Come On Folks...Where's the Shadow Movie TWO

It's time for the Shadow to invade the public consciousness once again.






One of the greatest literary creations ever, right up there with your Tarzan and your Sherlock Holmes, the Shadow hasn't been heard from much in recent years. His copyright owners are probably mostly responsible, as Street and Smith keep a tight rein on who gets to produce Shadow work, from movies to books to comics.






The shame of it all seems to me that no one has written a "contemporary" Shadow novel. Novelists Joe R. Lansdale and Philip Jose Farmer both received permission from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estateover the last twenty years to produce one Tarzan novel each. Farmer wrote one original Doc Savage novel some years ago.









But not many have dabbled in the Shadow. Certainly entertainment media have been slow to realize the potential.





Of course, we have had a fairly well-made Shadow movie, in 1994 and starring Alec Baldwin. Every time I sit down to watch it, I've forgotten almost everything about it except the actual Shadow himself (nice make-up and glittery eye effects.) I watch it and immediately forget what I've seen once more. The worst thing to say about the movie was that it wasn't bad, but it's dated already by its time frame, and not in a good 1970s kind of way.





So THE SHADOW movie was unremarkable, but not bad by any stretch. Acceptable might be another word, but not mediocre.







The last I'd heard, Sam Raimi had designs on making a Shadow film...it could be argued he already has, to a degree, with DARKMAN. If you took the Shadow and mashed him together with Frankenstein's Monster, you'd have Darkman. Love the movie, even though there's flaws...DARKMAN is one of the best neo-Pulp movies out there, made four years before THE SHADOW and not suffering from "gotta be a hit"-itis. DARKMAN gets a point across while THE SHADOW pinpointed the BATMAN crowd like a voodoo doll.




I'm not saying Raimi's the best man. The old joke is, two young people are about to get married. The preacher asks the groom, "Who's your best man?" The groom's buddy steps forward. The preacher says, "Is this the best man you could find?"







Sam Raimi's kind of like that. At least he grasps the concept of what the Shadow could be, and is, if DARKMAN is an indication. What you fear with any Hollywood product is, well, the movie being a Hollywood product.












I think the Shadow would work spectacularly better as a series, one of those HBO type things like "Dexter." The problem with television is a lower budget, and that means losing the 1930s era in which the Shadow operated, as "period" stuff is much harder to replicate and sell.


























From a personal standpoint, I don't think the Shadow has to be "period." I find something strangely alluring about the Shadow appearing anytime between the 1930s and the turn of the century. His anachronistic obsession with justice, his views on what constitutes evil from a time when Hitler threatened to take over the world, might clash interestingly with today's "shades of gray" society. The Shadow is an "A is A" kind of guy.









Pretty much everything I'm saying to repeated ad nauseum anytime a character like the Shadow or some superhero thing pops up in movie talks. The idea of television allows the Shadow to operate more as he should, a prevading presence in the lives of criminals and agents. In a modern context, think of Keyser Soze in USUAL SUSPECTS...Soze dominates the running time without physically appearing more than three total minutes the entire film.






My view is that the Shadow should be riding the cresting wave of Pulp Hero interest which has arrived in recent times. Comics (always the forerunners on thematic trends these days) have come around to the idea of Pulp as genre, evidenced by Hellboy's popularity, spawning the Goon by Eric Powell, referencing the Phantom published by Moonstone Comics, and circling to Atomic Robo by Red5 Comics, coursing bloodily through JONAH HEX at DC Comics and insinuating itself in Ed Brubaker's work at Marvel, particularly CAPTAIN AMERICA and the idiosyncratic SLEEPER from a few years ago.





If comics trigger the interest of the buying public, surely the Pulp wave will come next once the superhero "craze" has died down. At some point, American culture always returns to the dark side of heroics, the obsessed fistfighters and bullet dancers of Pulp. Indiana Jones followed SUPERMAN THE MOVIE into the consciousness of our society...BATMAN begat DARKMAN and THE SHADOW and THE PHANTOM movies. What's coming then, in the darkening surf after the superhero waves have passed?
















Is that a Shadow of something?




All artwork by spectacular contemporary artists Chris Samnee http://www.chrissamnee.com/2008_11_01_archive.html, John Cassaday, Gary Gianni http://www.garygianni.com/, Francesco Francavilla at http://pulpsunday.blogspot.com/, and the inimitable Jim Steranko on those classic novel covers of the 1970s.

Halloween...Shambling...Closer...Closer

Myself, I've always been partial to the "Wolf Man" icon of the Horror Greats.

Erroneously labeled "Werewolf" in this series from 1970's Marvel Comics, the character above is a Wolf Man through and through.


The difference?

For starters, it should be stated "Lycanthropy" or "moon madness" is a verifiable psychological illness in the "real" world. They ain't called "lunatics" for nothing, folks. "Lycanthropy" usually means someone who believes they turn into a raging beast when the moon is full. The word encompasses fiction's bastardization of the premise over the years.

A "werewolf" is an "Old World" legend concerning men who make deals with the Devil, usually involving selling their souls for a belt of wolf-fur that, when worn, turns them into great, big slavering wolves. No "man" involved post-transformation, just a wolf, usually larger than most, which feasts on human flesh. An odd by-product of this supernatural transformation is the discarded clothes of the practitioner, which turn to stone until he removes the belt (or whatever item given him by Satan) and becomes a man again.

The "Wolf Man" however, is purely a film creation.

Lon Chaney Jr. played the iconic Wolf Man in the 1945 movie of the same name. There was another before that, in 1935, again "wrongly" titled WEREWOLF OF LONDON with Henry Hull suffering the curse of the beast and Warner Oland (the first Charlie Chan) the film's villain. WEREWOLF OF LONDON is a great movie, and Hull's Wolf Man, unlike Chaney Jr's more fuzzy-wuzzy version (okay, I just dissed Hall of Fame make-up artist Jack Pierce, but his Wolf Man is no Frankenstein Monster!) is what I call an actual Wolf Man:







I mean, that is unbelievably badass.



Somewhere in between, and perhaps the greatest Wolf Man design of all time, is Oliver Reed in CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961, Hammer Studios):

http://www.gjsentinel.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/communities/toddp/

to see a bunch more sweet sculptures of horror icons!)

Pretty much the opening credits of CURSE do one thing better than any movie I've seen with a Wolf Man character...the opening shows a band of light across a set of yellow eyes--the eyes of Oliver Reed's Wolf Man--and over a period of a minute or so while the credits play, Reed's eyes begin to well up and tears stream down his face.

Now, I know this was because the colored contacts used in the 1960s were akin to pressing painted sandpaper on top of your eyeballs (according to Christopher Lee, who ran around in them as Dracula for most of the 1960s and early 1970s), so Reed "weeping" is eye irritation.

But in the context of the movie, of the Wolf Man as a victim himself, it's a beautiful (dare-I-pretense-it) metaphor for the tragedy.


Because a Wolf Man is, as the great screenwriter Curt Siodmak penned it (in a famous poem written specifically for THE WOLF MAN):

Even a Man who is Pure in Heart
And Says his Prayers by Night
May become a Wolf When the Wolfbane Blooms
And the Autumn Moon is Bright


Yeah, that is pure 100% my favorite poem of all time.


The tragedy of the Wolf Man is that he's usually a poor schlub like you or me, bopping along trying to date pretty girls, have a strawberry shake and catch the late show, when he's attacked by a "wolf-like creature" and injured, specifically bitten.


From that moment on, the schlub "dies" and is cursed to be immortal. Not a bad deal, except he becomes a Wolf Man during the full moon each month and tries to tear his loved ones to pieces. In fact, his loved ones are most likely to be his victims, as the "man" part will seek out those familiar to him, longing for help and understanding...and it is the beast, lusting for blood, who kills them.


I think this is why I always loved the Wolf Man more than Frankenstein's Monster or the Invisible Man or the Gill-Man...the Wolf Man cannot control his fury. He has to kill everything in his path. Other classic Horror Monsters make conscious decisions concerning their fate, but the Wolf Man has no choice. His animal instinct is to hunt and kill, merciless as nature.


To awaken from a dream of blood, as the Man must do once the beast recedes, is to awaken to a nightmare of what he has done. At the core of the Wolf Man's tragedy is this horror, the kind of horror none of us would want to bear, and that is why the Wolf Man is truly unique among his peers.