The Damned

Here's the full version of an introduction I gave to a screening of The Damned as part of a 12 Hour science fiction film festival at the Bike Shed Theatre for Phonic fm. I had to cut it drastically to fit it into the alloted 10 minute time slot, but still went hopelessly beyond the limit set. Sorry. Concision is an art I have yet to master.

My choice of film is The Damned, a 1963 film directed by Joseph Losey and produced by the Hammer film studios. I’ve chosen it partly because of its relative obscurity, which hopefully means I’m introducing you to something entirely new. It’s not very well known even within the Hammer film canon, and the studio found it difficult to distribute at the time. It was actually made and ready for release in 1961, but didn’t find its way into the cinemas until 1963, truncated and squashed into the lower half of a double bill, coupled with Maniac, one of Hammer’s post-Psycho thrillers. This delay and the wariness of exhibitors was in large part due to confusion over exactly what kind of film this was, and how it could best be marketed. Is it a science fiction film or is it a ‘youth gone wild’ rock n roll movie? Is it an exploitation quickie or a European arthouse meditation in the mould of the Antonioni and Bergman films then making such an impact on the continent. It’s interesting that its release coincided with the completion of Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly trilogy and Antonioni’s trilogy of films with Monica Vitti, both of which deal with similar themes of existential angst and disorientation in the shadow of the bomb and the Freudian tangle of human relations. The use of bleak, empty coastal landscapes in L’Aventurra and Through A Glass Darkly provides a strong continuity of mood with The Damned and they even share a symbolic use of helicopters.

But The Damned is also very much a genre film, a Hammer film. James Carreras, one of the pater familiases of the Hammer family business, would have been horrified at the idea that he had sanctioned the making of an art movie. The Damned is an anomaly in the Hammer filmography, an experiment which was considered an unqualified failure by the studio, and one never to be repeated. Looking back some years later, James Carreras summed up the reasons for this in a mildly expressed assessment which nevertheless encapsulated the company’s unswerving, hardline commercial priorities. ‘It’s not our cup of tea at all. Losey is a very eminent director and he has a great following among critics, and the film, I’m sure, was a good film. But unfortunately, you know, we can only judge it on results. Did it get its money back? And the answer is no, it didn’t’.

Joan leads the bikers through Weymouth

The very ambiguity about the nature of the film and the porous nature of its generic boundaries, which made it so difficult to place, created confusion amongst critics and put cinemagoers off, are the very things which make it such a fascinating watch in retrospect. It might challenge perceived notions of what constitutes science fiction, but science fiction it most certainly is. But it is a lot more besides. I also chose this film because of its reflection of contemporary fears and anxieties. There was moral panic over youth gang violence. This was sometime after the Teddy Boy scares and the trashing of cinemas showing Rock Around the Clock and just before clashes between mods and rockers on the beaches of Clacton and Margate in 1964. But the press-fuelled alarm was still present, waiting for the next incident to lend it form. There was also a sense of national disorientation in the receding wake of the ebb of empire. The complex psychology of the film expresses the confused stupor of a country no longer certain of its place in the world, and failing to come to terms with its vastly diminished influence. The hugely emblematic humiliation of the Suez Crisis had unfolded five years before the film was made. It had made it painfully clear to the British establishment that America was now the dominant force in the politics of the Western world. This dominance was also extending to the cultural sphere. The newly affluent youth were turning to American popular culture to forge their identity, which was increasingly at odds with the old establishment values of the British Empire and even of the post-war spirit of welfare state collectivism. This was the beginning of the consumer age, of a new form of status anxiety.

The sound of invisible death - the click and crackle of the geiger counter

There is also the pervasive sense of unease generated by the cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This is where the science fiction element really comes into its own. Nuclear radiation had been a central staple of 50s science fiction cinema. Sometimes it was just a vaguely mumbled rationale for bringing on the giant monsters – Godzilla, ants in Them, an oversized spider in the self-explantory Tarantula. At other times it used to more subtle, metaphorical ends. The nebulous cloud which causes the protagonist of The Incredible Shrinking Man to begin his slow, lonely journey towards the microworld and into the infinities beyond. The pandora’s box in the delirious pulp noir Kiss Me Deadly. Hammer had made its own radiation picture, X the Unknown, a great little film which is punctuated throughout by the ominous popping crackle of Geiger counters, wands which effectively render death sonically visible. In The Damned, it is combined with another common science fiction theme of the time, that of the mutant child or children – part of a generation which potentially represent a new stage in human evolution. They are sometimes persecuted outsiders, spurned for their difference. At other times, they are a menacing threat.

Children of the Grave - These are the damned

In SF literature, examples include Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (an early iteration from 1935), Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Edgar Pangborn’s Davy, Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos and The Chrysalids. The latter two are particularly relevant here. The Chrysalids even ends with another helicopter arriving like a deus ex machina to bring the ‘different’ children to a new and more civilised settlement where they will no longer be persecuted. The Midwich Cuckoos was filmed as Village of the Damned in 1960, the year before The Damned. The children here are malevolent in intent, the offspring of aliens who have, by unspoken implication, impregnated the women of a sleepy English village. They are capable of forming a gestalt mind which gives them enormous telepathic and telekinetic powers. The children in The Chrysalids are mutants in a post-apocalyptic world which has reverted to a pre-technological level, with an accompanying resurgence of superstition and persecution. The signs of their difference must be hidden lest they fall victim to this new form of witch-hunt. The children in The Damned fall somewhere in between these two breeds. They are exploited and kept in darkness – denied enlightenment in a literal and figurative sense as they are imprisoned in their shelter beneath the cliffs. But they are, through no fault of their own, also deadly to those not like them. They carry the poison of radiation, and live in an environment uninhabitable to ‘normal’ human beings. This is the tragedy at the heart of the film.

Strange Angel - King in the graveyard of St George's Church, Portland

I also chose this film because of its local setting. The locations here may be familiar to many of you. The Victorian seaside town of Weymouth and the cliffs and quarries of Portland Bill which loom above it. You can see Portland Bill from Exmouth or Dawlish on a clear day. There is a great deal of location shooting on The Damned (another reason why it was so expensive to make), and there are many incidental pleasures to be had. The steam train heaving up and down the quayside, the fashions of the extras and bypassers in the Weymouth town centre scenes, the general surreality of seeing familiar places incorporated into a fantastic fictional scenario. The 18th century Georgian church of St George’s is used to good effect, with Oliver Reed’s character King outlined leaning out from a memorial in the graveyard like some strange, demonic angel. The tombstones could be protruding from the bunker where the mutant children live, because their home is effectively a mausoleum; a cold modernist crypt to contrast with the clean classicism of the Georgian building above. The church is built from Portland stone, naturally enough, and there are also scenes set in the Portland quarries. These carry an ingrained symbolic weight, particularly when it comes to the climactic confrontations between establishment characters and the outsiders who have stumbled onto their activities. Portland stone has been used to build a good number of monumental buildings which represent different aspects of the Establishment, expressing entrenched and seemingly unassailable power. These include Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster (the House of Lords and Commons), St Paul’s Cathedral and, going further back, The Tower of London. It was also used extensively in Exeter Cathedral.

Quayside steam

Joseph Losey was a director who appeared to have a particularly European sensibility, along with an acute insight into the workings of the British establishment and class system. It’s surprising then to discover that he was a Midwestern boy, born in Wisconsin in 1909. It’s an origin he shares with Orson Welles, and like Welles he began his career in the theatre and ended up a Hollywood exile. In the era of Roosevelt’s New Deal he was involved in many radical productions in New York; radical in terms of their progressive, leftist politics and in terms of their experimentation. He also directed a large number of plays for the radio, again with a distinctly leftist slant. Perhaps the height of his theatrical career was a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the exiled German playwright’s Life of Galileo, which starred Charles Laughton. Losey’s first film, made in 1948, was a fable about difference and persecution called The Boy With Green Hair. It shares The Damned’s unambiguous anti-war stance. It could also be read as an anti-McCarthyite allegory.

Clocktower bikers

As such, it was probably one of several factors leading to Losey being targeted by the McCarthy witch hunts in Hollywood. He was called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, but decided to remain in Europe, where he was working at the time and avoid the grimly farcical and hysterically conducted proceedings which would inevitably ensue. As a result, he was blacklisted by Hollywood and remained an exile for the rest of his life. Looking back, he was sanguine about his fate, however. In 1983, a year before his death, he reflected ‘for some reason interviewers are always saying that the experience has left me embittered and this just is not the case. In a way my being blacklisted was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it forced me to go to Europe to continue my career as a filmmaker. Otherwise I might have stayed on in Hollywood, merely making money instead of making pictures I wanted to make’.

King by the clocktower

It also forced him to work within the bounds of genre pictures, and the tension between his coolly formal artistic temperament and the requirements of story and genre produced some memorable results. Before The Damned he has made several distinguished crime thrillers, including The Criminal, which starred Stanley Baker, one of his key actors. The Damned would have been much better served with Baker in the role of Simon. Losey was also slated to direct the Hammer SF picture X the Unknown. But the shadow cast by Hollywood in the wake of his blacklisting extruded its dark hand over the Atlantic through the agency of the film’s McCarthyite American star Dean Jagger, who objected to his participation.

Modernist cage

Losey’s leftist, anti-establishment leanings and concern with form and structure come through very strongly in The Damned. It is a film which works through contrasts, parallels and comparisons. The generic clash is one striking aspect of its structure, with the SF elements only introduced some way into the story. The locations and sets are also distinctly different but throw each other into clear relief. The bleak, fragmented cliffscape of Portland Bill and the long, empty sweep of Chesil Beach beyond are contrasted with the faded, peeling, formerly elegant Victorian façade of Weymouth town centre and seafront. The once-confident architecture of Empire is set against jagged cliffs and outcrops littered with blasted blocks of quarried stone which could be a vista from a pre- or post-human world. This is, after all, the promontory which extends the furthest southerly pseudopod of land on what is known as the Jurassic coastline, which begins further west in Exmouth. It’s an expanse of stratified bedrock steeped in deep time. The cliffs are in turn contrasted with the stark, cold modernism of the interior world beneath the cliffs in which the children are kept. This is the brittle, spindly modernism of the 50s – Festival of Britain modernism.

Feeling the rock - sculpture emerging from the geological spirit of place

The music also offers contrasts. James Bernard, whose strident scores for Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein and subsequent Hammer gothics did so much to define their mood, here produces something very different. A desolate, drifting, vaguely atonal flute melody which is reminiscent of the first of Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes or Gustav Holst’s brooding tone poem Egdon Heath. The latter comparison is particularly apposite given that Holst’s piece is an evocation of the bleak moorland which features in a number of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels and stories. Bernard’s restrained chamber music is contrasted with the brash rock ‘n roll song which blows it away when Losey’s roving camera takes us down into Weymouth. A rather tame, defanged piece in the Bill Haley mould, its lyrics nevertheless express the violence and menace which run throughout the film. Its inane melodic refrain is a recurrent motif, whistled by the bike gang as a kind signature tune and used as a call sign. The incongruous combination of jaunty ditty with the threat of violence is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, in which Malcolm McDowell’s Alex breezes through Singin’ in the Rain as he and his gang set about a vicious round of destruction, assault and rape.

King and Joan

The psychosexual interaction of the characters and the linguistic power games they play anticipates Losey’s collaborations with Harold Pinter in the latter half of the 1960s. At the heart of the film, and driving its initial narrative thrust, is the semi-incestuous relationship between Oliver Reed’s King and Shirley Anne-Field’s Joan, an edgy depiction of unhealthy obsession and arrested development. The two female characters in the film, Joan and Freya, both have or have had relationships with older men in which an element of ownership is involved. The artist Freya rents a cottage owned by her ex-lover Bernard, the scientist running a secret project nearby. Joan is intitially picked up by Simon, the American tourist, who thinks she is a ‘tart’. He becomes our nominal ‘hero’, although his behaviour makes him a far from noble one. He evidently still thinks she’s a tart when he takes her off on his yacht, an obvious status symbol which attracts her with its promise of further riches and luxurious pleasures. She is expected to pay for the privilege of being onboard, and he roughly embraces her in what amounts to an assault. The men of power, the scientist who has joined the military establishment and the rich American who has retired from the insurance business, both assume a proprietorial position of ownership. This is a man’s world dominated by male wealth, self-assertion and violence.

Bernard and Freya - a faded intimacy

Losey creates a multi-layered picture of British society, a series of refracting planes which demonstrate that its seemingly wildly disparate elements are in fact closely interconnected. This picture is encapsulated in the brilliant opening scene in which the camera glides up and around the clock tower, contrasting King and his gang with the memorial to King George III and drawing Simon, the American outsider, into their world – into England, in effect. King leads his gang, his ‘troops’, in mock military marches, and apes the chummy language and plummy accents of the establishment, satirising the breezy heroics and stiff-upper lipped stoicism of the war movies which filled the cinemas in the 1950s. King stands out from the rest of his leather-clad gang, wearing a stylish check jacket and swinging a tightly-furled umbrella with rigorous, square-bashing precision. He’s like a mod who has somehow found himself heading a band of rockers. The uniform of the gang who he marches through the streets echoes the uniforms of the military men in their secret, fenced-off base. Several times in the film, characters express their bewilderment at the seemingly mindless gang violence. ‘Why do they do it?’ they fret. It’s like the moment in The Wild One where Brando’s Johnny is asked ‘what are you rebelling against’, and he replies ‘what have you got?’ Losey shows how the gang violence is inextricably linked with the pervasive violence of society embodied in the military establishment. In the wake of the second world war it has now settled into the subterranean machinations of the cold war, its corrosive power still holding sway. The Edgecliff military base where Bernard’s secret project is housed has echoes of various secret military establishments in the West Country, most prominently Porton Down, home of the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment. Rumours and accusations of human experimentation were attached to Porton Down for years. And it was here in 1953 that a young 20 year old airman called Ronald Maddison died after being exposed to the nerve gas sarin.

King as frightened chiid

King and Henry

The last ride

King is like a child, aping what he sees around him, absorbing the violence which is in the air. He rejects the adult world and adult sexuality, and wants his sister to do the same. ‘It’s you and me against the world, Joanie’, he says. When he meets the children (recoiling with horror from the touch of their cold, dead flesh) one of them, Henry, forms a close bond with him. There’s a sense of fellow spirits connecting. Henry is a little boy lost, and we imagine that this was how King was when he was younger. Henry clings to King’s side, even when the latter tries to push him away. He insists on trying to escape with King at the end, telling him that he doesn’t want to go back since ‘none of the others really like me’. The scenes with them both are really very touching. King and Henry (King Henry?) are, for all of King’s violence, two innocents in the face of the tyrannical, depersonalised control of the military. King becomes something of an anti-hero, leading the children into destructive rebellion, trashing the joint like Teds ripping the seats out of a cinema where Rock Around the Clock is showing. His instability becomes manifest as the radiation sickness takes hold, and his underlying vulnerability becomes affectingly apparent. By the end, we understand something of his violence and rage, and desire to distance himself from the world. His final stand is a defiant fuck you to the British establishment.

Freya and Sid

Freya on the brink - working to the end

If King is one of the film’s isolated outsiders, then Freya is another. She is the artist as natural outsider, and thereby perhaps a reflection of Losey’s own status. She is also an outsider in that she is a foreigner (again like Losey), her name that of a Nordic Goddess. At the end of the film she speaks of the children in almost mythic terms. She refers to Bernard’s plan ‘to set nine ice-cold children free in the ashes of the universe’. It’s as if she is talking about the Norse eschatology of Ragnarok, the final battle in which only nine gods will survive to live on in the blasted remains of the world. The nine children echo this mythic pattern. Freya lives almost literally on the edge, isolated in the cottage on the clifftop. In one highly symbolic scene, she and King wrestle at the very edge of the cliff. They are both on the brink, outside of society looking on from the borderlands. King is not stupid – his mimicry has wit and satirical bite. But his deeper feelings, his raging inner conflicts, remain unarticulated. Freya has her art, which can express both the personal and the universal, inner and outer landscapes. King, perhaps jealous of what he cannot speak, maliciously smashes a sculpture she has been working on. A potential communion of outsiders is broken at the same time.

Bernard with expressionist double (the night mare)

Bernard as man of power - the scientist as God

Bernard, the scientist, is another individual amongst the deindividuated, the uniformed and ranked. His name may be a nod to Nigel Kneale’s famous scientist character Quatermass, first name also Bernard (Kneale’s tribute to Bernard Lovell, the British scientist who set up the Jodrell Bank radio telescope). But unlike the doggedly anti-establishment Quatermass, this Bernard has allowed himself to be co-opted by the military, even if it is supposedly he who is in charge. Freya mocks him for this. She provides a voice of dissent, undermining the assumed authority of his newfound status. She tries to reconnect him with his soul. But she knows him well enough to realise that the attempt is ultimately futile. The air of melancholy and regret which suffuse their scenes together is an acknowledgement that they now inhabit separate worlds. And just as it means death to enter the vault of the children unprotected, so it is death to enter the professor’s world. He is in fact a figure of death. The major in his radiation suit is referred to as the Black Death by the children, but he is really just one of Death’s minions. The professor carries his own poison with him; A mental and ideological poison, born of despair but feeding on power.

Indoctrination machines

Remote learning

‘Civilisation’ is contrasted with the ‘barbarism’ of youth culture, classical art with modern. The children, in their modernist bunker, are force-fed a classical diet of ‘culture’ to prepare them for the world to come. By implication, they will begin as the old generation left off, building a new Empire on the model of the old. The aristocratic Captain Gregory, played by the absurdly plummy-voiced James Villiers (a one-note performer if ever there was one), reads them the poem The Prisoner of Chillon by Byron. They are far too young for the poem, but it encapsulates something of their tragic fate:
My hair is grey, but not with years,
Nor grew it white
In a single night,
As men's have grown from sudden fears:
My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil,
But rusted with a vile repose,
For they have been a dungeon's spoil,
And mine has been the fate of those
To whom the goodly earth and air
Are bann'd, and barr'd—forbidden fare.

Looking at the world for the first time

Looking at a flower as the monster approaches

The scene in which the children briefly leave their cavernous prison for the light and air is powerfully moving. Joan looks after Mary, one of the little girls, and they sit on top of the cliff looking out over the seemingly endless expanse of the sea. ‘Take a look Mary’ Joan says, ‘that’s the world’. Mary is frightened by its sheer enormity, the lack of enclosing walls, so Joan suggests that she hold on to a small part of it and picks a flower for her. It’s at this point that one of the military men approaches in his radiation suit and tears Mary away from Joan’s arms, herding her, along with the rest of the children, back into their Portland pen. The violence of the establishment becomes brutally evident in the pitiless manner in which the soldiers go about their appointed task – men in frightening costumes brandishing guns. These are the Black Death night visitors emerging from the rocks to carry the children away in broad daylight; Nightmares in the waking sunlight, undeniably real. They are dehumanised by their radiation suits, which make them look like shambling, thuggish ogres, picking up small children as if they intend to eat them. This might appear to be a Hammer film without monsters. But they come out in an attacking horde in this climactic scene. They just happen to be human.

Remote viewing

Watching

The film also depicts a world in which everybody is being watched. King watches over his Joanie, and his bikers become a lookout gang, whistling code signals to alert each other to the whereabouts of Simon and Joan. When King disappears, Sid (the most sympathetic of the bike gang, played by Kenneth Cope) takes it upon himself to continue the surveillance with his high-powered binoculars to find out where he’s got to. The military base is surrounded by watchdogs and guards. Freya is watched over by Bernard and his underlings in an attempt to shield her from dangerous (indeed fatal) knowledge, but also to monitor whether she has been exposed to that knowledge and thereby become a threat which needs to be dealt with. The children are watched by remote controlled surveillance cameras, and their only contact with the outside world is via a TV communication screen, on which the professor’s face looms with imposing largeness. Freya’s sculptures also watch and wait. Her angel standing on the cliff’s edge looking out to sea, where navy ships are moored; her bird perching in windowsills or crouching behind the professor’s shoulder. Finally, the helicopters are like technological realisations of Freya’s birds, smooth mechanoid hybrids of bird and fish and insect which hover over the outsiders, Simon and Joan, Freya and King, herding them towards their end. Helicopters were still a relatively novel technology at this time, and became a symbol of futurity, representing freedom (as in the Chrysalids) or an oppressive, harrying presence. The shadow cast by the helicopter at the end of Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly provides the manifest outline of the spider god which the unstable Karin has been hallucinating during the film. In The Damned, the helicopters are another aspect of the depersonalised power of the establishment. Highly mobile surveillance machines which ensure that there is no longer any way of escaping the all-encompassing grip of authority, no matter how fast and wild you drive down the long, straight coast road.

Captain Gregory - not an art lover

The children are all terribly well-spoken. It’s as if they have absorbed the speech patterns of those who indoctrinate them. They are set against the deliberate and ritualised insolence and rough speech of the bikers, who do their best to get on the wick of establishment types like the Major, and succeed admirably. Captain Gregory, meanwhile, shows them the same patrician disdain and studied disinterest which he reserves for anything and everything. An acute awareness of class and the antagonism, resentment or deference which this creates is present at every level of society, on civvy street and in the military camp. Captain Gregory still exudes an aura of Imperial arrogance and entitlement. He may be lower in rank than Major Holland, but he assumes an air of inherent superiority. Any bully can push people around, he says, looking pointedly at the Major, but ‘a gentleman commands loyalty’.

Return of Fuseli's Nightmare

King as art critic - attacking the manifestation of his self

On the cliffs above the children’s bunker, the sculptures produced by the artist Freya Neilsen offer a modernist, expressionistic perspective on the contemporary world. These sculptures were actually the work of the British artist Elizabeth Frink. Her birds, horse heads and human figures seem to emerge from the rubble of the quarry, fierce, half-formed beasts assembling themselves from the rocky material around them. Like the children, these creatures seem to be waiting for the post-apocalyptic world. Will this be the forbidding fauna which awaits them when they emerge from the cave? Frink was loosely associated with a group of artists known as the ‘geometry of fear’ sculptors, although they were really a generation older than her. The title comes from the influential art critic Herbert Read’s comments about the British exhibitors at the 1952 Venice Biennale. He wrote ‘these new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance…Here are images of flight, of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear’. Frink’s hulking male figures, like chthonic trolls turned to stone, are filled with brutish, threatening power. King, Oliver Reed’s gang leader, hates them. He confronts her piece Warrior which she made in 1954, a nude male figure with helmet fused to head as if it is a natural extrusion of the skull, with revulsion and disgust. It angers him. Perhaps it offers too clear an insight into his own soul. Joan, on the other hand, seems to instinctively find something instinctively right about them, feeling a natural, almost sensual connection, enjoying work which is an expression of female creation and imagination. Frink's staring horse head, again made in 1954, looks like the fearful apparition appearing from the shadows at the side of the bed in Henri Fuseli’s famous painting and print The Nightmare. This is one of the most famous of horror images, in which a malevolent imp crouches on the chest of a restlessly sleeping woman and glowers out of the frame, as if it has just noticed our watching presence. Her heavy angel with its stunted wings is destined never to fly, but to remain rooted to the rocks, gazing out from the brink of the land over the empty expanse of the ocean.

Cafe raptor

Bernard's familiar shadow

The sculpture we see with the greatest frequency, however, is The Bird. It is referred to in the film as the graveyard bird, forging a link with King when he perches on one of the grave obelisks in the churchyard later on. This sharply predatory creature, tensed for a killing swoop, was an early work of Frink’s. The Tate bought it in 1952 whilst she was still at art college. This is the work of a young woman, then, further bringing out the generational gulf which runs like a seismic rift through the film. The bird is associated with Bernard, the scientist at the head of the secret project which is preparing the chosen children for a post-nuclear future. It almost acts as his twisted familiar spirit. It denotes the primal violence and predatory ruthlessness lurking beneath his civilised exterior. Its presence subtly undermines his rationalism and the carefully reasoned justifications he presents for his monstrous actions. We see it framed in the window of the seafront hotel café where he meets his military colleagues (his major and captain). Its shadow also arcs over his shoulder whilst he addresses the children over the remote communication system. Art expresses the truthful spirit which lies beneath the blandly constructed surface of civilised behaviour.

Modernist prints

Mention should finally be made of the cast. Oliver Reed is definitely the standout presence here. He brings a nervy intensity and incipient instability to his role, making of King a real character rather than a two-dimensional thug. He wins our sympathy in way that Malcolm Macdowell in A Clockwork Orange never does. Reed was one of Hammer’s repertory actors in the early 60s, and it was with the studio that his career really took off. After a minor part in The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, he had his first major starring role in The Curse of the Werewolf. After that he was in the smuggling thriller Captain Clegg opposite Peter Cushing; the pirate movie The Pirates of Blood River opposite Christopher Lee (with rogueish eyepatch); the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade; and the post-Pyscho suspense thriller Paranoiac. All of which shows the sheer range of pictures Hammer were making before they turned to specialising more exclusively on the gothic.

State violence and youth violence - an uneven match

Kenneth Cope, the biker who features most prominently in the story, will be familiar to many as the white-suited ghost detective in the 60s TV series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and also as a Corrie regular in that decade. He appeared in the 1981 Dr Who serial Warrior’s Gate, the final part of the e-space trilogy, a favourite of mine with its Cocteau references.

Why? - Macdonald Carey

Macdonald Carey, who plays Simon, nominally the hero, was one of a number of American actors Hammer shipped over to star in their early films, one eye firmly fixed on US box office potential. They couldn’t afford the latest stars, so tended to go for actors a little past their prime. Most notoriously, this included the casting of Brian Donlevy as Professor Quatermass, a choice which Nigel Kneale abhorred. Carey was best known in the movies for his roles in westerns. But he was better known in the States for his starring role in the long-running TV soap Days of Our Lives.

His May to September romance with Shirley Anne-Field’s character is one of the least convincing aspects of the film. But perhaps it is supposed to be – a jaundiced reflection on the artificiality of romance. Shirley Anne-Field was in a number of key British films of the new wave or kitchen-sink movement, including The Entertainer and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and she also appeared in Alfie later in the 60s. Her role here is more reminiscent of her part in the 1960 film Beat Girl, however, whose US title Wild for Kicks tells us all we really need to know.

Trashing the joint - the children's rebellion

The marvellously named Viveca Lindfors, who plays the artist Freya, was a Swedish actor of stage and screen who moved to America after the war and appeared in a large number of films and TV shows over the next 6 decades. I know her from George Romero’s horror comic movie Creepshow, in which she plays the tipsy Aunt Bedelia, whose abusive husband comes back from the dead on the anniversary of his birthday to demand his cake. It ends up decorated with poor old Bedelia’s head.

One of the child actors, Nicholas Clay, pursued an acting career into adulthood and appeared in one of my favourite films. He played the noble, handsome but fatally human Sir Lancelot in John Boorman’s 1981 Arthurian fantasia Excalibur.

The Major and the Biker

Douglas Gamley, who arranged the Black Leather Rock song, later jumped the Hammer ship and attached his colours to the rival company Amicus, where he produced some rather more distinguished scores. He worked on Asylum, Tales from the Crypt, And Now the Screaming Starts, The Vault of Horror, From Beyond the Grave and The Beast Must Die (from rock ‘n roll to blaxploitation wah-wah funk), as well as post-Amicus pictures The Land That Time Forgot and The Monster Club (the first horror movie I ever saw in the cinema).

The Black Death

In 1963, the year of The Damned’s release, Joseph Losey teamed up with another of his key actors, Dirk Bogarde, and with the writer Harold Pinter. They made The Servant, the first of a number of pictures which would fully establish his reputation as an arthouse auteur, a central figure in 60s British cinema. The Servant was followed by The Accident in 1967 and the Dirkless The Go-Between in 1970, the last of his collaborations with Pinter. It has to be said, there were also a few stinkers along the way. His comic-strip adaptation Modesty Blaise, with Sir Dirk and Antonioni star Monica Vitti was generally considered a dismal failure, although its colourful pop art stylings still make it a visual pleasure to watch. Boom from 1968, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor wearily going through their Tennessee Williams routine once more, has been chosen by trash director John Waters as one of the films to accompany his forthcoming season at the BFI Southbank. He describes it as ‘beyond bad, the other side of camp – a film so beautiful and awful there is only one word to describe it: perfect. If you don’t like this film, I hate you’. I wouldn’t go that far in describing The Damned. But I do hope you like it.

Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at The British Library

PART ONE

The British Library exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination began, appropriately enough, with a descent. After a brief introductory film in which four explorers of diverse Gothic realms (Neil Gaiman, Sarah Waters, Ben Wheatley and Mark Daneilewski) outlined the shadowy territory we were about to stumble blindly into, we walked down a set of stairs and entered a gloomy, crypt-like space. The ‘rooms’ we passed through were separated by draped veils of funereal black which shivered in currents of a spectral wind with no evident point of origin (yes, it was the air conditioning, but let’s not break the mood here). Darkness prevailed. It was all is it should have been; as it was fated to have been.

Surrealist Gothic - Jan Svankmajer's The Castle of Otranto

The first room concerned itself almost exclusively with Horace Walpole, his antecedents, friends and those he went on to influence. He was portrayed as an origin figure for Gothic literature and its subsequent cultural offshoots. Most notably, this was due to his anonymous self-publication in 1764 of the novel The Castle of Otranto, which established many of the staples of Gothic fiction to come: the incursions of the supernatural, the medieval castle with its secret vaults, the revivification of buried histories and ancient curses, the menaced and imperilled heroine and the general air of barely suppressed hysteria. It may be a story seldom read today, but its influence can be felt through its still proliferating lineage. The Czech animator, filmmaker and artist Jan Svankmajer paid homage to it in his short 1979 condensation of the novel, which was shown in the upper entrance room. Period illustrations come to animated life as a book’s pages are riffled by an invisible hand. The framing device for the film has a historian and literary archaeologist claim to have discovered the real Castle of Otranto at Otrhany, near Nachod in the Czech Republic. It is this which Walpole used as the basis for his fictional locale, he claims. As well as suggesting a rediscovery of a half-forgotten text, it’s a clever way of having the Gothic world of imaginary derangement infect and invade what is presented as rational documentary realism. Svankmajer is a contemporary inheritor of the surrealist sensibility, and as such his co-option of the Castle of Otranto is an acknowledgement of the prominence of Walpole and the Gothic in general within the surrealist canon, its curated cabinet of curiosities. A 1765 edition of the novel was displayed in the exhibiton, with Walpole, safely assured of the novel’s success, identifying himself as the author. It now bears the subtitle ‘a Gothic story’. Thus the genre was coined.

The exhibition took care to point out Walpole’s own influences, making it evident that The Castle of Otranto didn’t appear magically formed from a pure and untrammelled imagination. Shakespeare’s ghosts and supernatural beings offer a clearly defined precedent (if such a description is apposite for such immaterial manifestations and half-glimpsed sprites). Walpole’s 1728 copy of The Merchant of Venice was included here, as was Henry Fuseli’s highly dramatic and very physical rendering of the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in a 1796 engraving. A 1529 edition of Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur and a 1617 edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene further outlined the appeal of antiquity and of a dream medievalism, a fantasy of the past replete with quests and allegorical stories, strange landscapes inhabited by demons and monsters waiting to devour souls which strayed from the righteous path.

Johann Muntz's print of Strawberry Hill

Walpole’s fashioning of his own private Gothic domain at Strawberry Hill on the winding banks of the Thames below Twickenham from 1747 onwards was an attempt at realising this fantasy world in solid, architectural form. He was thus the progenitor of Gothic revival architecture in addition to recasting it in a new literary form. Some of the original plans for the house’s elaborate Gothicisation were included, serving to emphasise its general air of studied artifice. It was pointed out the Walpole intended his home to be a showpiece from the outset, charging visitors for admission once it was completed. It was a series of theatrical sets which the imagination was prompted to fill with shadowy figures and strange happenings. The spirit of Strawberry Hill, the experience of inhabiting the living dream of a self-created Gothic fantasy, inspired the writing of The Castle of Otranto.

Chatterton by Henry Wallis (1856)

Walpole initially published the novel anonymously, claiming that it was a translation made by one William Marshal of a work originally written by an Italian with the florid name of Onuphrio Muralto and printed in 1529. This may partly have been a device designed to shield him from any adverse reaction to the story’s sensational aspects. But once more, Walpole set the trend for the literary work as ‘discovered’ manuscript. Included here were two of the best known 18th century forgeries: James Macpherson’s ‘translation’ of Fingal, an early Gaelic epic by an ancient poet known as Ossian; and the ‘discovery’ of a number of manuscripts by 15th century Bristolian poet Thomas Rowley by the teenage would-be poet Thomas Chatterton, best known today as an exquisite corpse in Henry Wallis’ Pre-Raphaelite painting of 1856. Chatterton’s doctored manuscripts were on display, pasted into a large scrapbook. The crude attempts to make them appear timeworn and antiquated, with brown staining liberally splashed across the vellum he acquired from the attorney’s office in which he worked, now appear charmingly amateurish. That people were prepared to accept them as genuine is testament to the 18th century intoxication with antiquity, the intense desire to commune with voices from the past.

Walpole's Becket Reliquary

Walpole found fulfilment of this desire through his dedicated antiquarianism. He collected objects from centuries past, both in England and on his journeys through Europe, and filled up every niche and corner of Strawberry Hill with his diverse finds. A particularly beautiful 13th century enamelled reliquary chest dedicated to Thomas Becket was included in the exhibition, housed in a glass cabinet in the middle of the room which enhanced its sacrosanct air. This was an object to be circled and gazed at from all angles, but not touched. A certain distance was maintained, as it would have been for pilgrims centuries ago. It must have been thrilling for Walpole to be able to pick it up whenever the fancy took him, to open the small, hinged lid and peer reverently inside, imagining what it once contained. Alongside the reliquary was a book by his friend George Vertue, a catalogue of the antiquities he drew up whilst staying at Strawberry Hill, opened to show the page on which a colour study of the adjacent object was printed.

John Dee's 'shew stone'

Most intriguing, however, was another artefact which Walpole owned, one which, whilst looking fairly unprepossessing, was imbued with great power and mystery. This was John Dee’s spirit mirror. On loan from the British Museum, it is a smooth, flat disc of polished obsidian, darkly and depthlessly reflective. The accompanying tooled leather case bears a handwritten label by Walpole indicating the nature of its content. Walpole bought the mirror in 1777, and it was used by Dee in the late 16th century. But it originally found its way over to Europe from what is now Mexico, part of the plunder of the Conquistadors in the 1520s and 30s. Dee was obviously aware of its provenance as a mirror for divination and conjuration used by the Mexica priests. Dee himself was a magician, mathmetician, alchemist, cartographer and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, all disciplines which were regarded as part of an undivided body of knowledge. A fascinating character, he has proved irresistible to a number of writers and artists, and appears prominently in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, John Crowley’s Aegypt sequence of novels, Alan Moore’s Promethea comics, Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee, Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana and Gustav Meyrink’s The Angel of the West Window. Dee became acquainted with a young man called Edward Kelley, who claimed to commune with angels. Dee spent an increasing amount of his time attempting to make such a communication himself, with Kelley as intercessory bridge. The black reflecting mirror, or ‘shew stone’, was supposedly given to him by an angel and gave him access (via Kelley) to dimensions normally inaccessible to human vision. Whether or not you give any of this the slightest credence (and the question of whether the stone was ever in Dee’s possession is open to debate) there is a thrill in seeing this myth-infused occult object which such a fascinating historical figure firmly believed opened up higher planes of knowledge and existence, and allowed him to make contact with the beings who possessed and inhabited them.

Edward Young's Night Thoughts illustrated by William Blake

Walpole’s shared schooldays and later acquaintance with Thomas Gray also forges a connection between him and the so-called graveyard poets. This short-lived branch of English poetry, epitomised by Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742), gave expression to the morbid musings of young men who wandered around graveyards contemplating mortality, their own and others. The graveyard became the Gothic locus of a strange, inverted form of romanticism, pale, drawn and half in love with Death. The cold idyll of the graveyard, drained of bright colour save for the odd bunch of fading blooms and the red of the poisonous berries on the yew tree, would provide the trysting place for Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley. They would rendezvous by the grave of Mary’s mother in St Pancras churchyard. Neil Gaimain’s novel The Graveyard Book (which features later in the exhibition) also uses the graveyard as a romantic locale within the fenced and gated bounds of which the tale of a young boy’s growth to maturity takes place.

William Blake's Vala or The Four Zoaz

A 1797 edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts was illustrated by William Blake, who wrapped his angels, demons and tormented sleepers around a central pane containing the text. Pages of this book, which was only ever partially published, were on display here. It was a troubled commission, and only a fraction of the watercolours Blake produced as sketches for later engravings finished in final printed form. He retained many of the proofs which remained unused and began writing his own poem in the blank, squared-off spaces intended for Young’s words. The night journey undertaken by the figures he had drawn influenced the dark prophecies and troubled invective in Vala, or The Four Zoas, written shortly after the altercation with a soldier in the Sussex village of Felpham which had almost led to his trial for sedition. Never published in his lifetime, it was rediscovered in 1889, surfacing in a fin-de-siecle period the mood of which suited its intensely expressed visions of doom and apocalyptic fire. The pages exhibited here showed that the Gothic was capable of inspiring and encompassing extraordinary visionary height, and even more profound depths.

Fonthill Abbey - the ultimate Gothic folly

As the Gothic form developed, so it expanded to explore and colonise new areas, testing the boundaries of aesthetic, social and even physical tolerance by pursuing new extremes. There was an architectural model of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey on display which has long outlasted the extravagant fantasy for which it served as a template. Fonthill was designed to be the ultimate Gothic dwelling, leaving Strawberry Hill in its extensive shadow in terms of its scale and obsessive detail. It proved a hubristic structure, however, built without the accumulated knowledge of the medieval masons. The gargantuan spire, now a fairly obvious symbol of overweening male ego rather than a physical manifestation of heavenly aspiration, was from the beginning an unstable structure, which collapsed several times. Beckford eventually gave up on his expensive dream and built a structure which, perhaps in wry recognition of the true nature of Fonthill, resembled a folly; the tower which still raises its finger on the hills above Bath. Beckford’s novel Vathek (1786), a copy of which was on display in the exhibition, took the Gothic into the realms of the Arabian Nights fantasy. The ‘exoticism’ that this form afforded, its distance from the norms of Western civilisation and from familiar narratives and settings, allowed for new extremes of cruelty, violence and depravity. Naturally, the notoriety which ensued did nothing to harm the success of the book.

The exhibition notes made the observation that the levels of sex and violence in Gothic novels increased markedly in the wake of the French Revolution and the bloody Terror into which it descended in the 1790s. Matthew Lewis’ The Monk was the prime example offered here, which also throws in a good deal of anti-clericalism for good measure. The horrors of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation became another staple of Gothic fiction, memorably featuring in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (another subject of a Jan Svankmajer film). The figure of the depraved or pitiless monk, a terrifying cowled and faceless presence possessed of unassailable power and authority, took its place amongst the repertory of Gothic characters. The English Reformation cast a long shadow, and Catholic institutions and rituals could still be relied upon to elicit a shudder if cast in a suitably sinister light.

German Gothic novels, which drew on a rich heritage of folklore connected with mountains and dense forests, were renowned (or notorious) for being even more graphic than their English counterparts. They were briefly in fashion towards the end of the 18th century. In Jane Austen’s parody of Gothic literature, Northanger Abbey (1818), the heroine is offered a list of seven novels to read after she has finished Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents. Some are German, whilst others ape the Germanic style. They are all, however, perfectly ‘horrid’, she is assured. They have therefore come to be known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, and all turn out to have been real, published works. Austen evidently had in-depth knowledge of contemporary Gothic. Editions of these obscure works were laid open side-by-side in a central display cabinet so that we might glimpse something of their appalling nature. The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796), subtitled A German Tale (as the former may as well have been too) were both by the English novelist Eliza Parsons. The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath was another German tale written by an English writer, whilst Clermont (1798) was by the Irish writer Regina Maria Roche. The Midnight Bell (1798) by Dutch author Francis Latham not only claimed to be ‘A German Story’ in its subtitle, but also to be ‘Founded On Incidents in Real Life’. The final two novels were the genuine article, even if they claimed not to be. The Horrid Mysteries (1796), or ‘A Story From the German Of The Marquis Of Grosse’ was actually a translation of the novel Der Genius by Carl Grosse. The Necromancer or The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by Ludwig Flammenberg sounds particularly intriguing (and particularly German). Disappointingly, the splendidly named Flammenberg turns out to be another pseudonym, a florid mask for more mundanely monickered Carl Friedrich Kahlert.

Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare (1781)

Henry Fuseli was Swiss rather than German, and a long-term resident of the British Isles. There remained something Germanic about the fantastical, grotesque nature of much of his work, however. In 1781 he painted The Nightmare, a print of which was exhibited here. It remains one of the definitive images of the Gothic imagination, and was hugely popular at the time, reproduced in many subsequent engravings. The demonic imp crouching on the chest of the uncomfortably sprawled, restlessly sleeping woman and the marble-eyed, phantom horse materialising from the shadows have been the subject of much pastiche and parody over the years. This powerfully physical representation of a dream state is viewed with disturbing objectivity from a viewpoint exterior to the dreamer, as if these were real demonic beings inducing night terrors in the unknowing sleeper. The sideways stare of the homunculus, meeting the gaze of the picture’s viewer, makes it feel as if we have come across a scene we should not have borne witness to. It is a tableau of temporary suspension, full of the potential for sudden and very rapid subsequent action. The poster for Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic, his and writer Stephen Volk’s version of the events of that famously stormy night at the Villa Diodati (which we’ll come to in a moment), restages The Nightmare for a cinematic tableau.

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece illustration for an 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The Nightmare is a bridge into the Romantic era. The exhibition notes suggested that the Romantic artists largely diverged from Gothic themes. However, there were exceptions; manuscripts of Coleridge’s Christabel (a forerunner of Poe’s poetry) and Wordsworth’s The Vale of Esthwaite were included to show that they did sometimes descend into the shadows. And it was from the milieu of the Romantic movement that a work would emerge which would profoundly influence the direction which Gothic would take and form the ground from which new generic hybrids would sprout and flourish. Not the least of these would be science fiction, which Brian Aldiss defines, in Billion/Trillion Year Spree, as being ‘characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode’. The work in question is, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Included here was an 1831 edition with illustrations by Theodor von Holst. His depiction of the monster bears a resemblance to William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea. The title page print depicts with stark simplicity the horror Frankenstein feels towards his creation, and his abandonment of the bewildered newborn man, who sprawls like a loose-limbed puppet in the laboratory.

Shelley’s revised manuscript for the 1831 edition was on display, handwritten on blue paper. Also present was a letter written by Lord Byron, protesting that no impropriety had taken place during that storm-wracked evening at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where he had played host to Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, his physician John Polidori and Clair Clairmont, his mistress of the moment. Given his reputation, and such protest was liable merely to stoke further salacious speculation, and he would probably have been better advised to hold his silence. That evening, Byron had been reading ghost stories aloud as the storm rumbled and flashed outside (and German ghost stories at that!) He also read lines from Coleridge’s Christabel, which sent the unhinged Shelley fleeing from the room with a wild shriek. The reading led on to the suggestion that everyone should write their own horror story to complement the fearsome atmosphere of the night beyond. This challenge, instantly mythologised by all parties present, resulted in the first outline of Frankenstein. Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), who had already lost a child of her own, and whose mother had died as a result of her own delivery into the world, came up with the idea of the blasphemous birth of a new, monstrous man through the generative, galvanic powers of science; powers which wholly excluded motherhood and female agency.

Frankenstein functions as a gateway into the world of modern Gothic, largely via the numerous cinematic variations which have evolved from the central idea. The clip of Bride of Frankenstein playing on a loop was really our first glimpse of Gothic as the major stylistic component of the horror genre as it developed in the twentieth century. Frankenstein’s creation evolved (or devolved) from the tormented haunter of the wilderness, the self-educated outsider abandoned by his father, into Boris Karloff’s innocent, shambling brute, both pitiful and terrifying. Frankenstein provides us with our first classic horror monster. The novel opens a nocturnal window onto the twentieth century, giving us a brief prospect of the encroaching shadows of Gothic horror whose tendrils would extend into every aspect of popular culture. There was a copy of the 1967 Brunswick LP An Evening With Boris Karloff and his Friends, contained soundtrack clips from the great Universal monster movies introduced by the now elderly actor. Also on display were some of Scott MacGregor’s set designs for the late Hammer film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). This served as a self-reflective and melancholic conclusion to the studio’s series of Frankenstein pictures, almost invariably starring Peter Cushing as a particularly amoral Doctor, which had been so central to their output. Along with the Dracula films, they were instrumental in building their reputation as purveyors of quality Gothic to the masses. MacGregor’s designs are sketches for a dream film which could no longer be realised with Hammer’s dwindling resources in the bleak years of the mid-70s. Interestingly, Frankenstein and his creation have been conspicuously absent from recent revivals and revisitations of the Gothic canon. The single shambling monster has been largely supplanted by hordes of shuffling, moaning zombies. Maybe it is time for the creature to rise from the slab once more.

Frankenstein was the progenitor of many literary forms and ideas. But it can also be seen as an endpoint in terms of ‘pure’ Gothic fiction, if indeed there is a beast of such pedigree. Its Romantic sensibility and use of landscapes giddy with sublime terror (alpine peaks and Arctic wildernesses) as exteriorised expressions of interior states mark it apart from the more generic Gothic novel. The spectres of 18th and early 19th century Gothic arose from the historical past (real or fabled). Frankenstein’s monster, on the other hand, is created through the application of scientific rationalism, Henry Frankenstein himself the modern Prometheus who fashion his own relentless Nemesis. And so, we leave the 18th and early 19th century Gothic rooms and pass through the doorway into the period which has surpassed them in terms of furnishing the modern imagination with its ‘classic’ Gothic props – the Victorian age. And naturally, the writer who ushers us into this fogbound, gaslit world is Charles Dickens.