The Ghostbreakers: The Gargoyles

I recently re-watched The Gargoyles (1972) on Tubi. They have a free version that isn’t hard to watch visually. So many television movies are taken from bad video copies making them hard to watch for the wrong reason. This one is quite watchable.

Which isn’t to say it was good. The costumes and other special effects are quite dated along with some attitudes. (The leader of the gargoyles gives the winged female a slap on the ass that any male chauvinistic pig would recognize. The cops assume you’re a “doper” if you ride a motor cycle, etc…) But I knew this going in. This wasn’t going to be about good special effects. It was a TV movie. The budget wasn’t going to be in the millions. (Despite my feeling this, Stan Winston won an Emmy for Outstanding Make-Up for the film.) As any good Doctor Who fan can tell you (especially back in 1972), it’s all about the writing.

The plot has Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornell Wilde) and his daughter, Diana (Jennifer Salt) traveling to New Mexico to see a man who claims to have a strange discovery worthy of their time. Boley is professor of the occult and has written several bestsellers on the subject. That being said, he is also a skeptic. His interest is in the anthropological aspects of magic, not the practical. They arrive at Uncle Willie’s Desert Museum, a collection of frauds and phoneys for tourists. They met Willie (Woody Chambliss), who shows them no fakes but a skeleton of an unknown creature.

The shed the three are in is attacked by something unseen. Willie dies when the ceiling collapses on him, setting the barn on fire. Mercer and Diana grab the skull of the skeleton and flee. They drive off but a monster lands on the roof of their car, tearing the metal with its claws. They take the car to garage to be fixed then go to a motel. There they will be attacked again when the gargoyles come for the skull. One of the monsters gets hit by a truck. Now they have a whole body, not just a skull.

The duo tell the cops about Willie and meet a gang of bike riders that includes James Reeger (Scott Glenn), a low-level love interest for Diana. When she tells Reeger about the gargoyles he thinks she’s nuts. But the body of the dead gargoyle spawns a second attack. The cops have to believe it all when Diana is taken by the head of the gargoyles (played by Bernie Casey but voiced by Vic Perrin. The monster’s voice reminded me strongly of Star Trek since it was done with reverberation. It sounds like an alien through the universal translator.)

The cops, the bikers and Dr. Boley all get guns and head into the hills to find Diana. She has been taken to a big cave where a nest of gargoyle eggs is located. The chief gargoyle explains that they are all recently hatched. The gargoyles incubate for five hundred years then reveal themselves. Each time they are attacked and killed by humans. This cycle must stop. As he is a newly hatched being, he is extremely curious about Diana’s body (and thus some of the cheesiest bits in the show happen). His mate gets jealous and leads her father to them when he is taken too.

There is a big shoot-out with the gargoyles getting destroyed once again. Reeger dies so there is no big romantic scene with Diana later (this surprised me. I guess he was cool enough for riding bikes and shooting monsters but not romantic material.)

So why watch this old piece of TV history? It does have its rewards if you can ignore the faults, like unnecessary motor bike chases and terrible slow-mo used to make the gargoyle suits look less like Halloween costumes. For fans of Call of Cthulhu and all things Lovecraftian, the show does offer a supernatural mystery. The two investigators, one scholar, the other photographer, visiting the old coot, Willie, and his desert museum feels like a good start. The monsters aren’t revealed too early, only hinted at by strange shadows on rocks. The scene of the gargoyle on the car roof will be used again in other films like The Terminator (1984), famously. The pair again in a small hotel room surrounded by the gargoyles worked fairly well. Boley has a tape recording of Willie talking that he likes to play endlessly while his daughter is trying to sleep. Her SAN loss doesn’t seem to be a concern for him.

The rest of the plot is quite similar to Clive Barker’s The Night Breed (1990), right down to the dipshit cops. (Which aren’t in New Mexico but Northern Alberta!) The big finale takes place in a cave where the night monsters are hiding from the violent humans. The monster make-up is not much of an improvement on Stan Winston’s 1972 work either.

The best part for the HPL fans is when Diana has been taken by the leader of the gargoyles to read her father’s books to him. He wants to learn about human history. We get to learn a little about the gargoyles as well. They have more than one kind. The winged ones are the breeders, being the most special. We learn that they have taken human women in the past. Boley traces their existence in all mythologies from Egypt, Babylon, to Aztecs and the North American First Nations. These creatures have had a parallel existence to humans since the dawn of time. This is a nice 1970s Lovecraftian bit. Much better than “Pickman’s Model” on The Night Gallery around this time.

Speaking of other 1970s shows of this time, the Kolchak the Night Stalker from Dan Curtis was also 1972. This was the first movie, which was followed by a sequel then a one season TV show. I thought Curtis did Gargoyles as well but he didn’t. The executive producer is Roger Gimbel. Other Horror movies for TV in 1972 included Crawlspace, Moon of the Wolf (a personal fav), Ray Bradbury’s The Screaming Woman, Steven Spielberg’s Something Evil, and the Stewart Granger The Hound of the Baskervilles where Bill Shatner did it. Horror TV was big that year probably because of the success of Dark Shadows and the two films made from the series.

In 1994 Disney would produce a cartoon called Gargoyles. In this version the statue monsters become the protectors of humankind. That cartoon was written by the husband-and-wife team of Michael Reaves and Brynne Chandler Reaves. (The Gargoyles movie had also been penned by such a team, Stephen and Elinor Karpf.)

The cartoon begins with:

One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear. It was the age of gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night, We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again! We are defenders of the night! We are Gargoyles!

Reaves and the other writers may or may not have been influenced by the TV movie. In the cartoon the gargoyles wait a thousand years, not five hundred, to come again. In the movie, the gargoyles on cathedrals are echoes of the real creatures, while in the cartoon they are one and the same.

Now, to get to some kind of a point here. The cartoon was far too late to have had any influence on me. I remember my kids watching it. But the TV film may have been one of the first Horror movies I was allowed to see, since it was on TV. Along with Moon of the Wolf, The Night Stalker, The Cat Creature (1973), and Devil Dog: Hound of Hell (1978), Gargoyles was formative. No one was taking me to see The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby when I was ten. These TV acceptable versions of Horror flicks were a welcome first step to all those real Horror flicks I would watch later on. I think they also started my love of the occult detective. Kolchak is obvious, but even Dr. Mercer Boley is a ghostbreaker in his own way. 1970s TV had plenty of cop shows, doctor shows, even the occasional Science Fiction show, but ghostbreakers were limited to Kolchak. It was the movie length programs that gave me a window on the men and women who faced off against the monsters. X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were decades away.

Next time…Moon of the Wolf and a fuzzy Bradford Dillman…