Michael Chabon and Scream Queens on the Radio

There have been some interesting things on the radio over the past few days. On the BBC Radio 3 programme Night Waves on Monday Michael Chabon joined presenter Matthew Sweet to discuss his new novel Telegraph Avenue (it’s about seven minutes in). A reading from the book focussed on the character of Mr Nostalgia, a peddler of collectible ephemera, bubblegum cards in particular, selling people encapsulated fragments of their past. This led to a discussion about nostalgia and retromania, and the power of certain artefacts or pieces of popular art (songs or movies) to briefly bring about a sense of completely inhabiting a recollected past. As Mr Nostalgia reflects, the reverently preserved relics of throwaway culture, the bubble gum cards, model kits and spin-off boardgames he casts his slightly worldweary eye over, whilst they have no intrinsic value other than what people are prepared to pay for them, offer the possibility that what has been lost (a past which has acquired an Edenic aura in the mind) can be restored, if only for a briefly ignited moment. Chabon likens the powerful talismanic artefacts and mantric sounds which Mr Nostalgia and his Telegraph Avenue record shop proprietors seek out and sell to drugs, allowing the individual to access a layer of consciousness beyond the day to day awareness of the temporal instant, to defy the conveyor belt of linear time. As with any drug, it can prove addictive, its effects dangerously alluring. Sweet points out that nostalgia used to be classified as a medical condition up until the 1870s or 80s, the ‘algia’ part having its Greek roots in the word ‘algos’, or pain.

Chabon confesses that his own perspective on collecting and pop cultural obsessiveness is one of ‘helpless approval’, not to mention active participation. He goes on to discuss Doctor Who with Sweet, and the two immediately hit it off, sharing their in-depth knowledge of the series in the very manner which Chabon celebrates in his essay The Amateur Family, included in his recent collection Manhood For Amateurs. The word geek is avoided, as Chabon notes its negative connotations and contemptuous usage in his essay, and he’s not comfortable with the way ‘fan’ suggests an indiscriminate and narrowly uncritical focus, so he settles instead on the notion of enthusiastic amateurs. The essay also charts his Doctor Who obsession, which sprang from his love of the new series and his inherent need to then go on and discover the entire history of its fictional universe, watching stories all the way back to William Hartnell’s first appearance in 1963. He shares his extensive explorations of this expansive world with his children, who are soon sporting Dalek and Cybermen t-shirts, and they all enthusiastically engage in a conversation with a fellow fan in a museum, cued by his question ‘is that a Dalek?’ Reflecting on the way that fandom allows this intense and detailed enjoyment of a popular artwork (as he refers to it) to be shared with others, he comes to see the link between it and family life. Both are the domain of the passionate amateur, in which a shared world is explored and discussed, its limits tested and its familiarity alternately cherished and challenged. They provide a model through which the wider world can be better understood.

Holmesian Who - Tom Baker in The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Sweet asks Chabon who is his favourite Who from the past, and he opts for Tom Baker, apologising for the obviousness of the choice. Baker was the actor who most notably impinged on the American consciousness, and appeared with the greatest regularity on their screens, so he is partly drawing on youthful recollection. Harlan Ellison provides a good American perspective on the series in his 1979 introduction to the US editions of the paperback novelisations, noting that ‘we’re only now being treated to the wonderful universes of Who here in the States’. He remembers being introduced to it in 1975 by Michael Moorcock, the first year in which Baker took on the role, so he could even have begun with the classic Genesis of the Daleks story (than which he could have had no finer introduction). He testifies to his wholehearted conversion, calling the show ‘the apex, the pinnacle, the tops, the Louvre Museum, the tops, the Coliseum, and other etcetera’, and praising it as being ‘sunk to the hips in humanism, decency, solid adventure and simple good reading’. The Doctor, he suggests, has the same universal appeal as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Superman. Chabon holds up the Baker era as the one in which the greatest balance between between whimsy and pleasurable terror was struck. He specifically expresses his enjoyment of a Sherlock Holmesian adventure set in Victorian London, which Matthew Sweet immediately and enthusiastically identifies as The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Sweet too has come out as a Who fan, and provided a witty and well-informed documentary for the Invasion of the Dinosaurs dvd, a 1974 Jon Pertwee adventure which he puts into its wider political and cultural context (the birth of modern environmentalism and the fear of right-wing coups by private armies). ‘We’re on the same wavelength, Matthew’, Chabon remarks, ‘a nightwave’.

Night Terrors - Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad

They also discover a shared interest in the ghost stories of MR James (who is also mentioned in the previous article, about the worrying plight of the ash tree). Chabon has written an essay on James, included in his collection Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, and taking into account his enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes (who is the subject of another essay in the collection), there appears to be a definite Anglophone tendency to his literary tastes. Sweet suggests that Chabon’s record collectors and dealers in ephemera are like James’ antiquaries, with a similarly single-minded absorption in their quest, which leaves them vulnerable to attendant dangers, whether psychological or supernatural. Chabon insists upon the blamelessness of James’ scholarly protagonists, suggesting that part of the horror of the stories lies in their moral arbitrariness. These harmless dabblers (more enthusiastic amateurs) do nothing to deserve the terrible fates which befall them. Sweet mischievously points out that Professor Parkins, the amateur archaeologist of Chabon’s favourite James story, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, does earn the terrifying visitation of the spectre which forms itself from his bedclothes, since he mistranslates the Latin inscription on the bronze whistle which he unearths from an old Templar site on the bleak East Anglian shore. Or rather, it is an omission of scholarly thorougness. As ST Joshi points out in his annotated Penguin Classics edition of James, the inscription Quis Est Iste Qui Venit is adapted from Biblical verse (Isaiah 63:1 to be precise) and is correctly interpreted by Professor Parkin as meaning ‘who is this who is coming’. But he neglects to decipher the further marks etched into the ancient metal, Fur Fla Bis Fle, before impulsively blowing the whistle, producing a sound with ‘a quality of infinite distance in it’. Joshi alludes to the varying interpretations of the word fragments by literary scholars before opting for the Latin phrase ‘Fur, flabis, flebis’ as the most apposite. Translated, it means ‘Thief, you will blow, you will weep’. Undue haste and overeager carelessness in drawing conclusions are certainly academic sins, but the mind-cracking supernatural encounter which Parking suffers as a result certainly seems incommensurate with the original infraction.

Sweet and Chabon also discuss the notion of crossover characters, fictional creations who migrate from one story world into another. Science fiction and fantasy seem particularly adept at such wholesale import and export of established figures. Chabon continues to use Doctor Who as an exemplar, citing Captain Jack’s appearances in the new series, after having been established in Torchwood, and the Doctor’s in the Sarah Jane Adventures. He also proposes that Barack Obama is essentially a fictional character in the manner he and others have constructed his persona and presented itself to the American public, and that his appearance in Telegraph Avenue is therefore in the nature of a crossover. The grey parrot who crops up in Telegraph Avenue has also crossed over from Chabon’s short novel The Final Solution. This is a subtly devastating story which (as the title cryptically hints) conflates a portrait of an elderly Sherlock Holmes (never actually named, but readily identifiable to anyone who knows the Holmesian oeuvre) coping with physical and mental decline and the terrible, bureaucratic logic of the European death camps, whose spectre places him in a very different world from the Victorian and Edwardian environs he once surveyed with an all-encompassing eye. The new Moriarties have come aboveground, developed a political philosophy and taken control. The grey parrot, chattering out seemingly random sequences of numbers, holds the key to the mystery, one last case for the great detective to solve – a solution which will swallow up the last vestiges of his old world in a dark moral abyss. Sweet points to the fact that Chabon’s literary universe now contains both Sherlock Holmes and Barack Obama. Chabon makes the intriguing observation that the two have some affinity, a reference perhaps to the president’s perceived cool intellectual aloofness which has not proved popular with the portion of America which expects a more bullish assertiveness from its leaders. Who knows where this interest in crossover characters within his fictional worlds will take him. It’s started with a parrot, maybe it will develop into the kind of vast, teeming multiverse of Michael Moorcock’s fictional worlds, with their increasing retrospective ordering of an initially chaotic profligacy of genre-migrating characters, and the occasional appearance of ‘real’ people. Chabon can also be heard talking to Alex Fitch down a slightly distorted phone line on the Resonance FM Book List programme, the conversation starting about 40 minutes in.

Delphine Seyrig - Daughter of Darkness

On Tuesday, Reece Shearsmith presented the Radio 4 programme Scream Queens, looking at the role of women in horror films over the decades, but particularly in the golden age of British horror from the 50s through to the early 70s. The League of Gentlemen writer and performer isn’t the only one to have paid homage to his love of classic horror. Mark Gatiss made an excellent, very personal three part history of British horror films for BBC4 a couple of years age, and is soon to present its follow up, which will focus on the European horror film tradition. This single 90 minute film, called Horror Europa, is being previewed at the bfi on 28th October, with Gatiss present for a Q&A session afterwards. The bfi programme summary promises that the documentary will range from ‘the nightmare visions of German Expressionism to the black-gloved killers of Italian Giallo movies, from Belgian lesbian vampires to the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War’. So it sounds like we can expect a lineage tracing Murnau and Dreyer (Nosferatu and Vampyr) to Mario Bavo and Dario Argento, Harry Kumel’s deliciously decadent Daughters of Darkness (and possibly also his wonderfully surreal and dreamlike Malpertuis) to Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. Shearsmith’s approach is a little more flippant than Gatiss’, the latter managing to combine an evident affection for the films with an essentially serious approach to the material (which doesn’t preclude him having a bit of fun with some of the film’s more preposterous elements).

Barbara Shelley - Dracula Prince of Darkness

Shearsmith’s documentary, light and a little frivolous though it may be, does offer the pleasure of gathering together several actresses from British horror films of the 60s and 70s, Hammer and otherwise. It was particularly good to hear from Barbara Shelley, who recalls that her unpretentious desire upon becoming an actress was to entertain and amuse. She was initially wary of the horror roles she was offered, before coming to realise that these films achieved precisely that aim. She seems proud of her status as a Hammer icon, and claims that horror roles were in many ways more demanding than ‘normal’ ones. She recalls doing more research (in this case being into Greek mythology) for her role as Carla/Megaera in the Gorgon (one of her finest performances and a rare leading part) than for any other. Questioned about her dual role in Dracula Prince of Darkness, in which she is transformed by the Count’s infectious kiss from a primly repressed Victorian lady into a sensual vampiric temptress, she admits that she actually preferred the more ‘starchy’ parts, since they required a more restrained form of acting. But it’s this very restraint, the subtly conveyed air of a character holding some part of herself in, which makes her transitions into wild abandonment so compelling. Her wailing levitation under the influence of the pulsating force of the awakening Martian pod in Quatermass and the Pit is absolutely electrifying. These transitions can be equally powerful in reverse, too. She cites her death scene in Dracula Prince of Darkness as the moment in her film career of which she is most proud, her wild, hissing, animalistic ferocity instantly receding into peaceful repose as the stake is forcefully hammered in (an uncomfortable scene which has often been likened to a sexual assault).

Innocence and Experience - Madeleine Smith and Ingrid Pitt

Shearsmith also talks to Madeleine Smith, who came to Hammer quite late and featured in such films as Taste the Blood of Dracula, The Vampire Lovers and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. She talks, with the amused tolerance of someone remembering water which has passed under and well beyond the bridge, about the indignities she was obliged to put up with in an era in which Hammer was beginning to expose more flesh, and to make a sexuality which had been left largely implicit emphatically explicit (although not as emphatically as some of its seedier rivals, it has to be said). She puts this new emphasis on sex down to co-financing of The Vampire Lovers by AIP (American International Pictures) and the arrival of producers Michael Style and Harry Fine, who she says followed her around everywhere in order to ensure that they were getting the kind of film they envisaged. The BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) head John Trevelyan was sufficiently bothered about the script’s lesbian content that he contacted Sir James Carreras, the well-connected father figure of the Hammer ‘family’, asking him if he could try to temper the excesses of these upstart newcomers and ‘keep this film within reasonable grounds’. Carreras played the literary adaptation card, pointing out that the lesbianism was present in Le Fanu’s source story Carmilla (who lent the central character her name, if nothing else), which Trevelyan seemed to accept. A reading from Le Fanu’s story in the programme reveals that it does indeed possess a heady, narcotised atmosphere of decadent eroticism, remarkably so for the time of its writing (1872). Madeleine Smith professes to have been completely naive at the time the film was made, which helped to see her through, and her obliviousness to what was going on, and the nature of the parts she was required to play, gives her characters an authentic and affecting appearance of innocence. There was no such reticence or naivety about Ingrid Pitt, whose rich Eastern European accent is heard in an archive interview (hearing it makes you wonder why on earth her lines were overdubbed in Countess Dracula). She had no problem with nudity since, as she proudly proclaimed, ‘I had a wonderful body’.

The cult of Linda - Blood On Satan's Claw

Linda Hayden, who had to do a nude scene in Blood on Satan’s Claw in which she attempts to seduce the village vicar (as played by Anthony Ainley, later to exchange the cloth for the villain’s black of The Master in Doctor Who) in his church, also professes to have been unabashed at such a requirement, partly due to her respect for director Piers Haggard, whose work on the film she unreservedly praises. Despite its lurid title, Blood On Satan’s Claw is a haunting, beautifully shot evocation of a pastoral England infected with a malign spirit which seems to distil the cruel and vicious elements of the natural world. Hayden is chillingly effective as the leader of a rural cult in an isolated woodland village, her possession by a devil churned up piecemeal from the ploughed over earth signified by a wolfish thickening of her dark eyebrows Hayden is also very good in the 1969 Hammer film Taste The Blood Of Dracula as the daughter of one of a trio of Victorian ‘gentlemen’, seduced to the dark side by Christopher Lee’s Count in a story which exposes the hollow hypocrisy of their moral authority. Hayden embraces her vampiric nature with wholehearted abandon, fully conveying the sense of liberation from Victorian strictures which it brings.

Ingrid as Le Fanu's Carmilla - The Vampire Lovers

Madeleine Smith and Pauline Moran, who played the Woman in Black in Nigel Kneale’s 1989 TV adaptation of Susan Hill’s short novel, both decry the lack of leading roles for women both in horror and in the acting profession in general. Moran works for the actor’s union Equity, who have recently been working to redress this imbalance. Horror, whilst it frequently reduces women to the role of sacrificial victim or predatory vamp, has also provided some excellent opportunities for female actors. The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula may have been born out of Hammer’s attempt to compete with the exploitation market, but Ingrid Pitt puts in towering performances in both, bringing a touch of pathos and longing to her monstrous characters which earns them a degree of sympathy. She reflects that she was probably best suited to horror films, and that if she somehow strayed into a romantic comedy ‘I would probably kill him’. Leading female characters such as Irena in Val Lewton’s Cat People (played by Simone Simon) and Miss Giddens, the governess in The Innocents (played by Deborah Kerr), trailers or excerpts from both of which are heard in the programme, are richly ambiguous and psychologically complex, offering challenging and demanding roles for the actor (and both Simon and Kerr give fine performances).

Gloria Holden - Dracula's Daughter

Gloria Holden in Dracula’s Daughter (a neglected minor gem in the Universal canon) and Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein are also held up as exemplars of women who have created memorable female characters in horror films. Lanchester’s bride may be onscreen for only a few moments, and she doesn’t so much scream as hiss and spit, but her impact is unforgettable. Holden brings an unworldly, deeply melancholic quality to her cursed character, bringing a tragic dimension to the story. It’s interesting that both she and Irena in Cat People are subject to the interrogations of a psychiatrist looking to find the true subconscious origins of their afflictions – the underlying metaphor of their monstrous natures laid bare for a few moments. Irena ends up killing her psychiatrist in leopard form, however, which clears up that case. As a more modern example of a complex female protagonist, neither victim nor one-dimensionally feisty and all-competent heroine, Shearsmith mentions The Awakening, in which Rebecca Hall plays Florence, a sceptical ghost hunter. Shearsmith offers the intriguing insight that an early draft of Stephen Volk’s script revealed this character to be Flora, the little girl from The Innocents, all grown up but still working through the trauma of her experiences.

The Woman In Black - Pauline Moran

Pauline Moran’s performance as the hateful spirit of The Woman In Black, a revenant bent on revenge, was extremely effective. As she points out, she is only seen five times in the course of the film, but each appearance makes an indelible impression. She recalls the scene, which Shearsmith remembers as being possibly the most terrifying he has seen on any television programme, in which the woman in black descends on the hapless solicitor, marooned on his sick bed. She floats impossibly through his window and approaches him in a glide which seems to bring her looming endlessly forward without ever quite arriving. Moran reveals the mechanics of the filming of this spectral visitation, and the effect her appearance had on the normally fairly hardbitten crew; they all instinctively leaned away from her as she was pulled towards them on the dolly tracks, the wind machine blowing her hair and black cloak back behind her. She produced her bloodcurdling scream not as a full-throated bellow, but as a long-drawn out ‘eeeeeeee’ from the front of her mouth, held in a rigid rictus; a terrifying sound which seemed to draw on ancestral Celtic memories of banshee death wails in the dead of night. It was still utterly hair-raising even just coming out of the radio. Moran, Madeleine Smith and Barbara Shelley were united in their dislike for modern developments in the genre, which they see as having becoming coarser and more explicitly violent. Moran sees no reason why classic period horror shouldn’t find a place in the modern cinema landscape, however. The recent success of the revived Hammer’s version of The Woman In Black, for all its flaws (and they are, to my mind, manifold) shows that there is an appetite for such fare. And perhaps Hammer is the studio to provide it once more.

Scream Queens is part of the Gothic Imagination series of programmes on Radio 4. This week also saw the start of a new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s hugely influential novel Dracula. There is an immediate sense of redundancy to such an undertaking. The story has been told so many times before, and by now there’s a definite sense of strain in the search for a new way in which it can be approached. This is actually a fairly straight ‘classic’ interpretation, acted with period drama correctness, and offering little that is new. A degree of familiarity is almost assumed here, and the narrative appears at times to be unfolding with a retrospective air. The limitations of radio are exposed at times, or rather are not sufficiently overcome. Parts of the action are awkwardly conveyed by characters pointing them out: Lucy commenting on the Demeter’s dramatic storm-tossed beaching n Whitby Harbour (‘look, there’s a man on deck – he’s lashed to the wheel’, etc.) and Dr Seward’s ‘Ah, you’ve cut me’ in reaction to a knife attack from Renfield. Dracula is obviously a difficult role to take on, with the temptation to fall into the mannerisms of renowned Counts from the past hard to resist. He is presented here as an old man with a long white moustache, a welcoming, slightly creaky East European who seems disarmingly ordinary. The sexual nature of his predation on Lucy, which is brought out by lines such as ‘you must ask me to enter you’, and by the breathy moans which accompany his supping of blood, is rather undermined by this initial image of an ageing, slightly avuncular figure, full of mild complaint. It makes this Dracula seem more of a dirty old man than a dark seducer of the Christopher Lee variety (or even a stage mesmerist in the Lugosi mould). The sound design for the scenes of blood drinking is also decidedly odd, with an exaggerated ripping sound followed by a loud, stickily fluid bubbling. Perhaps it is intended as an expressionistic effect, but it verges on the inadvertently ridiculous, Dracula sounding like a loud and messy eater. Similarly, Renfield’s lapping up of blood from the floor is done with such an emphatic slurp that it sounds like he has produced a handy straw from about his person to hoover it all up. The action so far has reached Lucy’s death. Again, overfamiliarity has rendered the repeated attempts at reviving her through blood transfusions a little tedious. We know she’s not going to survive, so the whole process seems a little drawn out. Don’t let me put you off entirely though. There are also things to enjoy here. The performances are solid and the script a clear and faithful rendering of Stoker’s story (Christopher Lee would approve). The interjection of moments of interior monologue give depth to characters who can appear a little one-dimensional on the page, and make them more sympathetic. Dracula will be followed by an adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Given that her novel is far less familiar to the modern reader, this may prove more fruitful material for adaptation. Perhaps, for now, it’s time to put the Count to bed. He’s earned a long, long sleep.

The Gorgon

The Gorgon, released in 1964, is something of a hidden gem amongst Hammer’s gothic oeuvre. When it is mentioned it is usually in dismissive terms, deriding the appearance of the titular monster as being a bathetic let down, and criticising the ponderous pace of the film. This seems an unduly harsh appraisal. It’s a fine mood piece, with Terence Fisher’s expressionistic use of vivid colour reaching new, Douglas Sirk-like heights. It also gives a central role to Barbara Shelley, possibly the finest of Hammer’s female actors, who delivers an excellent performance, full of subtle restraint. It’s a film rich in implication and metaphor, with as much suggested as directly revealed, which is perhaps one reason why its reception has always been a little muted. The poster can’t have helped, either, with its garish promise of a new and terrifying monster which is only ever peripherally present. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are both on top form, the latter relishing the opportunity to play the bluff, scholarly hero turned man of action, who strides in towards the end of the film to sort the whole sorry mess out. John Gilling’s collaboratively produced script is also a brave attempt to introduce a new element to the Hammer formula, drawing from sources beyond the usual 19th and 20th century literary perennials. The disparity between the creature from classical mythology and the gothic trappings into which it is set is in itself striking, and implies a connection with ancient civilisations whose gods have yet wholly to have passed out of the world.

Romantic landscapes - cottage in the valley

The action takes place in the customary Hammer mittel-European setting, this time a woodland village which goes by the name of Vandorf. It’s an insular, unfriendly village, its inhabitants paralysed by fear and quick to fall into an aggressive defensiveness. Outsiders are left in no doubt as to how unwelcome they are, in the official capacity of Patrick Troughton’s steely Inspector Kanof if need be. One such outsider is Bruno Heitz, a bohemian artist living in a small cottage beyond the village boundary in cheerful, carefree poverty (although he does appear to have a Renoir painting hanging on the wall which might later serve to alleviate and lingering impecuniousness). Upon learning that Sascha, his coy model and casual mistress, is bearing his child, his playfully teasing manner instantly evaporates, leaving only an admonitory sternness which places the blame firmly upon her person – even though it was he who we have just witnessed attempting to persuade her to disrobe for ‘artistic purposes’. They both go their separate, unhappy ways. He to do the right thing and request permission to marry from her father, the splendidly named Janus Kass, she to hurry back to the village through the moonlit woodlands, the Berkshire beeches of Black Park familiar from so many Hammer films. Neither reaches their destination. Sascha meets with something that causes her to rend the night with a terminal scream of terror. Bruno is found hanging from a tree, his bruised and beaten features making it all too clear that his death was not self-administered, but meted out via the summary justice of the lynch mob.

Accusing finger

Sascha’s body is brought to the Vandorf Medical Institute, which is presided over by Doctor Namaroff (Peter Cushing), with the aid of his assistant Carla Hoffmann (Barbara Shelley). Carla has a quiet air of self-containment about her, infused with a hint of resigned and downcast disappointment. When the sheet is removed from the body, its petrified state is revealed. It has been transmuted into grey stone, a grim funerary sculpture. Carla looks on with an expression of fear and pity, but doesn’t utter a sound. She will later display a similar air of unruffled calm during a classic Peter Cushing brain removal. The scream, horror film’s emphatic punctuation mark and amplifier of the moment of terror, is provided by Martha, the wild-haired madwoman who has just broken out of Namarof’s lunatic ward. She is restrained by the hospital guard Ratoff, played by the ever-reliable Jack Watson, whose granite features (speaking figuratively in this case) are here set into their brutish thug mode, although Watson was equally capable of conveying stoic nobility and other qualities. The stony finger of Sascha’s corpse is snapped off and drops to the floor, where it points in disembodied accusation.

One of the grey men

Bruno’s father, Professor Heitz (Michael Goodliffe), travels to Vandorf to attend the hearing which will determine the cause of his son’s death. Namaroff withholds the truth about Sascha, and the verdict of suicide is clearly arrived at with the aim of concluding matters as swiftly as possible, obviating the need to delve further into the affairs of the village. The professor is volubly dissatisfied, and pursues his own investigations. His continued presence disrupts the villagers’ customary low-level disgruntlement, and they are soon forming a torch-wielding, stone-lobbing mob which descends on the professor (who is staying in Bruno’s cottage) to make it clear to him just how strongly they don’t like his sort around here. As tends to be the case with Hammer’s European peasantry, this angry, muttering rabble sounds more like a bunch of cockneys bruising for a scrap, with no trace of Prussian or Slavic accents to match the costumes and set dressing. All of which matters not a jot, of course. The professor is undeterred by the intimidation of the mob – indeed, it spurs him on all the more, intimating as it does that the entire village has a shameful secret it wishes to conceal. His area of expertise is literature, and it is in knowledge gleaned form the crackling, antique pages of age-old books that he begins to understand the nature of the curse which casts its shadow over the locals. One night he is drawn out into the moonlit woods and on towards the ruins of Castle Borski beyond by an eerie siren song. Climbing up and entering the castle through the open gate, he glimpses the terrible visage of the gorgon, scored with the lines of age and hatred, its hair a writhing corona of serpents’ heads. He manages to stagger back to the cottage and write out his last testament, his account of what he has discovered in his studies, and what he has just witnessed. He sits at his desk until all motion becomes impossible and he settles into his final statuesque pose.

Reflections from autumn leaves

His son, Paul Heitz (Richard Pasco), a student in a local city, is sent by his teacher Professor Meister to find out what has happened to both his father and his brother. He too receives a cool if not openly hostile reception and an evasive fog of stubborn ignorance surrounds his every inquiry. Only Carla treats him with any consideration, and he begins to fall for her enigmatic, sad-eyed charms. He intuits that there is something very wrong with the village, an aura of suppression which seeps into every exchange. But before he is able to uncover its source, he is glanced with a reflective glimpse of the gorgon’s stare in a pool of water and plunged into a deathly fever. From hereon, his vitality and mastery of events is greatly diminished. He becomes a weak and enfeebled man, old before his time.

Savant in tweed

The story is punctuated by the appearance of authoritative male figures, each with varying degrees of whiskery facial hair, who attempt to take control of the narrative and penetrate its secrets. These men have professional titles rather than first names, honorifics which also serve to mark out their elevated social standing. Doctor Namaroff, whom we meet first, possesses the secret knowledge of the gorgon’s nature and is intent on keeping it his alone, suppressing the monster’s terrible power as much as he is able, but failing to use what he knows to end the horror which is recurrently visited upon the village. Professor Heitz and Christopher Lee’s Karl Meister, who travels to Vandorf after learning of Paul’s sickness, are typical of the paternalistic elder characters in Hammer films whom Kim Newman identifies in his book Nightmare Movies as savants: those who possess or have access to the esoteric learning which gives them insight into the nature of the monsters they confront. The knowledge of these savants, often professors or scholars of one kind or another, gives them a natural air of authority, and is the key to determining how to destroy the unnatural creatures with which they and those who fall under their protection are confronted. Newman sketches the savant (in the chapter on ‘The Indian Summer of the British Horror Film’) as ‘an elderly mystic, steeped in arcane knowledge, apparently rational, but with an Old Testament streak of ‘vengeance is mine’ fundamentalism’. Professor Heitz, who is an intermediary John the Baptist of a savant, paving the way for Christopher Lee’s bluff, betweeded saviour, Professor Meister (or Master), falls foul of the gorgon’s fatal gaze, but has time to impart a considerable number of last words. These are not a series of emotive and breathless gasps with which he expresses feelings unarticulated in life. He departs with the written word, a swiftly penned resume of his research, findings and conclusions, before dying at his desk. He leaves life with one final scholarly paper.

Carla amongst the monochrome men

Carla takes her place amongst these men and seems meekly subservient to their authority. In court, she sits between two men in black, her pale yellow outfit contrasting markedly with their monochromatic conservatism. It’s never really any mystery as to the provenance of the gorgon’s periodic apparitions. It turns out that the spirit of the last of these three cursed sisters from classical antiquity has taken possession of Carla’s soul at some time in the past, probably before she arrived at the village and was left in the care of Doctor Namaroff at the Institute. Some degree of mental distress is hinted at, with blackouts and a general sense of unease. Whilst Carla remains consciously unaware of the monster which inhabits her, her troubled mind and bearing indicate that she intuits its malign presence at a deeper level. The gorgon emerges under certain circumstances which are only vaguely alluded to. It is certainly sporadic and irregular in its manifestations. The full moon acts as a catalyst for any such transformations. This variant of the werewolf mythos suggests that the creature has made certain accommodations to the legends of the north lands. The migration of the last of these terrible monsters of Greek antiquity from the mediterraenean to the European heartlands suggests the intriguing notion of mythological evolution; gods and monsters moving on from lands in which the currency of belief becomes devalued to places where they can adapt to new and still unfolding cultural patterns. Here they can give form to the hopes and fears (particularly the fears) of those who do not yet feel in control of the world, and who need stories to make sense of it. It’s an idea which has been used by many writers, notably Neil Gaiman, whose American Gods is an exemplary example of relocating a pantheon in a new environment and having them find there a renewal of their identities.

Romantic landscapes - the castle at night

The gorgon has moved on from the architecture of Doric columns and classical entablature and takes up residence in the gothic surrounds of Castle Borski. The castle is the locus of evil in the area, creating a negatively charged spirit of place which discourages visitors. It’s no wonder that this is where the gorgon is drawn to make its new home. The castle’s abandoned and ruined state, filled with the windblown debris of autumn, perhaps also denotes an admission on Hammer’s part that its gothic locales are now ready to be inhabited by a new breed. John Gilling’s Plague of Zombies and The Reptile would follow such an impetus, even moving from the mittel-Europe of Karlsbad and other such Teutonic-sounding place names to the wilds of Cornwall (whilst never straying from Bray studios, of course). The gorgon, we discover, is called Megaira. Greek scholars will immediately point out that this was the name of one of the three Erinyes, or Furies rather than that of one of the gorgons. Megaira is the Fury which embodies envious anger. The nature of the Erinyes, or ‘angry ones’, was inverted by Neil Gaiman in the last of his Sandman series, ‘The Kindly Ones’, in which they deliver a merciful ending for the dream lord, who is unable to bring it about himself. Classical mythology is mixed up and misquoted in the film, Megaira becoming partnered with Medusa and Tisiphone in the gorgon’s triad. She was in fact one of the three Furies, alongside Tisiphone and Alecto. The gorgons were three sisters, Medusa, Euryale and Stheno, of whom only Medusa was mortal. She was slain by Perseus, as Ray Harryhausen fans familiar with Greek mythology through Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans (certainly my primary sources when I was younger) will be aware. Euryale makes an appearance as the last of the gorgons in Harry Kumel’s film of Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis, in which she is brought, along with other remnants of the much diminished gods and creatures of Greek myth (including the Fates), to a rambling mansion on the outskirts of a Belgian port city.

Perhaps such confusion was intentional, since the idea of one of the Furies emerging to unleash its pitiless power upon all who cross its path or stir it into life is wholly in keeping with the submerged themes of the film. The Fury is like an archetypal projection of Carla’s unstoppered rage and fury, all the more terrible for having been so long suppressed. Her life with Doctor Namaroff is essentially that of an unacknowledged wife, as well as implicitly still a potential patient – both mate and inmate. Namaroff’s feelings are kept firmly in check, but Peter Cushing’s beautifully nuanced performance makes it evident that he does love Carla in his own way. It’s a possessive love, however, and his secret knowledge of the nature of her affliction enables him further to extend his control over her. When Carla hesitantly recites the tale of the three gorgons which she has memorised from Professor Heitz’s final letter, it as if Namaroff is forcing her to confront the presence of her inner demon, and so to concede her dependence upon him, her need for his protection. When she is finished, he embraces and declares his love for her, the only open display of affection and desire he offers in the film.

Munch pose

Carla is a character who is both vulnerable and strong. Convinced by Namaroff that some inherent mental weakness means that she must remain in his care, she nevertheless feels the frustration at the limitations imposed upon her life. Her cool strength is demonstrated in her unflinching observation of a Peter Cushing brain removal, and her impulse towards independence in the way that she goes to meet the outsiders (Heitz, father and son) who come to the village. It is Paul who makes her begin to believe that she might indeed still have a chance of beginning life again beyond the limits of the village, although the tragic element evident in her character (as indeed it is in most of the characters Barbara Shelley played in Hammer films, from Dracula: Prince of Darkness to Rasputin: The Mad Monk, and even Quatermass and the Pit, in which she is once more possessed by an evil force) makes us aware that this will never happen. In the latter stage of the film, with Megaira having manifested herself several times, we find Carla in Namaroff’s laboratory. With her hair pinned up, shirt buttoned to the neck and hands held anxiously before her she looks like one of the sorrowful women in Munch’s Frieze of Life paintings. Behind her, on the wall, is a large diagram of the cross-section of a brain. It’s a visual representation of the manner in which Dr Namaroff has dissected and clinically analysed her psyche and attempted thereby to dominate her will. Like Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she pushes against her domestic confinement and finally, encouraged by the increased sense of self-worth engendered by her meetings with Paul, confronts Namaroff. She tells him ‘I’m sick of your jealousy, sick of you’.

Classic Cushing brain removal technique

His reaction is restrained and placatory, a response which refuses to take her anger seriously. Her outburst takes place in his laboratory, amongst the powders and tinctures, and below the dissection table where he has just removed a brain (for no immediately apparent reason) and plopped it indelicately into a specimen jar. Incidentally, Cushing is, as ever, superb in conveying the sheer effort required to saw through cranial bone matter (particularly when you're only using a scalpel) in what is effectively a mimed performance, since the operation thankfully takes place below the edge of the frame. Carla is as much a fixture of this laboratory as she is a part of the doctor’s home, an object of his study as much as his affection. Every reaction and behavioural anomaly is to be noted and added to the case history. Finding a cure is not necessaritly Namaroff’s priority. While she is under the spell of the gorgon, or prey to her own self-negating neuroses (the one being a metaphorical mirror of the other) she is also under his spell. He is prepared to go as far as sending Ratoff after Paul with a knife in order to prevent him from meeting his rendezvous with her and possibly taking her away from the village. Anything to maintain Carla’s state of passive acceptance and self-denial. The villagers also militantly attempt to sustain a state of stasis throughout their surroundings. There is a sense of aggressive secrecy rooted in a fear of change. The petrification suffered by the gorgon’s victims is a highly symbolic fate and a deathly metaphor for such stultifying intransigence.

Brown and grey - the aged hero

The mood of the film is autumnal. It is in part a meditation on encroaching age, and of the disappointments associated with a life reflected upon and led less fully than once hoped for. Carla and Namaroff have settled into a listless, drifting partnership in which they barely acknowledge one another’s presence. Carla’s wistful melancholia and Namaroff’s permanent air of vagueness and distraction are signs that they have become disconnected, from one another and from the world, and have turned broodingly inward, in harmony with the spirit of the season. The sense of changelessness, of a permanent stasis which it no longer feels possible to disrupt further encourages the contemplation of aging; of involuntary change and declining fall. The gorgon is partly a harbinger of old age, taking the form of an aged woman. It lurks in a castle whose windows are broken and whose doors are permanently lodged open to cold and comfortless winds. Perhaps Megaira, as the Fury of envious anger, turns her terminal gaze on Sascha at the start of the film in impotent rage at the youth and vitality which she no longer possesses. Paul’s peripheral glimpse of the gorgon leaves him prematurely aged, his hair turned grey and lines of weariness scored around his eyes. This appearance can also be seen as a foretaste of the long-term effects of the village’s enervating atmosphere, of the dessication of spirit resulting from its wilfully narrow horizons. Paul attempts to persuade Carla to leave with him whilst they stand in the graveyard, a cold wind moaning in the background to complement the cold promise of the tombstones around them. Carla is framed by an ornamental row of classical columns, a hint of the world from which her demon has travelled. Autumnal colours are prevalent throughout the film. In this scene and others, Carla wears a long, sweeping cloak of brown, the shade of the fallen leaves. The beeches of Black Park have all turned a burnished copper, which also happens to echo the colour of Carla’s hair beneath the cloak’s hood. It all makes her seem of a part with this turning season – beyond summer’s end, awaiting the first icy touch of winter.

Technicolor test tubes

Terence Fisher makes wonderful and subtle use of bright colour in The Gorgon, as in his other Hammer films. Here, this is often displayed in small but significant details, which stand out against the otherwise restrained palette. As we’ve noted, the male characters in the film are generally notable for their lack of colour. The grey faces of those who are turned to stone are an extreme extension of this monochromatic appearance. Barbara Shelley’s Carla stands out all the more clearly as a result, with her yellow, peach and sky-blue blouses, muted though their tones are in accordance with her own subdued bearing. Christopher Lee’s Professor Meister proves a slight exception to the general trend of conservative male attire, arriving in caramel brown tweeds enlivened by the bright red splash of a protruding handkerchief. His lively and no-nonsense personality matches his mildly non-conformist outfit. Doctor Namaroff’s laboratory has plentiful elements of carefully contained colour in the contents of test tubes and the powders and tinctures stored in jars and on the shelves. We also see him with a bright red pen later on. These colours suggest that his passion lies chiefly in his work. He does also have a bright yellow cigarette holder (perhaps one of Cushing’s own), which visually rhymes with the yellow of the outfit Carla wears at the court hearing, and hints at pleasures quietly enjoyed beyond the lab.

Gorgon in green

When we see the gorgon, it rises from a throne upholstered in red and wears a bright green dress. Its eyes are rimmed with red. These are the colours of anger and jealousy, those qualities ascribed to Megaira the Fury. Touches of red and purple tinting the castle’s shadows add a further expressive element, and are very much akin to similar effects used by Mario Bava in films such as Black Sabbath and Kill Baby Kill. The glowing red of the fire behind the grate at the back of the cottage draws the eye and acts as a visual expression of the containment of passion and repression of feeling and hope which is such a major theme of the film. There are also a couple of impressive matte backdrops used at sparing intervals. One depicts the castle, looming above the treeline; the other Bruno’s cottage nestled in a valley with a river winding through it, as viewed from the rough, muddy bend of a road which passes precipitously above. Both serve to set the scene and create an atmospheric sense of place.

Castle interior - open to nature

Nature also plays an important part in the film, often abutting and intruding upon the man-made edifices of civilisation. The gorgon could be seen as nature’s agent in addition to being an emanation of Carla’s suppressed hopes and desires. The castle in which she manifests herself has been invaded by branch and vine, which crawl through the shattered windows. The floor is carpeted by leaves which have blown in the autumn winds through the doorway which is now permanently open to the elements which it once served to shut out. The castle is archetypally romantic, still largely intact but increasingly moulded by nature. As characters approach, it is framed by bare branches, with fallen trees to be negotiated in order to gain entrance. It’s location in the middle of the woods inevitably brings Caspar David Friedrich to mind (well, to my mind at any rate), particularly when a small, lopsided shrine is passed along the way. Megaira is dressed in bright green, like a woodland nymph fading and wrinkling in sympathy with the trees and bracken beyond the walls. Her final decapitation is accompanied by a further influx of dead leaves blown by the storm outside and skittering across the frame. It’s all very pagan – the death of the summer queen carried in on the warm breezes from the Mediterranean.

Courtyard oasis

The scene in which Paul encounters the gorgon is a marvellously evocative sequence, reminiscent of the composed scenes Michael Powell included in Black Narcissus and Gone to Earth. These attempted a marriage of sound, movement and editing, a kind of cinematic dance, and were full of nature mysticism. The courtyard outside Bruno’s cottage is filled with the resonant sounds of birdsong and trickling water, giving it the feel of a pocket Eden. The green of the trees and plants contrasts with the grey of the stone. A shadow passes over the pool of water, with its obscuring skein of coppery leaves. It’s Carla, dressed in peach (the promise of spring’s returning blossom?) and her autumn brown cloak. Paul, dressed in black, is terse and unfriendly. Shortly thereafter (and subsequent to Carla’s reiteration of the story of the three gorgons), when darkness has fallen, Paul returns to this oasis. The sounds of water and of rain falling on the pool, and the susurration of windblown leaves create a mysterious and premonitory atmosphere of suspended anticipation. The siren song music is introduced over the top. The gorgon’s visage appears momentarily in the reflected waters of the pool before it is dispersed by the splash of Paul’s hand, which bats the image away with reflexive terror. It seems almost to have emerged from and then faded back into the natural environment. In its own small way, the scene is very much like the Powell and Pressburger sequences in Black Narcissus and Gone To Earth in which Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) glides with terrible purpose through the empty corridors of the nunnery in Black Narcissus, and in which country girl Hazel (Jennifer Jones) hurries over the moorland on a stormy night in Gone to Earth, filled with ancient superstitions and primal fears. Both were ‘composed’ scenes, accompanied by the urgent cries and whispers of Brian Easdale’s romantic scores. The film as a whole has something of a Powell and Pressburger feel, in fact.

Mention should also be made of James Bernard’s music, which does much to enhance the mood of the above scene and many others. Bernard was Hammer’s in-house composer, and produced many memorable themes for the Dracula and Frankenstein films. He eschews his usual thunderously exclamatory register to create a dreamlike and impressionistic sound. It’s as if he has shifted from the violent, strident music of Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin or the first piano concerto to one of his passages of mysterious ‘night music’. Bernard also introduces a tender romantic theme, shot through with intimations of tragedy, which has echoes of Bernard Herrmann. Such romanticism is given further flowering in Frankenstein Created Woman, another of Terence Fisher’s tragic fairy tales.

Barbara imperious - Carla assumes her throne

Towards the end, Carla becomes increasingly aware of the dark spirit which possesses her, and when Paul comes to the castle to meet a rendezvous with her, she sits imperiously on the throne from which we have first seen the gorgon arise. The hood of her cloak is up, covering her hair and partially obscuring her face, as it had when she made her silent, shadowy descent past the classical columns into the graveyard where Paul was conducting his night-time disinterment. The juxtaposition in that scene of earth and stone, with Carla set against them in brown, is very elemental. Her covering serves to represent the burial of Carla’s true nature, her essential self. It also suggests that Paul has fallen in love with her superficial surface appearance, the Carla of meek manners moulded by Namaroff, and has no conception of what lies beneath. Her voice as she rises from the throne has lost all of its former tentative uncertainty and she now speaks in commanding, reverberant tones, seemingly pitched to resonate with the stones. As she descends the stairs to Paul, the hood falls down to reveal her face, and her voice becomes pleading, begging him to take her away immediately. There is a sense that if she leaves the village and the castle, escaping the malevolent spirit of place, the curse will be lifted from her. Unfortunately, Paul is a rather stolid individual, lacking the requisite romantic impulsiveness, and prevaricates to fatal effect.

Paul and Namaroff engage in their deathly duel at the climax of the film, allowing Peter Cushing to show off his athletic side, and fail to notice the gorgon’s emergence and slow approach to the head of the stairs above them. So what of the make-up effects which have drawn such derision? Well, they’re perhaps not Roy Ashton’s finest hour. Barbara Shelley, who wanted to play the part of her gorgon emanation herself, was apparently up for wearing a headpiece comprising live grass snakes, which shows considerable pluck. But perhaps wisely, her idea wasn’t taken up. In truth, the make-up serves functionally enough, with a little adjustment in focus from the inner eye of the imagination. The gorgon is really only designed to be glimpsed in mirrors and pools, and in the periphery of vision. Even if such subliminal appearances resulted from an awareness of the shortcomings of the make-up, they ultimately fit in perfectly with the tenor of the picture. The severed head which we are left contemplating as the credits roll is less satisfactory, and ends the film on a slightly discordant note. But these are really minor matters.

Veiled apparition - Carla amongst classical columns

What is more important is the atmospheric direction of Terence Fisher, who always preferred to think of his films as adult fairy tales rather than horror movies, and who here produces the perfect example to match that description. And then there are the great performances by Barbara Shelley and Peter Cushing, who bring the complexities of their characters to life in an undemonstrative yet quietly intense manner. It’s a difficult task to convey feeling which remain largely hidden, but they succeed in doing so through small looks and gestures. Christopher Lee also puts in a performance of great brio, creating a savant figure who breaks the mould somewhat. He seems like he might have a zest for fun as well as learning – a man who might share a few biers in the keller with his students. Bernard Robinson’s sets are also marvellous, particularly his transformation of the customary castle interior into a temple reclaimed by nature, complete with statue and plinth in the centre of the hall. It was a film which was always going to be a one-off. There was never any likelihood of the gorgon returning time and again in the manner of an indestructible Dracula or Frankenstein. Perhaps other mythical monsters, such as the Cyclops or minotaur, could have beaten a trail to the northern lands. But in her one appearance, the gorgon allowed for the creation of a melancholic, minor-key classic.