October Horrors #5:‘The Dracula Business’(Anthony de Lotbiniere, 1974)

Originally broadcast as a Tuesday night documentary by the BBC in August 1974, ‘The Dracula Business’ is a thoroughly entertaining forty-five minutes, structured in the ever-popular “this thing happened, also this largely unconnected thing happened” manner beloved of mondo movies and parapsychology paperbacks.

After an (unattributed) playback of the ship scene from Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’, proceedings begin, naturally enough, in Whitby. “I wonder if Count Dracula found this church yard as odd as I do?” muses presenter and Boris Johnson lookalike Dan Farson. Farson is the great nephew of Bram Stoker no less, and a “renowned Soho character” according to my (extremely limited) online research.

After treating some local children to a round of ‘Count Dracula’s Secret’ ice lollies, Farson quizzes them on their knowledge of vampire lore (chalk that up as “scene you definitely wouldn’t see in a documentary these days” # 1), before he attends a meeting of The Dracula Society at Purfleet (and these guys deemed 1972’s ‘Blacula’ “…the mosty horrifying film of the decade” according to my copy of the soundtrack LP, so they know what the hell they’re talking about). “Haven’t you got even ONE crank?” Farson asks the assemblage of mild-mannered eccentrics somewhat disappointedly.

In an attempt to demonstrate how much these programmes cost to make (gag © Eric Idle/Neil Innes), Farson next travels to Transylvania (“..there IS such a place..”) in present-day Romania, where the production captures some remarkably atmospheric footage, visiting a medieval convent decorated with appropriately infernal frescos, wherein nuns ward off evil by circling the grounds hammering planks of wood, whilst peasant-folk who look as if they could have stepped straight out of a Universal torch-wielding mob meanwhile queue up to kiss a carved icon above a well.

We are even presented with a picturesque rural funeral procession, featured in-between shots of mist raising from the forest, as Farson rambles on in pompous Wheatley/Lee type fashion about the depths of ancient superstition and an apparent “outbreak of Vampirism” that ravaged the area in the 18th century.

Remarkably, the filmmakers even manage to track down a woman – one of the singers at the funeral – who, interviewed against a backdrop of the local cemetery, tells Farson (via an interpreter) that her own father was suspected of being a vampire, and was disinterred and staked by village elders. Beat that for local colour.

Back in London meanwhile, things get a tad sillier, as Farson stalks about Highgate cemetery, musing on some recent cases of premature burial. Jarringly, we then jump straight from Farson recalling some spectacularly grim family tales about the ordeals faced by the Stoker family during a cholera outbreak in County Sligo during Bram’s youth, to the London offices of Lorimer Press, where some eager fanboys are sorting through a huge pile of Euro-Horror posters, preparing “..the latest work on vampire films”.

“Paul Naschy, the hunchback of the morgue!”, one of the guys exclaims happily, drawing our attention to a one-sheet for that very motion picture, which sits atop a fairly awesome French poster for (of all things) ‘Blacula’. I’m not sure who these fellows are (we’re not given their names at any point), but they seem like some cool dudes, with a lot of interesting things to say on their subject – perhaps the 1970s precursors to the Kim Newmans and Stephen Throwers of today?

Arguably somewhat less of a cool dude is good ol’ Michael Carreras, whom Farson corners at Hammer House, where he is checking out a test-pressing of Hammer’s cash-in Dracula LP. Carreras says something about the fantasy horror provided by Hammer being contrasted with “modern horror, more of a social realist document kind of thing..”. “Like Belfast?,” Farson jumps in. “Yes, very much so.”

Next up is Denholm Elliot, who gives us a great recitation of a passage from Stoker by way of demonstrating the “sexuality of vampirism”, following on from his 1968 TV version of ‘Dracula’ (which, on the basis of his hamming it up here, I should probably get around to watching). Elliot concludes his reading with perhaps the single greatest suggestive “HMMMMmmmmm…” ever captured on film. “Did you enjoy the devouring?” asks Farson. “Well, quite frankly, that isn’t really my scene…” responds Elliot.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, we then move to an on-set report from the making of Jose Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’ at Oakley Court. “How stunned my poor old Great Uncle might have been by these scenes,” Farson opines as Anulka and Marrianne Morris lounge naked on the bed waiting for the camera to roll, “and of the hard professionalism that goes into the making of this latest style of vampire film”.

We actually get a great glimpse here of Larraz in action, directing his leading ladies in rather hands-on fashion (“now, you go like that, and then like that, now… that is the thing… you come again, alright, with your hands like this…”, etc), all of which proves absolutely fascinating given the complete lack of ‘making of..’ footage that exists for most Euro-horror films of this era.

Sadly though, the scene cuts quite soon, as we return to Romania for a segment exploring Dracula sight-seeing tours, and plans for the “Count Dracula Castle”, which is to be opened to tourists in the Borgo Pass “hopefully in around 1977”. This in turn leads into a bit exploring the history of Vlad Tepes (“he was cruel, but… he had a certain style”) and the theories that have sought to connect him to Stoker’s Dracula.

Apparently running low on purely Dracula-related material, Farson next moves on to “..the general resurgence in the idea of the occult, which is greater in Britain today than it has been in the past few hundred years”. To pursue this further, he heads to a London sci-fi/fantasy bookshop (“specialising entirely in the occult, science fiction, and the ramifications of the Dracula cult..”), which needless to say looks amazing.

Here, he meets a woman, who, put on the spot by the presenter’s blunt questioning, states that she is attracted the idea of reading vampire novels due the fact she is “feeling rather aggressive” because her has husband left her, prompting her to seek vengeance against him through the form of “fantasy violence”. It’s all pretty awkward, to be honest.

From there, we return to Highgate, where poor old Mr Laws, the cemetery caretaker, is dragged out once again to hold forth on the “Highgate vampire”, Alan Farrant and the unfortunate flap of related grave desecrations that generated so much press in the early ‘70s. (For more on this, see my post here from 2010, featuring a report on a BFI screening of a contemporary news report that covered much of the same ground.)

As ever though, Mr Laws is good value for money. Choice quote: “one person said that he’d seen a horrible grey thing wrigglin’ down the road… all this bloody nonsense, y’know… I had to have the police clear them all off out of it..”.

And so it goes on: “Last year, in Stoke On Trent, a man was found dead in this house, in most extraordinary circumstances”. This leads us into the unfortunate tale of a paranoid individual who apparently died after swallowing an entire clove of garlic in an attempt to ward off vampires – a sad tale, somewhat leavened by the fact that the coroner Farson interviews on the subject has such a wonderful, Donald Pleasance-esque manner he could have fared pretty well in a horror movie himself.

The (rather questionable) Rev. Neil Smith subsequently rambles on a bit about his belief in vampirism and his attempts to exorcise people apparently suffering the attentions of vampires, before Farson states his belief that dabbling with the occult has “assumed the scale of an epidemic in modern day Britain”, travelling to “..the reassuring surroundings of a vicarage in Hull” to discuss the issue with a slightly more grounded clergyman, who again, manages somehow to turn his reflections on prevalence of mental illness encouraged by poking about with the powers of darkness into a highly entertaining turn.

Indeed, if there is anything to be said for the entirety of this confused, digressive and fatuous documentary, it is that it is hugely entertaining throughout - probably more so now than when it was first broadcast. The random insights it provides into pop culture and horror fandom circa 1974 are a delight, and it’s massively over-romantised, alien-coded visions of Northern Romania are likewise quite remarkable in their own right.

A perfect palette cleanser to throw on mid-way through your next Halloween movie marathon, ‘The Dracula Business’ can currently be viewed on the BBC iPlayer here, or via Youtube here.

Back.

Well, I'm back from Japan.

You can see & read about some stuff I did there here, if yr interested.

Meanwhile, just thought I'd drop a quick heads up for any UK residents, to let you know that Alex Cox's 'Repo Chick' will be available to watch for two more days on the BBC iplayer.

I just watched it, and to my surprise I thought it was really great! I guess some people might be put off in advance by the broad satire, bright colours and lo-fi special effects, but I feel their opinion should probably be disregarded. That stuff all sat real well with me, and the wayward/imaginative script, fast-moving, goofy tone and great ensemble acting from the cast all helped bring it home. Best Alex Cox movie in years in fact, and I'd love to see it get some wider distribution/recognition. High five to Mr. Cox for pulling the whole thing off so well, and kudos to the BBC for giving a whirl too.

Intermission: Mythos Mastermind

Discovered via Found Objects this evening:

Predictable responses, in order:

1. Man, I’ve got to sample John Humphrys sayin’ all that stuff for some kind of creepy slowed-down-voices recording.

2. I scored 11! How did you do? (Um, not counting the general knowledge questions, natch.)

3. I think I’m in love.

Mysterious Britain at the BFI.

BFI Flipside’s “Mysterious Britain” evening last week got off to an odd start in not quite the manner the organisers had anticipated, when Bruce Springsteen apparently announced a surprise public appearance to promote a documentary about himself, and claimed NFT Screen # 1, where the Flipside screening was due to take place, for that purpose.

I would have loved to witness the meeting between The Boss’s people and the soft-spoken British cinema archivist types, but needless to say, we’re now devoid of leg room, crammed into the substantially smaller NFT # 2. I don’t know whether or not late-arriving ticket-holders had to be turned away and given a refund, but I’m glad I got in early.

After a brief apology/explanation from curators Vic Pratt and William Fowler, it’s on with the show, the general gist of which is a collection of brief TV extracts dredged up from the BFI vaults, illustrating the British media’s approach to investigation of ‘strange goings on’ throughout the mid 20th century.

Proceedings begin with a 1973 broadcast on behalf of The Aetherius Society, a supremely weird religious sect based around the “sixty miles of audio tape” recorded by one Dr. George King, who claimed to be channelling the pronouncements of a holy being from Mars, who urged earth’s major religions to combine into some kind of benevolent mind-meld, turning back the tide of evil and atomic destruction. The footage of a young altar boy earnestly charging a battery with ‘prayer power’, backed up by an ethnically diverse congregation of four, was pricelessly eerie, as was the thought of an era in which BBC ‘community outreach’ funding could filter down to letting dubious outfits like this lot spread their message of hope via late night BBC2.

Next up, a 1972 edition of “The Sky At Night” which sees Sir Patrick Moore mixing it up with the druids during their midsummer rituals at Stonehenge. Sir Patrick says he found the druids to be pleasant and genuine bunch, before politely informing them that their veneration of the stones is clearly a load of bunk in the face of new research which reveals the Henge’s true function as a “primitive astral calculator”. “Well, there’s always 1973”, he cheerfully announces as the druids shuffle off at the end of their ceremony, disappointed that the overcast sky denied them a glimpse of the dawn. Words to live by indeed.

Sticking with standing stones and knighthood, Sir John Betjeman turns up next, narrating a short subject on the earthworks and stone circle at Avebury for a 1950s Shell Motor Oil travelogue series. Betjeman’s observations on the subject, though interesting, are strictly by the book, but the film is beautifully photographed. Black & white footage of the mysterious monoliths standing alone in a field of daisies and long grass with the scattered brick cottages on either side, is incredibly evocative, expressing the very heart of ‘weird England’ as it quietly thrived in the days of our parents and grandparents, almost too perfectly for words.


Next we have a full edition of an absolute genius ITV series from the late ‘50s entitled Out of Step, in which Daniel Farson, a sort of bullish proto-Boris Johnson figure, tracks down people who hold unusual views, and proceeds to antagonise and mock them. This week: people who believe in flying saucers! Are they cranks, frauds, or simply misguided? Farson’s first stop is the roof garden of the Rt. Hon. Brindsley Le Poer Trench, whose crumbling UFO paperbacks and inherently hilarious name certainly played a role in my childhood. Lord Trench gets bonus points for beginning his answer to the question ‘why do you believe in flying saucers’ with “well, speaking as the editor of Flying Saucer Review…”, and for repeatedly stressing that his sighting reports come from “serious, highly trained observers”, as opposed to, I dunno, some random bozos who just like wandering around staring at the sky. We get straight to camera statements from various of these observers, my favourite of which was a man who looked like a Dan Clowes caricature come to life, whose evidence of strange lights in the sky is somewhat undermined by the fact that his sightings have all taken place “in the area between two aerodromes”. If the aliens were to set up a base-camp on earth, he reasons, it would probably be in Stafford.

Subsequently, Farson seeks an opposing view from the retired Astronomer Royal, who sits in his drawing room absent-mindedly pondering the weight of the supplies these space-fellows would need to bring them to our solar system, and interviews a dentist who claims he was taken for a ride to Mars and Venus by interplanetary visitors (“if I may say so sir, it certainly sounds like one of us is being taken for a ride..”), and who states that the women on Venus were very beautiful indeed.

Looking back after subsequent decades in which the whole UFO mythos has taken on an increasingly dark and troubling tone, this programme’s light-hearted approach to the subject was a wonderful reminder of how simple and wholesome the whole business seemed prior to the arrival of cattle mutilation, recovered memory syndrome, suicidal cultists and the ever-present intimations of child abuse. I don’t know whether any other episodes of “Out of Step” have survived, but if so I’d love to see them – this one was a hoot.


Sixteen years into a darker future, and a queasy orange glow of deteriorated video tape colour hangs over a short news item about a young Birmingham couple sitting meekly whilst an exorcist (Church of England, apparently !?) banishes a poltergeist from their chilly-looking council house. The ghost has been doing terrible things, like turning the cooker off and hiding the husband’s wallet under the bed. The vicar conducts the ceremony from a little xeroxed booklet entitled “Exorcism”. I don’t know who wrote it, but it all sounds a bit fishy to me. Whilst we may be tempted here to focus our ghoulish retromancy on the kitchen’s lurid bad-trip flock wallpaper or the husband’s Tony Iommi approach to personal grooming, the truly notable thing in this case I feel is the way the parents leave their toddler to play unaccompanied on the front lawn for an extended period of time as they dutifully accompany the priest in his somewhat questionable business.

Back to the comforts of the black & white era, and next we have a delightfully baleful short programme from 1964, in which a BBC reporter recruits a cheerfully imaginative local historian to help interpret the remnants of several apparent folk magic ceremonies conducted in ruined churches in East Anglia. The presenter gives us a right mouthful in his introduction, automatically linking these rather generic magical talismans with a survival of pre-Christian Celtic tradition, which he then defines as “..the worship of Pan, or Lucifer”. Hmm. Anyway, he gets the biggest laugh of the night when he announces “it may be shocking to us to learn of the survival of these dark traditions, over fifteen hundred years since Christianity was accepted as the sole religion of the British Isles. But then… this is Norfolk.”

Perhaps my favourite item of the evening was a contemporary news investigation of the infamous Highgate Vampire flap, a sequence of events sparked by a spate of grave desecrations which took place in Highgate Cemetery through 1970. As The Sun reported on 19 August 1970; “A man armed with a wooden stake and a cross went on a vampire hunt in a cemetery. But all he found was the police. And they arrested him. Alan Farrant, aged 24, told magistrates at Clerkenwell, London yesterday: ‘my intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake in its heart’”.


Farrant, a “former tobacconist of no fixed abode” according to this news item, was subsequently acquitted in court, and when we join him here he’s up to his old tricks again, clambering over the wall of the cemetery after-hours for his regular anti-Vampire patrol. Farrant insists he has seen Satanists at work in the cemetery at night, consorting with the figure of a glowing eight foot high vampire, and that it is up to him to try to stop them.

Meanwhile, the supremely Garth Marenghi-like Mr. Sean Manchester, self-styled president of the British Occult Society, considers Farrant a rank amateur, going about his own unauthorised nocturnal vigils with a more sombre demeanour and an altogether more expensive-looking crucifix and stake combo. The British Occult Society appears to consist largely of Manchester presiding over counterfeit Golden Dawn rituals in his darkened bedsit (WHITE MAGIC, he insists). When he illustrates the best methods of destroying a vampire for our reporter, he speaks with the authority of a man who has seen Peter Cushing’s performance in ‘Dracula’ more than once.

The view of the long-suffering Highgate Cemetery caretaker on the impending occult battle transpiring on his territory? “Well they’re a load of bloody nutcases, aren’t they” he sighs, sweeping up the broken glass of another nocturnal trespasser. It is notable I think that many of the incidents that inspired this vigilante action in the first place (a body dragged from it’s grave and beheaded, another staked with an iron spike, etc) seem perhaps to have been the result of some similarly misguided anti-vampire activity; if not the work of morbid schoolkids, then possibly of Farrant himself, or some other sorry soul who’d taken all those Hammer flicks a bit too much to heart..?

From the ridiculous back to the sublime, the screenings conclude with “The Living Grave”, a half-hour TV drama from 1980, scripted by Penda’s Fen writer David Rudkin, based around the premise that a young woman under hypnosis is channelling the spirit of Kitty Jay, tragic subject of a well known Dartmoor folk tale, whose grave is apparently marked with fresh flowers to this day. Mixing highly convincing hypnosis scenes, in which we witness a psychologist slowly guiding ‘Kitty’ back through the details of her life, with documentary-like footage of a some guys visiting the locations she is describing, “The Living Grave” is an extremely effective work, using its paranormal conceit to draw us completely into the short, sad life of a rural orphan girl in 18th century England.

Although far more straight-forward than “Penda’s Fen”, “The Living Grave” is no less poignant in its forceful demonstration of the way in which the past can live on in the present, not through the contrivances of spooks and hauntings, but through the continuation of stone and wood and landscape, like the oak beam in the barn where Kitty Jay’s tale ends, holding the memory of a disgraced 18th century teenager kicking away a bail of hay and hanging herself, as we see a 20th century farmer beneath it, messing around with some fertilizer sacks. It’s all happening at once, after all. Certainly the most chilling moment I experienced over the course of this 21st century Halloween, and a fitting end to another exquisite evening of retromancy from BFI’s Flipside strand.

Outside the auditorium, it looks like someone has knocked over some of those rope cordon thingys, and torn some posters off the wall. By the back entrance, some heavy looking security types are loading gitar flight-cases into a Transit van, saying stuff like “Ok, we’re all done” and “go, go!” Boy, it sure woulda been cool to see Bruce Springsteen.

BBC4: A History Of Horror

A brief heads-up for any UK-based readers: the first two parts of a series entitled “A History of Horror”, presented by writer/comedian Mark Gatiss, are currently available to watch on the BBC iPlayer, and will remain there until, I believe, November 1st.

The first instalment, covering golden age of Hollywood horror, is pretty decent, but the second part, dealing with Hammer and ‘60s gothic horror in general, is bloody wonderful.

Initially I was irked by the fact that, like all current TV documentaries it seems, the whole thing has to be framed as some kind of ‘personal journey’ on the part of the presenter rather than just being a straight history. Thankfully though, Gatiss comes across as a genuine and knowledgeable fan, and manages to communicate the ineffable appeal of these films extremely well, I thought. And more to the point, I was happy to find myself agreeing with just about everything he said, and was overjoyed that he picked out so many of my personal favourites (“Plague of the Zombies”! “Black Sunday”! “Blood on Satan’s Claw”!) for special attention.

There’re also some great new interviews with Roger Corman, Jimmy Sangster, Barbara Steele(!) and Piers Haggard, a beautiful tribute to Peter Cushing, and… well, in short, I’d like to shake Mr. Gatiss by the hand and buy him a pint for making about as good a one hour TV documentary on this subject as could possibly be hoped for.

The concluding episode, covering ‘70s American horror, screens some time next week, and I’m looking forward to it.

For those of you in the rest of the world -- um, sorry, I don't think the BBC streaming stuff works abroad. Maybe somebody might Youtube it at some point...?

Youtube Film Club: Penda’s Fen

Last week, I watched the 1973 BBC play-for-today “Penda's Fen”, written by David Rudkin and Directed by Alan Clarke.

Shrouded in VHS fuzz and with otherworldly atmospherics, it’s an extremely unusual coming of age tale set in the Malvern hills, dripping with atavistic English mysticism in the spirit of Blake, Arthur Machen and Sir Edward Elgar, the latter of whom is good enough to put in a memorable spectral appearance.

Personally, I found “Penda’s Fen” to be a strange, wise and beautiful work, and in particular found it’s expression of a connection with history and landscape that transcends small-minded conservative drudgery, and of an innate spiritual faith divorced from religious dogma, to be very poignant.

What you’ll find it to be is anyone’s guess, but regardless - essential viewing for any connoisseur of vintage British high weirdness.

For the full background, see John Coulthart’s blog-post here.

Part # 1 (taken from a videoed Channel 4 repeat circa 1989) is here:

Petitionage.

It has come to my attention that over the past forty eight hours, this blog’s number of followers has nearly tripled. Which is… cool. Apparently Blogger has selected me as a ‘blog of note’. That was nice of them – cheers to whoever was responsible.

I hope that some of you new readers like what I’m doing enough to stick around. It’s all fairly self-explanatory I suppose. There are films, which I watch, and talk about. There are books, which are mainly things I’ve found in charity shops that appeal to me because they have striking/exciting/weird cover designs, although recently I’ve started writing short pieces about authors whose work I’ve actually been reading too (in a genre fiction context at least). Sometimes I might post videos of short films or trailers of note; sometimes I may do other things, who knows. But that’s basically yr lot. Music I do on my other blog.

Anyway, the point of this post was initially going to be to draw people’s attention to the banner above, which I initially saw on Celluloid Highway the other day. I can't be bothered to figure out how to make the image link to the petition as stated, but here's a link.

I guess it’s fair to say it’s probably something like the 500, 000th most important issue one could conceivably sign a petition about, but still, when it comes to causes I can whole-heartedly get behind, “getting old horror movies shown on the BBC again” probably ranks up there with eliminating world hunger, restricting international arms trading and letting the children boogie.

Because, well… I won’t launch into my standard diatribe about how TV’s become so worthless I don’t even own one anymore, but man, up until a few years ago, the BBC used to show some GREAT stuff late on Saturday nights. In fact, it’s stuff I first saw in that magic slot after Newsnight Review that is perhaps chiefly responsible for turning me into an active fan of horror/cult films, rather than just a passive ‘yeah, they’re pretty cool’ consumer. It was on late night TV that I first saw “Psychomania”, Michael Reeves’ “The Sorcerers”, John Gilling’s “The Night Caller”, Anthony Balch’s “Horror Hospital”, “Incense For The Damned”, “Plague Of The Zombies”, the list goes on – all fantastic films, many of which are unavailable on domestic DVD to this day. And even when nothing especially mind-blowing turned up, the opportunity take in as much of “Lust For A Vampire” or “Scream And Scream Again” as I could before I drifted off to sleep is one that all lonely, penniless young people should be able to avail themselves of after the pubs close on a weekend.

Despite the subsequent digital TV ‘revolution’, there’s now nowhere that shows this stuff, or anything remotely comparable re: worthwhile old movies. Surely digging ‘em out of the vaults can’t be any more expensive than buying in more shitty made-for-TV thrillers from America? How else will our children learn about ritual decapitation, the occult properties of graveyard toads and whether or not Joan Collins stands a chance against a psychopathic Santa Claus?

So, er, yeah. You get the picture.

Old Movie Reviews: Introduction.

As usual, I’ve got to apologise for the recent lapse in posting here – I’ve been busy moving house and taking care of all manner of related running around, and am now cat-sitting for some friends – which is all going pretty nicely thanks, but it does tend to rather put a hole in my schedule when it comes things like getting drunk and writing overlong diatribes about weird old movies, scanning the covers of old detective books I found in charity shops and so on – y’know, the real two-fisted ride into the danger zone that is my day to day life.

So until I manage to pick up steam again with all that, I thought it might be interesting to take a trip back to the heady days of the mid-‘00s, when I used to occasionally post movie reviews on my music blog, Stereo Sanctity. They’re fun little reviews, and they’re not doing much business gathering dust in the archives over there, so might as well give ‘em a new home here.

Reading them back today, it’s interesting (well, interesting to me anyway) to see how much my approach to things has changed over the past five years. Back then, my interest in horror/cult movies was still at a pretty embryonic stage… I enjoyed watching ‘em whenever I got the chance, but I never really went out of my way to obtain them or to do any research/reading on the subject. Also, I’m surprised at the extent to which I seemed to lack an understanding of the simple aesthetic pleasures of weirdo film – for instance, my comments on Lucio Fulci’s “The Black Cat” are quite sneering and derisory, whereas these days I hold that film close to my heart as an example of everything that’s wonderful about this kind of cinema. I guess my watching these films and writing these reviews back in ’04 and ’05 marks the beginning of an infection which has either turned my brain to mulch or raised my artistic sensibilities to a higher plain entirely, depending on which way you look at it.

As I say, I didn’t make much effort to actively further my weird movie viewing at this point in my life, but for a wonderful year or so, my existence of boredom and poverty led me to a wealth of random viewing opportunities, and hey, only a fool swims against the tide. For one thing, I’d just managed to hook up my little TV with an old-fashioned coathanger aerial that gave me pretty good reception, and I discovered that BBC 2 were showing a British horror movie every Friday night as an after midnight schedule filler after the end of Newsnight Review. And they weren’t just showing obvious/familiar ones either – for some wonderful reason, they were screening stuff that was TOTALLY FAR OUT, and often completely unavailable on video/DVD. It was on one of these fateful Friday nights that my jaw first hit the floor as “Psychomania” flickered across the screen, closely followed by “The Sorcerers”, Anthony Balch’s “Horror Hospital”, “Incense For The Damned”, and god only knows what else, padded out with generous servings of moderate-to-good Amicus and Hammer fare. And this wasn’t some fancypants “re-evaluating British horror” season or anything either – some hero in the scheduling department was just throwing this shit on at random intervals with no fanfare whatsoever, like some last stand for weirdo-friendly broadcasting in an era when they’d even replaced the Saturday morning cartoons with cookery shows (not that I ever got up early enough to confirm this vile treachery, having stayed up til 3am waiting for “The Blood Beast Terror” to stumble toward it’s conclusion). Anyway, god bless whoever was responsible, I hope they’re doing well.

My appetite whetted, I also never missed a chance to visit a stall which used to set up for business every Wednesday in Leicester Market (and maybe still does), manned by an appropriately scary and hag-like old lady who seemed to have access to a seemingly endless supply of totally killer VHS – tons of Redemption tapes, French New Wave movies, ‘60s concert films, anime… I don’t know where it was all coming from. It was by the grace of this scary market lady that I got to see my first Jean Rollin movie, George Romero films other than NOTLD, “Faster Pussycat Kill Kill” – oh, heady days. There was this great record stall there too that used to do cheap jazz records and garage/psych represses and stuff… social life? Who needs one!

But anyway: I’m gonna republish a bunch of those old movie posts, beginning this weekend. Please bear in mind that my feelings about a film THEN doesn’t necessarily reflect what I think about it NOW, but that aside, I hope you at least enjoy their brevity, which makes a refreshing change from my usual bullshit.

(Messiah of Evil pics borrowed from Monster Music Music.)

The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, 1972)

Featuring eerie, abstract visual effects, a cast rendered distantly familiar by bit parts in Dr Who, music and sound effects by the Radiophonic Workshop, and even a plotline directly concerned with the deterioration of analogue recording media and the search for a digital replacement, it was somewhat inevitable that Nigel Kneale’s 1972 teleplay “The Stone Tape” should emerge as a key text of Britain’s current ‘hauntology’ / analogue era nostalgia movement. (Ok, so I suppose I can’t actually prove its position as such, but c’mon, if the Ghost Box contingent haven’t regularly thrilled to a bootleg VHS of this one on a Sunday evening, I’ll eat my hat.)

Kneale should of course need no introduction as one of the most inventive and uncompromising writers to ever work in television, the man behind “The Year of the Sex Olympics” (1968), and the creator of Professor Bernard Quatermass, whose appearances in Kneale-penned BBC TV serials during the ‘50s, and in particular the hugely influential “Quatermass and the Pit” (1958), far outshone his adventures in Hammer’s series of film adaptations (in my opinion at least).

Like “Quatermass and the Pit”, “The Stone Tape” posits a group of characters who find themselves setting out to investigate a rumour-shrouded haunted site through the ruthless application of scientific method. In this case, it’s a team of researchers working for a consumer electronics firm who have been relocated to the until-recently-derelict Taskerlands house, only to find that the cavernous basement room they’ve earmarked for a computer storage facility is already occupied by a screaming spectre. And, also like “Quatermass..”, the story’s masterstroke lays in the way that, rather than diminishing and defanging the supernatural by dragging it into the light of reason, the results of the team’s investigations simply serve to draw us deeper inside the mystery, exposing new ideas that eventually prove weirder and more threatening than an old fashioned ghost story could ever be.

Conveniently, the researchers, led by loud and hard-headed Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), have been charged with trying to develop a new digital recording medium to help the British electronics industry compete with the Japanese (“give me Wagner’s Ring Cycle encoded onto a ball baring with instant playback”, Peter demands of his colleagues, to hoots of derision and disbelief that seem wonderfully quaint from a 2009 perspective). So when they find themselves confronted with a room that regularly manifests disembodied screams and a hanging phantom lady, the solution is as obvious as it is ingenious: the walls of the room itself are storing information from the past, and projecting it directly into the minds of visitors at irregular intervals… thus potentially making the room the breakthrough the team is looking for!

Initially “The Stone Tape” lays on the haunted house mythology pretty thick, often with direct reference to Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” (a film whose effective, no nonsense style is very much reflected here in both the writing and direction). So we have half-remembered tales of unsuccessful exorcisms, and of a local boy who went insane after being locked in the room overnight, a stairway leading to nowhere and a Victorian servant girl who hanged herself from the top of it. Director Peter Sasdy certainly had a pedigree in the world of horror, having helmed “Taste The Blood of Dracula” and “Hands of the Ripper” for Hammer in the preceding years, but what’s immediately notable here is that the jump-scares and gothic imagery one might expect of a ghost story are almost completely excised in favour of a more subtly malign atmosphere that reflects our characters’ scientific background and, in the case of Peter and psychic sensitive computer programmer Jill (Jane Asher), their respective moral failings and nervous disposition too. As such, The Stone Tape” is realized with a cold and queasy realist inversion of the gothic aesthetic that would find it’s natural home a decade later in David Cronenberg’s early films.

Kneale’s writing is at its absolute best here too, and in fact “The Stone Tape” is as successful as a human drama as it is as an excursion into high concept weirdness. Peter’s character – a mendacious, bullying egotist with a proto-Thatcherite drive to success that sees him grasp the possibilities of his haunting theory with an Ahab-like determination, then drop it like a hot potato as soon as his professionalism is called into question – is oddly fascinating, especially as every aspect of his situation, including his opportunistic affair with the fragile and confused Jill, is sketched out in detail for us. As a sub-plot develops involving Peter’s battle for funding with a rival research team led by an oaf trying to perfect an experimental washing machine (perhaps here Kneale is making a crafty reference to the BBC’s tendency to sideline more forward-thinking projects in favour of low-brow schedule-fillers?), one begins to realize that “The Stone Tape” would be a pretty involving tale with plenty to say about British culture, even without the supernatural elements.

For all its modernism though, “The Stone Tape” still manages to hold true to the gothic formula, essentially boiling things down to a frightened and hyper-sensitive young woman alone amid the ghostly ruins, as the repressive and claustrophobic nature of her situation and the venal and manipulative nature of her companions if given physical form via the supernatural – as per usual. Jane Asher (who you may recall tackled similar territory in Corman’s “Masque of the Red Death”) is superb in the role of Jill – a stricken gothic heroine breaking out from under the skin of an educated and level-headed modern woman.


Also adding a huge amount to “The Stone Tape”s singularly creepy totality are the audio and visual effects, with the spooky-at-the-best-of-times BBC Radiophonic Workshop turning in one of their all-time best unhinged sound designs, full of baleful, echo-laden incidental passages and distorted EVP ghost-chatter that could have been pulled straight off an Eric Zann or Mount Vernon Arts Lab release. The visuals, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, are the perfect match – despite the obvious budgetary constraints, the designers certainly didn’t hesitate to throw in as much beautiful, fluorescent ectoplasmic splurge as they could muster, with split second glimpses of unspeakable, half-formed things, disorientating UV lighting and surreal super-impositions all serving to create a truly startling conclusion.

Prior to the play’s final ten minutes though, it should be noted that the supernatural elements are masterfully underplayed, with the trad ghost story tropes setting us up for shocks and surprises that never really come, and that are all the more unsettling for their absence. In true cosmic horror fashion, even the story’s final, mind-bending conclusions are merely hinted at rather than fully spelled out, left to sink in slowly over preceding hours/days as the full scale of the play’s central concept becomes clear.

When, after a frenzied night spent trying to ‘control’ appearances of the apparition using frequency generators and UV lights, the phenomena seems to disappear completely, the team conclude that they must have accidentally ‘wiped the tape’, and, slightly embarrassed, move back to their original work. It is only Jill who realises that the others are still stuck in an analogue mindset. Rather than a ‘tape’, the stones of the room function as a three dimensional matrix, and as the most recent layers are removed, older voices – characterized by the room’s past victims as “the others” – will begin to emerge, more deteriorated and more malign the further back you go; and how far back CAN you go? – to the laying of foundations in Saxon times, or to the formation of the stones themselves, before the dawn of the earth…?

The answers are left hanging, just like the Victorian servant girl who previously tapped into the voices from the stone, as Kneale demonstrates powerfully the idea that when you try to throw science at a mystery, the mystery is just as liable to magnify and overtake you as it is to recede. Just ask the guys working on the Large Hadron Collider, and file “The Stone Tape” as essential viewing for anyone with an interest in intelligent approaches to science fiction, paranormal phenomena or cosmic horror, or anyone who simply wants to drink in the analogue ghosts of some authentic, high-grade British weirdness.