Carrie by Stephen King - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - April 28, 1974]

The Blue Ghost - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - April 26, 1930]

Here is another ad that caught my eye while I was searching for other stuff. I felt it was worth clipping and sharing here based on the title alone. But what is it, exactly? Well, I did a little digging and this what little I learned...

The Blue Ghost, by Bernard McOwen and J.P. Riewerts, is an old dark house yarn wherein a group of people gather together at the gloomy home of one Dr. De Former. Their intention is to investigate the bizarre occurrences that are happening in the house and to solve the mystery of the blue ghost.

Although the Oakland Tribune did not have a critic review this production's brief run at the Dufwin Theater, they did quote a review from the Evening World that was for its concurrent Broadway performances. An unnamed critic is quoted raving at how, "Eerie, ghostly, uncanny things happened so fast and furiously that the weak gasped, the strong gulped, and the blasé blinked."

Uh, okay...

The Tribune article goes on to share how the production offered "sliding panels, clutching hands, ghostly apparitions, doors that open and shut without human touch, flying daggers, shots in the dark and cloaked figures." Wow. That sounds like a good time to me.

The article then closes with the observation that this new mystery play is "said to have more humor than a majority of its companions."

I also learned that co-writer Bernard J. McOwen played Dr. De Former on Broadway. That production opened on March 10, 1930 and closed in June of that year, after just 112 performances. About 14 weeks on the Great White Way, at what was once the Forrest Theater and is now the Eugene O'Neill Theatre.

Learning that factoid got me to do a little more digging, which uncovered a less than stellar review of The Blue Ghost that appeared in the March 11 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle. 

The unnamed critic for that paper derided the production as "one of those plays of creaking boards, flickering lights, windows that open and shut without rhyme or reason, and appearing and disappearing ghosts, gargoyles, clutching hands and arms - also without rhyme or reason." Ouch.

This critic notes that the cast "works hard with the material available," calls a character a racial slur, and closes with the opinion that The Blue Ghost "should have been billed a burlesque of a mystery play."

I feel compelled to add, although this is pretty much stating the obvious, the fact that racist language was used to describe a character, but not the performer, suggests that blackface was used in the production. It was 1930, after all...

It's Alive (1974) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - April 10, 1977]

Larry Cohen's iconic monster baby opus It's Alive had a brief theatrical run in 1974, but was pulled and shelved by an unimpressed, or just plain embarrassed, distributor. 

Three years and a regime change later, the new boss had a far more favorable opinion of It's Alive than the old boss. So, in 1977, the movie was pulled off the shelf and re-released, with a snazzy new campaign that scared the living daylights out of nine-year-old me.

I was fascinated and petrified by the sight of that clawed hand draped over the side of an ever so slowly twirling basset, the thumping heartbeat that began as soon as it came into view, and the monstrous cry heard just after the narrator intones, "You see, there's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby... it's alive."

While not a huge hit by today's standards, the film did rake in a tidy profit for the studio. So a sequel was requested. More on that later.

I didn't see It's Alive until well into the 1980s. While it was not quite the traumatizing creature feature I had imagined as a child, it was nonetheless an intriguing and fascinating little nightmare scenario.

Xtro (1982) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - April 8, 1983]

I was still living in the United States when Xtro got its limited theatrical release, but I have no memory of it.

What I do remember from that time period was the gnarly image from the film that graced the cover of Fangoria's 24th issue.

Fangoria 24 - December 1982

There was also an interesting observation made about the film in The Twilight Zone Magazine's annual movie recap, printed in its January-February 1984 issue, titled 1983: The Year of Living Languorously (a scathing reference to the perceived mediocrity of most genre films released in 1983). 

TZ's recaps shared opinions of what was believed to have worked in the films, and what did not. The observation regarding Xtro was considered something that worked: "The oddly touching idea, buried somewhere in the film, that this entire story of a man kidnapped by aliens and returned to earth may be just the wishful dream of his abandoned young son." I like that read, it works for me. 

Xtro does have something of a dreamlike vibe to it and, if you go with that "wishful dream" read, its pairing with David Cronenberg's The Brood is an excellent choice. But I can't say the same about having Jekyll and Hyde Together Again serving as a comedic palate cleanser for this triple-feature. That movie is just plain dreadful.

By Reason of Insanity by Shane Stevens - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - April 8, 1979]

I was searching for a different ad when I stumbled across this full page one for Shane Stevens' By Reason of Insanity.

I had no idea this book even existed until, just over a decade later, I read Stephen King's afterward to The Dark Half. That is where King shared his admiration for Stevens' body of work, writing, "These [books], where the so-called 'criminal mind' and a condition of irredeemable psychosis interweave to create their own closed system of perfect evil, are three of the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream." King recommended Stevens' books only to those readers "with strong stomachs and stronger nerves."

Sold! 

Only in 1989/1990 there were no editions of Stevens' books to be found, anywhere. This situation was finally resolved in 1997, or thereabouts, when Carroll and Graf reissued Stevens' books, with King's praise for them plastered across their covers, of course.

That is when I was able to crack open By Reason Of Insanity and learn that King was not overselling the material with that strong stomach and nerves disclaimer. By Reason Of Insanity ends with a confounding gut punch of a reveal that, to this very day, makes a heavy knot of dread form in my stomach, sends a chill up my spine, and makes my skin want to crawl off my body and hide in a corner.