Writing by Jamie Evans

Category: Cultural things

  • How did horror dig its claws into you?

    Photographs of dead people, oh my.

    The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall caught on film. Maybe.

    (This is an update of an old piece written for the now-deceased site Horrified, which opened a column for contributors to share the moments that meant the most to them, the flesh and blood of their horror experience. What chilled blood and warmed hearts. A jolt of electricity or two and, like a shambling patchwork corpse, it’s resurrected for this blog.)

    Horror. It bewitches us, fires our imagination, burns itself into our being. There’s a lot to the genre we love and what connects us with it the most. It’s in the stories, the emotions, the atmosphere, the aesthetics. And it’s in the moments we find and the impact they have, from jarring scare to creeping, lingering dread. Most often it is these moments that stay with us and inform how we feel about a film, or television show or book.

    It’s in that zoom to Christopher Lee’s pitiful creature unravelling its bandages and moving from confusion to murderous rage in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, dir. Terence Fisher). Or in Peter Vaughan’s desperate and doomed attempt to escape the the curse he has brought on himself in A Warning to the Curious (1972, dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark). Or those final, chilling moments of Ghostwatch (1992, dir. Lesley Manning) when we realise there will be no happy ending. It is moments like these that resonate with us and evoke the most visceral responses.

    My experience will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the seventies, eighties and into the nineties. Back in these pre-internet days, a burgeoning horror fan still had much to choose from. From television showings of classic films in the wee hours to horror running through Baker-era Doctor Who’s DNA to huge hits like The X-Files, and a multitude of books, magazines and comics, these decades were awash with plenty to thrill the spookily-inclined. It was the halcyon days of monster magazines, fanzines, and short-lived but still fondly remembered comic titles like Scream! (1984). As the Scarred for Life team have demonstrated in their multi-volume hymn to what terrified people in the seventies and eighties, horror rippled through these years and continued to captivate more converts as the new millennium approached.

    Despite this, back in those days, we could not look up the history of a film or series or book with a few clicks or taps of a screen. It was the days of mail order, local discovery in your comic shop or newsagent of choice, or shared between friends like niche contraband. And it was not cosy or kind. It was gory film images in copies of Fangoria or latterly The Dark Side. It was sleepy, half-glimpsed nightmares in late night showings. On occasion, these images, these photographs were of something real, too. Magazines would do stories on ghosts ‘caught on film’. Issues of The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time (Orbis Publishing, 1980-1983) were filled with mind-altering, frequently terrifying stories which were so wild they could only be true. And, in one of his television series devoted to exploring phenomena, Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (Yorkshire Television, 1985), the author focussed on ‘Fairies, Phantoms and Fantastic Photographs’ (Ep 7, 22 May 1985).

    The Reverend K. F. Lord’s photograph of the Spectre of Newby Church. Maybe.

    There is one photo discovery from this era that lingers with me the most. The Spectre of Newby Church was bad enough, but the picture taken of Mrs Ellen Hammell by her daughter was the stuff of beguiling nightmare. In 1959, Mabel Chinnery had taken a photo of her husband sat in their car, but when developed there was a passenger of sorts. Behind her husband sat Ellen, Mabel’s recently departed mother. She had been dead a week. It’s grainy and Mrs Hammell’s straight posture is unnerving enough. But where the eyes should be is only white, like some sort of terrifying gateway into the beyond. When you are young, you don’t know anything about double exposures, trick photography or anything else that would explain it away. And this isn’t a film or show, it’s real. On film. Right there; a ghost. As an adult my rational mind knows there is an explanation for it, that there is (on the balance of available evidence) no ghost ever caught on film. And yet…

    The recently deceased Ellen Hammell catching a lift with her son-in-law. Maybe.

    It would probably be remarkable for Mabel Chinnery to learn that, for me and for others, this image and ones like it opened a door onto other worlds and possibilities in a way films, television and books could not. It frightened me to my very core, and yet I could not look away, because of the possibility of something horrific being actually tangible. Perhaps inescapable. Just like a love of horror. 

  • Some Ghoulishly Good Times

    Recent horrific film and television highlights

    Times are tricky right now, but in amongst everything that might be going on, there’s plenty to enjoy. I get a genuine distraction from the carousel in my head from a good show or film, very often horror, science fiction or mystery. A meditation of sorts. Here’s what I have enjoyed across the past few weeks or so.

    (A warning: There’s no serious, deeply analytical reviews here, so abandon all hope if that’s what you are after. I’m not writing an essay. No spoilers either. You’ll get a brief summary or introduction and one or two things from each I enjoyed.)

    Frankenstein begins the creation of his ‘monster’ in Frankenstein (1910)

    In 1910, J. Searle Dawley wrote and directed a one-reeler adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It runs to about 16 minutes, so is only a swift tour through the beats of the story, but manages to generate empathy for the monster, poisoned by Frankenstein’s arrogance and hubris. The birth of twisted life sequence itself is quite a startling example of early cinema’s ingenuity. This monster is formed of fire and potions in a bubbling cauldron in an effect that, while basic, conveys the pain of its forced creation. It’s remarkable, and an enduring example of early filmed horror’s ability to captivate and even appal modern us, with all our ‘sophistication’.

    Newspaper advert for Sweet, Sweet Rachel (1971)

    Sweet, Sweet Rachel (1971, dir. Sutton Roley) was writer Anthony Lawrence’s pilot-film-of-sorts for the following year’s The Sixth Sense (1972), his phenomenal, egregiously short-lived ESP-themed television series that starred Gary Collins. The film follows a similar approach, telling of Rachel, haunted by visions of death. Dr. Lucas Darrow, an ESP expert, tries to help her unravel what is happening to her as her grip on sanity wavers. Like the series, what works so well with Sweet, Sweet Rachel is its absolute lack of fucks given to anything but its own internal logic and its focus on a nightmare flow to events and imagery. The central mystery is nicely loose, and if you enjoy it, I shouldn’t need to do anything else to convince you to seek out The Sixth Sense series, one of television horror’s weirdest, most underrated gems.

    L to R: Barnard Hughes, Granville van Dusen and JoBeth Williams in The World Beyond (1978)

    Art Wallace is probably most well known as the developer and principal writer of the earliest days of television classic Dark Shadows (1966-1971). A decade or so later, Wallace had two attempts at an occult detective series, with pilot films The World of Darkness (aka ‘Sentence of Death’) in 1977 and The World Beyond (aka ‘The Mud Monster’) in 1978. The magnificently named Granville Van Dusen plays sports journalist Paul Taylor. After dying for two minutes following an accident, Taylor is ‘gifted’ with the ability to see ghosts, who nag him about people in danger he must help but without, you know, any real details or anything that might assist him. In these films, that includes a woman trying to unravel the mysterious deaths afflicting her wealthy, messed-up family, and an island stalked by a golem. There’s nothing new in either, but they’re both so stylishly, sincerely done that doesn’t matter at all. The first film’s elegant, dark chills give way to the second film’s oppressive, relentless focus on visceral experience, but both pack in actual horror and are great fun for people who love ponderous, deliberately paced 1970s television horror (that’s me).

    Poster for The Cat and the Canary (1927)

    The Cat and the Canary (1927, dir. Paul Leni) was one of Universal’s big early horror successes (before the run we have come to associate starting with Dracula in 1931). Like many a film of its time, it was based on a stage play, a darkly humorous thriller by John Willard, but the masterstroke of bringing in the director of Waxworks (1924) means this is no dusty, static retread. Rather, Leni and cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton make a virtue out of its isolated, minimal locations, the lack of dialogue in a silent film (via intertitles), and employ various German Expressionist techniques to create several sequences of gorgeously fluid, alive and confrontational film. A lot of the tricks – sliding panels in walls, disappearing bodies, reappearing corpses – are all too familiar now, but in 1927 they weren’t; this was still fresh to movie theatres. It’s a comedy horror that achieves that rare balance between being genuinely amusing and yet ruthlessly serious in its chills. Really fucking good.

    Lobby card for The Old Dark House (1932)

    James Whale followed the cadaverous, scandalous Frankenstein (1931) (we’re not counting The Impatient Maiden, his intervening drama) with The Old Dark House (1932), a tale of several people stranded by a violent storm and forced to seek refuge in the titular home, its inhabitants very possibly more dangerous than the rain and thunder outside. If you haven’t seen this, you’re really in for a treat, and you should fucking watch it, now. It’s about as good as films get, and has Whale at the peak of his artistry, directing a pitch-perfect cast. A Pre-Code classic,The Old Dark House is as dangerous, raucous, and subversive now as it was nearly a century ago. It’s funny, moving, genuinely unsettling, gleefully out of step and defiantly queer in the more-than-one meaning that word carries.

    Promo photo of Boris Karloff as host of Thriller (1960-1962)

    In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s 1981 history of horror, he suggests Thriller (1960-1962) was the best spooky series of its kind ever shown on television up to the point he was writing and got theWeird Tales vibe right on. He’s wrong.Thriller was in fact wildly erratic, from its early days of slow-moving crime stories, and still in its later episodes King was referring to. Some episodes were good, some were great, some were boring as shit. When it does nail it, the results are sublime, though often not for everyone. If you have a taste for overripe, camp gothic, then season two, episode twelve (‘The Return of Andrew Bentley’) is one such example. Richard Matheson scripts and John Newland directs and stars in a very silly – but very good – story of death and body snatching. To be clear, I really can’t underscore how much almost every bit of this episode is, objectively, bollocks. The score, the shameless performances, the dialogue. The drawn out ending. It’s an arched eyebrow daring you to take it seriously. But somehow, mix it all in together and you have a knowingly silly cocktail of horror cliche that is a lot of dumb fun.

    Poster for I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)

    Behind its gloriously garish title, Gene Fowler Jr’s horror-tinged science fiction thriller is a serious movie that plays almost like a lost first attempt atThe Outer Limits (1963-1965), or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, dir. Don Siegel) if that film was much more mean and obsessed with both the promise and threat of sex and the secrets we can and can’t keep. Marge marries the man of her dreams only to find he changes after they wed, almost like he is a different person. That’s because he is. There’s sci-fi thrills here and gloopy special effects, alongside a genuinely tense, pointed narrative only slightly undercut by one element of its ending. All the better then, that the other elements land so well. A sweaty, supple good time.

    Poster for House of Mystery (1961)

    Vernon Sewell writes and directs his fourth go at an adaptation of the playThe Medium. A young couple think they have stumbled onto an impossibly cheap bargain of a house. When the melancholy caretaker offers to tell them the history of its ghosts and murder, they realise why it’s on at a bargain price. Comprised of several smoothly done flashbacks, House of Mystery (1961) is a kind of proto-run at the ‘residual haunting’ theory that Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972, dir. Peter Sadsy) popularised significantly more loudly a decade later. Sedately paced for a 56-minute long mystery, it nevertheless captures and keeps the attention and squeezes in enough specifically British eccentricity to be plenty of fun. A delightful, creepy curio.

  • March Cultural Highlights

    A brief journey through what has been distracting me this month

    Book highlights this month

    Cover image of Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi by Marek Z. Turner

    Marek Z. Turner had the inspired idea to take a minor character from a Dario Argento film, Cat O’ Nine Tails, and make him the central focus of a book detailing some of his career as a burglar and minor-league criminal in Turin during the 1970s. Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi is a look into the world of Gianluigi ‘Gigi’ Moretti, a not-untalented burglar frequently derailed by alcohol, and equal parts poor luck and bad judgement.

    Turner finds comedic gold along with pathos as Gigi encounters everything from explosively broken toilets to double crosses and, in the book’s set piece story, a desperate attempt to outwit a deadly assassin. He has done his research and submerged himself in the culture of that decade in Italy, but also layers the stories with details of Turin and the realities of being a petty criminal nobody that add to a feeling of authenticity. The tone weaves with skill between being genuinely amusing, bittersweet with melancholy and escalating in tension, sometimes within the same story. I really enjoyed Born to Lose, and recommend not just it but Marek’s previous two books: another crime story (the brutal thriller The Eighth Hill) and a gory creature-feature horror (Killerpede) that opens with a bravura, grotesque death sequence that enjoyably sets the tone.

    Television highlights this month

    Close up from Public Affairs – DR-07, of a hand holding a badge that says ‘Make Love Not War’ on it

    Dragnet 1969: After writing about Jack Webb earlier this month it sent me back to what is probably still the defining achievement of his career, the resurrection of Dragnet in the 1960s for television.

    Launched in 1967, each of the four seasons are defined by the year they were broadcast. Dragnet 1969 is the show’s third season and the one where Webb detaches more significantly than in previous years from the template his original series (from the 1950s) had established. There’s only occasional room for the crime-of-the-week format from now on as Webb instead focuses on various functions of the police officer’s role in Los Angeles. I’ve not long reached a mid-season episode where Friday and Gannon are pulling duty at the Business Office (essentially the front desk) and it’s glorious.

    Webb sets out his stall from episode one this season, ‘Public Affairs – DR-07’, in which Friday and Gannon are sent as LAPD representatives to sit on a panel for the show Speak Your Mind. They are up against ‘historian, social critic, and political activist’ Professor Tom Higgins and Jesse Chaplin, ‘editor-publisher of L.A.’s favorite underground newspaper’. Neither are fans of the police. Nor is anyone in the crowd. What follows is 25-ish minutes of fantastic television, as Friday and Gannon respond to charges the police are a state goon squad solely there to protect property, to oppress Black people, and that a “man of conscience (has) the obligation do disobey outmoded laws“, including the police.

    Dragnet 1969 (and its other seasons) is a fascinating record of television and society changing to reflect the momentous events of the decade. It’s also simply very entertaining, directed in Webb’s clipped, easily parodied style, and as individual a series as you’re likely to find. Revisiting Dragnet 1969 also led me back to Suzy Dragnet’s wonderful blog ‘Everyone Nods: The Dragnet Style Files, a work of art in and of itself.

    Poster image for The Remarkable 20th Century

    The Remarkable 20th Century: I’ve also been taking a slow meander through a documentary series from 2000, The Remarkable 20th Century, presented by Howard K. Smith, one of the Murrow Boys and well positioned to host as someone who spent six decades of his life reporting on the events of the day. It’s a mix of talking heads and substantial footage from news reels and programmes, some of it potently shocking in its intensity. Each episode romps at speed through a decade and as such, it touches on events before moving on to the next big thing, but the fascination of what is unfolding prompts you to explore more after. Given the state of the world today – and its leaders – it’s clear we have learned little from history. Those leaders could certainly do with even this swift gallop through the best and the worst of last century.

    Warren Oates with GIANT EYES in The Mutant, episode 25 of The Outer Limits’ first season

    The Outer Limits: I am currently back to a run through The Outer Limits and up to ‘The Mutant’, the 25th episode of the first season. This has one of the most iconic ‘bears’* of the series, Warren Oates’ bug-eyed telepathic mutant Reese. It benefits immensely from Oates’ off-kilter rhythms and strange charm as he makes Reese feel genuinely ‘other’. Reese would likely be strange even if he didn’t have giant eyes and the ability to think people out of existence. It’s a good episode of a great show that twisted noir and fantasy, science fiction and horror into something uniquely queasy.

    *’Bear’ was the name given to the monster of the week, displayed prominently and quickly (usually in a pre-credits tease)

    Lola Albright and Craig Stevens in Peter Gunn

    Peter Gunn: I’m also back to Peter Gunn, a private investigator series created by Blake Edwards in the late 1950s. It has a jazzy score and instantly recognisable theme by Henry Mancini, and each week finds Gunn taking on a case that frequently gets him beaten up and/or nearly killed. Gunn is a good guy and that gets him into trouble as he comes up against gangsters, duplicitous dames and other unsavoury types. It’s a little slice of noir each episode, gorgeously shot and usually dependably entertaining. A lot of fun, and very much recommended.

    Music highlights this month

    Cover of Lonely People with Power by Deafheaven

    I quite like a lot of music, but it’s rare there will be a music highlight, given I only love two bands, listen to one band more than anyone else by far, and am generally otherwise indifferent to a lot of what gets released.

    But… this month, that one band I listen to the most by far released their first album in nearly four years, and it’s a beautiful record that distills everything that makes them special. Lonely People with Power by Deafheaven is a joyous listen from beginning to end. That might sound unlikely for a band that have mostly returned to their dense, overwhelming signature sound after a segue into lighter territory. It might also seem unlikely for a record that runs to just over an hour and keeps up a sustained mood of furious apocalyptic melancholy. But, we are where we are.

    Unlike lots of heavy music that trades in tedious machismo or bludgeoning anger, Deafheaven, and Lonely People with Power, takes darker emotions and fashions them into something else entirely. Blastbeats and giant riffs mix in with influences that vary from nineties British rock to ambient soundtracks. It’s the soundtrack to the end of the world, sure, but it’s a beautiful end. This might be their best apocalypse yet.