City of the Dead Movie Night (Premium E309) Sample
In this special Halloween edition of movie night, Jake and Travis discuss the 1960 British “B-movie” The City of the Dead. The film, the directorial debut of John Llewellyn Moxey and released under the title Horror Hotel in the United States, tells the story of a coven of witches in New England who lure women for a diabolical yearly sacrifice to Lucifer. The British actors, including a very young Christopher Lee, put on their best American accents to make a film so spooky that distributors chose to cut some references to Satan worship for the U.S. distribution.
Best of all? You can watch it for free in 4K right now on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl3cQ5Lo9HI
Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com)
qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast Premium Episode 309, Movie Night, The City of the Dead.
As always, we are your host, Jake Rakotansky.
And Travis View.
In my house growing up, there was a phrase my dad said often that never failed to elicit a groan from me and my brother.
A black and white classic.
Now he would often use this in trying to sell us on a beloved film or series from his childhood at a time when all we were interested in was Ghostbusters, Ninja Turtles, and usually a third revolving property, like Mask or StarCom, or some like piece of crap from the claw machine at Benegans that had become like a favorite toy, you know, in that moment.
Now, in the spirit of Halloween, and coincidentally, the only dad on the podcast, Travis has brought us a very special movie night.
Today we are discussing the City of the Dead, 1960.
A true BWC, as we used to call him.
Yeah, this is uh this is a good one.
I wanted to bring this.
This is a great film for Halloween because first of all, you could see it uh just about anywhere.
It's free on YouTube, it's on Amazon Prime, some like FUBO or whatever those, yeah, the commercial-driven platforms are you can see it anywhere.
It's nice and tight, is like not a wasted scene, very propulsive, and it's short.
So it's like it's a great Halloween season movie you can watch very quickly for free anywhere.
And it's really good.
I found it because I was trying to research, I was looking for movies that involved uh people doing historical research, historical primary research, and preferably with like and that involves occultism, and this like fit the bill, and I watched it, I was like, oh wow, this is actually a really good old movie.
So I'm uh I dived into it.
I'm really excited to share this.
Yeah, I'm glad you can relate to the uh the Angenew, the lead of the film who is, you know, just just doing research on some occultish things.
Uh I I hope you don't find yourself in the same situation that she does.
No, no.
That'd make for a good live episode, though.
Like one of our sort of out in the field episodes, like me and Julian and Liv, Brad, and Annie having to rescue you from the clutches of some cult that you got too deep into.
Yeah, yeah, like that's the real horror is that like you're just following your curiosity, following your like yo, academic sort of like inclinations, and it winds up uh you biting off way more than you can chew.
Well, and it's funny because the characters of this film in a lot of ways seem to go against your primary sensibility, as the movie kind of treats skeptics as like buffoons and like soon-to-be murdered fools.
No, no, I that's this thing.
That's the thing I got loved about it.
It's like, yeah, the skeptics are just getting BTFO'd left and right.
Like the occultists in the hyper religious are the people who like have things figured out in this world.
It stars a young Christopher Lee, which is really which is really interesting.
He's one of those actors that you're used to always being old.
Yes, exactly.
But bo, he's yeah, he is uh he was young, but still kind of like very menacing, very commanding performance.
Yes, he's got a sort of like lurch quality to him.
Yeah, but it was uh yeah, it's it's uh it's a good to see him.
So, as customary, I did a reasonable amount of research on the film, and there's some interesting stuff.
So it was the directorial debut of a guy by the name of John Llewellyn Moxie.
Sometimes he would go by John Moxie, sometimes John L. Moxie.
He was born in Argentina in 1925, and before entering the world of filmmaking, he served in the second world of war for the British Army doing reconnaissance.
And I don't have Liv or Julian here to make fun of me for that pun.
Pretty crazy.
It's it's always crazy to me to think of like people who serve in like intense uh sort of like combat situations, but then want to come back and make movies.
It's like you've been to the best movie.
You you've already you've played the the best game for real.
Yeah, uh it's it's I mean, I think it's like good, you know, especially when this involves like, you know, uh understanding war.
But um, yeah, it was an interesting career choice.
So Moxie would go on to direct a lot of classic TV episodes like Mission Impossible.
He directed the pilot episode of Charlie's Angels, he directed episodes of Miami Vice and Kung Fu.
I mean, that these are like, you know, huge, huge shows, huge, huge network shows.
Uh, but this is his first thing, which is really cool.
The screenplay was originally written by George Baxte, uh, as a series intended for actor Boris Karlov, but one of the film's producers adapted his original script for this film.
And uh one thing I found out through my research that's that's pretty interesting, is George Baxte, the guy who wrote this, is actually a legendary Jew, and as it turns out, a pioneer in queer literature.
Oh, is that legendary?
Is that uh is that harder to find than a rare Jew, the legendary Jew?
Yeah, one higher tier.
He's he's like, I mean, he's he was uh kid of Russian and Polish immigrants.
He was born in 1922, I think.
I mean, he this is right around my both of my grandfathers, also Russian-Polish immigrants, also born in the early 1920s.
So he is of my grandfather's both of them, both of their peers.
So he's the creator of one of the first openly gay detectives, uh Pharaoh Love, uh, which was first introduced in Bax's 1966 novel, A Queer Kind of Death, which I I'd never heard of, but that was six years after this film, and he went on to do many novels with that character.
So the reason he was in London in the first place, uh, where the City of Dead was produced is because he fled the United States in the 50s after a couple of his screenwriter buddies were blacklisted and labeled as communists.
He stayed in London for the next five years, writing payroll in 1961 and Night of the Eagle in 1962, which I gotta watch now because people online who I was I was reading their their comments about him.
Uh apparently these are his like more famous films, so I guess I gotta check those out.
And although the film's producers Max Rosenberg and Milton Sabotsky were American, the movie began filming at Shepperton Studios in England on October 12th, 1959, almost exactly to the day, 66 years ago.
Wow, yeah.
Premium episode 309, 9 minus 3, and you have our third six.
Holy shit.
Happy Halloween, folks.
It begins.
Proton pack's coming out.
As we discussed, the movie stars a very young Christopher Lee, who still manages to look old somehow, and I quite enjoyed myself watching this.
It was made for roughly 45,000 pounds.
So this was like I I guess at the time a micro budget.
Uh, it was often compared to Psycho, and we looked the budget of that up, which apparently was also supposed to be a low budget film, and that that had a price tag of about 800,000.
Yeah, this was, I mean, I was considered kind of a what they call a British B movie.
It was it was made cheaply.
Uh, I think they did a they did a lot with what they had.
They had like a a handful of sets, some cheap but well done, like, you know, sort of like fog effects and driving effects.
But no, I think uh this is a this is a very crafty film because of like how little the budget was.
I loved reading this.
So the funding came from two separate parties.
Uh, one was British television producer by the name of Hannah Weinstein, and the other financier was the Nottingham Forest Football Club.
Which I thought was was great.
Yes, I thought that they I thought they knocked it out of the park.
There's some really kind of ahead of its time stuff here.
It's especially what it does with point of view.
I also really liked how they got away with reusing sets.
Like, like, for example, when the brother comes back to the witch town to find the, you know, to look for his sister, and he goes through the same sort of like circle around town that she does and experiences things the same way that she did, and it kind of has this eerie sort of repetitive feeling, but on a technical level, they've bought themselves like 10 minutes of footage and a good scare by essentially using the exact same scene, the exact same actors and extras, like over and over again with the exact same blocking.
I mean, so it's there's really some brilliant stuff going on here, I thought.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.
For access to the full episode as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to Patreon.com/slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just five dollars per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverse with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA.
