The Gorgon

Most of the movies that I’ve watched so far for my New Year’s Resolution have been somewhat disappointing. The Gorgon stands out as a good 1960’s horror movie but with terrible effects. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing both starred in it so it clearly has its strengths.

It starts with a Star Wars-esque narrative crawl giving fairly bland exposition about Medusa and the Gorgons. The first real scene features a topless model being painted by an artist. It’s shot to avoid a clear view of nipples but I bet it grabbed the attention of 1964 teenaged boys.

The model tells the artist that he must marry her because she is having his baby. No beating around the bush–she flat-out says it. 1964 audiences may have been scandalized. The artist decides he must see her father. She protests that her father will kill him and follows. However, as she is trailing him, she sees something in the woods and dies.

When brought to the local hospital, her body is revealed to have turned to stone with one of her fingers cracking and falling off. Peter Cushing, the attending physician, tries to act as if petrification is a standard symptom of strangulation.

After the artist is blamed for her death, his father investigates. The gorgon kills him, causing the artist’s brother to take up the cause. Unfortunately for the gorgon, the brother gains a protector in Christopher Lee. Might as well give up now, snake head!

Hammer Films took liberties with the Greek myth of the gorgons. They get right that Medusa was killed and left behind two sisters. For the movie, one of the remaining gorgons was named Megaera and moved to central Europe for some reason.

Megaera, like the Wolfman, only appeared during a full moon. The Greek gorgons were full time monsters, but in the movie, Megaera possesses a normal person’s body, and secretly changes into a monster once a month. Who could it be?

In Throw Momma from the Train, Billy Crystal’s character criticized the mystery story that Danny DeVito’s character wrote, saying it’s hard to build suspense in a whodunit if there are only two characters and one gets murdered on the first page.

With only two female characters in The Gorgon, and one of which dying midway through the film, guessing the were-gorgon’s identity doesn’t require the wit of Hercule Poirot.

As I’ve alluded, the special effects of the gorgon’s snake hair were terrible but almost everything else in the movie was decent to very good. Worse movies have made better effects on cheaper budgets, both before and after CGI. I get that special effects are risky. Often they’re outsourced to the cheapest bidder and are out of the director’s control.

But I have trouble with the two suspect mystery. Couldn’t they afford another actress? Give a maid or a cook a few ominous lines? Were we supposed to believe Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee turned into a snake woman? (Or maybe we were—Psycho was released four years before.)

That’s the only flaw in the plot that I think matters. Some minor ones that other reviews fuss over:

● Megaera wasn’t a gorgon in Greek mythology. She was one of the Erinyes aka the Furies. I don’t know why the writer gave the gorgon the real name of another mythological figure, but is it really as big a deal as most reviewers make it out to be?

● She kept a large mirror in an easily accessed part of her castle. That’s like Dracula keeping boxes of wooden stakes or the Wolfman leaving around silver bullets. True, but the Wicked Witch did have a bucket of water lying around. Maybe female monsters are subconsciously self-destructive.

● Why was a Greek monster in central Europe? I can answer that–Hammer Films had sets and costumes from central Europe and didn’t have the cash to make new ones.

That brings us to the reason that this film isn’t better known–the very fake snake hair.

I could stick a bunch of rubber snakes on a lady’s head and it would look better than what they did for the movie. And even if they were legally obligated to use the special effects they had, why not obscure it with smoke or lighting? If Tom Savini could go back in time, I bet he could have made more convincing snake-hair from the change he found under his couch pillows, and The Gorgon would be regarded as a top ten horror movie.

Maybe in an alternate universe, Ray Harryhausen worked on this instead of Twenty Million Miles to Earth and I wouldn’t complain about a thing. Twenty Million Miles to Earth had a great monster and weak everything else while The Gorgon had a good everything else but with a monster that would be a weak Halloween costume for a broke college student.

Thinking of Twenty Million Miles to Earth made me remember how weak its background music was. Even before studios went all out on music for horror movies, The Gorgon‘s musical score was pretty good.

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee survived to work on many more movies. They deserved better snakes.