Who's your favourite Hammer Glamour girl?

Hammer Glamour, the book for which the coffee table was invented, and has patiently waited for these past centuries, is finally in my hands...
In fairness, as others have noted, it is in some respects a confusing publication, and in some respects a disappointment.
There seems little logical reason why some of the stars are given full entry status in the main body of the book while others are relegated to the 'Also Starring' directory at the back. It is nothing to do with number of appearances for the studio, nor even number of leads, since the main section includes numerous 'one-shot' stars, including one-shot supporting roles.
I suppose the standard is icon-status, but even then there are some odd anomalies that transcend mere difference of opinion: Catherina Von Schell, Jennie Linden and Rosenda Monteros all make it into the main section, while Niké Arrighi, Maggie Kimberly, Heather Sears and Angharad Rees do not. If iconic relevance is the issue, do Judy Geeson and Stephanie Powers really justify inclusion in the main text if Susan Strasberg doesn't?
The loss of Joan Collins from all consideration (a top-16 full-page inclusion in the 'Brides of Dracula and Others' photo-spreads from the beloved old House of Horror paperback) is perhaps not a huge surprise in a 'how the mighty have fallen' kind of way, the iconic merry-go-round being what it is, but how to account for the following no-shows: Virginia Wetherell, Katya Wyeth, Pippa Steele, Anoushka Hempel? And as Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires continues to grow in popularity, I think they'll come to regret excluding Shi Szu as well...
. Obviously, this is not a book one turns to with a thirst to read about anything. Therefore criticism of the more or less perfunctory text seems redundant, although the talk of exciting new interviews and research rather invites it, as does a tone of peevish disapproval in relation to some of the studio's excesses that sits oddly with the book's own raison d'etre. (Is "the lingering close-up" of Jenny Hanley's bosom after being attacked by a bat really "one of the most depressing shots in any of Hammer's early 70's films"?)
There's little new in the interviews, though a fascinating section on Vera Day, a more or less forgotten but plainly significant starlet of the fifties, is a notable exception. And I was glad to find out that Susan Denberg is still alive, and to learn a little more of my favourite vampiress, the monumental Marie Devereux.
.But mainly, the writing is just there to fill the gaps between photos, and that's fine. Not that a few odd choices haven't been made, even in this department. My own favourite, Veronica Carlson, for example, is represented by two large, shiny-faced studio portrait shots, rather than anything more evocative of the Hammer mood. If they had decided only to use official Hammer shots, that obviously narrows the field, but why relegate the now classic Frankenstein Must be Destroyed mooching-about-in-a-graveyard publicity session to the back cover?
. And I'm not certain that all of the main pictures are Hammer shots. Is the one of Susan Denberg on page 55? or Valerie Leon on page 97? (By the way, chaps: look at this latter picture very closely.)
I know that part of the idea is to reproduce rare and lesser-known images, but if isolating and celebrating the exact ingredients of the Hammer glamour style is the primary aim, then there should be at least some emphasis given to analysis of the really classic images.
The obvious choice for endpapers or back cover was surely the irresistible embarrassed-looking-cast-of-Vampire Lovers-lined-up-on-a-coffin session, which makes only a walk-on appearance (in a lesser-known shot without the coffin).
.And it's surprising to see Caroline Munro in her AD 1972 boots in a black and white car park rather than on the film's sets, to see so little of Denberg in that wonderfully fraudulent Created Woman session with Cushing, to see so little made of Hazel Court (one of those strange 'shovelling hay' pictures), or to see not even one picture of Leon in her Mummy's Tomb nightie ...
. But that's more than enough carping. Funny how every review of this book I've seen begins by listing its various faults and disappointments, then sort of verbally shrugs its shoulders as if to say but what the hell?
But what the hell? This is not a book that's going to get boring too quickly. If I've inadvertently given the impression that this book is anything other than a treat, or pretty much the Christmas present you've always dreamed of, let me hasten to correct my error. So here, with the official Carfax Abbey Seal of Approval, are Caroline, Yutte, Martine and Madeline.
And don't say I never do anything for you.

Who are your favourite Hammer starlets? Please take part in my poll at the top of the page. You can vote for as many as you like, and if you opt for 'other' leave me a comment to say who you prefer and why. The results will be tabulated and revealed in a later post, as another cheap excuse to include a load of pictures of them looking foxy.

Doctor Blood's Cornwall

Carfax Abbey has been holidaying in Cornwall, and so naturally decided to drop in on its very good friend Doctor Blood, who keeps a coffin there.
Actually, he doesn't, but it's just one of the many delightful surprises of Doctor Blood's Coffin (1960) that it is the second part of the title that's hyperbole: he doesn't have a coffin, but the main character is called Dr Blood - Dr Peter Blood, to be precise.
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Like The Ghoul, it is one of my all-time favourite British horror films, and like The Ghoul no critic in the universe has anything but the most scornful things to say about it. However, unlike The Ghoul, the low critical standing of which is a complete and enduring mystery to me, I am prepared to accept that in this case my ratio of objective/defensible reasons for liking it to subjective/indefensible reasons for liking it is probably somewhere in the region of 70-30 in subjectivity's favour.
But the objective reasons are not to be sniffed at, for all that. In the first place we have the considerable novelty of a Frankenstein movie set in present-day (that is to say sixties) England, rather than a hundred years ago in a mountain village in Switzerland. Then there's the even greater novelty - perhaps even innovation - that its hunky love interest and human vivisection-crazed villain are one and the same, the erstwhile Dr B (Kieron Moore).
And a right rotten sod he is too, descending on his father's Cornish practice, kidnapping innocent Cornish yokels, paralysing them and then taking out their hearts so as to stuff them into corpses and bring them back to life. And all in the bottom of a tin mine.
Therefore the film has no hero, only a heroine, in the form of Hazel Court, the woman they had in mind when they invented Eastmancolor. Hazel is the senior Dr Blood's widowed nurse, but when she balks at Blood Jr's attempted justification for his murders - the victims spent most of their time in the pub - he interprets this as her spurning him in favour of the memory of her late husband. So he digs him up, gives him a new heart (and that's all there is to it, by the way) and then takes her to see him stumbling about with green mould all over his face.
Hazel is of course the other great reason for enjoying the film. Though she became the first female face of Hammer horror in The Curse of Frankenstein (to say nothing of the first Hammer actress to appear nude, in mockingly lost footage from the export version of 1959's Man Who Could Cheat Death), the majority of her horror appearances were in Roger Corman's Poe movies, and Doctor Blood's remains her only other British horror (unless you count pre-Hammer weirdie Devil Girl From Mars) that features her in modern dress and settings. She spends the greater part of the film in a nurse's outfit, complete with high heels and one of those adorable little hats, photographed relentlessly from behind and frequently bending over.
At the time the film was criticised for its excessive gruesomeness, but there is little here that Hammer had not been doing for a year or two; the difference was in the fact that it was not set in some reassuringly distant place and time, and the mad scientist wore polo shirts and sports jackets rather than top hats and frock coats.
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My own affection for the film is due at least in part to its familiar - to me - Cornish backgrounds (though the original script had in fact been set in Arizona). So over the past week or so, we've been tracking them down...
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Dr Blood's Village
What is referred to in the film as Porthcarron is in fact the village of Zennor. Here's the first post-credits shot of a car driving into the location, followed by the same road as it looks today.
.Doctor Blood's Local
The sign above right is for The Tinner's Arms, the village pub, which, unusually, is also the building used for the location of the pub in the film. The stone work has been rusticated since the film was made; personally I prefer the 1960 whitewash.
.Doctor Blood's Cottage
Ironically, one of the few buildings used in the film to have changed significantly is the main one: the terraced cottage which doubles as Blood and Son's surgery and living accommodation. Over the past half-century it has lost its garden wall, most of its flower beds and its porch.
.The following shot of the cottage (on the right) and the white building next to the pub is still easy to locate, even though the latter has lost the blue painted window-frames and doors.

Here we see the scene in which Hazel bends down to pick up the morning milk (bending correctly at the knees) being restaged by Angela Levin (who bends at the spine, proving she's no nurse).
.Next, Hazel and Angela walk past the white building next to the pub...
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... and on up to the gates outside Hazel's house - try to forget the nasty-looking car, and note instead that the gates Angela is heading for are still the Hazel originals.
.And here's the view back towards the village, shot from the same spot.

.Doctor Blood's Pantry

The exterior of the mine where Blood keeps his paralysed, dead and revived bodies is Carn Galver Mine, West Penwith, still looking much as the good doctor left it. The interior is of course a studio set. Shortly after our photo was taken a busload of Germans arrived at the site, but not being able to speak the language we were unable to ascertain if they were touring Cornish landmarks or British Horror Film locations. Obviously I'd like to think it was the latter.
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Doctor Blood's Daytrip

Here we see Angela and myself, as Dr Blood, recreating the sequence in which the crazy quack takes a break from cutting out hearts to accompany Hazel to the seaside, and brag to her about when he was a Group Leader in the Cubs. The cliffs have fallen away somewhat since the film was shot, and the carefree manner in which Hazel skips back and forth over the wall would be virtually suicidal today. We were taking quite a risk, in fact, to provide you with the painstaking accuracy of the second shot, so please appreciate it.
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Doctor Blood's Little Stroll

Here we see Dr Blood taking a walk, passing G. F. Morton, the local funeral director, and on, past the church, to the village. The funeral parlour is really Zennor Village Hall. I was hoping to find the old G. F. Morton sign abandoned in a hedge or propping open a gate, but no such luck. In the reconstructions that follow the originals below, I will again be essaying the role of Dr Blood, while the character role of Morton will be taken by my father, Mr S. Coniam.
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Doctor Blood's Graveyard

In our reconstruction of the film's funeral scene, note that the fence leading into the churchyard is again the 1960 original. The grave that Hazel is looking at is a prop, but the large crosses in the background are unmistakable in both photos. Unfortunately, Equity rates being what they are, we couldn't afford any mourners, so you'll just have to use your imagination in the first one.
.And finally, at no extra cost, a delightfully-named nearby hostelry not featured in the film, but in which the Doc would no doubt have felt very much at home...
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“I like to torture!” Sadism in the pre-Code Universal horror film

"You monster! You like to torture!"
"Yes! I like to torture!"
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The above exchange - and you don't need me to identify the actor who speaks the reply - is from The Raven (1935), the film that served in many ways as a test-case for what the horror film now could and could not get away with in the Code era. By the time it appeared, Lugosi had long been established as the screen’s foremost sadist. (Lionel Atwill was perhaps not far behind.) Yet this kind of wallowing in cruelty is most definitely not a feature of Dracula or Frankenstein or The Mummy, the instigators of the first great American horror cycle. It emerged in their wake, and with its suppression after 1935, it became perhaps the most significant identifying feature of pre-Code horror. In that sense, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven are true anomalies: the three Universal horrors that rely for their effect not on atmsophere and the supernatural but on terror and cruelty and pain. That they are also the three great post-Dracula Lugosi movies is an interesting coincidence.
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If there is one dominant ingredient in a typical pre-Code horror film that did not survive the Code crackdown it would have to be sadism; a morbid inventiveness in tortures and ways of dying, and a central character taking lip-smacking relish in their implementation. This was the essence of many of the horror films made by Paramount (Island of Lost Souls, Murders in the Zoo) and Warners (Dr X, Mystery of the Wax Museum); it is also, of course, central to MGM's Freaks. But it had not been a feature of the first batch of Universals. This all changed with Murders in the Rue Morgue, the consolation prize for Lugosi and director Robert Florey for not getting Frankenstein.
.Most horror writers can’t bring themselves to refrain from calling the film Lugosi’s first starring horror vehicle after Dracula. But the sobering truth is that it is not. Already by this time, he is unambiguously co-starring; in both opening title card and subsequent list of players he is second-billed to Sidney Fox, a gorgeous but not especially luminary actress of the period, best-known for playing Bette Davis's Bad Sister in 1931. (Actually, there are rumours about how she ended up top-billed but I never tell tales about ladies.)
The truth is that the film is Lugosi’s show all through, of course, with little distraction from Fox or indeed Leon Ames as Dupin, the dashing hero. (How strongly you identify Ames with Doris Day’s loveable curmudgeonly father in On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon will have a lot to do with how easily you accept him here.)
Given his shot at the big job, Florey goes jogging with it, washing the film in high Germanic style and staging the narrative as a series of vignettes and tableaux; often the plot will be advanced by our overhearing it being discussed, by elegantly staged pairs and trios of supporting actors we do not see again.
How tempting it is to attribute the tone of the finished film to the simmering resentment of Florey, at last given the chance to show what he can do but in a far less prestigious production, and instantly running foul of budget cuts and front office interference. The bosses in particular wanted to cut the period setting (no surprises there: this remains the only Universal pre-Code horror to go with a pre-twentieth century setting) and slashed the budget when Florey held out. Whatever, it is certain that the film is at once the least typical of all the Universal horrors and at the same time, the most typically pre-Code in its attitudes and effects. (It begins in carny mode, with a Parisian fair at which the entertainment is authentic pre-Code vintage: torso dancers, over whom the camera crawls and loiters. Two old roués, one like Adolphe Menjou gone to seed, the other like a slightly more refined Charles Winninger, are at the front of the crowd: “Do they bite?” asks one. “Oh yes, but you have to pay extra for that” replies the other.)
It has only the name Dupin, a body up a chimney and an ape in a lady’s boudoir in common with the Poe story to which it owes its name and swears its allegiance, preferring instead to utilise a period setting and deliberately theatrical style as mist to cloak the most blatant exploitation of sadism yet in Universal horror.

Yet it also has as daft a plot as any horror film you ever saw. This Dr Mirakle is a carnival performer with the hokiest act on the circuit. He’s done up like the Devil, with curly hair and a tall hat, but basically his act is to stalk the stage, giving a long-winded exegesis of the theory of evolution, on the level of scientific sophistication one would associate with, say, a hack Hollywood screenwriter or two. Every so often, he stops, and pretends to translate the noises made by a chained gorilla, called Erik, into banal human speech. It’s the corniest act you ever saw, he must have been touring it for years, but he does it with such an air of contemptuous menace that your heart never fully goes out to him.
. He ends with a flourish, presenting Erik to the audience with the words “Behold: the first man!”
At this point, the mood turns ugly. “Heresy!” says one man, out of his seat with indignation.
Suddenly, mortally offended, Mirakle goes bananas, stares straight at the camera and intones:
“My life is consecrated to a great experiment! I tell you I will prove your kinship with the ape! Erik’s blood shall be mixed with the blood of man!”
It’s a closer call by now, but you still have to conclude this guy is hoking it; he even ends by offering the girls in the audience a chance to come up and see the ape. (“You liked her, didn’t you, Erik?” leers Lugosi after Sidney has been introduced.)
But it is at this point that the film suddenly lurches into the nastiest sequences in all of pre-Code horror. And Lugosi, lit from below and with massive eyebrows, is terrifying.

Don't forget, he was basically sexy and suave all the time in Dracula, bar a few distorted close-ups as he bent down for the kill. That was Lugosi the matinee-idol vampire. This is altogether different, and if he truly wanted to avoid identification with sinister roles, he only had himself to blame for the relish with which he goes at it here.
First, after some especially fluffy romantic banter from the film’s two young pups, we see Lugosi’s coach pull up at the scene of a savage knife fight, that leaves both participants fatally gored and which Lugosi watches with pleasure from his carriage window. He then walks slowly and menacingly through the fog to the camera – it’s the best of all Lugosi’s scary walks into the camera – and past us to close in on the terrified woman who had also been present at the scene. His offer to take her to his carriage for safety is tinged with overt menace, and she protests clearly, but is too scared to resist him manhandling her into his coach.
Next we see, she is screaming, tied to a wooden cross in tattered clothes while Lugosi is crudely jabbing her with a hypodermic syringe.

Now, let us be clear what he is doing here. The mystic business with the mixing of her blood with the gorilla’s is just a preliminary task: it is not the essence of the experiment that Lugosi had been alluding to earlier. I fear he meant blood as in ‘bloodline’.
This is a kind of pre-nuptial blood test; the real experiment is to follow. That’s what he means when he says, “one more minute and we… shall know if you are to be the bride of science!”
What his magnifying glass discloses that so angers him is not incompatibility of blood but the presence of venereal disease, indicating that she, as we knew from the opening credits, is a “woman of the streets” and thus not fit to be Erik’s bride, and so yes, that was what he meant by “You liked her, didn’t you, Erik?” He wants to prove human kinship with other apes by mating a gorilla with a young woman.

There’s something of an end-of-century serial killer movie in Lugosi’s petty obliviousness to the physical torment he is inflicting, as if the victim is being unreasonable in protesting. “You’re stubborn! Hush!” he says to her at one point. We continue to see her whimpering and writhing behind Lugosi as he calmly compares blood types in the foreground. “Hush!” he says again.
Eventually she dies, of the effects of the transfusion and sheer exhaustion from torture. Lugosi dumps her through a trap door into the river. Then it’s back to another of Florey’s tableaux, this time of picturesque tramps who provide a running commentary in a kind of poetic, Samuel Beckett trampspeak, as gendarmes discover the girl’s body, washed up beneath a beautifully lit backcloth of a bridge and a quiet stretch of river.
This is chilling stuff, aiming to horrify the audience with its tortures and threats of sexual outrage. But the most contentious sequence to anybody coming to this movie from a pre-Code angle is the scene in which Erik the ape enters the bedroom of Sidney Fox and her mother.

Presumably, what actually happens there is to some degree left to our imaginations. But you have to concede that it does play very much the way Thomas Doherty would have it in his book ‘Pre-Code Hollywood’:
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What transpires during the cross-cut commotion – between the attack in the bedroom and the frenzied activity in the hallway as neighbors prepare to break down the door and rescue the women from the gorilla’s clutches – can be interpreted in only one way: the gorilla is raping one of the women. Two brief shots repeat the same image: the gorilla’s head and upper torso thrusting downward as grunts and shrieks fill the soundtrack.
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Well, it is certainly not true to say the scene can only be interpreted this way: it has been widely interpreted to mean that the gorilla is thrusting as he stuffs a corpse up the chimney, and this I think is probably correct – but on the other hand, Doherty’s reading is the one that most irresistibly suggests itself to an audience (particularly as it is a while before we find out anything about the body in the chimney). What is additionally certain is that this reading of the scene must have been obvious to Florey and to the studio before they put it out. By not offering any clarification, they are at least responsible for actively promoting the misunderstanding. This was, after all, the film that was to out-Frankenstein Frankenstein.
.The Black Cat of 1934 was a late revival of the sadism theme unleashed just as the Hays axe was falling. It is a haunting, visually audacious film, with many striking and distinctive sequences, but an incoherent and often ill-motivated drama.
Set in a futuristic house built on the sight of a military massacre and adjoining a mass graveyard, the style is definitely modern throughout. Everything is white walls and metal and sharp angles, no crumbling castles of a bygone age here.
And no eerie silences either: this film is fully, sometimes obtrusively, scored, though the music itself is an excellent pot-pourri of well-chosen classical themes. (If you are one of those people who wish Dracula had a music score: surely this, over Philip Glass?)

This is all ultra-stylish, but the censors’ ears were pricked: the combination of modernity and monstrosity was noted with disapproval, as was the streak of sexual perversity. Karloff’s character is an architect, aesthete, Satanist and sexual decadent, who first tricked Lugosi’s wife into marrying him, then, when she died, had her preserved in fluid in a glass case and married her daughter (whom he will eventually kill). There is devil-worship, much talk of torture, and a crazy, delirious climax as Lugosi (in his most sympathetic horror performance) ties Karloff (in one of his least) to an embalming rack and skins him alive. (“Slowly! Bit by bit!”)
Some of the incoherence of the end-product is in fact attributable to a number of re-shoots and a deal of post-production re-editing, designed to lessen the oppressive atmosphere and make a more conventional good guy out of the Lugosi character, who had originally been far more ambiguous and is now just plain weird.

David Manners and Jacqueline Wells (an elegant thing who had come to Karloff and Lugosi a year after working with Laurel and Hardy) barely make it out alive as the house blows up. (Karloff, as I said, is an architect, and his home is full of such handy labour-saving devices). The film ends with Manners and Wells on a train, reading a review of his latest mystery novel, which complains that the plot is too far-fetched to be believable. They look at each other cutely, and we fade.
There’s mischief here somewhere; it wasn't to last.

The Raven was the last straw. A Poe-obsessed surgeon and eroticist of torture is driven to sexual mania by the young dancer whose life he saves, and with the unwilling aid of a violent criminal on the run ("You put the burning torch into his face... into his eyes!"), whom he deliberately deforms, he plans to torture the girl and her obstinate father and fiancé to death during a weekend party...
The British said no. The ban extended beyond one film and took in the whole genre. The decision crippled horror production in the US. An era ended.
Odd, now that the horror film is, once again, first and foremost a means of aestheticising sadism. Perhaps it always was, deep down. The trouble with The Raven was simply that it wasn't deep down enough.

Death of a Brooklyn Gorilla

Sammy Petrillo, Jerry Lewis impersonator and star of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla - Lugosi's most prestigious film of the nineteen-fifties - has died at the age of seventy-four.

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There's a few obits doing the rounds, this is a particularly interesting and sweet one.

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Mitchell only made four films - but what a four: both halves of a married couple in Doris Wishman's Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972), an uncredited bit in Joseph Green's mesmerising The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962), the lead in Shangri-La (1961), as a zookeeper who visits a series of nudist camps, and - above all this - his Lewis-a-like turn opposite Lugosi. (What did Lugosi make of the film? His expression in the third still, below, speaks a million words.)

"Brooklyn chumps become island monkeys in a jungle full of laffs" claimed the posters, and they were right. That is exactly what happens. Watch it tonight.

See ya, Sammy.

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“I needed to earn a living” - Kevin Francis, Tyburn and The Ghoul

Confession time...
The Ghoul (1975) has long been one of my favourite British horror films, if not my favourite of all time.
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I can't remember when I first saw it from start to finish, but I do remember the first time I attempted to watch it. I got halfway through the first scene.
Veronica Carlson is slowly making her way up the stairs of a creepy old house, holding a candle, while on the soundtrack we hear a man's voice whispering her name. After agonising seconds she reaches a door, slowly turns the handle and is confronted by the grotesque spectacle of a man hanging by a spike through his neck, drooling saliva, yet still faintly alive, and whispering her name.
I'm ashamed to say I fled in terror from the room. (Had I stayed a second longer I would have seen it revealed as a prank, and watched the man get down unharmed.)
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But from then on, The Ghoul remained in my mind the quintessential horror film, everything I imagined horror films to be before I'd seen any: richly coloured, flesh-creepy, with spooky music, blood, thick fog, quicksand, something unspeakable locked upstairs, pretty girls running and screaming.
It was only later that I learned that it was critically despised, and invariably dismissed as being of no merit whatsoever.
I have never quite understood why.
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When I was at university in 1995, Tyburn, the company that made it, still had offices at Pinewood Studios. I wrote to producer Kevin Francis, the man behind the company, with a questionnaire. He replied on Tyburn Film Productions headed paper with brief, occasionally irascible replies to my questions.
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What gave you the idea to form Tyburn?
I needed to earn a living.
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How easy was it to get off the ground?
Very.
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Stylistically, what were you trying to achieve with the Tyburn productions?
To get as much on the screen as possible with the money available.
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The story behind The Ghoul, and Tyburn Film Productions, is an interesting one.
The company came into existence at the lowest ebb of the traditional British horror film, just moments, really, before its flame was extinguished permanently.
Hammer, grappling with international disinterest and seemingly unfathomable changes in fashion, had been trying for the previous five years to freshen, reinvigorate and reinvent their formulae to keep track with emerging trends. All had, to varying degrees, failed at the box office. Then, in the midst of the darkest days of 1974 comes Tyburn, a new company, putting out movies that strive to look as much like Hammer as possible, and furthermore Hammer at its most traditional, re-employing casts, writers, directors and composers closely associated with the ailing company.
The idea that Francis (son of director Freddie) ever went into such a venture "to make a living" seems disingenuous in the extreme. This was more like suicidal aesthetic defiance.

When you watch a Tyburn film, you are never quite in danger of mistaking it for Hammer. But the chances are vastly higher than if you're watching The Skull (Amicus) or The Blood Beast Terror (Tigon) or Island of Terror (Planet).

But Tyburn did take care to establish their own identity, with the same graphics used for their title sequences, and the phrase "A Tyburn Tale of Terror" appearing prominently in all the posters and advertising materials.

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Did you see The Ghoul more as a tribute to Hammer, or as your own contribution to the genre?
Both.
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Persecution (1974), the company's debut feature, now looks like an unofficial trial run. With Hammer's Ralph Bates supporting Lana Turner in the lead, it was a late addition in the Baby Jane stakes; a garish melodrama with horror trimmings rather than a Gothic.
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How did you get Lana Turner to appear in Persecution?
I rang and asked her.
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What is your opinion of that film today?
Much the same as it was when we finished it.
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What Persecution lacked most pointedly was the presence of Peter Cushing.
More than anybody else before or behind the cameras he was the soul of Tyburn, its reason for existing; indeed it was a childhood love of Cushing's Hammer performances and a desire to make films with him that had inspired Francis to enter the movie business in the first place. "Peter was my dearest friend and a much valued colleague," Francis wrote in his letter to me, "and in both capacities I shall miss him more than I can say."
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Appropriately, then, The Ghoul showcases one of Cushing's best and most serious pieces of screen acting. The film is near as dammit a remake of Hammer's The Reptile (by the same writer, John Elder) only with a greater degree of mystery, stronger mise-en-scene and a much less AIP-ish monster.
It has often been said that Cushing never gave a piss-about performance and it's certainly true here: as Dr Lawrence, a tormented ex-clergyman in a permanently fog-shrouded (and marsh-encircled) Cornish mansion, who keeps the diseased cannibal son he cannot bring himself to destroy locked in his attic. Playing a sensitive, civilised man forced to procure human food for his inhuman child, he is affecting and entirely credible; vainly mumbling prayers in his private chapel and surrounding himself with relics of better times; we feel his agony.
Thanks to its appropriation of sets and costumes left over at Pinewood from the lumpen 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, the film has a gorgeous twenties atmosphere that is both effective in itself and especially pleasing in context; it's a setting that has rarely been used in horror films. By mixing this with decidedly modern horrors - cannibalism, and a rotting, green-skinned monster that would be more at home in a later Fulci film than at Hammer - the Francises (Producer Kevin and director Freddie) came up with a fascinating hybrid that really should have given the ailing genre a fresh lease of life.
Odd, too, to note the similarities with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which emerged the same year and is usually cited as exactly the kind of horror film that was making the Hammer sort obsolete.
The film begins with four young travellers getting lost in the middle of nowhere (a nicely diverse group: Hammer favourite Veronica Carlson, here at her iconic peak, former Champion and Blood-Spattered Bride Alexandra Bastedo, Ian McCulloch before his similar encounter with Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters, and two-time Pete Walker victim Stewart Bevan).
Some look for assistance in a nearby house, while Bastedo's car is forced off the road by Lawrence's gardener (John Hurt), a knicker-sniffing Great War deserter who lives in a shed filled with caged animals, and who leaps about maniacally in the road in a manner uncannily reminiscent of Edwin Neal's hitch-hiker.
Once killed, Lawrence's Indian housemaid lovingly converts the former bright young things into long pig soup. And while Lawrence's well-appointed house and civilised tastes seem leagues away from the homelife of the deranged chainsaw family, Hurt's shed, with its caged animals, general chaos and relics of earlier victims (the underwear in his bed), is not at all dissimilar to their abattoir-like dwelling.
. Veronica Carlson as she appears in The Ghoul: a bad horror film, apparently.

All the film's contributors give of their best.
Harry Robinson's score and John Elder's screenplay are both so much recycling, yet in each case the borrowed parts coalesced into a whole that stands as their definitive contribution to the genre.
Similarly, Freddie Francis, a horror director rarely comfortable with the genre, was never so confident and in control, his prowling camera seeking out every dark corner of the imposing house and fog-blanketed moors. Especially well-judged is the decision to delay a full sighting of the Ghoul until the end, forcing us in the meantime to build our own picture based solely upon repeated shots of his feet, all green skin, weeping sores and sandals.
Though generally hated by critics and writers, I have never known it fail with new audiences, including the many to whom I have shown it who don't usually like 'that sort of thing'. The opening scene, already mentioned, with the drooling hanged man, the sequences on the moors, and the H G Lewis-worthy finale in which McCulloch tumbles down the stairs with an ornamental dagger jutting from his forehead always work as intended.
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So why does nobody like it?
Well, I have discovered three potential explanations.

1. Some critics found it derivative of Psycho, and there's no question that the murder of Carlson's character is staged in deliberate emulation of the Janet Leigh death scene, with a mosquito net standing in for a shower curtain and Francis attempting to convey violence through rapid cutting and no actual shots of the knife making contact with her body.
But the other similarities - the old house, the nasty family secret, the murder of a man who tumbles down a flight of stairs - are incidental, and to harp on them reveals a lack of awareness of just how much cliche and convention went into Psycho itself.
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2. Oddly, among knowledgeable - and ostensibly more sympathetic - genre fans, it tends to enjoy an even worse reputation than among the straights, especially if the writer in question belongs to the smartarse fringe, like the berks from the Aurum Encyclopaedia and others, who like to pretend that the film is 'racist' in its suggestion that Lawrence's son became corrupted by a cannibal cult in India. ("At last!", Elder must have thought when given the commission, "my chance to finally express my contempt for India in a metaphorical context!")
This notion spurred Francis to greater loquacity than he expended upon all my other questions combined:
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It is only recently that I have learned of these comments on The Ghoul, which are inordinate rubbish as well as being deeply offensive to all concerned with the making of the film. If those who accuse the film of being "racist" honestly believed such to be the case, why do they not comment similarly on The Reptile?
Frankly, I believe some of these pseudo-intellectuals attempt to read too much into what are, after all, fantasy films. You may be interested to know that my accountant (who is Indian and Hindu) thinks The Ghoul is the best traditional horror/thriller he has ever seen.
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So that's two: me, and Kevin Francis's accountant.
3. Weirdest of all, the other reason usually given for dismissing The Ghoul is that it simply isn't any good. They say it's boring. They say it's scareless and sexless and witless and silly.
I can only grope in the dark for an explanation as to how they can have possibly seen the same film that I find so nearly faultless in editing, music, script, acting, visual style, suspense, plot and pace.
Part of it I think is because the Tyburn story has to be judged a failure in order to fit the story of British horror, in which it has been assigned the role of irrelevant death bed folly. The whole idea was a disaster, ergo the films themselves must be terrible.
I mean, everyone knows that reviewers at the time hated them, and audiences stayed well away. Right, Kevin?
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You must have been reading different reviews than me. The Ghoul received rave reviews at the time of its release. Legend of the Werewolf was received quite well, I always thought.
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And how did they fare at the box office?
The Ghoul, fantastically; Legend of the Werewolf, reasonably.
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And the strange thing is, he wasn't trying to sell me a crock. He's absolutely right.
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Alexandra Bastedo as she doesn't appear in The Ghoul. I'm afraid I couldn't find a still with her in it. Do the best you can with this.
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Legend of the Werewolf (1975) is not quite up to the standards of The Ghoul, but it is still first class trad-horror, with Cushing giving an equally graceful and untypical performance as an eccentric pathologist given to disconcerting unwelcome visitors to his lab by waving about dripping windpipes and other detached body parts.
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Also in the cast is iconic fifties nude model Pamela Green. Did she simply audition or was somebody at Tyburn a secret Pamela Green fan?
Sorry to disappoint you but the answer is 'neither'. Pamela Green is actually Mrs Doug Webb. Doug Webb was Tyburn's stills photographer at the time, who merely mentioned to me that Pamela was not working, so I hired her.
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The film is obviously indebted - not least in its near-identical werewolf make up job - to Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf, with which it again shares screenwriter Elder. But sorry, purists, the Tyburn film is better.
The script was in fact inspired by a story idea Kevin Francis had offered to Hammer in 1969 under the title Plague of the Werewolves, mixed by Elder with a treatment of his own (called Wolf Boy).
The story of a boy raised by wolves and exhibited in a travelling carnival, who becomes a wolf when stirred to anger, jealousy or sexual passion, it is a far more interesting and balanced piece of writing than Elder's Hammer script, which is half finished before the issue of werewolves is even raised.
There's more striking visual work from Francis Sr, this time red-tinted werewolf POV shots and effective shock-cuts to closeups of its bloodstained teeth. The film is also notable for ending, as did The Ghoul, on an unexpected note of pathos, with both monsters turning to Cushing and whimpering "help me". (In both cases it's the first time they speak and in both cases highly effective: because we had assumed that the werewolf couldn't speak, so it's a real surprise, and because the Ghoul has a gentle, high-pitched voice.)
. Legend was released on a shrewd double-bill with a reissue of one of the best and most compatible later Hammers, Vampire Circus, and the balance sheet in the BFI's improbable but compulsive tie-in book Making Legend of the Werewolf shows that, like its predecessor, it went more than comfortably into the black.
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Yet there was little more from the company.
As with Hammer, the distribution deal the company signed with Rank excluded the vital territories of America, Canada and Mexico, and in some territories Francis sold straight to television. An adaptation of Dennis Wheatley's The Satanist was announced but dropped, while other suggested titles - including something enticingly called Dracula's Feast of Blood - were probably never more than that.
Clearly, television was the future, as Francis had accepted in 1975. The BFI's book quotes him as saying that:

My business is to make films and sell them... It's not up to me to say that people have to see that film in the cinema. If I decide to sell a film to the cinema or to TV I make that decision on commercial grounds. TV is too important a communications medium and too important a market to ignore.

And so when the company returned nearly a decade later, it was strictly small-screen. There was a highly regarded Sherlock Holmes production called The Masks of Death (1984) with an elderly Peter Cushing as a post-retirement Holmes, a thriller with Hywel Bennett and Ali McGraw called Murder Elite (1985) and a feature-length interview with Cushing, A One-Way Ticket To Hollywood (1987). In the latter, the frail-looking actor heaps praise on Kevin Francis, and announces that he had turned down a second Holmes production for the company, to have been called The Abbot's Cry: unsurprisingly, the project was soon abandoned.
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Is there anything new in the pipeline?
Tyburn has no present plans for further feature film production.
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So that was that.
We didn't get a lot from Tyburn, and judging by the critical reaction, what we did get we didn't deserve. But we did get a first-class werewolf movie, and we did get The Ghoul.
As far as the latter is concerned, I will never be convinced that it is not one of the half-dozen greatest British horror films ever made.

We're a great read!

Mykal at Radiation Cinema! - the coolest blog on the block and your first and only stop for fifties apocalyptic sci-fi, mad scientists, marauding mutations, dancing native girls and more big bugs than you can glibly fire an atom bomb at and then watch what happens from a very short distance away - has honoured Carfax Abbey with a Great Read Award.
Thanks a whole heap, Mykal!
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This also gives me the opportunity to tip the hat and pass the gong to a couple of newer blogs that have recently been diverting my attention more than rewardingly from those healthy outdoor pursuits our parents used to make such a big deal of.
As they are, unlike Mykal's selection, not horror movie blogs, I include this alternative logo at no extra cost.
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And so, I hereby declare that...
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Silent Stanzas is a Great Read.
Subtitled 'Poetry, photos and anecdotes about silent film', this has only been around for a month or so, but there is already some really fantastic writing here, including some beautiful poems about silent stars.
Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: Hmm. Poems about silent stars, eh? Might just give that one a miss, if it's all the same to you, Carfax (if I may call you Carfax).
In which case I would say: yes, of course you may call me Carfax, but no, trust me: go and have a look. Your apprehension will vanish in an instant. This is really exceptional stuff, swooningly glorious and dangerously addictive, because it's not the kind of thing that can possibly keep coming at the rate you'll need it to. I'm already suffering.
And the same author's review site Flappers and Flickers is more than worth a visit too.
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And secondly, I announce that...
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Some Parade is a Great Read.
When you look down your blog roll and see someone's got a new post, you know instantly who your favourites are. There are those you set aside for later, and there are those you have to look at straight away, even if it means missing that late-night screening of Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman you've been looking forward to all day. I only started reading Juliette's blog a few weeks ago, but already she occupies a secure place in the latter category. Whenever Some Parade stirs itself you know you will be in for something a few degrees to one side of the norm, distinguished by at least one laugh-out-loud and the best turn of phrase around.
Juliette's off to college - God, how I hate the young - so hopefully she can use her Great Read Award to get herself editorship of the student paper, crack the case of the strange hooded figure in the belltower, and become the youngest journalist ever to win the Pulitzer. I've seen Urban Legend. I've read Nancy Drew. I know how it works. Just glad I can do my bit.
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So thanks to the excellent authors of these excellent blogs for keeping me entertained and away from a life of indolence and crime, and thanks again to Mykal for giving me the darned award in the first place.

Harry Alan Towers: A life of flickering shadowlike

From Charlton Heston's autobiography, In The Arena:
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The worst film I ever made... (was) The Call of the Wild. How can you possibly screw up that story? You may well ask... The root of our troubles was the producer, a sort of rogue Brit who flickered shadowlike in and out of the country to avoid his various creditors... What we finally ended up with was a joint British/American/Norwegian/German/French/Italian/Spanish co-production... There are many good actors in all these countries whose English is perfectly competent. Our producer did not hire them.
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Chuck never names his rogue Brit, but to more than one generation of off-centre film fans there is only one name that fits the bill.
And though he remained an indefinite quantity to the filmgoing public at large, Harry Alan Towers, who died on July 31st at the age of 88, was also instantly familiar to critics and industry insiders as an exceptionally colourful character of whom, as Halliwell put it, "neither subtlety nor competence should be expected."
He was a walking film machine, seemingly everywhere at the same time, making movies and making deals; his directors often discovering mid-shoot that he is hundreds of miles away, overseeing (or not, as the case may be) two, three, four films at once. Sometimes he left countries for other reasons: because he had to, and quickly. Charged in the sixties with running a call-girl ring, supplying high class girls to UN diplomats, his name has been linked to a number of scandals, including the Profumo affair and the 1975 remake of And Then There Were None.
Ironically, the news of his death came in just after I'd had a bit of a dig at Harry in my previous post, where I blamed him for the fact that El Conde Dracula (1970) was not the masterpiece is so easily could have been. True enough, but international oddball cinema was a better place last week, with him in it, than it is today, with him gone.
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Born in 1920, Towers was a child actor, radio writer and ITV producer before graduating to movies in the early sixties. As well as producing, he frequently wrote screenplays under the pseudonym Peter Welbeck, often on the plane on the way to the location with the cast and crew ready to go. The sheer vastness of his output prevents any clear assessment of where his interests lay; the frequency with which he returned to certain subjects reflecting more their saleability and/or public domain status than love of the material.
But he certainly seemed to have a fondness for And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie's celebrated murder mystery set on an isolated Devon island. His first version, Ten Little Indians (1966) featured Shirley Eaton and Fabian in the cast, and switched the location to a Swiss mountain chateau; his second (1975) took a sleepwalking Herbert Lom and Richard Attenborough to the Iranian desert; his third and final (1989)tried a jungle safari setting and starred Lom again and Sylvester Stallone's brother Frank. Those who have seen this version assure us it is the worst yet, though God knows the 1975 one takes some beating. The 1966 one, despite a whodunnit break towards the end and a ghastly score, is by far the most watchable, though it has nothing on Rene Clair's masterly 1945 version, from which it unofficially borrows a couple of original plot deviations and character names.
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The same feeling of inspiration running dry permeates his Fu Manchu films, which began in high style in 1965 with unquestionably his best screenplay, and probably his best film, The Face of Fu Manchu. For Towers, this was high class indeed, virtually indistinguishable from a sixties Hammer film, and frequently mistaken for one, with Christopher Lee as Fu and Tsai Chin as his sadistic nymphomaniac daughter Lin Tang. Pitted against them is Scotland Yard's most experienced Sherlock Holmes rip-off Nayland Smith, played by Nigel Green in the first film, Douglas Wilmer in the second and third and Richard Greene in the fourth and fifth. (Wilmer's recent autobiography dismisses the films as "preposterous twaddle" and informs us that during production Lee carried his spare change around in a sock.)
The standard dropped even by the time of the second film, as Lee recalls in his autobiography:

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Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) was tosh, in which an extravagant publicity stunt almost sank the picture. At the instigation of producer Harry Alan Towers, who took an enthusiastic part... I toured European countries choosing from each the winner of a national beauty competition whose prize was a part in the film. They tittuped and titted about the set, draped themselves about pillars in Fu Manchu's great stone den, and between takes some draped themselves about members of the unit... But they could not show themselves off to best advantage because they were not members of Equity and therefore they had not a line to speak between the whole dozen.

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When Wilmer left the series (after 1967's Vengeance of Fu Manchu), Towers seems to have lost interest altogether, handing the final two to director Jesus Franco, summed up by Towers himself as "a terribly nice man, but he shouldn't have been allowed to direct traffic."

Castle of Fu Manchu in '68 was a Spanish/Italian/West German co-production shot in Turkey, beginning with Fu freezing the Atlantic and wrecking an ocean liner via spliced-in clips from the British Titanic film A Night to Remember, tinted a spectral blue in a game if unsuccessful attempt to disguise the fact that they are in black and white and the rest of the film is in colour. Then came Blood of Fu Manchu (1969), shot in Brazil and Spain, and a chaotic, near-indecipherable mess: part horror, part James Bond, part spaghetti western, featuring female assassins with poisonous kisses and a superfluous last-minute subplot with Shirley Eaton in a leather cap as 'The Black Widow'. Towers had scored a huge critical and commercial hit with The Face of Fu Manchu, oversaw a superb production with impeccable period detail and earned the praise of original author Sax Rohmer's widow. Then he just seemed to give up on it.
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I discussed El Conde Dracula in my previous post: another Lee-Towers-Franco collaboration, and a generally pleasing one, if one marked more by the production values of Blood of Fu Manchu than Face. It was another example of Towers not going the extra half mile and letting a project of enormous potential fall by the way.

Lee seemed to place unerring trust in Towers and Franco, however, no matter how often he was let down by them.

Legendary is his participation in Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion (1969), one of a couple of Towers-Franco movies to draw inspiration from the puerile writings of the Marquis de Sade. It, too, is among Franco's better works, with that distinctive Euro-sexploitation atmosphere for which he is best known operating at pretty much full power.

Lee plays Dolmance, the chief and most active libertine in the book, but here more of a kind of master-of-ceremonies, standing by in Lee's own velvet Sherlock Holmes jacket and providing a robotic running commentary of Sadean aphorisms and observations.

A last minute replacement for an indisposed George Sanders, he must have known the nature of the original work, but insists in his autobiography that all the dirty stuff was either shot elsewhere and edited in later or in some cases going on literally behind his back:

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Everybody I could see kept their clothes on. There was nothing a boy scout could have quivered at. Little did I know that the woman on the altar behind me was naked, and that as soon as 'Cut' was called, drapery was swirled over her. Little did I know that the same scenes were re-shot when I was back in London, and the actors then peeled. Little did I know of the cross-cutting from me to scenes of debauch that would take place. I first knew of it when I heard that despite being only a guest star my name figured at the very top of the credits on a cinema in Soho frequented by a phalanx of men in raincoats. I was peeved. I told the producer so. He said all the big names were doing much more. It was true. That was not, strictly speaking, relevant to my complaint.

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A De Sade film fit for boy scouts? You can just see the queues forming outside the cinema...

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De Sade was a passion of Franco's but for Towers merely good value for money: a name that sells in the public domain. Accordingly, he did a lot of pseudo-literary adaptation, spiced up wherever possible with decadent trimmings. Massimo Dallarmo's Dorian Gray (1970) had no feeling whatever for Wilde's delicately subversive morality tale and cast Helmut Berger, a blonde German in a tweed hat, as his quintessence of male beauty. Treasure Island, starring and co-written by Orson Welles, was begun by Franco in 1964 and finished by John Hough in 1972, by which time Welles's Long John Silver could only be filmed from the waist up because he was too fat to bend his leg at the knee. Biographer Charles Higham calls it "Welles's worst performance on screen."
Towers mounted a relatively high-profile remake of The Phantom of the Opera in 1988 with Robert Englund in the lead, here no misunderstood and sensitive artist but a belligerent Faust with a penchant for mutilation and rotting skin that has to be stitched in place.

For Night Terrors (1993) directed by a slumming Tobe Hooper, Englund got to play the Marquis de Sade in flashbacks and a descendant in the main narrative, sinister ringmaster of a Sadean cult in modern-day Egypt. The two plot threads never come together, the latter ending with heroine Zoe Trilling, a contemporary Eugenie, suspended in chains in her lingerie being menaced by Englund with some sort of pneumatic retractable spike thing, the former with De Sade telling a priest at his death bed to "take your priestcraft and your palfrey and kiss my ass."

.The modern Towers project with the strongest whiff of nostalgia was The Mummy Lives (1993). This little beauty began its days as an Anthony Perkins vehicle, with Ken Russell down to direct. By the time it appeared Russell had been replaced by prolific hack Gerry O'Hara; and Perkins, sadly deceased, by Tony Curtis! The result was one of the most endearing monstrosities of the decade and already a cult favourite, filled with the kind of buffoonery you may have despaired of ever seeing in a horror film again:

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Perkins did work for Towers, however, in Edge of Sanity (1989), a cross-breeding (neither the first nor last) of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde with Jack the Ripper, heavily informed by the look and manner of Russell's Crimes of Passion. Perkins plays Jekyll and Hyde, Budapest plays London; David Lodge and Glynis Barber are in it; there's a Roman Catholic-themed brothel with sexy nuns, and characters wear nylon lingerie and use one pound coins (the latter a deliberate anachronism, the MFB suggested touchingly). "Oh my God," says Hyde before slaughtering one of several victims, "this is going to be so horrible!"

Whether director Gerard Kikoine was shooting in sequence and Towers stopped sending the cheques I don't know, but this remains the only version of the story to end with Jekyll unapprehended and his secret undiscovered. It's abrupt and oddly effective. The police come round to question him but get nowhere, and the film ends with a shot of them trudging dejectedly away and Perkins watching malevolently through a chink in his net curtains.

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The nineties also saw him put his name to a series of Edgar Allan Poe movies which, in long-standing cinema tradition, basically just bagged the titles of the stories and went hog wild making up new plots. One of them, Edgar Allen Poe's Buried Alive (1991) didn't even use a real title, and spelled Poe's name wrongly. (It is a riot, however, set in a home for wayward girls, with John Carradine getting mere seconds of screen time in his final role, Robert Vaughan leaving teeth-marks in the scenery as the surprise villain who keeps his face concealed even in front of his victims until the time comes to reveal the secret to the audience, Donald Pleaseance as a prowling red-herring in a disconcerting toupee, and a character getting killed with an egg-whisk. It's the essence of Poe, pretty much.)

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These are some of my favourite Harry Alan Towers moments; no doubt you have your own. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you thought that all his films were tripe. But it would still have been obvious that, as the last professionally active survivor of the golden age of British exploitation, cinema will be the poorer without him.

More has ended here than the certain likelihood of anyone ever producing a movie quite like The Mummy Lives ever again. An era has ended here.

“If there was anything else I would do it” - Christopher Lee's Dracula in the seventies

Between 1958 and 1969, Christopher Lee played Dracula four times.
Each time he returned to the role, he did so with greater and more vocal reluctance.
Yet over the following three years he would end up donning the cape four times more - however much he wanted to give up the character, it seemingly had no intention of relinquishing him.
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By the time of 1969's Taste the Blood of Dracula - designed, like Brides of Dracula (1959) as a sequel in which Dracula himself did not appear, until Warners insisted otherwise at the last minute - he made no secret of his desire and intention never to appear as the character on screen again. Writing to the president of his fan club, he explained:
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You know how I feel about Hammer films in general and their presentation of the Dracula stories in particular. Imagine therefore my surprise when I discovered on my return from Portugal that my agent, with the very best of intentions, has virtually committed me to playing Dracula for the fourth time in yet another Hammer production, at present tentatively entitled Taste the Blood of Dracula. Words fail me... I have been assured by many people that the fact that I play Dracula does not in any way mean that I am taking a step backwards into further cheap horror movies.
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Though it in fact proved the most intelligent and original sequel so far, Taste the Blood gave Lee virtually nothing to do. Why then did he immediately accept another Dracula picture?
Therein lies one of the most interesting chapters of the saga, as Lee again explained to his fan club:
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On November 3rd I start what I hope will be positively my last film for Hammer. The tasteful title is Taste the Blood of Dracula. As usual, words fail me, as indeed they will also do in the film...
However, here comes one amusing aspect of the whole mess. I have long wanted, as you know, to do Bram Stoker's Dracula as he wrote it. I have now agreed to do this, for three weeks on location starting on October 13th. So I will be playing the role twice in the space of two months.
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At last he was to play Dracula exactly as Stoker conceived! What could possibly go wrong? (Answers on a postcard marked 'Harry Alan Towers'.)
El Conde Dracula (Count Dracula, 1970) is directed by Jesus Franco and it may be his best movie; certainly it is high among them. This is not to make any great claims, however.
The cult of Franco would have it that he is a true master of cinema, a neglected exploitation artist of great style and originality. True, he is sincere, and passionate, and a charming, enormously likeable and interesting character. But he's a hack, just like they always said. And as a creative artist he's pretty much inept, just like they always said. I can see there may be amazing things going on in his head when he conceives of his films, but he has far more than small budgets and limited opportunities stacked against him when the time comes to make something of them.
At his best, he doesn't quite spoil things. In Count Dracula he comes close to his best. In fact he deserves none of the blame for what is wrong with the film: that rests with profligate British producer Towers, who scripted the film under his customary pseudonym Peter Welbeck.
As if trying to build up poor Christopher Lee's hopes the better to dash them, he opens with this text:
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Over fifty years ago Bram Stoker wrote the greatest of all horror stories. Now, for the first time, we retell, exactly as he wrote, one of the first - and still the best - tales of the macabre.
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But he breaks his word almost instantly. Needless liberties are taken with the plot, many of the locations, costumes and performances are senselessly anachronistic, and the climax is simply thrown away. Franco, as is invariably the case, tries his very hardest with what talent he has. Towers, on the other hand, is perfectly capable of writing an entirely professional script (The Face of Fu Manchu, for instance) but unlike Franco he is lazy. And here he let his laziness waft away a project of the most enormous potential.
Having said all that, and I do stand by it, the time now comes to add that, wasted though it is, the potential of the project is so great, and the experiment such a fascinating one, that in the final analysis I have to say that I do love this film. It took me a few viewings to get past the clodhopping Franco touches and Towers's maddeningly half-hearted narrative, but once familiar with the film's debits I found that every viewing brought forth fresh pleasures. I now consider it a true favourite.
It gets everything wrong you'd expect it to. But it also gets things right. It remains the only film to recreate some of the creepiest sections of the book: the ride to the castle with Dracula commanding the wolves, the woman who comes to the castle begging for the return of her abducted baby, Dracula's brides preparing to feed upon it, squealing in a bag.
Lee seizes the chance to finally do Dracula just the way he wanted to and gives the best performance any actor has ever given in the role. "The blood of Atilla throws through these veins!" How he must have relished finally getting the chance to deliver all that Stoker dialogue, especially after coming from a Hammer film where the he says about a dozen words in total!
As with the Tod Browning film, the opening reels are the thing - once we're in Herbert Lom's sanatorium in seventies Budapest or wherever it is, it is obvious we've seen the best of it. But Bruno Nicolai's music score is terrific and entirely professional, Soledad Miranda and Maria Rohm are arresting indeed as Lucy and Mina, and in the Transylvania sequences - filmed in a seemingly genuine castle somewhere - Franco's hit and miss approach to locations scores a most definite hit. The long, wordless scenes of Dracula on the prowl, getting younger the more he feeds, as per Stoker, are better than anything in Hammer.
But for Lee, who seemed genuinely not to be expecting another business-as-usual Towers-Franco compromise, despite his experience with the pair in the past, the film was an inevitable disappointment.
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Back at Hammer, Scars of Dracula was rushed into production shortly after the release of the hybrid Taste the Blood. Like its predecessor, it was scripted as a possibly Lee-free affair, as the actor noted in his usual fan club letter:
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Think of it! Another Dracula! This is titled The Scars of Dracula, another subtle and intelligent title. I've read the script. I must admit it isn't bad at all. It's considerably better than the last one, but there's one extraordinary element in it and that is that no attempt is made at resuscitation. You remember that in all previous pictures he's been revived in various weird and wonderful ways after being, so to speak, destroyed in previous episodes. In this one there's no attempt at resuscitation/resurrection, none whatever. I think I know the reason for this... The reason they have brought the character back without accounting for his sudden appearance is, I'm quite certain, deliberately contrived in case I should say no and they can put in another actor (which they're always telling me they're going to do or will do one day) in which case there is no need for further continuity...
You probably are aware that the next Frankenstein they're making now is being made without Peter Cushing. I suppose they feel they can do without us now...
If there was anything else I would do it... I may have to do it, but I hope and pray, as I have for the last two pictures, that it will be the last time.
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Scars would in fact prove a different kind of film entirely to its predecessors, and with its extensive use of studio sets, including for some exteriors, it doesn't look much like a Hammer film at all.
As Lee surmises, it is as much a remake, or a rethink rather, of the original as a sequel, though the worst of both worlds was achieved when, after Lee signed on the line, a resuscitation scene was added, that did not follow from the previous film and made no sense at all. (Taste had ended with Dracula perishing in London; here his mortal remains are back in his Transylvanian castle - it has just occurred to me that Hammer never refer to Dracula's homeland as Transylvania: I wonder why - where a rubber vampire bat comes and dribbles blood on them. This causes him to reconstitute, via the simple expedient of playing his death scene from the previous film backwards.)
Director Roy Ward Baker brings a pre-Hammer sense of enchantment to the material, as he had to The Vampire Lovers, restoring Dracula's ability to communicate with animals and scale the outer walls of his castle, as well as giving him a nifty new trick of being able to open doors without touching them.
As if to underline that this is Dracula returning to his roots the film also reverts to the old 'unwary travellers' scenario, and makes Lee's Count again the sinister host - with more dialogue than even the first picture - and no acolyte responsible for his resurrection (unless you count the bat).
At the same time, however, the levels of gore and sadism are considerably upped; Dracula stabs a vampiress to death with a dagger and then (in stills, but no print I've ever seen) laps at her wounds, and tortures his servant Klove with a red hot sword.
Baker's misunderstood, deliberately artificial visual style tends to get the film dismissed as the weakest of the legitimate series, a judgement that overlooks the fact that it moves at a better than usual pace, and has in any case so unique an atmosphere that it is scarcely comparable. Only the effects prove beyond redemption, especially the rubber mask on the burning stuntman at the grand finale. "The Count is Back - with an eye for London's hotpants... and a taste for everything!"
Oh, pity poor Christopher Lee! Dracula AD 1972 (1972) was radical indeed. It revived the Count in nineteen-seventies Chelsea, brought back Peter Cushing to play Van Helsing's grandson and, to keep the recalcitrant Lee on his toes, set another potential replacement snapping at his heels: Christopher Neame, in the role of vampire disciple Johnny Alucard (an alias Van Helsing has to work out letter by letter with a pad and pencil).
The film begins with a prologue in which both Dracula and Van Helsing perish in Hyde Park in 1872. We then flashforward to Chelsea a hundred years later, where the Count is revived by a gang of thirtyish teenagers as part of a satanic ritual that begins with the solemn injunction to "dig the music, kids!" As luck would have it, one of the youngsters just happens to be Van Helsing's great-great-granddaughter (Stephanie Beacham) and, well, basically it all snowballs from there.
Curiosity, and a pre-release poster showing Dracula looming over a naked woman spreadeagled on the bonnet of a Mini Metro, made it a hit of sorts, but Lee led a chorus of protests against the liberties taken with mood and location. All subsequent critics have sided with him, but no matter how hard they try to deceive their readers and themselves, the fact is that nobody ever watches this film without thoroughly enjoying it. At one time it was illegal to say a good word for it at all; presently we are at that nervous, tentative, cowardly "it's rubbish, but I can't help liking it" phase. Ultimately the truth will out. It's a great movie. It's fast paced, it's exciting, it has a great score, it's creepy and it's inventive. Caroline Munro is in there. Nothing wrong with it at all.

The whole idea, we are forever being told, is so inane as to make the film impossible to take seriously. Dracula in the seventies! Oh please! But isn't the guy supposed to be hundreds of years old? So we might just as well say 'Dracula in Victorian London! Oh please!'
Universal had moved him to a contemporary setting, and so of course had Stoker. Then there's the contradictory complaint that he's stuck in an abandoned church and does not interact with modernity in any way, whereas Stoker's Dracula was well up on modern communications, railway timetables and the like. Yeah, but then, Stoker's Dracula hadn't just been revived, with a century of catch-up to do.
Intriguingly, however, the next film would not only abandon making even a token gesture of explaining how he has been brought back to life (opting instead for the Universal Wolf Man tactic of simply hoping, or more likely assuming, that you will have completely forgotten the ending of the previous installment you saw about six months ago), but would also make a thoroughly modern vampire indeed of him, with an office at the top of a London tower block and a network of acolytes at the heart of the British establishment.

"I'm doing the next one under protest. I just think it's fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives - fatuous, pointless, absurd... " Once again, Christopher Lee was proving a Hammer publicist's dream with his public pronouncements on the subject of the next modern dress Dracula which, in fairness, was at the time provisionally titled Dracula Is Dead and Well and Living in London.
Bearing in mind that he'd been saying he would do no more Draculas for nearly a decade by this time, it's tempting to scan what eventually became The Satanic Rites of Dracula for some extra special reason why this was, in fact, the one where he stuck to his guns. And it's not that it was the last one, because it wasn't. He could have had a nice trip to Hong Kong with his pal Peter to do the Seven Golden Vampires gig.
So was there some extra special reason why Satanic Rites tipped him over the edge, when the pulling-the-stake-out from Risen From the Grave and the hanging-out-with-teenagers in AD 72 left him snarling but still open to offers? Well, the short answer is no, nothing obvious; Lee did say that he called it quits because he'd finally had enough and this this one was a new low in absurdity, but he'd been saying that forever, and it isn't.
I find the film hugely entertaining, and so do most people I know when they come to it for the first time, expecting more of the AD 1972 same. Dracula is masquerading as property tycoon DD Denham and plotting to destroy every living thing (and by extension himself) with a deadly plague virus. His campaign operates from an English country house guarded by bikers in sheepskin bodywarmers. The plot is intricate spy-movie stuff and there's a plethora of Bond-style gadgets and action sequences. It's all fun and highly inventive; the only problem, really, is that someone forgot to put Dracula in it: Lee gets a self-contained thirty-second biting-a-woman scene half an hour in, then that's it for him till the big ending.
It's an interesting one, though, and the first time in the entire series that he is killed in the traditional manner of having a stake driven through his heart. Before that, however, we see him react with horror at the prospect of a silver bullet, and learn that he lives in dread of the hawthorn bush, from which was (apparently) fashioned Christ's crown of thorns. To which Lady Bracknell might have observed, watching the climax, that to therefore have one growing in your own garden may be considered unfortunate, to walk through rather than around it when Van Helsing calls you from the other side looks like carelessness.

And here, perishing in his London garden from a surfeit of hawthorn, is where Lee said finis. Whatever the final straw was (and it may well have been a far better offer from the James Bond people), when Peter Cushing travelled to Hong Kong for The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), a collaboration between Hammer and the Shaw Brothers that came off looking like a collaboration between Hammer and the Ritz Brothers, he travelled alone.

Another in the 'impossible to dislike category', this 'first kung fu horror spectacular' boasts some impressive slo-mo demon-vampire-zombies and a wonderfully lurid vampire's lair, where topless girls are strapped to boards around a bubbling cauldron of blood, as just two of its many attractions. What it cannot boast is Christopher Lee. Instead it boasts John Forbes-Robertson. You may know him as Henry Possett in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Or you may not know him at all.

The gist is that a Chinese vampire travels to Transylvania in 1804 to seek Dracula's aid in restoring to their former glory the legendary but now weak and slumbering Seven Golden Vampires, one-time scourge and tyrant-rulers of a small Chinese village. Always happy to do his bit for struggling international vampire cults, Dracula enters the body of his visitor and high-tails it to China to help out his brothers.

A century later, Van Helsing, now making his living on the proto-David Icke wacko lecture tour circuit, agrees to lend his specialist assistance to an expedition intent on getting rid of the golden vampires once and for all. He travels to China with his son (played by Robin Stewart, Sid James's son from Bless This House), Julie Ege (as a wealthy aristocratic feminist adventuress with large breasts) and a crack team of kung fu vampire hunters.

In order to allow for the requisite number of martial arts sequences the team opt to wait until nightfall for the vampires to rise and then fight them, rather than, as you or I might do, kill them in the daytime while they are still asleep.

It's a shame Lee couldn't have been tempted. It's such a nostalgic film, with whole chunks of James Bernard's original Dracula score re-used and a screenplay that returns the films to the Victorian era, meaning that Cushing is again playing the original Van Helsing, and the film is chronologically incompatible with the rest of the series. (It also contradicts itself by setting its prologue a century before the main action, and thus making it impossible for the strictly mortal Van Helsing to have ever encountered Dracula before. Hammer really didn't care by this time.)

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And that was that. Requiescat in Pace Ultima.

Compared to those made in the sixties, these later Draculas, including the one Hammer in which Lee did not appear and the non-Hammer in which he did, are certainly a wilder bunch, and it is true that they lack the simple excellence in photography, design, and production value shared by their predecessors: Dracula, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (my favourite for all sorts of reasons, some of them verging on defensible) and Taste The Blood of Dracula. But neither should any of them be dismissed, and it's a pity that Lee found so little to enjoy about making them, understandable though his fear of typecasting was.
For better or worse, these films are a large part of the reason why his name and image and presence will endure long after the majority of his acting peers - including many of those on whose careers he must have looked with the utmost professional envy - are forgotten.

(The Christopher Lee quotes are taken from Wayne Kinsey's Hammer Films: The Elstree Studios Years, his highly readable follow-up to Hammer Films: The Bray Studios Years, which is also highly readable, as well as easily the best book ever written on the company.)

The Mummy (1932): “Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?”

If Ancient Egypt had not already existed, Carl Laemmle Jr would have had his lawyers look into getting it invented.

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The story of the tomb of Tutankhamen, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, set its visual signature on the Jazz Age and Art Deco and brought a touch of ancient mystery to a world that had in most other respects an aggressively forward trajectory.

And then there was that delicious nonsense about vengeful curses, striking down the members of the expedition one by one. It may have been journalistic hooey, but it was also irresistible.

Here was a horror film ready written: an expedition opens a sealed tomb, and meets some dreadful supernatural peril - exactly the fusion of ancient and modern Universal had been seeking in their screenplays, and in the most romantic setting imaginable. No problem with Carla Laemmle and her guidebook turning up here: here, in reality, was a land like Universal’s Transylvania, where modern conveniences and ancient evils rubbed along together. It could have been invented for the express purpose of Universal horror movies. Howard Carter’s first thought as he made that hole in the entrance to Tutankhamen’s tomb and peered though should have been, “Universal are certainly going to get some mileage out of this one.”

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There had been mummies in literature before; Arthur Conan Doyle had written a story about them, Edgar Allan Poe had ruminated in more than usually puckish mode too. But this story, this mix of two ideas (the revived mummy and the killing off of Western archaeologists after a sensational find), this essence of every single mummy film you ever saw, this is copyrighted Universal Studios, 1932.

There was never any question, for instance, that the Tutankhamen story would have inspired a supernatural mystery set entirely in Ancient Egypt. No, it is precisely that collision between old and new, the literal break in the wall that Howard Carter’s chisel made between the age of mystic rites and strange forces and the age of twenties freedom and glamour, that is the commodity in which this film trades.

Here was a world that was at once dark and creepy and not fully explained, and at the same time already central to Western culture and familiar to the American filmgoer. It was the film they had been trying to make all the time. Whichever way you look at it, after Dracula and Frankenstein, it just had to be the Mummy on next.

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Is The Mummy the masterpiece of Universal horror?

It is not (quite) my favourite: that, as for so many of us, is the one I saw first. But it does represent the perfection of that formula Universal was tinkering with in the early thirties. No other of their films mixes ancient superstition, supernatural evil and modern trappings quite so easily and reasonably. The atmosphere is beautifully maintained throughout (the best-directed Universal horror?) and there are none of the uneasy juxtapositions and lurches in tone that resulted from the attempts to modernise Dracula and Frankenstein.

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Now, here we need to stop and remind ourselves that the original mummy movie, a directorial reward at last for German camera wizard Karl Freund, is not part of the Universal mummy series that played to delighted twelve-year-old boys throughout the war years, any more than The Wolf Man is a sequel to Werewolf of London. This is, in fact, about as different as a movie can be while still being about a resurrected Egyptian mummy at large in the present day.

Outside of one amazingly sophisticated opening scene, we do not even see Karloff bandaged. Even here, we get only a few quick shots of a brilliant mummy make up that took Jack Pierce hours to put on Karloff.

We see him in his sarcophagus, we see him come very dimly to life, and we see one arm move. A moment later, we see his hand, and finally a single bandage trailing behind him as he leaves. And that’s it for one of Jack Pierce’s best ever make-ups.

As an aesthetic decision it’s perfectly justified: the scene is suggestive and creepy to a degree far greater than anything in the later Kharis movies, one of the few Universal moments that really do rival the subtle effects of Val Lewton at RKO. (But how it was got past the value-for-money front office is mysterious indeed.)

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If The Flying Serpent is a remake of The Devil Bat (and don’t you just love knowing exactly what I’m talking about there?) then The Mummy is a remake of Dracula.

Edward Van Sloan is Van Helsing gone bats on Egyptian folklore, subjecting leading lady Zita Johann, under the monster’s spell, to leading questions in the drawing room, while David Manners resumes his strategy of standing a pace or two behind her looking worried. Statues of Isis are handed out in place of crucifixes. There is even a civilised drawing room confrontation scene between wise Van Sloan and the monster.

This seems one of the safest projects of the early Universal movies, a surefire package like the monster rallies of the forties. The sedate, heavy, almost perfumed atmosphere, however, was not, presumably, what the studio ordered, but Freund’s intention seems to have been to recreate an opiate nightmare, a fleeting, flesh-creeping thing, rather than just another fight on the ramparts.

Observe the gorgeous scenes of Karloff loitering in the Cairo museum at night; intoning by candlelight. And look again at the most famous sequence, where the mummy first comes to life. It is so slow, and unfolds in such glorious Dracula silence, every shot counts, every moment is held just long enough… until the sudden eruption of maniacal laughter. (“You should have seen his face!”) This must have poleaxed them in 1932.

Only the flashback sequence interrupts the rhythm. Embedded within the movie, introduced by Karloff as “memories of love and crime and death”, it is a cracking, pacy, beautifully acted five-minute silent movie in its own right, with wonderful baroque performances (one-time silent actor Karloff still knows how it’s done), Cecil B DeMille costumes, Karloff entombed alive, and even a bit of good old-fashioned gore as a line of servants is bloodily impaled.

The rest of the film is as sedate and measured as the movements of Karloff’s crumbly and decrepit (but still good for his age) Egyptian scholar, who insinuates himself into the British expeditionary party for obscure motives that eventually resolve themselves in a reincarnation fantasy, as Karloff recognises Zita Johann as his long lost Egyptian queen reborn. (“Ancient Egypt! Nothing modern!” she swoons approvingly when she sees his interior décor.)

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Johann’s is widely regarded as the most nuanced female performance in the Universal sequence, and certainly, few actresses playing a hypnotic trance have proved so hypnotic. Even so, her reputation is smaller than her fascinating, brief filmography and extraordinary looks warrant: she should be an icon alongside Barbara Steele or even Louise Brooks.

She only made seven movies in her three-year career between 1931 and 1934; The Mummy being her third (after The Struggle [1931] for D.W. Griffith, and macho fishing drama Tiger Shark [1932] for Howard Hawks.) After her trip to the tombs, she led Luxury Liner (1933), a big project from Paramount, and then one of the truly odd films of Hollywood, The Man Who Dared (1933), Fox’s semi-fictional drama based on a true event in which a man was killed in the line of fire during an assassination attempt on Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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But most fascinating of all, she made one of the most unusual and provocative independent oddities of the pre-Code years, The Sin of Nora Moran (1933), playing an innocent woman about to be executed for murder.

This is a strange and relentlessly gloomy meditation on fate and mortality, told partly in flashback and partly in semi-symbolic form, in dreams and fantasies, which constantly butt into each other. It's pre-Code so, innocent though she is, she dies anyway, the real killer puts a gun to his head, and a character who has perverted the course of justice twice sums up for us and walks free.

Adultery, murders covered up by characters who go unpunished, and a supernatural climax, this really should have been Johann’s springboard to stardom. But maybe the studios weren’t looking; maybe her style is just that bit too unusual. She would have gone over in silents, for sure.

To get the most from Johann’s performance in The Mummy it’s good to come to it after watching Nora Moran rather than the other way round. That abrupt cut to our first glimpse of her, eighteen minutes in, seems instantly loaded with portent if you’ve just watched her grappling with destiny for an hour, if you already know what those soulful eyes are capable of conveying.

Watch the sequence where Karloff summons her while she is at a dance, and she walks from the dance floor, out of the building and into a taxi. It is beautifully shot, with an especially well photographed reverse tracking shot as Johann separates from her dancing partner and walks directly towards the camera, short-haired, round-faced, massive-eyed. And I‘m not sure what she’s wearing in that back-of-the-taxi shot, twenty-two minutes in, but what a fantastic composition!

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Once in Karloff’s clutches, he wastes no time getting her into a snake headdress and jewelled bikini resembling one of Claudette Colbert’s fetishistic outfits from DeMille’s Cleopatra; it makes you realise just how overrated historical authenticity can be. But enjoy it while you can: like Maureen O’Sullivan’s two-piece in the pre-Code Tarzan movies, costumes like this were not to survive the purge of ’34.

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And here’s David Manners, again, as I said. Who remembers now that he was actually a lot more than the guy that turns up here and in Dracula and The Black Cat... that through the pre-Code years he maintained a leading man career that constantly hovered on the brink of real stardom?

He’s certainly chiselled and dapper, and always extremely likeable; as an actor... well, I suppose it would be fair to say that the day after they handed out great dramatic talent, they made him chiselled and dapper and extremely likeable. He was in Journey’s End and The Last Flight; he’s with Stanwyck in The Miracle Woman for Capra; he’s the fiancé Katharine Hepburn spurns to look after her insane father in Cukor’s Bill of Divorcement.

If there is a problem with Manners, it is that he rarely seems to be in quite the same class as his leading ladies. Actors need real stature if they’re not to be pushed off the edge of the frame by the likes of Stanwyck and Hepburn. Zita Johann is the same. When she asks him “Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?” and he seems unable even to acknowledge that the question is provocative, we realise that some movie heroes really are too chiselled and dapper for their own good.

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If you want to see what he’s like in a straight movie as opposed to a horror (or you can just take my word: he’s pretty much the same), a fine choice to plump for is Man Wanted (1931), prime pre-Code society drama from Warners.

Manners, who gets to do some comedy here, is a department store demonstrator who becomes magazine editor Kay Francis’s male secretary after he turns up at her office at 9pm to sell her a rowing machine. (Whatever happened to great plots like this?) Naturally, his girlfriend is against the idea (the peerless Una Merkel, in perhaps her funniest ever performance) and Francis’s philandering husband is just looking for an excuse to divorce her…

Another good reason for watching Man Wanted is that Manners’s boss at the department store, the guy who motivates him to get out there and sell that rowing machine, is our old pal Edward Van Sloan.

Strange to hear that voice, which we are so used to hearing delivering mystic mumbo jumbo in as mannered and heightened a fashion as Lugosi’s, here rattling its way through slangy American dialogue with pace and confidence and the emphases in all the right places. This is what Lugosi dreamed of being able to do, though of course Van Sloan ended up in The Phantom Creeps just as surely as he did.

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Britain's scariest castle

Rather than a location that has been featured in a horror film, I thought I'd introduce you to a location that hasn't been used in a horror film but should have been.
To the best of my knowledge, the only time that Berry Pomeroy Castle in Devon has been featured in a movie it was in one of those ballsachingly witless Comic Strip Presents Famous Five parodies.
Never, so far as I'm aware, has it been recognised for what it is: the greatest unused standing horror film set in Britain.
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In the book James Herbert's Dark Places, the great Mr H writes: "It's said that present-day visitors to the site frequently shiver from inexplicable chills, even on bright afternoons."
You can't see it from the main road. You arrive by turning down a long, winding road shrouded on both sides by overhanging trees that entirely obscure your view both left and right. Then, suddenly the road widens, you come to a clearing, and there she is...
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True, it is no longer as eerie it was. Built in the fifteenth century, and at one time the home of Edward Seymour, governor of the boy king Edward VI and brother of Henry VIII's wife Jane, it has been a ruin since the early eighteenth century.
For generations after, its origins and history were lost beneath a mantle of ivy and neglect. When I used to visit it as a young boy it was still in total, untended disrepair; you could drive up and wander in at any time, and watch bits fall off the walls. At dusk especially, the atmosphere was extraordinary.
Lately it has been purchased by English Heritage, who have done some excellent renovation (and discovered a splendid late medieval wall painting beneath a thick growth of moss) but also quite a bit of restoration, which always seems to subtract at least as much as it adds. Now you have to pay to get in, everything is signposted and labelled, the dangerous bits are fenced off, and something of the romance has inevitably gone.
. But it's still an amazing place; every young boy's dream of a spooky castle, with ramparts, dungeons, narrow concealed passageways, and a wealth of ghost stories which, if I believed in such things, I'd be bothered to tell you about.
.If you'd like to see some more great photographs of Berry Pomeroy Castle, please click here.

Trends in Modern Horror 1: The Postmodern Turn

The story so far...

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The Horror Film was invented in America in 1931, specialising in supernatural subjects inherited from European literature and folklore.

By the end of the Second World War, familiarity had blunted their horror value, and they had become fitting subjects for parody.

The genre retreated, its place taken by radiation-enlarged insects, alien visitation and the other terrors of the horror-science fiction film.

In the late fifties, Hammer, a British company, remade the old supernatural horrors with a new kind of realism in the acting and - most importantly - with onscreen blood and dismembered body parts. The result was the fluke revival of traditional horror not only in Britain but also America, Spain, Italy and elsewhere.

By the seventies, the public had again tired of monsters but the realism of Hammer's style, coupled with the collapse of American film censorship spawned a new kind of intense and disturbing modern gothic, led by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House On The Left.

What these films were not, however, is mainstream successes in the way that the '31-'45 and '57-'73 cycle had been. That was achieved by a low-budget horror called Halloween, which brought the new style into a crowd-pleasing suspense format.

The result was a whole wave of similar slasher movies in which teens are stalked and killed by masked outsiders in either high school or woodsy settings, often on significant festival days, and the third big horror cycle.

This became played out around 1984, shortly after the last freak hit of the cycle, an unusually supernatural variation called A Nightmare On Elm Street.

The next decade or so were perhaps the darkest year for horror, the genre kept alive only by an insular clique of fans, the films rarely rewarded with cinema release. Endless rounds of sequels to Freddy and Jason kept the genre out of mainstream consciousness, and the place of horror on screen was taken by another related genre, just as it had been when science fiction nudged it aside in the fifties. This time it was the serial killer film, inspired by a nasty, silly smash hit called The Silence of the Lambs, in which genius mass-murderers on killing sprees leave elaborate clues and ritualised crime scenes for the police to unravel.

Once again, the traditional horror film had been left looking old-fashioned and no longer viable.

Now read on...

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Scream (1996), ostensibly another film about a masked psychopath stalking American high school girls, is in fact one of the most important films in the history of the genre, as central as Halloween (1978), Psycho (1960) or, indeed, Dracula (1931).

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It is the fate of all true innovators to become commonplace almost overnight, and like many another milestone it is already a period piece. (“What are you doing with a cellular telephone, son?” the police ask one character).

Yet its achievement was vast. It rescued horror from the doldrums of what future chroniclers will call the genre’s ‘straight to video years’, and enabled it to once again to engage with mainstream audiences and get serious critical acclaim.

It rescued Wes Craven from a declining career post-Freddy Krueger, and even gave the genre an era-defining rep company of recurring players, reinforcing the feeling that a renaissance was underway. (But unlike the horror icons of a previous generation, these were all young women: Neve Campbell, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar.)

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The twist was Postmodernism. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson was a Tarantinoesque film fanatic devoted above all else to Halloween and its progeny, and his screenplay seemed fresh in that it unfolded within an explicitly horror movie context.

The film is as much about films where teenagers are killed by a masked maniac as it is a film where teenagers are killed by a masked maniac. Heroine Neve Campbell bemoans the tendency of horror film heroines to run up stairs rather than out the front door, an error she promptly repeats when confronted with a 'real' killer. The murderers wear a ghoulish ‘Father Death’ costume, but the choice does not ‘mean’ anything, nor does it relate to some earlier circumstance; it’s simply the sort of thing the killers wear in a horror film, and that is how the murderers view themselves.

All the characters relate to each other via the set of movie clichés most befitting their station: the police employ the psychobabble of the serial killer movie (indeed Scream was able to bring horror back to public acclaim via a close alliance with this subgenre), the girls wonder who will play them in the inevitable movie, and the frat house element sit around watching horror movies and attempting to decipher the generic rules that might just give them the survivor’s advantage above others in the victim pool.

The scene in which movie geek Randy (Jamie Kennedy) explains the rules for surviving a horror film is one of two that most impressed genre-savvy critics, (“Behind you!” he shouts repeatedly to Jamie Lee Curtis as he watches Halloween, unaware that the real killer is lurking behind him); the other of course being the prologue, in which first victim Drew Barrymore is quizzed on her horror film trivia knowledge before being gruesomely dispatched.

The film's strength, however, is that it did not merely coast on these touches (as the sequels would) but grounded them in brilliantly directed suspense sequences and a genuinely effective and surprising whodunnit script.

It also had a hip young cast, a rock soundtrack and a new kind of attitude: basically one of extreme callousness, as censorship campaigners were quick to notice. The film is about characters who apply a film script glibness to real acts of horror and murder themselves inspired by cinema. No wonder it contains moments in which characters remonstrate with others over their heartlessness and detachment from reality (most notably Henry Winkler’s uncredited High School principal).

But the killers are allowed to dictate the overall tone of the film itself, and it is surely beyond dissent that the film glamourises brutality and the cult of murder, with all of the frivolousness and insincerity it purports to wag its finger at. It certainly goes out of its way not to distance itself from the killers’ glib certainty that violence is cool.

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Nonetheless, it was the self-reference and sass that got everyone talking about horror films again, and - crucially - that got them going to see them again; that pulled off the old trick of making a moribund genre cool again.

There were precedents, of course - there always are once you know what you're looking for.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) had the intertextual postmodernism, if not, perhaps, the humour, but An American Werewolf in London certainly had both back in 1981. Meanwhile the genre’s re-engagement with mainstream young filmgoers, intertextual sass and new stars had all been first assembled in The Craft (1996), a fun film about high school witches that helped re-establish the teen credibility of horror, and thus not only pipped Scream to the post, but also paved the way for tv off-shoots like Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the latter of which had ironically begun its days as a totally uncool movie about which nobody had cared much at all.

But then - how far back do you want to go? Wasn't Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein plainly on a road heading this way? What about Lugosi's The Ape Man, through which wanders a mysterious, unidentified character, revealed at the end to be the screenwriter. ("Screwy idea, wasn't it?")

You can go mad chasing these kinds of rabbits down these kinds of holes. In the end it's the winner that gets the gold cup, and Scream won because it took those ingredients - the ratio of inheritance to invention will be lost to time so we may as well let it rest - and put them all together and did it right, at just the moment that people seemed to want it. That's all there is to it.
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The film spawned two sequels, the most inept and pointless parody ever made (Scary Movie - unquestionably the work of mental defectives), and a legion of imitators.

Just as Halloween was used as a template by a decade of other movies not just in its essentials but its incidentals also, so Scream bequeathed a generation of movies that were structured as whodunnits, with the killers usually revealed to be one of the main cast rather than a masked outsider, monster or freak - an innovation with far more precedent in Italian gialli than the previous generation of American slashers ostensibly being referenced.

..The big surprise with the official follow-ups was how ordinary they were. Scream 2 and 3 (1997 and 2000) both feel much longer than the original to sit through, though their running times differ only slightly. Invention is strictly rationed, even with a whole new box of mirrors to play with. (The first sequel is set around the release of Stab, the movie based on the events of the first - with Heather Graham amusingly reprising Drew Barrymore's iconic opening scene, this time with old-style cliches intact, including a shower scene - and is full of discussion about the merits of horror sequels. The second concerns the making of Stab 3, and features one memorable moment in which Neve Campbell finds herself being chased by the killer through an exact replica of her house on a Hollywood sound stage.)

On the whole both films are considerable disappointments, suffering from a lack of freshness that is perhaps forgivable, and a rampant hubris which surely is not. Both sequels are outrageously in love with themselves, expecting us to remember every minor plot turn from the first film, and love the characters enough to welcome their constant survival of plainly fatal butcherings.

In both the killer turns out to be someone who only came in to the story for that movie, and in neither case is their identity a surprise. Which is not to say you'll necessarily guess who it is, merely that who it is doesn't matter. It could be any one of them, and it turns out it is.

The trouble with horror films is that they've always reproduced not in a Darwinian way, retaining the beneficial features and casting off the unsuccessful, but in a Rank Xerox way, reproducing every single chance innovation of the great defining template movie, be it Dracula or Psycho or Halloween or Scream.

There's no dramatic or stylistic reason why so many of the first-wave slashers should revolve around specific times of the year: it's just that Friday the 13th copied Halloween and so My Bloody Valentine and Prom Night and Happy Birthday To Me became a mathematical inevitability.

So, instantly, the post-Scream variations settle into a rut where the characters watched horror films on the television, icons of the genre appear in cameos and the poster would feature a large scary image beneath which the cast were shown in a line, looking cool, often in fan mag poses rather than their film costumes.

This way the films very quickly lose their crossover appeal - which is rooted in their novelty - and become again the property of audiences who 'like that sort of thing'. The result is ossification. It was ironic but inevitable that Scream's witty dissections of horror conventions, sharp enough to draw huge crowds of folks who ordinarily wouldn't dream of going to "some Wes Carpenter flick", should almost instantly become generic conventions, so that critics very soon started heaping praise on films that played the horror dead straight for their very absence of those qualities they had recently hailed as a breakthrough.

And when Williamson popped up again to wave his postmodern wand over the sci fi horror (The Faculty) and even the werewolf movie (Cursed), the general feeling was that the joke isn't funny anymore.

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I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, my favourite of the bunch) was a hit, and cleared a space alongside Neve Campbell for Jennifer Love Hewitt to establish her scream queen royalty status, still being put to good use in her tv series Ghost Whisperer, an odd mix of great scares and sappy new age hugging and crying. The film, written again by Williamson but seemingly marking a conscious effort to put some layers of skin back on the genre onion, also featured Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose bubbliness and subsequent Buffy-derived reputation for invincibility makes her murder here, and even more so in Scream 2, a genuine shock.

Successful too, by and large, was Final Destination (2000), which applied the new rules to the supernatural, and revived the moribund trope of naming the characters after significant directors and stars.

But Urban Legend (1997, my other favourite) - which spun a chance remark in Scream into an an entire screenplay, kicked off with a great first scene and welcomed Alicia Witt and Rebecca Gayheart to the pantheon - and Valentine (2001) - which riffed on Carrie, borrowed David Boreanaz from Buffy and had a bikini-clad Denise Richards killed in a swimming pool with a road drill - played to noticeably smaller and more specialised crowds. No longer scoring the crossover success of Scream and Last Summer, the genre was showing worrying signs of slipping back into its teen male ghetto.

Cherry Falls (2000), which cleverly took on the original slashers' tendency to kill the young lovers and leave the wholesome girl alive by having its killer target high school virgins, didn't even get a cinema release. By the time Urban Legends: Final Cut and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer rolled around it was obvious that history was repeating itself.

Final Destination took three episodes to reach itself. I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer went straight to video. The unimaginable Scream 4 is apparently still on course for a 2010 release.

Clearly the genre was going to have to reinvent again, and quickly, if it was to stay a mainstream concern. This, surprisingly enough, it would do, but the formula would mutate at least twice more on the journey.

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(Coming soon... Trends in Modern Horror 2: Revenge of the Remake)

Herschell Gordon Lewis: Happy Birthday, Wizard of Gore

I began this blog on the thirteenth of June this year, with a small piece celebrating the knighthood of Christopher Lee. (All the older pieces are crossovers from Movietone News.)
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Somehow, I then managed to let June the fifteenth drift idly by, without stopping to note that it was the eightieth birthday of one of the most celebrated, reviled, loved, hated and incontestably significant film-makers ever to work in the horror genre.
That man is of course the wizard of gore himself, Mr Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man who invented the gore film and created in Blood Feast one of the dozen or so most important horror movies of all time.
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I came of age as a film fan at the height of the mania for "incredibly strange films", the moment when systematic serious critical scrutiny was devoted for the first time to the universe of international exploitation cinema. The moment had been anticipated somewhat by the slightly earlier fad for bad movies, spearheaded by the Medved Brothers and their Golden Turkey Awards, but this was altogether different: it was academic; it took the films seriously and on occasion even went so far as to hail them as great art.
From its researches a new pantheon of alternative artists emerged: Lewis, Meyer, Steckler, Wishman, Mikels...
It was an exhilarating time. Learning about these strange and eccentric directors and their wild product was undoubtedly one of the most exciting periods of my film education. Lewis, we learned, was the gore man, whose breakthrough shocker Blood Feast had revolutionised the horror film by showing dismemberment, guts and gore in unflinching - if reassuringly unrealistic - close-up profusion, for the first time on the American screen.
The interesting thing, however, is that if one was a young English boy, growing up in a country with few outlets for bizarre non-mainstream cinema and what remained at that time a pretty thoroughgoing board of censors (pornography was unequivocally illegal, for instance), there was very little opportunity to actually see the films being discussed, simply because the saleable ones were too controversial, and the uncontroversial ones weren't saleable.

So apart from a few enticing clips on documentaries, we devoured everything we could read about the films, but hardly ever got the chance to see any of them.
(I can still remember my excitement at finally getting hold of copies of 2,000 Maniacs, which turned out to be cut, She-Devils on Wheels, which turned out to be boring, and Double Agent 73 - and we all know how that turned out.)
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Eventually, that would all change. The market for obscure exploitation grew large enough to justify proper video and DVD releases, and censorship relaxed sufficiently to pass the once outrageous titles as suitable for adults. And by and large, it was the saddest comedown of all time.
All these films that seemed so interesting to read about, and which Andrea Juno and the like had assured us were real, stimulating works of alternative art, turned out to be pretty much exactly what the squares and the straights had said all along - too cheap to take seriously, too graceless to enjoy as trash - and dull, dull, dull.

Yes, that was the cruellest surprise: the majority of them were desperately boring.
The only exceptions for me, and the only films of that tradition that I continue to own and watch, were a few of Lewis's. Of all those dozens and dozens of films, with their so enticing titles and posters and plots, the only ones that lived up to the hype for me were Blood Feast, 2,000 Maniacs, Color Me Blood Red and The Wizard of Gore.
I was quite a bit older when I caught up with them, and my enthusiasm for their world had long been dissipated by ever more tedious trips to the shallow well of Russ Meyer and Jesus Franco and John Waters, and all those others so much better read about than sampled. I bought Blood Feast out of only the mildest residual curiosity at the chance to finally see a film I had done so much thinking and reading about over so formative a period of my life.
I was expecting to be, at best, mildly amused, slightly interested. But the damned thing worked like it had never been out of the box.
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This is not to say that it was without fault, for that would be a frankly crazy thing to say. On one level all of Lewis's films are pretty much a catalogue of faults. Neither am I claiming that it works as a horror-suspense film: it is not exciting and it is not scary, nor was it ever.
But here at last was that demented creative energy we were taught to believe was common to the whole crowd of them, that sense of being taken into a truly unique imagination, unfettered at any stage by the traditional restraints imposed upon artists in the mainstream machine.
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Blood Feast (1963) is the first, simplest and most creatively inspired of the man's oeuvre, if not perhaps the best in the strictly relative sense in which Lewis's movies can be assessed for quality. It's short, the plot is nonsensical, much of what happens in it is impossible, and, as many before me have pointed out, the acting is not merely amateurish but wretched: much worse, in fact, than might be expected of a cast chosen completely at random.
The narrative is of course merely an excuse to string a series of set-piece outrages together, and is insufficient even as that.
Why, then, does it continue to cast the spell that transfixed drive-in audiences on original release?
Partly, because the film has a very modern kind of knowingness to it. There is an inept quality to much of it fully the equal of Ed Wood, but where Wood was naive and heartfelt, Lewis is cynical and mocking. The statue of Ishtar is a shop window mannequin sprayed gold not solely because Lewis couldn't afford anything better, nor solely because he simply couldn't care, but because he couldn't afford anything better and simply couldn't care.
That's why the book the detectives are reading is called Ancient Weird Religious Rites; it's why Fuad Ramses, crazed Egyptian caterer, chooses a blonde co-ed's birthday party, seemingly at random, to be the venue at which he stages the atrocity for which he has presumably been planning his whole adult life, then tries to kill the girl herself in the kitchen before unveiling it, then runs away when she screams, then falls in a garbage truck fleeing the police. It's why he shuffles along with a pronounced limp, yet somehow manages to outrun several policemen in hot pursuit.
And it's why the newspaper headline following a scene in which a girl's legs are cut off is LEGS CUT OFF!!!
Partly because verisimilitude costs money that Lewis does not have, but also because he knows - as Wood (whose aspirations, paradoxically, were so much higher) does not - that money spent on verisimilitude is money wasted.

This is the key to Lewis's directorial uniqueness, why his films are unmistakably his, why they are mocking rather than self-mocking, and why his violence is simultaneously gross and nonthreatening. These absurdities listed above are not intended to be funny, yet neither is Lewis unaware of their absurdity, both individually and cumulatively. He just knew that everything was incidental, and he knew that his target audience would not be troubled.

Interviewed in the book Incredibly Strange Films it is interesting to see him bridle at the suggestion that the films could be read as self-parodying, and that the original audiences found them funny:

I don't share that view. The reason I don't is this: I'm not a film historian. I'm the kind of jerk who sits in the theater watching the audience, and if they react, that's all I care about. (...) That's what's missing today: no one thinks in terms of audience reaction. They make films like Heaven's Gate. They choose impossible, stupid titles; the titles alone would keep people out of the theaters... They don't think in terms of showmanship. Some of the campaigns I see look like they were written by half-wit oysters.

In a neat reversal, it is now the sophisticates who cherish Lewis, as he himself observed when asked to describe the typical H. G. Lewis audience member for an interview in the book The Sleaze Merchants:

A typical audience member would live south of the Mason-Dixon line, would be between twenty-five and forty-five, would live in rural rather than urban circumstances, would probably be male, would not be highly educated, and would have a terrific number of prejudices. Oddly enough, the fans I run into now in my posthumous appearances as an historical figure - a cult figure like the late James Dean - are exactly the opposite.

Blood Feast worked because it was perfectly pitched to its target audience; the films that followed were better, perhaps, but inevitably lacked the original's freshness and surprise. 2,000 Maniacs (1964) boasts what amounts almost to a coherent plot; it's a nice supernatural revenge story, and the murder scenes are inventive and reasonably well-staged.
Color Me Blood Red (1965), my personal favourite, is less liberal in its bloodshed (albeit incredibly intense in two sequences at least) but the film scores because it is basically a satire on the creative process, with Don Joseph's Adam Sorg unquestionably my favourite movie mad painter (though Bogey in The Two Mrs Carrolls comes close), slaughtering girls for their blood because it is the only way he can achieve the exact shade of red he needs for his hilarious paintings. There are some wonderful scenes of him locking antlers with exhibitors and critics, and a good deal of humour at the expense of would-be arbiters of aesthetic consensus. It's Lewis's wittiest horror film, and, for me at least, the most interesting; it's certainly the one I find myself watching most frequently.

Nonetheless, like those that followed (The Gruesome Twosome, A Taste of Blood, The Gore Gore Girls) it is really vital only to completists: to the casual historian of horror, Blood Feast tells you all you need.
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If a second helping were required, however, The Wizard of Gore (1972) may be the one to go for, since it is surely one of the very strangest horror films ever made, unspooling like a drunkard's nightmare, without least concession to logic, meaning or even internal consistency. Whereas his previous films had the flimsiest of functional plots, this one is truly anarchic - it deliberately makes no sense at all and frustrates every attempt to come to terms with it.
The basic idea is simple, and quintessential Lewis: Montag, master of illusion - played, like Blood Feast's Fuad Ramses, by a youngish actor made up terribly to look older - is a stage magician who hypnotises his audience into seeing on-stage acts of outrageous mutilation - including a pre-Tobe Hooper chainsaw massacre - as harmless illusion. This false perception is shared likewise by the victim, and somehow persists for a time after the show until, eventually, suddenly, reality reasserts itself and the victim reverts to a true state of hideously mutilated death!
Everything else about Montag's motives and actions is unexplained, and the basic idea - though fascinatingly strange - can't really be called clever because it simply makes no sense, nor ever attempts to. It could be the most knowingly peculiar horror film ever unleashed upon unsuspecting rednecks. Each new twist is more meaningless than the last, and by the time it finishes back at the beginning you'll swear you fell asleep somewhere in the middle, missed bits and dreamed others, or else that you're still asleep and the film doesn't really exist at all. Montag would certainly have you believe as much:
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Are you certain you know what reality is? How do you know that, at this second, you aren't asleep in your bed, dreaming that you are here in this theater? I know - it all seems too real... well, haven't you ever had a dream that seemed so very real... till you woke up? Then again, how do you know that you ever really did wake up? In fact, perhaps when you thought that you were waking up, you had actually just begun to dream. You see what I mean, don't you? All your life, your past, your rules of what can and cannot be... may all be part of one long dream from which you are about to awake - and discover the world as it really is!
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There's no answer to that, as Eric Morecambe would say, and no desire on Lewis's part to make anything of it, either: it's merely the most ridiculous peg he ever invented on which to hang a half-dozen set-pieces of outrageous mutilation and dismemberment.
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One final observation: if there is, by any chance, anyone reading this who was not previously aware of Lewis or his legacy, let me head off one possible misunderstanding. These films, though this would surely not be obvious from the above, are in no way comparable to the modern style of horror film that has come to be known as 'torture porn'. Lewis in no way trades on pain, distress or even sadism for his effects. Indeed, considering the material, it is amazing how little the films make even inadvertent use of these ingredients. (He himself once said in an interview that he would shy away from scenes in which the victims died slowly.) The action and set-ups are so wildly unrealistic that nobody could possibly become involved in the characters' plights to a degree sufficient either to be distressed or aroused by them. The drama is always, and deliberately, pitched at the most banal of levels. The gimmick, the twist, the disruption, the fault-line dividing Lewis's cinema from that of his peers is the totally unprecedented quantity and intensity of unflinching, onscreen blood and guts, in the most literal sense. As well as unexpected, it is also, of course, unjustified within the narrative context: Blood Feast, for example, is basically a cop thriller, but one that simply refuses to look away when the killer goes to work.
It need not absolve him of crimes against taste and decency if you feel, quite reasonably, that such things are in themselves abhorrent, neither does it grant him immunity from the charge of culpability in the matter of influence upon later, less innocent variations on the same model, but I feel certain that the man's own motives lay a million miles away from the exploitation of cruelty and suffering. Nothing is real here. It's the blood itself, divorced from all context, that fascinated, and continues to fascinate; it's the instinctive, primal lure (or recoil) of this simple physical commodity, that explains the man's unique and incredible success story.
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Fuad Ramses leans towards the camera. He looks ridiculous, with drawn-on eyebrows, talking to a woman giving one of the worst performances in screen history in one of the most negligible sets ever erected.

"Have you ever had... an Egyptian feast?"

The moment could not be more ludicrous. But the excitement is palpable.
Because we know what the film is called, and we've seen the opening titles, and we've seen the first scene, and we know that for the next hour all bets are off.
That worked for the original audiences and it still works for us now, and it's why Herschell Gordon Lewis has to be taken seriously, as a film-maker as well as a showman. Good or bad, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Whatever Happened to Billie Cassin? - The horror films of Joan Crawford

Now, please don't ask me about any pictures that followed Baby Jane.
They were all terrible, even the few I thought might be good. I made them because I needed the money or because I was bored or both. I hope they have been exhibited and withdrawn and are never heard from again.
If I weren't a Christian Scientist, and I saw Trog advertised on a marquee across the street, I think I'd contemplate suicide.
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- Conversations with Joan Crawford (Citadel Press, 1980)

So it came to this... Joan Crawford, perhaps the greatest, surely the most determined self-made star in the Hollywood firmament, the woman once described as "the spirit of all that it means to be young and gay today", our dancing daughter, sturdy-thighed hoofer, flapper with enormous eyes to drown in, the MGM upstart who stole Grand Hotel from beneath Garbo's imperious nose, queen of elegant anguish at Warners, the women's picture made flesh... after all that, it came to this.

Crawford was far from the only Hollywood icon to end her career in trashy horror. They were all doing it: Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Miriam Hopkins, Lana Turner. (Neither were hers the trashiest, as anyone who has seen Veronica Lake in Flesh Feast will happily confirm.)
But of them all, it was Joan who became most associated with horror in her later years, and it was Joan who had inaugurated the trend, alongside Bette Davis in that strange film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? - basically Sunset Boulevard rewritten as a cheap horror thriller.
Indeed, if her presence in these films was not so obviously reluctant, her attitude to the material not so plainly contemptuous, she might even have found herself a second career as a horror icon: a female Vincent Price, almost.
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The reason she accepted these roles is very simple. They were all she was offered, and hers was a temperament that needed the validation of above-the-title work or she was nothing. Anything, then, rather than nothing.
What she didn't grasp, however, was that in pulp genre, above-the-title billing is an illusion. It's the genre's ingredients the people come to see. In that sense, strange (and perhaps terrible) as it may seem, she was lucky to get Trog. A name like Joan Crawford's on the bill may have given this strange film a veneer of class, but if she had pulled out of the project it would have gone ahead, no problem, whereas she may well have found herself with few other offers. She needed Trog more than Trog needed her.
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Look at it this way. Stars cost money, and their job is to sell pictures. So if you have a picture that sells itself, who needs the additional expense of an unnecessary star? That, with the best will in the world, is how someone like Matthew Broderick ends up with the lead in Godzilla. That's why no fewer than three of the biggest, most all-conquering box-office hits of the last fifteen years have got Jeff Goldblum in them.
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So when the new Hollywood replaced the old in the sixties, the safest place for a fading star to look for work was is in self-promoting genre, where their very unnecessariness guaranteed them their old spot at the top of the bill. James Stewart and Henry Fonda (and, interestingly, Barbara Stanwyck) survived the putsch by finding a niche in westerns. But Joan, Johnny Guitar notwithstanding, was never going to build a new career on the old frontier. For her, the obvious choice, and the only choice, was horror.
(She was just too late for another self-selling genre in which she could have made a home: the seventies disaster movie. This not only operated on the same principles - the people are coming for the effects, so anyone with a name will do - but was also structured in such a way as to feature huge numbers of more or less equally important characters. Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, Gloria Swanson, Dana Andrews, Joseph Cotten, Olivia de Haviland, Martha Raye and Jimmy Stewart all got a nice billing and a few desultory lines in the Airport series alone. But ill-health caught her just before they would have come calling.)
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What must have been especially galling to Joan, though, was that while Davis followed Baby Jane (and its immediate follow-up Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which also featured Olivia de Haviland, Agnes Moorehead, Cecil Kellaway and Mary Astor, but from which Joan pulled out at the last minute) with relatively sophisticated work for Hammer, she found herself relegated almost immediately to the bargain basement, first swinging axes about for gimmick king William Castle in America, then thawing out frozen troglodytes for Herman Cohen in Nowheresville UK.
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Actually, the William Castle films may, just, have seemed like quality work. Her role in I Saw What You Did (1965) amounted to no more than a flatteringly top-billed cameo - doubtless her agent sold it to her as a favour she was doing to him - and Strait-jacket (1964), with its screenplay by Robert Bloch, was plainly intended as a second Psycho and comparable box-office smash.
That it wasn't is not simply because it's ridiculous. Psycho was ridiculous. Psycho's success was due solely to clever handling, canny promotion and the sheer surprise of its savagery. Strait-jacket failed to repeat the trick because it was not so cleverly handled, and the promotion gimmicks and surprises only worked once.
And let's be honest, the central plot twist of Psycho - it was the person you thought it was all along, dressed up as his mother just as you'd assumed - needed all the promotion it could get. The only way that plot could be freshened up was by going backwards, so by this time the genre had slipped back to Les Diaboliques, and the murders were usually some complex plot to drive the main character mad. This had been the 'surprise' in Sweet Charlotte and most of Jimmy Sangster's British variations for Hammer, and by the time Bloch gets around to it here there are no promotional tricks in the world that can disguise its absurdity.
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Still, it's a shame it wasn't a smash, not because it's a great movie - whatever else it may be, it plainly isn't that - but because it would have meant so much to Joan, and because here, for once, she is so clearly giving her all.
You have to go back to Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster for any comparable example of a performer so insultingly better than their material, so unhappy about being involved at all, and yet going for it so energetically. It's as if she's been hypnotised into believing she's in some other, much better film.
There are flashbacks, in which she plays decades younger than she is, and she struts and swaggers like Mildred Pierce had been the week before. She takes Bloch's painful gobbledygook dialogue and exposition and delivers it with a conviction and sincerity you would never believe possible of anyone.
All to no avail. By the time we learn the killings are being committed by her supposedly loving daughter in a Joan Crawford mask, all is lost.
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She was also managing to pick up a little tv work in these years, appearing to generally pleasing effect in The Man From UNCLE and similar. But the only film offers were either demeaning bits she turned down, or increasingly florid horrors.
Again, you can just about see why she okayed Berserk! (1967). It's a star turn; it's a big, splashy role - a circus ringmistress, no less - with over the top costumes and plenty of swagger. True, she's 61 now, so she wears long gloves in every single scene - but the gams, revealed in full-length fishnet glory, are as impressive as they ever were.
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Producer Herman Cohen, an American weirdo in London, was a tireless packager of exploitation shockers, the majority of them involving someone in an ape suit. He had begun as associate producer of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) and graduated to I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (both 1957) before moving to Britain and producing Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Konga (1960, originally to be called I Was a Teenage Gorilla). By the time Joan entered his orbit he was a relatively successful but relentlessly downmarket presence in British horror, and it does seem strange that, say, Hammer couldn't have made her a better offer.
But Berserk it was, and berserk it assuredly is: a lurid mix of sensational murders and authentic filler from Billy Smart's Circus: one minute it's Michael Gough having a tent peg hammered into his head; the next, Phyllis Allen and her Intelligent Poodles. Oddly, the revelation at the end is almost identical to that of Strait-jacket: the murders are the work of Joan's insane daughter, attempting to put the blame on Joan herself. And with the daughter played by the willowy Judy Geeson, the revelation is not just surprising, but physically impossible.
Also in the cast was yesterday's beefcake Ty Hardin, and the one-time British almost-Marilyn Diana Dors, who gets cut in two with a circular saw.
According to Cohen the lead role was originally to have been played by a man, but he hurriedly re-wrote - though not much, I'll warrant - when Joan came into the picture. He recalled:
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I'd always loved Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, and had got to know both of them pretty well over the years. Joan wanted to work, but of course she had a drinking problem. She would drink 100 proof vodka straight in a coated glass that said Pepsi on the side. However, we made a deal that she didn't take her first drink until I gave her the okay. She was always the first one on set and always knew her lines. She didn't get on with either Ty Hardin or Judy Geeson, but Diana Dors and Joan loved each other. They were great pals, two of a kind.
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Trog had been around for ages, spiralling downmarket. It had originally been kicking around Hammer, then announced as forthcoming by Tigon, before it ended up in Cohen's lap. The story of a missing link discovered in an English cave that goes on a tame rampage after a kindly female scientist attempts to humanise it, it seemed a non-starter from the word go.
Joan plays Dr Brockton, famous anthropologist and author of the book Social Structures In Primates - and what must she have thought the first time she read the script, and heard herself delivering dialogue as crass as this:
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Joan:
We believe that Trog could be the connection between the creatures of early civilisation and man as we know him today. This troglodyte who somehow survived is a living reminder of what happened after our ancestors the apes left the forest and first started to walk on hind legs and take shelter in caves.
Reporter:
Aren't you over-simplifying?
Joan:
The study of anthropology supports me. After a few more aeons, the creature developed a brain. Physically and mentally he became the early shape of man... and the prime objective of our programme will be to pull Trog across a time span, right into the heart of the twentieth century.
Reporter:
Sounds like an impossible task.
Joan:
Just the same, we must try.
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In Trog, Joan has nowhere to hide; there's no glamorous background like the circus world of Berserk, and there's nothing glamorous about her character, so she can't distract us with great hair and make-up and costumes. As a result she looks lost, adrift in drab and rainy Britain, dressed in a hard hat and a series of shapeless smocks, and - for really the first and only time in the movies - she looks like a little old lady.
Her performance is genuinely inadequate: it's hard to make lines like "You kill it and you may be destroying the most valuable scientific evidence we have in existence today!" any worse than they intrinsically are, but I'm afraid she does, in this case by stressing the word 'may' and thus introducing an absurd note of uncertainty to the statement.
But then, why should she bother in a film this foolish? It makes no sense at all. It's like some kid wrote it.
She says she wants "to really study and classify Trog" (as opposed to half-heartedly study and classify him, presumably) yet what she actually does is attempt to train it like a dog. She says "here, Trog" and "good boy" as she feeds him (fish and lizards because "he is not a carnivore") and throws a rubber ball for it in the garden. What this is intended to scientifically prove is anyone's guess. Asked how he could have survived underground for ten million years, she replies:
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I can only give you an hypothesis. Conceivably, Trog was frozen solid during the long, long glacial age, a state similar to cryogenic suspension... We now know that human sperm, red blood cells, even skin can be brought back to life after freezing.
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If nothing else, then, Trog is your only chance to hear Joan Crawford say the phrase 'human sperm'.
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The end of the line: Joan shares a joke, and a Pepsi, with a man in an ape suit.
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It would be nice to just have a laugh and enjoy Joan in these final films, but the fact that she clearly isn't having a laugh and enjoying herself makes it difficult to. You can see the moments when she does get her old confidence back - in the flashbacks of Strait-jacket and through much of Berserk! in particular - but overall we sense exactly that desperation to which she freely admitted in interviews: the need to keep working, to still be the star no matter what she is the star of... when what she could have done, and should have done, is sat back, surveyed her achievements and realised that they were more than enough to justify her continued celebrity.
But as she explained in Conversations with Joan Crawford:
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If you're lucky you come up with parts that let you play an older woman, but by the time I'd reached "that certain age" all the good parts were written for men. If your whole life has been acting and all of a sudden there's no place to go to act, you're like a warhorse that's been put out to pasture. Something in you dies. I know I'm explaining this badly, but when your whole life has been acting, and nobody wants you to act anymore - it's like trying to exist in a vacuum.

Dracula's back garden

It was my birthday this weekend, and I've at last had my Purple Rose of Cairo moment...

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Part of my present was a trip to Black Park in Buckinghamshire, and that strange, wonderful, dream-like sensation of walking into a movie.
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If by any chance you need a reminder of the cinematic significance of Black Park, let me jog your memory...

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It is, of course, where just about every woodland exterior of every Hammer horror film ever made was shot. And it's all still here, exactly as you imagined it, exactly as it was the last time you saw it, exactly as if they'd just finished shooting Dracula Has Risen From The Grave yesterday, exactly as if they weren't movies at all, but real...

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The eerie, sun-dappled yet strangely chilly paths through the forest...

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The lake, from which so many bodies were pulled...
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The tree-lined roads along which horse-drawn carriages rumbled and raced...

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... and nervous travellers stopped at roadside shrines on lonely crossroads...

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The fern-carpeted thickets, where the sinister dwarf from Vampire Circus led an entire family to their doom, Christopher Lee observed a black mass in The Devil Rides Out and Susan Denberg killed her last victim in Frankenstein Created Woman...

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And the deep, dark forests, with who knows what hiding behind every tree... Christopher Lee, perhaps...

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... or, if you're lucky, a passing vampiress, possessed by the spirit of Valerie Leon...

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In all: a thoroughly recommended visit.

But, as always with locations imbued with supernatural evil, do please take care.

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Knight of the Living Dead

Went for a walk this morning, walked past a newsagent's and saw the headline "Arise, Sir Dracula!" next to a picture of Christopher Lee with red eyes and blood-dripping fangs.
The knighthood, long overdue, has been campaigned for relentlessly by his fans via internet petitions. Now at last it is his, but imagine his bittersweet pleasure at seeing that headline!
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The last of the great horror icons, Lee is a versatile and distinguished actor of an older, more theatrical tradition, and also wonderfully, heroically grumpy.
He has never quite come to terms with – or fully accounted for – the fact that his career took him into some extremely seedy and low budget corners of the film industry, when, say, Kenneth More’s or Donald Sinden’s or Richard Attenborough’s did not. This was the kind of civilised Pinewood company he had gone into the film business expecting to encounter; instead he was as often as not to be found in Spain or Italy or Germany, making films with the likes of Jesus Franco and Harry Alan Towers and titles like The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism, Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion and Howling 2: Your Sister Is a Werewolf.

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ffffffffffff..............ffffffffffffff Lee being scary
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Hammer fans often get impatient with his insistence that he is not a horror star, that he has played in far more films of other genres, and that the Dracula movies were undertaken reluctantly and under pressure from Sir James Carreras.
But delightful as the Dracula series is, it is obvious that he is right, and that the films could have been a lot better if more care had gone into them.
Perhaps the biggest treat in Wayne Kinsey’s two endlessly readable volumes of nerdy Hammer trivia is the quotes from the letters Lee wrote to the president of his fan club when he began embarking on a new Dracula movie. Every time he repeats the same objections and assures us that this will be the last.

He is also, I sense, not thrilled by the obsessive nature of many horror fans: I well recall an occasion when, after lecturing at the NFT, he was cornered by a Devil Rides Out fanatic whose life seemingly depended on conveying the fact that his favourite scene in the film was “the bit where you say ‘don’t look at his eyes’”; it remains the only time I have ever seen him look frightened.

The ethics and worldview of the exploitation industry simply baffle him. He is hilarious discoursing on, for example, Milton Subotsky’s decision to cast him as Jekyll and Hyde - retaining the original plot and all subsidiary characters, correctly named - only to insist on his roles being renamed Dr Marlowe and Mr Blake and the film itself rebranded I, Monster. The reason is probably simple: the very fact that the film was a faithful adaptation meant that Subotsky felt obliged to pretend it was something new, and if by any chance there was anyone who hadn’t heard of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I, Monster was far more likely to get them into the cinemas.
But to Lee, the whole affair is a dark, impenetrable mystery.
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ffffffffff................ffffffffff Lee trying not to be scary
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His best performances are often in unworthy projects. Halliwell's dismissal of Rasputin, the Mad Monk as a “dreary excuse for Christopher Lee to go berserk” is funny but hardly fair: Lee is fully mesmeric in the role. (As well as playing Rasputin he had been introduced to his assassins as a child, and to his daughter as an adult. He is also the only actor to have played Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes and Sir Henry Baskerville, and to have beheaded both Charles I and Louis XVI on screen.)
I love his cameo in Death Line, his barnstorming turn in the old boys' reunion House of the Long Shadows and his scariest villain: Lord Summerisle, a fine performance in what I fear may be a somewhat overrated film, The Wicker Man.

And his Dracula, too, is unquestionably magnificent, especially in the Franco version for which he had such high, dashed hopes. Lee’s Count is convincingly aristocratic, frighteningly powerful when suddenly roused to violent activity, and imbued, like his Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster, with a delicate pathos, conveyed via his considerable gift for mime. The voice is rich and compelling, but as an actor it is not his principle instrument. Lee acts primarily with his body, turning to advantage the six feet and five inches that initially kept him out of lead roles for over a decade.
Watch the behind the scenes footage of him filming the prologue to Dracula AD 1972, as director Alan Gibson tries to show him how to act being impaled on a cartwheel. Lee listens graciously, then looks away and raises his eyebrows to the heavens. The gesture tells you almost all you need to know about the man’s integrity, his devotion to his craft, and his commitment to giving audiences the very best of which he is capable.

Irene Ware: Dr Vollin's girl

Sometimes, there's simply no reason at all why some people become stars and others do not.

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And of all the rungs on the Hollywood ladder to find oneself stalled on, it seems to me that 'almost made it' just has to be the loneliest.

The nobodies are anonymous.

Nobody bothers them, nobody points them out in restaurants or asks what ever happened to them, nobody is watching them, or waiting for them to fall.

An actor who's never going to get leads can remodel himself as a character actor. No problem. He may even get a longer career out of it than the stars he envies.

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But if you're a beautiful starlet, it's obvious you're not in the game from a desire to play small parts.

And you are going to get noticed; you'll get that first level of stardom handed to you; that tantalising, tormenting first rung... they'll know your name, they'll see your picture in all the magazines.

But when it comes to wanting to see movies with you in the lead...

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It is these nearly-made-it starlets that have the least armour.

Clearly, they live only to be the name above the title. And if they never make it, the wind must blow hard and cold around those swimsuits.

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I have many favourites among these also-rans, and in almost every case, there's really no good reason in the world why they didn't make that final leap into the vindication of unambiguous stardom.

Talent has very little to do with it: many a star made it without it, many a failure failed in spite of it.

What, I mean what that really mattered, did Marie Macdonald lack?

Just luck. Just the breaks.

And then there's this, from my Wonder Album of Filmland, a pictorial guide to the stars of 1932:

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It is, maybe, a little early to include a picture of JUNE VLASEK in such a gallery as this. Her film career has only just begun and the world has yet to see her real capabilities. But she deserves to appear in any film-land picture display because she really is admitted on all sides to be "the most beautiful girl in Hollywood." You do not need to look very hard to see why.

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And yet... not enough, June; not enough.

You see her here and there. She's in Chandu the Magician (1932), and Bonnie Scotland (1935) with Laurel and Hardy... she kept at it until 1947, did a bit of tv... died in 2005.

And yes, in those early thirties appearances, she really could be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. But for June, for some reason... not enough.

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Also appearing in Chandu is the actress who is, for me, the undisputed queen of the very-nearlys.

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Irene Ware is most things a Hollywood goddess should be, so far as I am fit to judge.

She has that certain grace, and ease, and slightly aristocratic poise that unites women as different in every other way as Crawford and Colbert and Fay Wray and Kay Francis.

As an actress? Hard to say how good she is: from the little she is given the chance to show, she seems fine.

As a beauty: almost unrivalled.

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Why, then, was Irene Ware not a major Hollywood star of the thirties?

Because the whole thing's a lottery, that's why. Because the whole thing's a joke.

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The IMDB would have me believe that she was crowned Miss United States of 1926, at the age of sixteen. Quite the honour, but not apparently so: I am grateful to Allure, one of my favourite blogs, for this more accurate account:

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Irene Ahlberg was born November 6, 1910 in Pelham, NY. Several references state she was crowned Miss America of 1926. Not so, she was named Miss Greater NY in 1929, and then Miss United States for the Miss Universe competition.

However, this is not the Miss Universe you have come to know and love/hate. This "Miss Universe" was the Galveston, Tex., International Beauty Contest.

Virtually ignored by the U. S. press, the Galveston tournament was big news elsewhere in the world. In Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, editors reported on just what Miss France, Miss Spain, Miss Austria, Miss Brazil were doing, wearing, saying at each instant of the final ceremony. For the record, Austria won and Irene took second, and it was reported as "Irene Ahlberg, a Manhattan stenographer, 18 and blond, won $1,000 and second honors".

I'm guessing she took that $1000 to help the move to show business. From late 1929 through early 1932 Irene appeared in several of Earl Carroll's Vanities broadway productions. Hollywood and a name change to Irene Ware came in 1932 when she signed a contract with Fox.

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The Fox contract brought her one juicy lead, at least, in Chandu, the delightful adaptation of the hit radio serial with Edmund Lowe somewhat stolid and draggy as the mysterious Chandu and Bela Lugosi on full battery as the villain Roxor.

Irene, as the Princess Nadji, is everything anyone could have reasonably expected the Princess Nadji to be: likeable, attractive in states of peril, spectrally beautiful at all times.

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It led to very little, alas. The old story: she couldn't get out of support roles; always on trial, never given the big shot.

She's sixth-billed but the definite standout in Six Hours To Live (1932), second fiddle to Boots Mallory in Humanity (1933), looking for chances in the shadow of Carole Lombard in Brief Moment (1933) for Columbia.

Back at Fox she was sliding further and further down the cast roll: fourth-ranked female in the pre-Code musical My Weakness (1933), an uncredited showgirl in Moulin Rouge (1935), blink and you'll miss her in The Affairs of Cellini (1934), a film that also conspires to squander Fay Wray.

Presumably, from this rather pointless evidence, someone somewhere, sat behind a desk with gravy stains on his tie, decreed that Irene Ware didn't have what it takes to make it.

She went to other studios, doing the usual juggling act: leads for the fly-by-nights and in-and-outs for the majors. (Look sharp and you'll see her in Gold Diggers of 1937.)

The best news around this time came from Universal, who picked her up for a couple of good spots in Let's Talk It Over (1934) and Rendezvous at Midnight (1935) and gave her her best ever leading chance in The Raven (1935).

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The Raven (above) is the one that breaks your heart. The female lead, reunited with Lugosi, doing screaming in cellars and sophisticated banter with one of my favourite male nearlys - Lester Matthews, the nearly-Melvyn Douglas - she is stunning and she is delightful. If anyone has what it takes, she has what it takes!
Now, I'm not going to pretend that I have not seen this performance criticised, even condemned. The Midnight Marquee book Bitches, Bimbos and Virgins: Women in the Horror Film slams her; calls her "a doll in a silly wig, not a living, breathing person."

Well, there's room for all views, I have no doubt.

All I can say is I'm glad I've not seen that version of The Raven. I'll stick with the one I stayed up later than I'd ever stayed up before in my life - 1:35 am! - to see in the summer of 1983... the one where we first see her curled up on Lugosi's sofa in a shimmering satin dress, he sat at the organ playing Bach's Tocata and Fugue, the desert island disc of all movie mad scientists, she purring "You're almost not a man..."

The one where she dances 'The Spirit of Poe'.

The one where she is absolutely magnificent.

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Could Irene Ware dance? Or is one of the reasons why she wears a mask in this gorgeous scene from The Raven so as to disguise the presence of a dancing stand-in? None is credited...

Obviously, it helps not only that she is in so stylised a production - this is top of the range Universal horror - but also in so intense a drama.

The plot has Lugosi as Richard Vollin, a great surgeon and Poe-obsessed sadist, who saves her life after a car crash and then becomes sexually obsessed with her. When she spurns his advances, he merrily invites her, her boyfriend and her father to his house for a weekend party so as to spend the night torturing them to death in his basement. Here he has built a variety of torture devices inspired by Poe's stories, including his razor-edged pendulum and "room where the walls come together"

It's ghoulish stuff - Britain put a ban on imported horror films on account of it - and Irene, who could easily have been hopelessly inadequate as the object of murderous erotic obsession, breezes through the role with both a star's beauty and that star's confidence that counts for so much more.

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The rest is mainly Poverty Row.

Many of these thirties films are available on budget DVD: the romantic comedy False Pretenses (1935) and the thrillers Murder at Glen Athol and The Dark Hour (both 1936), in particular, are eminently worth your time and your small change. You can watch them, and almost pretend they were, say, big studio B's. Pretend she's the star she should have been.

Most fascinating of all is King Kelly of the USA (1934), a truly insane Monogram musical. Poverty Row is always compelling when it gets big ideas, and this piece, an absurdist Ruritarian farce with Edgar Kennedy, Franklin Pangborn and a bunch of songs, is strange and funny and consistently delightful, reminiscent of Duck Soup and Million Dollar Legs and suchlike oddities that proliferated around the same time.

Irene is Tania, princess of a fantasy kingdom dependent for its economy on the export of mops, now in dire straits following the invention of the vacuum cleaner. She has an animated love song performed in her honour. She slides down a banister. She is utterly adorable.

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Irene Ware ended her career trying to make a go of things in Britain. No dice. Her last film was Outside the Three-Mile Limit (1940), with Jack Holt doing likewise.

She didn't branch out into television in the fifties.

She died in March, 1993.

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Could she have been a big star? Yes, she could have been a big star.

Tod Slaughter, the villain they loved

In 1956, at the very dawn of Hammer horror, a British actor passed away more or less without notice at the age of seventy.
One of the most unlikely of thirties film stars, with his round, teddy bear face and tubby physique, at a first glance he seemed most suited to kindly, paternal roles, and had indeed often played such characters in his earlier theatrical days.
But in a long career on stage and screen, Tod Slaughter had established himself as the nation's foremost villain and fiend, revelling in his status as the star audiences loved to hate: for him hisses and boos were like laughter to a comic. Without him, there may have been no Hammer horror at all.
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He had been born Norman Carter Slaughter – yes, Slaughter was his real name – in Liverpool in 1885. He made his acting debut at the age of twenty, becoming an actor-manager in the grand tradition. In the twenties he ran his own theatres in Chatham and Elephant and Castle, where his revival of many of the old melodramas of the Victorian music halls cemented his reputation as (to quote the publicity tag appended to one of his later films) “the villain they love”.
One of those imperishable one-offs who seem simultaneously to debase and enrich the culture that begets them, he is an acting law unto himself; he stalks across the screen, leaps, cackles (heh heh heh), leers, looms, rolls his eyes and rubs his hands together.
Sometimes he addresses his lines directly to the audience rather than characters; in one film, after some especially dastardly bit of evil plotting, he looks at us and slowly nods his head. And no actor before or since has matched the glee and panache with which he delivers lines like: “Be loyal to your trust and it will repay you handsomely, betray me and I’ll feed your entrails to the pigs!”
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His films invariably follow a strict theatrical pattern. He’s usually a wicked squire or some other trusted authority figure engaged in a secret life as a master criminal (often with names like ‘The Tiger’ or ‘The Spine-Breaker’). He always kills for profit or gain, yet takes clear sadistic pleasure in the act of murder, cackling and gloating beforehand. He is also lecherous, and obsessed with the conquest of beautiful virgins.
Typically, his lust for some innocent girl leads him to frame the man she loves for one of his own crimes. His villainy is usually revealed to the audience from the outset, and he shares it with them from then on, Christmas pantomime-style, even as he attempts to deceive the other characters. About half way through the hero and heroine get the true measure of him but are not believed; he is arrested, she is put in mortal or maidenly peril, and only some last minute intervention saves the day.
Then, when confronted with the often pretty flimsy evidence of his criminality, Slaughter instantly switches from swaggering arrogance to ranting, gurgling madness and screams for mercy. (Mercy which is needless to say not extended: the audience would have rioted if it were.) .

The subjects of his melodramas were the same that preoccupied the authors of penny dreadfuls and sensational ballads; that residue of grim English folklore stretching back to the highwaymen and grave-robbers, and on to Dr Crippen and Jack the Ripper.
His debut, Maria Marten, or: The Murder in the Red Barn (1935, note the bill-board theatricality of the title) was based on a notorious murder that took place in the Suffolk village of Polstead in 1827. (Maria was a mole-catcher’s daughter made pregnant out of wedlock by a wicked local squire named William Corder. On the pretext of eloping, he arranged to meet her at a red-tiled barn on his property, where he murdered and buried her. The body was eventually discovered and Corder, who had fled to London, was hanged in public in front of Bury St Edmunds jail. Visitors to the local museum can still see a selection of gruesome relics associated with the crime, including Corder’s scalp and an account of the crime bound in his skin.)
In Britain this sort of thing was considered frightfully tasteless, pandering to the worst instincts of the lowest common denominator. Indeed, the scene in Maria Marten in which he lures poor Maria to the barn and murders her is not explicit in any modern sense, but the inordinate amount of time separating his telling her she is about to be killed and his actually doing it, accompanied by her screams and pleas, give the film a prurient quality that almost anticipates the serial killer movies of the nineties.
As well as Maria Marten, many other of his films give a melodramatic gloss to real life crimes and mysteries, including the story of Edinburgh ‘ressurectionists’ Burke and Hare (The Greed of William Hart), mysterious Victorian villain Spring Heeled Jack (The Curse of the Wraydons) and, by far his most famous role, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936).
.Slaughter played this role countless times on stage, and was still recreating it in novelty spots on tv in the fifties. The film version catches him at his very best, telling his customers how they have “a beautiful throat for the razor”, and concluding with relish “I’ll enjoy polishing you off!” before sending them plummeting through the trap door that takes them to the basement of Mrs Lovett’s pie shop…
But unlike on stage - where Tod delighted the crowds with a prop razor that spurted gore - the British censor has here insisted that the horrors be toned down to a point where it would be difficult for audiences unfamiliar with the story to be sure what is going on. The trap door under the barber's chair is operated before Todd cuts the incumbent's throat, and the ultimate destination of the corpses is never stated outright. The closest we get is an innuendo, as a sailor chomping on a hot pie wonders aloud what the killer does with the bodies.
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Just as Maria Marten had begun, rather like Olivier’s Henry V, as a modern stage production which gradually becomes a film; so the narrative of Sweeney Todd is recounted in flashback by a modern day barber, whose horrified customer ends by fleeing, still lathered, into the street and bumping into a hot pie vendor. The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936), meanwhile, is staged as an episode of the radio show In Town Tonight, beginning with a comic song from the musical comedy duo Flotsam and Jetsam and other irrelevant items before Slaughter is brought on, his interview segueing into the narrative. (Asked about his favourite methods of murder, he replies: "I keep a perfectly open mind on the matter.")
Of course, the chief purpose of all these odd-seeming additions is to distract the censors. After all, Hawke proper begins with a scene in which Slaughter lures a small boy into the bushes and callously breaks his back - were the film to begin that way it would never have been passed.
Perhaps the cleverest of all these tricks can be seen in It's Never Too Late To Mend (1937), which opens with a rolling-caption disclaimer claiming that the book upon which it was based was directly responsible for prison reform, and was read and approved by the Dear Old Queen.
As additional insurance, the film is presented in association with something called the Dawn Trust ("under the direction of the Reverend Brian Hession"), at whose instigation, one must presume, the film has been landed with a heroic priest character, who confronts Slaughter at the end Dracula-style, with only an outstretched crucifix for protection.
With this cover safely in place, Slaughter runs riot as Squire Meadows, a sadistic magistrate who gets his jollies visiting prisons and taunting and flogging the prisoners, who he calls "my children".
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His film work goes through two distinct phases. At first he is Slaughter the novelty, in films that deliberately emulate the look and atmosphere of the stage plays on which they are based.
Then, from about 1937 onwards, he is Slaughter the bona fide film star, in (comparatively) cinematic vehicles crafted around his new movie fame.
(He was even picking up support work in other movies around this time: a clear reflection of his new legitimacy as a film actor. He turned up as guest villain in a Sexton Blake movie, Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, in 1938, and as a sex-pest gypsy in Song of the Road (1937), a lugubrious drama about a middle-aged freelance farm labourer and his beloved horse struggling to find work after the invention of the tractor. And they wondered why British films lacked international appeal.)
If Sweeney Todd is the defining film of his first phase, the best-remembered title among the second crop is surely The Face at the Window (1939, subtitled “a melodrama of the old school, dear to the hearts of all who unashamedly enjoy either a shudder or a laugh at the heights of villainy”), remembered chiefly for receiving a glowing review from Graham Greene in his days as a film critic. (He even went so far as to compare Slaughter approvingly with Charles Laughton.)
The film casts Slaughter as ‘The Wolf’, a killer in nineteenth century Paris, who stabs his victims while their attention is distracted by the horrifying face of his hulking, lunatic brother pressed against their window pane. When he's not out staring through windows, Slaughter keeps him locked in a cage. .

Less famous, but even better in many ways, is the last and most impudent product of his golden era: Crimes at the Dark House (1940).
By Slaughter's standards it's a prestige production, as befits its unprecedentedly highbrow source. The film is in fact an adaptation of Wilkie Collins's classic Victorian novel The Woman in White, but don't worry: it begins with Slaughter hammering a tent-peg into a sleeping man's ear, and follows it up with him impregnating and then murdering a helpless servant girl. ("So you wanted to be a bride, my dear Jessica did you? So you shall be : a bride of death! He, he, he! Heh, heh, heh!")
The climax goes so far as to make a cliffhanger of the threat of rape ("Back in Australia I used to break in fractious horses - now I'm going to break in a fractious mare!") In an incredibly powerful scene - surely impossible in a Hollywood film under the Hays Code - we begin by seeing him downstairs, preparing to deflower the young bride waiting unwillingly in his bed. We cut to her, crying pitifully. He goes to join her, and a series of disembodied close-ups emphasise his intentions: his feet slowly climbing the stairs, his hands gripping the banisters, then her face again, suddenly lit as the bedroom door opens... Slaughter's joyless laugh fills the soundtrack, and the scene fades. Heh, heh, heh...
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The majority of the pre-war vehicles were produced and directed by George King (1900-66), maverick producer of quota quickies and second-features, and one of those enterprising and energetic chaps in which the early British cinema abounds.
The war, however, gave him a chance to raise his game: British Aviation hired him to produce propaganda films like The First of the Few and Tomorrow We Live (both 1942). But while King scampered upmarket, his former star, in a corresponding reversal of fortune, was prohibited from producing such unwholesome films during the war years, though he was allowed to tour army camps with his Sweeney Todd stage show.
He returned to the screen for two last barnstormers when the war was over but he was sixty now, visibly older, even rounder, and time had moved on. Neither The Curse of the Wraydons (1946) nor The Greed of William Hart (1948) really compare with the pre-war films except in fleeting moments, such as the beautifully scary close-up of his leering face in Wraydons, filling the screen as he advances on the woman he is about to strangle in a leafy, sun-dappled forest.
William Hart, meanwhile, is most notable for its ingenious response to Slaughter's last ever set-to with the censors.
The British censors declared that no film could be made about the Burke and Hare murders that used the killers' actual names. The only trouble was that by the time the producers realised this, the film was already in the can. Obviously it would have been impossible to go back and reshoot every scene in which the names 'Burke', 'Hare' and 'Knox' are mentioned, but the solution they hit upon seems scarcely less difficult: to laboriously post-dub every individual use of each name.
This was plainly a labour of Hercules: hardly a scene goes by that doesn't mention at least one of them, and the sudden substitution of the new names (Moore, Hart and Cox), with tell-tale errors in intonation (rather like those piecemeal voice messages you get on railway stations and telephone answering machines), is often distractingly comic in its obviousness.
(Further evidence of this policy can be seen in the British release print of Val Lewton's The Body Snatcher, where every reference to Burke and Hare - though not to Knox - has been crudely excised, from the single word 'Burked' in Karloff's line "This is how they Burked 'em!", to the entirety of his song ["Nor did they handle axe or knife, To take away their victim's life / No sooner done than in the chest, They crammed their lately welcomed guest"]. The version of the film released on video in Britain in the late eighties by VCI is of this British cut, and I had watched it for years in ignorance of what was missing and why, until the revelation of the recent Lewton DVD box set. Note also how, though not filmed until 1985, the film of Dylan Thomas's forties screenplay The Doctor and the Devils retains substitute character names: Fallon and Broom, and Dr Rock.)
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After William Hart, Slaughter returned to the boards, supplementing touring versions of Sweeney Todd and his other great roles with occasional bit-work in supporting films and tv.
He died of coronary thrombosis in 1956, after a good meal and one last performance as the wicked Squire Corder in Maria Marten, a role he had been technically too old to play in 1935, and had never stopped playing since.

Slaughter was, without doubt, the founding father of the British horror film. In the later examples his spirit is everywhere: you can imagine slipping him into, say, Baker and Berman's madly stylised Jack the Ripper (1958) and it hardly missing a beat. Can't you seem him as Dr Callistratus in Blood of the Vampire (1958)? Or the head of the Grisbane clan in House of the Long Shadows (1983)? Or any of the ranting deviants essayed by Michael Gough in the films of Herman Cohen?
Wasn't he born to play Edward Lionheart in Theatre of Blood (1973)?

Vincent Price's crocodile

As all Vincent Price fans know, he was no mean cook.

Still, you have to wonder what he was thinking of when he came up with this. It's taken from his book Cooking Price Wise, and comes courtesy of Zelda Manners.

So here it is...

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VINCENT PRICE’S CUCUMBER CROCODILE
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You will need:
1 cucumber
4 strips green pepper
olives/cherries/currants etc (for the eyes)
few blanched almonds
+ cocktail sticks
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Split broad end of cucumber lengthwise for 2-3 inches to form the mouth and prop open with small cocktail sticks.
Press in a few pieces of blanched almonds for the teeth.
Arrange the eyes.
Shape strips of green pepper into legs and secure in place with cocktail sticks.
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Quite what he envisages you doing with it after that I really wouldn't like to say. But it should look like this...

... and surely that's good enough all by itself.

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Strange to imagine this great, great actor in his kitchen, alone perhaps, maybe chuckling to himself... as the idea first hits him to turn a cucumber into a crocodile.

For this, and for your performances in Laura, House of Wax, His Kind of Woman and Theatre of Blood, we salute thee, Vincent, where'er thy soul resides.

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Time to say goodbye to Jane Randolph

Jane Randolph died earlier this month at the age of ninety-three.

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If forties noir is your thing, no doubt titles like Jealousy (1945) and Railroaded (1947) will mean something to you, and will conjure up a bunch of memories, the majority of them probably visual, and doubtless Jane will be a part of that.

But if you're a slob like me, it's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein you think of first, where Jane is the blonde good girl, the better to underline the foxy wickedness of Lenore Aubert, who you'll recall has cooked up a scheme with Dracula to put Lou Costello's brain in the skull of the Frankenstein Monster.

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Ordinarily, we can sit here for hours thinking about the moving candle, and the bit with the big pile of suitcases, or the bit where Lou mistakes the sound of the wolf man for that of someone gargling.

But our minds race further, because of course, Jane Randolph is more than just that... she's also sneaky Alice Moore in Cat People (1942) and Curse of the Cat People (1944), two very different masterpieces from producer Val Lewton making for one seriously weird double bill: indeed, quite possibly the most mismatched original and sequel ever. The first is a terrifying psychological horror film, one of the best and scariest ever made, the other a lyrical drama about the imagination of a child, and a beautiful film in its own right.

But why do I call Alice sneaky? I leave that to the judgement of the individual viewer. I'm still undecided how much is scripted, how much merely in the performance, and how much in my imagination. But I do know this: when you watch Cat People with girls, they have their claws out for Alice long before Simone Simon shows hers.

On the surface she's caring, dependable, decent and all that hooey, but she's manipulating Ollie, the big dumb lunk of a hero played by Kent Smith. She's taking him away from his wife, and to me at least she seems to be doing so quite calculatedly and deliberately. She wills poor Simone to madness and self-destruction.

But like so much else in the film, it's all under the surface.

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It's actually very good acting from Jane Randolph, who first got into the movies in the very early forties as uncredited secretaries and hat check girls at Warners, before being picked up by RKO in '42, following a stint as an ice skating model for the animators of Bambi (1942).

Universal borrowed her for Bud and Lou's great contribution to the art of cinema in '48, but it turned out to be her last movie (bar a walk-on in '55): she married, moved to Madrid and became a pillar of Spanish high society. She didn't really need the movies, and they didn't really need her.
Nonetheless, Randolph's image will endure forever, or at least for as long as the love of film endures. Her name may not mean a whole lot to most people, but there are worse things that can happen to a film star.

What Jane Randolph has is a pair of tickets to film immortality. One is for taking a walk in the night, and getting a bus, in one of the scariest mood sequences in horror film history.

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The other is for just possibly topping even that, by taking the movies' scariest ever swim.

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And both in the same film!

Every time you watch these amazing pieces of cinema, you may be thinking about Val Lewton, you may be thinking about Jacques Tourneur, you may even be thinking about Simone Simon. But you're watching Jane Randolph.

And with that, the image fades, and it's all over.
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Jane Randolph (1915 - 2009)

Jack Cardiff, Master of Technicolor (1914-2009)

Jack Cardiff, one of the greatest directors of photography Britain ever produced, as well as the director of some of its most peculiar exploitation films, died this month.

His reputation as master of colour cinematography is unchallenged. He had trained in the Technicolor laboratories in America in the thirties, and brought to British cinema in the forties an innovative confidence in the process's potential.

Under the aegis of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger he created the stunning visuals of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), for which he won an Oscar, and The Red Shoes (1948), which Natalie Kalmus called the best Technicolor film ever made.

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As a director, he had either limited opportunities, bad luck, or an unerring eye for the eccentric and outré. I think the jury is still out as to which.

Sons and Lovers (1960), photographed in black and white by Freddie Francis, another master DP turned oddball director, found acclaim, but the rest ranges from hack work to downright bizarre: the legendary Errol Flynn disaster William Tell, left unfinished in 1953; Scent of Mystery (1960), a thriller presented in Smell-o-Vision via the technological marvel of perfumes pumped from a central generating unit to small outlets concealed in each cinema seat, and Girl On a Motorcycle (1968), naff swinging sixties stuff with Marianne Faithfull in and out of a zip-up leather catsuit and Alain Delon as a master seducer in bobble hat and sandals. The ludicrous soliloquies, dopey back projection and tragic ending will keep you laughing for hours.

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But my favourite of all is The Mutations (1974), one of the weirdest and scuzziest of all weird, scuzzy 1970's British horror films.

Donald Pleasence plays a scientist and university lecturer trying to cross-breed animals and plants. At one point he is asked if he has had any success. He replies that he most certainly has, and proudly produces a dead mouse with a sprig of watercress sticking out of it.

He pays a deformed freak show proprietor called Lynch (Tom Baker drooling and covered in plastic lumps) to abduct girls, and post-experimental rejects are passed on to the freak show. Some of Donald's students (including Jill Haworth and Julie Ege in Man About the House fashions) get a bit too close to the truth; one of them, a wisecracking buffoon crass beyond endurance, is satisfyingly turned into a human venus fly trap.

Yes, it's tasteless, but at the same time, it's a film in which a man feeds a rabbit to a growling shrub.

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It was also Cardiff's last film as director. I've a feeling it would have been anybody's last film as director.

He returned to photography, but there wasn't much left to photograph. He made Egypt look sensational in Death On The Nile (1978) and The Awakening (1981), and did some lovely work on Michael Winner's remake of The Wicked Lady (1983).

Still at work in his nineties, Jack Cardiff died on April 22nd at the age of 94.

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How “Dracula” invented the modern horror film

My life changed at 10 pm on Saturday 9th July 1983.

I was what generation upon generation, separated in all other matters by unbridgeable chasms of social change, would have unanimously deemed an odd boy, simultaneously morbid and extrovert, and affecting a worldly-wise cynicism considered precociously endearing in a small child, less so as I reached double figures and downright obnoxious in later teenage. (Oddly enough, now that I am beginning to lose my hair it has gone back to being endearing.)
Outdoorsy things interested me not at all. I am perhaps the only boy in history who never finished Treasure Island on the grounds that, fascinated though I was by all the comings and goings at the inn in the beginning, my attention wandered when they hit the open seas.

I basically had one big interest. My parents tried to get me to acquire a few more; some took, some didn't, but none displaced my one true passion which was always, for some reason I cannot explain since it dates back further than I am able to recall, Dracula. That my mother was not wholly in approval of this obsession did nothing to dampen it. Nothing could. If I could convey to you even a fraction of how obsessive I was you would probably fear for your own sanity on the grounds of contamination.

But not until the age of 10, on Saturday 9th July, 1983, did I actually see a Dracula movie.
That Saturday marked the first time that a late night horror show had coincided with my parents deeming me mature enough to stay up and watch it. And with the good luck that so often accompanies such things, it was a double-bill of the peerless 1931 original Dracula and Frankenstein, week one of a season of Universal classics that ran through the summer. Dracula played at 10pm (which was late in those days: stations shut down at around midnight), with Frankenstein following it at 11.15 (and in those days still lacking the famous scene in which Karloff's Monster throws the little girl in the lake: one of the great holy grails of lost cinema, it was long presumed lost forever, and we felt hugely privileged when it was unexpectedly rediscovered and reinstated a couple of years later. Now we all take it for granted and I find myself feeling oddly privileged that I ever had the chance to see the film while it was still missing.)
. Neither the first nor the last time that a picture of Glenn Strange would be used to represent Karloff - but this page of the Radio Times still gives me goose-pimples.
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I knew as much about them as was possible without actually seeing them. I had read their production histories, knew the plots, stared for hours at the famous stills. But finally seeing them, seeing those stills move, was an experience that has stayed with me throughout my adult life. And while other films in the season also made a huge impression, especially The Mummy, The Raven and House of Frankenstein, it was that first double-bill that remained my ultimate favourites.
And of the two, Dracula was the clear first choice. It still is, actually, whatever their relative merits as pure cinema.
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Looking back, I can now see that I was discovering (or confirming) a love of two things: Dracula and, more generally, the iconography of American popular culture in the late twenties and early thirties.
For the film is no sober adaptation of a Victorian British novel. It is a spunky rethinking of it, set in the year it was made, and adopting and adapting the milieu of the American society drama. Lugosi’s vampire is not different from the book’s by accident: the character has been radically reconceived.

There’s another 1931 movie, called Secrets of a Secretary, in which Claudette Colbert plays a young woman who marries unwisely, to a conspicuously wasteful and extravagant lounge lizard (Georges Metaxa). Naturally, he turns out to be a parasite, who refuses to work, spends all her money and angrily insults and abandons her when her funds run dry.
It took me most of the movie to think who he reminded me of, but once the penny dropped it was astonishing. Here were the exotic East European accent (Metaxa was, in fact, Romanian), the shiny black skullcap of hair, the opera clothes: all the standard uniform of the society gigolo and European romantic mystery man.
And what was his narrative function? He is a bloodsucker, who gains the control of a beautiful young woman, drains and abandons her, and all with a cheerful, amoral selfishness. Variations on this character recur throughout pre-Code cinema, and conform in almost every degree to Browning and Lugosi’s conception of Dracula!
What Lugosi had done then, was to turn a fictional character that is old, isolated from modernity, physically unpleasant and pitted against British nineteenth century Victorian society, into a modern sexual predator, suave and foreign and mysterious, whose prey is the new, high-kicking, easily-led American gal of the Roaring Twenties.
The classic image of Lugosi’s vampire in his evening dress and cape, looming over a reclining female is an exact parody of the typical attitudes of high society lovers in contemporary drama.

In particular, there’s an oft reproduced still from Grand Hotel (1932) showing John Barrymore’s Baron looming over Garbo’s ballerina in exactly corresponding postures. I remember seeing it when I was young and wondering at first if it might be a still from a vampire movie. Everything is in place for it to be so: the woman reclining in loose, flowing white in an attitude of surrender, passivity and hypnotic languor, and above her the male, vigorous, swooping and in command, clad in black with slicked back hair.
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It is remarkable how many pre-Code society dramas feature a central female figure with a best friend who doesn’t make it to the fade-out, a casualty of one or other of the perils and excesses that await the youthful citizens of (to quote the title of a great Joan Crawford movie of 1931) This Modern Age. They suffered the consequences of unrestrained desire on behalf of audiences with little chance of following their example, but a keen desire to see the illicit pleasures they encountered on the way down.
The characters of Mina and Lucy, their relationship, attitudes (and fates), could have sprung straight from this formula. The scene in which Mina mocks Dracula’s accent and pretentious speech (after he meets them at the opera) and Lucy defends him (“I think he’s fascinating!”) plays like a moment from any one of a dozen other movies of their time. Lugosi is the threat not of the supernatural, which Browning does not emphasise, but of decadence and loose living, and the pursuit of sensation.

Then think of those three lovely undead girls that keep Lugosi company in his cellar.

By Hammer’s standards (still more by Coppola’s) they are demurely clad, their high-necked billowing shroud-dresses trailing in the dust behind them, with no hint of cleavage or even so much as an ankle on display, but my, are they gorgeous all the same!
With their dark, stylish make-up, their hair gelled and gleaming, one blonde, two brunette, they are the epitome of twenties glamour gone bad. They are the bad sister, the one that dated the bootleggers and went to the nightclubs, while Joan Crawford or Claudette Colbert worked hard as a secretary and made something of themselves. And this is where they have ended up: in the basement of a vampire’s castle, their beauty, and the ephemerality of their bobs and bangs, preserved forever in living death.
The very word 'vampire', in fact, was far more likely to conjur up images of Theda Bara than of Dracula to 1931 audiences, as revealed by Photoplay Magazine's review of the film: "... before it’s over you’re pretty confused about this vampire (a bat-like demon, not a lady in black negligee) business."
So, the famous Hollywood On Parade short, in which Lugosi bites Mae Questel mid-song, intoning, “You have booped your last boop!” is not so far from the world of Browning’s film as it may now seem!

This raises two points about Lugosi. First, it clarifies a fact that some film writers consider faintly ludicrous: that he received sacks full of passionate fan letters, and was considered, albeit briefly, a sex symbol. This matinee idol type (the tall, dark, foreign and mysterious) may have disappeared today, but Lugosi is by no means untypical of the breed. If Valentino is sexy, so is Lugosi.
Second, it renders similarly less ludicrous the actor’s own pleas, which became more plaintive the further they receded from likelihood, to be cast in romantic or light comic roles. Had he been launched in any other way than as Dracula this would have been a distinct possibility. He must have considered himself a Valentino or Paul Lukas type, frustrated by his accidental identification with a single role, but not as a horrifying or sinister personality per se. (Close your eyes next time you see a Paul Lukas movie and tell me who you see…)
Of course, his fame may have been short lived, as the Latin lover archetype retreated from visibility and with the thick accent that would always have conspired against general casting. But had he come to Hollywood ten years earlier than he did, there is every chance he could have been a huge sex symbol of the silent screen. (And if he had died as tragically and as young, there is no reason why the name Lugosi would not linger iconically as the name Valentino does today.)
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This is why, even now I am older and more critically objective, I continue to find Dracula a more interesting film than Frankenstein. The latter, like all of James Whale’s films, adopts entirely its own fairy book style rooted in English theatrical traditions. But Dracula is an American movie, made by Americans for Americans, and to the social historian of cinema it is more evocative and resonant. It was Dracula re-imagined for its own times, a time that also just happened to be the most stylish and vibrant – and visually distinctive – of modern American history. This was Dracula in the Jazz Age, vamping the vamps; it was Gothic filtered through the iconography and preoccupations of pre-Code.
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The film disguises its true intentions for about twenty seconds. In the first shot we are, just, in the realm of literary gothic. Beautiful glass-painted Transylvania skylines, the small inn, the nervous peasants, the horse drawn carriage… all seem to have come straight from the pages of Bram Stoker.
But almost instantly this spell is broken: “Among the rugged peaks that frown down upon the Borgo Pass, are found crumbling castles of a bygone age.”
These lines are the first heard in the film, spoken by an American tourist in cloche hat and glasses, reading aloud from a travel guide. (The squeaky flapper voice, Helen Kane by way of Jean Arthur, belongs to Carla Laemmle, aka Rebekah Laemmle, Uncle Carl’s beautiful, bob-haired, dancing niece.)
Instantly, then, we realise that this is today, that is to say 1931. And Dracula, though clearly a product of this pre-industrial wilderness, has somehow survived (and kept up with the fashions, more or less) into a time when pre-industrial wildernesses start turning up on the summer travel itineraries of American college girls.
There’s something delightful about the fact that this place is both a land of wolves and vampires and dark powers and terrified villagers, and an international tourist stop. But this is exactly the world of Universal horror; a no man’s land between the present and the past, with the freedom to pick and choose the best of each: that modern sassiness of speech, the idiom of the wisecrack, by which thirties sophisticates identified each other, the latest fashions for the ladies, and the chance that our slumbers might be violated by some frightful fantasy of the pre-scientific imagination.
It’s a heady brew, because it brings horror home. The Gothic had traditionally been set in the past, this time the past is coming back to haunt the present. It was Hammer in the fifties that fetishised the Victoriana, even opting, with the utmost perversity, to set their version of The Mummy in the eighteen-nineties. Universal horror is almost always modern, sometimes even modernist, as in The Black Cat (1934 version).
The stage version of Dracula, on which the film is in fact based, was the first to modernise the story and update the Count, and as such was set entirely in modern London. But the film opts to retain the beginning of the novel, where we see Dracula in his Transylvanian castle - but he's still the drawing room vampire of the play!
It is sheer absurdity, just plain silly, yet so potent that today it doesn't even bother us or strike us as odd in the least. This complete discrepancy, this mad and lazy convenience, blithely codifies the fundamental visual language of talking horror cinema.
Here, for centuries, in a country of gibbering peasants, has dwelled a vampire who is sleek, charming, dinner-jacketed, elegant to the point of immaculate with the little medallion and the hair slicked back, yet lives in ornate filth, in conditions of stately, picturesque but absolute decay, among cobwebs, wild armadillos and loose dirt on the floor of his reception hall.
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Clearly, the risk of the whole edifice crashing down amidst gales of audience laughter was a distinct possibility. So, what Browning has done is to downplay the supernatural parts, get the spooky stuff at the start out of the way in one reel, and leave the real frights off screen for the characters to describe. (“What’s that running across the lawn? Looks like a huge dog!”)
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Not that he's above moments of extreme weirdness in that first reel, however. The armadillos in Dracula's cellar, certainly, are weird. The giant wasp crawling out of the coffin is weird. Or is it meant to be what it clearly is: a normal-sized wasp with its own little coffin? And wouldn’t that be even weirder?
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One side-effect of this scraping away of supernatural barnacles, and of centralising the action in London society, is that John Harker, robbed already of his participation in the Transylvanian prologue and of two thirds of the syllables of his first name, is rendered a peripheral, faintly ludicrous figure. (He's played by David Manners, now remembered chiefly for his roles in Universal horrors but very nearly a big star in the early thirties.) His girlfriend is talking in an eerie monotone to a bat flapping above her, and he’s slapping at it and saying, “Look out, it’ll get in your hair!” When she tells him of her hallucinatory nightmares, his considered response is, “Darling, we’re going to forget about these dreams, think about something cheerful, aren’t we?”
With almost nothing to do and little chance to appear heroic, if ever there was a truly redundant male it is he, with all the vampire-hunting know-how going to Van Helsing, and all the sexy mysteriousness coming from the chap who thinks being really dead must be glorious.
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Stalking London in top hat and cape, Dracula becomes a Jack the Ripper figure, closing menacingly on a flower seller in another superbly staged near-silent sequence, and reserving his wit and table manners for the upper class girls he desires for reasons above mere sustenance. These most eligible of young English ladies are Helen Chandler as Mina and Frances Dade as Lucy..

There are so many posed publicity stills of Lugosi carrying Helen Chandler on various bits of the set, him glaring at the camera, her in a swoon; they must have been taking them all day. No fun for either, I’d have thought. Chandler, pilfered from Broadway when the talkies came in, seems to have been quite the eccentric, as this account from the book ‘Hollywood Players: The Thirties’ suggests:
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Once, after reading a book on the life of Gauguin, she rushed out and bought huge supplies of paint tubes, several oversized canvases, and “an inspiring easel plus a bouquet of lovely little brushes.” However, oils took too long to dry and this annoying fact destroyed her impressionist period. She had an aversion to banks because they bounced her checks due to her forgetfulness about making deposits. She disliked anything governmental, especially since she was being constantly besieged with income tax “nonsense”. She hated opening letters, theorizing, “If you don’t open and read something, you can prove you didn’t know a thing about it.”
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She once said in an interview: “They have problems with me in pictures. With this sharp profile, when they turn me sideways to the camera, I look just like the edge of a Bible.”
Actually, her life, quirky wit aside, seems to have been that all-too predictable one of great promise and wooing words being converted into disinterest and dismissal when plans do not immediately run as predicted. She did a few more movies, putting her gift for sardonic asides to good use in The Last Flight (1931), John Monk Saunders’s Sun Also Rises among the airmen, where she was a welcomely feminine distraction from David Manners and the other angry young men. But already disenchanted, she opined in an interview:
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Hang me for heresy if you like, but sounding the screen robbed it of glamour. I used to love the silent movies, their beauty the enchanting lighting, the slow gestures. Just try to open your mouth and look soulful. The voice reveals, ah, it does!
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A few trips back to Broadway seemed disloyal, and Hollywood more or less gave up on her; the rest is bad films, dwindling offers, mental breakdowns, near-deaths unconscious in a burning room, committal to mental hospitals… the typical spiral.
But one from which she was, thankfully, rescued, and best of all, by Lillian Roth. Roth, who had been through the mill a few times herself, invited her to stay at her house and get better. This was at the end of the fifties, for Helen and Lillian several lifetimes away from that time, on Broadway and then, just for a moment, in Hollywood, when there really was nothing to do but enjoy yourself. How often do you think they discussed those days, the fun times and the absent friends and the people that screwed them over, as the evenings drew in, around the kitchen table?
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Frances Dade had been doing okay for herself in exactly these sorts of socialite roles, with Manners in He Knew Women, with Ronald Colman and Kay Francis in Raffles and female lead in Cukor’s Grumpy, all in 1930. She’d come to Hollywood via the lead in a touring production of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (She billed herself as Lorelei Lee for a time.) But for some reason she didn’t go much further than Dracula; we will cross paths with her again, however, when she appears with Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931) over at Paramount.
Dracula’s defining sequence is Lugosi’s nocturnal assault upon Dade, the ultimate demonstration of pre-Code vampirism. We see her undressing by her window while Dracula watches outside, then getting into bed and finally lying prone in her satin sheets as a bat flaps excitedly at the window. Then Lugosi is there in the room (we see nothing so absurd as an actual transformation), his hand outstretched, closing in on her as she sleeps… It was at this moment, I suggest, that Dracula became the smash hit movie of the year.
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Once the girls are bitten, and we’ve had the shots of the undead Dade on the prowl, the film is inevitably anti-climactic. Dracula is exposed for the cad he is with a clever trick at a dinner party, having already crossed swords with a peevish John Harker:
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Dracula – In my humble effort to amuse your fiancée, Mr Harker, I was telling her some rather grim tales of my far-off country.
Harker (indignant) – I can imagine!
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Thus, the dramatic exposure scene over and done with, and with little chance of a chase back to Transylvania, all that remains is to get the men up to speed, track the Count back to his London lair – cobwebs, windows smashed in, filthy cellar: a real home from home - and drive a stake through his heart. (Off-camera, of course.)
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I thought I'd never enjoy myself so much again.

This year, “Don’t Open Till Christmas” will seem more poignant than ever

I wrote here about the film Don't (or strictly speaking Dont) Open Till Christmas.

By any objective measure it's a terrible film, as I think I made clear.

I also love it, as I think I also made clear.

I watch it at least once a year, and always around Christmas time. No other film quite captures its sense of what a nineteen-eighties Christmas looked and felt like, in a London conveyed as thrillingly and acutely as that of American Werewolf, and though it is both inept and at points disgusting, it is also naive, benign and without a genuinely cruel bone in its body. Its outrages are silly, like a child's, its pretence of knowingness hides a deep well of boyish innocence.
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It also starred and was for the most part (for some reason I am still not certain of) directed by Edmund Purdom, who died this week.
Purdom was one of those interesting actors who started as matinee idols and then fell away, and chose exploitation over oblivion. (Another was Cameron Mitchell.) He started in Julius Caesar and The Student Prince and The Egyptian. He's also in one of my favourite British movies, The Beauty Jungle with Janette Scott. Purdom has a fine screen presence, and he really does bring something of value to his later films, not least Christmas, in which he is plainly a professional of a quite different sort to everyone else involved. Remember also Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, and I think you'll see again that he really does help lift the film from sheer flotsam into something you are frequently able to pretend is a proper movie. Of course, it's always possible that you've not seen Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, in which case let us part here while you hurry to E-Bay, put matters right, and come back later. Then there's Horror Safari (with another lost soul, Stuart Whitman) and the chainsaw favourite Pieces if you find you've got the taste.

In later years he did voice work in cartoons, and dubbing, along with a few bits of television, in Italy, where he lived. He even played Dracula in an Italian comedy movie.

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......... Purdom suffering for his art in Joe D'Amato's Ator the Invincible

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As always, it's only when people die that you realise how much more there was to them than you thought. That Purdom, with a different throw of the dice, could have been as accomplished and acclaimed a serious actor as anyone is obvious (painfully so if you happen to be watching Dont Open Till Christmas): he's got the delivery, the presence, the brooding looks and the rich brown voice of Burton.
But did you know this? (I certainly didn't.)
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Denis Vaughan writes ('Lives remembered', Times, January 26th): Edmund Purdom was extremely gifted and forward-looking in the field of recording orchestral music. He was among the very first to use a multi-track system, and his own six-track machine was perfected with the help of Decca technicians.
He financed and recorded my complete Schubert symphonies, followed by 12 Haydn and 15 Mozart symphonies, the Mozart opera Il Re Pastore, Schubert’s Rosamunde and Die Zauberharfe, and some popular Bach and Mozart discs. His flexible equipment and cleanly accurate recording enabled me to balance all these works myself, while he then edited the tapes together. The results were all released internationally by RCA Victor Records. The recordings were all made over eight years in Naples in the splendid Sala d’Ercole of the Palazzo Reale, where Haydn himself performed.
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The thought of a man this cultivated and this accomplished trapped in Dont Open Till Christmas is heartrending. It almost makes me feel guilty for loving it so much. It was obviously not something he would have freely chosen, cannot possibly have been an experience he enjoyed, not even something that would have earned him much money, denying him even Burton's motives for getting involved with Exorcist II. According to some sources, he was liable to actually put the phone down on interviewers who raised the subject of the film.
Senseless to try to explain to a man who must have known that he was capable of vastly more that there is still nothing negligible about any work that gives such sustained pleasure, or that sincerity and talent can be conveyed under almost any circumstances. More senseless still to do so now.

But it is so, and so I do.

The hard-boiled canary

Hollywood soprano Susanna Foster has died at the age of 84.

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Best remembered for Universal's lush Technicolor remake of The Phantom of the Opera (1943), and, the following year, the rather similar The Climax with Boris Karloff, hers was a short and troubled career set in a long and troubled life.

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Interestingly, of all major versions of Phantom, only this one cast a trained singer in the role of Christine, as a result a lot of screen time is given over to her vocal performance. And when she's not singing, Nelson Eddy is, meaning that Claude Rains's Phantom sometimes looks like a guest star in his own movie. As a result the film is not wildly popular with horror fans, and suffers somewhat in comparison with the still amazing silent version, and the almost equally fine Hammer remake. But audiences of the time were much taken with both Foster and the movie; even so, she abandoned her film career in 1945.

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As so often, behind the movies was a hell of a life story. From Ronald Bergan's Guardian obituary:

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Her earnings from her Universal Studios contract enabled her to rescue her family from poverty. Yet, 13 years later, she was struggling to survive and bring up her two young sons, and her financial and mental situation worsened over the years.
Foster admitted that she was partly to blame for her changed circumstances, saying that she had made the wrong choices, including leaving films at the height of her popularity, walking out on her marriage and, when only 12 years old, turning down the title role in National Velvet because "there was no singing in it"...

In 1948, Foster made her stage debut in the Victor Herbert operetta Naughty Marietta, opposite the baritone Wilbur Evans, whom she married. They toured together in a number of operettas and musical comedies, trading on her name as a film star. However, it was Evans who got a huge break, playing Emile de Becque to Mary Martin's Nellie Forbush in the 1951 London production of South Pacific. A few years later, Foster suddenly left Evans, who was 20 years her senior, and whom she claimed never to have loved, taking her two young sons with her.
There followed years of living on and off welfare, and from hand to mouth. While trying to ensure her children were fed, she also attempted to help her alcoholic, widowed mother and mentally unstable younger sister. Foster, too, suffered depression and had problems with alcohol. In 1982, in order to save rent, she lived in her car at the beach in California. She was rescued for a while by a film fanatic, who let her share his squalid apartment, and she later cared for him when he lost his sight. In 1985, her younger son, who had become a drug addict, died of liver failure. Her surviving son, Michael, brought her back to the east coast, where she spent the last years of her life living in a nursing home.

Happy 25th Birthday, Bloodbath at the House of Death!

Let your memory take you back twenty-five years, to the first time you saw, to ominous John Carpenteresque accompaniment, a group of cowled figures stalking menacingly towards an old, fog-shrouded house, past a sign identifying it as ‘Headstone Manor - Businessman’s Weekend Retreat and Girls’ Summer Camp’.

The figures enter the building and begin prowling the corridors, many of them clutching hatchets, machetes and other weapons. One of them stops to use the lavatory.

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Yes, Bloodbath at the House of Death is now twenty-five years old.
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Long before the multiplex era brought revitalisation and the overpowering smell of plastic to the British cinema industry, early-eighties movie houses were dusty, velvet and carpet affairs that survived on James Bond films and hot dog sales, prayed for an ET or a Ghostbusters at least once a year, and scraped along the rest of the time on a diet of Clockwise and Morons From Outer Space.

British cinema was virtually non-existent in 1983; it was a brave producer indeed that bothered to release anything with any serious expectation of people willingly going to see it. Such ventures were so rare that Cannon and Ball’s film The Boys In Blue, a remake of Will Hay’s Ask a Policeman with Suzanne Danielle as the love interest and Roy Kinnear as the villain, actually made it to the front cover of Film Review magazine. (FIRST FILM SALVO FROM CANNON AND BALL, the headline read.) Bloodbath at the House of Death, it is sobering to reflect, was a foolhardy failure even by these standards.

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It suddenly occurs to me that there may be some poor incomplete people out there who need a little reminding exactly what Bloodbath at the House of Death was exactly.
It was a film vehicle for Kenny Everett, and I can only hope that no reminders are in order on that score. Everett was a truly unique character, a manic DJ with a penchant for exhibitionism, a beard, and an obsession with communications technology. His fetishistic love of videotape prompted him to move the format of a radio show to television, and his natural exhibitionism found full expression in the links between acts.
Thus the title of the programme – The Kenny Everett Video Show – and the birth of the one thing everyone seems to remember about him: his comic ‘characters’. These – Sid Snot, Marcel Wave and later Gizzard Puke - were in truth not characters at all, but costumes, safely ensconced in which Everett would come on and tell a joke. The jokes were rarely if ever tailored to the characters, and could easily be swapped among them with no ill effect. It seems strange now, but like almost everything Everett did, it was as impossible to dislike when it was bad as when it was good.
But as the show became more popular, and audiences took to this utterly loveable and naturally funny if completely undisciplined man, the programmes moved further from their video jukebox origins and more towards scripted comedy. (Prompting a title-change to The Kenny Everett Video Cassette.)
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The programme's titles credit three men with this responsibility: Everett himself, who probably came up with little more than character ideas, jingles and perhaps a bit of on-set improv, Ray Cameron, who produced the shows and is something of an unknown quantity (he was apparently a game show deviser, and he wrote some of the songs on Clive Dunn’s album Grandad Requests Permission To Sing, Sir; his chief writing contribution to Everett may well have been the thousands of game show parodies his instantly identifiable voice would invariably introduce with “and now heeeeeeeeeeere’s Kenny!”) and Barry Cryer, the everywhere man of British comedy who wrote all the jokes.
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When Everett died, I was amazed to see Spike Milligan, notoriously tight with his commendations, warmly and sheepishly saying “I think I influenced his humour.” For a man who made no bones about describing Q as “the show that Monty Python copied” this seemed incredibly generous praise. Somewhat overly so, you might think – and if you do, forget the BBC compilation video, get over to E-bay and pick yourself up a bootleg of the first two BBC series.
By this time, all pretence of it being a tv-radio show has been dropped; it’s pure comedy, as signified by another telling title change to The Kenny Everett Television Show. And it is bliss. Of course, a lot of it is sloppy; there are bits of aimless dressing up and those sodding ‘characters’ padding out the running time, but still each episode contains something like twelve minutes of amazing comedy. It’s not Q, but it comes closer, miles closer, than anything else has ever even attempted.
God, what a mix; what fun Cryer and Everett and Cameron were clearly having. Brilliantly used guest stars like Joanna Lumley, Geoffrey Palmer, Billy Connolly, Mel Smith, even John Bluthal for the love of Mike, complement the amazing work of this central performer who never displays anything as straightforward as real comic talent, and yet is somehow one of the funniest men that ever lived. (Cryer once explained: “We could do anything because he wasn’t a comic who said, ‘this isn’t me’, as he had no sense of identity as a comic. One minute he was an insurance salesman; the next minute he was Queen Victoria.”)

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By 1983, Everett was one of the most popular stars on tv, a regular riot in the middle of the bottom row on Blankety Blank and a firm favourite of adult and child alike. What better than a feature film to exploit this popularity?

The first interestingly suicidal decision was to cut out the huge contingent of short-trousered fans that adored Kenny and would never miss him (including yours truly and all who were of the age to have spent Christmas day 1979 and ‘80 poring over those Video Show annuals) by giving the film an 18 rating so as to more fully exploit the show’s obsession with tit humour and comedic gore. We younger fans could, in all seriousness, have made the film a hit; we would have come out for it, no question. Instead we could only dream of it, watch the clips on Barry Norman, and wait for the day – o, glorious day – when Thorn EMI released it on tape and we could get one of our mates’ dads to rent it for us. (Did it let us down? Did it hell.)

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The title is both good parody and quintessential Everett - it could easily be one of the starring vehicles Cupid Stunt would announce every week on his shows – and the decision to make it a horror film parody allowed whichever of the writers it was that so loved flinging blood about (presumably not Cryer, possibly Everett himself) to go for broke in scenes where victims have their craniums split with meat cleavers, another is slowly decapitated on a wall-mounted tin-opener and, with oddly satisfying aesthetic rightness, a severed head lodged on a windowsill bleeds all over Cryer’s snowy white hair.
Everett, with an on-off German accent and a metal leg, is the leader of a group of scientists sent to investigate the strange phenomena reported in an old house where eighteen people had been murdered in one night; his “distinguished international team of specialists” are played by a distinguished international cast that includes Gareth Hunt and Don Warrington as a gay couple, Sheila Steafel as a butch lesbian, Pamela Stephenson (who was never a hit in our house and regrettably steals the attention of the film from Everett in its final quarter) and Cleo Rocos, Everett’s eccentric friend and sexy set dressing on the BBC shows, here given a major role, murdering every line and not taking her clothes off once: another baffling executive decision. (She also doubles-up as the voice of the receptionist who answers Everett’s call to the police: “What type of a dead body?” “Upside down with big chests.”)

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Then there’s David Lodge and Graham Stark, and even Vincent Price, who plays “the arch disciple of Lucifer himself”, and is billed as ‘the Sinister Man’. Price, surprisingly perhaps, was no stranger to British rubbish: he had recently played a vampire with retractable fangs disco dancing to the Pretty Things in The Monster Club, and even shows up in Percy’s Progress, indisputably the penis transplant comedy sequel of 1974.

This, however, was the first time he had been scripted by Barry Cryer, so he is required to act out the old “And you tell me to piss off – you piss off!” gag, says “Oh shit, my hand!” at the end of an incantation and has it chanted back to him by his followers, and has to deal with the inevitable misunderstanding of his injunction to “take the faggots and burn them”. His delightful line “Seven hundred years undead and now this!” is delivered with what can only be described as feeling.
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The biggest surprise is how straight a lot of it is played, and how, sadly, the jokes really do dry up halfway through. Some of the horror scenes, including such staples as the bleeding bathroom and blade shooting from a telephone mouthpiece, are played without comic spin, almost as if Cameron wants to get a few genuine scares in. There are several indigestible movie parodies – Sheila Steafel in a school uniform taking on Carrie, Stephenson being raped by an invisible entity with whom she shares a post-coital ciggie, and Everett writhing on the table like John Hurt in Alien, before finding relief in a prolonged belch. Some of the cross-referencing is so specific as to be meaningless. Asked why he is melting a wax dummy with a blowtorch, Price replies, “I always do!” This is presumably a reference to The Abominable Dr Phibes but is certainly not the generic cliché the joke seems to imply.
It’s 1983, so there are Mel Brooks-type jokes, too: Vincent Price, Graham Stark and ET all get to say “Oh shit!” and Brooks’s second favourite joke also gets an airing, when what we take to be ominous soundtrack music is revealed to be Everett practicing the cello. (Rest assured, this latter is given the Everett touch, however: he’s playing it while sat on the toilet.)
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The truth about the film is that it’s not good enough, and that’s a pity, because the team that had just made Everett’s first two BBC series was capable of something extraordinary. The script feels like a first draft: it needs serious editing, a couple more plot ideas and lots more jokes. Too much of it is just naff (Stephenson screams “Look out a bat!” and a cricket bat falls from the ceiling), and there are some very basic double-entendres getting stuffed and mounted without a trace of comic awareness by Rocos and straight male lead John Stewart Hill. (Bafflingly, their characters’ romance seems at times to be played almost for real, certainly not for laughs.)
God alone knows what happens at the end. The film simply slips from the grasp of all concerned and sort of trickles away, with the scientists and the monks killed by satanic doppelgangers who then declare the ‘sacred house’ has ‘been cleansed’, and depart in a space ship. But I’m telling you the plot.
The final caption – ‘The End – Or Is It The Beginning?’ – is both hugely apt and, fascinatingly, the exact same caption that was used at the end of the George and Mildred film.
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But the first half is good; from the opening caption (‘August 12th 1975, Thursday, Give or Take a Day’) we know that Cryer’s in the house, and a lot of what follows comes near to that peculiar self-deprecating, throwaway quality that made the tv shows so uniquely entertaining. An attempt to remember the exact manner in which the various victims had been murdered turns into a singalong to the tune of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ (“one blew up, one was hanged, two were axed, and six were frozen to death”), and there’s fun to be had in a tour-de-force of excess where Everett’s attempts to retrieve his monocle after it drops into his patient during surgery end with him ripping out handfuls of the man’s innards and pelting his mocking colleagues with them.
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All to no avail. The film flopped disastrously in Britain, despite a fairly extensive publicity campaign, a tie-in novel by Martin Noble (yes, I’ve got it; yes, it’s great; no, you can’t borrow it), and Renault cars supplied for the film by Vince Maishman of Stations Supreme, Potters Bar. It was, however, a box office hit in Australia, where slumming British comedy always seems to go over okay. (In an interview to promote the film on Australian television, Everett attributed its lack of home-ground success to the fact that the British "have no class.")

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In a Guardian piece celebrating the film’s triumphant reappearance on DVD earlier this year, producer Laurence Myers offered his own explanation as to why it failed: “It's a fairly terrible film… I recall showing it to [censor] James Ferman who thought it was fine and funny enough, but thought we were showing him the reels in the wrong order. We weren't - the film just doesn't make sense.”

One thing’s for sure: there has never since been another British comedy quite like it, except possibly Guest House Paradiso.

Happy Hallowe'en!

The Munsters' favourite holiday has come round again.

Here to help you celebrate are five recommended movies, in increasing order of scariness, to add the finishing touch to the day.

1. I Married A Witch (1942)

Rene Clair, French master behind Le Million, came to America in the forties and by some oversight was actually given worthwhile things to do. This could be the most delightful Hollywood comedy of the forties, with Veronica Lake in the role she was born to play: a Salem witch putting the hex on aspiring politician Fredric March. First class whimsy, with Lake at her most iconic and front-rank support from Cecil Kellaway, Susan Hayward and the great Robert Benchley.

.................. Veronica Lake: What Hallowe'en was invented for

2. House of Frankenstein (1944)

A convenient quick fix of Universal monsters: in the space of one hour and eleven minutes mad scientist Boris Karloff and hunchback assistant J. Carrol Naish break out of a lunatic asylum, strangle George Zucco and steal his travelling Chamber of Horrors show, revive Dracula (John Carradine) and set him loose on a killing spree, discover the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr) and the Frankenstein Monster (Glenn Strange in the first of his Karloff-equalling three turns in the role) frozen in blocks of ice, thaw them out and set them loose on killing sprees. At the end Naish gets thrown out of a window and Karloff is sucked down in a bog. But I'm telling you the plot. Plus a surprise appearance by Sig Rumann, blustering foil to the Marx Brothers who enjoys the peculiar distinction of playing a senior medical expert called in to expose a patient with fake symptoms in no fewer than four totally separate and unconnected movies.

3. Night of the Demon (1957)

Genuinely spooky British horror film, made seconds before the Hammer revolution by the director of several of the best Val Lewton films. A most persuasively eerie atmosphere, a fine, literate script and Niall MacGinnis beating even Charles Gray to the title of cinema's best ever Satanist as Julian Karswell, leader of an English devil cult and expert on dancing witches ("They do dance; I've seen them!")

Paulette Goddard done up like a cat in a publicity photo with an at best tangential relationship to the films being discussed. I anticipate no complaints.

4. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

The most enjoyable sequel to an acclaimed original which, nonetheless, only really works once. This, the first after a long lay-off and the odd diversion that was Halloween III: Season of the Witch plays far better, though saying that is the kind of heresy that can get you burned at the stake. Good ranting from Donald Pleasence and one of cinema's most convincing ever child performances from Danielle Harris, who later turned up fully grown in Urban Legend and the Halloween remake.

5. Suspiria (1977)

Argento at his most hallucinatory: as always, great so long as you know what you're getting. A German ballet school staffed by witches is the excuse for hysterical violence on insanely saturated Technicolor stock, dream logic and just about passable dialogue and plotting. This has one of his better casts, including Jessica Harper from Stardust Memories as the Little Red Riding Hood heroine and Joan Bennett and Alida Valli, no less, as the witches, but it is the visuals and pounding score by Italian prog-rockers Goblin that are the heart of the show. Ideal for traumatising any young trick-or-treaters who come to your door in the mistaken belief that we live in America.

Horrors enough

The Strangers based, it claims happily, on a true story, is about a yuppie-ish couple who are tied up, tortured and, for a grand finale, stabbed to buggery by teenagers in grotesque masks. (The tagline is "Because You Were Home...")

Eden Lake pits a totally different yuppie-ish couple against a totally different pack of ferals (including that obnoxious tyke Thomas Turgoose); totally different torture, slashings, severed tongues and burnings alive ensue.

Donkey Punch is light relief: a pack of morons turn psycho when one of them accidentally kills some tart by walloping the back of her neck during sex on a yacht; savage killings ensue.

Urban violence is apparently the new thing in horror; a strange amalgam of the traditional slasher film, the serial killer thriller and that popular hybrid known jovially as torture porn. Aside from identikit plots and identikit best-horror-film-I've-seen-in-ages-type reviews, these films have this in common: their collective presence at the moment when their genre abandoned the last pitiful vestiges of what we can now see was only ever a cynical and opportunist reliance on fantasy, and the pretence of ultimately siding with the angels.

No longer is lip service paid to the threat being countered at the end, no longer are the monsters different from the rest of us, no longer is there any effort to pretend that mere sadism is insufficient as content, and should not be offered explicitly for the delectation of other sadists. Now, torture and thuggery are indispensable ingredients in horror.

This is a huge milestone moment in the history of horror movies akin to the debuts of Psycho or Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chainsaw.

Think back to the last mini-milestone that was Scream. How cosy does that look, already? These are fast-paced times, folks: look out.

It took just ten years to get from The Curse of Frankenstein to Corruption, a mere twelve from Psycho to Last House on the Left, a piffling fifteen from Silence of the Lambs to Hostel. The last journey may be the most interesting of all, not just because it takes in so many unbelievably bad films along the way - Copycat, The Bone Collector, In Dreams, The Cell, Kiss the Girls, Natural Born Killers - but also because it shows how quickly walls tumble once breached.

The official line on Lambs was that it was an important film, not cheap exploitation, so we all dutifully took it seriously and pretended it was serious drama with serious things to say, and we trooped off seriously to see it and went in with serious faces and came out with serious faces. Watching it, we had a lot of fun. How long before we were just allowed to have fun with this stuff? Fifteen years. And look where we are now, and how commonplace it all is now, and how Hostel barely raised an eyebrow.

And still we talk of films 'influencing' people, and argue the toss about it, as if the people who make the films aren't influenced every bit as much as those watching them! As if this clear progression from the shocking to the commonplace, despite the constant upping of the dose of sadism and degradation and masturbatory clinical detail, does not tell its own obvious story of a culture and a product coarsening each other as they march together. Coarsened sensibilities both are coarsened and coarsen others, and the ride never stops.

The name of the game now is realism. The killers are real, the killings are real, the pitilessness is real, the gloating over sadism is real, the hopelessness is real.

Even when Psycho made it okay for ordinary human killers to be fun-scary, the iconography remained resolutely other-worldly. As late in the game as Halloween and the Friday the 13th series, the threat is always overtly monstrous, bordering on supernatural, the killer signposted as fundamentally different from those around him, not least by the adoption of a signature mask that seems somehow more his real face than whatever lies beneath.

Chucky and Freddy were the most the previous generation had to worry about: one a sort of ghost, one a doll, neither likely to be hanging around the back of your local supermarket.

Even the masks are being let go now; true, the killers of The Strangers adopt such disguises, but only to be scary. Like the killers of the Scream series they use horror masks not because they are an outward manifestation of their psyches but because that's what killers wear in the movies. The arrival of films like Wolf Creek and the Hostel and Saw series shows that art now imitates life imitating art imitating life.

I'm aware of the difficulties in addressing this issue. Honestly I am. I realise that all horror films, even those that now seem the mildest, were all offensive to some in their day, and all pushed at their generation's generally agreed lines of taste and decency. Whale's Frankenstein with its ghoulish imagery of violated graves and post-mortem surgery certainly did. Of course, we can look back and say ah, but there is no explicit detail, and no sadistic killings, and order is restored at the end - and all of this would be true, and would point undeniably to a worrying regression in public taste... but it still wouldn't face up to the fact that horror has always stood outside of mainstream consensus, and that perhaps that is its job.

The Raven, with Lugosi getting obvious sexual pleasure from torturing the woman who spurned him, was felt to be horribly sadistic, and was. The trappings and acting style all distance us from it today, and lessen any serious potential it might hold to shock or disturb, but it would disingenuous to say it was always and intentionally thus.

And yet, irrationally perhaps, I find myself thinking that horror films are a luxury for a people that can afford them, a harmless escape valve for ordered, decent societies that have a strong sense of themselves and a shared certainty as to what ultimate values are being violated on screen. In a flabby society of relative values, weak justice, increasing fear and disorder, such films serve a different and darker purpose. The time has perhaps come, then, to tighten our belts and be done with them. Lugosi does it all a million times better anyway. Watch The Devil Bat instead. See the killer bat swoop on its victims, the ones Lugosi has cunningly doused in the after shave lotion that drives it into a killing frenzy, watch Lugosi explain his cunning plot to a large fake bat hanging upside down from a coat hanger. You'll find you don't need to watch people get tied to chairs and disemboweled.

Richard Mansfield, the American actor who was appearing in a London stage adaptation of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde during the time of the Jack the Ripper murders closed his own production down when newspaper gossip linked the play to the mood of the times, and suggested it might even influence the killer. He made one last performance, donating the proceeds to charity, and afterwards thanked his audience for their patronage and took his leave, explaining "There are horrors enough outside."

Lugosi is all the horror I need at the moment; of the other sort, there is enough outside.

Gloria Stuart is 98 today

In 1998, Gloria Stuart became the oldest actress ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for her part in Titanic. The film itself has not held up at all, but Stuart deserved the recognition: after the death of Fay Wray (who turned the Titanic gig down) she became perhaps the last of the great thirties Hollywood stars.
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A philosophy graduate from Berkeley and a gifted exponent of Shakespeare and Chekhov on stage, she was an intelligent and serious actress encumbered with Hollywood glamour. She came to films reluctantly, and was never certain she had made the right decision, particularly as her much announced superstardom never materialised.
“When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed,” she once said, “I didn't realize it would take so long.”
The attempts to turn her into a production line Hollywood sexpot were often so blatant they seem deliberately antagonistic, as if intended to break her independence and feistiness. She appears in a 1932 Hollywood on Parade short in a cheesecake line-up of Hollywood’s unanimous choice of 1933’s starlets of tomorrow: fourteen girls, one from each studio. “I’m an all-American girl,” she says, in answer to her one question. (The 14 chosen proved a meagre crop, with only Ginger Rogers built for the long haul. Others included Patricia Ellis, Mary Carlisle and Lona Andre, who tells us she got into pick-chas bah bein’ the pantha woman. They didn’t realise when they said stars of tomorrow that they meant Monogram’s stars of tomorrow.)
At Universal, Carl Laemmle Jr was enraptured (“I have never seen such poise, such delicate beauty, such depth, why she almost scares you”) and insisted that “We’ll have to find some truly distinguished stories for her, in fact the finest, because… it would be foolish, and rather embarrassing all round, to put her in, well, a trivial story”.
. But none of her work, either freelance or contracted to Universal and later Twentieth Century Fox, made anything like full use of her talents. She looks stunning in the Eddie Cantor farce Roman Scandals, and does her best singing ‘I’m Going Shopping With You’ with Dick Powell in the Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1935; at Fox she worked with Shirley Temple and the Ritz Brothers, and gave one of her best performances in one of her best films: John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936).
Today, apart from Titanic, she is probably best known now for her roles in Universal horror films. In The Invisible Man (1933) she is purely decorative, essentially reprising Mae Clark's worried girlfriend role from Frankenstein. But Secret of the Blue Room (1933), the least known of the bunch, at least has the sense to keep her the centre of attention.
Adapted from a successful German film, Geheimnis des Blauen Zimmers, no effort has gone into Americanising it, so Paul Lukas is our hero, Captain Walter Brink, and Gloria is our heroine, Irene Von Helldorf, doting daughter to Croydon-born Lionel Atwill. (At least Lukas has an accent: Irene is German by way of Long Island.)

We open in a large and imposing Germanic mansion, almost a castle, where Irene, younger, prettier and more kittenish than the Teutonic sobriety of her name might lead you to suspect, has chosen to celebrate her 21st birthday by inviting the three men who most fancy her to dinner and have them squabble over her. (We’ve all met girls like this.)
Stuart is coquettish and haughty here; with little in the script to bite into she plays the part as a prim tease; indeed, with Lionel Atwill on hand as master of ceremonies, we’re beginning to wonder just what kind of coming of age party this is going to turn into.
“And now,” he says, “Give us all a nice birthday kiss”; Stuart first kisses her father full on the lips, then all the other men in turn. But before Atwill has time to get the snake out of the cupboard, the contest between the three eligible bachelors (that’s Captain Walter Brink, Frank Faber and Thomas Brandt: stout Germanic types all, especially young Tommy) takes a sinister turn when it is discovered that the castle has a sealed bedroom, in which two guests were murdered years before, their killer never identified and his method of entering and escaping never found. In an only barely sublimated courtship display, it is mooted that they each spend consecutive nights there. One dies, one disappears, and one puts two and two together.
There are no surprises here. But it’s got the full compliment of panels and passages, it’s got red herrings of a sort, it’s got Gloria Stuart done up like Harlow in platinum curls and clinging satin nightwear… and how she must have hated teasingly delivering lines like “Oh, it must be terrible to be a man and have to be brave; thank goodness I can be a coward with a clean conscience!”
The masterpiece of her Universal years, and probably of her career, is James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932). (As well as The Invisible Man director and star also teamed on The Kiss Before the Mirror [1933], a stylish murder mystery, between the two horrors.)
.How she must have relished the chance to begin a film not cooing in luxury but trapped in a car in the pouring rain, already deep in a bitter argument with her screen husband. She gives an excellent performance throughout The Old Dark House because she can see it’s worth the effort; she’s also at her most beautiful on screen here, too, which may not be a coincidence. The film is among the more authentically pre-Code of the early Universals, and the potent atmosphere of weird eroticism in the scene where she is subjected to sexual interrogation at the hands of Eva Moore is still disquieting and extraordinary.
Deciding to change out of her wet clothes, Stuart is taken upstairs by Moore, who sits on the bed and harangues her with lurid reminiscences of her hated sister, who had died in the same room at the age of twenty-one. She was wicked, “handsome as a hawk”, and “all the young men used to follow her about with her red lips and her big eyes and her white neck.” As each tragic episode of this poor girl’s life is recounted as if evidence of her evil – she fell off a horse and broke her spine, then lay screaming on the very bed on which she is now sitting (Moore gives the pillows a satisfied pat to make the point), begging to be killed for month after month, before finally expiring “Godless to the last” - Stuart is slowly undressing to her satin underwear, fixes her stockings, then dresses slowly, just her shoes first, then pulling on a fantastic (if quite inappropriate considering the temperature and the company) clinging white satin dress. (Like a white flame, director James Whale envisaged.)
The juxtaposition between the horrible narrative, recounted with obvious glee by Moore, and the alluring visuals is deliberately emphasised by Whale, who brings it to a memorable dramatic coda, as Moore concludes her diatribe against “brazen, lolling creatures in silks and satins” by circling Stuart and ending up staring into her face:

You’re wicked, too. Young and handsome, silly, and wicked! You think of nothing but your long, straight legs and your white body, and how to please your man. You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don’t you? (She grabs the material of her dress.) That’s fine stuff, but it’ll rot. (She pinches Stuart’s skin.) That’s finer stuff still, but it’ll rot too, in time!

Whale finishes with a great shot of the curtains, and Stuart’s dress, billowing in the wind as she runs down a corridor on the beautiful, Cat and the Canary–ish set. Bravura, pre-Code tours-de-force from writer, director and cast alike, and one of those scenes where you most long for a look at one of those gleaming first run prints. (The Old Dark House survives only in a ratty old print resembling a DVD bootleg.) Stuart, her hair neatly parted and half-lit, half-shadowed, getting a chance to really perform while being photographed so magnificently, looks as beautiful as any actress has ever looked at the movies.
All of which helps make Gloria Stuart the world's most important living film star.

Julie Ege: Hammer's head cavegirl

First Hazel Court, now, less than a week later, Julie Ege.
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While Court was of the first, more stately generation of Hammer leading ladies, Ege was very much of the later school, the seventies international crumpet contingent.

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She had been Miss Norway, a Penthouse centrefold and one of Blofeld’s girls in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by the time Hammer spotted her, declared her “the new sex symbol of the seventies” and cast her as a cavewoman in Creatures The World Forgot. The film died, but any Hammer fan will tell you that she was the studio's top cavewoman, outgrunting Raquel Welch, Edina Ronay or Victoria Vetri by a prehistoric mile.

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For a while Ege was busy in British films, combining sexpot roles in Up Pompeii (as 'Voluptua'), Percy’s Progress, Not Now Darling and The Amorous Milkman with more interesting work (this is strictly relative, remember) in some of the odder British horror films, like Herman Cohen’s demented Craze, and The Mutations, which ends with her turning into a plant.
In all these films she was well-served by an air of bemusement which could have been unfamiliarity with the language but was just as likely incredulity at the weird things she was being asked to do and the overall shabbiness of the productions in which she was being asked to do them.
Unlike many Hammer glamour queens of the time, she has a down to earth quality and seems to be enjoying herself. As a result, she seems less self-conscious and more likeable on screen, and she is easier to pick out and remember from film to film, than many of her peers.

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The Mutations has her as a student in London, and there is a convincingly matey, Man About the House-type interplay with her co-stars Jill Haworth and two blokes (you look up their names if you’re so interested). And she is charming in the Marty Feldman film Every Home Should Have One, funny in The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, and game indeed in The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, her second Hammer, in which she plays a kind of proto-feminist European adventuress. It is, I suppose, acting-wise the meatiest of all her roles, but as I said, this is all relative.
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She lived in England for a while but eventually returned to Norway, where she became a nurse. It was, she said, what she had always wanted to be: “To be honest, I was never really that proud of my performance in films, but I gave it my best and enjoyed the work very much.”
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She died of cancer on April 29th.

Hazel Court: Hammer’s head girl

Hazel Court, star of The Curse of Frankenstein, has died at the age of eighty-two, just a week before the publication of her autobiography.

Court was the original Hammer Horror girl, first in a long line of screaming damsels menaced by the many unspeakable horrors of the English gothic tradition.
The popular image of a Hammer starlet is of the 1970’s variety, blonde and pneumatic, recruited as often as not from Playboy magazine. Court, by contrast, was of the first generation, product of a time when the studio favoured slightly older and more classical actresses, statuesque rather than blatantly pulchritudinous, often red-headed, and in at least three cases called Yvonne.

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Court's importance to the Hammer story is basically symbolic. In terms of longevity and number of films, Barbara Shelley (who somewhat resembled Court and according to Christopher Lee possessed “a bass baritone quite rare for a woman”) is a more central figure in the studio’s history, as well as a comparably gifted actress who transformed a number of pretty watery roles. But it was Court who got there first, as Elizabeth in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the first true Hammer gothic.

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She only appeared once more for the studio, but scored another first: becoming, in 1959’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death, the first Hammer lead actress to appear nude. (But only in export prints, in a sequence now lost. For many Hammer fans, these few seconds of film are worth a hundred London After Midnights, though a still from it does appear in Court's autobiography.) But she confirmed her genre reputation with subsequent appearances in Hammer carbon Dr Blood’s Coffin and three AIP Poe films for Roger Corman: The Premature Burial, The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death, the latter as a somewhat tragic villainess rather than screaming heroine (below).
Her qualities were felt more keenly in her absence. As the sixties brought worldwide success for Hammer, a more international and overt glamour element was sought, and the refined English model typified by Court and Shelley gave way to younger and blonder variations; it coincided with the move away from Bray studios and was an equally regrettable loss to the Hammer formula. These were the days of Raquel Welch modelling mankind's first bikini and Susan Denberg, Playboy’s Miss August ’66, in Frankenstein Created Woman (the clumsy title legacy of a brief period when it was touted as a vehicle for Bardot – a good indicator of the direction in which Hammer was moving).

The best of this middle batch is clearly Veronica Carlson (left), who debuted in 1968’s Dracula Has Risen From The Grave and followed it with two Frankensteins and Tyburn’s Hammer-alike The Ghoul.
The bottom fell out of Hammer shortly after they were awarded the Queen’s Award to Industry in ’68, and as the films themselves became more desperately exploitative in the studio’s drive to regain lost favour at the box-office, so did the central casting. The archetypal Hammer queen from this (perhaps any) era is, I suppose, Ingrid Pitt, though she too only appeared in two films for the company (in one of which she is dubbed) and made her name crucially as villainess rather than heroine; off-screen she was something of a loose wire to say the least.

Standing out amongst this final catch are the winsome Madeline Smith, who specialised in young and naïve victims, and Caroline Munro (left), the only actress signed to a Hammer contract and an enduring genre presence well into the eighties.

But I must also put in a word for Valerie Leon (left), Amazonian support in Carry On films and similar, whose one and only Hammer performance was also her one and only lead, in Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb. It shouldn’t have worked out but it does: Leon is beautiful but in a very weird way, and her strange, penetrating face, which her comedy roles played down, Hammer played up. As a result, she gives a genuinely spooky performance, looks amazing, and even her fairly wooden delivery adds to the trance-like characterisation.
The rest were typified by the likes of Yutte Stensgaard (Danish crumpet in Lust For a Vampire), Victoria Vetri (Playboy centrefold turned Hammer cavewoman), or Madeleine and Mary Collinson (Playboy’s nude twins, Hammer’s Twins of Evil, left). These stars, often spotted by eagle-eyed Hammer boss Sir James Carreras (“I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it”) in newspapers and advert-hoardings, were put into films like The Vampire Lovers and Dracula AD 1972 ( “The Count is Back... with an eye for London's hotpants” ran the advertising) to take advantage of a newly liberalised British Board of Film Censors. Far from pornography, these films seem rather charmingly short-trousered today, with big-breasted Scandinavians tumbling out of their nightgowns in solemn re-enactment of the fantasies ten-year old schoolboys had when they were supposed to be doing geometry.

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Though she certainly shares with later custodians of the Hammer tiara what the Times obituary describes as a “panoramic cleavage”, Court’s was a poised and elegant screen presence, her beautiful red hair, green eyes and translucent skin seeming almost unreal in the harsh Eastmancolor palette. (She seems even more other-worldy in Dr Blood’s Coffin, which casts her not in Victorian costume but as a 1960’s nurse in a Cornish village.)

Her voice, too, is unusual; she purrs rather than talks, and it almost sounds as though there is a foreign accent being submerged beneath the cut-glass vowels, though she was in fact from Birmingham. Rewatching The Curse of Frankenstein, as I assume we have all just done, it is clear that she, more perhaps than any other Hammer female lead, has real star quality as well as being a quite exceptional beauty; you can easily imagine her sparring with Margaret Lockwood in a Gainsborough melodrama, or even in women’s pictures in Hollywood.
But Curse rescued her from a career that was fast going nowhere. She had been around since the mid-forties without ever quite making an impression; like the equally striking Barbara Steele she had been signed to a Rank contract and then more or less ignored.

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By the mid-fifties she was most often to be found on television or in those cheap second-feature thrillers that took the place of the original quota-quickies.

The most notorious of these is 1954’s Devil Girl From Mars (1954), wonderful on-the-cheap British sci-fi, with Hazel as one of a group of earthlings trapped in a pub by a black leather-clad Martian dominatrix out to recruit men as breeding stock. (The Times, reporting her death, claimed Court herself played the Devil Girl: alas, she did not, but I understand the wishful thinking.) Incidentally, the film - like Behind The Headlines (1956), one of her very last before Hammer - paired her with Adrienne Corri, another striking redhead whose time was still to come.
After Hammer, she was suddenly the hottest thing in British films. A contemporaneous issue of Picturegoer put her on the cover, and in an article titled “Our cover girl shines among the ghouls” noted: “Hers will be the most widely screened British face in America this year”, and that the film itself was “tipped to be shown in more US cinemas than any British film ever.”
Well, the predicted superstardom never came, and it is a great pity that the main fruit of her success – a part in the American tv series Dick and the Duchess – kept her away from British movies at a time when she should have been consolidating her success. As it was the series ended after a year, and she returned to a movie business that had moved on in her absence. Apart from the Cormans and Dr Blood’s, almost all of her subsequent credits were in tv.
But she remains, for me, the best as well as the first Hammer heroine, and it is sad indeed to contemplate how good she would have been as Mina in Dracula, or Isobel in The Mummy, or in any of Barbara Shelley’s roles.
Watching Curse again, I was struck as I always am by the confidence and ease of it: there is no sense whatsoever that the studio realised they were doing anything radical or far-reaching in its influence. It is, in fact, a rather underrated film, one that it is fashionable to write-off as far more important for what it began than for what it is. I’ve never found it so: certainly I feel it is equal to Dracula, its immediate follow-up and a masterpiece acknowledged by all. Hazel Court, in incredible real Victorian costumes that seem nonetheless tailor-made for her, is a huge contributor to its success, and to that crucial aura of class Hammer were able to give what was in truth a very cheap film. Like Cushing, similarly far more than Hammer could have reasonably expected, she bestows elegance on all she brushes past.

Vampira goes home

Edward D. Wood Jr's Plan Nine From Outer Space is unquestionably the most famous bad movie of all time.

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It first came to prominence in the late seventies when it was hailed as the worst film ever made, and Wood the world's worst director, and it was only over time that a more respectful cult grew around it, saluting Wood's inventiveness, eccentricity and resourcefulness.

A tragic, tortured individual, he sadly lived long enough to witness the first wave of acclaim but not the second. One of his stars, Valda Hansen, recalled him saying: "Do you think I care if I'm a millionaire? No... what hurts me is the cruelty toward me... I'm only trying to do the best at what I feel. All this garbage I see, they praise. And me, they seem to love to deride me."

The man had a point. At a time in the nineteen-seventies when so much acclaim was being heaped on childish, utterly pretentious films like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, what was so terrible about a few wobbling tombstones and super-intelligent aliens who write their plans for world domination on scruffy sheets of A4?

Looking back at that 'Golden Turkey' period, and thinking of Wood's final days - alcoholic, barely scraping a living, still proud of his films and desperate to make another - it does all seem unbelievably cruel. He did indeed do the best he could with what he had, and parts of his films really are triumphs of inspiration over an almost complete lack of resources. Of course, that does not make them good movies by any objective standard, but Wood was an eccentric who should have been treasured.

And as for Plan Nine itself, it seems to me that while later attempts to redress the injustice by hailing him as a genius and visionary are plainly ridiculous, the narrow-mindedness of the earlier mockery is equally blinkered.

The truth is that the film does have some things going for it, especially in its first half. Once the heroes are on board the spaceship - with its tatty curtains and Dudley Manlove shrieking "Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!" - the absurdity of the concept becomes insurmountable. But some of the earlier sequences are genuinely spooky if you catch them in the right frame of mind - that is to say with a wide-eyed child's kind of imagination, which was exactly the kind of imagination Wood possessed. There is a visual style unique to the film, and the library music score is entirely effective. (The famous main theme is in fact a Soviet hymn to industry: 'Iron Foundry' by the Russian composer Alexander Mossolov.)

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And the human presence that most instantly evokes and defines it - far more than Lugosi, far more than chiropractor Dr Tom Mason pretending to be Lugosi with a cape over his face, more even than the stumbling, massive Tor Johnson - is actress Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira, who died earlier this month at the age of eighty-six.

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In the film she plays Bela Lugosi's wife, ressurected from the dead by aliens whose plan to enslave the earth by reviving human corpses is so obscure and ill-considered one can only wonder what their first eight plans were like. She is never named: Vampira is how she is billed as actress rather than character. The notion of a zombie being played by a woman called Vampira is in fact one of the subtler oddities that proliferate in Wood's universe.

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'Vampira' was originally a character Nurmi created for television, a role in which she could provide on-screen introductions to late-night horror shows. Unlike her mute, scary turn in Plan Nine, she was flirty and fun. The look she invented - tight black dress, long black hair, arched eyebrows and odd mix of skittishness and predatory allure, kind of like Veronica Lake's evil twin - was inspired in part by the famous Charles Addams cartoons but predates by years Carolyn Jones in The Addams Family, Yvonne de Carlo in The Munsters, Fenella Fielding in Carry On Screaming and all those other variations on the same basic formula.

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Wood's stars tend to fall into two categories: those that loved him, loved his films, appeared in several of them and hung out with him between pictures, and those who somehow found themselves roped in and couldn't believe the ants-nest of weirdoes, derelicts, has-beens and freaks into which they had landed. Chief among the latter has always been Plan Nine's hero, Greg Walcott, who has frequently scorned the notion that Wood was a frustrated artist, and opined that even with a big studio's resources he still would have made the same film. (His exact words were: "He had no taste. Even if he had ten million dollars it would have been a piece of tasteless shit.")

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Surprisingly, perhaps, Nurmi belonged to this latter category. Her entry into Wood's world came about through necessity rather than choice. The way she told it, she was being courted by all the major studios when she first heard that Wood was interested in signing her, and openly scorned the idea. But then she was blacklisted, and accepted Wood's offer in desperation when all other avenues had been closed to her.

According to her she was paid 200 dollars for a day's work, and travelled to and from the studio in full make-up on the bus.

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Rarely has screen immortality begun so humbly, for there is no doubt that a huge part of the film's enduring status is attributable to her role and her presence.

Plot-wise she is an utter mystery. All that the aliens are supposed to have done is make some corpses rise from their graves, and we are expected to believe that she is the wife of a rather elderly and conventional man, played by Lugosi. So to what are we expected to attribute her extraordinary appearance? Why was she buried in that incredible costume? What's with the make-up? Who cares? She looks sensational. For most of my teenage years this was exactly the girl I wanted on my arm.

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Her first appearances, if one thinks of them purely as cinema with no regard to the story Wood is supposedly telling (which seems to be the way Wood thought most of the time), are gorgeous little pieces of film. Wood cuts to that tiny, minimalist grave set, jet-black save for a tomb, a single wizened tree and some wisps of fog in the extreme foreground. Slowly, from behind the tomb, she emerges, her arms held rigid but not straight, twisted at odd angles, shaking slightly as if palsied. Staring directly at us, she moves slowly but not gracefully, in odd, lurching spurts of movement. It is intercut with location shots of the two gravediggers (one of them producer J Edward Reynolds, a baptist who put up most of the money on the condition that the entire cast be baptised in a swimming pool) and the match is hopeless: they are in dusk on location, she in impenetrable, inky, studio blackness.

The effect is hard to describe but unforgettable to watch, and I'm aware that one can oversell it as much as undersell it... obviously it's not really scary and it makes no sense as drama... but purely on the level of imagery it is really quite beautiful.

Most of her sequences are variations on this set-up, walking either to the camera or away from it on this single cramped set, sometimes her face blank and placid, sometimes contorted in an evil sneer. On one memorable occasion we see her walking away from us in her fantastic dress, a tight belt around her tiny waist, before half-turning her head and looking directly at us with one eye.

Just imagine what her home-life with Lugosi had been like! The only reference we get implies complete domestic harmony: against poignant footage of Lugosi shot shortly before his death, narrator Criswell (a non-psychic psychic who predicted entire cities of homosexuals in America and an inter-planetary convention before the end of the twentieth century) intones typically purple, incomprehensible Ed Wood prose:

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The grief of his wife's death became greater and greater agony. The home they had so long shared together became a tomb, a sweet memory of her joyous living. The sky to which she had once looked was now only a covering for her dead body.

The ever-beautiful flowers she had planted with her own hands became nothing more than the lost roses of her cheeks.

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Like so much else, perhaps everything else, about this film, the words are meaningless, crazed, hopelessly self-contradicting - yet oddly effective, strangely haunting.

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In later years, Nurmi seemed happily resigned to the fact that Plan Nine was her ticket to immortality, and spoke affectionately of Wood and the times they spent promoting the movie. Interviewed by Rudolph Grey for his generous and fascinating oral history of Wood's life and work Nightmare of Ecstasy she told of her most recent business venture: selling Hollywood celebrity grave rubbings by mail order.

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AND... I've only just learned that Yvonne de Carlo died last year, too; somehow the news got past me until now. A beautiful starlet in forties tosh, westerns and exotica (Salome Where She Danced, Frontier Gal, Slave Girl) and wife of Moses in The Ten Commandments, she will be remembered above all for the role of Lily Munster, which she accepted reluctantly and never quite came to terms with. She knew that The Munsters, rather than any of her starring movies, would unquestionably be her legacy, and the fact bemused her somewhat, but she appreciated the renewed popularity it brought her with successive generations of children.