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.

Ingrid Pitt

I was sad to read of the passing of Ingrid Pitt last week. Headline writers no doubt reached for the nearest cliché on the shelf and posthumously crowned her Hammer’s Scream Queen. In fact, she only appeared in two Hammer films, and didn’t scream, unless it was in horror at glimpsing a reflection of her own instantaneously aging visage in Countess Dracula. Her brief membership of the Hammer family came after its golden period, when it was beginning to enter its decadent phase (in both senses of the word). Neither of her films could be said to be amongst the studio’s finest, but they are far from being its worst. I’ve not seen The Vampire Lovers, Hammer’s take on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, although I have had the misfortune of watching tis follow up, Lust For A Vampire. Pitt’s portrayal of the female vampire did much to earn the former film its generally accepted place in the canon of creditable later Hammer films, whereas her absence in the latter was just one of the elements which made it one of the studio’s biggest embarrassments.

Ingrid Imperious

Her Hammer roles cast her as the seductive monster, who somehow retained an element of audience sympathy despite the trail of pallid young innocents she left drained and lifeless in her wake. Her performance in Countess Dracula certainly turned what could have been an inadvertently absurd farce (complete with disguises which have to be rapidly changed behind the scenes) into a dark fairy tale which carries a powerful archetypal charge. The story was based on the figure of the Hungarian Countess Elisabeth Bathory, a bloodbathing aristocratic monster whose name became a blend of history and myth. For some reason, her name is here changed to Countess Elisabeth Nadasdy. The rejuvenating qualities of virginal blood which the Countess discovers create an ever accelerating rate of decrepitude once the effects wear off, resulting in a progressively grotesque appearance which maps the stages of the character’s moral disintegration in a manner akin to Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Her assumption of her daughter’s persona (her unfortunate offspring’s incarceration in a gurning peasant’s hut is a recurrent piece of narrative dead weight which the film could have done without) is a transposition into female form of the oedipal drama played out between kings and male heirs, the ruler’s fear of losing power and potency and being usurped by their progeny. It’s the kind of story which Angela Carter would have relished. Indeed, her radio play Vampira made reference to Elisabeth Bathory. Pitt was very enthusiastic about the part, and lobbied Hammer head James Carreras to get it, winning out over director Peter Sasdy’s first choice, Diana Rigg. She put particular effort into getting her accent right, drawing on her mother’s East European inflections. She was therefore absolutely furious (‘post-apocalyptic’, as she put it) when Sasdy (himself of Hungarian descent) replaced her dialogue with a dubbed recording by another actress (conveniently ‘losing’ her original voice track). He apparently had decided that the Countess, being royalty, should speak the queen’s English.

Pitt doesn’t say an awful lot about her Hammer films in her autobiography, even though its title, Life’s A Scream, plays on her reputation as one of the studio’s defining figures. It’s a tribute to her talents that she should have created such a lasting impact with just those two films. Her anecdote about repeatedly losing her loose-fitting fangs down Kate O’Mara’s capacious cleavage whilst filming an intimate moment in The Vampire Lovers, and having to cadge a stick of chewing gum from one of the studio crew in order to fix them in is very amusing, and indicative of her refusal to take herself too seriously. She was always very proud of her horror films, however, and was only too pleased to attend conventions and answer fans’ questions. You can see some great footage of her at one such event over at this Guardian collection of clips. Her website is entitled Pitt of Horror, which hardly suggests that she was chary of her reputation as a genre figure. It’s a good site, too, and contains some of her writing on horror, including a lengthy piece on Hammer.

Ingrid in The House That Dripped Blood

The picture of her which is used most frequently in articles comes not from either Hammer film, but from her Amicus outing, The House That Dripped Blood. It’s a publicity shot which shows her projecting a buxom, full-fanged vampire hiss at the camera. I watched the story from this portmanteau film in which she appears the other night. It’s a diverting and enjoyable comic squib, with Pitt having no trouble playing the cool actress opposite Jon Pertwee’s pompous and self-important horror star, whose insistence on authenticity might be a little dig at Christopher Lee’s repeated pleas to return to the source material of Bram Stoker’s novel for the next Dracula script. Pertwee’s character, in stating his preference for classic horror, mentions Dracula, but adds that he is referring, of course, to Lugosi, ‘not this new fellow’. The new fellow, Lee, appears in an earlier story in the film. Pertwee digs up a real vampire’s cloak in one of those ill-frequented antique shops, generally open only after dark and cluttered with grotesque and occult artefacts, which feature in Amicus films. He finds the authenticity he was seeking, but at a price. Pitt, who playfully dons the cloak at the end, turns out to have been indulging in an advanced form of method acting herself, having been a vampire all along. She clearly has a lot of fun, rising and flapping towards the petrified Pertwee, who mugs and gurns in comical terror for all he’s worth. Pitt looks fabulous throughout in a series of seventies outfits topped off with large floppy brimmed hats, taking languorous puffs on cigarettes attached to the end of a holder which rivals Audrey Hepburn’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s for absurd length.

Pitt went on to work with Jon Pertwee in the Doctor Who episode The Time Monster, broadcast in 1972. She played the extravagantly coiffured queen of Atlantis, who is wooed, for his own nefarious ends, by the Master. This was Roger Delgado’s last appearance in the role before his untimely death in a car crash. She appeared in a later Who story from the Peter Davison era, Warriors of the Deep (broadcast in 1984), in which she, along with the rest of the supporting cast, adopt a post New Romantic look. Unfortunately, this is Doctor Who at its very worst, a woeful attempt to revive both the Silurians and the Sea Devils, who had been dormant since the early Pertwee period. Ingrid does get to show off her karate chops, however (she was a black belt). It’s as good a way as any to tackle a would-be sea leviathan, the Sea Devil’s purportedly deadly pet the Myrka. It’s a monster which would shame a parish hall pantomime (or an episode from the William Hartnell years), and makes the giant rat hand puppet in The Talons of Weng-Chiang look like a masterpiece of terrifyingly authentic design. She went on to write a Who script herself, in collaboration with her husband. It used the mystery surrounding the supposed ‘Philadelphia Experiment’ carried out by the US Navy as its background. It never made it into production at the time, but has now emerged as an audio adventure, The Macros, in the Lost Stories series. Having made her Hammer and Amicus films, and appeared in The Wicker Man, Pitt went off to Switzerland to make the children’s TV series Ski Boy, a complete contrast to her previous roles. She also wrote a children’s book herself, Bertie the Bus, which falls squarely into the anthropomorphised vehicle category.

I also listened to Pitt’s audiobook recording of her autobiography Life’s A Scream. It’s an extraordinary story and a hugely affecting reading, in which she relives painful and horrific events from her wartime childhood. It must have been hard enough to write about these things, let alone to speak them aloud. The turbulent currents of emotion stirred up by such recollections are quite audible in her voice. The book opens with a trip to LA for a publicity event to promote the opening of the film Where Eagles Dare, in which she played the subsidiary (and this being an Alistair Maclean adaptation, all women’s roles would be subsidiary) but significant part of Heidi. Her description of the tawdry daylit world of LA, disguised I the neon-lit glamour of its nightside, and her clear-eyed appraisal of the movie industry’s sexism, as embodied in the new MGM head Bo Poke’s view of women as objects paraded to sell product, indicate from the outset that she’s not out to write a starstruck showbiz memoir. When the stereotypically crass Poke comes out with a crack about the Nazis being the biggest source of entertainment since Nero burned down Rome, a comment which turns out to be the cue for a ‘comedy’ Nazi in SS uniform and Hitler moustache to burst in and march about the room, Pitt stands up and walks out. The story of her childhood which follows shows just why (aside from her temperamental inability to defer to the power of moronic moguls or boneheaded bullies of any description) she was not prepared to put up with such a dismally distasteful display.

She had been born Ingrid Petrov in 1937 on a train which had crossed over the German border into Germany. Her parents were trying to flee the Nazi regime and make their way to England, where her father had lived for many years. Her father was German, of Russian descent, and a scientist wanted by the government to assist with work on military projects. Her mother was Polish, of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and therefore in considerable danger. Ingrid’s arrival was ill-timed, and meant that they were unable to get out of the country. They stayed with her mother’s parents in Bialystock, but the Nazis caught up with them in the end. They were herded into the trucks of a train bound for the concentration camp at Stutthof, where Ingrid and her mother were parted from her father. They were to spend the next three years in the camp, until the war came to an end in Poland with the advance of the Russian army. Ingrid’s detailing of the constant immediacy of death and abuse which they witnessed and suffered makes for a harrowing documentation of the experience of the camps. It is both personal and particular, and stands in for the suffering of so many which went unrecorded. Her reading in the audiobook adds a reference (absent from the book) to Primo Levi’s quote about the good ones having died in the camps, with the survivors being left with their guilt. She makes it clear at the end of the book that her survival was a matter of sheer chance. ‘I survived the hell,’ she wrote, ‘but hardly any one else did. Surviving doesn’t make one special – but it does make one extraordinarily lucky’. Her account of life in the camp comes partly from her own childhood recollections, but also from the memories which came pouring from her mother’s mind as it became dislocated from the present at the end of her (thankfully long-lived) life. She had never liked to talk about her experiences beforehand.

Ingrid spent a good deal of time in the kinderschuppen, or children’s hut. SS officers would come in from time to time and round up potential candidates for being raised in good Nazi households. She would appear to have been an ideal choice, being a pretty blonde-haired girl. But there had been an infestation of lice in the dormitory hut where she and her mother slept, and she had scratched her head until it was a tectonic landscape of scabs. The SS inspectors, noting such imperfection on closer inspection, turned to someone else instead. Ingrid came very close to death having caught an infection which caused a swelling on the side of her neck. Of course, no medical treatment was on offer in the camp. She was saved by a man named Peter Steiner, who had been a shoemaker before the war. He kept a knife hidden about his person, and used it to lance her wound. He later carved her a wooden Cossack doll with the knife. He was one of those unsung heroes of the war, who did their best to preserve life where they could. Such acts of selfless kindness would unquestionably have led to his death had they been discovered by the camp authorities. Later in the war, as reports of the Red Army’s advance began to filter through, the SS began to systematically round up the prisoners, hut by hut, to take to the gas chambers. Steiner once again rescued Ingrid, smuggling her out of the children’s hut when he received information that it was going to be the next to be ‘cleared’. Of course, very few had such brave and resourceful guardians to watch over them.



Eventually, the SS came to the hut where Ingrid and her mother awaited their fate. But instead of pushing them towards the gas chamber they marched them out of the camp and along the road outside. Those exhausted souls who were unable to keep up and fell by the wayside were shot where they lay. After a while, a plane flew low overhead and strafed this straggling line of guards and prisoners. Ingrid’s mother fell into a ditch by the side of the road, dragging her daughter down with her and lying atop her. She played dead, convincingly enough to persuade the SS guard who nudged her with the side of his boot that she had fallen victim to the plane’s bullets. They lay there for some time before escaping into the forest. Here, they came upon a couple of foraging partisans who agreed, reluctantly at first, to allow them to join their encampment, which was hidden in the heart of the woods. Ingrid recalls this period with a great deal of fondness as a time of romantic adventure, the woodland setting allowing her imagination to roam free. She became inseparable from a boy called Yuri, who joined her in her games and came to play a willing part in her imaginary world. ‘Forests for me will always mean Yuri and the partisans’, she later recalled. ‘Surely it was the best part of my childhood. The only time I remember without pain’. She had recently been working on an animated impression of her life in the forest with Bill Plympton, which hopefully should see the light next year, as you can see above.

After the war ended, Ingrid and her mother trudged across Europe on foot, from one displaced persons camp to another, trying to find any news of her father’s fate. They discovered that her grandparents, with whom they had found shelter in Bialystock, had perished in the camp at Treblinka. Finally, after much tribulation and near fatal illness, they made it to Berlin and the remains of their old house. They did have an emotional reunion with Ingrid’s father, whom they tracked down to an old college friend’s place. He too had spent the war in a camp, having refused to assist in developing new weapon systems. He had made his way back to Berlin at the end of the war, but had collapsed and found himself unable to remember his address. Worn out and physically diminished, he lived on for a further five years before passing away. During this precious remaining time, he took the young Ingrid to the cinema on many occasions, and she got it into her head that she wanted to be an actress.

Having been rejected at every turn and corner in her initial attempts to reach the stage, she decided to try the prestigious Berliner Ensemble, which had been set up after the war by Bertolt Brecht, and was now run by his widow, Helene Weigel. To her surprise, she was accepted. Weigel was perhaps won over by her brazen chutzpah, or maybe by her personal interpretation of Chekhov (she had grown up reading the Russian classics). Never one to keep her opinions to herself, Ingrid found herself in trouble with the volkspolizei, the East German police force which doubled as an ideological enforcement army. Having narrowly escaped their clutches once, thanks to Weigel’s timely intervention and plea of mental instability on her behalf, she was informed that they were after her once more. She was waiting to go on stage for her first major role with the Ensemble at the time, playing Kattrin in Brecht’s Mother Courage. The police were sitting in the front row to enjoy her performance before arresting her. Casting aside her big moment, she fled in full-skirted theatrical costume. She was soon cornered by the police in the streets outside, and made a desperate dive through an adjacent hedge. This turned out to be bordering a steep slope which sent her tumbling down into the icy waters of the River Spree. She was swept along by the currents and struggled to stay afloat, managing to summon a last surge of energy and kick her way to the concrete shore. She lacked the strength to pull herself out of the river, but an American GI happened upon her and reached down to pull her out. He and a friend took her to recuperate in a local brothel, where the prostitutes treated her with great solicitude. A few days later, her rescuer came to visit her at her mother’s flat, and not long thereafter, they were married. He was lieutenant Pitt, and so she became Ingrid Pitt.

There is much further incident in the book, all of it involving and well-observed. Pitt writes well, and did indeed publish a number of novels in her lifetime. She also wrote scripts, articles and magazine columns. Her East European Jewish roots show through in her fondness for the Yiddish word ‘schlep’ (as in ‘I schlepped my suitcase up the stairs’). Her familiarity with English idioms (she lived in England for the greater part of her adult life) comes through in her use of such phrases as ‘shanks’ pony’. The earlier half of the book is undoubtedly the most powerful, however. As, given the events it relates, it could hardly fail to be.

Ingrid and the boys (and Mary Ure)

There are small passages of film star anecdotage scattered throughout. Richard Burton comes on to her, arousing the catty ire of Elizabeth Taylor. John Wayne irritates her by calling her ‘little lady’, making her mad enough to join the poker game in which he is engaged with some buddies. This is a particularly ill-informed decision since she has very little money and even less expertise in a game whose rules she has only been shown a few weeks before. Orson Welles proves to be a huge disappointment, treating her with contemptuous rudeness after she has expressed her genuine admiration for his work, and making a slobbering, drunken advance. She learns karate with the teacher who is instructing Elvis, and has a few practice bouts with the King. Peter Cushing provides the most touching story, dating from the time when he was starring alongside her in The Vampire Lovers. He had discovered that it would have been her father’s 100th birthday (she had brought champagne onto the set to toast him). He and his wife Helen invited her out for an evening meal. After they had finished, a cake was brought out with the words ‘For Ingrid’s Papa’ written on top. Such a lovely gesture of simple kindness. Ingrid found out that Helen knew Russian, and they used to write short letters to each other in the language. Alas, their friendship was cut short by Helen’s premature death, which so utterly devastated poor Peter.

Ingrid also fell into an ill-starred relationship with George Pinches, a very powerful man in the British film industry. He was the booker for the Rank cinema chain, which was then dominant in the country. Finding herself in trouble over obtaining a work permit, and facing possible deportation in the near future, she accepted his apparently sincere offer of a marriage of convenience. This would allow her to stay in the country, and him to have a companion to accompany him to film premieres and other gala events which a man in his position was expected to attend. Outside of these obligations, they would lead entirely separate lives. He proved to be considerably less amenable once the certificates were signed, and became extremely possessive. He seems to have been one of those people who embodied the overlapping of the networks of the post war British film industry and the criminal underworld. They were close in more terms than just their physical proximity along the narrow alleyways of Soho. He appears to have been a genuinely unpleasant man (although admittedly Pitt may not be the most objective of judges here), who nobody liked but all feared. He made good on his promise to wreck her career should she stand up to him. She lost many film roles as a result.

But the book is not about showbiz stories, and indeed, most of these are comfortably excised from the audiobook abridgement. At its heart are her enduring love for her mother (and father, in the brief time she was able to spend with him), her daughter Steffanie (or Steffka), and later, her husband Anthony Rudkin (whom she insists on Latinizing as Tonio). The rest is just set dressing. It is through them, and through her own fortitude, that she is able to partially overcome the mental scars of a childhood in which she was classed as one of the untermenschen, or non-people. The book ends, after she has come through a second bout of cancer (her attitude to which was ‘the Nazi’s didn’t get me and a bunch of fucking cancer cells wouldn’t either’), with an uplifting affirmation of life as constant blessing. ‘I love every day’, she wrote. ‘But then I always have done. The sun or the rain, cold or stifling heat. I love the moon and the stars, the dark nights with wind blowing around the house, telling tales of goblins and gnomes and demons and elves rushing through the park – just like that Polish forest, lifetimes ago’. I hope that she sustained such a feeling of joy until the end.