Offscreen Notes
Curtis Harrington: 1930-2007
Film critic, filmmaker, actor, and writer Curtis Harrington passed away in his Hollywood home on May 6, 2007 at the age of 80. Harrington had a varied career which saw him leave his mark in many areas of film history. Harrington began as a film critic, writing several essays on the horror film, most notably “Ghoulies and Ghosties” in Focus on the Horror Film. Harrington then befriended filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos to form the central impetus to the second wave of American experimental cinema in the 1940s (initiated by friends and colleagues Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid). Like Anger, Harrington loved Hollywood lore and they incorporated cinema history into their own personal, ‘mytho-poetic’ (term coined by P.A. Sitney) dreamscapes. Harrington worked on several Anger films (Puce Moment, 1949, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, 1954) and made several of his own experimental shorts, including Fragment of Seeking, 1946 and On the Edge, 1949. Harrington then left the underground for the mainstream, beginning with a debut film which carried over some of the surreal and poetic quality of his experimental work, Night Tide, 1962, starring a young Dennis Hopper as a sailor who falls in love with a woman who thinks she is a mermaid. Harrington is probably best remembered for his contribution to the minor sub-genre of gothic horror popular in the 1970s, which included How Awful About Allan, 1970, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, 1971, and What’s the Matter With Helen, 1971. Harrington then moved into television, directing episodes of Baretta, Wonder Woman, Dynasty, and Charlie’s Angels. He made a return to feature films in 2002 with his Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, Usher, which he wrote, directed and starred in as the titular character, Roderick Usher.
