There is now, of course, a third notable NOSFERATU in the collective unconscious, which I haven’t yet gotten around to hate-watching.

The plan, on Christmas, was to get up early, and begin with Murnau’s 1922 silent, in bed (which I did), then stay put and revisit Herzog’s 1979 remake (which I also did). Finally, I would set out to complete the trifecta with Robert Eggers’ third pass at not-Dracula. (I did not do that.) The world doesn’t need another talky white guy’s perspective on either Murnau or Herzog, but in short turn I’ll see the new, gangly thing, rope em all together, and do my best to justify my unthusiasm.

In the meantime, I’m bananas for Robert Hartford-Davis’ 1968 grindhouse yarn, CORRUPTION. I’ve watched a lot of Hammer movies, so I’ve seen a lot of Peter Cushing off the chain. But never quite like this.

The story is openly pulled from Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE, from 1960. Only this time the mad scientist is cutting up people instead of animals, and he isn’t saving his disfigured child but his disfigured lover. Cushing, in a nuanced and unusually vulnerable turn, plays John Rowan, a brilliant surgeon whose romance with a Swinging London it-girl model goes south when, in a hard left into Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP, territory, he tangles with an overbearing fashionista-svengali at a wild sex party freakout, in the midst of which the model’s face gets burned off. Folks familiar with the Franju movie will need to see this collision of sensibilities to believe it. Long story short, to return his scarred love to the spotlight, and more importantly keep hold of her heart (Sue Lloyd adding a bonkers femme fatale to the mix) he must commit murder and deft subsequent feats of face transplant, and fend off a gang of would-be burglars (whose leader arrives wearing a cape.) There’s also a death laser.

In its tacky psychedelia and ratcheting up aesthetic of shock horror (and shock camp in equal measure) we somehow pick up a pastiche of a lot of great, otherwise-unrelated movies. Blink slowly and you’ll catch nods to Hitchcock’s THE LADY VANISHES and THE BIRDS. But the real kicker is watching things come full circle, when, four years later, Hitchcock, clearly fearing himself falling behind, released his own foray into the shock genre, FRENZY.

Even Russ Meyer’s BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, with one foot planted in forward-thinking and the other gallantly in not-thinking, feels like it couldn’t have happened without crossing this grindhouse strait, first. So much of the violence, emotional and physical, uniting all of these movies is rooted in vanity and resentments over being left behind in quickly changing times, and the disastrous efforts we make to keep up with them. The holy-shit factor of CORRUPTION keeps the theme from ever being a killjoy.