Writing by Jamie Evans

Tag: Horror

  • Stuff I Have Enjoyed This Year

    It’s that time you’ve all been waiting for, a round-up of Stuff I Have Enjoyed this year, across film, television, books and, very occasionally, music. Some of it might have even been made this century! Although, almost certainly not. This isn’t everything for the year, instead a selection of (mostly) new-to-me highlights.

    2025 has been a year where I’ve broadly dropped self-imposed reading targets or anything like that (turns out they’re stressful and feel like a chore when other things preclude you from keeping to them, who knew?). I have replaced this with floating arbitrary goals (do Chaplin’s entire filmography, from the earliest Keystone days! Make lists of all of the films included in books like You Won’t Believe Your Eyes!: A Front Row Look at the Science Fiction and Horror Films of the 1950s!) because they seemed like a good idea at the time, dammit.

    That has led me to things like a return to and increased use of Letterboxd, the type of social media I can get behind (limited human interaction? Cool, good stuff) and moving away from pretty much all other platforms (is Bluesky next? Possibly). On Letterboxd I’ve been enjoying logging, reviewing and rating films, despite that being a largely pointless, arbitrary (again!) endeavour.

    On that topic, off we go with the round-up.

    Silent films

    I’ve been really enjoying widening my silent film experience, and this year has included some of my favourites yet.

    Poster for The Cat and the Canary (1927)

    The Cat and the Canary (1927, directed by Paul Leni) takes the familiar-in-1927, overripe tropes of old dark house mysteries and puts a more comedic spin on them, but Leni can’t resist some genuine chills and gorgeously dark imagery, so the film turns out to be one of the best examples of the very thing it is pastiching.

    Swedish poster for The Bat (1926)

    Roland West’s first go at adapting the stage play The Bat into a feature in 1926 is a similar mix of comedy and serious thrills, evocative imagery, and a good central mystery. Some of the frames in this film should hang in art galleries. Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions label gave this a Blu-ray and DVD release last year that shows it the love it deserves.

    Lon Chaney as Erik (the Phantom) at the masquerade ball

    For its 100th birthday, Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera (‘directed’ by Rupert Julian in 1925) was back in cinemas in October and I gained a new appreciation for the film and for one of Lon’s more unsubtle performances. Once his glorious make-up for Erik is revealed, the delirious journey to its brutal conclusion was grand big-screen fun.

    French poster for West of Zanzibar (1928)

    On the subject of Chaney, I also hugely enjoyed the utterly reprehensible West of Zanzibar, directed by Tod Browning in 1928, which was wildly inappropriate, grotesque and deeply suspect. It’s also great fun, with a phenomenal Lon holding the entire wild ride together.

    Cast members of Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) in costume

    Wilfully frustrating, nightmarish and oddly moving, Seven Footprints to Satan (directed in 1929 by Benjamin Christensen) is best come to knowing as little as possible about it. If the photo above of key cast members doesn’t make you want to watch it now, then I can’t help you.

    Short films and cartoons

    French poster for Haunted Spooks (1920)

    The actual haunted house part of Haunted Spooks (directed in 1920 by Hal Roach and Alfred J. Goulding) is decent, silly fun marred by a disappointing raft of racist gags. The first half, which finds Harold Lloyd trying to woo his current love, get rejected, and then decide to end things, only fail every time, is much better. Dark hearted but still delightfully silly, with some excellent gags and delivery.

    Posters for The Haunted House (1921) and The Goat (1921)

    Two favourite Buster Keatons from this year (where every Keaton was good to great) were The Haunted House and The Goat (both directed by Keaton and Eddie Cline, both 1921), the former an inventive run at…uh…haunted house cliches and the latter an at-times jaw-dropping spectacle that has some of the best stunt work and gags he ever did, which means some of the best anyone ever did.

    A poster/lobby card for Habeas Corpus (1928)

    It might be impossible for me to not enjoy a Laurel and Hardy film from the twenties or thirties, and it hasn’t happened yet, with Habeas Corpus (directed by Leo McCaret and James Parrott in 1928) quickly becoming a new favourite. Their first synchronised sound picture (here meaning a score with sound effects), it’s a classic of The Boys’ broad slapstick, drawn-out gags, silliness, and graveyard shenanigans that I loved.

    Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen, and Charlie Chaplin in A Busy Day (1914)

    Chaplin’s opening run of Keystone films range from the brilliantly inspired to the dismal, but special mention in this post for A Busy Day (directed by Mack Sennett in 1914), which is almost completely morally irredeemable (extreme violence, barrel-bottom misogyny, utterly formless), but on the day I put it on, Chaplin in drag hoofing the shit out of anyone within kicking distance for 6 minutes before meeting an unfortunate end made me chuckle when I really needed it. Don’t ask me to stand by this assessment in future.

    A bad poster for The Haunted House (1929), a good poster for The Mad Doctor (1933)

    I enjoyed several early cartoon classics this year, but two Mickey Mouse ones stood out, perhaps because of how far they are apart from modern Disney, but definitely because they function as some pretty wild, gnarly horror in their own right. The Haunted House (directed by Walt Disney and Jack King in 1929) and The Mad Doctor (directed by David Hand and Wilfred Jackson in 1933) are stuffed with extraordinary animated imagery and, for the first title in particular, stack up against any serious circular nightmare horror. But you know, for kids.

    Sound films

    Posters for The Man From Planet X (1951) and Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

    A low key science-fiction minor classic and an outstanding television movie horror are first up. Veteran director Edward G. Ulmer’s The Man From Planet X (1951) functions as a kind of proto-Quatermass-y, horror-adjacent yarn in which a spacecraft lands on a foggy Scottish moor, intentions unknown. A journalist and scientist try to find, not that by the film’s conclusion we really know that much more for absolute certain. Game attempts at Scottish accents, solid direction and a properly alien alien are all good fun.

    Dark Night of the Scarecrow, directed for television by Frank De Felitta in 1981, is a leisurely paced, beautifully shot, frequently excellent tale of revenge that goes to some very dark places. A great cast is still dominated by a powerhouse, grotesquely villainous turn by Charles Durning as Otis P. Hazelrigg, a deeply unsettling, vile piece of work.

    Poster for House of Mystery (1961)

    Vernon Sewell had already made three versions of stage play The Medium by the time he had another go with House of Mystery in 1961, but let’s be glad he did. A pre-The Stone Tape riff on the concept of residual haunting, it’s mostly made up of flashbacks, and while the central mystery and final reveal are not exactly subtle, they are still effective, as is this rather wonderful little film, and it does it all in under an hour.

    Promo image for Murder by the Clock (1931) and poster for The Unholy Three (1930)

    Murder by the Clock, directed by Edward Sloman in 1931, is a macabre early talkie mystery thriller that has some of its stage-trained cast playing to the cheap seats with the advent of sound, but benefits from Lilyan Tashman having a blast as a scheming seductress after an inheritance. It also has an old, dark house (and graveyard!) setting, crypts, secret passages, murders and a flinty, blackly funny heart.

    The Unholy Three, directed by Jack Conway in 1930, remakes a Tod Browning film from only five years before, starring the same leading man, and sticking to the same story. Why bother? Well, this was the talkie debut of Lon Chaney, so a real event, and what better way than a story he knew and the audience already loved. Sadly, it would turn out to be his only talkie, and his last film, with Lon dying a month after The Unholy Three‘s release. We have just this one to go on, but it’s pretty clear from it Chaney’s career would have survived the transition to sound. He’s incredibly good in this, his performance charismatic, captivating and showing that he understood the new opportunities for film ahead. Lon Chaney is one of the greatest actors from the entirety of cinema history, and as a swan song for possibly the best to ever do it, The Unholy Three, and its final scenes, is pretty much perfect.

    Television

    Detective Murdoch and Doctor Ogden. And a brain.

    Highlights this year have been the always revolving schedule of shows like You Bet Your Life, The Jack Benny Program, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, Dark Shadows, Upstairs, Downstairs and more, but the most surprisingly enjoyable experience has been a late-in-the-year start of Canadian detective series Murdoch Mysteries, based on the novels by Maureen Jennings, and currently at 19 seasons. Season one has had Murdoch meet Arthur Conan Doyle amongst others, alongside showing his fascination with the future of crime solving (‘finger marks’, lie detectors, forensic science). It’s all agreeably easy-going, but not undemanding, entertainment.

    Books

    Covers for The Story of Victorian Film and The Silent Film Universe

    Two excellent early film histories were published this year, and both combined scholarly insight with accessibility and a passion for the beginnings of cinema, establishing themselves almost immediately as key texts. Bryony Dixon’s The Story of Victorian Film and Ben Model’s The Silent Film Universe are essential reading for anyone who wants to know how we got from there to here, and why these eras of film are full of life and innovation and ever vital to explore.

    Cover of Hollywood: The Pioneers

    Kevin Brownlow had already written one of the definitive histories of silent film with his 1968 book The Parade’s Gone By… but just over a decade later, he did it again, this time putting together the definitive documentary on silent film, the 1980 Thames Television series Hollywood. The accompanying, highly recommended book wisely doesn’t try and retread his previous work. Instead, Brownlow collaborates with another film historian, John Kobal, to create a book that is equal parts informative text and beautifully done visual history, full of hundreds of often rare photos. You can find this for about £5 (or equivalent in other areas), so very much worth it.

    Covers of Fleischerei and Phengaris

    I’ve written about both of these books already (Modern horror writing at its best) and they remain two of the best pieces of fiction of the year. If you haven’t already read them, you really should.

    Music

    I’ve gone from being obsessed with music a couple of decades ago, to barely registering what is happening with it these days, so probably good for me that two favourite bands released their new albums this year, Deafheaven (Lonely People with Power) and Greet Death (Die in Love). Better still that both show each band at their peak. It’s been largely either very loud explorations of losing humanity in the lust for power (Deafheaven) or deceptively pretty explorations of the darkness and beauty of life (Greet Death) and I’m grateful for both of them.

    Covers of Lonely People with Power and Die in Love

  • Whitechapel: A bloody good time

    A Great British horror television series remembered

    Phil Davis, Steve Pemberton and Rupert Penry-Jones as the central trio of Whitechapel

    When we talk about the best British horror television, it seems there is rarely a mention of Whitechapel, which ran on ITV for four series between 2009 and 2013. Perhaps that is because Whitechapel was presented at first glance as An Other cop show, if ever so slightly more acquainted with the grimmer side of that genre. It was so much more than that in its finished form. And so, dear reader, it’s time to set things right and celebrate this glorious, pulpy, luridly compelling and emotionally involving show. Be warned, said celebration is slightly spoilery. 

    Created and almost exclusively written by the couple Ben Court and Caroline Ip, Whitechapel starts by taking us into the heart of darkness that is a copycat killer seeking to reenact the murders of Jack the Ripper, bringing a new reign of terror to the capital. Subsequent series explore the secret sons of the Kray twins following their fathers’ worst examples, and tales inspired by H.H. Holmes, the Marquis de Sade, London After Midnight, witch hunts, a killer who flays the faces from their victims and a deranged cult seeking to bring about the apocalypse. Then there’s the ongoing arc that bubbles away in the background about Whitechapel very possibly being a gate to hell. Add to that the mysterious Louise Iver, played to perfection by Angela Pleasence. Iver may be a sweet if somewhat rude old lady, but she also may be something even older and significantly more evil and dangerous. The clue might be in the name.

    One of the things that makes Whitechapel so enjoyable is the cast and characters. As the first series begins, Rupert Penry-Jones plays DI Joseph Chandler. Joseph is the son of a well-respected and long-dead police officer. The largely untested Chandler has been put on the fast track to promotion by his father’s friend Commander Anderson and is given his first big assignment when a woman is found murdered in Whitechapel. He arrives to lead the team charged with investigating it, a team in practice being lead by the old school copper DS Ray Miles, played by Phil Davis. Soon, and much to Miles’ displeasure, Chandler has enlisted the involvement of noted Ripperologist Edward Buchan, played by Steve Pemberton. Buchan suggests to Chandler that the murders that are afflicting Whitechapel are the work of someone trying to recreate Jack’s crimes in precise detail. So begins this unlikely and at times often uncomfortable trio’s journey into a hidden and deadly part of London.

    Joseph Chander in front of a crime board

    Whitechapel is a darkly violent series and doesn’t shy away from presenting the killings and the impact they have on those investigating and the community itself. So far, so lurid. And yet, through its minor characters and particularly Buchan’s character arc it balances this out by paying attention to the victims. From a writing perspective, Court and Ip are skilled at including the briefest of character moments that allow peeks into their lives beyond what is presented onscreen. Whitechapel takes place in a version of London that has violence seeping through its cracks at every turn, in later episodes almost apocalyptically so. The characters provide a counterbalance to this that allows the show to walk a tightrope between pulp, horror-soaked crime and retaining its humanity.

    Chandler ready to box, Miles ready to soak up the blood

    Our three nominal leads do some of their best work in this series. Penry-Jones’ Chandler at first threatens to be the cliched ‘untested’ but arrogant cop-in-charge but Court and Ip subtly subvert that early on and expand on it throughout. Chandler is the very image of well-presented modern policing: meticulous, smart and indefatigably moral. But he’s also riven by self-doubt and neurosis. There’s some short hand here in the way that is done, particularly with Chandler’s fixation on physical order, but it is thought out, sympathetic and never played for cheap laughs or at the expense of actual depth. Penry-Jones is excellent throughout, ensuring Joseph is a fully rounded character. Davis matches him as Miles, and although the two must initially play out the combative new vs old school methodology cliche, again Court and Ip subvert this. The relationship that develops between Chandler and Miles is the core of the series but it is never allowed to get stale or comfortable. These two men find something in each other, but it’s not as brothers or a father/son surrogate but instead something deeper and more satisfying.

    Buchan and Miles in a shadow filled room

    Pemberton has the flashier role, as the show begins. Buchan is a Ripperologist who runs walking tours of the area where Jack did his ‘work’. He has a deep knowledge of the criminal history of Whitechapel and considers himself an investigator. But Buchan is out of his depth and as the first series progresses is forced to confront his own relationship with the crimes and how exploitation and the distance of time has allowed him to disconnect from the real-life weight of grief. His desire to be clever and invaluable to the investigation has personal consequences that follow him for the rest of the series. Pemberton does some excellent work exploring Buchan’s moral and professional collapse and subsequent rebuilding.

    The rest of the cast, which shifts slightly before settling into a unit for the final two series, provide Chandler, Miles and Buchan with a solid, likeable team. Another admirable aspect of Whitechapel is Court and Ip avoiding the modern malaise of the workplace ‘family’, that cliche ignoring as it often does that families bicker, sometimes viscously so, and that peace is sometimes uneasy, just as it is here. It’s a mark of a good cast that every time a regular appears (like Claire Rushbrook’s Dr. Llewellyn) it’s not just to further the plot, we also want to learn a little bit more about their characters. The various guest performers that fill the series are excellent too, from Craig Parkinson’s Kray twins via Peter Serafinowicz’s unnervingly bad apple cop to Lydia Leonard’s doomed Morgan Lamb.

    Miles and Chandler in – surprise, surprise – a shadow filled room

    There are other crime dramas that have an affection for horror and pulp influences that are clear in their approach, notably Luther. But although such shows and films with flirt with these influences they are first and foremost thrillers. Whitechapel is a procedural, there’s no doubt of that. But it is equally pure horror and once it reaches the third series, goes full tilt into first slasher influences and then a run of witches, urban legend (killer pigs in the sewers anyone) and apocalyptic terror. The series loves its milieu and there’s a lot to enjoy in picking out these influences and the tributes and homages that fill the episodes and load it with atmosphere. There are some bravura, tension-packed set pieces throughout and the show is agreeably unafraid of the absurd and the overblown when it is needed, delighting in red herrings and left-turn plot twists.

    Amidst all of this, Whitechapel never forgets its characters or its humanity. It is a series that sets out to thrill, disturb, entertain and deliver heart too, something it succeeds in . Take this as full-blooded recommendation thatWhitechapel is one of British television’s finest, most enjoyable horror series, ripe for (re)discovery. 

  • A Peculiar and Beguiling Bleakness

    Casting the Runes (1979) and updating M.R. James for the Scarred for Life generation (this article previously published on the now-defunct Horrified website)

    Title card of the episode shows Casting the Runes written in red against a shot of fields and trees covered in snow, the sun’s rays raising from behind a hill

    The 1970s was a time of wild contrast in Britain. Wealth inequality was at its lowest but the country was beset by industrial action. Music, film and television had entered a period of creative fecundity that would continue Britain’s position as an innovator and leader in culture. Alongside this, the country was afflicted by power cuts, inflation, the rise of the far-right and the beginning of the slow death of that one-generation-only dream of the middle class. Parallels can be drawn with our most recent decade or so, one where it has seemed the good times are over and terminal decline is inevitable. 

    It is perhaps then not surprising that the horror produced throughout the decade had a peculiar and beguiling bleakness. Stories across books, film and television took us to dark places and often left us there at their conclusion, no happy endings or release. One of the towering achievements of these years was the annual BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas, a mix of filmed adaptations of M.R. James, Dickens and original screenplays (one of which, Stigma, was contributed by the writer of this version of Casting the Runes, Clive Exton). These haunting tales of a genuinely disturbing and dangerous ‘other’ lurking just out of sight are rightly hailed as classics of the genre. 

    A man and a dog crouch on snowy ground, looking around them, the man appearing to be concerned – behind him, on the hill, a stone figure of a demon can be seen

    All but one of these were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, a talented director with an unerring ability to present creeping dread onscreen. After he had finished with the BBC sequence, Clark wasn’t done with the supernatural. For the ITV Playhouse strand he took on the challenge of providing an updated version of M.R. James’ ‘Casting the Runes’. The story had been adapted some two decades before for the classic Night of the Demon (1957, dir. Jacques Tourneur), one of the great British horror films. A decade later it was adapted again for the anthology series Mystery and Imagination, an episode that is sadly lost to us.

    As with Jacques Tourneur’s film, Casting the Runes updates the story to contemporary times. It gives us a female Dunning (played here by Jan Francis) and an American Karswell (Iain Cuthbertson) and adheres loosely to the main beats of James’ chilling short story. It’s a version that isn’t particularly well remembered these days, or seemingly thought of highly, in comparison with its more elegantly mounted BBC relatives, or the 1957 film. We have a tendency to compare needlessly, and a low-budget 50 minute television adaptation shot on a mix of film and video has little chance of equalling the impact of a crisply produced black and white big screen version directed by one of Hollywood’s most skilled psychological horror craftsmen.

    Dunning and Derek Gayton in a room, looking a small slip of paper with runes on them

    And yet, there is much to enjoy in this production, starting with a glorious opening sequence which took full advantage of the blizzard conditions it was shot in. There’s a clear folk horror influence to this beginning, evoking memories of films like The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971, dir. Piers Haggard), finding as it does the menace inherent in indifferent nature. As we start, a man we later learn is called John Harrington is out walking his dog in the snowy countryside until the animal becomes unnerved by the presence of something out there with them, something that is slowly, inevitably hunting John. It benefits hugely from the snowy landscape and, in its un-retouched presentation on DVD, a scratchy film print as well as a menacing score. 

    In this iteration, Karswell is a cult figure, the self-styled Abbot of Lufford, and he has made somewhat of a name for himself as writer of a book called ‘A History of Witchcraft’ and as proponent of a philosophy that would have ‘Vice as the only true virtue, lust as the only true modesty, indecency the only true decorum and evil the only true good’. When Karswell is mocked by a television exposé on ‘mumbo jumbo’ produced by Dunning, he determines to take his revenge on her next. Our introduction to Karswell is the converted rectory where he lives, surrounded by grand gold ornaments. Karswell enacts his curse, manufacturing a meeting with Dunning. When Dunning is attacked in her bed by a creature created from Karswell’s magic, and she learns Harrington had written a scathing report of Karswell’s book and paid for his life with it, Dunning begins to understand her scepticism will not keep her safe.

    Karswell, a smugly mean expression on his face, holds a small figure with red clothes and dark hair

    The remainder of the play, whilst not overtly frightening or aiming to be, is equal parts unnerving and melancholy. Exton and Clark work together to create a world where the characters live in a definably real world that is being intruded by something ancient and unrelenting. There are some great performances, with Francis an anchor to everything as the unravelling Dunning. Cuthbertson has a grand time as the wicked Karswell, here a genuinely malevolent presence, a character who seems to revel in the power he wields. Being a production made in the 1970s and filtering through a decade of that beguiling, bleak approach the play also has a suitably harsh conclusion as it fades out, the wreckage caused by Karswell extending far beyond the final shot of a devastated Dunning.

    A man in a long coat and hat at the crest of a footbridge covered in snow

    Though not part of the BBC ghost stories, this adaptation of ‘Casting the Runes’ shows Clark learned well what worked for them and has much to recommend for those who appreciate the uniquely chilly, uncompromising horror the 1970s produced and acts as an effective chaser to much of what proceeded it. 

    (The version referenced throughout is from a now out-of-print Network DVD release, though the episode can be found in other places online)

  • Carl Kolchak: An Appreciation

    Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak

    It’s my esteemed and correct opinion that Carl Kolchak is one of popular culture’s greatest characters. As brought to life by Darren McGavin in a shabby seersucker suit and straw hat, he’s a lovably shambolic, rough-edged crusader for the truth. The reporter started out life as the main focus of Jeff Rice’s novel The Kolchak Papers. It tells of a foul-mouthed drunk who had a remarkable story to tell about a vampire loose in Las Vegas, who used Rice to get his story out. As he was working unsuccessfully to get the book published Rice was also inking deals with those who could put his story on the screen. This was the early 70s and television movies were a huge deal, bringing in massive audiences. So when ABC optioned the book you can imagine Rice’s excitement at the prospect of bringing Kolchak to homes all across America. Ultimately it would be the hugely talented Richard Matheson who would write the script, slightly softening Carl’s gruff edges but keeping the humour and commentary that pops off the pages of Rice’s book (I don’t think Stephen King was a fan, however).

    Dan Curtis was onboard as producer and it might be hard to get just how big now, but Curtis’ previous project Dark Shadows which had finished in 1971 was huge. It turned the reluctant Jonathan Frid into an unlikely middle-aged sex symbol and had a generation of monsters kids running home from school to follow plots of vampires, werewolves and all sorts of supernatural chicanery taking place.

    Title card for The Night Stalker (1972)

    John Llewellyn Moxey was brought in to direct and in early January 1972 Carl made his screen debut. It was a smash hit and brought in the biggest ever audience for a TV movie at the time.  There’s a reason it was a hit: it’s near perfect, a mix of serious scares and humour centred around McGavin’s effortlessly charming performance, ably supported by Simon Oakland as his suffering editor Tony Vincenzo. At first here Kolchak is a beat reporter, using his police scanner to show up as quickly as possible at crime scenes and generally making himself a nuisance to the powers that be.

    When young women start turning up murdered, Kolchak thinks he’s got a killer on the rampage, but soon he finds out this killer might not even be human. Carl’s the type of guy who goes where the leads take him and so when the pieces start to fit that it’s a vampire that is killing these women, Carl thinks something must be done. Those powers that be aren’t buying it and they set about making Kolchak’s life even harder work. But that’s not going to stop him getting to the truth and doing what it takes to stop the bloodsucker from getting away with it. The thing about Carl is that he believes the people have a right to know and he’ll protect that right no matter the cost to himself. It’s not that he’s particularly noble, it’s more a compulsion that truths hidden should be revealed. If you haven’t ever enjoyed this classic go and find it now.

    Carl holding a cross up to repel something nasty

    When The Night Stalker was a huge hit, inevitably talk of a sequel followed. That talk turned to action in double time and in 1973 The Night Strangler followed this time directed by Curtis. In this one Kolchak has relocated (not through choice) to Seattle and comes into contact once again with a despondent Vincenzo. At the same time another killer is murdering people by strangling them (but of course) and using their blood to stay alive, something they have been doing for over a 100 years. Kolchak discovers the truth but again narrowly avoids getting killed for his troubles and is railroaded out of town for good.

    The same year Rice finally got his novel published as a tie-in to the first film. A reverse of the first film’s process next year found Rice adapting Matheson’s Strangler script for a tie-in book that would be published in 1974, the same year the series started. Before that Kolchak had nearly made it into a third film, in a script by Matheson and William F. Nolan called The Night Killers which would have had Carl in conflict with android replicas. McGavin was tiring of the formula and didn’t want to do it. Curtis wasn’t apparently impressed either and things cooled for a while, during which Curtis and Nolan went off to do spooky TV movie The Norliss Tapes, which could easily have been a Kolchak case. 

    A police sketch of the undead killer in The Night Strangler (1973)

    Eventually after negotiation, McGavin was tempted back for a weekly series which he could produce, although Curtis was finished with it and opted out. In September 1974, after multiple protracted negotiations and fallouts, and in a season ABC desperately needed success in, Kolchak: The Night Stalker hit small screens as a weekly show. The first episode was ‘The Ripper’, and it finds Carl now set up in Chicago, still working for Vincenzo. It’s almost a remake of sorts of the two films with its story of a madman killing people off who turns out to be THE Ripper, a maniac of unusual longevity.

    Like many an episode of Kolchak it has its good and bad elements. Plotting in the episodes is frequently perfunctory, low budget monster-of-the-week stuff that holds few surprises. But the series still had it’s star in McGavin and he’s reliably excellent no matter if he’s being chased around a cruise ship by a ‘werewolf’ who resembles more a guy who fell face first into some hair-restorer as opposed to a beastly lycanthrope, or sowing a zombie’s mouth shut and hoping it’s not going to wake up while he’s doing it. There’s many reasons to love McGavin but there’s a great little moment in ‘The Ripper’ where you just know he’s doing it the way you would too. Trapped in the Ripper’s room all Kolchak has to do is stay quiet and he’ll make it out unseen. But when the Ripper gets too close Kolchak lets out a yelp and makes a run for it, blowing his cover. By grounding Carl in recognisable flaws and humour, he became more real to us. Not an impervious hero but instead a dude who’s scared shitless but can’t turn away from the truth or doing what needs to be done.  

    Carl with microphone and puzzled expression

    When you go back to the series now one of its strengths is just how infrequently it chose to stick with the usual screen horror villains. Sure, there’s the Ripper and a werewolf and another zombie. There’s even another vampire but it links in with The Night Stalker in an interesting way and is one of the best episodes. But others included witches, prehistoric monsters, a haunted knight’s armour, robots, aliens and demonic spirits. This level of creativity always fought against the network drive to make every week’s entertainment broadly the same as the week before and is representative of what eventually brought the series down before it’s first season had finished, with a few scripts un-produced. Ratings were never massive and as the series went on McGavin got restless and the network could see it was not the hit they hoped for, with the various attempts at meddling causing friction between star and studio. In 1975 the episode order was cut by two and Kolchak limped to a sad end. But it was not the end really.  

    Reruns of the series would find more receptive viewers in the late 70s and this would continue through the 1980s until the series found a new home on the cable Sci-Fi Channel at roughly the same time a new series called The X-Files on Fox was moving from cult hit to mainstream sensation. Chris Carter has spoken before of his memories of Kolchak in part inspiring Fox Mulder and Dana Scully’s adventures and this helped continue to build an interest for newer viewers as to who this Carl Kolchak was. Home video releases of the first film and series started to surface too, along with the reruns allowing people to get to know McGavin’s intrepid reporter again. Mark Dawidziak, a critic for an American newspaper, wrote a guide book on Kolchak that arrived in 1991 called Night Stalking: A 20th Anniversary Kolchak Companion. This led in turn to a new deal between Rice and the same book’s publisher for new Kolchak novels. To kick it off Dawidziak was tasked with writing the third book (to follow on from the films and series) and Grave Secrets duly arrived in 1994. The deal for more faltered when the publisher was unable to actually get anything else in print and nothing more would arrive for some years. But thanks to Dark Shadows actor Kathryn Leigh-Scott’s publishing company Pomegranate Press an updated and now illustrated 25th anniversary edition of Dawidziak’s definitive book would arrive in 1997. 

    Cover for Jeff Rice’s The Night Stalker novel

    After this, the new century found Carl in surprisingly good health. Universal released a (sadly totally extras-free) box set of the entire series. The two TV movies came out on a dual disc release.  A book with Matheson’s three scripts (including The Night Killers) was released with introductions by Dawidziak. Moonstone Books began publishing comics based on the character in 2003 and these became almost an industry in their own right, covering Kolchak through comics (with adaptations of the first film and unfilled scripts), novels and short story compilations. More comic adventures have followed.

    In 2005, a short-lived revival series aired starring Stuart Townsend as Carl in an updated version taking in modern TV’s story-arc concerns. Low ratings and inevitable but unfair comparisons to The X-Files did for Night Stalker after only 6 episodes were aired, but it’s a remarkably good and interesting series in its own right. Frank Spotnitz was show runner and took influences from the original but filtered it through a style more influenced by Michael Mann that left us with an unfinished show that is significantly more interesting than its reputation suggests. It’s not all been good news. Back in 2012 Disney announced a film adaptation was in the early stages with Johnny Depp as Kolchak and Edgar Wright directing.  This (with or without Depp and Wright) turned out to be just an idea and so far Kolchak has yet to return to the screen. Perhaps this is for the best, given the debacle of Depp’s Dark Shadows film and…you know…everything else.

    Carl with a makeshift cross and an angry looking vampire

    But if his history has taught us anything it’s that Carl is a tenacious sonofabitch and it’s likely we’ll have him back on the screen someway, somehow. For now though, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure, go find The Night Stalker and get introduced.

    (Recent years also found the original films and series getting American Blu-ray releases, another resurrection for Carl)

    Further suggested reading:

    The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler by Jeff Rice (published variously as separate books and a one-volume compilation)

    The Night Stalker Companion by Mark Dawidziak (Pomegranate Press, 1997)

    The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets by Mark Dawidziak (Cinemaker Press, 1994)

    The Moonstone Books various comics, graphic novels, short story compilations and full-length novels.  

    Progeny of the Adder by Les Whitten (Doubleday, 1965).  This is a book at some points rumoured to have ‘inspired’ Rice as it tells the story of a modern vampire terrorising a city (in this case Washington DC) and the desperate attempts to stop the killings.  

  • Ghoulishly Good Times – The Shorts Edition

    We all love a long movie, right? Two hours, three hours, lost in the magic of cinema. Well…maybe not all the time. Fortunately, the art of the short film has been there since the earliest days of the medium. There’s a wealth of funny, moving, weird, creepy, thrilling and adventurous entertainment that won’t numb your arse or sap your will to live. And so, I welcome you to this spooky short (mostly) silent film specific edition of Ghoulishly Good Times.

    Bluebeard attempting to woo his entirely – and correctly – unenthusiastic bride to be

    Barbe-bleue (aka Bluebeard, 1901, dir. George Méliès) retells the French legend of a dubious – but very rich – old dodger courting his eighth wife, the seven before her having died ‘in mysterious circumstances’. His new wife is not impressed with being dumped with the danger, nor is she too happy being left bored in his castle while he buggers off. He does leave her, however, with the key to the place and instructions not to get curious, after which she stumbles on the truth of what befell his other wives. What starts as a broad comedy of over gesticulating takes a hard swerve into serious darkness about halfway through. Surreal nightmares, ghosts, a demonic sprite and some deeply unsettling imagery drive it to the reveal of whether wife number eight is destined for the same fate. What we have here, for me, is some of the first flourishing of narrative horror with a bravura shift in tone from ‘oh this is fun’ to ‘holy shit that’s dark’ that became familiar to movie-going horror audiences across the following decades, done here early and in style.

    A totally, absolutely convincing skull with a shroud hanging from it during a séance

    Alongside the development of photography and film and the tantalising prospect of recorded proof (or the lack of it), the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th continued a pronounced split between people who wanted to believe in an afterlife and that people we had lost could be reached there, and those that saw it as a grift designed to exploit vulnerability and grief. This can be seen in the differing beliefs of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini (two men who were nevertheless friends) as fraud and debunking entered into a new phase, and the urgency to believe was shaped by the scale of previously unimaginable loss of life world conflicts inflicted. The UK short Is Spiritualism a Fraud? – The Medium Exposed (1906, dir. J.H. Martin) isn’t really asking a question, but instead presents a couple of con artists getting caught in the act of faking communication with the dead, after which those duped take their revenge in an escalating sequence of slapstick violence. It’s not subtle stuff, but it is a fascinating and entertaining example of the innovation happening in Britain at the time, giving us some startling horror-informed imagery along the way. Enjoyably vicious too, reflecting the way some people felt about the cruelty of offering a bogus way of contact with people lost to them.

    The spectre of the title in his grotto, using magic to torment people and looking pretty pleased with himself.

    Le Spectre Rouge (aka The Red Spectre, 1907, dirs. Segundo de Chomón, Ferdinand Zecca) is a trick film, ostensibly comparable to the Méliès style. Though it’s easy to say everything followed his work, like D.W. Griffith inventing and perfecting every cinema technique you’ve ever heard of, it’s neither true nor fair. This one is its own thing, and has a demonic magician hanging out in his underground lair, dicking about with tricks that seem largely designed to torment women. His attempts are interrupted by a good sprite who intervenes, stopping or reversing the mischief he has wrought. That’s pretty much it, the premise being an excuse to have fun with tricks and special effects, something the film does well. It’s a frequently beautiful film that plays as an inventively crafted window into another world, full of splashes of vibrant imagination.

    Delightful French poster for Haunted Spooks

    Haunted house movie (and theatre) tropes were already well known by 1920 and ripe for comedic parody. Haunted Spooks (1920, dirs. Hal Roach, Alfred J. Goulding) does just that. But before we get to the titular spooky abode, the film starts with a remarkable sequence where Harold Lloyd’s would-be suitor fails to secure the affections of the woman he loves. This drives him to decide to <ahem> resolve the problem of life permanently through several failed attempts that escalate in a darkly amusing fashion. He’s distracted from any further tries when he runs into a lawyer working on behalf of a young woman who urgently needs a husband to claim her inheritance from her grandfather. Part of that inheritance is a beautiful house that the woman’s uncle covets, and so he does what any reasonable person would: fakes a haunting in the hope it will scare her off. When the couple arrive, we get another sequence of escalating events as the uncle’s ill-considered scheme unravels. There’s a lot to enjoy in this one, not least an intertitle A-game, which doesn’t only complement the action but enhances it (as the best examples did). Lloyd and co-star Mildred Davis make a winning central couple as things get truly hair-raising (makes sense when you see the film). It’s also fair to note that there are some disappointing, tiresome racial ‘gags’ in the second half, so be advised.

    Poster for The Haunted House, 1921

    Buster Keaton also got in on the haunted house parody gig in the following year’s…uh…The Haunted House (1921, dirs. Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline). In this one, bank teller Keaton has a day start badly (gluing cash to his hands) and get worse (on the run from the police, hiding out at a ‘haunted’ mansion). It’s not actually haunted, however, but instead the hideout of a gang of thieves using fake ghosts and ghouls to keep people away from their lair. The entire film is a great example of Keaton’s often bizarre, off-kilter humour. When we get to the hideout, it gets increasingly wrapped up in a building run of visual gags and repeated refrains that land in a final sequence that pays off beautifully. There’s one gorgeous frame after another along the way in this gem. I could write more, but I just recommend seeking it out and enjoying it.

    Herbert Stern as Roderick Usher

    The Fall of the House of Usher (dirs. James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber) was one of two adaptations of Poe’s tale in 1928, both of which traded in surreal visuals (the other a feature-length French version). This one was an American production and gives us an avant-garde take on the story, existing for the purposes of experimenting with imagery, mood and technique. It’s a remarkably close approximation of the recognisable feel of a nightmare. The narrative is still straightforward enough to follow but it’s not the point of the film: that is to use images to make you feel unsettled and unbalanced and it does this very well. I wouldn’t say it’s an enjoyable experience, but it certainly qualifies as horrific and, alongside the range of techniques used here, it’s definitely worth seeking out.

    Screenshot of an excellent intertitle from Habeas Corpus

    The first Laurel and Hardy film to be released with synchronised sound (here a musical score with sound effects), Habeas Corpus (1928, dirs. Leo McCaret and James Parrott) has the duo knocking on the door of an insane professor (in the hope of work or money, or in Stan’s case, a slice of buttered toast). He offers them $500 to bring him a body back from the cemetery, and despite their misgivings, they accept. They go down to the graveyard, but unbeknown to them, the police are also aware of the potential crime being committed, and head down there too, aiming to pretend to be a ghost and put the duo off. What follows is a film packed with arguably predictable gags and slapstick somehow, as so often the case with these two great performers, made fresh and appealing by the talent and chemistry of Ollie and Stan. There’s also a wilful drawing out of sequences like them trying to scale the wall into the cemetery that makes that something familiar become something fresh – like a different, more cuddly, less confrontationally weird version of the off-kilter Keaton approach. Again, a Laurel and Hardy hallmark. Great fun.

    Screenshot from The Haunted House (1929)

    At the end of the decade that started with Lloyd and Keaton encountering fake ghosts, Mickey Mouse ran into the real thing in The Haunted House (1929, dir. Walt Disney). During a storm, Mickey seeks refuge in an abandoned house, only to find himself forced to soundtrack (by playing the organ) a delirious dance-off between the skeletal inhabitants. When he tries to escape, things get weirder still. A horror-comedy building on the same year’s The Skeleton Dance* (1929, dir. Walt Disney), this comes from Disney’s emerging days, when it wasn’t tethered to its later image, and it’s pretty wild, nightmarish stuff. For me, much of this has the feel of a Fulci-esque circular nightmare of the seventies or eighties, where if you found out the mouse was dead and trapped in his own private hell, it would need no further explanation. A ‘happy’ conclusion is inevitable (it is a cartoon after all, you know – for the kids) but if it cut off a few seconds earlier, or ended with Mickey lost in the storm again, discovering the house, that could only make it (slightly) better.

    *That one, as the NYT reported in 1931, banned in Denmark for being ‘too macabre’

    A POV shot of the intruder from Suspense. looking up at the woman inside the house

    Though not a horror, a bonus mention for Suspense. (1913, dir. Lois Weber), an excellent home-invasion thriller which finds a woman and her young child in their remote house, abandoned by their maid, and menaced by a passing stranger who finds his way inside. With her husband alerted and racing back from work to try and get there in time, the stranger makes his way through the house, up to her room where she has barricaded herself and her child in. Like several of the above films, the elements are familiar but Weber makes stylish use of technique, frames the story imaginatively, and adds in little shorthand character notes that bring them to life despite the brief running time. An outstandingly good, and perfectly named, film.

  • More Ghoulishly Good Times

    You might think everything is terrible right now. You might believe that part of the suck is that there’s nothing new in culture (from films to television, books, music, theatre, art), that we are drowning in remakes and reboots and reimaginings. You mutter curses as you read of ‘a dark retelling of the Pinnochio story, coming to book stores this year’. Dick Wolf wakes up in a fluster one Sunday morning, an idea for a new ‘franchise’ burning feverishly like so much sloshing jock sweat in his brain. A remake of a film you swear is only three years old is announced. “Doesn’t anybody have an original idea?”, you muse. The answer is no, absolutely fucking not. Where, then, is all the good stuff? It’s still everywhere, thankfully. The people you love, the things that fire your imagination, the world out there. There’s lots to enjoy as we spin in space. Some of it is here, too, in the second instalment of Ghoulishly Good Times. Here’s what I have enjoyed across the last few weeks.

    Poster for The Bride of Frankenstein

    James Whale agreed to take on a sequel to Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale) on the condition he could make it a ‘hoot’. And hoot it is, with The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) eschewing the gothic gloom of the first film and pitching instead for a dark-hearted fairytale. It carries over the themes of men hungering to play God and brings back Colin Clive as Frankenstein and Boris Karloff as his unloved creation. But otherwise, the film’s messy genesis, going through several scripts and production woes, reshoots and censorship, works to its credit, leaving us with an occasionally coherent series of vignettes that expand the lore, give Karloff more to do, and allow Whale to create something defiantly eccentric. More absurd black comedy-fantasy than horror film, it nevertheless packs in plenty of imagery to compliment the iconic original, and entertains completely.

    Spanish release poster for The Magician

    Speaking of Universal’s Frankenstein(s), an acknowledged influence on them both can be found at the end of silent classicThe Magician (1926, dir. Rex Ingram). Gothic laboratories, assistants of a smaller stature, and men playing God. Based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel, the first hour at least finds sculptor Margaret the unwelcome subject of the obsessive Oliver Haddo, hypnotist, magician, student of medicine and all-around bastard (played by real-life bastard Paul Wegener). Haddo is convinced that Margaret is the key to an arcane ritual he has discovered which he believes will give him the power over life and death. Made in France, it’s a beautifully shot, creeping thriller (with some striking location filming) that diverts pleasingly in its final half hour into a gothic horror. Shooting overseas away from studio executive interference certainly helped the film, but at the time, reactions to it criticised it as ‘tasteless’. Take that as a recommendation in my opinion.

    Title card for Dark Night of the Scarecrow

    Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981, dir, Frank De Felitta) writer J.D. Feigelson had hoped his supernatural revenge script would have made it to cinemas, but its eventual home on television as a TVM probably gifted the film its legacy. I don’t know what the minor changes made for its new home on CBS were, but there are no edges smoothed. This is a seriously dark, unsettling tale and stands out. A vulnerable man has a friendship with a young girl that upsets local postman and all-round piece of shit Otis Hazelrigg (Charles Durning). He convinces three friends to take matters into their own murderous hands. It’s not long after this that something – some kind of vengeful force – starts causing fatal accidents for the quartet. As events spiral, Hazelrigg moves from disbelief to desperation to protect himself, no matter the cost. There’s lots to love about the film: performances are all great, the atmosphere of creeping dread is nailed from the outset, it’s absurd, blackly funny and shameless about it, and its purposefully slow pace allows director De Felitta and cinematographer Vincent Martinelli space to conjure up some gorgeously unsettling imagery. But the main ticket is Durning, here playing an unrepentant scumbag, a soul black with squalor and hypocrisy, and this film’s dark, festering core.

    The Bridge title card

    In 1929, Charles Vidor wrote and directed a short film of ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, making the first adaptation of the famous Ambrose Bierce story of 1890. It’s only 10ish minutes long but The Bridge (1929, dir. Charles Vidor) plays like a preview to The Twilight Zone (which had its own version of the tale) and similar shows and films. A man escapes his execution on a bridge but his journey to get back to his wife and child is beset by a creeping sense something is not right. Nicholas Bela is outstanding in his role as the man, and Vidor’s version could have been made last week: it experiments with technique and structure in ways that feel familiar to an audience nearly 100 years later. Really very good.

    Newspaper advert for The Ace of Hearts

    Director Wallace Worsley and star Lon Chaney reunited after 1920’s wild The Penalty on the following year’s The Ace of Hearts (1921, dir. Wallace Worsley), a thriller about a group of anarchists who, having decreed that a rich piece of shit has lived too long, draw cards to decide which of them gets the honour of killing the wealthy prick. Chaney’s Farallone is besotted with comrade Lilith but when she marries their other comrade Forrest, the mission becomes more complicated. Although the mid-section gets a little bogged down and talky (no mean feat for a silent picture), the opening scenes and the tense and beautifully done final sequences more than make up for it. Lilith and Forrest are the nominal leads, but the show is Chaney’s. He gives it his all, and gifts Farallone a tortured humanity that convinces as the film builds to its ending. The conclusion is at once overdone and yet perfect for the movie (more so than the original, which was reshot – in this case wisely – at studio head Sam Goldwyn’s request). Alongside a great Lon, the film’s themes are still heavily resonant today, almost jarringly so. Highly recommended.

    Promotional trade advert for The Bat

    The last week has been a tale of three Bats, starting with 1926’s first version of the successful Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood play, The Bat (1926, dir. Roland West). A close relation to the following year’s The Cat and the Canary (1927, dir. Paul Leni), Roland West’s first go at adapting the play is a mix of mystery, comedy and horror that works incredibly well, bringing together a dark house, a cast of potential victims/suspects, and a villain who makes a vividly lasting impression. As with Leni’s film, there’s a lot of German Expressionism influence, some outstanding set design and cinematography, and a finely done balance between mystery, comedy and some genuine chills.

    Screenshot from The Bat Whispers

    West’s second go came just a few years later in 1930, sound pictures now the standard, with The Bat Whispers (1930, dir. Roland West). West doesn’t appear interested in retreading ground from the first film, and this version focuses more on the mystery element and dialling up the comedy. The Expressionist style is mostly gone, but that doesn’t mean we lose the horror influence entirely. And again, West doesn’t just rehash the first film’s imagery. Instead we get something much closer to the inspiration for Bob Kane’s early Batman of a few years later. We also get a film shot in early widescreen and some ambitious camera work, making use of panning in particular to create some startling sequences. West didn’t get a third go at the title, his career derailed a few years later by a scandal involving the death of his mistress, Thelma Todd, in 1935, a death West was rumoured to be responsible for, though never charged with anything.

    Screenshot from The Bat (1959)

    The last bat is connected to the original in more than the obvious way and also brings us full circle. Crane Wilbur wrote and directed the 1959 version, The Bat (1959, dir. Crane Wilbur). Wilbur was a contemporary of Roland West and Lon Chaney, adapting The Bat and writing his own blackly comic dark house mysteryThe Monster (1925, dir, Roland West), starring Lon Chaney and serving as a comedic critique of the dark house and mad scientists sub genre tropes and acting as an inspiration for Universal’s Frankenstein films. Vincent Price is in the cast for this iteration, although the horror influence is dropped almost entirely, the focus here on the mystery. It plays like an unusually cynical Scooby Doo episode, and that’s a compliment. The fantastic Agnes Moorehead is part of the cast, too, and there’s some enjoyably unsubtle undercurrents that modern audiences will recognise easily enough running throughout that make it feel substantially different to the previous two versions, and very worthwhile in its own right.

  • 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.

  • Modern horror writing at its best

    I want to write a little bit about two recent book releases that share some thematic crossover and urge you to check them out. Both books are remarkable pieces of writing and deserve a wide audience. A fair warning: the books deal with gnarly subjects and this piece references them throughout, so if you’re put off by mentions of grief, illness, gore and the like… read no further. No spoilers, however.

    In Phengaris, we meet 17-year old Mark, a young man adrift. He is looking after his terminally ill mum, a parent with whom his relationship is conflicted to say the least, his dad disappeared years ago, and all Mark really wants to do is get high and tune out of the relentless noise of his life. He thinks he’s found the perfect spot in nearby Thurstrop Wood and an abandoned workshop yard. Unfortunately for Mark, something no longer human there has seen him and doesn’t want to let him go.

    Phengaris opens with a visceral description of a body mutilated by disease and something disturbingly unnatural. It sets the tone for what follows, as Mark becomes consumed by the mystery of Thurstrop Wood and how it connects to his family, revealing secrets that have been buried for years. There’s other things buried in the woods, too, and they are coming to the surface. Orridge writes with skill and empathy about the burden of youth, and of illness, and about the unforgiving way bodies attack themselves at the same time as the world around us weighs down on us. There’s a thread of ecological awareness, too, and a focus on the nature of parasitical behaviour.

    It’s also concerned with what it means to be human, and how family connections not even escapable by death bond us together for good and for ill. Orridge has a beautiful way with phrasing and illuminates the secondary and minor characters in a way that brings them vividly to life. Sadness and melancholy and loss knot their way through Phengaris, as does a quietly effective rage. It’s ambitious, passionately alive, and makes the personal deeply political.

    Fleischerei by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin has some complimentary themes but is a radically different experience. In it, we are introduced to Órfhlaith, living in Berlin and working as a content moderator. Órfhlaith is a bloody ball of grief, guilt and self-loathing, punishing and exciting herself with masochistic fantasies. When she moves their focus onto her sickly, compellingly unreadable colleague Arnaud, the wall between her interior darkness and the world around her unravels. As their romance develops, they find in each other a shared yearning for emotional dislocation and physical mutilation. Órfhlaith just wants to know Arnaud, but is it ever really possible to know someone else, no matter how much a part of you they become?

    This is a troubling, affecting work. Intimacy throughout is a transgression that leads to violence and permanent scarring. It’s a confrontingly visceral book and will make you look at the concept of ‘meat’ substantially differently afterwards. It is also fearless about making bodies and consumption and grief defiantly, unapologetically political and challenging us to think about what that means.

    Fleischerei is putrid as it builds its grotesque concoction of smells, tastes, sensations and consumption. It’s about the interior as pungent reflection of what is outside of us, what is done to us. Again, this is a book concerned with what makes us human and what it is to be human, and offers no easy answers, preferring instead challenges to expected narrative conventions. An unrelentingly brave, compassionate work of art.

    Phengaris and Fleischerei are both outstanding, personal, feminine, bleakly beautiful works of modern horror writing at its best. I highly recommend you experience them.

  • The Reptile – Bile and Self-Loathing in Hammer’s Cornwall

    Poster for The Reptile (1966)

    Returning soldier Harry Spalding is determined to uncover how his brother died in the remote Cornish village of Clagmoor Heath. Was it the Black Death, as the locals fear, or a more melancholy and human evil?

    Generations separate us as people and families and communities. Sometimes were decades, centuries or even millennia removed from other humans that walked and talked, loved and felt deeply, bled and lived and died. I contend we’re not so different in what we want, despite the years and the different focuses of each successive generation, the cruelty and petty prejudices that threaten to consume us. We want happiness, however fleeting, human connection, status, safety, love. Those who reached adulthood in the most recent two decades can easily be forgiven for feeling as though the doom and gloom of these years is unprecedented. Growing up in the shadow of a global financial crisis, austerity, a monstrous pandemic and institutions run by the very worst of us is enough for anyone. It’s not that long ago however, that people grew up in wartime or in the feverishly imagined ever-present shadow of a mushroom cloud, or the devastation wrought by AIDS. No, we’re really not so different. And so it is with the art that touches us. The methods may differ, but the intent is similar. To connect, to inspire, to share what it is to be human in all its failures and glories.

    My main aim here is to explore how this unusual Hammer classic offers commentary and a caution on the ways we can be toxic and poisonous if we stew in the unspoken, choosing to live in darkness, letting fear control us. The characters in this film are from a time older still than when the film itself was made, but the connection is universal. There are other readings of the film and I recommend you seek those out, too. But first, some context. 

    Part of Hammer’s fascinating 1965 four-film cost cutting exercise, The Reptile (UK, John Gilling, 1966) was shot on the same sets as The Plague of the Zombies (UK, John Gilling, 1966) and the only one that actually came in under budget. These films are close siblings in other ways, from mood to intent. Both are Hammer chillers that don’t rely on the tropes of traditional monsters or previously filmed titles. Each is unsettling and compelling in its own way, a mix of mystery and for-its-time grisly and grotesque horror. Gilling, who had a reputation as someone who did not suffer fools, was a tight craftsperson, in charge of the material, pacing and clarity throughout the majority of his work and yet who also includes flourishes of artistry in almost everything he made. And so it is with The Reptile, a film which retains control of its central mystery and also loads it with sinister atmosphere, disturbing imagery and an understanding of the mechanics of what horrifies in sometimes startling ways.

    Italian poster for The Reptile (1966)

    We have no bloodsuckers or traditional monsters here. The horror is not overtly sexualised like Hammer’s vampire films, nor is there anything murderous or of human malevolence in what transpires. Instead, we have a tragedy of family played out where the monster is us. And the deaths are grim in a way Hammer rarely was, to some degree prefiguring the following decade’s obsession with body horror. It’s partly this which provides The Reptile with a remarkably oppressive atmosphere. Much of Hammer’s output of the decade revolved around things rational people can easily discount, from vampirism to monstrous doctors building people out of body parts to zombies, ancient curses and Satanism. These now frequently come as a cosy, distanced horror, one that can be resolved in under 90 minutes and pose no real threat to us. And while the ending of The Reptile doesn’t stray too far from this template, the majority of the film is something else. The deaths in the film are, well, disgusting. Each victim starts frothing at the mouth, turning black, their bodies dying from poison. Still recent world events have only underlined the fear that can be generated by something invading us, free from any moral underpinning, indiscriminate. This is how events first appear in Clagmoor Heath with people dying and the community circling in on itself in fear. And fear and poison are key themes of the film, both viscerally and brutally swift in the deaths and achingly sad in the central relationship between Dr. Franklyn and his daughter. A fear and poison that affects not just them but spreads out into the community they live within. 

    Harry’s brother Charles dies as the film begins, the prowling camera showing him stalked by something through the countryside until he is cut down and left blackened, rotted to his core. Harry meanwhile has a new wife and nowhere to stay. It’s partly this that brings him to the village, inheriting his brother’s house and giving the new couple somewhere to live. But there are also unanswered questions about his brother’s death and Harry has decided he will find out what really happened. It’s not long before Harry has artlessly alienated the suspicious villagers even further and only friendly(ish) publican Tom remains (played in an expanded role by Hammer cameo master Michael Ripper). In the course of his investigation, Harry comes into contact with the profoundly unfriendly Dr. Franklyn, who has more reason than any to seek the solitude that comes from living on the heath. That Franklyn leaves flowers on Charles’ grave underlines to us there is something rotting the doctor too, a poison of a different kind, one that has destroyed the generations that should have followed him.

    The Reptile has many fine qualities, making it one of Hammer’s very best films. It has an unusual (for Hammer) cast, beautiful use of sets and another melancholy and haunted turn from the estimable Jacqueline Pearce. We have John Laurie as a twisted and ultimately deeper and tragic riff on the comic relief character. Gilling does wonders with his budget, producing a frequently handsome film that succeeds as chilling horror including at least one great jump scare. The core mystery is at once obvious and complicated. Don Banks’ score is a wonderful mix of the melancholy, the brash and the inventive. Anthony Hinds’ screenplay (writing here under the name John Elder) is unforgiving and, combined with Gilling’s skill as director, a bold approach for Hammer. The Reptile is a stirring and remarkable tale of curses, disturbed graves, death and desire. 

    For the rest of this piece however, I’m going to explore that key theme of the film which, for me, keeps it ever-relevant to the now and can resonate with us personally, through its mournful atmosphere, heavy with guilt, to its focus on the damage wrought by those who act without integrity or passion or courage. From here there be both spoilers and commentary you may wish to avoid.

    In The Reptile, Dr. Franklyn has returned to England after time overseas with his daughter, Anna. Franklyn and Anna are attended by a servant, known only as The Malay. Franklyn presents a harsh front, rude and dismissive of attempts to converse or connect with him. He is contemptuous of his daughter, cruel and unkind to her. Despite his protests to Harry that he is not a doctor in the way the village needs, no surgeon but instead a doctor of divinity, Franklyn also shows no interest in discovering more about what is killing people. This is because, as the film reveals, Franklyn knows ‘it’ is Anna. In his time overseas, Franklyn took a colonialist’s approach to the secrets of the religions he encountered and one such ‘cult’, of which The Malay is a member, took extreme umbrage at his methods and disregard for what they considered holy. Kidnapping Anna, they placed a curse upon her which sees her turn into a snake creature with a poisonous bite. Franklyn has retreated with Anna to somewhere remote, surrounded by the empty collected trophies of his work and travels, watched over by The Malay, to endure his suffering. And suffering it is, with Anna the victim of his hubris and arrogance, condemned to live not even half a life, no joy in her future. When Franklyn lays those flowers on the grave it is symbolic of the regret, loathing and guilt that is his life now. He has destroyed the life of his daughter, Anna turned literally into a monster to punish him. In Franklyn’s distorted world, those flowers are for him more than anyone else.

    Dr Franklyn looking tired, The Malay looking invigorated

    As touched on earlier, The Reptile is not a traditional Hammer horror film. Although not new to themes of tragic monsters, notably in pictures like The Curse of the Werewolf (UK, Terence Fisher, 1961), Hammer arguably had its greatest success with the villainy of its Dracula and vampire series. The Brides of Dracula (UK, Terence Fisher, 1960) presents a somewhat more nuanced evil and it’s there in Van Helsing’s mix of pity and disgust at the close of Fisher’s first Count film as Lee’s king of the vampires crumbles to dust, but ultimately there’s no quarter given to wickedness that inarguably must die, must be purged, and in the context of desire, must be contained. Helen Kent’s animalistic panic at her demise in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (UK, Terence Fisher, 1966) followed by the beatific expression on her face after being staked to death makes it clear to us, Dracula and his ilk are no misunderstood monsters, but evil in a pure, defiling form. After all, it’s part of the enduring appeal of certain horror stories, as with the police procedural, where equilibrium is disrupted by evil only to be restored at the end. But there is no restoration at the end of The Reptile. Undeserved tragedy begets yet more tragedy and no one is left untouched. Fire is so often used at the conclusion of a film as symbolic of a cleansing, the world being reset. Here it just covers the truth, burying everything unspoken in ashes, cleansing nothing.

    This then is a key theme of The Reptile for me. How recoiling from acknowledging and confronting ourselves, our personal guilt and regret, if left denied, often reaches out beyond us to others, impacts on the lives of people we care about, usually first and most profoundly those we share blood or bonds with. About how our actions reverberate down the years, how that poison infects others and spreads like a death that consumes. Franklyn tries to hide, to disappear, to run from and ineffectively reduce the damage his actions have caused but not try to fix it, to refuse the help he is desperate for. Instead, he acquiesces to self-inflicted punishment, wallows in his misery, gives up on his daughter and anything she might want from her life. And yet the guilt will not leave him be. It dismantles everything around him, even as he tries to stumble on and blank it, unravelling anything he touches. He lives in fear of himself, what he has done, and what will come next as a result of his inability to act.

    Poor John Laurie, doomed for sure

    This can be found in The Reptile in its approach to fear, from fear of ourselves, or feelings for each other and more widely of those we meet and subject to fear of the other. The Reptile is uncommon in its time in that its fear of the other is not presented through overt racism or xenophobia. The Malay is not a cartoon villain here, but instead an agent of revenge without comment as to whether that revenge was earned or justified. Hinds’ writing is thoughtful and subtle here when compared with some contemporaries. The curse placed upon Anna is not The Malay and his people acting with eye-bulging, moustache-twirling malevolence. It is, for him and his people, simply a matter of justice. Instead, the other presented here is a different kind of fear, a fear of ourselves and the people, even in our own immediate family, that we know and love but can never really know but also in how we choose not to acknowledge who we are and what we have wrought. It’s presented in how Franklyn is at once appalled by and desperate to protect his daughter, but only really to hide his shame.

    Anna is a victim, cursed through something she did not bring upon herself, by the action of one who should have been building a world she could find her place in. Here she is confused and lonely and unable to explore her dreams or desires. This is all instead directed at her uncomprehending father who it seems would be equally uncomfortable with the idea of his daughter maturing sexually as he would be her turning into a snake monster. It’s both symptomatic of the time it is set in, but particular to Anna and the life Franklyn knows he has doomed her to. We can imagine Anna’s wants and her desires have never matter to Franklyn until he was confronted by them. Franklyn’s cowardice as a human-being swirls at the centre of The Reptile, as much as his self-involved guilt and grief that she has no real future. These are the layers here to unravel how it remains so devastating nearly sixty years later. In that respect, this is as potent a metaphor for the fears of the parent about what the child may become and learning to love who they are as The Exorcist (US, William Friedkin, 1973). Except here, Franklyn knows what Anna is and why and there is nothing to love for him, a mirror showing him his failings.

    Jacqueline Pearce as Anna

    For Franklyn, the poison is of his own making. Anna is a mirror too, to his crumbled hubris and it is fitting, for him at least, that he dies at her kiss, a kiss as poisonous as he deserves. And there is The Reptile as cautionary tale against our hubris, selfishness, disinterest, arrogance and living in fear. We might want to, but we can’t hide from that which will consume us, and sometimes those we care about. If we really do care, we must force ourselves to confront the darkness, if not for us, for those who, like Anna and the people of Clagmoor Heath, don’t deserve to share in desperate things not of their making.