Lacey, Lesbie Ann Warren, Julie Man-Drews, Clit Walker, Vulvian Vance, and Peener Youstinoff. The castle, though terrifying and full of dead bodies, trap doors, and secret passages, was also to be a fabulous dance hall/speak-easy with Vaudeville acts, including drag performance-knife throwers, transvestite-trapeze artists, contortionist-fortune tellers of indeterminate gender, and dog-and-cat ventriloquism! I was going to play “The Insatiable & Inscrewtable Vaj-eena”, a gypsy fortune teller who uses tea leaves and oblong vegetables to determine the unsuspecting guests’ futures… Misfortune and Merriment ensues!... or so we hoped. The Hays Committee shut us down for “Gross Indecency!... and oblong vegetables!” JEEEESH!!!!

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Sybil Bruncheon's 31 Days of Halloween... Manners Are Nice #15...

Boys and Girls, if you're invited over to a friend's house for Halloween refreshments, always remember to hold your saucer in one hand while you drink from your cup held in the other. It will prevent drips that might soil fine upholstery or a nice table doily or a lady's dress. And of course, never drink from your hand... or slurp... or um... lick a plate... or... whatever...

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Sybil Bruncheon's "My Merry Memoirs!"... the 1950s...

THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957)... on a personal note, I was cast in the sequel made in 1958 with Kenneth Tobey, Beverly Garland, Gloria Talbot, Faith Domergue, John Hoyt, and Narda Onyx... it was called THE DEADLY WO-MANTIS (1958)... I got to play the title character!... well, until the Marines dropped an A-Bomb on me while I was eating Toledo... JEEESH!

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Sybil Bruncheon’s “Hollywood’s Hysterical Histories!”…

Seen here is a rare photo of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe, secretly visiting the set of GODZILLA (1954) on the first day of shooting. She had been in private negotiations with the director Ishirō Honda about starring in the film, but he carefully explained to her through translators that the only American in it would be a male reporter to be played by Raymond Burr. Apparently, Monroe laughed merrily and said “NO, Silly!!” She wanted to play the title character… GODZILLA! She revealed she had been coached for months by her mentor Lee Strasberg and had stayed overnight at the Cuddly Critters Petting Zoo … in their iguana cage! The staff, again patiently, granted that although she was quite convincing at stepping on toy skyscrapers in slow motion and roar-honking loudly on cue, she was still too attractive to play a dinosaur… even if she DID stop using moisturizer. She was devastated and returned to America heartbroken. She immediately married baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. Who she claimed “looks a lot like Godzilla, especially when he just gets out of the shower!”…

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Sybil Bruncheon's "My Brilliant Career!".....Chapter 36:

A British film studio sent me a proposal for a remake of the 1960s film GEORGY GIRL with me in the title role……. Here’s the opening sequence:

London. Music plays on an old broken juke box in a rundown pub…."HEY THERE, Georgy Girl! There's another Georgy deep inside...show off all the love you hide.....". etc., etc.... Georgy (Sybil) an overweight dumpy girl dressed in a forlorn “mod” costume dances around sad pub, upsetting chair and a table with mugs on it..... she jumps up on counter to do the “frug”, when counter collapses onto 6 patrons, killing one, and crippling 3 others for life!!!!!.....music stops as ambulance and local police are called......patrons run out of pub screaming in horror..... (dramatic monster music)…

Gorgo suddenly appears from behind a hillside attracted by screams. Interacts with electrical power lines and Big Ben. While upending a tramp steamer on the Thames, a street car heading for Piccadilly, and a fish-cart selling cockles, mussels, (alive-alive-o!), he notices a plump rubber snack on the ground. He doesn’t realize it’s actually Georgy and picks it up in his mouth, shaking it like a puppy playing with a sock, and swallows it in one gulp...... He rampages on to Glasgow for a night of drinking and carousing on a pub crawl with Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra who have flown in for the weekend!.... more mischief ensues involving more ship sinkings, planes pulled from midair, and fish-cart tragedies.. in the closing credits, Judith Durham and The Seekers are heard singing "Hey there GORGIE-boy, there's another GEORGY deep inside.....". Credit roll reveals cameo appearances by Honor Blackman, Ethel Griffies, O.P. Heggie, Ernest Thesiger, and an as-yet-unknown Sean Connnery as a fish-and-chips peddler in Brighton. As the credits finish, the Monkees are seen running around in a fast-motion chase with tambourines and Benny Hill carrying an ax! Black-out.

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Sybil Bruncheon's Tales From Other Worlds... or... Are They?...

"Pathetic Earth creatures! We have come a great distance from another world. Our own planet was not enough for our delights. We have eaten our pets, burned our forests, gouged our mountains, and soiled our oceans. It was great fun, but now we want to do the same to yours. Offer us your abundant plenty, and we will allow you to protect one of your puny offspring from our kitchens during our feast time. One youngling only! In honor of our own beloved Spawn, who we hatched from his larva-sack and crowned as our pupa-prince. Note his oh-so-delicate fore-pincers; small and very sophisticated, and how he waves them about when he harangues his hive-ettes. Worship him and obey his whims lest you incur his righteous wrath. Build huge hive-walls to protect him from brown-things... and tremble in awe of his mighty cranium-pod covered in orange bug-silk! Bzzzzzzzz!!!!!!"

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!".... what is that, there in the shadows?...

....the tradition had always been to make a wonderful costume either with your friends in the weeks before the big night, or do it all separately from them all so you could surprise them on Halloween night at the parties before everyone went out Trick-or-Treating. That was the tradition... and it was a good one... and one that everyone trusted, generation to generation... father to son, mother to daughter... on and on... Until the Bad Time came.... when children were no longer safe to go out into the night and only play at being scared, and to gather candies in exchange for facing their childhood fears.

True, in the past, there were occasions, rare, very rare occasions when a child might go missing, but those were very few and far between. But NOW... in the Bad Time, no one would dream of sending a child off into the night, not in the neighborhood, not even into the gentle countryside to celebrate the merriment and mystery of Halloween without watchful, even fearful adults, hovering, questioning, fretting.... And that was why, when she appeared out of nowhere... well, so much upheaval. Rumors whispered, compounded on more rumors... wild, strange terrifying stories about horrible, horrible... too horrible to even name. Grown-ups spent sleepless nights…or else endless nights of strange, heated sleep, sweating but frozen too till they shivered and ached in their soaking wet sheets...tangled and twisted with dreadful visions... to wake exhausted into flat gray mornings. Too gray to even know if it was morning..

She was nameless, so someone, unnamed themselves, called her The Melon Lady because of that... was it a face? ...At some point, she became The Melon Lady. And her reputation was instantly known far and wide because she had been named. Her .... "proclivities"...and "habits" had been witnessed...from "remains".... but it was the naming that made everything so final. And so factual. There was the fact now of what she could do...and might do.. and how much farther and more grotesque it might get...if she wasn't stopped...She had to be stopped. But how? The banal powers of the "modern world" were useless...stupid and clumsy.

You see, the Bad Time had created her ...and made her necessary... in an odd irony. The Bad Time had brought her here...and she was created out of the great mystery of the thing known as Balance. And that Balance was what was both a horror…and a comfort. For you see The Melon Lady was the one who did the bad things… to the bad people. It started out only as rumors… a person would be found perhaps days after being reported missing… well parts of them would be found..in various places where many people would find what she had left behind. There would sometimes be writing …on the pieces.. or if fire was involved, then on a wall nearby.. or a note pinned to a doorway. As the acts became more hideous, a sort of humor would be injected… the notes would be scrawled on fine stationery… in blood… or ..No!... it was lipstick… It started out as a word or two, a phrase, but eventually they turned into short poems with deliberately bad punctuation, misspellings, dangling modifiers… split infinitives… or… “provocative” drawings… drawings that sneered at the victim, and insulted his or her family… and even threatened them as well…

And so, she became bolder, more brazen in her daring… the Balance required that, as the Bad Time worsened, she had to be more… thorough. Because she was the Protector of children. The Avenger. The Terrible Price. Her names became manifold…. So it was easier, more expedient… and more terrible just to say that The Melon Lady had come. The Melon Lady had been there. The Melon Lady had left.. that… behind. The Melon Lady would punish you. And she did. She always did. …and …gradually the Bad Time and its friends began to be burned away… She was never wrong. The Balance was infallible… She was The Melon Lady… and children everywhere grew to love her… love her very much.

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HALLOWEEN-ERS!!.... Convention Time!!!

HALLOWEEN-ERS!!!...Attention! The International Vampire Hunters Convention is converging on Manhattan this weekend. Last call for pre-registration for seminars, exercises, meet'n'greets, classes, symposiums, demonstrations, cocktail parties, celebrity banquets, vampire slayings, Holy-Water-Balloon Fights, and the Equipment & Device Swap! (.....please notify the caterers of any dietary preferences or allergies to shellfish, peanuts… or garlic) 

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN": Curtain UP!

...Hey Facebook Friends! Aren’t sure what you’re doing on the evening of the 31st yet, but you don’t want to be home for Trick-or-Treaters??...well, the Shubert Organization and a posse of producers are proud to present a special new play to premiere that very night; PRIVATE LIVES…ON URANUS!! The new interpretation of the Noël Coward classic will feature the regular characters, Amanda, Victor, and Sybil, but the character of Elyot has been replaced by a suave yet psychotically dangerous and petty robot… his behavior, alternately murderous and then gossipy and condescending, (with a cigarette holder!) vexes the other lovers and eliminates the servants one-by-one. A frayed extension cord, a sudden Spring shower, and a stale scone bring the riotously funny and frightful horror-comedy to a very satisfying close…albeit in an oxygen-free atmosphere at -276°F….

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Sybil Bruncheon’s “31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!”…. Those Naughty Nickersons!

                  Toinette Nickerson proved to be a fairly mischievous child even at 4 years of age. She teased the cat, hid thumbtacks in grandma’s rocking chair cushion, and replaced the sugar in the sugar bowl with salt. At first, her family chuckled that she was “such a scamp” as her Aunt Delia called her, but her pranks escalated in both frequency and severity as she grew older. A missing tricycle, a broken wagon, and a stolen princess tiara at Halloween were eventually superseded by missing money, a broken windshield, and a stolen wallet when she was in high school. It was interesting that she became a delinquent when most young ladies were obsessed with just that; acting like young ladies. But Toinette bought herself a black leather bolero jacket, and kept a pack of Lucky Strikes in the breast pocket with her Zippo lighter that she flipped open with one hand. She could talk tough with any of the guys in shop class, and dated a few of the football players, though none of the stars.

                   High school came and went!...she managed to graduate with a C- average. College never exactly came… Toinette wasn’t really interested, motivated, or gifted enough to think about college. And so the usual events tumbled one after the other in her humdrum, small-town, rustbelt life. Barmaid in a roadhouse and dating a biker, then a bass guitarist in a local band, then a gas station mechanic who was both a biker and a drummer in the same band.

                  And then the first kid, and another, and another …all with an aluminum siding salesman she met at the roadhouse. Things (and years) flowed along with some ups, some downs, nothing very dramatic…or exciting either. Toinette found herself accepting that she had become a woman, mellowing, and even responsible in many ways especially because of her three children for whom she tried to set a good example. Her own parents before they died were often surprised at her growing maturity, chuckling at how even she had become …well, “motherly”. Her figure thickened, she kept earlier hours, she and her husband bought a station wagon…and a swing set…and were saving up for an above-ground pool for the kids. Eventually, they actually bought the roadhouse and ran it together…fairly successfully, especially after the new highway was rerouted right by it.

                 Everything was going great, until that one Halloween. The rumors were that Toinette had been telling the children about her own childhood Halloweens and the pranks that she and some of her naughtier friends from “the wrong side of the tracks” had practiced on the neighbors. Old Mrs. Kenbright had her porch covered with wet toilet tissue and bags of dog poop that had been set on fire. Mr. Bandy had stepped on the rake they left on his front steps, and it flipped up and broke his glasses and chipped his false teeth. And they had taken Kimmy O’Connor’s tricycle and left it five blocks away in the parking lot of the Piggly-Wiggly…. But it was never seen again. Toinette’s children laughed and laughed, mostly because she had a fun and frisky way of retelling her misadventures… but she also managed to strip the events of any empathy for the victims or seriousness in the consequences. And there were consequences. Mrs. Kenbright’s trellis actually caught fire, and it spread up the right side of the house, charring the magnificent, ancient oak tree that had been planted there 150 years before. Mr. Bandy, in his late 70s, was severely bruised for weeks afterwards, and died suddenly of a heart attack only three months later. And little Kimmy was never really very cheerful or trusting again after her beloved tricycle disappeared. One would think that children were much more resilient, or forgetful in the face of loss, but Kimmy was one of those more sensitive and introspective children. From that Halloween night on, Kimmy was described as having a “sad streak”, becoming untrusting and withdrawing from most of her friends. She ignored the new tricycle her father bought her claiming that her “old one was lost somewhere out in the world” and was crying to come home. She woke up constantly from nightmares screaming that her tricycle was lonely and afraid in a field in thunderstorms….or that “it was being killed by bad men with sticks and rocks”. Whenever it snowed, she would sit in her bedroom window with her little hands pressed against the brittle glass, rocking back and forth obsessed that it was lying in the frozen mud wondering why she hadn’t come to save it. She was inconsolable and grief-stricken as only sensitive children can be who have none of the callouses and maturity that adults use to make sense of or ignore the cruelties that befall the innocent in our world.

                Toinette had started out as not one of those innocents. Whether by birth or by training, she had never been heartbroken or betrayed by the casual and careless world, and if she had been, she certainly didn’t let it inconvenience her for more than a moment or so. Some people don’t mind the pain that others feel. They don’t see the devastation in the eyes of another person in the face of terrible loss. And even as she grew and aged, and matured with a family of her own, that lack, that flatness if you will, still remained inside her, because of course, as you well know, people are pretty much what they are. After the first few years of childhood, it’s almost impossible for someone to be other than what they have become. Their characters have set in stone, so to speak….for good or ill. Is that why Toinette took her children out trick-or-treating that one Halloween evening and suggested that they might do a few “innocent pranks”, even when they had been given candy! At the Bancroft’s house, she tiptoed up on the porch and showed her children how to soap the windows over on the side where it wouldn’t be noticed till the next morning… and at the Carterette’s, they smashed the huge pumpkin that Nellie had carved herself and named King Chuckles…. right in the bushes, his smiling face caved in and broken, half-smiling still and yet now, unbearably sad. Toinette and her children scampered off into the dark, going from one house to another as the night drew on, and finally she realized they were forgetting to even ring doorbells and collect the “treats” that they had started out for. She herself seemed to be returning to her own childhood as she dragged her breathless kids along on an increasingly frenzied rampage.

                 It was getting later, much later than most parents would have allowed their children to be out, and so reluctantly, Toinette decided it was time to head home. Her eldest asked if they were going to ring bells for any more candy, but Toinette knew that they would be met with concerned and even disapproving looks if they wandered up onto porches at that hour, especially with her youngest being a toddler and her oldest no more than 6. As they rounded the corner of one of the streets, she noticed a darkened house up a remote and winding drive that looked abandoned. She stopped and asked the children if they’d like to have one last adventure where they could play all the pranks that they could think of. Her children stared at the house in the faint and fading moonlight and the middle one sniffled a little about being scared. Toinette told her not to be a baby, and she began marching up the gravel drive, grown over in many places with weeds and ivy. Toinette picked up some stones in her free hand and handed them to her children saying that if the house was empty they could throw them through windows!...much more fun than soaping them. And she said to the kids, wasn’t it fun that they had dressed as ghosts because they could go into the house and run about pretending to haunt the place, making scary sounds, and breaking furniture and anything else they found inside. They could scream and shriek and moan like hideous monsters as wildly as they liked! Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t that be the very best fun??... and her children stared at her, both excited and a little frightened by their Mommy’s strange voice.

               As they walked up to the huge house, right up to the dilapidated porch that had once been so wide and grand but now was falling away, Toinette gathered them all together. She hugged them and laughed and encouraged them to be scary and wild. They looked back down the long drive, winding and black into the thick bushes and leaning trees, and marveled that they had been brave enough to come all this way. “See?”, said Toinette. “Look how far we’ve come, and we’ve been ghosts all night long. Just like when I was a little girl playing tricks on people and scaring them!”… and then, suddenly, for a split second she heard her own voice…outside of herself. And she thought for just one instant… just one, of Nellie’s pumpkin looking sadly up at her as the candle flickered out… and of Kimmy’s little tricycle, so many years ago… looking back over her shoulder at it sitting in the single lonely light of the parking lot. Waiting to be taken back to the loving arms of a little girl who would never see it or hold it again.

              And it was in that moment, that moment of remembering other Halloweens over the many years, that Toinette heard a small twig snap behind her… and the children…. And then, for the first time, it was her turn to be afraid…

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