Pigeons From Hell~aired June 6 1961 Adapted for the screen by John Kneubuhl and directed by John Newland. Pigeons was another story taken out of Weird Tales Magazine from a story by Robert E. Howard (Author of Conan the Barbarian), in 1938, which he based on old legends that his grandmother had told him in West Texas.This also seems to coincide with similar themes of Voodoo as author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance Folklorist/Writer/Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote the non-fiction exploration of Haitian/Caribbean rituals in Tell My Horse in 1937, just a year earlier.
It takes place one fateful night when two New York brothers Johnny and Tim Branner, after driving over a rickety wooden bridge (shot in obvious day for night), suddenly hit a muddy ditch and begin spinning their tires to no avail. Now they remain stranded under a wonderfully bewitching weeping willow, a classic prop for a southern Gothic tale,in the swamp lands of the Louisiana countryside.
The opening scene is embellished with the willow’s mossy tendrils, swaying,drifting, blowing as if by an unseen lazy wind. And so it begins.
The boys get out of the car and Tim played by the very wholesome looking Brandon De Wilde says ” Welcome to the fabled south, land of Crinoline, Magnolias, lovely ladies and swamps!” While Johnny goes off to find a pole that they can use to dislodge the tire from the mud , that’s when the the wailing starts, like that of a distressed alley cat in heat.
Johnny wanders off starting to reach deeper into the context of the landscape. As he pushes aside the dangling mossy vines, dozens of pigeons begin cooing madly. He discovers the desolate antediluvian plantation, The Blassenville Mansion going to decay. The place seems plagued or inhabited by these mysterious, demonic pigeons. There is an eerie cackling, unearthly wails and the hellish fluttering of their wings pervade. They begin to converge on Johnny, coming right at his face, like a scene out of Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds. Once Tim arrives after hearing his brother’s bloodcurdling screams, Johnny tells him that the pigeons seemed like they were trying to kill him!
Like many great southern Gothic tales, this one is surrounded by the presence of something lurking behind the silent deteriorating walls. The wonderful B&W and shadows of pale and steely gray.
Time has stood still. There’s a sense that the house is diseased with a family secret, much like one of my other favorite episodes Parasite Mansion. The setting bares the remnants of a Robert Aldrich film like Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. We break for Boris’ prologue.
By an old gnarled tree Boris steps out to greet us. A cautionary deep string flourishes, as he looks around, standing in a swirl of mist. “This swamp is alive”-”Spirits come back from the dead to guard their ancestral home against intruders.” ” Spirits who in life fed on evil and now in death return to feed upon the living returning each night, driven relentlessly by the spell of a terrible curse.” -
Once Johnny and Tim are inside the house,we see a large winding staircase that hints at a time when this might have been an opulent showplace. They call out, is anybody home?. There is no furniture, the place is a dusty, decaying hollow shell of another era like the exoskeleton of a giant decomposing beetle. Preparing to take refuge over night on the lower floor they set out their sleeping bags, but Johnny still seems like he’s in a state of shock.He begins to walk around and finds a cobweb covered painting of a woman whom he senses holds the secret to what is haunting the place. From the beginning Johnny does seem to have an uncanny second sight which is causing him great distress. Staring at the painting, a poignant violin melody begins it’s undercurrent, it is the theme of this mysterious woman. Dissolve, into the spooky, dreamy gray facade of the mansion. Columns, the rhythmically otherworldly drone of these sentinel pigeons guarding their ancient Gothic citadel. Winged gatekeepers to a graveyard.
Tim is awakened in the middle of the night and discovers that his brother Johnny is not there. We hear a sweet, distant vocalise (pronounced Vocaleez) , like the sirens of Greek mythology who lured the sailors onto the rocks. Johnny has been aroused by this haunting lullaby lilting in the air, and seems to be drawn upward as if in a somnambulist’s trance. Moving by some unseen provocation, the voice leads him up the staircase. We are sharing his enchantment. We follow him. Now we hear the pigeons in a fury. Louder like a heart pumping blood, pulling us up the stairs with Johnny. Tim proceeds to look for his missing brother. The vocalise is more audible to him now, as Johnny ascends the stairs there is a crescendo of fluttering, wings, a female voice. Tim about to reach the top of the stairs hears his brothers scream. John emerges from the shadows, blood flowing down his face. He is holding an ax. He moves towards Tim and strikes with the ax but misses and sinks it into the wall behind Tim.Tim runs down the stairs, calling his brother’s name. “John, John!” He runs out of the house in abject fear and stumbles into the swamp and hits his head. Johnny still sleepwalking or the walking dead, holding the ax, collapses as he buries the ax in the sleeping bag where Tim’s head would have been.
This is where Sheriff Buckner played by Crahan Denton steps in. Tim is awakened by the Sheriff who has taken him back to a local named Howard who has a nearby shack ,so that he can interrogate Tim. Tim wakes screaming “Johnny, Johnny, where am I?” He begins telling Sheriff Buckner that Johnny’s head was smashed but he was still walking with a hatchet in his hand. “He was walking down the stairs to me, his head was split, he was dead, I know he was dead.” Buckner realizes that the only place he could be talking about is the old Blassenville Plantation.
In order to clear his name and to recover his brother’s body, Tim agrees to go back to the house with Sheriff Buckner. Buckner seems not to believe the boy, and is pretty sure that he’s either crazy or murdered his own brother. Back at Blassenville house, Tim tells Bruckner, ” he came down those stairs” the sheriff holds his lantern and shines light on a blood stain. They go into the room where Johnny is lying dead on the floor-” he tried to kill me, he tried to kill me” The somber cellos , the use of shadow underpin the tension. Bruckner doesn’t believe Tim yet. ” Why do you suppose he went upstairs” Tim says ” I don’t know but from the moment we saw this house it was as though he were listening all the time. just listening” – and then those pigeons started, they’re not there now, but I saw them!” Tim struggles, to press the truth but Bruckner tells him that it’s the judge and jury that he has to convince. Sheriff Bruckner wants to go upstairs and investigate but Tim doesn’t want to be left alone, so he follows him. The lantern shines light on the bloody trail leading up the stairs.
An effectively creepy moment happens while they are searching the upstairs, the lantern goes out-although there’s plenty of kerosene and the wick is fine, right at the spot where Johnny had been struck by the hatchet.They both get scared and decide to go back downstairs, and then the lantern goes on again-
The sheriff decides that he believes Tim’s story and that the only way he’s going to get anyone to believe it is to find out what’s in the house.Tim sees the painting and asks ” who is she?’ “I’m not sure, one of the Blassenville sisters I think. Ms Elizabeth, she’s the last one who lived here. She lived here for years after her sisters were gone” “Townsfolk wondered how long they were going to hold onto this house,falling into ruin, plantation gone all to weeds, then when they disappeared no one was surprised.” 3 sisters growing old in a place like this, no one to take care of them, cause they had a mean streak in them. All the plantation workers ran away. With the exception of Jacob Blount, who’s very old and half out of his mind. ” They beat him” the sisters, but he stayed on. And there was a young servant girl, Eulla Lee…they beat her too. Finally she ran away.
Back upstairs they find a dust covered piano but the keys have no dust on them. It’s as though somebody’s been playing it. Then they find a diary with what looks like Elizabeth’s name on it. The sad violin melody, the Blassenville theme begins to sway again. Tragically drawn out notes. Tim tries to read the fine writing. “I can sense someone prowling about the house at night, after the sun has set, and the pines outside are black.Often at night I hear a fumbling at the door, I dare not open it. Oh merciful heaven, What shall I do” The sheriff responds. ” The thing was after her too!” ” All the help have run away, my sisters…gone, I am here alone. If someone murdered my poor sisters.(pause) Then, Eulla Lee named Jacob Blount and Eulla Lee would not speak plainly, perhaps she feared I shall die as hideously as they.” Then Bruckner says ” We’ll see Jacob Blount” Jacob Blount is portrayed by the wonderful Ken Renard.
They arrive at Jacobs shack. He’s an old raggedy man lying in his cot. Sheriff Bruckner starts shaking Jacob and says” I’ve got some questions I wanna ask you, Come on boy get up. ( I was very offended at this gesture, Jacob was a very old man and the use of the term ” boy” was a very racist remark. I don’t believe he would have referred to an old white male this way)He proceeds to tell him that tonight a boy was murdered over at the old Blassenville Place. Jacob looks terrorfied.
In an accent assumed to be of Caribbean origin Jacob tells them ” Nobody dare (there) now, de all dead, but de come back at night, all dem pigeons” Bruckner interrogates him, and tells Jacob that Ms Elizabeth thought he knew who murdered the sisters, and who might still be in the house, after 50 long years. Eulla Lee would have reason. They beat her. Why did they beat an innocent servant girl?
“Eulla Lee was no servant…she was a lady of quality. A Blassenville like them.” Eulla Lee was their half sister. “They had the same mother, but different fathers” Sheriff Bruckner realizes that this would explain the rage towards Eulla Lee and Elizabeth’s terror of her.
Jacob tells them, ” Life is sweet to an old man” meaning that someone would harm him if he continued to talk about it. But he says “No Humon, No Humon. De big serpent would send a little brudda (brother) to kill me if I told. I promised when de make me maker of Zuvembies-” (Voodoo superstition. They’re women who are not human anymore.) “She knew I was maker of Zuvembies, so she came and stand right dare in my hut, and beg for de holy drink.De live forever, time mean nuting, an hour, a day, a year, all de same.She can command de dead, de birds, de snakes, de fowls, and only a led bullet can kill her”
Then begins the sound of the unholy fluttering of wings outside the hut. ” Listen, no more no more, If I tell, she will come” As Jacob starts to stir the fireplace with a stick he begins to scream wildly. He’s been bitten by a snake. A little brother. And he is now dead.
Bruckner and Tim go back to the plantation and now the pigeons are all over the sheriff’s wagon where Johnny’s dead body is laid out. The climax of Pigeons From Hell leads us once again to the sweetly haunting, mesmerizing musical motif that is the Blassenville theme. The eerie woman’s vocalise now summoning Tim up the stairs. We see, in a slow shot, an old decaying hand not quite in focus, reaching around the corner in tattered rags. It comes into sharp focus, clearly now, Tim keeps ascending up the stairs in a hypnotic state. The Lullaby, the southern Gothic tribal call of Eulla Lee, and we now see the old crones desiccated face. She’s waiting, she opens the door all the way, holding a meat cleaver. Just as she’s about to hack into Tim, Sheriff Bruckner shoots at her and she falls away. Once Tim comes out of his trance, he follows Bruckner behind a secret passageway and they stumble onto an incredibly horrific discovery. With a small candle lit, they find 3 skeletons, all dressed up in lace and pearls, ” Our three sisters, all murdered, the way your brother was, the way you were supposed to be” Then they turn and see something stage right. Walking slowly. The sweet sorrowful melody begins to play on the violin, the resolve to the nightmarish years at the plantation.
Eulla Lee is slumped in a chair, Bruckner mutters,”Eulla Lee, Eulla Lee”. Holding the candle to her face- Is she dead? Her eyes stare off -we hear the sweet vocalise again as it leads us out of the episode, a close up on her ancient face. Fade to black.
I haven’t read Howard’s original publication of the story, so I am not sure where he is coming from in terms of message. There are definite racial themes in this adapted script. But from reading an excerpt from Howard’s story I think that the racial overtones are more severe there. I hesitate to use the word “miscegenation ” because it is problematic in the fact that people find this term offensive. Usually scholars use this when discussing the historical relevance of interracial relationships. The taboo of the mixing of ethnic blood lines. Coming from a time when the process of racial interaction was taking place because of the European Colonization of The Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade. The idea that the Blassenville sisters raged against Eulla Lee for being the product of a biracial relationship. Having the same mother, but not sharing a white father, was a bold underpinning motive for the turbulence and hatred that inflicted the curse upon the family. And the story does ” Otherize” Eulla Lee. The fact that she seeks retribution through such “non-Christian” methods.,the implication that she’s a savage. Read the little tidbit from Howard’s story below;The references to Eulla Lee being a beast only reinforces my sense that she was considered “Other”. With words like beast and bestial nature. Of course the story was couched in very supernatural terms but the thread of racism is so pervasive in this story.
Here’s an excerpt from the original story that didn’t make it into the Thriller script: The name Griswell had been the original last name for Tim and Johnny.
Sheriff Buckner:
“They say the pigeons are the souls of the Blassenvilles, let out of hell at sunset. The Negroes say the red glare in the west is the light from hell, because then the gates of hell are open, and the Blassenvilles fly out.
Was that thing a woman once?” whispered Griswell(Tim). “God, look at that face, even in death. Look at those claw-like hands, with black talons like those of a beast. Yes, it was human, though — even the rags of an old ballroom gown. Why should a mulatto maid wear such a dress, I wonder?” “This has been her lair for over forty years,” muttered Buckner, brooding over the grinning grisly thing sprawling in the corner. “This clears you, Griswell(TIm) — a crazy woman with a hatchet — that’s all the authorities need to know. God, what a revenge! — what a foul revenge! Yet what a bestial nature she must have had, in the beginnin’, to delve into voodoo as she must have done———” (“Pigeons From Hell” by Robert E. Howard)
Original Thriller Script http://www.geocities.com/emruf7/pigeons.html
A fun fact: Turkish Pigeon Culturehttp://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2006/01/pigeon-culture-in-turkey.html
