The Dark Masters Trilogy by Stephen Volk

Three of Stephen Volk’s recent novellas, portrait stories of significant figures in the fields of horror and the macabre, have been lovingly and lavishly repackaged and conjoined as the ‘Dark Masters Trilogy’. Here we meet, in youth, middle age and premature old age, ‘Fred’ Hitchcock, Dennis Wheatley and Peter Cushing in the environs of Leytonstone, Netherwood and Whitstable. It’s a resonant overarching title. The real characters embedded in these tales of psychological suspense, uneasy horror and occult powerplay were all masters of the dark arts. But the darkness is also the existential void, the crisis of the soul with which Volk confronts them. Peter Cushing’s sense of desolation after the death of his beloved wife Helen; ‘Fred’ Hitchock’s childhood bewilderment at the strange machinations of the adult world; and the sense of inadequacy and social inferiority which bedevils Dennis Wheatley.

There is a thematic coherence which fully warrants the use of the word ‘trilogy’, and subtle links are included which connect the worlds of the three focal characters. In Whitstable, a waitress is referred to as ‘a Kentish Kim Novak’; Both Hitch and Aleister Crowley are likened to Buddha; Alesteir Crowley recalls an encounter with a young and enthusiastic Christopher Lee, who professes to be an ‘enormous fan’ of Dennis Wheatley (a gentle dig at Sir Christopher’s tendency to name drop); and Dennis Wheatley recalls his friendship with Hitch and Alma. But is this testing, this drawing out through the psychic scouring of adversity and terror, which draws the three portraits together and provides us with such a rich, ambiguous and ultimately loving depiction of legendary figures made human, revered icons rendered vulnerable. The stories, inflected with biographical detail but straying far from the straight path of fact, nevertheless feel true. Volk’s investment in the lives and the work stamps them with the hallmark of authenticity.

Novellas they may be, but Whitstable, Leytonstone and Netherwood are highly concentrated, multi-layered works which encompass a complex array of themes. As the titles suggest, they are partly evocations of place. The East End London of Leytonstone, where Fred’s father owned a grocer’s at 517 The High Road; The Kentish fishing town of Whitstable where Peter Cushing became such a well known resident; and the Hastings guest-house where Alesteir Crowley lived out his declining years. But these are also places rooted in particular historical moments, hence the appending of dates to the titles in the contents pages. Leytonstone is set in 1906, the pre-First World War twilight of Empire; Netherwood takes place amidst the post-war ruination and austerity of 1947 – ‘the blighted land’ as Dennis Wheatley thinks of it whilst gazing out of the train window; And Whitstable is situated in 1971, at the beginning of the steady decline of the decade following the euphoria of the 60s.

Together, they offer a kaleidoscopic portrait of England (more particularly, South Eastern England) across the twentieth century. Volk has a way of nailing time and place with a keen, haiku-like phrase. An ‘airfix blue sky’ is the perfect simile for a clear 70s day. And the use of the word ‘malachite’ to describe the particular shade of green livery employed by southern railway carriages somehow immediately fixes them to the 40s world, to British Transport Film colour. Indeed, the very fact that Dennis Wheatley, a writer at the height of his bestselling renown with the wealth attendant upon it, travels by train says much about the nature of post-war, pre-Beeching Britain. Small details are also used like cuttings in a nostalgic scrapbook to summon the particularities of an era. In the case of the 1971 of Whitstable, songs on the radio (Grandad and My Sweet Lord), Pan Books of Horror and a Doctor Who Radio Times cover heralding the first appearance of Roger Delgado’s Master.

This national portraiture also encompasses a keen sense of class division, which Volk delineates with great subtlety. The ‘monster’ of Whitstable is a working class character, and Peter Cushing’s entrance into his ‘lair’ and encounter with a working class mother is a finely observed distillation of the bristling class conflicts boiling to the surface at the time. It’s a measure of the novella’s loving tribute to Cushing (it was first published in his centenary year) that he is shown as being entirely understanding of her verbal hostility towards his refined accent and bearing, even though he feels each ‘fuck’ thrown at him as a blow. The class distinctions of the East End Edwardian milieu are exemplified by the division of the local into saloon and public bar areas. Even within the fairly narrow economic range of this neighbourhood, there seems some inherent need to put up barriers to make the stratifications of social position visible, to ensure they are correctly observed. The tensions created by the maintenance of such appearances are one of the barely understood influences which go towards forming the character of young Fred, and thereby, of course, his subsequent art.

Dennis Wheatley is plagued by a sense of social inferiority, of the hollowness of his achievements. Joan, his wife, is from an aristocratic background and he never feels a part of her circle; ‘they were Joan’s people, not his’, as his inner chorus comments during a recollection of a grilling at a particularly awful party. Like Hitch, the persona put on by the adult Fred, he feels the obligation to put on a front, an affable, clubbable façade. Peter Cushing, feeling utterly hollow in his grieving for Helen, also finds himself compelled to don his outward cloak of charm and gentile courtesy when all he really wants to do is hide from the bright life and expectations of the world. Pedro Marques’ cover art captures this aspect of the trilogy perfectly. The sense that we are glimpsing a series of authentic, troubled selves behind a carefully fashioned masquerade. This is not to say that we are offered the kind of one-dimensional ‘dark-side’ portraits of well-loved characters which have been a staple of TV biopics for some time now. These three stories are an attempt to create rounded, human characters by taking biographical details and fleshing them out with themes and preoccupations distilled from the work.

It’s an interesting fictional form, a blend of tribute, biographical meditation and auto-commentary on the subjects’ work. All three masters are caught within refractions and inversions of their own archetypal tales. Peter Cushing’s confrontation with a monster whose ‘evil’ seems inherent and ineradicable; Fred’s early reification of the ‘fair-haired girl’ icon, his manufacture of a suspense narrative whose ultimate, ever-receding aim is self-discovery; and Dennis Wheatley’s reluctant involvement in an occult thriller with the model for one of his own villainous magi, Alesteir Crowley - A scenario which complicates his own need for a world in which the forces of darkness and light are clearly defined, as they had seemed to be during the war.

These all work magnificently as tales of terror, unease and suspense in and of themselves. But the moulding of the fictional narratives around psychological portraits of actual artists (whether their artistry comprised of writing, film directing or acting), the splicing together of art and biography, results in a reflection on the extent to which authors, auteurs and actors invest truthful elements of their own being into their work (to whatever degree of self-consciousness or fanciful disguise). This also becomes a comment, particularly pertinent in an age of rampant celebrity, on the way that readers or viewers can mine books, films or performances for seams of the creator’s authentic inner life, which may be hidden by the cultivated public persona presented to the prying world. Dennis Wheatley’s experiences at Netherwood, his co-option and testing by the arch manipulator Alesteir Crowley, leads him to contemplate the theme for his next novel, the book which will free him form a debilitating period of writer’s block, a crisis of self-belief. He comes up with the title and the character sketch of the protagonist: The Haunting of Toby Jugg. With its portrayal of an airman physically and psychologically traumatised by the experience of war, it’s generally considered his most substantive and personally nuanced achievement.

Oddly enough, I have recently come across two further pieces of writing which have directly reflected upon the Dark Masters Trilogy. Earlier this year, I saw the film The Ballad of Shirley Collins and later read Shirley’s excellent autobiographical memoirs All In The Downs. Collins was a young girl growing up in Hastings during the post-war period. Her mother was a member of the local Communist party and would send Shirley and her sister Dolly out into the town to sell the party magazine the Daily Worker. Dennis Wheatley would have been horrified to see it. In the film, Shirley is seen watching the revived Jack In the Green ceremony in her old home town. More Pagan rituals in Hastings. She was aware of Crowley’s presence at Netherwood at the time. She notes that she and Dolly first sang in public at Oakhurst Hotel on The Ridge as part of a Hastings Communist Party social weekend. Netherwood was just nearby. Crowley ‘had a reputation as a person to keep clear of – and I know that when Dolly and I were walking along The Ridge to The Harrow where our Uncle Wally and Aunt Nell in their Tudor farmhouse, we’d always cross to the other side of the road and creep by. Then run!’ This is no doubt an anecdote which she has regaled to her good friend David Tibet, who was instrumental in encouraging her back to singing once more. Tibet creates powerful music of an incantatory, recitative nature with Current 93, constructing his own occult mythologies in which the forces of good and evil battle struggle for ascendancy in scenarios of Gnostic apocalypse. He was also one of the authors of Netherwood: The Last Resort of Alesteir Crowley, by a ‘Gentleman of Hastings’, a book which Volk found in a bookshop in the Old Town (an area which Shirley’s mum considered ‘rough’) and which proved indispensable for the writing of his own Netherwood tale. The introduction of All In the Downs is written by Stewart Lee, a great fan and supporter of Collins. Lee is one of the writers appearing in an anthology of horror stories written by comedians and edited by Johnny Mains and Robin Ince, Dead Funny (and its follow up, Dead Funny Encore). Volk dedicates the Dark Masters Trilogy to Johnny.

Another comedian with a story appearing in Dead Funny is Matthew Holness. His story Possum, about a tormented puppeteer, is the basis for a forthcoming film of the same name (with a very, very disturbing poster, particularly if you are an arachnaphobe). Holness was interviewed by the Guardian about it. He talked about his childhood in Whitstable, and his early obsession with the horror genre. He met with Peter Cushing in town, of course. Cushing ‘expressed concern that the six-year old asking for an autograph knew so much about Hammer’. Did young Matthew have a copy of Dennis Gifford’s Monsters In The Movies, I wonder. When he passed his 11-plus, Cushing gave him a copy of his autobiography with a lengthy inscription (yes, he really was a lovely man). Connections, connections.

In telling tales whose focal characters are key figures in the literature and cinema of horror and the macabre and incorporating them within contemporary variations of their own archetypal narratives, Volk also interrogates the nature of the genre. He suggests the insights into human nature, the understanding of the moral struggles constantly at work in the world and, strangely enough, the comforts which it can afford. Dennis Wheatley, in being granted a glimpse of his eventual obscurity, comes to the conclusion that there is a certain nobility and honour, an essential usefulness in providing people with imaginatively diverting and luridly exciting entertainments in a post-war era which has left people in a state of psychological shock. The names of Dachau, Buchenwald and Belsen are recited like an appalling dark litany in both Netherwood and Whitstable. In Leytonstone, the celebration of Empire Day, a tableau which is built around the famous photo of young Fred, clad in military attire, sat upon a pony outside his dad’s grocers in a street bedecked with Union Jacks, anticipates the clash of Imperial powers in the First World War, and the disastrous fractures of world politics and economics which ensued. What can a literature of terror do to encompass (or even to attempt to exclude) such terrible knowledge of the depths to which humanity can sink? How can the old Romantic and Gothic traditions continue to provide their sublime terrors, their subtle frissons in the face of the numbing extremity of the horrors starkly presented in newpaper photos or on the TV screen throughout the 20th century. Peter Cushing perhaps speaks for Volk in his self-defence of the genre for which he had unwittingly become such a defining figure. Answering a no-doubt oft-voiced question as to why he made such ‘horrible films’, he explains ‘I think the best so called “horror” shows us our worst fears in symbolic form and tries to tell us in dramatic form how we can overcome them’.

For Volk, a romantic humanist, the answer is connection, always connection. It is Hitch’s tragedy that he never truly seems to find it. There is always a hollow chamber within, a cell inhabited for life by the confused and frightened boy who must keep the world at bay with ordered systems (from train and tramspotting to the plotting of perfect cinematic thrill rides) and a bluffly remote façade of macabre joviality. The damage sustained in childhood and carried through into adulthood, and the threat to children from the damaged or simply monstrous is a theme which recurs in Volk’s fiction, from Afterlife to Ghost Watch and The Awakening. It is present throughout this trilogy too.

Both Cushing and Wheatley are firm believers in a benevolent Christian God, a force for good in the world. Their worldview is strongly moral, with an underpinning commitment to confronting evil wherever it might be encountered. For Wheatley, as for so many others, the Second World War was a fight against the encroachment of an evil ideological poison in the world. The ritual battle he takes part in with Crowley as an unlikely ally is a struggle against a kind of occult fascism, an attempt to use magic potency attained through pitiless cruelty and brutish bullying to exert a violent, self-aggrandising power. The dark magus whom they oppose is the antithesis to Wheatley’s values and it turns out, surprisingly, Crowley’s. His utter disconnection from all human connection, fellow-feeling and compassion are what makes him truly monstrous. The same is true for the monster whom Cushing confronts in Whitstable. He talks of life being about satisfying ones appetites, and talks of developing the taste for the once prevalent local delicacy of oysters (a scene with uncomfortable echoes of Laurence Olivier’s seduction of Tony Curtis in Spartacus). This is stated as if it were a self-evident truth. Cushing quietly offers an alternative credo in his mind. Life is given meaning through love. Peter’s love for Helen, and Dennis’ love for Joan. This is the redemptive force. Whether it derives from a benevolent God or from the shining heart of the Human spirit.

Bloody Homage: The Hammer of Dr Valentine, Terrors of the Théâtre Diabolique and the Enduring Appeal of Hammer and Amicus

The golden age of British horror movies continues to exert a fascination over successive generations of fans. The films of the late 50s through to the mid-70s belong to a distinct period of post-war popular culture, a pre-corporate era in which small companies could produce and market movies which were relatively small in scale but highly distinguished in quality. It was also a time in which maverick Soho producers at the lower end of the market could knock off cheap exploitation pictures which occasionally (very occasionally) resulted in the revelation of a fresh and exciting new talent, creating something which transcended the formula its backers were flagrantly trying to copy. The horror cinema of this era bears so little relation to contemporary manifestations of the genre, with their emphasis on prolonged physical pain and the dogged pursuit of new extremes, that they seem to come from a far more distant time, beyond living memory. Their values can seem impossibly outmoded, but in this marked difference lies part of their charm. The best of the pictures from this time offer a great deal more than the nostalgic appeal of period quaintness, however. They were made with great care and craftsmanship, featured actors of real class (the oft-twinned names of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee being the stellar examples) and a wonderful array of character performers, and were often possessed of a full-blooded romanticism which formed a continuation of British traditions both cinematic (Powell and Pressburger and Gainsborough), literary and artistic. The Hammer and Amicus studios were the most notable homes from which they emerged. And they were homes, with a family feel to what they produced, a house style which you could depend upon. It’s a seemingly contradictory thing to say about the productions of a genre intended to inspire terror, but a real warmth and affection for their films and those involved in the making of them has developed over the years. Two new books pay homage to them in the form of reference-steeped fiction, and serve as testament to this enduring appeal.

The Hammer of Dr Valentine by John Llewellyn Probert, published by Spectral Press, is a sequel to The Nine Deaths of Dr Valentine, which won the British Fantasy Award for best novella at the 2013 World Fantasy Convention. That first encounter with the diabolically resourceful physician, bent on avenging the death of his daughter, drew very consciously on the films of Vincent Price. The models for the absurdly elaborate deaths meted out to the medical staff deemed responsible for allowing his daughter to die are lifted from Price’s films, Valentine adapting them according to circumstance. The narrative structure and blackly comic tone is lifted from Theatre of Blood and the Dr Phibes movies in particular. They were distinguished by lusciously contrived camp, the horror (and they were surprisingly vicious at times) alleviated by knowingly exaggerated and patently ridiculous excess. Dr Valentine emulates ham thesp Edward Lionheart in Theatre of Blood in his adoption of role-playing disguises, his propensity for gloating moral lectures and his relish for bad puns and mordant quips as agonising at the torments he inflicts upon his victims. These victims are invariably loathsome and wholly undeserving of sympathy, thus allowing us to enjoy the spectacle of their exquisitely plotted and executed demises.

The Hammer of Dr Valentine shifts the focus from Vincent Price and onto the extensive output of the Hammer studios. The Doctor is back and this time choosing as the subjects for his art of death the tabloid sleazemongers and hack bestseller writers who distorted the true nature of his previous escapades. As an aesthete of decadent derangement, this distortion of his carefully constructed narrative or revenge is unforgivable. Thus they are picked off one by one, eliminated by the monster they helped to foster and becoming fodder for more of their kind. Still sticking assiduously with the template of Theatre of Blood and Dr Phibes, even though nominally now on Hammer territory, the Doctor is provided with a young and loyal female assistant, his co-star and siren in the deadly skits he contrives. Also following the pattern, the forces of the law always plod a few paces behind. The returning DCI Jeffrey Longdon is left cursing impotently at his minions, the morbid chorus of DIs Martinus, Graves and Wentworth, as he comes across the latest implausible murder scene. He’s less the stoical Peter Jeffries of the Phibes movies, more the irascible, cynical and petulant Donald Pleasance in Death Line. There’s a less morally compromised character on the roster of potential victims, John Spalding, the equivalent of Joseph Cotton in The Abominable Dr Phibes or Ian Hendry in Theatre of Blood. If anyone is likely to survive and bring the Doctor’s murderous mystery play to a close it will be him. He is also effectively the ‘savant’ of the scenario, the character with the specialised knowledge necessary to defeat the monster. He is no Van Helsing, but his knowledge of the variety of Van Helsings on screen may prove of use. As a film critic he is acquainted with the whole range of Hammer films and thereby with the modus operandi of the supervillain he and the police force face. But will this cinephile learning arm them sufficiently to defeat such a mercurial, elusive foe.

Hammer fans will have a huge amount of fun spotting the films whose deaths Dr Valentine goes to such lengths to reproduce. They’re not necessarily the obvious ones, either. Probert digs deep into the Hammer back catalogue and comes up with some surprising and effective choices. He may just lead you to dust off films you’d put to one side as inessential. Fear In The Night or The Reptile, for instance. Valentine is in some ways a superfan himself, dressing the part and paying his own form of tribute with appropriate bucketloads of Kensington gore. Probert makes no bones about his own love of the studio’s output. Well, most of it anyway. He reserves a pronounced disdain for the 70s psycho Peter Pan drama Straight On ‘til Morning, with the new Hammer star of the time Shane Bryant and an uncomfortable Rita Tushingham (her unease palpable in the commentary she provides for the dvd release). His objects to what he perceives as its failed pretensions towards arthouse status. I find things of interest in it. It seems to be a swinging sixties film infected with the growing disillusionment of the seventies. The Knack or Smashing Time in which the bright pop art backdrops have faded to grey, the zany antics wound down into entropic stasis; the Peter Pan fantasy of carefree youth is no longer sustainable, and the attempt to prolong it induces psychotic breakdown. But no, it ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of such a scenario, and descends into another of Hammer’s tiresome psycho derivatives.

Prominent citation of sources during the opening credits for The House That Dripped Blood

In an extensive afterword, Probert provides a film by film key to the story’s cinematic reference points. There’s a lovely image in the book of the police incident room map, lines of red wool radiating out from the crime scenes to join with small reproductions of the relevant Hammer film posters. The afterword is Probert’s explanatory counterpart to this chart. It is charmingly autobiographical, and his remembrances of first encounters with various films will chime with many readers, prompting their own misty reminiscences. I particularly liked his recollection of watching Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed on HTV Cymru, unconvincingly dubbed into Welsh. Amicus gets a look in via the reference to Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen, the classic study of German expressionist horror. It is prominently placed on a desk and lingered over by the camera at the start of The House That Dripped Blood.

We also get to visit Dr Terror’s Haunted Cornish Funfair, which combines Dr Terror’s House of Horror’s with the fairground setting of Torture Garden. A new entertainment venture for Peter Cushing’s tarot reader, perhaps. The rides include Dr Blood’s Coffin and Crucible of Terror, references to two Cornish set films of surpassing dullness (Zennor standing in for ‘Porthcarron’ and Perranporth for any Cornish folk out there). ‘These local things were never up to much’, one character muses, ‘so they could give the Crucible of Terror a miss’. It’s an amusingly offhand critical dismissal. Probert’s story is full of such pleasing details and, like its illustrious sources, serves up shudders of fear and laughter in equal and well-balance measures. We also get to visit one of the ultimate locations for 60s and 70s British horror: Oakley Court, a neo-gothic mansion by the Thames in Berkshire (conveniently close to Hammer’s Bray Studios). It provided the backdrop to several Hammer films, transported to Cornwall for The Reptile and Plague of Zombies and middle Europe for Brides of Dracula. Amicus used it for one of their few all-out gothics, And Now The Screaming Starts, and it was put to atmospheric use in Vampyres. Intriguingly, a parting reference to Don’t Look Now suggests that the demented Dr V may yet return – but moving into the arthouse and using Nic Roeg films as his sick source material. We can only wait with fearful anticipation.

Terrors of the Théâtre Diabolique is an anthology edited by Dan Barratt and John Davies. It is graced with an urbane introduction by David Warner, who played an unfortunate character in the Amicus film From Beyond the Grave, a devilish cover by Simon A.Brett and illustrations by Paul Griffin. Profits from the sales of the book, whether in physical form or as a downloadable pdf, are going to MIND, a particularly worthy charity. Not least amongst the services it offers is enlightening the public about the nature of mental illness, thus dispelling the bogies summoned up in Amicus’ film Asylum; an absurdly melodramatic view of the ‘mad’ as devious and dangerously unpredictable which is still surprisingly prevalent. The inspiration here is the series of portmanteau horror films made by Amicus from the mid 60s through through to the mid 70s. Or the early 80s if you care to include The Monster Club, which I rather think I do, largely out of blurry nostalgia. Alright, so Amicus had folded by then, but it was produced by Milton Subotsky and is an Amicus film in all but name. It was the first horror film I saw in the cinema. I was thrilled at the prospect of watching an Amicus picture on the big screen, having become familiar with the likes of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, From Beyond the Grave and Asylum via Saturday night horror double bills on the BBC.

Dan Barratt shares my affection for the Amicus portmanteau films and has fashioned a contemporary version in the form of a short story collection. He supplies the framing narrative himself, inviting others to provide the creepy vignettes he sets up. The opening scenes are written with a cinematic sweep, taking the point of view of a swallow gliding down towards a seaside town. This affords us long and medium distance establishing shots, followed up by exterior close-ups of the Victorian gothic details of a crumbling theatre of dark varieties. Following a near escape from a local cat, the swallow conducts a swift (sic) aerial survey of the interior before coming to a rest at a high vantage point, from which it can watch events unfolding below. The choice of a swallow might be a little nod to Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. The swallow as symbol of selfless sacrifice provides an ironic contrast to the self-absorbed outlooks of the characters who people the stories in the collection.

You're all dead already - end of story

The protagonists in Amicus films are by and large unsympathetic: selfish, mean-spirited, venal, cold-hearted and frequently coldly murderous. They tend to find themselves gathered together in some unwelcoming venue (a crypt, a vault) or linked by a common locale they all visit (a strange shop, a house which changes hands with suspicious regularity). There is a guide or host who welcomes them, generally with a highly portentous, sepulchral air. He then proceeds to tell them their secret stories, reading their fates, which invariably involve a distinct element of finality. Having pronounced their collective doom, he then reveals the shocking truth, which brings the film to an end. This tends to be a reminder that they’re all dead already and will be, or have for some time been spending an eternity in hell.

Peter Cushing's mild-mannered shopkeeper in From Beyond the Grave - just don't shortchange him

There’s certainly a strong current of judgement contained within the stories of the Amicus portmanteaus. Poetic justice is meted out with cackling relish, often rounded off with a summary quip from our guide. I always loved Peter Cushing’s parting words to Ian Carmichael in From Beyond the Grave. Carmichael had just surreptitiously swapped price tags on two antique snuff boxes, buying the more expensive one for a considerably reduced price as a result. In this uncanny shop, hidden away in a forgotten city alleyway in which the Victorian era seems to live on, it is, however, extremely, indeed fatally unwise to cheat the proprietor. ‘I hope you enjoy snuffing it sir’, he says, a pitiless note underlying his amiable, mild-mannered demeanour. He clamps his pipe in his mouth, turns and shuffles off with a certain air of weary disappointment at being confronted yet again with human weakness and greed. The moral comeuppance visited upon richly deserving characters betrays the influence of the notorious EC comics of the 50s. These had a notably satirical undercurrent, drawing (and inking) a picture of contemporary America as a moral vacuum which belied the comfortable self-satisfaction of the Eisenhower era. Vengeance was often carried out at the clawed, earth-encrusted hands of rotting revenants, leering corpses returning from the grave to right wrongs with much rending and tearing of flesh. They were anti-superheroes of a sort, emerging from the earth rather than descending from the skies, draped in ragged shrouds rather than colourful capes. A suppurating Justice League of America for the downtrodden and betrayed. Needless to say, they failed to win the approval of the moral majority. The Amicus films didn’t really share the barbed satirical element of the EC comics, although there was a certain undermining of 70s consumerism and class divisions, the relentless pursuit of wealth and the idealisation of the spotless suburban household. There weren’t many rotting corpses clawing their way out of the grave either. One memorable exception was the tale of Arthur Grimsdyke, a highly effective episode featuring a performance of heartrending pathos from Peter Cushing. We cheer him on when he returns from the dead to make literal the figurative heartlessness of his proto-yuppie tormentor. That story was told in Tales from the Crypt, one of two films directly adapted from EC comics.

Grimsdyke returns in Tales From The Crypt

There’s definitely a strong element of moral comeuppance to the tales told in the Théâtre Diabolique as well. We have our guide here, too. A cowled figure who ushers his ‘guests’ through a tour of the dilapidated Victorian house of varieties, leading them into the subterranean vaults lying beneath the stage. There are conscious echoes of Amicus films throughout, as you would expect from a homage. The touring party pass various dusty objects in storage rooms which hint at stories untold, or perhaps ones we’ve seen before: an ‘ornate mirror’ reminds us of the possessed glass in From Beyond the Grave; ‘a child’s doll’ the toy which Christopher Lee snatches from the hand of the little girl he believes to be a witch in The House That Dripped Blood; ‘some scattered illustrated pages’ are perhaps drawn by Tom Baker’s artist in Vault of Horror, whose portrait subjects suffered damage commensurate with that inflicted upon their images. Others are less familiar, although ‘a large, ominous pendulum blade’ and ‘a human sized ape suit’ might have strayed in from the Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe pictures The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death. Similarly, a ‘spiralling metal staircase’ which ‘groaned and swayed alarmingly’ may have been relocated from Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, as memorably visualised in Robert Wise’s The Haunting.

Ingrid Pitt in a publicity still for The House That Dripped Blood

As for the stories themselves, they fit the Amicus mould in that they share a contemporary setting. No moonlit gothic castles wreathed in mist here. Amicus briskly dispensed with the gothic staples in their first portmanteau picture, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, which featured werewolves, vampires, a crawling hand (the beast with five fingers), voodoo curses and, er, a swiftly spreading variety of intelligent, carnivorous weed (menacing poor old Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman). They turned up from time to time, but in a joky context. Vampires bared their teeth with an accompanying nod and wink in Vault of Horror (tucking into rare or medium clots in an exclusive restaurant) and in The House That Dripped Blood (supplying a splendid and much reproduced still of Ingrid Pitt hissing through elongated incisors if nothing else). They no doubt realised that they couldn’t beat Hammer at their own game, and so set their cruel tales in 70s living rooms, bedrooms and lounges (and basements). The horrors often extended to the décor.

JR Southall’s House Sitting is a variant of the malevolent house tale. A building which feeds off the fears and painful buried memories of those who stray into its field of baleful influence. Ghosts of the mind are awakened, personal hauntings set into spectral motion. Southall’s tale harks back to The House That Dripped Blood, with its desirable Victorian detached house from which tenants are despatched with disdainful frequency. It also echoes the evil architecture of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, with its uncanny feel for the hidden weaknesses of its inhabitants. The Day Martin Anderson Lost It is a latterday tale of Walter Mitty daydreaming. This is extreme Mitty, however, with fantasies of psychotic violence directed against a hated call-centre boss superceding the whimsical escapism of Thurber’s character. In railing against corporate workplaces with their empty managerial mantras, it voices frustrations which we can all identify with to some extent.

David Warner looking decidedly unwell in From Beyond the Grave

Tony Eccles’ The Finding is a haunted house tale whose supernatural manifestations centre upon a mirror with uncanny properties. It’s the kind of mirror whose depths contain a little more than a simple inverted reflection presented to those standing in front of it. It brings to mind the David Warner episode in From Beyond the Grave, one of the more disturbing of the Amicus stories, not least because of Warner’s quietly intense performance. It follows its protagonist into the depths of a psychotic breakdown, his murderous actions prompted and directed by a figure in the mirror he bought from Peter Cushing’s shadowy emporium. He didn’t pay enough cash, either. A haunted mirror also appears in the honourable ancestor of the Amicus portmanteaus, the 1945 Ealing picture Dead of Night. Eccles’ story also plays with the confusion of the real and the imaginary, the border between rational perception and emotionally clouded hallucination. This ambiguity provided the basis for a few Amicus stories. There was the ‘Dominick’ episode of The House That Dripped Blood, in which a murderous character from writer Denholm Elliott’s novel seems to have come to life. And in Asylum, Charlotte Rampling dreams up an imaginary friend (Britt Ekland) who indulges in all the wild things she is far too timid and anxious to do herself.

Simon A Brett’s The Artist’s Medium concerns a very special pen which, when mixed with bodily fluids (their specific provenance doesn’t seem overly important) becomes imbued with the power to alter in reality that which it draws on the blank page. Used unwittingly in a state of post-coital reflection or in a fit of drunken rage in the wake of a bitter break-up, the results prove grimly ironic. They are punning deaths in the Amicus mould, figures of speech or symbolic representations rendered literal, with liberal splashes of gore to bring it up to date. The Vault of Horror story with Tom Baker as an artist who discovers his power to affect reality through his painted representations is a classic reference point here. Tom misuses his powers, but comes a cropper when a workman knocks over a bottle of white spirit onto his self-portrait, causing features to blur and run – a Francis Bacon meat face for real.

Lee Rawlings’ By Rook or By Crook (the agonising Amicus pun contained in the title) is kitchen sink psycho horror combined with the Freudian supernatural of The Birds. The dynastic rivalry between father and son is also a clash between the pragmatic Yorkshireman’s bluntly fiscal worldview and the more aesthetic outlook of his adopted offspring. The age old imperative to displace the father, enshrined in the modern age by Freud, is given a nicely ritualistic air by the stark, ancient landscape in which the story takes place. Jon Arnold’s The Golden Ghouls (another painful pun) draws on the new extreme strands of cinema, and on the body horror which has been a significant generic strand since the 80s. His story is simplicity itself. Two lively old ladies in an old people’s home who still entertain libidinous thoughts are charmed into drinking an elixir of youth. It’s a homeopathic remedy whose sub-microscopic elements are demons from hell. They are duly possessed and their puppeteered bodies are made to dance to the devil’s tune in a strict modern tempo. Arnold takes the satire of the EC comics and some of the Amicus stories to delirious new levels (or depths). His story seems driven by a pervasive disgust at and cynicism about the modern world, and exhibits a visceral horror of old age. The wholesale assault on venality, consumerism and the empty, possessive carnality which accompanies it is unbalanced and more than a little hysterical. Arnold certainly holds nothing back in his detailing of the ladies’ orgiastic rampage. It’s like a mini-Salo, portraying contemporary society in terms of readymade circles of hell. The in your face unpleasantness could almost be construed as rude riposte to the relatively refined horrors of Amicus and Hammer, a mark of how far we have come (or fallen). Milton Subotsky, an old school horror aficionado (as witness the books displayed at the start of The House That Dripped Blood, borrowed from his own collection) would not have countenanced its like. I certainly don’t have the stomach for it, which is why I tend to avoid most modern manifestations of horror. A matter of taste (and age), I suppose.

Who's next? Could it be YOU?

The finale, bringing us out of the theatre once more, creates an explosive eruption of Lovecraftian delirium which Amicus could never have dreamed of staging on their meagre budgets. They tried consigning a soul to a fiery pit of damnation at the end of Vault of Horror, but their ambition outstripped their means, and the effect was frankly embarrassing. Dan Barratt gives a grandiose climax which encompasses and then surpasses the default Hammer way of ending things by bringing the house down, and usually burning it the ground as well. A quiet coda offers a version of the typical Amicus ending in which the guide or proprietor turns to the new visitors, customers or lost souls. Who will be next to enter my domain – could it be you? Here we are introduced to a modern incarnation of the popularly loathed social type, the sort who many would gladly see receiving their just dues. For our age, it is a banker. It rounds things of with a pleasing circularity, ending on the kind of wryly humorous note which characterised the Amicus films. A reminder not to take any of it too seriously. The curtain falls. But which side are you left on? Who is that cackling dryly in the shadows? Why has it all gone so dark? Where has everybody gone? Hallo?

Dracula AD1972

Hammer tended to locate Christopher Lee’s Dracula in some vaguely defined nineteenth century mittel-Europe, which road signs or directions given to harried coach drivers would place as being near a Germanic sounding town called Karlstadt. Truth to tell, the fearful peasantry tended to sound more West Country than Westphalia, and the heathland and beech woods were hardly the Black Forest, but the notion was there. The Count did make it to Victorian England in Taste the Blood of Dracula, carried in dessicated form by Roy Kinnear’s unwitting salesman and unleashed by Ralph Bates’ fin de siecle seeker after new and undreamed of heights of decadent sensation. But he immediately retreated to the ancestral castle for the woeful Scars of Dracula, a low point in the studio’s output which makes such derided efforts as Prehistoric Women and The Viking Queen seem like minor masterpieces in comparison (they’re certainly a great deal more entertaining). The general weariness displayed by all involved, and the desperate resort to liberal lashings of tawdry gore must have occasioned a rethink, and the obvious way to refresh the Count was to introduce him into a contemporary setting. In the aftermath of the social upheavals of the 60s, the implications of which were working themselves out as the new decade progressed, a rural European setting in thrall to the feudal class divisions of a previous century no longer had much resonance for a popular audience. Michael Reeves’ 1968 film Witchfinder General had set a new standard for the representation of a particularised English past of squalid rural brutality which made Hammer’s fairy tale locales seem even further removed from the times. It was time for Dracula to come down from his castle. This was, after all, what he had done in Bram Stoker’s novel, making arrangements to move to London in order to take full advantage of the steam-driven technologies and gas-lit rookeries of the modern late-Victorian metropolis.

Gothic standoff - Van Helsing and the Count meet again

The title Dracula AD 1972 foregrounds this move to the modern era, but the opening of the film eases us towards such jarring modernity with a fatal struggle to the death between the Count and his arch-nemesis Van Helsing atop a careening carriage a hundred years earlier. This nod towards an Anglicised version of the Western convention of the assault on a speeding stagecoach, an extended version of which was played out towards the climax of Tim Burton’s Hammer homage Sleepy Hollow, is an indication of the generic elements which will be added to the usual gothic mix in this film and its follow up, The Satanic Rites of Dracula. The writer of both, Don Houghton, had already displayed his propensity for such miscegenation with his two Jon Pertwee Doctor Who scripts, Inferno and The Mind of Evil, which used plot structures borrowed from the disaster movie and the Cold War thriller, and he was later to create a self-reflexive country house murder mystery within which to house the strange metaphysics and surreal internal logic of the Sapphire and Steel universe. The Count’s meagre remains, which we have seen in previous films are more than enough to effect a resurrection, are buried beyond the pale of the graveyard where Van Helsing is interred. There is a definite sense that these adversaries need each other. They are the twin poles of a Manichean worldview, each defined by the other’s opposition. The resumption of this eternal struggle will almost be a relief to them as they find themselves adrift in the rapidly shifting social milieu of the 70s.

Gothic script on modern skies

The shock of the new is rather neatly conveyed by a camera pan away from a close-up on Van Helsing’s tombstone, which reveals that it is now surrounded by the encroaching rubble of demolition in preparation for subsequent redevelopment in the 70s style. And that means concrete. From the bird song in the rural Victorian graveyard where we have just witnessed the dual interment, the camera pans upwards to witness a jet plane roar overhead. It is a century-bridging cut which directly echoes a similar effect in Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, where the hawk sent gyring into the air by one of Chaucer’s pilgrims is transformed into a spitfire as we are shifted into the modern Kentish countryside of the Second World War. Director Alan Gibson gives us some sweeping wide-angle lens panoramas, a technique of which he seems quite keen, to give an impression of this disorienting new world. Concrete overpasses spanning busy roads (the Westway), the dizzying heights of steel and glass office blocks, and traffic choked London streets. It is little wonder that Dracula, once reincarnated, opts to stay in his small oasis of Victorian gothic revival. Remember, this was the era in which British Rail wanted to demolish the Gothic railway temple of St Pancras, presumably to make way for something along the lines of the brutalist civic centre now facing it in an architectural version of a Sergio Leone standoff. The seeming irony of the Count taking refuge in a church, albeit a deconsecrated one, perhaps taps into a deeper sense that such figures of darkness can only have a meaningful existence in a world in which faith is still central. Van Helsing similarly takes refuge amongst the Victorian furnishings of his book-lined study, a scholar’s retreat which his granddaughter Jessica likens to a mausoleum. So is this really an analysis of the soul’s desolation, the isolation of the individual in the shadow of God’s absence from the world, in the manner of Bergman’s Winter Light? Er, not really, no. But it does reflect the wilful demolition of the past and the values which it embodied which was being carried out at the time. Many have seen the confinement of Dracula within St Botolph’s church as a failure of nerve, but I find it entirely appropriate for the period. A crisis of faith, be it cultural or religious, is a threat to sacred monsters and sacred architecture alike.

Bad boy Johnny

The Count’s servant seems to have changed little over the century, save in his foppish fashions and modish hairstyle, but we must assume that he is a direct descendant in the same way that Peter Cushing’s strangely named Lorrimer Van Helsing is the grandson of the original vampire hunter. The book ‘The House of Horror’, an official version of the Hammer story, was to be issued the following year by Lorrimer Publishing, which explains such peculiar nomenclature. Is there a genetically inherited component to evil henchmanhood being hinted at here? The name Johnny Alucard is a bit of a giveway, and it doesn’t fill us with confidence in his mental acuity that Van Helsing needs to painstakingly doodle an acrostic in order to figure it out. It also reminds us of other ‘hipster’ characters such as John Cassavetes’ jazz playing Private Eye of the nightclub world, Johnny Stacatto. Indeed, the name would seem to be more suggestive of a beatnik milieu, and it seems at times as if Houghton is drawing more on memories of this era (or the films which embodied it) for his view of youth cool. This would explain the inexplicable enthusiasm which Marsha Hunt evinces for a ‘jazz spectacular’ at the Royal Albert Hall. The Mahavishnu Orchestra, maybe? Johnny is at the centre of a ‘hip’ Chelsea set which is first seen ‘freaking out’ the squares in a posh Kensington pad. These unfortunates have their house invaded by the happening sounds of Stoneground, who churn out uninspired grooves of lumpen heaviosity in the backgound. It was to have been The Faces, but alas, the ‘Ground had a pre-existing contract with the distributors, Warner Bros., so the services of Rod and the boys were not called upon.

Johnny with Caroline Munro

The opening party scene demonstrates the level of authenticity we can expect in the depiction of contemporary youth culture; it is more convincing than the hippy festival at the end of Carry on Camping, but only marginally so. The dialogue is the big let down of the film. Its risibility obscures the fact that there are some interesting ideas at play elsewhere. It’s perfectly possible that the whole thing is intended to be satirical, in which case we are laughing along with the script rather than at it. The babbling inanities of the supremely irritating ‘comical’ member of the cool inner circle would certainly mark him out for imminent death in any horror film made ten years on, particularly given his penchant for practical jokes of the leaping out from behind a gravestone variety. Why he chooses to dress in a monk’s robe is anyone’s guess. Caroline Munro’s pogoing dance moves exude an infectious enthusiasm, however. Munro, whose first significant film role this was (playing the exquisite corpse of Vincent Price’s wife in The Abominable Dr Phibes wasn’t much of a stretch) went on to become something of a fantasy film favourite in the 70s, appearing in such timelessly entertaining fare as Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, At the Earth’s Core and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, becoming a Bond villainess in The Spy Who Loved Me before disappearing along with the rest of the British film industry. It was great to see her lending her support to the Classic Horror Campaign recently. She was always very courteous and considerate to her fans, and is clearly a good egg of the first order. Adam Ant payed tribute to her iconic status (as he had already done with Diana Dors) by casting her in his video for Goody Two Shoes. Stephanie Beacham, as Van Helsing’s granddaughter Jessica, diplays a splendid example of a feathercut hairstyle, bested in 70s film only by Jane Fonda in Klute, and sports a variety of purple clothing on her way to 80s Dynasic soap queendom. She also starred in Hammer rivals Amicus’ period gothic And Now the Screaming Starts, in which she was menaced by an ambulatory disembodied hand which, given its extremely sluggish nature (the mechanics were a bit ropey, apparently) tended to rely on the element of surprise. Marsha Hunt arrives fresh from inspiring The Rolling Stones hit Brown Sugar, having had a daughter with Mick Jagger in 1970. She went on to have a small part in the little-loved (I like it) concluding film of Lindsay Anderson’s Travis trilogy, Britannia Hospital, by which time the planet-sized afro is long gone.

Caroline freaks out to the White Noise

If the execrable dialogue can be enjoyed in its own right, the same can probably not be said for Michael Vickers’ intrusive, heavy-handed score, with its endlessly repeated horn riff and flailing guitar mangling. For this they ditched the reliable services of long-running Hammer composer James Bernard? Much more impressive is the electronic music used to accompany the black mass scene, played by Johnny on his ‘portable’ reel to reel recorder. Appropriately enough it’s a track called Black Mass (subtitled An Electric Storm in Hell) from the 1969 Electric Storm LP by White Noise, which was a rather atypical release for Island Records. White Noise were a temporary studio union of young technical wizard David Vorhaus and Unit Delta Plus, better known as BBC Radiophonic workshop legends Delia Derbyshire, who also provided electronic sounds for the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House, and Brian Hodgson. The music is a genuinely disturbing blend of distorted vocals, musique concrete screams and electronically processed drum sounds, and it builds the ritual to a pitch of hysteria climaxing in Dracula’s resurrection. It demonstrates what a vital role a good soundtrack can be in helping to create an evocative atmosphere. Not even Johnny’s lame invitation to ‘dig the music, kids’ can entirely dispel its power.

Peter and Stephanie - the Van Helsings

Whilst no classic, Dracula AD72 is really much better than its lowly reputation would give it credit for. Peter Cushing gives his usual sterling and committed performance, and displays a touching tenderness in his scenes with Beacham. Their relationship, with its inter-generational conflict giving way to genuine affection, feels far more authentic than anything within the groovy swinging set, and the scenes in which the two are together begin to give us the sense that these are real people. Van Helsing doesn’t play the disapproving elder, either, at no point expressing prim disapproval of Jessica’s lifestyle. The contemporary setting allows Cushing to indulge in his chain-smoking habit, and he is able to bring an absolute conviction to such exchanges as: ‘let’s just hope you’re wrong about this whole business’…‘I wish I was, Inspector. I wish to God I was’. Christopher Lee lends his usual looming presence, and although he doesn’t have a lot to do other than smoulder and glower and sweep his cloak (he doesn’t even turn up until about half way through) he does all of these things splendidly. When he does get to engage in a bit of action in the duels with Van Helsing(s) which bracket the film, the scenes have a real, thrilling physicality which harks back to the climax of the original 1958 Hammer Dracula. There is an intriguing homoerotic undertow to the film, as Alucard pleads with his anagrammatic master to be bitten and exposes himself with a look of expectant ecstasy. Lee approaches with a grimace of distaste, and the camera shies away from the actual bite (the vampire’s kiss) but Alucard attains the ‘power’ he craves and proceeds to pass it on to Jessica’s boyfriend, whilst the women are simply led to Dracula to be drained and discarded. The film dwells on the banality of everyday, kitchen sink environs, such as the car wash in which Jessica and her boyfriend talk, and the night-time launderette outside of which Johnny trawls for victims. New gothic locations are also put forward, such as the Cavern, a subterranean club space in which the usual elements connoting neglected antiquity such as cobwebs and cracked stonework are now self-conscious props. This being a late period entry in the Hammer Dracula cycle, the methods of despatching vampires are becoming correspondingly baroque, and there is a nice bit of business in which the elements of a morning wake-up routine, the shaving mirror and the shower, are used to deadly effect. But of course, a film which proudly displays the year of its making in the title will always offer the pleasures of period detail. Look, there’s the number 19 to Finsbury Park, a Routemaster yet! And there’s Battersea Power Station, still belching out smoke and yet to be a Pink Floyd cover! And there’s some vintage Chelsea and West Ham graffiti, although the fact that they are placed neatly one above the other with no sign of erasure, and are daubed in a similar hand suggests that the art department was at work in this case (I hope they had permission). Really, this is just a film to sit back and unashamedly enjoy. So, take Jessica Van Helsing’s advice, relax and indulge in ‘a quiet bit of mindblowing’.

Christopher commands

Reposted from From Out of the Shadows

The Gorgon

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

Romantic landscapes - cottage in the valley

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

Accusing finger

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

One of the grey men

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

Reflections from autumn leaves

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

Savant in tweed

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

Carla amongst the monochrome men

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

Romantic landscapes - the castle at night

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

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

Munch pose

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

Classic Cushing brain removal technique

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

Brown and grey - the aged hero

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

Technicolor test tubes

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

Gorgon in green

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

Castle interior - open to nature

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

Courtyard oasis

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

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

Barbara imperious - Carla assumes her throne

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

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

Veiled apparition - Carla amongst classical columns

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