Raised From the Grave

In 1972, a psychedelic horror film was shot in Philly, hit the drive-ins, then disappeared without a trace. Now it's been exhumed to haunt the big screen again.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Jun 4, 2008

INTERIOR, ATTIC, 2003 — DAY

"Enter A spanish dwarf": Two years before his Bond turn as Nick Nack, Hervé Villechaize was Malatesta's sadistic Bobo. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

CHRISTOPHER SPEETH, a hardy, white-haired man in his mid-60s, rummages through boxes and piles of forgotten mementos in the attic of his Mount Airy home. Suddenly, a dawning sense of shock as he uncovers two dusty, round canisters holding a half-forgotten horror from Speeth's distant past ...

"That's a bit hypey," Christopher Speeth laughs. Over lunch in a Chestnut Hill tavern, the director of Malatesta's Carnival of Blood — the film that lived in those canisters — dismisses the suggestion that he had rediscovered a "lost" film. Speeth had long remembered cutting up his only personal print in order to construct a trailer for the film's limited release. But the reel in his attic was complete, and the director promptly ushered the film to Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope, where it was restored and quietly released on DVD. While it's true that the film went unseen for almost 30 years, could it really be considered lost if no one was looking for it?

An anxious audience gathers for the première of a locally shot horror film. Anticipation runs high, but as the evening progresses, the filmmakers sink lower into their seats ...

It's unclear what the audience gathered on Penn's campus was expecting that night, but it certainly wasn't Malatesta's Carnival of Blood. And they were not pleased.

"A couple of us got some money together and rented some klieg lights and set them up like this was a big première," recalls Dan Dietrich, heir to the Luden's Cough Drop fortune, arts philanthropist and sometime actor who played the title role. "We were told to desist by the hospital across the street because the lights were shining in the patients' windows. But the film was met with complete silence, and as the titles came up at the end, this massive cry of indignation arose. It was a bad scene, borne mostly on the shoulders of Christopher Speeth."

Horror films in the early '70s ran the gamut from William Marshall's erudite African vampire Blacula to Christopher Lee putting the bite on mod London swingers in Dracula AD 1972; from the murderous twins of Brian de Palma's Sisters to Wes Craven's rape-revenge sleazefest Last House on the Left.

Into that marketplace burst Malatesta, a psychedelic fugue about a carnival housing an underground clan of cannibalistic ghouls. This singular oddity was helmed by an eccentric polymath, assisted by prominent Philadelphians with cinematic aspirations and money to burn, with a cast blending students, off-Broadway veterans and participants in Philly's nascent underground theater scene.

Thirty-six years later, queries about the film are met with the sort of rolled eyes and mock embarrassment evoked by decades-old prom photos. For most of those involved in its production, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood is a fondly, if only vaguely, remembered flirtation with filmmaking. Today, it stands as a testament to guerrilla filmmaking, an amusement park that once thrived where a mall now stands, and an idiosyncratic mix of Philadelphia characters.

An attractive pair of twentysomethings, JANINE CARAZO, portraying heroine Vena Norris, and PAUL TOWNSEND as her boyfriend, Johnny, have just escaped from the bizarre underground funhouse of the evil Malatesta and his flesh-eating cult (not to mention HERVÉ VILLECHAIZE as the sadistic dwarf Bobo). For no apparent reason, they've decided to take a midnight ride on the roller coaster rather than escape, when JEROME DEMPSEY, as the subtly named vampiric park manager Mr. Blood, rears up in the car behind them, fangs bared ...

As scenes like this one exemplify, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood has little patience for narrative sense. A generation later, that turns out to be the film's most laudable quality. Borderline incomprehensible, unevenly acted, directed in a rush and produced for pocket change, the film nonetheless looks like almost nothing else, with a handmade, collage-art-of-the-damned design that resembles the Manson Family remaking Magical Mystery Tour in the aftermath of a circus train derailment.

By its latter half, when the minimal story line has been jettisoned altogether, the film progresses with the disorienting leaps and obsessive recurrences of a nightmare. With the run of a dilapidated amusement park and sets cobbled together from found materials, Speeth obviously opted for visual audacity over linear storytelling. Many of those involved now deem the film "hokey," but modern viewers would be more inclined toward words like "psychedelic" or "trippy." Where too many low-budget horrors get weighed down by endless exposition, Malatesta is almost wholly unconcerned with logic or continuity. It all ends with the victorious monsters enjoying one of the park's rides, an absolutely endearing shot that embodies the playfulness of its production.

As scenes from Nosferatu and Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera play out against the back wall of the empty factory standing in for the carnival's subterranean lair, the black-robed DAN DIETRICH, playing Malatesta, tosses chunks of meat to the grotesque rabble huddled at his feet. CHRISTOPHER SPEETH, camera on his shoulder, frantically captures the madness ...

The sense of giddy play on the set came from two completely different sources for the film's director and its lead villain. For Speeth, it was a necessity, the result of a shortage of time and money and the mere sketch of a script. For Dietrich, who certainly wasn't reliant on stardom for making his fortune, the role was a bit of a lark, undertaken for a friend.

The two were partners in another film, a documentary on local painter Thomas Eakins, for which they were then engaged in an ultimately futile struggle to find distribution. Speeth had recently graduated from Penn's Annenberg School, where he'd studied film under documentarian Sol Worth, known for his work giving Navajo Indians access to filmmaking equipment. He'd been making commercial and documentary films for clients including Mount Sinai Hospital and the United Church of Christ, who funded a film called Dona Nobis Pacem, an anti-Vietnam war piece featuring footage of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy at a Washington peace march.

One of three brothers who inherited the Luden's Cough Drop brand, Dietrich began collecting the work of Eakins and other American artists shortly after college and soon learned that several of the painter's models were still alive. He enlisted Speeth to direct interviews with them, which eventually blossomed into the full-fledged documentary.

Dietrich was not, however, a complete acting novice; he'd appeared in several productions at the Theatre of the Living Arts during legendary director/cinematic dinner guest Andre Gregory's tenure, and was still serving on TLA's board. At the time, the theater was at the center of a South Street arts movement, pointing the way toward the revival of Society Hill.

"I was no great shakes as an actor," Dietrich confesses, "but I spent a lot of time in rehearsals watching Andre and what the actors did in response. I was very immersed in the risks and the hazards and the euphoria that's part of creating."

With his long, dark hair and mustache, Dietrich resembled a satanic Concert for Bangladesh-era George Harrison, and lends Malatesta an impish quality that undercuts his malevolence but becomes just another of the film's dreamlike incongruities.

"There was no one acting style at work," Dietrich says. "You had everything from extra-plain to off-the-wall histrionics. I guess I was trying to find that brooding, Nosferatu-like, haunted, lost-but-by-no-means-innocent energy. I love horror movies — not slasher movies, maybe not the kind of movie Chris was making, but the great Old Master horror movies."

Today, Dietrich's company's sale of Luden's to Hershey in the mid-1980s has left him to concentrate on the philanthropic Dietrich Foundation, granting funds to arts organizations with more experimental leanings, including the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Network for New Music. Speeth seemed to have a knack at the time for attracting wealthy dreamers, which is how Malatesta came to exist in the first place.

Bugged out: Alan Johnson, doubling for Dan Dietrich's Malatesta, carries Janine Carazo toward her doom. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

CHRISTOPHER SPEETH strikes up a conversation with his seatmate. RICHARD GROSSER, mid-30s, happens to possess both a newly minted fortune and an interest in the movie business ...

"I was always interested in the technology side of film," explains Richard Grosser from his Palm Desert , Calif., home. An inveterate techie who currently designs exhibits and repairs aircraft for the Palm Springs Air Museum, Grosser was a Wharton School grad who had worked at Penn with the designers of the ENIAC and UNIVAC, the earliest electronic and commercial computers. In 1960 he founded a typesetting software company that he sold to business services giant ADP eight years later, leaving him with "more money than brains."

With shared interests in computers (Speeth later filmed many of those Pennsylvania computer pioneers for a never-completed documentary) and film, the two became fast friends.

"Around that time," Grosser recalls, "the IRS had an incentive that allowed you to write off any investment in film as a long-term capital gain — a short-lived tax shelter, basically. So I got this idea: Let's make a horror film."

Only a few years earlier, George A. Romero had created Night of the Living Dead on the other side of the state, initiating the modern horror film and inspiring a new generation of would-be low-budget gore auteurs, as Grosser was well aware. "Night of the Living Dead was made for $1.98 with no professional actors in some godforsaken place near Pittsburgh, and was very successful," he says.

To fund the project, Grosser assembled a syndicate of investors from businesspeople and wealthy acquaintances in the city. "The one guy I knew who wouldn't invest in it," Grosser recalls, "was [billionaire Penn alum] Ron Perelman, who wasn't super-rich yet. He turned me down; he was the smartest one of the lot. I couldn't quite get enough together, so I made the ultimate movie-making mistake of investing my own money."

Through his father's business selling off assets for bankrupt businesses, Grosser was able to gain access to the abandoned Wicaco Machine factory in Germantown, where all of the interiors were filmed. Perhaps his most important contribution, however, was securing access to Willow Grove Park. The once-thriving amusement park had fallen on hard times, and would close its gates for good three years later, to be razed and replaced by the mall that now bears its name. With those elements in place, Grosser and Speeth turned their attentions to developing a script that fit them.

A performance of The Young Master Dante, the first production by playwright WERNER LIEPOLT. Actor HERVÉ VILLECHAIZE waits in the wings, while onstage the play's lead performs a soliloquy to his own tapeworm. CHRISTOPHER SPEETH sits in the audience, spellbound ...

Werner Liepolt attended Annenberg at the same time as Speeth, studying theater under playwright/director George Tabori. Liepolt and Speeth kept in touch after graduation, and when the idea of a horror film arose, Speeth asked his classmate to produce a script.

"My early plays dealt with the grotesque in American society," Liepolt explains. "In Chris' house, he had merry-go-round horses made into chairs and one of those fortune-telling machines. He liked to be kind of a carnival/wizardy guy, so I tried to play into what I thought he was up to."

Liepolt, who has since abandoned playwriting for software development in Connecticut, based the concept on the legend of Sawney Bean, the head of a 16th-century clan of cannibals living in a cave in coastal Scotland. (One unfortunate remnant of the source is Malatesta's hook-handed character Mr. Bean, the frequent mentions of whose name become inadvertently humorous in the post-Rowan Atkinson world.)

"When they were finally caught," explains Liepolt of the legend, "none of Bean's offspring had any idea of what normal morals were. That's where the idea of this family of creatures who hid in the carnival came from. But Chris ended up scrapping a lot of the script."

The film's loose, improvisatory, often disjointed feel suggests just how infrequently the script was referred to during production. One shift in tone was the fact that between the initial concept and actual filming, Willow Grove Park was retooled as the Western-themed Six Gun Territory, which explains the odd mannequin horses and miniature stagecoaches that crop up throughout. Although the last-gasp effort failed to save the park, the renovation did benefit the film in that there were plenty of cast-off materials laying around for the taking.

Horror Auteur: "The more I worked on it," says Speeth, here in his Mount Airy home, "I was so tired that I just wanted to stay alive by the end." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

JANINE CARAZO writhes in an enormous, translucent balloon, while CHRISTOPHER SPEETH trains a camera in her direction. Elsewhere in the factory, architects-turned-set designers RICHARD STANGE and ALAN JOHNSON string fiberglass insulation around the room, and coat a suspended VW bug with orange bubble wrap ...

Malatesta's most striking features are undoubtedly its sets. A fever dream of craft fair castoffs and repurposed garbage, the cavernous interiors resemble a collision of Warhol's Factory and a Coney Island sideshow. They seem like cobbled-together junk heaps of carny detritus, discarded industrial surplus and handmade abstractions — mainly because that's exactly what they were.

"Recycling was a '70s theme," says Richard Stange, one of three partners who founded Alley Friends Architects, the green-conscious firm that designed Malatesta's sets. "We wound up using recycled materials from Willow Grove Park — some signs, some trash, tires, old carts, rides. Pink fiberglass insulation, which was cheap and looks like cotton candy. The idea was that the ghouls were living in this recycled world."

"Look at the materials," continues partner Alan Johnson. "You could walk through almost any industrial area in the city and just throw them in your truck and nobody would even know you were taking them. Pallets, tires, things like that — you might be doing people a favor by taking them."

Johnson and Stange co-founded Alley Friends in 1970 with Bruce Millard (who was not involved with the film). The three shared an interest in ecologically oriented design, and something of an offbeat approach. The company continues today, with a host of green-focused buildings around Philly designed out of a pair of offices on Front Street in the shadow of I-95.

"The world looked differently in the '70s," Johnson says, "and one of the concepts that came up architecturally is that buildings are not permanent, inspired by nomadic cultures and the hippie culture."

Combining those ideas with a flair for showmanship, Alley Friends began experimenting with a large-scale inflatable building while working with a traveling theater company. The Institute of Contemporary Art learned of the effort, and when the theater troupe couldn't afford to fund the project, ICA auctioned a night's use of the structure, 90 feet across and 35 feet high, to raise funds. Speeth stepped inside the building while it was mounted at ICA and instantly recognized its possibilities.

"It had cinematographic power without spending a lot of money," Johnson describes. "Chris asked to use the inflatable, and when he saw some of the wiggy stuff we were doing, he thought maybe we'd like to get involved with the whole movie."

At the time, Alley Friends were working on the Academy House condominiums, which featured passive solar windows, but saw in the idea of set design for film an analogue to their ideas of nonpermanent architecture. Still, they needed some convincing that an up-and-coming architectural firm should give up two months of potential gigs to work on a disreputable horror film. Johnson asked Speeth why he was bothering with the genre, and the director answered simply, "To scare people."

"I said, 'That's it?'" Johnson recalls. "And Chris said, 'It's not that easy.'"

The architects compiled materials with only a loose sense of what the final product might be. Speeth had let them know the types of sets he needed, but gave Alley Friends free rein in translating those instructions. Somehow, the production acquired several rolls of orange bubble-wrap, which was intended for Army use but had failed a quality test. "Too many of the bubbles popped," Johnson recalls, "so for $10, we carted away enough bubble-pack to encase the whole place."

The inflatable building became an ethereal trampoline for Vena's dream sequence; the orange bubble-wrap transforms the hood of an upturned VW bug into a gaping mouth; a yellow slot car track becomes a strange barrier to Vena's escape.

"If we hadn't had to make do with that stuff," Johnson suggests, "would we now have a film that was less amateurish, but much less interesting? It was all born out of necessity, a little art, and a bit of our heart in the message. There isn't a shot in there for which three-quarters of the imagery isn't something recycled. At the time we didn't think we were doing anything extraordinary. Little did we know, people don't even recycle now, 30 years later."

"It's a very early eco-friendly film," Speeth echoes. "With the cannibalism, even the people are recycled."

JANINE CARAZO, acting in her first film, is quickly disabused of the glamorous image of the movie business as she lays, clad only in a negligee, in the mud, her hair streaming out into brackish water ...

"The production assistant was so intent on getting the shot that she neglected to mention that there were snakes in that water," Janine Carazo says. "I remember being incensed that my well-being wasn't placed ahead of the shot."

Now an English and German teacher at Central High, Carazo was born in tiny Palmerton, Pa., and was enrolled in the MFA acting program at Temple when the open casting call for Malatesta came in. Her experience at the time was limited to stage work at Temple, a few commercials, and guerrilla theater in period costumes outside Independence Hall.

"I guess they figured I was the most naïve-looking," Carazo says about winning the role of Vena. "I'm like a country kid. I come from a very small town, a very closed environment. I think Chris just saw me as the type and said, 'Just act naturally, honey, and you'll be fine.'"

Carazo idolized Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, and along with most of her fellow students looked up to the young DeNiro, Keitel and Pacino. "In theater school, we trained in Stanislavski, method acting, finding the motivation for everything. There was a scene in Malatesta when my boyfriend gets killed on the Ferris wheel, and I figured I'd need time to prepare, get my emotions up and think of something horrendous to scream about. But Chris just said, 'Stand there, and when the car reaches eye level I want you to scream.' I was aghast, and after a few takes I screamed, 'And this is art?!?'"

Not all of Malatesta's cast shared Carazo's inexperience. Jerome Dempsey, who played Mr. Blood, was commuting back and forth between the Malatesta set and Lincoln Center in New York, where he was acting in a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Dempsey would later counteract Mr. Blood's vampiric tendencies as Van Helsing opposite Frank Langella's Dracula, and also appeared in Sidney Lumet's Network.

For Speeth, the most important factor in regard to the actors was making sure the main cast was paid scale, as they "were all starving to death off-Broadway at the time." Liepolt recruited a few of the actors from his stage productions for the film, including Lenny Baker, who played the gypsy fortune teller Sonja, and the diminutive thespian who went on to be the most recognizable name in the credits.

"In the script," recalls Johnson, "I see a notation that says 'Enter a Spanish dwarf.' And I thought, 'Well, this should be good.' How often do you go down to casting and ask for a Spanish dwarf for the day? So I made sure I was on set that day, and sitting on a chair, calmly reading a book, is a Spanish dwarf. That's when I knew the movie was serious."

The actor in question was, of course, Hervé Villechaize (who was actually French, of Filipino ancestry). Everyone has loving memories of the late Villechaize, who was two years away from being cast in The Man with the Golden Gun and five years from his iconic role as Tattoo on Fantasy Island.

Perhaps the oddest local find was poet William Preston, who plays the mute, murderous "Sticker," stabbing people as well as litter with his trash stick while aggressively working his glass eye. Preston went on to sporadic acting work, appearing regularly as Oldy Olsen in skits on Late Night with Conan O'Brien until his death in 1998.

Blown Up: Speeth films Carazo inside Alley Friends' inflatable building during the making of Malatesta's Carnival of Blood in 1972. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

As a crew of young novices speed frantically around him, veteran cinematographer NORMAN GAINES methodically checks and double-checks light levels and camera set-ups, heedless of the increasingly urgent call for haste ...

The crew as well as the cast was a hodgepodge of dabblers, amateurs and seasoned pros. "You just did everything and anything you had to do to make it happen," recalls Meg Turner, credited as assistant director and currently involved in online children's media in Connecticut. "You did some editing, you did some picking up of people at the train station, you did some set design and set production, whatever it took. The script was, shall we say, in continual evolution."

Gaines was a longtime cameraman in the advertising business, the type known, Dietrich says, for "that perfect utopian shot of beer being poured and foam coming up to just the top of the glass." Unfortunately, his fastidious methods were better suited to glistening cheeseburgers than off-the-cuff cannibal high jinks, and Speeth eventually manned the camera himself for much of the non-dialogue-driven action.

That's not to suggest that Gaines was not willing to enter into the spirit of the production, as Johnson recalls. The architects had constructed a hall of mirrors out of silver mylar, but Gaines blanched when he walked onto the set. "He said, 'This is not going to work because you'll be able to see me no matter what I do," Johnson says. "So he took some of the mylar home and made a costume out of it. But Chris made him take it off, figuring that it's a movie, people are going to figure out sooner or later that there's a cameraman, so why hide it?"

Veteran TV and film producer Walker Stuart handled day-to-day logistics, including providing the unruly crowd of ghoul extras with doughnuts and $5 a day, while co-producer Richard Grosser indulged his fondness for gadgets. Grosser was in charge of special effects, mixing blood, wiring sparks on an electrified fence, rigging a WWII surplus combat camera to a roller coaster car.

"There was one scene where the young hero is being eviscerated by these ghouls eating his guts out of him while he's alive," Grosser says. "Of course it was pork sausage and he was done up with Technicolor blood, and I had hidden tubes so that blood would spurt out of his chest by compressed air, and he's shaking and his eyes are rolling. As the camera tracked in, the focus puller lost his lunch, and then four other people threw up."

A small audience parks in front of a screen, most of them neglecting the ghoulish images for other nocturnal pursuits ...

"We were so green and naïve and foolish about this that it sort of shocks me when I think about it now," Grosser says about their attempts to distribute the film. "We submitted the film for a rating and they wouldn't give it an R because of the cannibalism. I found out much later that what they wanted was a bribe. We could've made the whole problem go away for $3,500, but I didn't know that, so we re-edited the film. And it's a shame, because the film made no sense at that point. Then we had to find a distributor, which was our second mistake. We got hooked up with these sleazebags, and the film actually did make money, but we never saw a dime of it."

"The more I worked on it," Speeth says, "I was so tired that I just wanted to stay alive by the end. Then editing and not getting any money, I was just getting poorer and poorer and poorer."

In the parking lot, a host of high school and college students are transformed into raggedy, cannibalistic ghouls under a misty rain, illuminated by car headlights ...

Many of the ghouls have gone on to become doctors, lawyers or art gallery owners. Roberta Miller is an interior designer whose experience on the film was to get caked with oatmeal and fake blood and then wait in the rain for several hours before being sent off to a local IHOP to drink coffee and dry off while waiting for her scene to come up. After scaring herself silly in the bathroom mirror, and feeling wet, tired and frustrated, Miller gave up and went home. Though she never actually set foot in front of a camera, her experience became a familiar family story, one related by her daughter to Joseph A. Gervasi of Exhumed Films, who tracked down the film and initiated this weekend's screening at the International House. Speeth, Carazo, Dietrich, Stange and Miller will all be on hand.

"I came to Malatesta as I've come to other lysergic delights of the early '70s," Gervasi says, "that constant compulsion that comes from wanting to see what squirms under every cinematic rock. I've always had a firm connection to Philly's underground culture and the promotion of said culture, so finding not only a peculiar little gem of a psychedelic film, but also one that was shot locally, is a perfect amalgam of my passions. Plus, shit, there's a dwarf in it and most movies with dwarfs are killer."

After Malatesta's disappointing release, Speeth worked for a few years as a cinematographer and director-for-hire. After several aborted projects, including his computer documentary and a film series on ecology that he researched for five years, Speeth began working a night-shift government job, meanwhile continuing to sporadically produce and direct documentary and TV projects. In recent years, Speeth's filmmaking energies have been reawakened, leading to the re-release of Malatesta and the revival of some of those long-dormant projects.

"I think for every one thing I got to do," he says, "there's easily 99 that I didn't."

For Dietrich, all of the elements that so haphazardly combined to create Malatesta are indicative of an artistic spirit present in Philadelphia at the time.

"The spirit was in the air of the ecology movement and some kind of burgeoning cry for something more honest," he says. "A sense of rebellion against tradition was certainly part of the atmosphere. I wouldn't say that it was pervading Malatesta's Carnival, but in a sense Malatesta was one of those madcap happenings that focused a lot of energy on a few very creative people for a little while, chaotically as it turned out."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Malatesta's Carnival of Blood will be shown by Exhumed Films Sat., June 7, 8 p.m., $12, with Messiah of Evil, at International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org, exhumedfilms.com.