Hammer and beyond: The British horror film 9781526151193

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Hammer and beyond

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Hammer and beyond The British horror film Peter Hutchings Edited by Johnny Walker

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Estate of Peter Hutchings, 2021 Introduction to the new edition © Johnny Walker, 2021

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Afterword © Russ Hunter, 2021 The right of Peter Hutchings to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published in 1993 by Manchester University Press The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. This edition published 2021 by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5118 6 paperback ISBN 978 1 5261 6342 4 hardback This edition first published 2021 Cover credit: Peter Cushing in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, 1969 (photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images) Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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For Sally and Rosemary Hutchings

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Contents

List of figures ix Acknowledgementsxi A return to Hammer and Beyond: introduction to the new edition – Johnny Walker

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Part I: Hammer and beyond: the British horror film Introduction to the first edition 29 1 For sadists only? The problem of British horror 32 2 1945–55: from Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment55 3 1956–64: Hammer and other horrors 89 4 Frankenstein and Dracula 137 5 1964–69: horror production 171 6 Horror and the family 202 Conclusion232 Part II: Selected writings on British horror film The Amicus House of Horror 237 American vampires in Britain: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Hammer’s The Night Creatures255

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Putting the Brit into Eurohorror: exclusions and exchanges in the history of European horror

274

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Afterword – Russ Hunter 291 Select bibliography 296 Index304

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Figures

0.1 Cover of the first edition of Hammer and Beyond, originally published in 1993 2 0.2 A video trade press advertisement for Blood Tide: a British horror film from the early 1980s 10 0.3 A séance takes place during a video call in the quarantine-set Host (2020) 16 0.4 ‘One, two, three … and Brexit!’: The Ritual (2017) 17 2.1 Caroon stumbles into a chemist’s shop in The Quatermass Experiment (1955) 80 2.2 Cosmopolitan classlessness: Brian Donlevy as Professor Quatermass in The Quatermass Experiment (1955) 83 3.1 John Banning (Peter Cushing) and his brother, Joseph (Raymond Huntley), in The Mummy (1959) 108 3.2 Paul (Richard Pasco) sees the reflection of the Gorgon (Barbara Shelley) next to his own in The Gorgon (1964) 122 4.1 Peter Cushing’s ‘organised, professional’ Baron Frankenstein in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) is ‘a very different sort of scientist’ to Colin Clive’s portrayal in Universal’s version from 1931 143 4.2 ‘Who am I?’, asks the resurrected Christina (Susan Denberg) in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) 150 4.3 Charming and extremely good-looking – the first appearance of the Count in Hammer’s 1958 version of Dracula156 5.1 An icon of an earlier horror cycle: Boris Karloff as Professor Monserrat in The Sorcerers (1967) 180 6.1 Fanged, phallic power: The Vampire Lovers (1970) 205

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6.2 Tera (Valerie Leon) in Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) 212 6.3 The tyrannical father (Baron Zorn, played by Robert Hardy) is ‘destroyed’ (impaled by a cross) in Demons of the Mind (1972) 224 6.4 ‘Votes for Women’: progressive graffiti in Hammer’s Hands of the Ripper (1971) 228 7.1 Cannibalism meets the British class system in Frightmare (1974)233

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Acknowledgements

The scholarship of Peter Hutchings changed my life, as did the man himself when he co-examined my PhD thesis and mentored me as a new employee at Northumbria University in 2013. I, like so many, miss him greatly. Bringing Hammer and Beyond back into publication is a tremendous honour, and there are many people to thank. Sincere thanks go to Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press for making this edition a reality. I am grateful to the editors of the Journal of British Cinema and Television – specifically Julian Petley – and Edinburgh University Press for granting me permission to reuse material from ‘Hammer and Beyond: Peter Hutchings’s Contribution to the Study of Popular British Cinema and Television’, which originally appeared in issue 15.3 (2018). Select paragraphs from the aforementioned piece appear in the new introductory chapter. My gratitude extends to Routledge/Taylor and Francis for allowing me to reprint ‘The Amicus House of Horror’, originally published in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley’s 2002 collection British Horror Cinema; Cambridge Scholars Publishing for granting permission to reprint ‘American Vampires in Britain: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Hammer’s The Night Creatures’, which originally appeared in Dan North’s edited collection from 2008, Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films; and Manchester University Press for granting permission to reprint ‘Putting the “Brit” into Eurohorror’, which originally appeared in Film Studies 15.1 in 2016. I am lucky to work with many people at Northumbria University who share my passion for the study of British horror cinema. Thanks especially to Russ Hunter for penning the afterword that rounds off

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the volume and for being a rock for Peter when he needed it most. Present and past members of the Media Subject Group have shown unwavering support for this project: Sarah Bowman, Kate Egan, Gary Jenkins, Steve Jones, James Leggott, Noel McLaughlin, Gabriel Moreno, Massimo Ragnedda, Sarah Ralph-Lane, Jamie Sexton, Clarissa Smith and Tom Watson – I thank you all. Thanks also to my doctoral students Erin Wiegand, Adam Herron and Rui Oliveira; my fellow Northumbria colleagues Ysanne Holt and David Gleeson; and to Roger Domeneghetti, Steve Jones, Nathan Stephens Griffin and Shelly Addison for daily therapy and laughs aplenty. Thanks to Kate Egan, Kieran Foster, Neil Jackson and Tom Watson for offering comments on an early draft of the new Introduction, to Laura Mee for being there always, and to M.  J. Simpson for sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary British horror cinema (nobody knows more than him). I thank Charlotte Brunson and Helen Wheatley for their words of support; the global Horror Studies community, especially Kendall Philips, Matt Boyd Smith, Murry Leeder, Adam Hart, Ashley R. Smith, Sonia Lupher, Murray Leeder, Adam Lowenstein, Joan Hawkins and Harry Benshoff; Steve Chibnall and Ian Hunter for supplying research materials that enabled me to complete the new introduction; Craig Mann for the post-2014 British horror recommendations; Constantine Nasr for his displays of enthusiasm for the new edition (and for his excellent, rigorous contributions to British horror historiography beyond academia); and those scholars of British horror film carrying the torch: Kev Bickerdike, Lindsey Decker, Katerina Flint-Nichol, Kieran Foster, Amy Harris and Lauren Stephenson. I am incredibly lucky to have the support of a wonderful family. Thank you, as ever, to my parents, Jacqueline and Robert, and to my loving partner Nikki, our two beautiful and hilarious children, Rowan and Penny, and our dog, Willis. I love you all and appreciate so much the life you’ve given me. Finally, I’d like to express my deepest thanks to Peter’s family, especially his sister, Sally, who signed on the line and made this edition of Hammer and Beyond a goer. I dedicate the book both to Sally and to her and Peter’s mother, Rosemary. Johnny Walker Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2021

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A return to Hammer and Beyond: introduction to the new edition Johnny Walker

‘Hutch has gone!’ –Luke, The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017)

In 1989 Peter Ward Hutchings, a doctoral candidate at the University of East Anglia in the UK, earned his PhD for a thesis entitled ‘The British Horror Film: An Investigation of British Horror Production in its National Context’. Four years later, Manchester University Press published a revised version of the dissertation as Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Figure 0.1).1 Both the original thesis and the subsequent book emerged at a time when popular British cinema was receiving scholarly reappraisal, challenging what some perceived as an over-emphasis placed by critics on films of the social realist tradition, in addition to the long-standing – and, looking back, frankly astonishing – belief that British filmmakers lacked ‘a specifically cinematic eye’ or any ‘awareness of form and style’.2 In years to come things would change. The field of British Film Studies became broader and more inclusive, with scholars less willing to concede flippant and derisory remarks about British cinema’s alleged inferiority to US modes, being instead determined to pull away the ‘stifling blanket’ of social realism and examine the national cinema’s ‘popular’ forms.3 Julian Petley’s influential essay on this issue – in which he explored what he terms the ‘lost continent’ of British cinema – served as a rallying cry to scholars of popular cinema looking to kick back against the notion of ‘realism’ as the only mode worth discussing, and to show that genres such as horror were ripe for reconsideration. Hutchings, with Hammer and Beyond, was well positioned to ride this wave of revisionism.4

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Figure 0.1  Cover of the first edition of Hammer and Beyond, originally published in 1993

Having worked for thirty years at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, Hutchings died in February 2018, much to the sadness of his colleagues and many working across Screen Studies. Hammer and Beyond remains his defining work, representing the first of several significant contributions that he made to the study of horror cinema over his career, including the revered textbook The Horror Film, the Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema, and monographs on Hammer’s most famous film, Dracula (1958), and its director Terence Fisher.5 This new edition seeks to commemorate Hutchings’ key interventions in the field by reprinting the original text in full, alongside a number of later articles by Hutchings that develop some of the book’s key themes. The present introductory chapter has been written to help position the reader in relation to the academic climate that saw the first edition materialise, to consider some of the book’s omissions, and to assess the state of British horror in the years immediately leading up to, and since, its publication.



Introduction to the new edition 3

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Hutchings rides out The first edition of Hammer and Beyond was, when first published, the second of two scholarly studies on British horror cinema. The first, David Pirie’s illustrious A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946–72, was written in the early 1970s, presenting a neat – and for subsequent scholars, hugely attractive – argument that ‘the horror genre, as it has been developed in this country by Hammer and its rivals, remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America’.6 There is no question that Hutchings’ book owed an awful lot to Pirie’s, from the period under scrutiny to many of the main case studies. Both books begin in the mid-1940s and end in the early 1970s, both give detailed consideration to Hammer’s characterisations of Dracula and Frankenstein (a chapter each in A Heritage of Horror, one chapter of two halves in Hammer and Beyond), and both champion British horror – with a strong emphasis on the output of Hammer – as stylistically innovative and distinctive. There are, however, differences of note. For a start, Hutchings adopts a different tone to Pirie, one indicative of the era in which he was writing and the broad shifts in attitudes towards the horror film post A Heritage of Horror. While Pirie is at pains to stress the cultural worthiness of British horror cinema (‘No matter how painful and even humiliating the process may turn out to be …’), Hutchings refrains from doing so; from the outset of Hammer and Beyond it is taken as a given that British horror films are worthy objects of study.7 By the time Hammer and Beyond was published in 1993, horror was very much part of mainstream academic criticism, thanks to landmark writing on American horror cinema by Robin Wood, Carol J. Clover and others, in addition to a special issue on ‘body horror’ of the leading journal Screen, featuring key interventions by the likes of Philip Brophy and Barbara Creed.8 Hammer and Beyond entered British horror into international discussions that were heavily weighted towards North American film production, combining of-the-moment psychoanalytic approaches (à la Wood, Creed and Clover) with nuanced sociohistorical readings.

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Secondly, while acknowledging his indebtedness to Pirie’s book, Hutchings nevertheless frames Pirie’s argument as limiting. Pirie’s approach, Hutchings suggests, precludes detailed consideration of ‘aesthetic and ideological properties’ of the British horror film.9 Hammer and Beyond, as a cultural history, foregrounds sociopolitical and sociocultural factors (with an emphasis on gendered power relations), the historical contexts that birthed British horror, and how such issues played out on screen. It is true that Pirie on occasion offers socially charged analysis, remarking for instance that ‘X The Unknown was the first proper example’ of a British film that engages with Cold War anxieties, but such observations are ­fleeting.10 Pirie is more concerned with providing examples to support the notion that British horror films are part of a deeprooted literary tradition. Hammer and Beyond, thus, in moving beyond Pirie’s ‘heritage’ argument, featured analysis anchored not to long-standing attitudes or literary tropes, but rather to everchanging shifts in the sociopolitical and economic contexts within which such films were made. In showing horror as a central part of British film culture that presents a ‘rich, fascinating and multifaceted response to life in Britain’,11 Hutchings was able to make his case for ‘the “Britishness” of British horror’: the genre as British national cinema. He therefore finds value in films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) and The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970), akin to, for example, films of the British New Wave.12 British horror films are said to ‘draw upon, represent and are always locatable in relation to much broader shifts and tendencies in British social history’,13 and, in the process, they address ‘specifically national issues and concerns’.14 Films as disparate as Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti et al., 1945), The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, 1959), The Mummy (Terence Fisher, 1959) and Countess Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1971) are therefore read alongside shifts in British culture around issues such as gender, sexuality, the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party in 1964, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and changes in the image of the family unit. Indeed, for Hutchings, the tendency in film criticism to prioritise analysis of social realism over more popular film types was problematic, given that, in terms of box office figures

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Introduction to the new edition 5

at least, popular vehicles in the Carry On and Hammer traditions were more visible to audiences and therefore spoke more to the notion of a national cinema than ‘kitchen sink’ dramas did. It was for this reason that Hutchings also took issue with the notion that horror constituted the national cinema’s ‘dark side’ (in terms of its critical disreputability and absence from academic film criticism): a viewpoint, which, for Hutchings, worked to further understate the genre’s global popularity. Such positions, Hutchings argues in the first chapter, fail to take into account of the fact that these ‘subterranean’ films in themselves comprise an immensely popular cinema. When dealing with critical discourses that are primarily evaluative, it is often easy to lose sight of some of the commercial realities of British cinema. By any account, Hammer was a far more profitable enterprise (especially in the long term) than, say, the 1960s ‘kitchen sink’ productions  […] simply because more people saw its product […] In this sense, it is the dark side of British cinema rather than its realistic component that can be viewed, in the 1950s and 1960s at least, as dominant.15

Hammer and Beyond recognised the ‘commercial reality’ of British film production, treating horror films first and foremost as cashgenerators for the industry, but arguing that such films spoke to the nation precisely through their popularity with Britons.

Looking elsewhere However, for all that the first edition of Hammer and Beyond is bold in its assertions, there are omissions that may surprise readers coming to the book for the first time. Cornerstone works of the 1970s, often written about in the burgeoning horror fan press of the 1980s and since celebrated for engaging with issues as broad as feminism, the family, authority figures and class – precisely those of interest to Hutchings – are mentioned briefly or not at all. Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972) and Pete Walker’s Frightmare (1974), for instance, appear together across a couple of sentences in the book’s conclusion, while the work of Norman J. Warren (such as the films Prey [1977] and Terror [1979]) is discussed only briefly

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in Hutchings’ PhD dissertation, and does not feature at all in the published version. Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) are also conspicuous by their absence. As for horror production in the 1980s, The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) and Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) are the only British horror films made during the decade to be acknowledged, again briefly in a single paragraph. Writing in his dissertation, Hutchings offers something in the way of justification for side-stepping such films, arguing that the work of Walker, Sherman and Warren constitutes ‘fleeting glimpses of potentially new British generic models that, because of unfavourable economic circumstances, were not allowed to come to fruition’,16 while The Company of Wolves and Hellraiser are said in Hammer and Beyond to not ‘engage in any meaningful sense with a specifically British reality’, but instead ‘look elsewhere for their effects and meanings’.17 For all that one might perceive the aforementioned omissions as shortcomings of the book, it would not be long before other scholarly works emerged to flesh out the important historical sketch that Hutchings had made with Hammer and Beyond. Within two years of the book’s publication, De Montfort University hosted ‘A Naughty Business’, a festival of ‘the British cinema of Exploitation’ at Phoenix Arts, an independent cinema in Leicester, showcasing a number of horror films, including Walker’s The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and House of Whipcord (1974), and Warren’s Inseminoid (1980). Shortly after, Harbour Lights Cinema in Southampton hosted a study day on exploitation films, with considerable emphasis on British production.18 Such events helped to carve a niche within academia for those academics studying the less reputable end of British horror, enabling further exploration of British cinema’s lost continent. As the festival booklet for ‘A Naughty Business’ declared: ‘Beyond Ealing, beyond Merchant Ivory, beyond even Hammer and the Carry On’s [sic] lies the forgotten world of the British exploitation film – the nudie flicks, sex comedies and tacky horror movies of the 60s and 70s.’19 Extended studies that addressed such films, which were ‘overlooked by film historians’, but which nevertheless – and contra what Hutchings suggested in his thesis – ‘sustained the British industry’

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Introduction to the new edition 7

through their ‘unabashed populism’, emerged from this context.20 Thus Steve Chibnall’s Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker and Leon Hunt’s British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation addressed for the first time independent British genre production of the 1970s, of which horror films – which Hunt characterises as ‘grim flarey tales’ – played a key role; and the first edition of Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema offered a rigorous yet accessible overview of British horror ­production from cinema’s beginnings up to the 1990s, including consideration of 1980s offerings such as The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984), Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) and more.21 Beyond this, Chibnall and Petley’s British Horror Cinema emerged in 2002, positioning itself as an outlet for work on ‘more neglected areas’, including films by Hammer’s competitors and (briefly) genre production during the 1980s and 1990s. Other works focused on overlooked curios such as Hammer’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker and Chang Cheh, 1974), neglected decades such as the 1930s, and Britain’s contribution to science fiction film.22 Numerous other works followed over the next decade and a half, including further work on Hammer, work on British horror television, a revised and updated edition of Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror, new histories of British ‘trash’ cinema, research into British horror stardom, work seeking to move beyond ‘British’ and ‘English’ horror to consider Welsh, Scottish and Irish iterations, and work focused squarely on British horror film production in the new millennium.23 While divergent from Hammer and Beyond in terms of methodology, scope and focus, the aforementioned works nevertheless speak to the legacy of Hutchings’ first book as a significant intervention into the study of popular visual British culture. Hammer and Beyond, amid a flurry of work on international horror films, put British horror on the academic map, laying the foundations upon which other scholars would build.

British horror film beyond Hammer and Beyond What of the British horror film in the lead-up to, and since, the first edition? The late 1980s and early 1990s tend to be regarded

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as somewhat of a wasteland. Tellingly, the genre is virtually absent from the defining academic works on British film production during these decades.24 One might assume, from these accounts, that there were no horror films – or at least no films of significance (however defined) – produced during this time. While this was certainly not the case, there was definitely a slump in production for which a number of reasons are typically given. These broadly relate to shifts in industry policy and a lack of proper industrial resourcing for horror filmmakers. Despite these factors, British companies continued to produce horror films. By the 2000s horror was very much a go-to genre which, on account of its ability to sell well domestically and overseas, benefited from cash injections from public subsidy. The industrial landscape changed for British cinema in the 1980s. Hammer, due to the dwindling popularity of its output and  the withdrawal of American subsidy, was dissolved in 1979 and sold on to its former accounts manager, Roy Skeggs, who turned the company over to television production with the series House of Horror and House of Mystery and Suspense in the 1980s.25 While there was a handful of attempts by filmmakers to affectionately hark back to Hammer’s glory days, including Pete Walker’s The House of the Long Shadows (a gothic parody from 1983 which brought together Hammer icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee with horror stars Vincent Price and John Carradine), the style of horror that had made the company so famous was by this point outmoded, as audiences looked towards modern, visceral films from the US, Italy and Spain: fare that was proving especially popular with owners of the new video cassette recorders.26 British horror was not dead, however. Films were being made, albeit not in numbers comparable to those of Hammer’s golden age, and they were less frequently conceived as products that would perform well with domestic cinemagoers. As John Hill notes, changes in film policy in the 1980s, including the demise of the screen quota and the Eady Levy, meant that the domestic market within which commercial British production – such as horror and bawdy comedies of the Carry On and Confessions of ­traditions – could fairly compete with Hollywood product disappeared under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.27 As

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Introduction to the new edition 9

a result, and with the exception of a number of films that ­benefited from national government subsidy – such as Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), The Godsend (Gabrielle Beaumont, 1980) and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) – British horror films made in the first half  of the 1980s tended to be low-budget, independently produced  movies made in response to international trends, which in most cases found their natural home in the burgeoning video market. Consider, for example, Blood Tide (Richard Jefferies, 1982), a film shot in Greece for the short-lived British-based production company Connaught International in 1981. Co-produced by exploitation tycoon Nico Mastorakis, the film is typical of much contemporaneous exploitation fare, in that it was low-budget, shot on location, had a voguish electronic soundtrack and substandard postproduction dubbing. Tellingly, following Connaught’s winding-up in the same year, the film was acquired, and subsequently represented worldwide, by the American exploitation film distributor 21st Century, whose credits at this point included the violent horror film Nightmare (Romano Scavolini, 1981) among others. A far cry from the production and distribution agreements that Hammer had had with the Hollywood majors Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox, the fate of Blood Tide was sealed.28 Within weeks of the film’s appearance at the international film market, MIFED, it was released on to video in Britain in October 1982.29 The film’s lack of a theatrical release, yet its quick acquisition by the new British video distributor Skyline Video as part of its ‘premier releases’ package (Figure 0.2), indicates that low-budget exploitation/horror films of this sort, at the dawn of the video age, were not destined for high box office returns per se. Indeed, the booming video market created huge demand for new films in all genres, but horror films – caught up in the widely documented ‘video nasties’ panic in Britain, and the growing readership of genre magazines such as Fangoria in the US – were proving top earners for distributors and video shops. The story was almost identical for the low-budget British slasher film Don’t Open Till Christmas (Edward Purdom, 1984). Handled by 21st Century, and having made a brief appearance at Cannes and MIFED, the film found its home on video in 1985 in the US, where horror remained a ‘year round traffic builder’ for video stores.30

Hammer and beyond

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Figure 0.2  A video trade press advertisement for Blood Tide: a British horror film from the early 1980s

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Introduction to the new edition 11

In the early 1980s the British home media distributor Palace was among many such companies experiencing the successes of horror video: the firm’s release of the micro-budget independent film The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) topped the video sales and rental charts in 1983.31 However, when the company moved into film production some months later, it was telling that it did so with a horror film, albeit of a sort with broader appeal than the high-profile video nasties of which The Evil Dead was among the most notorious.32 The film in question, The Company of Wolves, was an attempt by Palace to break into the commercial mainstream by straddling demographics. As Ian Conrich identifies, Palace looked to target, on the one hand, an assumed hard core of horror fans but also, on the other, ‘middle-class’ connoisseurs of Angela Carter, on whose work the film is based. For The Company of Wolves, this dual address worked, with the marketing successfully ­foregrounding the film’s ‘surrealist elements’ and its combination of ‘horror, mythology and fairytale’, resulting in commendable (and frankly, for British horror in the 1980s, unanticipated) box office takings.33 As a hybrid piece the film was able to attain levels of credibility when other forms of visceral exploitation films, such as those framed as video nasties, were being denigrated in the mainstream press. Palace had less theatrical success with Dream Demon (Harley Cokliss, 1988), the company’s most overt attempt to make an all-out horror picture. Borrowing its premise from the successful A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984–2010) series – the film’s protagonists are pursued by demonic figures in their dreams – it was, as Conrich explains, promoted not to capitalise on this element, but rather in a manner similar to The Company of Wolves: as an arty, ethereal picture, capable of straddling audience demographics. The film’s main promotional poster strays from the vibrant colour palettes and bold imagery of most contemporaneous horror film advertising, instead offering a monochrome illustration of an angel towering over a sleeping figure. The film’s press advertisements are awash with semi-intellectualised observations by middlebrow critics, such as ‘Expertly harnesses everyone’s night-time fears and lingers bewitchingly in the mind’, ‘Surreal, comic, horrific, satirical’ and ‘horror of the highest degree’.34 Such design choices are at odds

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with the exploitation ballyhoo that graced the video box art of The Evil Dead (e.g. ‘THE ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE IN GRUELLING TERROR’), and do not chime with the character-centred horror formulae characteristic of the era, as in the promotional material for the recently released US production A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988) or the British Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Pete Atkins, 1988), both of which feature their monstrous antagonists (Freddy Krueger and Pinhead respectively) front and centre in their print advertising. Tellingly, come the film’s video release – and indicative of the environment in which Blood Tide and Don’t Open Till Christmas had found themselves earlier in the decade – Palace did away with the original illustration and the middlebrow quotes, together with the avant-garde artwork that in all likelihood had alienated its core audience in the first place. Instead, ‘body horror’ elements are foregrounded: a twisted image of a demon’s face is presented front and centre in echo of the aforementioned, monster-centred hits. To the top left of the image sits a quote from the populist, tabloid newspaper The Sun, declaring ‘A GRUESOME SHOCKER … DON’T HAVE DINNER BEFORE SEEING IT’. In so doing, Palace more accurately embodied the core market for horror at this time, by promoting Dream Demon in a manner that remained true to its commercial impetus: a gory horror film of the direct-to-video era.35 By the 1990s a new era of British cinema was dawning. Much writing on the period celebrates the decade’s theatrical successes both at home and abroad, including comedies such as The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) and Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1998), and heritage films such as Howards End (James Ivory, 1992) and Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995).36 Genres that did less well theatrically tend be framed as commercial failures or, rather more sympathetically, as parochial dramas with something to say, which, on account of their socially informed foci, were always destined to play only in art cinemas.37 While horror, as mentioned above, is at best peripheral to these discussions (beyond Richard Stanley’s ambitious dystopian fantasy Hardware [1990] and the supernatural horror Dust Devil [1992]), it is worth stressing that, while British horror films of the 1990s did not tend to do well in cinemas, numerous films made during the

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Introduction to the new edition 13

era were not cultivated with such success in mind. As in the 1980s, the genre was known to do best on video and, additionally, cable television. Indicative of this situation, some of the first horror films of the 1990s were – like Dream Demon – low-budget, unabashedly derivative, with commercial aspirations in keeping with the genre’s contemporaneous success rate beyond the movie theatre. A case in point is the formative output of Metrodome Films, a new producer and distributor established to produce commercial features, which emerged at a time when British cinema, in the opinion of some at least, amounted to little more than ‘costume dramas and depressing BFI social documents’.38 Metrodome’s first venture, the horror film Beyond Bedlam (Vadim Jean, 1994), sought to challenge this viewpoint, being conceived from the outset as ‘outand-out pure entertainment’.39 The film, which sees an inmate of a mental institution haunt the dreams of the lead protagonist, is largely remembered as a derivative mash-up of popular horrors of the period, including The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and it failed to resonate with critics and cinemagoers. A review published in Variety captures the film’s lukewarm reception but also, in its dismissiveness, identifies the industry shifts from which horror films such as this were benefiting: ‘Genre nuts may want to check out this curio, but [the] pic’s longest lockup will be in the vid bin.’40 Pejorative language aside, the review resonates with Metrodome’s broader commercial strategising during this period: to produce films in popular generic forms, for sectionalised audiences, across a host of media platforms, of which video was an especially lucrative stream.41 If the 1980s and 1990s were decades during which there were no break-out theatrical successes for British horror, the 2000s witnessed a fully fledged new wave, thanks to numerous factors ranging from shifts in national film policy to the boom in accessible prosumer technology and the rise of DVD and online streaming platforms. The new slasher boom of the mid-1990s and a spike in East Asian and European horror production led to a swelling in popularity for the genre in cinemas and on video. As far as theatrically released films are concerned, Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) showed that there was international demand for youth-oriented genre pictures, while The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez

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and Daniel Myrick, 1999) and Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1999) showed that there was global commercial potential for horror films made on a shoestring.42 Within this context, Danny Boyle’s digitally shot 28  Days Later (2002), in which a virus transforms the majority of the UK’s population into fast-moving zombie-like creatures, and independent sleeper hits such as Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2001), in which an army platoon comes under siege from a family of werewolves in the Scottish highlands, proved popular with audiences in cinemas (and on video) at home and abroad.43 It appeared that the commercial cinema typically associated with romantic comedies and heritage dramas was bleeding over into horror and, for the first time in decades, the genre was met with a degree of critical respectability.44 Perhaps most famously, Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) managed to fuse the rom-com and the zombie movie to great critical (and box office) success, while ‘hoodie horror’ films such as Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008) and Cherry Tree Lane (Paul Andrew Williams, 2010) were seen as infusing the genre with aesthetic and thematic qualities typically associated with critic-pleasing social realism.45 With that said, positive critical reportage on British horror has, as one would expect, ebbed and flowed across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. At one end of the scale are those championing the genre for harbouring fresh talent. Ben Wheatley is one example: his films Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012) and A Field in England (2013) are widely celebrated for their ambivalence and visual artistry. Similarly, Alice Lowe, who made a splash with critics on the release of her debut feature, the ‘brilliantly conceived’ Prevenge (2016),46 is one of several female directors welcomed for ‘bringing new blood’ to the genre across the world.47 At the other end of the scale are the creatives behind the likes of Lesbian Vampire Killers (Phil Claydon, 2009) and Zombie Undead  (Rhys Davies, 2011), who have collectively been called out by the middlebrow for making films regarded ­unanimously as terrible.48 What has remained consistent during this period is the volume of production. Between 2000 and 2010, over 400 British horror films were made.49 Since then it is estimated that a further 600 have been produced.50 In 2006 the trade press heralded the British ‘horror boom’, recognising the global popularity of films such as

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Introduction to the new edition 15

Neil Marshall’s 2005 production The Descent (which did well in the US), and the boom in (mostly European) co-productions such as Creep (Christopher Smith, 2004) and Severance (Christopher Smith, 2006).51 One of the key developments in this context, and a factor that has played a role in aiding the steady production of horror films, is the availability of government subsidies to support independent film. The establishment of the UK Film Council in 2000 enabled the development of many such films, including low-budget indies such as Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009) and the ‘highest grossing British horror film ever’, The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2012); others have benefited from subsidies granted by the Regional Development Agencies established between 1998 and 2000, as well as other organisations.52 Numerous British horror films since 2000 have benefited from these agreements, in many cases obtaining tax relief by shooting overseas in Canada, the US and, especially, Continental Europe.53 More locally, regional funding initiatives such as, for example, Screen Yorkshire have aided the production of such films as Kill List, Ghost Stories (Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, 2017) and The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017), while the likes of Creative Scotland and Ffilm Cymru Wales have distributed National Lottery funding to, for example, Calibre (Matt Palmer, 2018) and Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021).

Dead time? The future of British horror It has become somewhat of a tradition in writing on British horror to speculate about what the future holds for the genre – though one does so at one’s peril! Pirie, in the early 1970s, was optimistic about the continued success of British horror. Rigby, a couple of years before the ‘British horror revival’ in the early 2000s, expressed pessimism. In a post-Brexit world, presently doubling as the age of Covid-19, and with the future having never been so uncertain, speculating about horror production is even more of a precarious endeavour. While cinema owners worry about imminent closure, and film distributors delay releasing their summer blockbusters, numerous British horror films feature on pandemic-themed movie ­watch-lists,

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Hammer and beyond

indicating that, while British horror films are not currently being made, they are still thought to be relevant, and are, one may conclude by extension, being watched.54 At the time of writing, a Screen Sector Taskforce has been established by the British Film Institute to help enforce a recovery plan for the industry in the wake of Covid-19. This coincides with the publication of a report by the British Film Commission, endorsed by the government, which sets out how those in the film and television industries can ‘work safely’ in the current climate.55 Some creatives have managed to make films beyond these initiatives, including the quarantine-set British film Host (Rob Savage, 2020), which takes place entirely during a Zoom video call, and which was released directly to Shudder, a horrorthemed video-on-demand platform, in August 2020 (Figure  0.3). Additionally, numerous horror shorts have resulted from the ‘Horror Lockdown Short Film Competition’ launched in June 2020 by cult film distributor Arrow Video and the Sheffield-based horror film festival Celluloid Screams. A notable example is The Garden (Ian Cottage, 2020), in which a widow (Jane Arnfield) descends into madness as the corpse of her dead husband – presumably a victim of coronavirus – decomposes on the back lawn.56 In this context, Covid-19, while a hindrance for many in the industry, has enabled

Figure 0.3  A séance takes place during a video call in the quarantine-set Host (2020)

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Introduction to the new edition 17

Figure 0.4  ‘One, two, three … and Brexit!’: The Ritual (2017)

independent horror to flourish (Host became a ‘viral sensation’ that was said to have ‘Hollywood quaking’), and has proven to be a ­referent in works looking to rearticulate for contemporary audiences the genre’s long obsession with viral outbreaks, technology, death and malady.57 Elsewhere, the spectre of Brexit features as a marker of impending doom in the diegesis of recent horror films. An early scene in The Ritual, for example, sees a group of Brits on a walking holiday in rural Sweden stopping to take a group photograph; they forego the customary ‘say cheese’, going instead for ‘one, two, three … and Brexit!’ (Figure 0.4). While in this context Britain’s divorce from the EU serves as an in-joke for the horror that ensues (in which Britons are massacred in European woodland), beyond the diegesis lies the literal fear of the potentially disastrous impact that Brexit will have on the transnational initiatives that make films such as The Ritual possible. Brexit’s impact on the short-term movement of people, including the movement of film crew members into EU territory, could affect production, in addition to a decrease in opportunities for British distributors and sales agents to attend festivals to sell their wares and ‘to exchange ideas and find partners for co-production’.58 Given the centrality of Europe to British horror production, this outcome is bleak, with  some  commentators concerned that ‘independent British films … have the most to fear’.59

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Of course, many filmmakers source funds independently, as in the case of Host, and shoot on location in the UK, as with the recent crowd-funded slasher film Clownface (Alex Bourne, 2020).60 This is a context that is unlikely to change once ‘normality’ fully resumes. As in the 1980s and 1990s, independent video distributors have excelled in the independent arena, catering to the booming market for British horror with the aid of aspiring filmmakers looking for means of selling their wares. To this end, lo-fi online distributors such as Brain Damage and Chemical Burn Entertainment have given independent features such as Bane (James Eaves, 2007), DeadTime (Tony Jopia, 2012) and Wicked Witches (Martin J. Pickering, 2018) international exposure to sectionalised audiences of niche horror fans, while other filmmakers have found their core audience through VoD streaming services such as Amazon Prime, specialist sites such as Shudder or the likes of YouTube and Vimeo, which host an abundance of independently produced films. In the latter context, in practical terms, Brexit means very little. At the end of the first edition of Hammer and Beyond, Hutchings discussed Hammer’s critical respectability in the wake of a dedicated film season at the National Film Theatre. Even then, at a time when Hutchings was seeking to explore the extent to which Hammer’s historical critical disreputability offered great insight into the transgressiveness of its work – he argued that ‘rendering these films worthy and respectable … would be like forcing them into the light and then watching helplessly as they crumble into dust’ – the company was very much embraced as a British institution.61 Yet despite Hammer’s return to production in 2007, and the success of its blockbuster The Woman in Black, the company remains nowhere near as prominent domestically or on the global stage as it was during its golden age.62 If there is a comparable studio to the Hammer of old it is surely Blumhouse, the US company whose runaway successes The Purge franchise (2013–18), Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) and Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) make it, it is fair to say, the closest thing the industry has had to a ‘house of horror’ for decades.63 The lack of a British equivalent to Blumhouse is not to be lamented, however. The original Hammer, for all its ‘Britishness’,

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Introduction to the new edition 19

was, as Hutchings noted in the first edition, a company akin to all other major producers of cinema; one with its eyes on international markets and which, ultimately, regenerated the success of properties originally made famous on-screen by an American company, Universal.64 Although the British cinephile may continue to find comfort in Hammer as a national institution, its production output was always intended to transcend national borders. Hammer’s current incarnation, thus, has struggled to articulate its brand in the contemporary market place as it attempts to balance its Britishness with its drive to appeal to audiences for fresh horror film in a global market.65 The company’s latest film, The Lodge (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2019), is, aesthetically speaking at least, a far cry from the period set-pieces of its most iconic properties. If the success of The Woman in Black showed anything, it was not, as some argued at the time of the film’s release, Hammer’s relevance for contemporary audiences, but rather the appeal of Daniel ‘Harry Potter’ Radcliffe, the film’s star. It is telling that the film’s 2014 sequel, Angel of Death (Tom Harper), in which Radcliffe does not feature, took $50m at the box office, $80m less than its predecessor.66 The Lodge, a ghostly thriller in which a family is trapped in a lodge during the winter months, helmed by the Austrian directorial duo of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, speaks more of a company that is attempting to keep up with current trends in opulent, ­slow-paced ‘prestige horror’ (a much-debated term) such as The VVitch (Robert Eggers, 2015), Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) and Luca Guadagnino’s 2019 remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977).67 The Hammer name, as a one-time leading producer of horror films, barely resonates in this context. Irrespective of Hammer’s marginal presence in international horror production, the number of British horror films being produced by other companies and individuals speaks for itself. Of course, quality varies across what is a broad spectrum; so too do audience numbers. But if the twenty-first century has proved anything for British horror, it is that the genre remains persistent and resolutely broad in its budgets, sub-genres and appeal. Brexit and a global pandemic notwithstanding, British horror shows no sign of crumbling into dust any time soon.

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A note on the new edition The new edition is divided into two parts. Part I is the original book. I have, where relevant, taken the liberty of adding new images. The first edition relied on the reproduction of promotional stills and film posters that rarely complemented Hutchings’ argument or observations. Advances in technology since the early 1990s mean that one can more accurately support Hutchings’ textual analysis through the use of screenshots. Part II anthologises some of Hutchings’ subsequent writings on British horror, and plugs some of the gaps left by the first edition. Reproduced in full is Hutchings’ article on Amicus Productions, a piece on Hammer’s unmade adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, and the article ‘Putting the Brit into Eurohorror’, which offers an assessment of more recent films within academic discourse around British horror cinema in – and as part of – Europe. The new edition concludes with an afterword by Hutchings’ ­colleague and close friend, Russ Hunter.

Notes  1 Peter Ward Hutchings, ‘The British Horror Film: An Investigation of British Horror Production in its National Context’, PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1989; Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).   2 Thomas Elsaessar quoted in Julian Petley, ‘The Lost Continent’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 98–119 (99).   3 Petley, ‘The Lost Continent’, 100.   4 For a broader discussion of revisionist writings on British cinema at this time – ‘The New British Revisionism’ – see I. Q. Hunter, British Trash Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2012), 7–10.   5 Peter Hutchings, Terence Fisher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Peter Hutchings, Dracula (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004); Peter Hutchings, Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).

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Introduction to the new edition 21

  6 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, ­1946–72 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 9.   7 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 8.   8 Wood’s collected writing on horror, including his pivotal ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, can be found in Barry Keith Grant’s recent anthology, Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018). See also the second edition of Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality – The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, Screen 27.1 (1986), 2–13; and Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’, Screen 27.1 (1986), 44–71.   9 See below, 42. 10 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 31. 11 See below, 30. 12 See below, 44. 13 See below, 30. 14 See below, 45. 15 See below, 44. 16 Hutchings, ‘The British Horror Film’, 314. 17 See below, 223. 18 Cinema of Exploitation: A One Day Examination, progra­mme booklet, Harbour Lights Cinema, Southampton, 25 November 1995. 19 Steve Chibnall and I. Q. Hunter, ‘The Films that Time Forgot’, A Naughty Business! The British Cinema of Exploitation, festival programme booklet, De Montfort University, Leicester, 29 September–1 October, 1995, 3. 20 Chibnall and Hunter, ‘The Films that Time Forgot’, 3. 21 Steve Chibnall, Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker (Guildford: FAB Press, 1998); Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London: Routledge, 1998); Jonathan Rigby, English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (Richmond, Surrey: Reynolds and Hearn, 2000). 22 Julian Petley and Steve Chibnall, ‘The Return of the Repressed? British Horror’s Heritage and Future’, in Julian Petley and Steve Chibnall (eds), British Horror Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), 1–9; I. Q. Hunter, ‘The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires’, Postcolonial Studies 3.1 (2000), 81–7; Alison Peirse, After Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 122–48; and I. Q. Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999).

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23 See, for example, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–52; Sue Harper, ‘Beyond the Forest: Terence Fisher and Transylvania’, Studies in European Cinema 3.2 (2006), 143–51; Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Helen Wheatley, ‘Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Children’s Gothic Television in the 1970s and ’80s’, Visual Culture in Britain 12.3 (2012), 383–97; David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008); Hunter, British Trash Cinema; Kate Egan, ‘A Real Horror Star: Articulating the Extreme Authenticity of Ingrid Pitt’, in Kate Egan and Sarah Thomas (eds), Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 212–25; Matt Hills, ‘The Horror!’, in Martin Conboy and John Steel (eds), The Routledge Companion to British Media History (London: Routledge, 2014), 414–24; James Leggott, Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror (London: Wallflower, 2008); Johnny Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 24 John Hill, British Cinema of the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s (London: British Film Institute, 2000). 25 Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 112. 26 For an account of horror video in Britain, see Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 27 Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, 47. On Carry On, see Steve Gerrard, The Carry On Films (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); on Confessions of, see Sian Barber, ‘The Pinnacle of Popular Taste? The Importance of Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974)’, Scope 18 (2010), www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2010/october-2010/ barber.pdf (accessed 12 March 2021). 28 On Hammer’s collaboration with Warner Bros. and Fox, see Denis Meikle, A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009). 29 On Connaught’s dissolution, see Anon., ‘Connaught Wound Up’, Screen International, 17 October 1982, 148. On Blood Tide at MIFED, see Anon., ‘21st Century Vends Horror, Opera at Mifed; Also Shops’, Variety, 20 October 1982), 65. On Blood Tide on video in the UK, see Anon., ‘Video Releases’, Broadcast, 11 October 1982, 27; and on US video, see Anon., ‘Around the Video Track’, Variety, 2 May 1984, 40.

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Introduction to the new edition 23

30 Anon., ‘Every Day is Halloween Night for Horror-happy Video Vendors’, Billboard, 2 November 1985, HV 2. 31 Anon., ‘Britain’s Top 50’, Video Retailer, 26 January 1984. 32 Egan, Trash or Treasure?; Julian Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 33 Ian Conrich, ‘The Contemporary British Horror Film: Observations on Marketing, Distribution and Exhibition’, in Harvey Fenton (ed.), Flesh and Blood: Book 1 (Guildford: FAB Press, 1998), 27–31 (27). See also pp. 27–9. 34 Conrich, ‘The Contemporary British Horror Film’, 29. 35 Anon., ‘UK video top 20’, Screen International, 4 March 1989, 20. 36 See, for example, Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s. 37 See, for example, Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Unseen British Cinema’, in Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s, 135–44. 38 Nigel Odell (producer), quoted in Alan Jones, ‘Blood and Cuts’, Vox, 1 April 1994, 100. 39 Jones, ‘Blood and Cuts’, 100. 40 Derek Elley, ‘Beyond Bedlam’, Variety, 2 May 1994, https://variety. com/1994/film/reviews/beyond-bedlam-1200437404/ (accessed 12 March 2021). 41 Anon., ‘Lifetime/Metrodome Multimedia Venture Set to Shake the World’, Broadcast, 7 January 1994, 1. Beyond Bedlam briefly found itself at the heart of a short-lived reignition of the video nasties panic, following the murder of toddler James Bulger by two young boys; there was speculation that violent horror videos might have inspired the killers (a theory dismissed at the time and since regarded as lacking credibility). To this end, the film was initially blocked by the BBFC in mid-1994, before eventually being released in January 1995. On the film’s temporary banning, see Jason Bennetto, ‘Censors Block Eight Films from Video Release’, Independent, 11 May 1994, www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/censors-block-eight-films-from-videorelease-1435084.html (accessed 12 March 2021); on its release, see Bob McCabe, ‘Video to Rent’, Vox 52 (1 January 1995), 115; on the James Bulger case and violent horror videos, see Patricia Holland, ‘Living for Libio; or “Child’s Play IV”: The Imagery of Childhood and the Call for Censorship’, in Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds), Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2001), 78–86. 42 Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 15–17. 43 Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 25–7. 44 Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 22–4.

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45 On Shaun of the Dead, see Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 63–6; and Lindsey Decker, ‘British Cinema is Undead: American Horror, British Comedy and Generic Hybridity in Shaun of the Dead’, Transnational Cinemas 7.1 (2016), doi: www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/20403526.2015.1078120; on the ‘hoodie horror’ cycle, see Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 85–108. 46 Jeannette Catsoulis, ‘“Prevenge,” Orchestrated by a Fiendish Fetus’, New York Times, 22 March 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/ movies/prevenge-review.html (accessed 12 March 2021). 47 Mark Kermode, Imogen Carter, Guy Lodge and Kathryn Bromwich, ‘The Female Directors Bringing New Blood to Horror Films’, The Observer, 19 March 2017, www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/19/ the-female-directors-bringing-new-blood-horror-films-babadook-rawprevenge (accessed 12 March 2021). See also Amy Harris, ‘“They’ve got something you haven’t: a cock”: Exploring the Gendered Experience of Horror Filmmaking in Britain’, in Victoria McCollum and Aislinn Clarke (eds), Bloody Women: Women Directors of Horror (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming). 48 Hunter, British Trash Cinema, 73–81. 49 Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 14. 50 M. J. Simpson, ‘A Few Words about the Future’, British Horror Revival, 6 October 2019, http://british-horror-revival.blogspot.com/2019/10/afew-words-about-future.html (accessed 12 March 2021). 51 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Scare Tactics’, Screen International, 29 September–5 October 2006, 11–13 (11). 52 On the UK Film Council, see Gillian Doyle, Philip Schlesinger and Raymond Boyle, The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); on The Woman in Black, see Stuart Kemp, ‘“The Woman in Black” is the Most Successful British Horror Film in 20 Years’, Hollywood Reporter, 28 February 2012, www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/daniel-radcliffe-woman-in-black-boxoffice-295641 (accessed 12 March 2021); and on Regional Development Agencies and other funding groups (in relation to horror production), see Russ Hunter, ‘Horrifically Local? European Horror and Regional Funding Initiatives’, Film Studies 15.1 (2016), 66–80. 53 See Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 29–33. On the European context specifically, see Hunter, ‘Horrifically Local?’ 54 Kayleigh Dray, ‘Pandemic Horror Films: 17 Scary Movies that Hit a Little too Close to Home Right Now’ (no date), www.stylist.co.uk/ life/best-pandemic-horror-movies-films-on-netflix-amazon-primeitunes/378609 (accessed 12 March 2021).

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Introduction to the new edition 25

55 British Film Institute, ‘Working in the Screen Industry during COVID19’, 29 May 2020, www.bfi.org.uk/supporting-uk-film/covid-19-up​ date (accessed 12 March 2021). See also British Film Commission, ‘Working Safely During COVID-19 in Film and High-end TV Drama Production’, 1 June 2020, www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/down​ loads/bfi-british-film-commission-working-safely-covid-19-film-highend-tv-drama-production-gidance-2020-06-01.pdf (accessed 12 March 2021). 56 For more information on the competition, see https://arrowfilms.com/ news/horror-lockdown-short-film-competition-is-now-on/ (accessed 12 March 2021). 57 On the success of, and buzz surrounding, Host, see Nosheen Iqbal, ‘House of Horror: Host, the Zoom-call Hit Movie that has Hollywood Quaking’, The Observer, 16 August 2020, www.theguardian.com/ film/2020/aug/16/house-of-horror-host-the-zoom-call-hit-movie-thathas-hollywood-quaking (accessed 12 March 2021). 58 Oxera, Impacts of Leaving the EU on the UK’s Screen Sector, 6 January 2017, 26, www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-impactleaving-eu-uk-screen-sector-2017-v2.pdf (accessed 12 March 2021). 59 Charlotte Hall, ‘Why a No-Deal Brexit Could Mean the End of British Film’, Cherwell, 10 September 2019, https://cherwell.org/2019/09/10/ why-a-no-deal-brexit-could-mean-the-end-of-british-film/ (accessed 12 March 2021). 60 On the production context of Clownface, see Mark Adams, ‘Putting on your Clownface’, Horror DNA, 20 September 2017, www.horrordna. com/features/putting-on-your-clownface (accessed 12 March 2021). 61 See below, 234. 62 Kemp, ‘The Woman in Black’. 63 Andrew Pulver, ‘Fangs Out: Is Blumhouse the New Hammer Horror?’, The Guardian, 16 March 2020, www.theguardian.com/film/2020/ mar/16/fangs-out-is-blumhouse-the-new-hammer-horror-invisibleman-dracula (accessed 12 March 2021). 64 For a discussion of Hammer’s overseas success, see, for example, Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 1953–1968 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 43–62. 65 See Matt Hills, ‘Hammer 2.0: Legacy, Modernization and Hammer Horror as a Heritage Brand’, in Richard Nowell (ed.), Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 229–49; and Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema, 109–30.

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66 Data available at www.the-numbers.com/movie/Woman-in-Black-2Angel-of-Death-The-(2015)#tab=summary (accessed 12 March 2021). 67 On the ‘prestige horror’ phenomenon, see David Church, ‘Apprehension Engines: The New Independent “Prestige Horror”’, in Joe Hickonbottom, Eddie Falvey and Jonathan Wroot (eds), New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020), 15–33.

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Part I

Hammer and beyond: the British horror film

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Introduction to the first edition

Certain branches of the British cinema are able to weather any crisis: they do not so much rise above it as sink beneath it, to a subterranean level where the storms over quotas and television competition cannot affect them. This sub-cinema consists mainly of two parallel institutions, both under ten years old: the Hammer horror and the Carry On comedy.1

Francis Wyndham’s remarks, written in 1964, reflect upon the way in which through the last part of the 1950s, into the 1960s and then on to the 1970s, British horror was one of the most commercially successful areas of British cinema.2 As Wyndham indicates, easily the most prolific of horror producers was the relatively small company called Hammer Films, from which there emerged from 1956 onwards a series of gothic horrors, most notably those featuring Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, which were to become famous throughout much of the world. But the story of British horror involves much more than the activities of the filmmakers at Hammer. For one thing, well over one half of British horror production comes from companies other than Hammer. For another, the significance of British horror derives as much from the critical and popular responses to the films on their initial and subsequent releases as it does from the ­filmmakers themselves. In order to ascertain the importance and the merit of British horror, as well as the reasons for Hammer’s dominance, we also need to recognise that both creators and audiences exist within and in relation to a particular historical context. Of course, this does not mean that British horror reflects in any unmediated way

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aspects of British post-war reality. Nevertheless, this book will demonstrate that these horror films do draw upon, represent and are always locatable in relation to much broader shifts and tendencies in British social history. It is equally important, however, to think of these films, on the most basic of levels and regardless of how one values them, as aesthetic and artful constructs which are to a certain extent separate from the everyday concerns and experiences of their intended audience. What this means when we look at the films themselves is that we need to be aware of how they fit into and sometimes diverge from the characteristic practices and concerns of British cinema at the time of their production. Only in this way can a sense be gained both of their social resonance and their cinematic specificity. It follows from this that the aim of this book is primarily a ­cultural-historical one. In particular, the book will trace the changing nature of British horror from the mid-1940s to the present day as it constantly seeks to redefine itself in the face of social change. In so doing, films of some distinction will be identified and discussed. But the worth of British horror does not reside entirely, or even perhaps mainly, in these. Instead, the genre itself, or movement if you prefer, the possibilities it offers and all the films it contains, can be seen in total as offering a rich, fascinating and multifaceted response to life in Britain over the past few decades.3 I would like to thank Charles Barr for his invaluable comments on an earlier version of this book. I would also like to thank the students and colleagues with whom I have worked over the years who, in all sorts of ways, have supported and encouraged this project. This book is dedicated to my parents, John and Rosemary Hutchings.

Notes 1 Francis Wyndham, ‘The Sub-Cinema’, Sunday Times Supplement, 15 March 1964. 2 On the Carry On films – still a relatively unexplored area of British film production – see Marion Jordan, ‘Carry On – Follow That Stereotype’,

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Introduction 31

in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 312–27. 3 British horror can be considered both as a sub-genre, a category of international horror production, and as a nationally specific movement with a finite beginning and end. I discuss this in more detail in the first chapter of this book. Suffice it here to indicate that later in the book when I discuss the genre of British horror, I mean to refer to a distinctive area of British cinema which has affinities with and can be related to horror films produced elsewhere, but in very important ways is separate and unique.

1

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For sadists only? The problem of British horror

Horror is often a problem for critics. The all too visible stress in many horror films on morbid themes and acts of violence; the openly exploitative nature of much horror; the association of the genre with a predominantly adolescent audience: all these factors militate against the horror genre being viewed in anything but  the  most derogatory or patronising of terms. So much is this the case that even those critics who want to argue for the worth of these films sometimes find themselves negotiating what appears to be an inhospitable terrain, with their work taking on an accordingly defensive tone. Nowhere is this unease more evident than in the various critical responses provoked by British horror cinema over the years. From the outraged to the laudatory, these responses are part of the baggage which British horror inevitably brings with it to any critical discussion. If we are to move beyond some of the less helpful long-standing assumptions about horror and towards a more systematic understanding of this sector of British film ­production, we need to consider this legacy of criticism. For our purposes, the press reviews and other critical articles and books that appeared between 1956 and the early 1970s – the period which saw British horror’s great box office success – are of particular interest. These critical pieces form a significant part of the cultural climate within which British horror was created and developed, and for that reason alone are relevant to a contextual understanding of the genre. The relationship between criticism and film production needs to be seen as a two-way process. It is not just a question of films being made and then being critically appraised. It is much more interactive than this, with critical attitudes being

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For sadists only? 33

defined and redefined in relation to trends in film production and, at the same time, filmmakers responding to these attitudes, sometimes reacting against them (see my later discussion of Michael Reeves in this respect) but often, as in the case of Hammer, cheerfully accepting the place allotted them within a particular map of British cinema. It is fair to say that the critical verdict on British horror during the time of its proliferation was overwhelmingly negative. More positive critical evaluations began to appear in the early 1970s when horror production (and indeed much of the rest of British cinema) was beginning to wind down. Most notable among these was David Pirie’s 1973 book A Heritage of Horror which sought to locate horror cinema within a British gothic tradition.1 Another approach which has since become apparent is to view British horror as part of ‘the dark side’ of British cinema, ‘a lost continent’ still waiting to be rigorously explored and mapped. The ‘dark side’ metaphor is especially potent in that it suggests not only a repression on the part of earlier critics who have refused to engage with the genre, but also that the films themselves are dealing with the release of forces that are repressed in other, more respectable areas of British cinema. The first part of this chapter explores the various responses to and readings of British horror. It will demonstrate that while some of these, most notably Pirie’s, are more convincing than others, important issues are still not being addressed. In particular, more thought needs to be given not only to the way in which these films relate to the social and historical circumstances of their production but also to how the aesthetic and the commercial imperatives of the genre interact. The chapter will conclude by offering another way of thinking about British horror, one that seeks to take all these factors into account in an attempt to identify what it is that makes the horror film so distinctive and important a part of British cinema.

The press response The attitudes of British film critics to British horror were to a large extent formulated in response to a series of immensely popular horror

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Hammer and beyond

films produced by Hammer in the last part of the 1950s. Two things are apparent from a consideration of the press notices of the Hammer horrors of this period. First, British horror, and Hammer in particular, was not as controversial as some histories of horror have suggested. In discussing the critical receptions of two non-Hammer films, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Ian Christie and Charles Barr respectively stress the way in which the critics almost unanimously refused to engage with these films on any level.2 A product of this was symptomatic factual errors in the actual reviews. Hammer horror did not receive such treatment. It was, quite simply, not as threatening as the two films cited above. Certainly, emotive words were used to condemn it, but significantly one finds very few factual errors in the reviews in question. One reason for this might be that the Hammer films tended to lack those formal and rhetorical devices used by both Powell and Peckinpah to implicate the spectator in the violence depicted on screen. Secondly, perhaps as expected, the reviews of British horror films become shorter in length as time passes. Linked with this, they also begin to use a recognisable shorthand based on the name of ‘Hammer’. For example, only two of the available reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) mention Hammer at all (Sunday Express, 5/5/57, Evening News, 2/5/57). The reviews for Dracula (Fisher, 1958), released one year later, contain a few scattered references to the studio. A year after that we can find, among other references, ‘the horror boys of Hammer films’ (Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker, 28/3/59 on The Hound of the Baskervilles [Fisher, 1959] – ‘the horror boys’ recurs in other reviews by other writers,  implying a certain childish, ‘naughty’ quality about the filmmakers) and ‘Hammer Films’ own baleful province’ (Evening Standard, 3/12/59 on The Stranglers of Bombay [Fisher, 1959]). By the late 1960s one finds, typically: ‘Directed by Terence Fisher, The Devil Rides Out is no better nor worse than any other Hammer horror and, of course, stars Christopher Lee’ (Nina Hibbin, Morning Star, 8/6/68 – complete review) and ‘There’s not much to say about The Devil Rides Out except that it’s the latest Hammer horror release’ (Guardian, 7/6/68). Incidentally, The Devil Rides Out is considered by many supporters of the British horror genre as one of its most distinguished films.

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For sadists only? 35

Here the name of Hammer is being used as a reductive, descriptive category. Merely to utter it implies a certain type of film, and in particular a certain type of horror film. Merely to invoke it implies a critical response which no longer requires elaboration. On one level at least, this can be viewed more as a response to Hammer’s self-image, its unabashed foregrounding of the formulaic nature of its product. (Another possible reason for the brevity of the later reviews might be the fact that Hammer simply stopped showing certain films to the press from the mid-1960s onwards.) Of course, this does not mean that the press reviewers were the passive victims of the manipulations of the Hammer selling machine. Undoubtedly they were sensitive to it, often mentioning, in rather distasteful tones, the gaudy posters and tasteless promotional stunts that surrounded the films. One particularly memorable example of the Hammer approach to marketing is provided by the invitations to the press screening of The Stranglers of Bombay – filmed, according to the poster, in ‘Strangloscope’ – which were written on silk scarves similar to those used as murder weapons in the supposedly factual film. In the midst of such activity, and to a certain extent as a reaction against it, the British critics worked to identify Hammer, and British horror in general, in their own way. As we will see in a later chapter, the evaluation of Hammer that emerged was subsequently used as a yardstick against which nonHammer horrors were judged and valued. Perhaps the best way to understand this process of identification, as well as the array of critical attitudes that it involves, is to look at the reception of one particular film, in this case The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer’s first colour horror film, released in 1957. David Pirie describes the critical reaction to The Curse of Frankenstein thus: ‘at the time outraged critics fell over each other to condemn it’.3 While this is certainly true, it is also the case that the virulently negative reviews were far outnumbered by reviews  that were, on the whole, either indifferent to or amused by the film. Of the twenty-three press notices available in the BFI archives, only five could conceivably be described as ‘outraged’. These include the reviews in The Daily Worker (4/5/57, Robert Kennedy) and The Daily Telegraph (4/5/57, Campbell Dixon), in the latter of which the following appears: ‘But when the screen gives

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36

Hammer and beyond

us severed heads and hands, eyeballs dropped in a wine glass and magnified, and brains dished up on a plate like spaghetti, I can only suggest a new certificate – “SO” perhaps; for Sadists Only.’ Similar attitudes are expressed in The Sunday Times (5/5/57, Dilys Powell), Tribune (10/5/57, R. D. Smith) and, perhaps most notably, The Observer (5/5/57, C. A. Lejeune): ‘Without any hesitation I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.’ Looked at in this statistical way, one could say that The Curse of Frankenstein’s critical reception was not extreme at all (as indeed it wasn’t compared, say, with Peeping Tom – there is clearly no unanimous condemnation of the film here). Yet if the reviews are examined in detail, the positive (The Daily Herald and The Sunday Express), the negative and the rest, one finds a shared set of assumptions about British cinema, horror and the film audience. In particular, this audience is assumed to be split into two distinctive groups: on the one hand, ‘us’, supporters of ‘entertainment’, who can really see what a shameful and exploitative thing the horror film actually is, and, on the other hand, ‘them’, credulous horror fans, possibly childish and/or stupid, perhaps even mentally disturbed. This process of separating out the audience is at its clearest in the early days of Hammer horror. For instance, R. D. Smith’s negative review begins with: ‘For all lovers of the cinema only two words describe this film – Depressing, degrading!’ Having thus established who the film is not for, Smith goes on The whole business of Grand Guignol … needs an analyst rather than a critic … in the cinema there are those who find it profitable to keep alive in people – (and especially, one feels, in the case of children) – primitive fears and cruelties. (Tribune)4

Here the audience for horror is conceived as completely Other, primitive, childlike, easily exploited, possibly in need of an analyst. This is admittedly an extreme version. But this process is not by any means confined to the wholly negative reviews. The notice in The Times (6/5/57), for example, is, on the whole, neutral. Yet at the end one finds:



For sadists only? 37

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Not a film for the nervous, nor for that matter for those without a morbid taste for the revolting and who feel that the world has supped full enough of horror without having more, in colour, thrust down their throats from a wide screen.

The tone might be different from that of R. D. Smith’s invective, but the critical terms are the same. In a mildly dismissive review, this time in The Financial Times (6/5/57), Derek Granger discusses the way in which people react to horror films: Only the saddest of simpletons, one feels, could ever get a really satisfying frisson. For the rest of us they have just become a rather eccentric and specialised form of light entertainment, and possibly a useful means of escape for a housewife harrowed by the shopping. (My emphasis)

A device which features widely is apparent here, namely humour. Humour in this context works to secure a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. They take the films seriously; we don’t. This will be returned to below. But first it is useful to look briefly at one of the positive reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein. The most consistent champion of Hammer films in this period was Paul Dehn (later to become himself a film screenwriter). An appraisal of his approach to the genre is instructive in relation to the critical terms outlined above. For example, from his review of The Curse of Frankenstein (Daily Herald, 3/5/57), which went out under the heading ‘I Like It Grisly’: When titles like The Curse of Frankenstein come shuddering through the scrambled smoke, blood and flame of the Warner Theatre screen, I put on my spectacles, and spell them out and smile, and say ‘Very good indeed’. I know that it’s uncritical to say this sort of thing before the picture has even begun, but I can’t help it. Monsters are my addiction and my sustenance. I like my vegetables two-legged. I like people who have roots. (My emphasis)

Also relevant here are his remarks on an earlier Hammer film, The Quatermass Experiment (Val Guest, 1955): ‘This is the best and nastiest horror-film that I have seen since the war. How jolly that it is also British’ (News Chronicle, 28/8/55). What Dehn does here

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Hammer and beyond

is maintain a division between a good/tasteful and a bad/tasteless audience, while – and this is where he is different from other critics  – identifying himself wholeheartedly with the latter. He is deliberately being, in his own words, ‘uncritical’, surrendering himself in a fetishistic way to the dubious delights of the horror genre. The critical terms are the same as in the other reviews – the pleasure to be gleaned from horror is still illicit – but the position within these terms has shifted. Many of the reviews for The Curse of Frankenstein and later horror films make humorous remarks at their expense. Perhaps most typically (in a review of Dracula and The Moonraker [David MacDonald, 1958] in The Daily Herald, 23/5/58): ‘My reaction to them is: gore blimey. Because of seeing these two pictures, I would probably have fainted if I had cut myself shaving this week.’ Most of the complaints against Hammer accrue from the idea that its films are in some way too ‘realistic’, that it is too unpleasant to be laughed at. The position of the disbelieving spectator ridiculing events on the screen is threatened, it seems, when the most overtly fantastic or stylised elements of the genre are absent. Here, a lighthearted but revealing criticism of Dracula (The Star, 22/5/58): ‘probably the best acted, directed and photographed horror film yet made. But to be effective Dracula needs a certain amount of bad acting. Ham as well as blood is what he feeds on.’ On another level, Nina Hibbin writes in The Daily Worker (24/5/58), I went to see Dracula, a Hammer film, prepared to enjoy a nervous giggle. I was even ready to poke gentle fun at it. I came away revolted and outraged … Laughable nonsense? Not when it is filmed like this, with realism and with the modern conveniences of colour and the wide screen.

If, in this light, one returns to Hammer’s champion, Paul Dehn, one finds: ‘My readers know me to be a sucker for the sort of Draculine horror film which is rooted harmlessly in fairytale soil’ (review of The Stranglers of Bombay, News Chronicle, 4/12/59 – my emphasis). A similar attitude is apparent in all three, a need to push the film away through distancing laughter. Some critics, like Dehn, succeed in doing this; others, like Hibbin, do not. (Significantly, Dehn did

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For sadists only? 39

not like Peeping Tom, a film which works to implicate the spectator in the text.) These critical attitudes, the division between ‘them’ and ‘us’, the bad and the good audience, and the use of humour as a support for this division, are a constant structuring element in the press reaction to British horror throughout the 1950s and 1960s (although, in later years, they do become more attenuated, subordinate to the name of Hammer). The inevitable outcome of this way of approaching the genre is that horror is held firmly at a distance and functions either as a source of humour or as a cause for concern. This is equally the case in most of the critical histories of British cinema that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s – including those by Roy Armes, Ernest Betts, Charles Oakley, George Perry and Alexander Walker.5 In these, horror, one of the most commercially successful areas of British film production, is usually conspicuous by its absence or its marginality. The formulaic nature of much British horror, the way in which it seems to define itself entirely in relation to the demands of the market place, ensures that the films involved are accorded a lesser status than those films which are seen to have been made by ‘artists’ who in some way or other have transcended commercial constraints. At the same time, the pleasures afforded by horror films, arising as they apparently do from a fascination with violence, pain and death, are often seen by critics as being rather dubious, with this impression encouraged by advertising which stresses the illicit and forbidden nature of the horror experience. The influential British film critic Roger Manvell, writing in 1947, provides an early example of what would quickly become a standard model for dividing up and valuing British cinema. The high film is comparatively rare, sometimes successful with the public and always valuable for prestige: it excites the artist and technician into making new discoveries, gladdens the columns of the filmweary critic and normally enters the pages of film history. The middle film is the staple box-office product, the reliable success, the film which offers sound entertainment without demanding too much or too little of the greater audience’s sensibilities. The low film is the quickie, the noisy, raptureless programme-filler, the B film in every implication of the letter.6

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Hammer and beyond

Manvell distinguishes not only between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ but also between entertainment that is in good taste, ‘sound entertainment’ in his words, and entertainment that is not (and perhaps is not even entertainment). It tends to be the bad taste elements – most notably horror – which are marginalised or done down in the British film histories. An example of good taste commercial filmmaking might be the James Bond films. This is most evident in Alexander Walker’s Hollywood England where Hammer is hardly mentioned and James Bond has a whole section devoted to him. Roy Armes, on the other hand, devotes as much space in his book to Hammer as he does to Bond. He approves of the latter, ‘the most potent myth of British cinema’,7 and dislikes the former, seeing it as ‘a new manipulation of the old clichés with a little more visual or verbal explicitness’. He goes on to describe Hammer’s exploitation of these clichés as positively unBritish, ‘more characteristic of Hollywood than the British film industry’.8 The role played here by the horror filmmakers was an interesting one. In particular, Hammer, the principal producer of British horror, seemed to contribute wilfully and enthusiastically to its own critical disreputability. Indeed this disreputability became an important factor in the way in which Hammer sold itself and its products to a mass audience. The following remarks made by Hammer’s head James Carreras clearly signal what he saw Hammer’s position to be: if back parlour dramas look like clicking and somebody submits a good basic idea for one, we can act fast and have the finished article on screen while demand is still there … Showmanship – and I’ll go on saying that ’til I’m blue in the face – is still this industry’s lifeblood, a fact that is too often ignored by many. When I see producers who are reluctant to bang the big drum about their product, it makes me wonder why they bother to make films at all.9

A repeated stress on both the need to be sensitive to market trends and the value of showmanship characterised many of the public statements made by Hammer personnel. The company constantly identified itself as a commercially minded purveyor of entertainment for a mass audience. Other areas of British cinema can be grouped generically – Gainsborough melodramas and Ealing ­ comedies,

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For sadists only? 41

for instance – but none other than Hammer foregrounded in so extreme a way the mass-productive elements of genre. Not only did Hammer use a stock company of actors, but up until the late 1960s when it moved its production base it also used and reused for the sake of economy the same sets and props (much remarked upon and derided by critics when the films were released). It made little or no attempt to hide the cyclical, formulaic and serial nature of its products – a structure which will be shown later as largely inherited from an American conception of horror developed in the 1930s. Indeed this aggressive exploitation became part of a consciously created product image, something of which to be proud. Largely as a consequence of this, Hammer, and horror production in general, found itself on the critical margins from the 1950s through to the early 1970s when David Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror initiated a slow process of reappraisal. We can now consider what insights are offered us by more positive accounts of British horror, most of which appeared at a time when British horror production was itself in decline.

Positive reports David Pirie’s claim in his groundbreaking work, A Heritage of Horror, that British horror was worthy of critical attention undoubtedly ran counter to the readings of British cinema dominant in the early 1970s when the book first appeared. However, Pirie himself denied that his work was a polemic, and indeed a close examination of it reveals that the two main strategies Pirie adopts to bring horror into the fold of critical respectability are closely connected to an already established way of understanding and valuing British cinema. The first of these involves the construction of the horror genre as an important part of a national culture, with links to other aspects of British cinema, to literary traditions and also to a distinctive British character: ‘it may be that the themes relate to certain psychopathological aspects of the English temperament’.10 The second entails bestowing upon Terence Fisher, Hammer’s main film director, the status of auteur, someone with a vision

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Hammer and beyond

that transcends commercial constraints: ‘Indeed, once one begins to look at Fisher’s films closely, it becomes clear that, unlike almost  any other director working in the British commercial cinema, they appear to embody a recognisable and coherent Weltanschauung.’11 At the same time, Pirie is more sympathetic than other critics to Hammer’s market-led production philosophy which, like Armes, he associates with Hollywood. There is a very slight echo of Ealing in the structure that emerged, but perhaps the most obvious analogy is with one of the small Hollywood studios of the 1930s and forties like Republic or Monogram; for almost overnight Hammer became a highly efficient factory for a vast series of exploitation pictures made on tight budgets with a repertory company of actors and a small, sometimes over-exposed, series of locations surrounding their tiny Buckinghamshire estate.12

A Heritage of Horror is full of valuable insights, and my own account of British horror is indebted to it. However, in his attempt to endow horror with a certain cultural respectability and worth, Pirie does not engage to any great extent with the reasons why the genre was disreputable in the first place. Also, while he includes an account of the economic circumstances within which Hammer was working, the implications this might have for the aesthetic and ideological properties of the films being made by Hammer are rarely taken up in his otherwise very provocative analyses of specific films. Generally, these analyses instead seek to locate the films in question within a long-standing gothic tradition or as products of an individual director’s vision. Writing in the early 1970s, Pirie was unable to avail himself of recent developments in film theory and history, with those concerning the relation of film aesthetics to the economic structures of the film industry especially pertinent to an understanding of British horror.13 From the vantage point of today, the commercial nature of much film production seems less of an obstacle to a consideration of any film as a cultural artefact than perhaps it did in the past. Because of this, my own discussions of the aesthetic qualities of particular films will incorporate the fact that, without exception, these films were made primarily to make money.

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For sadists only? 43

It is surprising given the upsurge of critical interest in British cinema that has taken place in the 1980s that so little has been written on British horror outside of a few isolated essays and remarks in essays on other related subjects since A Heritage of Horror. One shift in attitudes that has taken place registers, albeit ambivalently, in one of the press reviews of Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987): ‘This, in fact, is a horror fantasy: the genre it has become fashionable to view as the repressed underside of British filmmaking.’14 The idea that British horror constitutes one aspect of what might be termed ‘the dark side’ of British cinema has been developed by Julian Petley in an article entitled ‘The Lost Continent’. Petley argues that British films which are realistic have been valued by critics above all others. Consequent upon this, an awareness of other areas of British film production has been repressed. These areas are characterised by non-realistic or fantastic themes and styles: they include Gainsborough melodramas, the iconoclastic work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and, of course, the British horror film. This strain of fantasy permits the expression of that which is inexpressible elsewhere in British cinema. In so doing, it reveals the limitations of, perhaps even works to deconstruct, a critically privileged realist aesthetic.15 The metaphor of the dark side has provided a way of thinking about films which were not afforded much attention before. However, at this point we need to identify some of the shortcomings of this approach and, at the same time, indicate other possible ways of conceptualising British horror’s position within British cinema. Two principal problems are apparent. First, while it is clear that the realism/fantasy dichotomy upon which this metaphor depends is a central one in much critical writing on British cinema, it should also be clear that in an important sense the British horror film is operating in the same way as other, more realistic areas of British film production. The fact that horror films invariably come in the form of 80–120-minute fictional narratives peopled by psychologically individuated characters means that on a basic level and regardless of any aberrant or disreputable content they are unexceptional. For example, Hammer nearly always relied on straightforwardly conventional narratives. As Andrew Higson

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Hammer and beyond

notes, ‘Clearly, different films, and particularly different genres of film mark themselves as more realistic or more “fantastic” (this is particularly evident in British film culture), but it needs to be recognised that such marking is always in relation to a particular understanding of cinema.’16 Secondly, ‘the dark side’ offers itself as something which arises nightmarishly from within and is subservient to a dominant realist cinema. This fails to take account of the fact that these ‘subterranean’ films in themselves comprise an immensely popular cinema. When dealing with critical discourses that are primarily evaluative, it is often easy to lose sight of some of the commercial realities of British cinema. By any account, Hammer was a far more profitable enterprise (especially in the long term) than, say, the 1960s ‘kitchen sink’ productions from the likes of Woodfall and Bryanston, simply because more people saw its product than they did the products of the latter. In this sense, it is the dark side of British cinema rather than its realistic component that can be viewed, in the 1950s and 1960s at least, as dominant. The contradiction between British horror’s popularity, its centrality in the market place, and its critical marginalisation is not satisfactorily addressed by placing British horror on ‘the dark side’. Looking at horror in this way, in its relation to realist discourses, can certainly be productive. However, it needs to be recognised that the horror genre as developed within this country has its own distinctive and complex history which encompasses a literary tradition (explored by Pirie), links with other horror movements and an aesthetic identity which in many instances is quite different from as opposed to deconstructive of a realist approach. What this means is that British horror does not merely reveal what is unsaid or repressed elsewhere in British cinema, but is also capable of offering different ideas and a new way of seeing.

National cinema and genre The main aim of this book is to explore the ‘Britishness’ of British horror, the way in which it functions within a specifically national context. It does seem that the various approaches outlined above,

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For sadists only? 45

despite the usefulness of some, are in the end not fully adequate to this task. What is helpful at this stage is to think about British horror films as being part of a British national cinema, where this cinema is simultaneously a cultural and an economic institution which, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s words, ‘in some way signifies itself to its audiences as the cinema through which that country speaks’.17 Defining such a cinema is not as straightforward as one might suppose. This is readily apparent in The British Film Catalogue 1895–1970: A Guide to Entertainment Films where Denis Gifford lists a number of films which one does not usually think of as British; for example The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) and The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964).18 Gifford’s definition of what makes a film British depends on trade and legal designations, avoiding any consideration of theme or style and including films which might appear in their formal qualities to be more American or European. Conversely, films thought of as, say, unproblematically American can be shown to have had a significant British input in terms of the creative personnel who fashioned them. Charles Barr has shown this for the 1935 Universal horror film Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale).19 While an important component of a British national cinema must be its propensity to address specifically national issues and concerns, account also needs to be taken of films like The Haunting and The Masque of the Red Death which, while not connecting with a British context in any thematic or stylistic way, do testify to the importance of American-financed production in Britain throughout the 1960s. Similarly, that Bride of Frankenstein can to a certain extent be seen as a British horror film in exile signifies rather pointedly the hostility of 1930s British film censors to the development of an indigenous horror genre. Thinking about the similarities and differences between British and American horror films leads to another difficulty in our attempt to locate horror within a specifically national cinema: namely that the operations of the horror genre are not restricted to any one country or culture but rather are spread across much of the filmmaking world. What has to be considered here then is the role of this genre, and for that matter genre in general, within British

46

Hammer and beyond

cinema. For French critic (and later filmmaker) Jacques Rivette, this role is perfectly clear:

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British cinema is a genre cinema, but one where the genres have no genuine roots. On the one hand there are no self-validating genres as there are in American cinema, like the Western and the thriller … There are just false, in the sense of imitative, genres.20

Rivette’s view (which in retrospect has a certain irony to it inasmuch as it was expressed in 1957, the year which saw the release of The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer’s first important colour horror film) can be contrasted with David Pirie’s claim that the British horror film is in fact deeply rooted in British culture, ‘the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America’.21 Is British horror ‘rootless’, merely a local example of a transnational cultural mode? If not, what relation does it bear to its American and European counterparts? British horror’s place in the standard accepted history of the horror genre lies in between American Cold War SF/horror and the modern American horror film (usually seen to have been initiated in 1968 with the release of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby), with considerable overlaps at either end. In what is usually seen as a constant process of generic regeneration, Hammer and other British companies – alongside Italian filmmakers such as Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda and American filmmakers such as Roger Corman – introduce into the genre in the late 1950s colour as well as relatively graphic depictions of violence and sexuality, with all this played out in period settings. However, by the late 1960s gothic horror is superseded by a series of American films boasting modern settings and even more explicit images. One factor that enables the construction of such a ‘grand narrative’ is the presence of ‘horror’ (regardless of how it is defined) as a distinct category within the organisation of different national film industries. But it is uncertain whether one can actually abstract from the extraordinarily wide range of horror films specific aesthetic elements or structures which can be seen to characterise the genre as a whole. Attempts that have been made, particularly in their i­nsistence

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For sadists only? 47

on the genre having either a fixed function or a central core of meaning (‘the Ur-myth … a tale still hidden’),22 have necessarily lifted films out of the national contexts within which they were produced, thereby evacuating them of much of their sociohistorical significance. Despite operating from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, many of these generalising approaches manifest a social conservatism. Horror tends to be identified as a means by which an audience comes to terms with certain unpleasant aspects of reality. For example: ‘The horror film teaches an acceptance of the natural order of things and an affirmation of man’s ability to cope with and even prevail over the evil of life which he can never hope to understand.’23 Psychiatric and psychological concepts have been especially influential in the development of the notion of horror as offering an essentially healthy and life-enhancing experience. Perhaps the baldest statement of this is found in Dr Martin Grotjahn’s article ‘Horror – Yes It Can Do You Good’: ‘There is, perhaps, a healthy function in the fascination of horror. It keeps us on the task to face our anxieties and to work on them.’24 A related view of the genre has been argued at some length by James B. Twitchell who in his book on the genre writes: horror sequences are really formulaic rituals coded with precise social information needed by the adolescent audience. Like fairy tales that prepare the child for the anxieties of separation, modern horror myths prepare the teenager for the anxieties of reproduction.25

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Steve Neale has offered a different approach to the genre. He argues that horror addresses the fascinations and anxieties of sexual difference, particularly as they register for the male spectator. In discussing horror’s use of chiaroscuro lighting he notes that: all the elements involved here are central to the problematic of castration and … the horror film – centrally concerned with the fact and the effects of difference – invariably involves itself in that problematic and invariably mobilises specific castration anxieties.26

Horror is seen as ‘centrally concerned’ with questions of gender, not in the sense of providing role models but rather in its seeking to

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produce a secure spectatorial position for the male subject situated within a patriarchal social formation. The insistent return in all the work cited above to an essential core of human experience or meaning enables their identification of horror as a distinctive body of work operating in a number of different social and historical situations. Even in Neale’s apparently more socially aware approach, social specificity is acknowledged only inasmuch as the genre is seen to relate to a patriarchal society. The ahistorical qualities of his argument are clear from the examples he uses. These are picked, apparently at random, from British and American cinema of the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the implicit assumption being that when reduced to their defining and invariant function, these films are more or less the same. It is also the case that those feminist critics of horror who have argued that the genre is an irredeemably misogynist area of culture, with its female characters functioning solely as victims, fail to grasp that particular horror films might – depending on the context in which they are produced and received – challenge or problematise certain patriarchal attitudes and definitions. For instance, the position of the woman in British horror from the mid-1960s onwards can be seen as offering a degree of resistance to an attempted male objectification of her. The forms this takes, and the extent to which it can be taken as a significant disruption of a male-centred narrative, can, however, only be determined through an analysis of specific films which does not presuppose the genre having fixed, immutable qualities. One way of initiating a more comprehensively historical approach to horror is to see it as at any one time comprising a set of aesthetic conventions or norms (with these relating both to stylistic and thematic factors and narrative structure), the actual interplay and development of which takes place within particular national contexts. Jan Mukarovsky, in a discussion of aesthetic norms, provides a way of thinking about horror in these terms when he writes: we can state that the specific character of the aesthetic norm consists in the fact that it tends to be violated rather than to be observed. It has less than any other norm the character of an inviolable law.  It is rather a point of orientation serving to make felt the degree of



For sadists only? 49

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­ eformation of the artistic tradition by new tendencies … If we look d at a work of art from this point of view, it will appear to us as a complex tangle of norms.27

What this suggests in the case of Hammer (and for that matter British horror in general) is that in its construction of horror within the context of 1950s Britain, it was negotiating with pre-existing generic norms, engaging in a process of product differentiation which necessarily involved ‘common sense’ definitions of what a horror film actually was. The motivation for this differentiation can be found in the company’s search for a new, expanded market. This approach helps us in locating British horror as part of a specifically national cinema. The relation of British horror films to non-British horror, rather than arising from a shared generic identity, is instead constituted through a series of negotiations and differentiations, in effect through different interpretations of what horror actually is. This also has implications for our understanding of the internal development of British horror production, for, as will be shown, Hammer horror increasingly came to function in the 1960s as the ‘norm’ from which British horror filmmakers – ­including some working for Hammer itself – sought to differentiate their own work. The norms in relation to which Hammer initiated its own distinctive horror cycle were primarily those of the American cinema, and particularly the type of horror associated with Universal Studios throughout the 1930s and 1940s and featuring stars such as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jnr (with some of these films still proving popular in British cinemas in the 1950s). This is most apparent in Hammer’s producing films centred on monsters already established in film horror by Universal: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and the Wolfman.28 Both Dracula and Frankenstein were ‘stars’ on the stage before the 1930s.29 Universal’s main innovation was to place them in cycles of films, in so doing removing them even further from the novels in which they first appeared. This cyclical structure, which was reproduced in the subsequent Mummy and Wolfman cycles, helped the studio to make the most of its limited resources: sets, costumes and, in some cases, footage could be reused. But this also

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had ­implications for the type of monster that was being produced. In particular, the relationship between the monster’s creation and its eventual destruction changes when it is assumed (both by filmmakers and audiences) that the monster will return in a later film. It would seem that the elements of spectacle associated with these moments on the stage become even more important in the movies. As Steve Neale has noted, the horror film is often marked by a fascination with the appearance and disappearance of the monster, turning as these do on a ‘fetishistic division of belief’.30 These moments, codified for the first time in serial Universal horror production, are usually linked with a display of cinematic techniques (make-up, special effects, set design, etc.), so that not only the monster but aspects of cinema itself are involved in the spectacle. It is within such a conception of horror that Hammer, initially at least, operates, most visibly in its Frankenstein and Dracula films but also throughout the rest of its horror production in the 1950s and the first part of the 1960s. As has already been indicated, British horror in the late 1950s was also part of a much wider renaissance of the genre: this included films from Italy (Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri in 1956 and Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio in 1960), America (Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher in 1960 and his subsequent Poe adaptations, Hitchcock’s Psycho in the same year) and Spain (Jesus Franco’s Gritos en la Noche in 1962). All of these exploited a general relaxation of censorship through an increased explicitness in their representations of sex and violence, while many also utilised the relatively cheap colour systems that had just become available. They also, to a limited extent, shared some creative personnel. (This was mainly the case with actors: for example, British cult actress Barbara Steele made films in Italy, America and Britain.) However, the ways in which British, Italian and American cinema responded to these common elements were in the main determined by factors operative within their respective national contexts. Moreover, while there was undoubtedly an international market for horror at this time (an important consideration for filmmakers), with films from the countries listed above regularly distributed in other countries, it is most unlikely that the response

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For sadists only? 51

of the various audiences was a uniform one. As will be shown in subsequent chapters, many of the issues with which British horror was working were of specific relevance to British life, and, because of this, certain aspects of the films would simply have lacked resonance for non-British audiences. This does not mean that audiences in America and Europe (where British horror, initially at least, proved very popular) were ‘misreading’ these films; rather that they were locating them within and making sense of them in relation to their own national cultures. The extent to which a film lends itself to this process determines its international success or failure. When the horror genre is viewed in this way as a collection of different horror cinemas, the relations between which are mediated via numerous national institutions, it becomes much easier to think about British horror both as an important intervention into the international horror genre and as a significant part of the post-war British cultural scene.

Entertainment value when the National Film Theatre gave us a two-week season I was horrified. I thought if they made us respectable it would ruin our whole image. When one reads all those criticisms such as the ones that appear in the NFT programme and the little ones that appear in Time Out when one of our films appears on TV, one is simply amazed. (Michael Carreras, Hammer executive and filmmaker)31

Carreras’s words are a salutary reminder of the fact that the vast majority, if not all, of British horror films were intended primarily as ‘just entertainment’. However, this raises the question of what the nature and function of entertainment for profit actually is. While this book will identify some of the economic factors at work in the production of horror, these factors in themselves do not wholly explain the forms which the films take. This is because films do not arise naturally, ready-made, from the conditions of their production, but are instead imagined by groups of individuals working within particular institutions. An account of the ‘entertainment value’ of British horror needs to discover what was entailed

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in the imaginative work done by the filmmakers. It will become clear that in seeking to make horror attractive to an audience, these filmmakers necessarily had to address what they perceived to be  the lived experiences, fears and anxieties of that audience, with the terms of this engagement both aesthetic and ideological. In fact the history of horror in Britain can in part be read as a number of attempted (re)identifications of an audience, the nature of which (because of demographic factors and changing definitions of youth, class and gender) was unstable. British horror films did not merely reflect or reproduce socially specific trends and issues but instead imaginatively transformed whatever they incorporated. For example, in the case of Hammer in the 1950s, its work can be seen to have involved seizing upon aspects of a contemporaneous social reality that were not naturally connected – in particular, shifts in gender definition and changing notions of professionalism – and weaving these into an aesthetic unity in the interests of making horror relevant to a British market. While it is clear that much of this work would have been unconscious, this does not render any of these creative processes any less effective. Only through an awareness of such activities is one able to engage with both the conditions of British horror’s existence and the nature of that existence.

Notes   1 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema ­1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973).   2 Charles Barr, ‘Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and the Critics’, Screen 13.2 (1972), 17–31; Ian Christie, ‘The Scandal of Peeping Tom’, in Ian Christie (ed.), Powell, Pressburger and Others (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 53–9.   3 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 40.   4 It is interesting that the five negative reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein, of which Smith’s is one, came from three ‘highbrow’ newspapers (The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Observer) and two left-wing newspapers (The Daily Worker, Tribune). Their collective revulsion from the film might be related to a broader critique of various manifestations of popular culture, particularly in its association

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For sadists only? 53

with American culture, within which the right and left were concerned in the 1950s to defend different values and hierarchies; conservative standards of cultural literacy in the case of the former, working-class identity in the face of consumerism in the latter.  5 Roy Armes, A Critical History of the British Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Ernest Betts, The Film Business: A History of British Cinema 1896–1972 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973); Charles Oakley, Where We Came In: 70 Years of the British Film Industry (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964); George Perry, The Great British Picture Show (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974); Alexander Walker, Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Michael Joseph, 1974).   6 Roger Manvell, ‘Critical Survey’, Penguin Film Review, 3 (August 1947), 10.   7 Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema, 254.   8 Ibid., 249.   9 A 1962 publicity handout reprinted in Little Shoppe of Horrors, 8 (May 1984), 22. 10 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 11. 11 Ibid., 51. 12 Ibid., 42. 13 For example, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). 14 The Guardian, 10 September 1987. 15 Julian Petley, ‘The Lost Continent’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 98–119. 16 Andrew Higson, ‘Critical Theory and “British Cinema”’, Screen 24.4–5 (1983), 91. 17 In Pam Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 36. 18 Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue 1895–1970: A Guide to Entertainment Films (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973). 19 Charles Barr, ‘Amnesia and Schizophrenia’, in Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays, 9–10. 20 Quoted in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinema: Volume 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 32. 21 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 9. 22 James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 99.

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23 R. H. W. Dillard, ‘The Pageantry of Death’, in Roy Huss and T. J. Ross (eds), Focus on the Horror Film (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1972), 37. 24 Martin Grotjahn, ‘Horror – Yes, It Can Do You Good’, Films and Filming, November 1958, 9. 25 Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures, 7. 26 Steve Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 43. 27 Jan Mukarovsky, Structure, Sign and Function (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 52. 28 An important connection between the British and American ‘schools’ of horror lies in the copyright agreement struck between Hammer and Universal permitting the former’s ‘remakes’ of Universal horror classics. This was only one of a series of agreements between UK and US companies that signalled the importance attached by British film producers to the US market. In this respect, it makes sense that Hammer should turn to Americanised models of horror, if only to transform them. 29 For a discussion of stage adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, see Radu Florescu, In Search of Frankenstein (London: New English Library, 1977), 163–71; Albert J. Lavalley, ‘The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein’, in George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds), The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), 243–89. For details of stage adaptations of Dracula, see Donald F. Glut, The Dracula Book (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), and Dracula: Universal Filmscripts Series: Classic Horror Films – Volume 13 (Absecon, NJ: Magic Image Filmbooks, 1991). 30 Neale, Genre, 45. 31 Quoted in John Brosnan, The Horror People (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976), 118.

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2 1945–55: from Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment Universal’s influential Americanised version of the horror genre was formulated in the 1930s. Throughout this period British cinema was strikingly deficient in horror production. The small number of horror films that were made were either pale imitations of the American product (a plot synopsis for Castle Sinister [Widgey Newman, 1932] reads: ‘Mad doctor tries to put girl’s brain into apeman’s head’)1 or isolated attempts to locate horror within a recognisable British landscape (for example, The Clairvoyant [Maurice Elvey, 1934], and The Man Who Changed His Mind [Robert Stevenson, 1936], the latter featuring Boris Karloff). One of the reasons for there being no considerable body of British work in the horror genre throughout the 1930s was the nature of British censorship at that time. As Jeffrey Richards has shown, British cinema in the decade was carefully regulated by the censors in order that those films that were perceived by them as having the potential to disturb social, political or moral order did not reach the screen.2 It follows from this that if there had been a demand for horror in Britain at this time or before, any attempted satisfaction of this by the industry would almost certainly have met with substantial censorship problems. As one censor wrote in 1935: Although a separate category has been established for these films, I am sorry to learn that they are on the increase, as I cannot believe that such films are wholesome, pandering as they do to the love of the morbid and horrible … Some licensing authorities are already much disturbed about them, and I hope the producers and writers will accept this word of warning, and discourage this type of subject as far as possible.3

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Given the standard practice of submitting scripts for the censor’s unofficial approval before filming actually began, the absence of horror becomes not merely comprehensible but inevitable. However, while horror films as such were discouraged, other genres of the period were regularly incorporating the macabre and the morbid into their narratives. One can note in this respect a number of ‘low-life’ thrillers which often dealt in the grotesque, as well as a series of gruesome melodramas starring Tod Slaughter.4 These included Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red Barn (Milton Rosmer, 1935), Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (George King, 1936), The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (George King, 1936) and The Face at the Window (George King, 1939). Of the last-named of these Graham Greene wrote on its initial release, ‘it is one of the best English pictures I have seen and leaves the American horror films far behind’.5 While a detailed account of the interwar period is beyond the scope of this book, it does seem that elements which would later be mobilised within a distinctive British horror genre were already in existence in British cinema before the war. Similarly, while throughout the Second World War no horror films were produced in Britain, and, significantly, the censor declined in general to pass ‘H’ – that is horror – films between 1942 and 1945, potentially gothic or horrific elements were occasionally present in disguised or submerged form; for example, Tower of Terror (Lawrence Huntington, 1941), which centred on the activities of an insane lighthouse keeper, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1944 production A Canterbury Tale, in which perverse sexuality – in the form of the Glueman, an apparently deranged magistrate who pours glue into the hair of various women – was seen as an integral part of rural life.6 It is clear then that, while not without its precursors, Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945) is the first important recognisably British horror film. However, to view Dead of Night as marking the ‘birth’ of British horror cinema is rather problematic, for in many respects Ealing’s film is very different from the long stream of horror films that eventually followed from the mid-1950s onwards. This 1950s wave of horror was in large part initiated

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From Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment 57

by the ­enormous commercial success of Hammer’s SF/horror The Quatermass Experiment in 1955. In seeking to explain the transition from Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment, as well as the virtual absence of horror from British cinema in the intervening years, one needs to take into account both the broadly social and the specifically cinematic context of each film’s production. Such an approach will reveal the way in which the identity of British horror cinema was subject to constant and substantial revision.

Dead of Night: ‘Oh Doctor, why did you have to break your glasses?’ Dead of Night is arguably the most famous ghost story ever produced in British cinema. It tells of an architect by the name of Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) who arrives at a house party only to find that he has dreamed in extraordinarily accurate detail both the house and its inhabitants. The guests then take it in turns to recount their own experiences of the supernatural. As their stories proceed, and the architect begins to remember some of the more horrifying aspects of his dream, a division between fantasy and waking reality becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. In the film’s celebrated conclusion, the architect wakes up and realises that he has been dreaming all along. This dream quickly fades from his memory as he leaves for the very same house party at which we saw him arriving at the film’s beginning. Previous accounts of Dead of Night have tended to concentrate on two of the guests’ stories, ‘The Haunted Mirror’ and ‘The Ventriloquist’s Doll’.7 However, if one considers the film as a whole, paying particular attention to the ways in which all the stories – both those told by the house guests and the architect’s ‘dream-story’ – relate to each other, then Dead of Night emerges as an intense and obsessive meditation on issues arising from the transition from a wartime to a post-war society.8 An appraisal of the film’s opening few minutes provides a useful starting point, for it is here that its project is laid out in an almost schematic fashion. The first three shots of the film are exemplary

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in this respect. The first shows a road, with a car driving towards the camera. It pulls up and Walter Craig looks offscreen. As an audience steeped in the conventions of mainstream filmmaking might expect, the next shot is his point of view of an apparently innocuous house. The third, again as expected, returns us to Craig. However, he seems puzzled by what he sees, and the audience in turn is puzzled by his puzzlement. He shakes his head as he drives out of frame. A wipe separates off this triad of shots from the rest of the film. Immediately the act of looking, of vision as it is constructed within cinema, has been problematised. Craig’s hesitation before his own point-of-view shot – which is repeated throughout Dead of Night – is symptomatic of the whole film’s hesitation before the image, its constant refusal to confirm whether what we the audience are seeing is ‘real’ or an illusion. As argued by Mark Nash in an article on Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), such a hesitation is a mark of the fantastic, and clearly Dead of Night falls into that category (whereas Hammer horror, with its altogether more solid monsters, does not).9 However, it will be suggested below that there is another, nationally specific motivation behind this hesitation. As Craig enters the house, it is revealed that he is an ­architect – a  symbolically charged occupation at a time of national ­reconstruction – who has been asked to design, significantly, two new bedrooms for the house. In both American and British cinema, ‘upstairs’ often functions as a resonant image of the private, psychological aspects of life. The bedroom is, of course, also the site of dreams and is referred to repeatedly as the film progresses. Eventually Craig finds himself in a living room where six people wait to meet him. They offer greetings or handshakes, all of which Craig, still apparently dazed and unsure of what he is seeing, ignores. Instead he begins to tell them of his dream, a recurrent dream which predicts in exact detail the group now before him. Five of the people present then tell their own ‘ghost’ stories, with each of these comprising a separate episode within the film. They occur in the following order:

From Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment 59

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Narrator

Story

1 Granger

An encounter with a sinister undertaker

2 Sally, an adolescent girl

An encounter with the ghost of a murdered boy

3 Joan

The haunted mirror: a man becomes murderous under the influence of a mirror

4 Eliot Foley

A whimsical tale in which a dead golfer haunts an old friend

5 Dr Van Straaten, psychoanalyst

A ventriloquist is apparently possessed by his dummy

Audiences of the mid-1940s would undoubtedly have been familiar with this multiple-narrative structure, for it was one that characterised numerous wartime British films. A principal theme running through many of the more overtly propagandistic feature films of the war years was the need for the individual to put aside his or her own personal ambitions and desires and enter into a national community, with this thematic impulse having distinct consequences for the ways in which the films in question organised their narratives. Often a sense of what this wartime community/nation was like was articulated via a film’s dispersing its drama across a number of only loosely connected mini-narratives. Such a structure enabled the portrayal of the activities of a group of characters from different walks of life, who in the course of the film would overcome their differences and together form a cohesive unit, a unit which could then be used by the filmmakers as a symbol of national unity. As Andrew Higson notes of some of these films, it is difficult to identify any single line of narrative emphasis which is clearly structured in terms of a goal to be achieved, a wish to be fulfilled, a disruption to be resolved. On the contrary, these films are structured as a series of interweaving narrative lines, following a multiplicity of characters rather than a single central narrative protagonist.10

The representation of an individual’s desires – in narratives which did have clearly identifiable central protagonists – was left to other, less reputable areas of British film production during the war. Perhaps

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the most notable examples of wartime fictions of desire were the extremely successful Gainsborough melodramas (the first of which, The Man in Grey, was released in 1943), in which sexuality tended to be placed at a safe distance in a pseudo-historical past.11 In its multiple-narrative structure, Dead of Night seems then to refer back to a wartime fiction of collectivity and national unity. But the differences between Dead of Night and earlier war productions are as striking, if not more so, as any similarities. For example, while wartime films frequently showed the movement of their characters away from home and family into a more community-based social structure (exemplified by a military unit), Dead of Night takes place almost entirely within the home of one of its characters. Even more significantly, Ealing’s film seems to be playing itself out inside a particular character’s head. One way of explaining Dead of Night’s return to the home would be to see it as reflecting things actually happening in British society at the time, with many men returning home from overseas and many women giving up, willingly or otherwise, their wartime occupations and adopting again the nurturing roles of housewife and mother within the domestic household. As another aspect of this, one can also note the stress in government social policy of the immediate post-war period on the need to rebuild traditional family life after the disruptions of war.12 Certainly Dead of Night does show a return to the home – quite literally, as the opening sequence demonstrates. But what it does not show is a reconstituted family. Fathers, mothers and children are present, but never all together in the same story. The people who do gather in the opening sequence are a curiously unintegrated group, the interrelationships of whom (outside of a few very sketchily drawn mother–son, husband–wife relationships) are never elaborated in any detail. Neither is this a dynamic community in the manner of wartime features, a community that is coming into being. Rather it seems to function as a community in  the process of disintegration, caught up as its members are in essentially private fears and memories. A sense of uncertainty pervades the film; about the respective values of domesticity and community and the roles played by men and women within each; about reality itself.

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From Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment 61

It can in fact be argued that the more one considers the tone of Dead of Night – the way in which, for example, its domestic settings are increasingly marked as claustrophobic and confining – as well as its convoluted narrative structure and its systematic turn to fantasy, the more necessary it becomes to start thinking about the film in terms of its cinematic specificity (as opposed to seeing it as merely mirroring a particular social trend). As the analysis below will demonstrate, Dead of Night is working with and seeking to resolve in imaginary terms a problem which is primarily aesthetic and cinematic but which has its root cause in the broader historical conditions of the film’s production. This problem can be expressed as follows: how does one produce credible cinematic representations of human desire and sexuality within recognisably contemporary settings after a period in which desire had been either banished from or marginalised within those very same settings? Importantly, Dead of Night is not alone in its seeking to trace a passage from a wartime collectivity to a more desire-centred, individualistic fictional world. Writing about mid-1940s British film production, Charles Barr has noted ‘a spectacular shift which occurs in British films around this time from the public sphere to the private, with a stress on vision and fantasy’.13 Each film he cites (of which Dead of Night is one) is marked by the difficulty of showing desire in a contemporary domestic and familial environment. In Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), home and family are traps repressing both male and female sexuality, while in A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946) the heterosexual and technicolour romance of hero and heroine is threatened by and has to justify itself before a monochrome Heaven. Significantly for our later argument, both Dead of Night and A Matter of Life and Death produce a sense of desire as something which is difficult or impossible in two connected ways: first, via a problematisation of the film image itself (in Life and Death the hero is never quite sure whether his ‘visions’ of Heaven are real or hallucinations), and secondly, through a questioning of male vision and sanity. These various cinematic meditations on the problem of desire are not reducible to the various social disruptions attendant upon the end of the war. But they do connect with social changes which

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also impinged upon and helped mould the lived experience of the film’s intended audience (as indeed they had to for the films to be meaningful). As has already been suggested, one important factor in the immediate post-war situation was the partial dislocation of conventional ways of thinking about and defining the capabilities and nature of each gender – with men and women alike to a certain extent separated from traditional social roles (and with women in particular being asked, sometimes compelled, to relinquish the limited independence they had gained during the war). Such a situation was fraught with potential tensions, frustrations and anxieties for both genders. The question of desire, and the form which heterosexual relationships would take in a reconstructed post-war society, were very real issues at this time. In order to trace the ways in which Dead of Night operates in this area, the following discussion of the film will be divided into two sections. The first will deal with the way in which the figures of the independent/strong woman and the weak/emasculated man are used within the film to produce a sense of there being something wrong with conventional heterosexual relationships. The second part will deal with the relation of Dead of Night to some of the aesthetic practices that characterised British cinema at the time of production, especially as they are constructed through the look. In the end, these two elements are inseparable, and the latter part of the analysis will link them together in order to give an overall view of the complex relation of Dead of Night to the context of its production.

Gender crisis: ‘strong’ women and ‘weak’ men The first of the guests’ stories told within the film concerns Granger (Anthony Baird), a racing driver. It begins with his crashing during a race, after which he is wounded, both physically and mentally. One can profitably equate this race with the opportunities for conventional male heroism provided by the war. It can also be argued that no male in the film as a whole quite recovers from the crash, that is, the end of that war. The post-war trauma often takes the form of male neurosis; in this case, Granger has a portentous vision of doom and begins to doubt his own sanity.

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The final image of this first episode is interesting in this respect: a close-up of Granger as he sees his vision come true, it shows him as passive, q ­ uiescent, ­qualities more conventionally linked with representations of femininity. The second story features a young girl, Sally (Sally Ann Howes). It takes place at a children’s party in a large house; significantly, aside from a briefly glimpsed aged butler, there are no adult men present. During a game of sardines, the eldest boy makes a pass at Sally and she strikes him. Immediately afterwards, she finds herself in the bedroom of a sobbing boy, Francis Kent, whom we discover later was murdered eighty years previously by his elder sister. (This is based on a famous, true-life murder.) The method of killing is important. Constance Kent cuts her brother’s throat. This act, this cutting of the human body, has often been read as an inscription or writing of sexual difference on to the body, particularly in the context of the horror film where the body in question is usually female, the wielder of the weapon usually male and the outcome a reassuring (for men) reimposition of traditional gender roles.14 In Dead of Night this is reversed, so it is the male who is marked by what can be read in this context as a symbolic castration (which becomes a self-inflicted act in ‘The Haunted Mirror’ episode). Moreover, this castrating act is shown as causatively linked with Sally’s violent rejection of the advances of a pubescent boy, someone who is not completely a man. The third story in the film is perhaps the most famous and discussed – ‘The Haunted Mirror’. From the very beginning of this story its main male character, Peter (Ralph Michael), is signalled  as  being inadequate in the face of Joan (Googie Withers) his fiancée’s strength. The episode opens with him seated in his flat waiting for Joan to appear, a position usually reserved – in cinema, at least – for the female half of a relationship. There is also a suggestion in this first scene that Joan is enjoying the company of two men, Peter and their mutual friend Guy, as if one is insufficient (an idea taken up in more detail by the next story). Later exchanges such as Joan’s ‘You’ve been a bit broody all evening’ – ­‘broodiness’ another conventionally feminine attribute – and Peter’s reply ‘A bit limp with the heat, I expect’, as well as the fact that it is Peter rather  than  Joan who suffers from the again ­conventionally

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f­ eminine eve-of-wedding nerves, obviously connect with this partial reversal of roles. This is further underlined by Joan’s gift of a mirror to Peter, which e­masculates him in two related ways. First, the mirror in art has frequently been used to symbolise female vanity.15 Secondly, the male gaze is here associated with a narcissism which signals a fascination evident throughout the film with images of male introspection. In Dead of Night, men seem to spend most of their time staring anxiously into space (and, implicitly, into their own minds). As Joan herself puts it, ‘I thought you’d like to look at yourself.’ The mirror’s original, nineteenth-century owner was, we are told, a man of ‘dominating influence’ who, confined to his bedroom by an accident, murders his wife in a fit of jealousy and then cuts his own throat before the mirror. The parallels between this and the Joan–Peter relationship are clear. Peter’s repressed jealousy over Joan’s friendship with Guy is apparent from the beginning, a jealousy which by the end of the episode and under the influence of the mirror has become murderous. A crisis point is reached, during which Joan, after herself seeing for the first time what up until then has only been visible to her fiancé, succeeds in smashing the mirror. Peter’s first words after this are ‘I’ve cut myself.’ The wounding of the male inflicted behind the mirror is reinflicted before it. Those traces of resistance to Joan’s dominance are brought out and then vanquished. ‘I thought you’d like to look at yourself’: the mirror reinforces Peter’s effeminacy, a state consequent partly on his general insipidness and partly upon Joan’s usurpation of the ‘male’ role in their relationship. As with the previous two stories, this story also gives us contemporary heterosexuality as weak and listless. The only imaginable sexual energy here emanates from the past (the room seen in the mirror could easily be a set for a Gainsborough melodrama) and is viewed as dangerous and destructive. The fourth story, a comic relief sketch in which a dead golfer returns to haunt an old golfing acquaintance, and which features character actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, is usually considered the weakest element in the film. But even here one can find in operation those concerns outlined above, although not in such a complex form. For example, the idea suggested by ‘The

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Haunted Mirror’ of one woman to two men is here made literal as both Radford and Wayne leave the church with the bride for the honeymoon. The fifth and final story, ‘The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’, can be read as representing on a barely submerged level a homosexual love triangle, with Sylvester (Hartley Power), an American ventriloquist, at one point, Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave) at the second, and the dummy, Hugo (John McGuire), at the third. The ‘bitchiness’ of the dialogue between Maxwell and Hugo, and Maxwell’s neurotic fear of Hugo leaving him for Sylvester, both testify to this level of meaning, however stereotypical a representation of homosexuality this might be. Maxwell’s highly pitched, nervous voice and his ‘feminine’ mannerisms also signal him as the passive/‘female’ half of the relationship. In the previous two stories a situation is envisaged in which one woman requires two men. As a bizarre but logical development of this idea, and one which connects with and underlines the fragility of Maxwell’s male identity, Hugo can be seen to function in this story as a kind of detachable phallus, a symbol of an extreme male insecurity. In support of this one can note Maxwell’s neurotic possessiveness of the dummy, his terror that Sylvester will take it away from him, the way in which his very identity, his ‘completeness’ depends upon his possession of it. Indeed the psychiatrist describes it as part of Maxwell, who is unable to speak of his crime until it is restored to him. The end of the episode is revealing, especially bearing in mind the number of wounded men present in the film. Hugo is brought to Maxwell, who, realising that he cannot keep his doll, destroys it by stamping on its head. Later, as he lies in an asylum, he is made to speak. He opens his mouth and we hear Hugo’s voice, that is, an even higher-pitched voice than Maxwell’s own. The destruction of the dummy/phallus – equivalent to the self-inflicted throat-cutting in ‘The Haunted Mirror’ – has, quite simply, left Maxwell a castrato. The conclusion of the film as a whole, in which Craig kills Van Straaten (Frederick Valk), strikes Sally (returning the blow she earlier delivered to another male), asks Peter if he can hide in his mirror, and is finally attacked by Hugo, both summarises the stories and thoroughly implicates the architect in them.

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Seen in this way, the film is a complex imagining of a gender crisis, one which focuses in particular on fears, anxieties and uncertainties about the role of the male in a post-war British society. Hence the film’s insistent stress on male neurosis and the impossibility of heterosexuality. However, such a reading is necessarily incomplete, for Dead of Night can also be seen as evincing a concern with vision as it was figured within British cinema at the time.

Seeing/looking Walter Craig hesitates before his own point-of-view shot in Dead of Night’s opening sequence. This hesitation is reiterated throughout the film; Granger hesitating before his own ‘vision’, Peter staring disbelievingly into the mirror, and Basil Radford staring, again disbelievingly, at Naunton Wayne’s ghost. In the case of Granger and Peter, as with Walter Craig, this hesitation tends to be presented via point-of-view shots. In both Granger’s and Peter’s stories, the ‘visions’ are created not through the use of any special effects but simply by cutting from the person who sees to what is seen. The presentation of supernatural events as spectatorial events, things to be looked at by characters within the film, echoes the way in which spectators in the cinema respond to what they see. When the audience looks at the screen, its reaction to objects that are visibly there but are also absent is split between belief and disbelief. What it sees when it watches Dead of Night is this mixture of belief and disbelief reproduced within the narrative world of the film itself, reproduced and brought to a moment of crisis. Both Peter and Granger look and see things which cannot actually be there – and yet they both accept what they see as being in some sense ‘real’. Significantly, both of these ‘visions’ refer themselves back to cinema. The curtained window in Granger’s room before which he experiences his vision of the hearse parallels the covered cinema screen, another ‘window on to the world’ and Peter’s mirror provides another particularly suggestive metaphor for the nature and function of cinema (one that has been explored by psychoanalytical film theory). On one level, these stories can be read as self-reflexive pieces, through certain mechanisms foregrounding their own cinematic nature. If one takes a wider perspective, however, and looks at the



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film as a whole, then the meaning of these mechanisms changes somewhat. It is on this new level that Dead of Night’s peculiar relationship with social history becomes apparent. The whole film is of course caught up within Walter Craig’s dream. A passage from film theorist Christian Metz is helpful here. It deals with one of the ways in which cinema can dramatise notions of belief and disbelief: Or else, in so many films, the character of the ‘dreamer’ – the sleeping dreamer – who during the film believed (as we did!) that it was true, whereas it was he who saw it all in a dream and who wakes up at the end of the film (as we do again).16

For Metz, the dreamer waking assures the audience that the images they have been seeing were really false while the images they are seeing now are really real. No such comfort or assurance is offered by the conclusion of Dead of Night. Craig wakes up and the audience realise that what has gone before was a dream. But then the dream (if that is what it is) begins to reassert itself, so that now we do not know whether the images we see and have seen are ‘real’ or ‘false’. The whole film has turned over on itself; the ending is exactly the same as the beginning, giving us Craig’s hesitation of vision twice-over, a hesitation which the film takes up in a complex and disturbing way. Granger’s and Peter’s visions, and the play of belief and disbelief apparent in them, are associated with a crisis of gender (and especially male) identity. This of course is an anxiety specific to the post-1945 transition from war to peace and the social and representational dislocations that this involved, an anxiety acknowledged throughout this film, in all of its stories. But the film does not merely reflect this or work it through in an unproblematic fashion. All of its images are operating within a narrative structure which problematises every image in the film. The ontological certainty of wartime cinema – exemplified by the use within fiction films of documentary techniques – has gone. Not only are the images in the mirror now questionable, but also every character and object before the mirror and indeed even the mirror itself (and also the ‘dreamer’, Walter Craig). One does not even know whether this is an actual dream that one is seeing. Dead of Night refuses to construct a hierarchy

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of meaning on the level of the image – it challenges the structures of belief outlined by Metz – in what is essentially a process of fetishistic disavowal, seeing and not seeing, both acknowledging and denying that there is something ‘wrong’ with heterosexuality and male identity. In a sense, this is why the film does not end in any conventional way, why it cannot arrange its narrative elements into a suitably reassuring point of closure. British cinema during the war was generally devoid of formal experiments which explored the nature of the image. Even in the more flamboyant, formally excessive genres such as Gainsborough melodrama, there was no questioning of the image on the scale of Dead of Night. This is particularly interesting when one notes that the film was made for Ealing Studios, which, as Charles Barr has observed, played a key part in the wartime cinematic construction of a national community. ‘Ealing had been the dominant studio for war-effort production, absorbing documentary ideas and ­personnel … and making films for – to appropriate Grierson’s phrase again – social use.’17 (Wartime Ealing films included San Demetrio London and The Bells Go Down.) Whereas the contemporaneous Gainsborough melodramas were dealing with the expression of sexuality, in these more respectable films sexual desire tended to be subordinated to the interests of the group or community. It can be argued from this that in Dead of Night one finds Ealing’s attempted reconstruction of the male as a sexualised individual as opposed to a desexed participant in the national community. In this it can be aligned with two other Ealing films of the immediate post-war period, the prisoner-of-war drama The Captive Heart (Basil Dearden, 1946) and the social problem film Frieda (Dearden, 1947), both of which, although not as complexly structured as Dead of Night, contain equivalent representations of a troubled masculinity.18 In the case of Dead of Night an attempt to solve or erase this ‘trouble’ is imagined in such terms as make it, in the end, an impossible task. On the one hand, there is clearly an awareness in this film of certain problems around male identity and sexuality at this time. On the other hand, and as a condition of the former, there is at work a complex strategy of denial, as if Ealing were not prepared or, given the type of filmmaking associated with Ealing, able to follow this through in any systematic fashion, which results

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in one of the most formally aberrant films British cinema has ever produced. It is perhaps not surprising that Ealing retreated from what in many ways was a complete dead end and took another course. Dead of Night was a false start for the horror genre in this country, intense and disturbing but a horror film without a recognisable monster, or rather a film where the monster turned out to be the film itself. One small but telling point: the psychiatrist in the film wears glasses. Throughout the framing story he is constantly, obsessively taking them off and putting them on again. A tiny detail which signals yet again a process of disavowal, of seeing and not seeing. The centrality of this to the film, the way in which it blocks the film at every level, is made clear at the moment the narrative collapses, when the doctor accidentally breaks his glasses and Craig strangles him. Craig’s line of dialogue here is ‘Oh doctor, if only you hadn’t broken your glasses.’ And then Craig wakes up. The glasses are smashed, the process of disavowal is momentarily halted. But then it begins again …

Quatermass and 1950s SF/horror Very few horror films were produced in Britain between Dead of Night in 1945 and The Quatermass Experiment in 1955. In accounting for this, both the changing industrial structures of British cinema and the films actually produced in the period need to be considered. Through an analysis of these two factors one becomes aware of the relationships that the post-1955 British horror films bear not only to Dead of Night but also to the films that fall between. The discussion of mid-1950s production that follows will centre on three science fiction/horror films made by Hammer Films which can be seen as precursors to a ‘full-blooded’ colour Hammer horror, namely The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II (Val Guest, 1957) and X – The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956). It was with the production in 1956 of The Curse of Frankenstein and later Dracula, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Mummy (Terence Fisher, 1959), among others, that Hammer constructed a particular

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model of British horror that was to hold dominance for almost a decade. In these three SF/horror films, two of which were made before Curse, one finds this model in the process of construction, as an original aesthetic mobilisation of form and theme which draws heavily upon the contemporaneous structures and concerns of British cinema. In effect, what Hammer is doing at this moment in history is seeking its constituency, a process which involves finding both a distinctive voice and a profitable audience.

The industry The 1950s was a period of economic crisis for the British film industry. A substantial decline in admissions (down 66 per cent between 1948 and 1960) and the closing down of many cinemas (34 per cent in the same period) were only the most visible signs of the way in which cinema’s position in society was shifting. The growing popularity of television in this period (TV licence ownership, just under 764,000 in 1951, rose to almost 10.5 million by the end of the decade, with ITV beginning transmission in 1955) was also an important factor, although there is a need to place this in a wider social context, as John Hill does when he observes: Ironically, those very elements which in one light betokened affluence only spelt decline for the cinema. Rising incomes, increasing homeownership and home-orientated consumption, the diversification of leisure facilities and increasing popularity of motoring all seemed to conspire to diminish the cinema’s importance.19

What this notion of a declining cinema does sometimes serve to obscure, however, are changes in the composition of the everdecreasing audience, and most significantly its increasing youthfulness. In 1951 those aged 16–24 went to the cinema nearly three times for each visit by older people, while by 1960, as Stuart Laing notes, ‘44 per cent of those between 16 and 24 still attended cinema at least once a week and a further 24 per cent at least once a month. Against this 68 per cent of reasonably habituated cinemagoers, the figures for other age groups were considerably lower.’20 In The Decline of Cinema, an important 1962 study of the industry, John Spraos saw this as a continuing tendency as the

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products of the post-war population boom grew to maturity in the early 1960s.21 Clearly, the days of the ‘family’ audience were more or less over, not only in terms of actual audience figures but also for the exhibition and distribution practices adopted by the major cinema circuits. The 1950s also saw an opening up of what could be represented on the cinema screen. The impetus for this initially came from Hollywood as the studios attempted to regain an audience lost to television by offering them what their supposedly more anodyne competitor could not, namely an intensified visual experience (through Cinemascope, 3-D, etc.) and, more importantly as far as an understanding of horror is concerned, an increased explicitness on a wide range of issues.22 The ‘X’ certificate had been introduced in Britain at the beginning of the decade, partly as an acknowledgement of an increasing non-family audience. Both Rank and ABC, the two major cinema circuits, resisted it for some years; Rank, openly committed to a family audience, released only fourteen ‘X’ films in the decade, a more open-minded ABC fifty.23 Significantly, most of these appeared in the late 1950s when the circuits, realising that their old audiences were dwindling, were beginning to accept ‘X’ films as a way of targeting a new market.24 British film censorship at this time, while not in any way as liberal as it would become later, was far less restrictive than it had been in the 1930s and during the war. (John Trevelyan, a censor whose policies very much embodied a liberal and, to a certain extent, permissive approach, was appointed Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors in 1958.) A period of limited decensorship, commencing with the Obscene Publications Act in 1959 and the subsequent unsuccessful prosecution of the erotic novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was about to begin.25 While most of these important changes occurred in the late 1950s, the situation to which they were a response was in existence from the early to mid-1950s onwards. In British cinema of this period one finds a predominantly young audience (traditionally the target audience for horror films) coupled with a growing, although still limited, permissiveness in terms of what could be shown on screen. It seems that for what was probably the first time in

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British cinema history there was a space – in terms of both market potential and what would be allowed by the censors – in which an indigenous horror genre could conceivably operate.26 How it was that the Hammer company rather than any other came to fill and dominate that space, what it was about this relatively small production set-up that enabled it to exploit this situation so effectively, are questions that can now be considered. Hammer Film Productions came into being in 1947. Between that date and the release of The Curse of Frankenstein, its first colour horror film, in 1957, it produced approximately fifty films, both features and shorts, only five of which were in a SF/horror mould: these were Stolen Face in 1952 and Four-Sided Triangle and Space-ways in 1953 – with all three directed by Terence Fisher – as well as The Quatermass Experiment and X – The Unknown. The majority of the films were 60- to 80-minute programme-fillers and often featured imported American stars, especially after 1951 when Hammer made its first American distribution deal. They were also frequently adapted from radio – and later TV – plays and serials. Examples include versions of the radio serials Dick Barton – Dick Barton: Special Agent (Alfred J. Goulding, 1948), Dick Barton Strikes Back (Godfrey Grayson, 1949) and Dick Barton at Bay (Godfrey Grayson, 1950) – and PC 49 (The Adventures of PC49, Godfrey Grayson, 1949), in addition to, of course, BBC TV’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953). Three elements that bear on Hammer’s subsequent pre-eminence in horror are clear from its pre-horror history. First, this small company had already established itself as a producer of films, the subject matter of which was more often than not known to an audience beforehand through another medium. This meant that Hammer was already highly sensitive to what was actually in demand in the market rather than being blindly committed to any notion of ‘family entertainment’. One example of this sensitivity was the questionnaire circulated to cinema managers by the company in order to ascertain whether it was the horror or SF elements in The Quatermass Experiment that had made it so popular.27 Alongside this, there was a flexibility within the company that enabled it to take swift advantage of any new trend, with perhaps the best example of this being its last-minute ­reorganisation of its

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­ roduction schedule in 1956 in order to accommodate and exploit p its growing success with horror productions.28 Secondly, Hammer had by 1951 located itself at Bray Studios – its base for the next sixteen years – and had assembled a group of highly proficient craftsmen and technicians. This provided the basis, both in terms of personnel and physical resources, for a continuity of production, so that the company’s eventual move into horror could be achieved without any substantial and time-consuming transformation of its internal structures. Thirdly, Hammer had already forged a link with an American distributor. In the past, and particularly since the war, Hollywood had been commonly perceived as an economic and cultural threat to a national British cinema.29 Even at this early stage Hammer apparently did not share this view and was attempting to secure longterm American finance. In this, it anticipated the increasing reliance of the British film industry on American capital in the 1960s. Later this pro-US stance would assist Hammer in gaining access to a worldwide distribution network and also facilitate its seeking of copyright permission to remake old horror classics. As the composition of the British audience changed, and censorship and exhibition practices also shifted, Hammer was well prepared, perhaps more so than any other company, to move quickly into the gap thereby opened up. In so doing, however, it also helped to forge what would prove to be one of the most durable of British genres, and to understand the nature of this durability one needs not only to look at the economic conditions that enabled horror to come into being and helped to maintain it thereafter, but also to examine the particular aesthetic forms that the genre took within this new industrial context. How do Hammer’s first sustained efforts in the horror genre relate both to concerns and issues in British cinema and British society of the period and to the colour horror films that were shortly to follow?

The unknown The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass II can be located within the production practices developed by Hammer through the late 1940s and first part of the 1950s. Both were adapted from

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pre-existing properties, in this case two enormously successful BBC TV series, the first transmitted in 1953, the second in 1955. At the same time, The Quatermass Experiment in particular (as well as X – The Unknown) marked a distinct break, the moment at which Hammer identified and began to address through a distinctive aesthetic form a set of problematics to do with gender definition that would subsequently occupy much of colour gothic horror. At one point in The Quatermass Experiment, Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner) says to Quatermass (Brian Donlevy), ‘No one wins a Cold War.’ Certainly one way of approaching these three Hammer SF/horror films is to view them as ‘Cold War’ thrillers (as David Pirie does in discussing X – The Unknown),30 close paranoid cousins to the American invasion fantasy. However, it does seem that the inspector’s remark – an apparently defeatist statement by a figure of social authority – underlines the film’s lack of commitment to and interest in a 1950s superpower conflict, and in this it suggests another, potentially more profitable reading. One can further argue that while these films are operating within the same global political and military situation as their American counterparts, there is something distinctively ‘British’ about the position they adopt within that situation, and this ‘Britishness’ is to be found in the way in which a specific social and cinematic context organises their respective narratives. In this case, the central metaphor of invasion has a meaning very different from its meaning in American SF invasion movies such as Invaders from Mars (1953) or Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956).31 One striking and distinctive element in all three British films is the vaguely specified origin of the monster. In The Quatermass Experiment it is a thing floating in the depths of space, in X – The Unknown a shapeless blob that emerges from a bottomless hole in the ground, and in Quatermass II an unidentified object in the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere. This can be contrasted with American 1950s SF where if the monsters were not assigned to a particular planet (usually Mars, the red planet), then they were implicitly seen as stemming from a communist society (either Russia or China). While American 1950s monsters tended to be signalled as completely Other within a context of extreme social ‘normalcy’, the monsters in the corresponding British films are shown as Other

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quite simply because the films do not seem to be able to specify exactly what they are or where they come from. Hence their amorphous, shapeless forms, with the fluid monster in X – The Unknown as the most extreme example of this. Hence also the tentative endings of all three films. The Quatermass Experiment concludes with Quatermass repeating his first disastrous experiment, while Quatermass II ends with his suggestion that the alien invasion might not after all have been defeated. Perhaps most notably, X – The Unknown concludes with the monster exploding, followed by the scientist protagonist advancing upon the hole whence it came and remarking of the explosion, ‘It shouldn’t have happened’ (which is his last line of dialogue in the film). After all, these films seem to suggest, how can one destroy a monster, the origin and substance of which remain unspecified? The two Quatermass films and X – The Unknown concern themselves with a military and scientific mobilisation in the face of a largely unspecified threat which comes from somewhere ‘out there’. Considering this ‘trilogy’ as British Cold War cinema, ‘out there’ in this context could signify outside an ever-decreasing British sphere of influence. This was the period that saw a growing public awareness of the decline of Empire and Britain’s reduced status as a world leader, with Suez in 1956 functioning as a particularly visible instance of this process. Connected with these changes, a social fear of the time involved Britain being caught up in a military conflict that was not of its own making (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – or CND – was formed in 1958). On one level, the threat from ‘out there’ given us in these films can be seen as a representation of this fear, a condensation within narrative forms of a changing perception of national identity, of what it actually meant to be British, especially in the area of foreign relations and world status.32 Much writing on British cinema views the 1950s, at least until the advent of the British New Wave, as an artistically undistinguished period for British filmmaking. The decade’s output has been seen as both socially and formally conservative and repressive of emotion and sexuality; the ‘stiff upper lip’ is often invoked as a derisory term. In his study of British horror, David Pirie largely subscribes to this model, reading the opening sequence of The Quatermass

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Experiment, in which a rocket crashes into the peaceful English countryside, as Hammer’s phallic, sexualised intervention into this ‘sexless’ cinema.33 Other work on the period, however, has mounted a critique of this position, noting strains and tensions within films which were previously conceived of as cinematically lifeless and repressed. Charles Barr has traced the implications of this for a revised understanding of the British horror film: ‘The relation of such films to the later horror cycle, and indeed to the later “New Wave” cinema, has to be seen, in fact, as more complicated than one of straight difference, the bland giving way to the fullblooded.’34 It follows from this that a contextual analysis of these SF/horror films will be concerned not only to judge the difference and innovation they might represent but also to identify the ways in which they interconnect with earlier and concurrent strands of British cinema. What Pirie does not do in his analysis of The Quatermass Experiment is relate the opening sequence to the rest of the film or to the opening sequence of its companion piece, X – The Unknown. This latter film commences with a crack opening up in the earth; a vaginal image to go alongside the phallic one that opens the first Quatermass. But rather than merely holding up these two sexually charged images as examples of sexuality per se bursting into a sexually repressed cinema, a more profitable approach might be to examine how they function as problems for the types of narrative and representational norms characteristic of British cinema at this time. Significantly in this respect, there are indications that the disruptions which initiate The Quatermass Experiment and, to a lesser extent, X – The Unknown are particularly extreme, functioning not only as disruptions of a narrative world but also as interventions into a particular way of seeing and making sense of reality. In The Quatermass Experiment the crash breaks the camera that is on board the rocket. The camera as an image of cinema is an analogy of which the film is insistently aware, as is demonstrated at one point when Inspector Lomax, referring to the film salvaged from that camera, remarks, ‘This is one premiere I don’t want to miss.’ Just as the various mirrors and windows in Dead of Night direct a viewer back to cinema, one can argue that this remark also represents a moment of self-reflexivity, a reference to the film

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itself, the ‘premiere’ film of its type, an awareness on whatever level of its special relationship with earlier cinematic practices. In X – The Unknown the advent of the ‘monster’ is announced by a bizarre geiger counter reading. As a soldier remarks, ‘We’re getting a reading on the counter where there shouldn’t be one.’ While there is no obvious cinematic parallel here, once again a device which symbolises a perceptual certitude is shown as being inadequate. It is instructive at this point to see what were the most popular British films at the box office in the mid-1950s. In 1953 The Cruel Sea (Charles Frend) was the top British moneymaker, in 1954 it was Doctor in the House (Ralph Thomas) and in 1955 (the year of The Quatermass Experiment) The Dambusters (Michael Anderson).35 Two war films and the first in an enormously successful ‘Doctor’ series: in this context, The Quatermass Experiment, the most influential of the SF/horror films as far as the later development of British horror is concerned, produces a violent collision of these two groups of films, and in particular the opposed  – although connected – definitions of masculinity that are offered by each. It follows from this that these SF/horror films need to be understood not only as inflections of the Cold War thriller but also as a constituent part of what might be termed here Welfare State cinema. Both Elizabeth Wilson and Jeffrey Weeks have argued that the British Welfare State in the 1950s was centred on a particular conception of the nuclear family.36 This was seen both as the site for the reproduction of the nation/workforce and as a centre for a burgeoning domestic consumerism, ‘a fountainhead of consumption’ as Weeks puts it. Discourses supportive of this structure – in the form of legislation, government reports, newspaper articles etc. – dealt largely in the case of the woman with definitions of femininity and motherhood, and for the man, perhaps surprisingly, in debates about homosexuality.37 Underlying this and acting as a possible contradiction and source of tension was, to quote from Weeks again, ‘the generalisation across all classes of the ideal of mutual sexual pleasure, but very much within the context of a stable marital relationship’.38 The family was seen as both the proper place for and the container of male and female sexuality, and any sexual activity outside its domestic auspices was marked as deviant.

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One of the areas in which these various debates were being worked through was the cinema. As far as the aforementioned war and ‘Doctor’ films were concerned, what was at stake in their narratives appeared to be a definition of masculinity within a nurturing state where family and home comprised the central repository of ideological and economic value. In the war films one finds what is in effect the negative imprint of the Welfare State in the conditions necessary for ‘the hero’, the male role model par excellence, to exist; namely, his separation from that State, from home and family, and only a tenuous connection with the female, women remaining marginal throughout. That is to say, he must not be contaminated by certain aspects of Welfare State ideology. Paradoxically, he must live outside the time that has fashioned him. Hence the cinematic return to and recreation of the Second World War. Hence too the intense repressiveness involved in these war films; present-day reality has at all costs to be kept out.39 In the ‘Doctor’ films, however, the male is inserted into a ‘present-day’ world (indeed into the Welfare State in the narrowest sense of the term), no longer a hero but instead indulging in comic, romantic and sometimes childish antics under the benign gaze of one of the major castrating fathers of British cinema, Sir Lancelot Spratt. What is gained here is the ability to move within what was a loose approximation of contemporary reality, and also to relate to members of the opposite sex. What is lost is the opportunity to risk all for a mythic ideal of nation, to live up to the cultural definition of what a hero actually is. On one level at least, the war films can be read as a resistance to a new masculinity demanded by a dominant ideology organised around family and home. While the ‘Doctor’ films can accommodate a 1950s ‘new man’, they work to trivialise and diminish him through humour and ridicule. This then is the situation into which the Quatermass rocket crashes. What The Quatermass Experiment works to do in such a context is to expose this uneasiness around masculinity, an uneasiness which relates both to a particular moment in British social history and to the representations being produced by British filmmakers, with a series of calculated and precisely executed acts of violence.

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From Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment 79

The Quatermass Experiment commences with an astronaut falling from the sky. His Christian name is Victor, and repeatedly throughout the film he is referred to as a hero. In the 1950s war film the RAF was the most mythic of all the fighting services, the open sky the most suitable arena for a staged escape from the world ‘down there’. One could say that what Hammer’s film is doing, in a sense, is pulling down a hero, one of the RAF victors, from the sky and propelling him into a world which, as will become clear, is very much structured by a Welfare State ideology. What is given us in this film then is a particular construction of masculinity, a heroic role model, decaying (quite literally) before our eyes under the onslaught of a contemporary reality. But what is the exact nature of this ‘reality’? And how does it cope (or fail to cope) with the returning hero as he appears in this film? One can compare The Quatermass Experiment with Reach for the Sky (the most successful British film of 1956, directed by Lewis Gilbert), which also featured a pilot crashing to earth, in this case suffering the loss of both of his legs. This war film concerns itself with the attempts of the central character to negotiate between air (a war situation) and ground (peacetime society), and shows him coming to terms with the loss of ‘masculinity’ (his injury functioning in this respect as a symbolic castration) that being on the ground involves. The Quatermass Experiment is more disturbing than this. One can note here the iconography of the sexual pervert that gathers around the Victor Caroon (Richard Wordsworth) character – his shabby raincoat, scruffy appearance and shambling walk, the inarticulate animal-like sounds that he makes, his physical decay, his preference for areas of wasteland, and so on. The famous publicity still for the film which shows Caroon holding out his deformed and decaying right hand, when seen in this light, could quite easily function as an advertisement warning against the dangers of self-abuse. All the repressive force that works to maintain the purity and virginity of the war hero has collapsed and, like Dorian Gray, he has now become a physically corrupted figure. Immediately after the crash, Caroon is directed into the arms of his wife, Judith (Margia Dean). She tries valiantly to re-establish a conventional marital relationship, rescuing him at one point from the significantly named Central Clinic (not even the Welfare

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State can hold Caroon). But upon seeing her husband’s deformed hand – its position in his lap just before the moment of revelation underlining its function as a symbol of monstrous sexuality – she promptly,  and somewhat improbably in terms of psychologically realistic motivation, collapses into insanity. Later a child offers Caroon a doll and, in one of the film’s more disturbing moments, he knocks it aside, decapitating it in the process. In so doing, he alienates himself both from wife and child and from the possible family unit they might represent, with this alienation associated with a sexual force that cannot be contained by the family as it is portrayed in the film. The challenge presented by Caroon to this world is further defined in a scene where he stumbles into a chemist’s shop. As the chemist tries to help the pain-racked astronaut who is in the process of being transformed into an alien being, one can clearly see at the bottom of the frame a sign which reads ‘Get your National Health prescription here’ (Figure 2.1). The pathetically inadequate attempts of

Figure 2.1  Caroon stumbles into a chemist’s shop in The Quatermass Experiment (1955)

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From Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment 81

the chemist, and by extension the National Health Service, to deal with this patient and his peculiarly sexualised ‘problem’ underline the fact that the nurturing state and its attendant ideologies posit and depend for their effectiveness on an altogether more compliant, conformist and socialised model of male behaviour. In line with this, there is a general sense in The Quatermass Experiment that the national landscape through which Victor Caroon moves and within which he is alien is an enervating one, with its ‘normal’ inhabitants constantly seen as somehow anaesthetised and pliable, unaware of what is happening around them. At the beginning of the film, a crowd stands idly by at a moment of crisis: ‘What do they think this is – a bank holiday?’ remarks a policeman. Later in the narrative there is an apparent and curious lapse in continuity. The morning of Caroon’s encounter with the little girl is signalled as being a Sunday – through the sound of church bells, the deserted docks upon which the camera lingers, the carefully constructed sense of pervading peace. And yet the day before this event has itself already been identified by a sign on the door of the chemist as a Sunday as well. Two Sundays, one directly after the other: thus is created a sense of the nation ‘at rest’, pacific, not to be disturbed. As an elaboration of this, when a TV outside broadcast team stumble across a fully transformed Caroon in Westminster Abbey at the conclusion of the film, the TV director’s frantic shouts of ‘Cut transmission’ ensure that no potentially disturbing images find their way into what is implicitly the location for this peace and passivity, namely the home. It can be argued at this point that Caroon’s method of killing his victims – draining away their life force – is merely an extension of what is happening to them already in this increasingly conformist and domesticated world. The Quatermass Experiment focuses exclusively and intensively on the fate of a particular model of masculinity within such a world. In Reach for the Sky the clean-cut hero adapts to the demands of his new life at the cost of his legs. Victor Caroon, who returns intact, can never be assimilated into this particular concept of nation and so must be destroyed.40 It would make for a satisfying symmetry if one could read X  – The Unknown as the ‘female’ equivalent of The Quatermass

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Experiment. Certainly a film which begins with a vaginal crack opening up in the earth and a nameless object emerging from that crack, heading directly towards a phallic tower and burning to death a boy called Willy, is operating, no matter how unconsciously, in the area of sexuality and sexual difference. Unfortunately, X – The Unknown never fully realises the fascinating possibilities suggested by this opening. Throughout the remainder of the film the monster tends to be identified in terms of irredeemable Otherness, with the potential relationship of complicity that it might bear to the world which it disrupts remaining undeveloped. The surprise expressed by the chief scientist at the monster’s demise could be seen in this light as standing in for the filmmakers’ lack of confidence in their own entirely arbitrary conclusion. One of the important differences between X – The Unknown and The Quatermass Experiment lies in the decisive figure of Professor Bernard Quatermass. In the original BBC TV production he is a caring, middle-class scientist who at the narrative’s conclusion appeals to the remnants of humanity within the monster, thereby causing its death. In Hammer’s version he is played as a brusque, bullying authority figure by Brian Donlevy, an American actor whose accent (for British audiences at least) renders him more cosmopolitan and ‘classless’ (Figure 2.2). At the film’s climax, unlike his humanitarian TV predecessor, he causes the monster to be blasted out of existence. It is in the exercise of this irrefutable male authority that Hammer proposes a solution to the problem of masculinity that it is at the same time working to identify and formulate. In this case the solution fails and Caroon dies. But subsequently these structuring elements will be taken up and developed in a more affirmative and commercially successful fashion in colour gothic horror. The third film in this unofficial ‘trilogy’ – Quatermass II – is undoubtedly the most coherent and finely executed of the three. Its narrative – an alien invasion effectively conceals itself behind British bureaucracy – enables a further representation of the nation as asleep, here run by an apparently benign authority that can no longer be trusted.41 The fact that the film was produced at about the same time as the inception of the colour horrors is significant insofar as concerns around the representation of masculinity central to The Quatermass Experiment are at this point being siphoned

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Figure 2.2  Cosmopolitan classlessness: Brian Donlevy as Professor Quatermass in The Quatermass Experiment (1955)

off into and remodelled by the gothic horror form. Quatermass II does not deal with the same issues as The Quatermass Experiment, but provides a more political and class-orientated account of 1950s Britain than does its predecessor. In this respect, the representation of industrial workers rising up to fight their alien bosses at the end of the film is an extraordinary event which almost certainly would have met with censorship problems if located within a more realistic narrative. Quatermass II also records the weakening of old class ties as workers are shifted to new housing estates, their distrust of strangers (which in the film inadvertently aids the invaders) symptomatic of their growing insularity. While Quatermass II is the most formally perfect of the three films, it does seem that The Quatermass Experiment, with its comparatively fragmented narrative structure, its ellipses and confusions, is perhaps more interesting and important as far as the development of British horror is concerned. It is in the decisive representational work done by The Quatermass Experiment, the

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partial rift in British cinema that it creates, that the aesthetic and ideological possibilities of the extensive horror productions to follow are first suggested. The concern with questions of male identity becomes an important part of the subsequent Hammer horror films. The no-nonsense attitudes of Quatermass himself, as well as the entirely physical nature of the monster, are also carried over (especially in the Frankenstein cycle). Perhaps most significantly, the exploitation of a particular market signalled by the fact of the film being sold initially as The Quatermass Xperiment (the spelling of Xperiment referring of course to the ‘X’ certificate, a marketing tactic repeated with X – The Unknown) suggests that Hammer had finally found its place in British cinema. Clearly The Quatermass Experiment, rather than being another dead end like Dead of Night, opens the door to one of the most important interventions into British cinema since the war. This does not mean that the colour horror films followed on naturally and unproblematically from this. On the contrary, a great deal of work – economic and aesthetic – had yet to be done. In Hammer’s film, Quatermass’s experiment fails. As he is leaving the scene of the disaster, someone asks him what he is going to do next. ‘Start again,’ he replies as he walks into the distance and an unknown future. Another experiment, another attempt to deal with the ‘problem’ of male identity, is proposed. What lay ahead, both for Hammer and the horror genre in general, is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes  1 Synopsis taken from Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue ­1895–1970: A Guide to Entertainment Films (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973).  2 See Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); for a slightly different perspective, see Tony Aldgate, ‘Comedy, Class and Containment: The British Domestic Cinema of the 1930s’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 257–71.

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From Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment 85

 3 Quoted in Guy Phelps, Film Censorship (London: Littlehampton, 1975), 36.  4 For a discussion of some of these films, see Robert Murphy, ‘Riff Raff: British Cinema and the Underworld’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 286–305.   5 Graham Greene, The Pleasure-Dome: The Collected Film Criticism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 245.  6 On the banning of ‘H’ films, see Phelps, Film Censorship, 163; on A Canterbury Tale, see Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, The Best  of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 43–59; and Ian Christie, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (London: Waterstone, 1985), 67–71.  7 On ‘The Haunted Mirror’, see Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (London/ Newton Abbot: Cameron and Tayleur in association with David and Charles, 1977), 55–8; and David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 23–5.  8 In a later chapter I will discuss later multiple-narrative films, mainly those associated with the Amicus company in the 1960s; films such as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965) and Torture Garden (Francis, 1967). Suffice it here to indicate that the motivation there for such structures is very different from that found in Dead of Night.  9 Mark Nash, ‘Vampyr and the Fantastic’, Screen 17.3 (1976), 29–67. 10 Andrew Higson, ‘Five Films’, in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 25. The films he discusses include Millions Like Us (Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, 1943), The Gentle Sex (Leslie Howard, 1943) and The Bells Go Down (Basil Dearden, 1943). To these can be added San Demetrio London (Charles Frend and Robert Hamer, 1943), The Way to the Stars (Anthony Asquith, 1945), The Way Ahead (Carol Reed, 1944) and In Which We Serve (Noël Coward and David Lean, 1942). 11 The Gainsborough melodramas were The Man in Grey (Leslie Arliss, 1943), Fanny by Gaslight (Anthony Asquith, 1944), Madonna of the Seven Moons (Arthur Crabtree, 1944), The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945), Caravan (Arthur Crabtree, 1946) and Jassy (Bernard Knowles, 1947). For a discussion of the representation of sexuality in these films, see Sue Harper, ‘Historical Pleasures: Gainsborough Costume

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Melodrama’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 167–96; and Sue Aspinall, ‘Sexuality in Costume Melodrama’, in Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy (eds), Gainsborough Melodrama (London: British Film Institute, 1983), 29–39. 12 See Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London: Red Rag Collective, 1977), 59–62. For a slightly different perspective on this, see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (Harlow: Longman, 1981), 232–3. 13 Charles Barr, ‘Amnesia and Schizophrenia’, in Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays, 16. 14 For a discussion of this, see Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, Representations 20 (autumn 1987), 187–228; and Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Mary Ann Doane et al. (eds), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: American Film Institute, 1984), 83–99. 15 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 51: ‘The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical … The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.’ 16 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan, 1982), 73. 17 Barr, ‘Amnesia and Schizophrenia’, 18. 18 For discussions of Frieda, see Barr, Ealing Studios, 74–6; and Terry Lovell, ‘Frieda’, in Hurd (ed.), National Fictions, 30–4. 19 John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 35. 20 Stuart Laing, Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1986), 110. 21 John Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962). 22 See Phelps, Film Censorship, 52–5; and Tino Balio, ‘Retrenchment, Reappraisal, and Reorganization: 1948–’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 315–31. 23 Phelps, Film Censorship, 40. 24 See ibid., 115, for a table that shows the rising number of ‘X’ films in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 25 See John Sutherland, Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain 1960–1982 (London: Junction Books, 1982).

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26 John Hill has argued that the British New Wave established itself within the confluence of the major circuits’ changing business practices and a relaxation of censorship: Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, 35–52. It can further be argued here – and Hill suggests it in passing – that British horror, rather than wholly arising in a deconstructive fashion from a set of realist discourses, represents a different form of exploitation operating within the same market conditions. 27 Mentioned in a Daily Cinema tribute to Anthony Hinds (available in the BFI Library’s file on Hammer). 28 For details, see Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 38. 29 See Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84 (London: British Film Institute, 1985). 30 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 31. 31 See Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 101–59, which locates these American SF/horror films in their national context. 32 A similar situation was evoked in John Wyndham’s enormously popular trilogy of SF invasion novels from the 1950s – The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), all published by Michael Joseph – which also depicted Britain as the virtually helpless victim of monsters and aliens, the origins of which remain shrouded in mystery. See Christopher Priest, ‘British Science Fiction’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (London: Longman, 1979), 187–202, for a discussion of Wyndham in the context of SF literature of the period.   Also relevant here is Val Guest’s film The Day the Earth Caught Fire – made in 1961 but planned earlier – in which the existence of the earth is threatened by superpower nuclear tests. The journalist-hero can do nothing except report the planet’s rapid decline. Britain is again seen as powerless. 33 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 29. 34 Barr, ‘Amnesia and Schizophrenia’, 25. 35 Information from Gifford, The British Film Catalogue. 36 Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, 59–68; Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 232–9. 37 Weeks cites a relevant example from a 1953 publication entitled Social Casework in Marital Problems: ‘It provided a catalogue of success stories achieved through therapeutic casework, with women “making astonishing moves towards femininity”, learning to become competent  mothers, and men overcoming homosexuality, achieving new

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status in work, and doubling their earning capacities.’ Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 236. 38 Ibid., 237. 39 See Christine Geraghty, ‘Masculinity’, in Hurd (ed.), National Fictions, 63–7, for a helpful discussion of some of these points. 40 The Quatermass Experiment bears obvious comparison with Don Siegel’s 1956 American production Invasion of the Bodysnatchers insofar as both stress the dehumanising powers of social normality. However, the fact that they are operating in different national contexts results in each identifying and adopting a position in relation to this normality in a substantially different way: for a discussion of the politics of Siegel’s film, see Biskind, Seeing is Believing, 137–44; and Stuart Kaminsky, ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’, Cinefantastique 2.3 (1973), 16–19.   Another interesting comparison that can be made here is with the British film Seven Days to Noon (John Boulting, 1950), in which a scientist threatens to destroy London with a nuclear bomb. As with The Quatermass Experiment, one is given images of a military mobilisation, as a rogue male capable of causing the absolute destruction of a post-war world is tracked down and destroyed. While in each case, the threat is ostensibly a scientific one – a nuclear bomb, a monster about to reproduce – in both films it can in fact be seen to involve shifts in gender definition attendant upon the formation of the Welfare State. However, it can further be argued that The Quatermass Experiment, perhaps because of its status as a horror film, provides a more intense and disturbing exploration of this situation. (A further link between the two films is that James Bernard, who wrote the music for The Quatermass Experiment and many other Hammer films, was involved in the screenplay for Seven Days to Noon, as indeed was Paul Dehn who, as we have seen in the previous chapter, was a critical champion of the Hammer horror film.) 41 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 35–8.

3

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1956–64: Hammer and other horrors

To a certain extent 1956–64 can be seen as the classic phase in British horror production, years during which a particular national horror movement emerged. The most famous (or infamous), influential and commercially successful sector of British horror at this time was that produced by the Hammer company, and this chapter will be devoted in the main to a discussion of Hammer horror. It is worth noting in this respect that the 1956–64 period is ‘book-ended’ by two important Hammer films, The Curse of Frankenstein (Hammer’s first colour horror, produced in 1956 and released in 1957) and The Gorgon (1964): these were, respectively, the first and last of the five Hammer films on which horror stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and principal Hammer director Terence Fisher collaborated.1 This fact alone marks the 1956–64 period as a distinctive stage in Hammer’s development. Importantly, The Gorgon also represents a key point in a wider shifting of terms within the genre that occurred in the mid-1960s away from a preoccupation with aspects of masculinity towards what will be shown in later chapters to be a broader exploration of gender roles. That The Gorgon was a commercial failure, as well as the way in which, despite the participation of Cushing, Lee and Fisher, it has not until now attracted much critical attention, even from horror aficionados, might be seen as arising precisely from the absence within it of some of those qualities which had characterised previous Hammer horror films. Any discussion of British horror production in this period should not lose sight of the fact that while Hammer was certainly dominant, approximately two-thirds of horror did not fall under

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Hammer’s auspices.2 The latter part of this chapter will show that while these films were often working with the same issues as those addressed by Hammer, on the whole (and with a few distinguished exceptions) they lack the richness and energy of Hammer’s more successful approach. Of course, the years 1956 and 1964 have a much wider significance, representing as they do important moments in British social history. It has already been argued that the relation between this history and British horror production needs to be seen as somewhat more mediated and indirect than the notion of the latter simply reflecting the former might suggest. However, it is useful at this stage to have an awareness of some of the events and trends associated with 1956 and 1964. The historical sketch that follows is intended in this light merely to introduce some of the social issues and concerns that will subsequently be discussed in terms of the way in which they impact upon and illuminate our understanding of specific horror films. Robert Hewison has written of 1956 as ‘the first event of history after the Second World War about which there is anything like a persistent myth, and like the myths of wartime, it is a combination of historical truths and popular distortion’.3 It was a year comprising a tightly overlapping number of momentous events and more insidious changes which were seen by many as forming a composite, multifaceted threat to a traditional British way of life. The incursion of ‘Americanised’ mass culture that threatened established standards of good taste, a further and substantial growth in consumerism (with independent television – which began transmission in 1955 – a key factor in this) that obscured class boundaries, an apparent weakening of the family unit that was associated with a younger generation who seemed to some to have become rebellious and disrespectful, and the ongoing dissolution of the Empire and along with it Britain’s international influence as symbolised in this year by Suez; all, compressed together as they were, gave the overwhelming impression of an unstoppable wave of change.4 Several commentators have noted how this move from being a world power to being a somewhat less powerful, consumerist society was represented culturally via shifting notions of gender. For example, John Hill has read Suez as ‘a symbolic ­castration – the final

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humiliation of a nation no longer in possession of its manhood’.5 He has further argued that the ‘kitchen sink’ films of the British New Wave often identified the woman as a symbol of undesirable social change, this inasmuch as she had been c­onstructed  – by advertising and other discourses supportive of a consumerist ideology – as the figure of ‘the housewife’, both a symbol and the manager of an increased domestic consumption which was seen as threatening to an older system of (implicitly male) social organisation.6 D. E. Cooper’s remarks on the Angry Young Man phenomenon indicate that this also applied to many of the shifts in theatre and literature that were taking place from the mid-1950s onwards: ‘What these writers really attack is effeminacy … the sum of those qualities which are supposed traditionally … to exude from the worst in women: pettiness, snobbery, flippancy, voluptuousness, ­superficiality, materialism.’7 Such a situation had a certain irony about it insofar as it was at this time that increasing numbers of women, supposed embodiments of all for which the domestic household stood, were going out to work, earning the money required to sustain the consumption boom. Hill notes one of the implications of this: ‘the increasing involvement of women in the labour force and occupation of traditionally male roles deprives the male worker of his privileged status as head of the family and sole breadwinner’.8 In fact, this was only one aspect of the contradictory relation of women to a dominant ideology of consumption and needs to be linked with an increasing stress at this time on the importance of female sexuality (although this was nearly always discussed within a marriage context). As Stuart Hall puts it, ‘It was difficult to reconcile all these roles (wife/mother/worker) within the dominant representational forms and discourses of a fully fledged ideology of domesticity and motherhood.’9 In 1964 the first Labour government for thirteen years came to power under the leadership of Harold Wilson. It had won the election on a platform of managerial efficiency, of breaking away from what had been perceived as an amateurish management of economic and social affairs. In so doing, a different set of social values was proposed, a new definition of national identity constructed.10 In the immediately preceding years, leading up to this t­ ransformation, one

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finds intensive debate on the nature of ‘Britishness’ and a growing sense that there was something ‘wrong’ with Britain. (Noteworthy random examples of this process include the Profumo scandal and the apocalyptic 1963 edition of Encounter magazine entitled Suicide of a Nation?) This admittedly schematic rendering of a small part of post-war British history at the very least provides a sense of some of the pressing issues upon which British horror would seize in its attempt to address a particular market. What needs to be done now is to consider how this activity manifested itself in specific films. The obvious starting point is the most successful British horror producer of all.

Hammer horror Hammer made a variety of films in the 1956–64 period. Of these, twenty-four might be considered as horror films – including fourteen colour gothic horror films, three SF/horror (X – The Unknown [Jimmy Sangster, 1956], Quatermass II [Val Guest, 1957] and The Damned [Joseph Losey, 1963]), four psychological thrillers (Taste of Fear [Seth Holt, 1961], Maniac [Michael Carreras, 1963], Paranoiac [Freddie Francis, 1963], Hysteria [Freddie Francis, 1965]), in addition to films that crossed from one generic area to another (historical drama and horror in The Stranglers of Bombay [Terence Fisher, 1959], comedy and horror in The Old Dark House [William Castle, 1963]).11 However, it was the company’s colour gothic horrors which proved its most distinctive and successful product, and it is to these films we can now turn. They were, in order of release: Title

Year of release

Director

The Curse of Frankenstein Dracula The Revenge of Frankenstein The Hound of the Baskervilles The Mummy The Man Who Could Cheat Death

1957 1958 1958 1959 1959 1959

Terence Fisher Fisher Fisher Fisher Fisher Fisher

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Title

Year of release

Director

The Curse of the Werewolf The Brides of Dracula The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll The Phantom of the Opera Kiss of the Vampire The Evil of Frankenstein The Gorgon The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb

1960 1960 1960 1962 1964 1964 1964 1964

Fisher Fisher Fisher Fisher Don Sharp Freddie Francis Fisher Michael Carreras

One of the most immediately striking qualities of these films, a quality that informs them on several levels, is a robust physicality, an insistence on the solid and corporeal nature of the conflict between the forces of good and evil. Random examples of this physicality include the doors and windows that are continually being smashed open in this period, the ferocious fight scenes in Dracula and The Mummy with the assailants quite literally at each other’s throats, an athletic Van Helsing leaping off a table, pulling down some drapes and letting in the fatal sunshine at the conclusion of Dracula, a dead body tearing through stage scenery at the beginning of The Phantom of the Opera. Both the settings and the style of Hammer horror function to accommodate and highlight a sense of this physicality. The castles, pubs and drawing rooms which comprise Hammer’s characteristic Victorian or Edwardian milieux provide a suitably ordered backdrop against which various acts of violence are rendered even more striking than they would be otherwise. (These sets are also often characterised by a sensual, luxuriant feel which in turn connects with another important aspect of Hammer horror, its fascination with sexual matters: a discussion of this follows below.) Similarly, the camera work in Hammer horror is on the whole fairly restrained. Extravagant camera movements are few and far between at this time (and indeed afterwards). While one possible reason for this might have been the limitations of space within Bray Studios, which was a converted country house, this method of filming also accorded perfectly with Hammer’s overall stylistic identity.12 Complementing it was an undeviatingly conventional form of editing.

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It is in this carefully constructed sense of physicality, and the formal restraint that usually accompanied it, that Hammer horror distinguished itself from other types of horror. In other words, Hammer chose not to indulge in the disturbing self-reflexive games played in Ealing’s Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti et al., 1945) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). It also contained little of the evocative use of darkness and shadow that characterised, say, the 1940s American work of B-movie producer Val Lewton or the Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman in the early 1960s. It has been on the basis of these very distinctive and easily recognisable qualities that Hammer’s colour horror films, and the work of Terence Fisher in particular – and the two are nearly synonymous at this time – have in the past been described as pedestrian, overliteral and cinematically lifeless. What can be argued here is that this negative appraisal of these films rests on a misapprehension of the relationship between the various stylistic and thematic elements deployed within Hammer horror; and that these elements, rather than lying lifelessly alongside each other, are working together, mobilised within an aesthetic that has not as yet been fully appreciated critically (although several critics, most notably David Pirie, have begun to construct such an appreciation). One further point needs to be made in our introductory comments about Hammer, and this is to note the substantial contributions of director Terence Fisher and actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee to the period horror films now under discussion. Out of these fourteen films, Cushing appeared in eight, Lee in seven and a remarkably prolific Fisher directed eleven. Of course, Hammer horror, like the vast majority of cinematic enterprises, was the product of a collaborative process, with significant input from, to name but a few, producer and screenwriter Anthony Hinds, writer Jimmy Sangster, art director Bernard Robinson, directors of photography Jack Asher and Michael Reed, and composer James Bernard. In this sense, Cushing, Lee and Fisher need to be seen as mere members, albeit important ones, of the Hammer team. Nevertheless, it is the case that the five films upon which all three worked, The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Mummy and The Gorgon, embody the Hammer aesthetic in its most accomplished form. These five films can be seen

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as centres of gravity within Hammer horror, in the same way that Hammer horror itself provides a basic definitional model of British horror cinema in general. Consequently, much of what follows will be centred on these films, although the other nine will also be considered in some detail. (The Frankenstein and Dracula films will be dealt with at greater length in the next chapter.) In our account in the previous chapter of The Quatermass Experiment, Professor Quatermass was identified as an early version of a character-type that would become very important in subsequent Hammer productions – the male professional authority figure. As a way of entering into and starting to think about Hammer horror as a distinctive aesthetic practice, we can now elaborate further on the role played by notions of professionalism in Hammer and how these related to and drew upon a wider social reality.

The professional The figure of the professional is of key importance in Hammer horror throughout this period. Its Van Helsing (played by Peter Cushing) is, arguably, horror cinema’s first professional vampire hunter. Previously – in, say, the 1931 Universal version of Dracula (or to a certain extent in Bram Stoker’s original novel) – this character was inclined to lengthy pseudo-scientific or quasi-religious speeches, the physical business of actually killing the vampire relegated to the sidelines. In Hammer, Van Helsing’s statements concerning the vampire tend to be matter-of-fact instructions on how to destroy it. Hence his dictation into the phonograph in Dracula where the ‘facts’ about vampires are stated baldly and without fuss. When in this sequence he refers to the crucifix as ‘symbolising the power of good over evil’, neither he nor the film is underlining the religious or spiritual element of this. Instead the cross, garlic, running water and so on are given us as tools of the trade, so to speak, practical weapons against an all too physical threat.13 The figure of Sherlock Holmes (Cushing), the arch-professional of British detective fiction, in The Hound of the Baskervilles is another example, as, for that matter, is Hammer’s Frankenstein,

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especially in his no-nonsense attitude to his business as opposed to the ­narrow-minded ­moralising of those around him. One possible reason for the importance of professionalism to Hammer is revealed through a brief survey of its key creative personnel. What one finds is that, as far as the routes by which they had all entered the film industry are concerned, the filmmakers in question can be readily divided into two groups. First, family connections had brought producers Michael Carreras and Anthony Hinds into the Hammer company: the former was the son of chief executive James Carreras, the latter the son of William Hinds, co-founder with Enrique Carreras (James’s father) of Exclusive Films, the distribution company from which Hammer had evolved. (William Hinds was also a music-hall performer whose stage name of Will Hammer gave the new production company its name.) Neither restricted themselves solely to the producer role: Carreras also wrote and directed while Hinds was a prolific screenwriter under the pseudonym of John Elder.14 Secondly, most of the directors who worked for Hammer, both during this period and after, had begun in menial posts in the industry and had usually worked their way up to the position of director by their mid-40s. For example, Terence Fisher, Hammer’s most prolific director (born in 1904, first film for Hammer The Last Page in 1952) and Freddie Francis (born in 1917, first film for Hammer Paranoiac in 1963) had both begun as clapper boys in the 1930s, with Fisher subsequently becoming an editor and Francis an award-winning cameraman. Similarly, John Gilling (born in 1912, first film for Hammer as screenwriter The Man in Black in 1950, as director Shadow of the Cat in 1961), and a later Hammer director Roy Ward Baker (born in 1912, first film for Hammer Quatermass and the Pit in 1967) had started out as, respectively, third and second assistant directors. Another key figure, Bernard Robinson, the art director for many important Hammer horror films, had also begun in the 1930s, this time as a draughtsman, joining Hammer in 1956 to work on Quatermass II. The one major exception to what was essentially a graduation to important posts after years of experience appears to have been screenwriter Jimmy Sangster (who in the 1970s would also direct and produce for Hammer). Here too, however, a similar career progression is evident, with Sangster

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joining Hammer as third assistant director in 1947, becoming production manager, and then writing the screenplay for X – The Unknown in 1956, although in Sangster’s case this process was somewhat accelerated. Two things are apparent from this. First, many of these people were working or had worked for Hammer before the inception of the colour horror films. Thus, not only was there a continuity of space and technical resources at Bray Studios (discussed in the previous chapter) but also a continuity in terms of creative personnel to facilitate what was by any standards a rapid move into horror production. Secondly, none of these individuals had entered the industry specifically to make horror films (unlike later directors such as Michael Reeves – see Chapter 5), or for that matter any particular type of film. They owed their allegiance instead either to the family firm or to the film industry’s standards of professional integrity and competence. It is in this context that the epithet ‘journeyman’, often applied pejoratively or condescendingly to Hammer filmmakers, takes on a different, non-evaluative meaning, describing a particular relationship between filmmaker and genre which stresses the former not as ‘artist’, someone whose work is imbued with originality and embraces serious themes, but instead as ‘professional’.15 Hence the lack of artistic pretensions which further aided Hammer’s transformation into the ‘horror factory’: as James Carreras himself put it, ‘I’m prepared to make Strauss waltzes tomorrow if they’ll make money.’16 The designations of artist and professional are often located in a hierarchical structure, with ‘art’ at its pinnacle. What needs to be realised here is that these terms not only function within critical discourses but also operate within the film industry itself, and that Hammer’s positive valuation of professionalism, in films, publicity and interviews, provided for it and its personnel a potent model of self-definition and worth. This in turn impinged upon the films themselves, all of which tend to endorse a no-nonsense approach to various manifestations of evil. (Of course, this did not mean that Hammer filmmakers possessed in any way a monopoly on professionalism or that no other directors had ever worked their way up through the industry; however, the journeymen at Hammer can be contrasted with the ‘artists’ working concurrently in the British New Wave.)

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It is also significant that in the years of Hammer’s unquestioned dominance of British horror between 1956 and 1964, the designation ‘professionalism’ had a much wider social purchase, figuring as it did in debates about the nature of Britishness and British national identity. One can argue that in fact it was the resulting connection or correspondence between the inner workings of Hammer and the society within which it was located that bestowed upon Hammer’s films a social relevance and potency which, in part at least, contributed to their success at the box office. A sense of what this debate about national identity actually entailed can be gleaned from remarks made by Michael Frayn on the state of the country at the time of the Festival of Britain in 1951: ‘for a decade, sanctioned by the exigencies of war and its aftermath, the Herbivores had dominated the scene. By 1951 the regime which supported them was exhausted, and the Carnivores were ready to take over.’ For Frayn, the Herbivores were: the radical middle classes – the do-gooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, the Guardian and the Observer; the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC … gentle ruminants … who look out from the lush pastures which are their natural station in life with eyes full of sorrow for less fortunate creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages, though not usually ceasing to eat the grass.

The Carnivores, on the other hand, were ‘the members of the upper and middle classes who believe that if God had not wished them to prey on all smaller and weaker creatures without scruple he would not have made them as they are’. Frayn goes on to associate the Herbivores and their influence with what for him was by 1951 ‘the sad remnants of the once triumphant post-war Labour government’, soon to be replaced by a Carnivore–Conservative administration.17 As far as British cinema of this period was concerned, Herbivore values can be seen to have found their home in the Ealing comedies of the late 1940s and 1950s, which, as Charles Barr has noted, frequently dramatise a tension between what might be termed the herbivorous beliefs and attitudes of small businessmen and the carnivorous nature of big business, with the former invariably winning the day and seeing off the ruthless Carnivore capitalists.18 In Hammer, perhaps appropriately for a company whose most

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consistently successful product was its vampire films, this situation is neatly reversed, and now it is the authoritative upper- or middleclass male (usually middle-class), the Carnivore if you will, who is triumphant. The Herbivores, the decent but fatally narrow-minded and weak inhabitants of the Hammer world, are either won over to the side of the no-nonsense authority figure or violently destroyed. If Ealing, under the benign dictatorship of Michael Balcon and harboured safely within the Rank Organisation, can be read as the archetypal Herbivore of post-war British cinema, then Hammer, independent of any major studio and hungry for finance and profit under the showmanlike guidance of James Carreras, can just as equally be read as the archetypal Carnivore. However, the advent of Hammer horror some six years into a Conservative administration in no way involved an unequivocal endorsement by the films of all the values associated with that administration. Certainly there are distinctively conservative elements present in Hammer horror, particularly the stress laid throughout on the need for authoritative leadership. But at the same time, Hammer horror’s impatience with any manifestation of what it saw as amateurism and the accompanying valorisation of professional activity immediately align it with further, contemporaneous shifts in the debate about national identity as it was developing through the latter part of the 1950s and into the 1960s. To gain an insight into how the agenda for this debate about the nature of Britishness had changed since the early 1950s and the situation outlined by Frayn, we can look at an article written in 1963 by Henry Fairlie entitled ‘On the Comforts of Anger’. In this he argues against the need for technological progress in industry: ‘It is time that, against their evil doctrine, we reasserted our right to be inefficient.’19 At one point he goes so far as to link the ‘evil doctrine’ of professional management with Nazism and death camps, and signals it as something completely alien to a British tradition. However, within the very book, Suicide of a Nation? (a special issue of Encounter magazine), that his remarks occurred, he was virtually a lone voice – one might even argue, a Herbivore voice – among many who, like Arthur Koestler, the book’s editor, believed that ‘The cult of amateurishness, and the contempt in which proficiency and expertise are held, breed mediocrats by natural selection.’20

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Suicide of a Nation?, with its apocalyptic predictions of disaster unless ‘amateurishness’ was removed from British life, was published in the same year that saw Harold Wilson’s keynote speech at the Labour Party conference on the potentially vast benefits of a new technology. As Stuart Hall has observed ‘The whole aim of the Wilson propaganda leading up to the 1964 election was to put together an alternative, and more stable, historical bloc behind the slogans of “modernisation” and controlled and orderly “growth”.’21 Wilson won the election, a victory which was seen by many at the time as a managerial and professional takeover (albeit a shortlived one; in 1969 Dr David Granick, an American management expert, would call Britain ‘the home of the amateur’).22 It does seem from this that Hammer’s privileging of the professional at this moment in social history enabled it, in an almost prescient fashion, to tap into a widespread feeling that British society was in transition. In this way Hammer offered itself to its audience as a particularly ‘modern’ intervention into British culture (in opposition to the traditional virtues extolled by many Ealing films from the 1950s). It is possible that the outrage of a handful of film critics over Hammer horror arose in part as a reaction against the relatively new ideas of British national identity proposed by the films. Certainly, one of their most disturbing qualities for these critics appears to have been their Britishness. But a paradox still remains. While Hammer horror films need to be seen very much as addressing the social context within which they were fashioned, account also has to be taken of the fact that, despite their ‘modernity’, they were set in the past. Clearly the films’ engagement with present-day matters was, at the very least, veiled or coded. In a perceptive short piece on Hammer horror, David Robinson considers the reasons for the colour horror films being more successful than Hammer’s black and white psychological thrillers. He argues that because the former are set apart from the present, they actually require less of a suspension of disbelief from an audience than do the thrillers with contemporary settings. The period setting, and the historical space thereby opened up between film and audience, enables a more fantastic, stylised acting out of events, unencumbered as it is with the suggestions of realism carried by modern

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locations.23 This displacement ensured that Hammer was never as disturbing to audiences, most critics and the censors, as were more realistic horrors. It might also be the case, as I have already suggested, that the period settings permitted a conservative nostalgia for a fixed social order, one in which those who were powerless were legitimate prey. Robinson’s remarks underline the need to think about Hammer as, on the most basic of levels, an imaginative enterprise, one that is by its very nature distanced from the real world. While it might draw upon socially specific discourses associated with professionalism, while it might contain conservative elements, it is by no means reducible to any of these. In order to develop further an awareness of the way in which Hammer mobilises these various elements and the tensions that arise from them, to grasp in effect the aesthetic life of Hammer horror, it is worth considering how the figure of the professional is actually used within the films in question. How is his authority established and to what ends are his efforts directed?

Authority and masculinity Valorised authority in Hammer horror of this period is always the property of the professional, the man (and it is always a man) who knows exactly what he is doing and why. It can be found in the attitudes and capabilities of, among others, Van Helsing and Holmes.24 It is also apparent in a type of acting exemplified by Cushing and Lee, an economic and above all controlled performance style (which might profitably be compared with the flamboyance and nascent camp of Vincent Price’s performances in Corman’s Poe films). In part, the authority of Hammer’s two principal stars derives from their relative seniority. At the time of The Curse of Frankenstein, Cushing was forty-three, Lee was thirty-four (and Fisher fifty-two years old). Horror films are usually marketed to a younger audience, and Hammer was no exception to this.25 Yet in these films (and this is a characteristic shared with other types of horror – Corman’s Poe films, for instance) those members of the cast who most closely approximate the peer group of the film’s intended audience tend to be the most ineffectual in terms of the power and authority that they

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wield. Clearly, they are not being held up as ideal figures for audience identification purposes. Neither, it can be argued, are Cushing, Lee or the characters they play. Rather, if one is to take audience identification into account, such identification must be with the power wielded by these authoritative characters. An appreciation of the certainty and unwavering capabilities expressed on every level of these films is an important, indeed necessary, element in an enjoyment of them. Authority in Hammer horror also has a clear class dimension. Hammer’s class structures are inflexible, with working, middle and upper classes remaining totally separate social strata. Despite the plethora of aristocratic titles in these films (Count, Lord, Baron, etc.) the figures of valorised authority (that is, Cushing or Lee) tend to be middle-class, if not in their actual social position then certainly in the values they espouse. The professionalism which, as we have seen, is an important aspect of their authority is dependent on their either having a profession in the conventional sense (professor in The Gorgon, consulting detective in The Hound of the Baskervilles, archaeologist in The Mummy) or organising their obsessions in an ordered, methodical and altogether professional manner (Frankenstein and Van Helsing). The few members of the upper class – with the notable exception of the ‘middle-class’ Baron (who, as will be shown, is middle-class only in a limited way) – who do appear are invariably characterised, as they must be in a world which values a certain type of work ethic above all else, as parasitic and corrupt (Sir Hugo in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Lord D’Arcy in The Phantom of the Opera) or simply weak (Lee’s Sir Henry in The Hound of the Baskervilles).26 Further underlining the middle-class bias of these films, a bias which presumably arises from the fact that professionalism is itself a middle-class designation, one finds that on the few occasions when the working class is seen in the form of a crowd (it usually appears only as comic relief or victims), it is always shown as ignorant and a force of repression. A useful comparison that can be made here is with the democratic torch-carrying crowds that are found in Universal horror films of the 1930s. After age and class, the final significant dimension of the authority of Hammer’s professional resides in his maleness. Authority

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is inalienably patriarchal in Hammer horror of this period; it also tends to be associated with celibacy. (Think, for example, of Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes.) Male sexual desire is itself nearly always seen as either weakening or evil. In line with this, female characters have little or no autonomy in these films but are usually defined as an essentially sexual threat for male characters. Significantly, many of the Hammer leading ladies at this time are non-British – for example, Marla Landi in The Hound of the Baskervilles and Yvonne Furneaux in The Mummy – as if sexuality is in some way not a characteristic of the British woman and has to be imported. As will be shown later, the placing of the very British Barbara Shelley at the centre of The Gorgon signals a particularly intense crisis for Hammer horror. While these are the attributes of the Hammer professional, our subsequent analyses of specific films will demonstrate that this professional is by no means the isolated, almost abstract figure that our earlier remarks might have implied. All of Hammer’s authority figures exist and to a certain extent are defined in relation to particular dramatic and narrative contexts, with this in turn having distinct consequences for the ways in which professional authority is exercised. In this period, the unassailable confidence of Baron Frankenstein, Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes (more on the first two of these in the next chapter) sits alongside slightly more troubled representations of professional activity. When viewed in this way, as a group of films which seek to reproduce in a compelling and credible fashion a particular set of values, rather than merely presenting them to us ready-formed, both the dynamism of Hammer’s aesthetic and a sense of these professional values as themselves unstable, requiring constant reworking, become more apparent. At this point, it is revealing to look briefly at some of the films that fall outside the relatively small Fisher–Cushing–Lee canon while still remaining a recognisable part of Hammer horror, namely The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Phantom of the Opera (1962) and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960). All four were directed by Terence Fisher, but Peter Cushing is absent from all of them and Christopher Lee appears only in supporting roles in The Man Who Could Cheat

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Death and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll. All four were disappointing commercially. One possible reason for this lies in the way in which they deviate from ideas and themes that characterise the Fisher– Cushing–Lee collaborations. In fact, it can be argued that Fisher’s work without Cushing and Lee in this period (although not later) is not as complex and intensely fashioned as his collaborations with those two actors. While there are some noteworthy set pieces in the films listed above, they tend to be effective but isolated moments rather than parts of an organic whole. One only has to examine the central figure in each film to gain an awareness of how they differ from the authority figure embodied so well by, say, Cushing’s Holmes. Leon (Oliver Reed) in The Curse of the Werewolf is born a werewolf, and as he grows to maturity is subject to frightening attacks and transformations. In The Man Who Could Cheat Death Dr Bonner (Anton Diffring), frantically attempting to keep old age at bay, is subject to violent fits if his medicine, the elixir of life, is kept from him. The Phantom (Herbert Lom) in The Phantom of the Opera also suffers from fits of rage and a wide range of nervous moods and twitches. Finally, Dr Jekyll (Paul Massie) struggles in vain against the monster within him. All four, Leon, Bonner, the Phantom and Jekyll, have little or no control over either their bodies or their eventual fates. (Jekyll does succeed in eventually ridding himself of Hyde but only, inevitably, at the cost of his own life.) In their rages, fits and self-pity, they stand opposed to the confidence and practical and professional abilities exhibited by Frankenstein, Van Helsing and Holmes. Bonner in particular, whose role as a pioneering searcher after scientific truth comes close to Frankenstein, is given us as little more than the conventional mad – that is to say, unprofessional – scientist. All four also embody what are seen as the debilitating effects of sexuality. This is most apparent in The Curse of the Werewolf where Leon’s unwilled transformations into a ravening beast are linked with sexual desire, with one of these transformations actually taking place inside a brothel. Indeed the circumstances of his conception are also connected with a male sexual desire that is seen as animallike and corrupting; this takes the form of both the degenerate beggar who rapes Leon’s mother and the syphilitic nobleman who makes advances to her.

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Bonner and the Phantom are both men who have sublimated their sexuality into an obsession with art, which is seen to be largely founded on the objectification of and control over the female figure. The final inability of these obsessions to contain the sexual drive is shown by these characters’ involuntary lapses of control and the scars and marks that appear on their faces, visible testaments to a growing corruption within. Their respective downfalls are caused, inevitably, by their falling in love with a woman. The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll depicts a similar situation, with a staid and sexually repressed Jekyll directing his energies into obsessive scientific research, research which produces the highly sexualised evil of Mr Hyde. Following on from this, the men in these films who do not fall prey to the evils of sexuality – Leon’s friend in The Curse of the Werewolf, Harry Hunter (Edward de Souza) in The Phantom of the Opera, the Christopher Lee character in The Man Who Could Cheat Death – are often shown to be in some way ineffective: one can note here as an example the helplessness of Harry Hunter, the notional hero, at the conclusion of the film in which he appears, as well as Lee’s high-handedness and aloofness. In a process of identification already apparent in the earlier The Quatermass Experiment, male identity is shown as caught between monstrous, physically debilitating desire and a neutered ineffectuality. It can be argued that The Curse of the Werewolf, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Phantom of the Opera and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll are revealing failures or marginal texts in a wider project involving the construction of a significant relationship between professional action and a particular version of masculinity. That these four films are dealing primarily with the defeat of their central characters underlines the systematic control provided by a figure of professional authority elsewhere in Hammer horror. In order to develop an awareness of the nature of this control and the ‘evil’ over which it is exercised, it is necessary now to look in some detail at specific films. First, The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles (both from 1959) will be discussed in terms of their representations of authority, professionalism and gender. This will be followed by a discussion of The Gorgon (1964), considering it as a pivotal work that points forward to later developments in the

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horror field in the area of sexual identity while still remaining within the structuring tenets of the preceding Fisher–Cushing–Lee films. It will be shown that the stress laid in these films on troubled father–son relationships is symptomatic of a view they all share that the transmission of patriarchal power from one generation to the next has become blocked. In order to represent this situation, each film mobilises distinctly oedipal elements, with a succession of male characters shown as inadequate in the face of demands emanating from a usually absent father and as troubled by a forbidden desire for the woman. Such a configuration – which the professional, himself a paternalistic figure, seeks to resolve – lends itself in a very potent way to an imaginative binding together of some of the social tensions and issues outlined above and in the previous chapter, in particular those to do with a problematisation of masculinity in the post-Empire, consumerist British society of the late 1950s. The authority of the absent Father stands in this sense for old definitional certainties that have become unattainable – perhaps even monstrous – but which Hammer is unwilling or unable completely to jettison.

The Mummy As has already been noted, in the 1950s the British Empire was in the process of dissolution, with the Suez debacle offering itself as a symbol of this trend. In the face of such a historical situation, The Mummy portrays a nationalistic Egyptian priest with surprising sympathy, permitting him to present a considered argument against the cultural imperialism represented by the institution of the British Museum. The feebleness of the Cushing character’s reply to this – that as an archaeologist he is only doing his job in collecting relics from overseas – indicates the especially troubled position of the professional within this film. One could add here that references to ‘Egyptian relics’ and representations of a threat to England emanating from Egypt would have had a particular relevance in 1959, a mere three years after the Suez affair.27 On one level, The Mummy does seem to operate as an interrogation of aspects of imperialism which conflates this with a

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representation of a troubled masculinity. In this, it can be aligned with a 1960 Hammer film (also directed by Terence Fisher), The Stranglers of Bombay. The latter, which tells of the Thuggee cult in British-ruled India, consists of what can only be described as a series of symbolic castrations (eyes put out, hands chopped off, legs cut open) committed in the name of the female god Kali. The important difference between the two films is that while The Stranglers of Bombay offers itself as little more than a forum for the playing out of castration anxieties, The Mummy comprises a more thoroughgoing investigation of a masculinity in trouble, an investigation which in the end goes beyond the effects of imperial collapse. The form this investigation will take is apparent in The Mummy’s opening sequence, which takes place at an archaeological dig in Egypt in 1895. An English expedition led by Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer), his son John (Peter Cushing) and his brother Joseph (Raymond Huntley) is searching for the long-lost tomb of Princess Ananka. By the end of this short sequence the tomb has been found, John is permanently crippled and Stephen has been driven insane. Already the confident world of the English middleclass ­professional – evident here in Stephen Banning’s authoritative dismissal of the Egyptian priest who seeks to dissuade the English from disturbing Ananka’s resting place – is shown as hubristic and inadequate. John Banning’s disabling leg injury is a direct result of his father’s unwillingness to order his son to leave the site and go to a hospital. Here the father, the figure of patriarchal authority, is revealed to be weak (especially as played by the characteristically bumbling Felix Aylmer; later we discover that Stephen Banning is incapable of even managing his domestic affairs) and premature in relinquishing the power to make decisions to his son. The male inadequacy and impotence that this involves is signified by the array of male wounds and injuries that litter the film, most notably John Banning’s own crippledness (Figure 3.1). The fate that Stephen Banning himself suffers is particularly suggestive in this respect. While alone in the tomb of Princess Ananka, reading the Scroll of Life, he is confronted by Kharis/The Mummy (Christopher Lee) and promptly goes mad. This configuration – man discovered in the company of a dead woman by another, older

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Figure 3.1  John Banning (Peter Cushing) and his brother, Joseph (Raymond Huntley), in The Mummy (1959)

man (in this case, thousands of years older) – is reminiscent of a similar scene in Dracula (1958), in which Dracula traps Jonathan Harker in his tomb after Harker has just killed Dracula’s bride. At the moment of discovery, both Harker and Banning are shot from above, this diminishing them in size before, respectively, Dracula and Kharis. Under Dracula’s gaze Harker drops the stake he is holding, while Banning similarly loses hold of the Scroll of Life. One thing that is apparent in both these scenes is the distinctively oedipal qualities of Hammer’s conceptualisation of male identity. Many of its male characters, such as Stephen Banning and Jonathan Harker, go in fear of a tyrannical father figure (who does not necessarily have to be present for his baleful influence to be felt). The role of the woman here – especially the ostensible love interest in these films – tends in this context to be a thoroughly maternal one: it is significant in this respect that the woman in both the scenes described above is much older than the male victims. As is the case in the classic oedipal scenario, the desire of the presumptive male for this woman, who is characterised by maternal qualities, coexists with and is inseparable from the punishment meted out by a jealous father figure, punishment which usually takes the form of

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wounds visited on the male body. In Dracula and The Mummy, the dropping of the stake and the Scroll of Life, which are decidedly phallic both in shape and in terms of their respective roles in the two dramas, suggests that these moments function as yet more symbolic castrations. That there appear to be so many of these in Hammer horror at this time underlines Hammer’s obsessive identification of masculinity as something which is unstable and liable to regression. Under a distant, Egyptian sky, a small group of men find themselves unwilling participants in an oedipal drama. These men have travelled far only to come face to face with themselves and their own troubled identity. Only in leaving England can they return to it carrying this knowledge, the knowledge of the Mummy and all that it represents. The way in which The Mummy then mobilises to confront this knowledge shows us the figure of the professional under pressure, complicit as he is here with a problematised male identity. The fact that John Banning, the film’s hero, is married immediately sets him apart from Hammer’s celibate authority figures, Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes, and brings him uncomfortably close to the positions filled by the male leads of Curse of the Werewolf, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Phantom of the Opera and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll. (This is underlined by the casting of Cushing – who in Hammer horror plays Van Helsing and Holmes, both father figures – in the role of the son.) Because of this, The Mummy, lodged firmly within the Fisher–Cushing–Lee core of Hammer horror, proves to be one of the more extreme tests for Hammer’s professional ideology to come out of its 1950s work. After this opening sequence the narrative jumps three years and moves to England. Quiet, pastoral music is heard on the soundtrack as the camera slowly pans across a stretch of tranquil countryside before, in a wonderfully apt moment, alighting on the leafy grounds of a lunatic asylum. This peaceful-looking location is at once an integral part of this tranquillity and, because of its function, a troubling, unstable element within it (as, in a different context, the Glueman both belongs to and disturbs the English countryside that provides the setting for Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale). The Mummy proceeds to elaborate upon the nature of this instability by showing that inside the lunatic asylum, and by implication at the heart of England, is Stephen

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Banning, a lone male suffering, if one is to believe his doctor, from a ­persecution complex. He thinks ‘Mummy’ wants to kill him. (This being Hammer, he is of course proved correct.) ‘The Mummy,’ he says, to all intents and purposes a paranoid child, ‘it’s waiting. It’s always there.’ The possibility realised here of a psychological regression, of a collapse into a fearful childhood, haunts the remainder of the film. Within this situation, those people who refuse to open their minds to the existence of the Mummy, to accommodate a knowledge which in the end cannot be denied, are severely dealt with; most spectacularly Joseph, killed by the Mummy shortly after denying that it exists. The survivors are those who do preserve an open mind: John Banning and an initially sceptical police inspector who at first only wants ‘the facts’ but is willing to shift his position when these facts do not fit with his own assumptions. The agency for this survival, however, turns out to be not so much the professional and practical abilities of Banning and the police ­inspector – Banning’s attacks on the Mummy are enthusiastic but ineffective – as it is Isobel, John Banning’s wife and the double of Princess Ananka (both parts are played by Yvonne Furneaux), the mere sight of whom stays the Mummy’s hand. But the apparent power of the woman in this film needs to be seen as arising from a certain ambiguity regarding the identity of the Mummy itself. Most obviously the Mummy is Kharis. Originally a high priest in ancient Egypt who is buried alive for attempting to resurrect Princess Ananka, centuries later he is resurrected himself when Stephen Banning reads aloud from the Scroll of Life. He is the familiar bandage-wrapped figure that had already been established as a standard movie monster in a series of horror films made by Universal in the 1930s and 1940s. However, there is another mummy in Hammer’s film, another cause for Stephen Banning’s insane terror. That parallels can be drawn between Kharis and the character played by Cushing indicates that they might be similarly positioned in relation to this other mummy. Both suffer wounds before the tomb of Ananka – Kharis a ripped-out tongue, Cushing a damaged leg – with Kharis’s fate also bearing a close resemblance to that of Stephen Banning insofar as both are caught in the tomb of Ananka by the delegates of Karnak

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and suffer because of this. Kharis is entombed alive for thousands of years; Cushing at one point remarks, ‘It seems the best part of my life has been spent amongst the dead.’ Finally, both Kharis and John Banning desire Isobel/Ananka. This brings us to the other mummy in the film – Isobel/Ananka, the woman as maternal figure caught up in an oedipal struggle between men. Ananka is high priestess to and therefore the property of the god Karnak; Karnak himself is an essentially paternal figure before whom both Kharis and John Banning are emasculated (and whom a presumptuous Banning disparages at one point as a minor deity). Isobel is, quite literally, the double of Ananka; in marrying her, John Banning marries, as it were, the mother, a sign of regressive sexuality if ever there was one. When seen in this way, this marriage is analogous to the desecration of Ananka’s tomb which opens the film and as a response to which Karnak’s will demands the deaths of those involved. Both are transgressive actions which merit paternal punishment. Karnak’s vengeance is realised largely by Kharis, who in the latter part of the film, after his own disastrous defiance of the god and his subsequent mummification, is someone with little or no will of his own. Only the sight of Isobel, and presumably the memories it stirs of his own forbidden desire for Ananka, prevents him from completing his mission and enables John Banning to survive. Significantly, within this oedipal configuration of fears and desires, female desire is notable only for its absence. Ananka herself remains silent – she is already dead when we first see her – and is eventually mummified. Isobel has very little dialogue in the film, her only real function being to appear as an image of Ananka. What one finds in The Mummy is a complex set of parallels and analogies – at various points John, Stephen and Kharis, with their wounds and insecurities, are all compared and contrasted with each other, as are the idealised figures of Ananka and Isobel – which in effect comprises a drama of male inadequacy and powerlessness, with a succession of men shown as incapable of fulfilling the demands of an inflexible patriarchal law. Even the film’s ostensible professional John Banning, because of his emotional involvement in what is going on around him, finds it difficult to manage this situation as successfully as other Hammer professionals might have done.

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The drama has to end, however, and The Mummy concludes with a blast of shotgun fire which terminates Kharis’s living death. The Mummy is returned to the swamp from which, in a memor­ able haunting scene, it initially emerged after its arrival in England, dying, characteristically for Hammer, a physical rather than a spiritual death (with a large part of its chest graphically blown away). That this is in a sense a false ending, that this reassertion of physicality and professionalism – with John Banning leading the shotgunwielding rescuers – has to be tempered by our awareness of Banning’s shortcomings, is indicated by the way in which the camera remains on the swamp as the end credits roll. This bottomless swamp is the last thing seen in the film. As a final image, it disturbingly suggests that this narrative closure can only be temporary, that the oedipal tensions which have propelled the narrative forward have not been resolved, that perhaps the monster is still with us.28 Finally, just to show how thoroughly The Mummy is bound up with the notion that male desire for the woman is ultimately something fearful, we can turn to one of the comic relief scenes. A poacher (played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper) has just seen Kharis walking through the wood. Understandably shocked, he stumbles into the local pub and asks for a drink to calm his nerves. When some other rustic character asks him what the matter is, he replies ‘I’ve seen the likes tonight that mortal eyes shouldn’t look at.’ ‘Ah,’ the rustic notes wisely, ‘You’ve been round to Molly Grady’s again.’ On one level, this functions as fairly uninspired low humour. On another, deeper level, it yet again points to the potential danger posed by women for men within the Hammer world of the 1950s.

The Hound of the Baskervilles It is instructive to note the changes that Hammer made in its reworking of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic 1902 Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The most significant occur around the position of women in the narrative. In Doyle’s novel, the two women implicated in the mystery of the Hound are presented as merely the tools of John Stapleton (played in Hammer’s film by Ewen Solon), illegitimate heir to the

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Baskerville fortune and real villain of the piece. Hammer’s film totally excludes one of these women, Laura Lyons, and turns Beryl Stapleton into Cecile Stapleton (played by Marla Landi), no longer Stapleton’s wife and unwilling accomplice – in the novel, an image of quite literal bruised innocence – but instead his daughter, who is ­presented as a highly sexualised character. Stapleton himself is a working-class figure who in no way resembles the middle-class schemer envisaged by Conan Doyle. His daughter is rebellious and does not submit easily to his rule, and at the end of the film it is her hatred of the Baskerville family rather than his, her willing complicity in the attempt to murder Henry Baskerville (Christopher Lee), that results in the calling down of the Hound. The Hound itself, as was noted by critics at the time of the film’s initial release, is unimpressive, being little more than a dog wearing a mask. While this could easily be put down to an inadequacy on the part of the filmmakers, one can also argue here that the shifting of Cecile from the margins into the centre of the Baskerville conspiracy registers a wider shift of focus within the film away from the male villain and Hound (hence their diminution) on to what is seen as the greater threat posed by the sexually attractive woman (although, as will become clear, the Hound still serves an important function). This makes it perfectly consistent with much of the Hammer product of this time and also makes for some interesting comparisons with what in many ways can be seen as its companion piece, The Mummy. The Hound of the Baskervilles opens with a sequence which details the origin of the Hound and the terrible death of Sir Hugo Baskerville (David Oxley). This death scene bears a remarkable resemblance to those oedipal scenes already discussed from The Mummy – with both Stephen Banning and Kharis trapped and punished in Ananka’s tomb – and Dracula – with Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) trapped and punished in Dracula’s tomb. Rapacious and cruel Sir Hugo has just stabbed a peasant woman to death. He then turns away from the body and sees the Hound (which we, the audience, do not see). Like Harker and Stephen Banning, he is shot from above as he screams; the knife falling from his hand also recalls Harker dropping the stake and Banning ­relinquishing his hold on the Scroll of Life.

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This sequence, placed as it is at the beginning of the film, suggests that The Hound of the Baskervilles will deal with similar oedipal tensions to those found in The Mummy. However, a further comparison of it with equivalent moments in The Mummy indicates that these tensions are being posed in a different way and that, consequently, a more effective resolution of them is likely. In particular, attention has to be paid to the position adopted by each film’s principal male authority figure in relation to these events. It has already been argued that in The Mummy both Kharis’s punishment and Stephen Banning’s confrontation with Kharis parallel John Banning’s own domestic situation. The fact that the sequences which depict these traumatic events occur in the film out of proper chronological order, in flashback form, with each flashback narrated by John himself, emphasises their closeness to and relevance for him. The events culminating in Sir Hugo’s death, on the other hand, are narrated by a secondary character, Dr Mortimer (Francis De Wolff). Sherlock Holmes, unlike John Banning, is not caught up personally either in this story or in the sexual tensions that it involves. As the film makes clear, he is celibate and lives in an all-male environment; there is no Mrs Hudson in this film. While both Holmes and John Banning are played by Peter Cushing, Cushing as Holmes, the uninvolved professional, is much better equipped to deal objectively with the mystery posed within the narrative than he is as the weakened John Banning in The Mummy. Significantly in this respect, the leg injury suffered by Cushing’s Holmes during the course of his investigation is a minor setback from which he has virtually recovered by the end of the film: it by no means carries the symbolic charge of John Banning’s altogether more serious injury. The story of Sir Hugo concluded, the narrative moves into the calmer confines of Sherlock Holmes’s rooms at 221b Baker Street. As David Pirie has noted, this transition accentuates a division between the materialistic, eminently reasonable world inhabited by Holmes and the more irrational, mythic world of the Hound.29 Holmes certainly is concerned to distance himself from mystical matters. ‘There are many things in life and death that we do not understand, Mr Holmes,’ says Mortimer at one point. ‘Then I suggest you might have done better to have consulted a priest instead of a detective,’

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Holmes replies. ‘Do you imagine I can influence the powers of darkness?’ Like the police inspector in The Mummy, he states that he is interested only in ‘the plain facts’. Unlike that inspector, who is forced to relinquish this modus operandi, Holmes is able to hold to it throughout the film in which he appears. However, such is the potency of the threat posed by the Hound and what it represents that even he, the most in control of Hammer’s professionals in this, one of its most confidently authoritative films of the period, is compelled to modify his methods, although not his fundamental beliefs, before the film reaches its conclusion. That this shift is minimal when compared with the police inspector’s wholesale abandonment of his scepticism in The Mummy is symptomatic of the wider differences between the two films. While The Mummy operates essentially through analogy, its oedipal drama played out obsessively across all the film’s settings, Egyptian and English, ancient and nineteenth-century, The Hound of the Baskervilles restricts its portrayal of a troubled male identity to a particular finite geographical space, thereby rendering this trouble much more manageable. This enables the production of something lacking in The Mummy, a supremely rational narrative closure. From the calm of Sherlock Holmes’s rooms and some expository scenes in a London hotel, The Hound of the Baskervilles moves to the setting where the film’s sexual tensions will be played out, namely the Moor. The precise nature of the threat posed by this wild, untamed place is made clear early in this section of the narrative when Dr Watson takes a walk across the Moor. The hostility of the environment is quickly confirmed when he nearly steps into a snare, only to be prevented from doing so by Stapleton, who then warns him of the dangers of being swallowed up by Grimpen Mire should he leave the safety of the path. A few minutes later, Watson encounters Cecile Stapleton. Without saying a word, she runs away from him. He follows, leaving the path, and promptly falls into the Mire, to be saved at the last moment by Stapleton and his initially reluctant daughter. Here the figure of the sexually attractive woman is made equivalent with both the swamp and the lure of the snare, both deadly traps for men. Characteristically for Hammer, it is Cecile rather than Stapleton, the ostensible villain, who lures the

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male, be it Watson in this case or later Sir Henry, off the safe path, to be destroyed by either the Mire or the Hound. In the middle of the Moor stands Baskerville Hall, which functions in this context as an evocative symbol of the current troubled state of masculinity (there are no female Baskervilles). It is a beleaguered, claustrophobic construction in the midst of a hostile wilderness, within which the male is safe. Significantly, when the  Stapletons visit the Hall, only Stapleton enters. At no point in the film do we see Cecile inside it: she is of the Moor. But the line that holds the Hall is weak, suffering as it does from a congenital heart condition. Sir Henry is himself the last of the Baskervilles. This line is under attack, nominally by Stapleton but actually by Cecile, and it is to its defence that Holmes, unimplicated in the matter, springs. A feature shared by both novel and film is the absence of Sherlock Holmes from the middle third of the narrative. In the novel, this gives Watson the opportunity to gather a considerable body of mystifying facts which Holmes can eventually illuminate with his customary conciseness. It also enables Holmes to form his reading of  the case ‘off-stage’, so to speak, his mental processes hidden from us even more thoroughly than usual, so that his miraculous reappearance in the narrative coincides with a commensurately miraculous transformation of our understanding of the mysteries of the Moor. While this is also true of the film, one also finds here that in this period of absence Holmes, as given us by Hammer, has shifted his position somewhat, so that now he tells Watson, ‘There is more evil around us here than I have ever encountered before’ (which can be contrasted with his earlier ‘Do you imagine I can influence the powers of darkness?’). As if to underline this change, when he seeks the assistance of the local priest, he says ‘I am fighting evil, fighting it as surely as you do’, apparently contradicting the remarks he made at the beginning of the film. This shift brings Holmes closer to Hammer’s Van Helsing insofar as the latter incorporates a positive moral force (as symbolised by the crucifix, light etc.) into a professional ideology of positive action. In solving this mystery, Holmes takes on to himself an authority over and above that which he demonstrates in his approach to more conventional and mundane

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problems; his deducing the reason for Dr Mortimer’s initial visit, for example. Here the film is acknowledging the extremity of the threat posed by events on the Moor. This is a supreme mystery. The confidently made acknowledgement does not signal, however, any inadequacy on Holmes’s part nor any insufficiency in his methods, but instead, in stressing how difficult and important the case is, prepares the way for the detective’s triumph. The case is thus. The male Baskerville line is threatened. The Moor, hostile to the male, is linked with the sexually attractive Cecile. She in turn is linked with the Hound. One can say that in fact the film gives us two Hounds. The first is the Hound of legend, firmly separated off from the rest of the film in its own sequence. We, the audience, do not see it but instead see Sir Hugo’s reaction to it (dropping his knife, covering his eyes). It can be argued that this Hound serves an equivalent function in the drama to that served by the god Karnak in The Mummy insofar as both symbolise and guarantee an absolute male authority which underpins the narratives but is generally inaccessible to the men who appear in them (with the notable exception of the celibate Holmes). The second Hound – the dog in the mask – is the delegate of the first, as Christopher Lee’s Kharis is the delegate of Karnak. The mask itself becomes significant as an image of role playing. This notion of role playing, of re-enacting via ritual a primal truth, is reinforced by the mutilation inflicted upon the unfortunate convict Selden by an antique dagger, this being the same dagger that Sir Hugo used to commit murder. (As with The Mummy, an array of male wounds greets us at every turn.) The identity of the person responsible for the mutilation of the convict is not made clear, although circumstances (her vehement hatred of the Baskervilles) suggest that Cecile is the guilty party. On one level she is serving a similar function to Isobel/Ananka in The Mummy, with the desire for the woman associated with wounds and mutilation that emanate from Karnak or the Hound. At the same time, however, Cecile’s aggressiveness and complicity with the conspiracy clearly distinguish her from the more passive heroine of that film. In this sense she is more like Kharis, being herself the delegate of a patriarchal authority. Consequently, she suffers the same fate as Kharis – sucked down into a swamp.

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What is at stake in both The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles is masculinity. An absolute, jealous, god-like male power – embodied in the absent Karnak and the Hound of legend, whose presences are so keenly felt throughout – operates in these films as an alienating force, with male characters in each weakened and/or crippled before it. The woman is also a powerful figure in this situation, although only insofar as she is identified as the property or delegate of these absent, essentially paternal figures. There is a clear acknowledgement throughout both these films of a masculinity that is deeply troubled and anxiety-ridden. This can be seen as a representation of and response to the already-discussed changes in and disruptions of understandings of the roles and identities of men and women in the 1950s. But this situation is imagined here in such terms as make it impossible to see it as anything other than a tragedy for the male, as he is unjustly and peremptorily refused the confidence and strength that, the films assume, is his rightful inheritance. The oedipal qualities of each narrative point in this respect to the films’ overwhelming concern with what is viewed as a breakdown in the transmission of patriarchal power, with the filmmakers involved apparently feeling no need to question or in any way think about the nature of that power itself. The malecentredness of such an approach ensures that the objectification of the woman that occurs in both The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles is taken completely for granted. The breach between Hammer’s troubled male characters and a god-like and self-sufficient patriarchal certainty – with both Karnak and the Hound placed inaccessibly in a distant past – is absolute, with no possibility of a final resolution of the tensions deriving from it. So, at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles, masculinity remains in a parlous state, with a congenitally ill Sir Henry still the last of his line. (There is no romantic love interest in this film to promise a future regeneration of the Baskervilles.) However, Sir Henry’s situation has certainly been ameliorated by the professional skills of Holmes, who in solving the mystery of the Hound and thereby ensuring the death of Cecile has removed the  most immediate danger. It is because of this that The Hound of the Baskervilles contains an element lacking in The Mummy – a coda, a moment of peace in Holmes’s rooms before the film ends.

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Like other Hammer professionals from this period, Holmes is working to manage and contain a problematic of male identity and male power rather than solving it once and for all. In the final Fisher–Cushing–Lee collaboration, The Gorgon (1964), one finds this process of containment finally breaking down, with significant consequences for subsequent horror productions. In particular, the spectre of Cecile – of woman as object of terror – is revealed in The Gorgon to be an aesthetic strategy that is no longer viable.

The Gorgon To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.30 Suppose we were to ask the question: what became of the Sphinx after the encounter with Oedipus on his way to Thebes? Or, how did Medusa feel seeing herself in Perseus’ mirror just before being slain?  … Medusa and the Sphinx, like the other ancient monsters, have survived inscribed in hero narratives, in someone else’s story, not their own; so they are figures or markers of positions – places and topoi – through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning.31

As the prologue roll-up of The Gorgon informs us, the film tells of ‘a monster from an ancient age … No living thing survived and the spectre of death hovered in waiting for her next victim.’ There are no revealing comic interludes and no reassuring codas in this film. It can be read in many ways as Hammer’s most despairing, hopeless project. Its desolate conclusion, which takes place in a deserted castle and gives us the nominal hero and heroine (played by Richard Pasco and Barbara Shelley) along with Peter Cushing’s character, the man of science, all losing their lives, is only the logical conclusion of a narrative in which nearly all the characters are seen as helpless and unable to control their own fates. However, this despair should not be viewed as a sort of existential angst but

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rather must be considered as a partial wrenching apart of some of the structuring tenets of the Fisher–Cushing–Lee canon. What makes this film – a commercial failure and little valued in previous accounts of the horror genre – so important to the subsequent development of Hammer is that, while locatable within the same model of horror as earlier films, it is beginning to construct a way out of what is in effect a process of endless male denial. The despair and hopelessness which engulfs the formerly self-possessed Hammer professional in The Gorgon arises in this sense from a collapse of certain patriarchal structures. A radical shift is thereby accomplished away from questions of masculinity and male subjectivity to a broader concern with sexuality and gendered identity in general. It is a break in Hammer horror that is, as will be shown, represented via the figure of the woman, significantly split in this film into two characters, Carla, the romantic lead, and the Gorgon, the film’s monster. Arguably, this disruptive quality, the way in which The Gorgon set out to undermine certain expectations, contributed to the film’s failure at the box office. Perhaps the most striking difference between The Gorgon and the Fisher–Cushing–Lee collaborations discussed above is that The Gorgon lacks a powerful patriarchal figure like Karnak or the legendary Hound: in this film, the Gorgon, who has moved into the deserted castle that overlooks the town of Vandorf, serves no master, but herself derives from ancient myth. Vandorf itself provides a characteristic Hammer setting, with its clearly defined class boundaries and men in charge throughout. As with previous Hammer films, these men are plagued by fears and anxieties. But in this film the close and forceful presence of the Gorgon serves to accentuate this ‘man trouble’ and, crucially, in so doing reveals and in part dispels its causes. Peter Cushing plays Dr Namaroff, the head of Vandorf’s medical institute. He spends the duration of the film attempting to protect Carla (Shelley), who works as a nurse at the institute (although from what he is protecting her only becomes clear at the film’s conclusion). This romantically motivated, and ultimately unsuccessful, project is comparable both with the efforts of The Gorgon’s male romantic lead Paul Heitz (Pasco) to win Carla’s affections and, significantly, with Namaroff’s imprisonment of a madwoman in his

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charge (a woman who is held in the same building that holds Carla). In each case, a male attempt to impose a particular role or function on the woman – whether it be lover, wife or prisoner – meets with resistance from the woman concerned, with Carla in particular providing the focus for many of the tensions that ensue from this. This struggle over and for the female body is introduced in The Gorgon’s opening sequence. In this we find Bruno Heitz, Paul’s brother, painting a nude portrait of his girlfriend, Sasha, in a room littered with similar pictures of her and other women. It is into this same room – a room which functions in this film nostalgically, almost as a shrine to the notion of the female figure as the object of a male gaze – that both the father, Professor Heitz, and later his son Paul move. That even this, and all that it represents, is no safe haven for the beleaguered males in the film (unlike Baskerville Hall) becomes apparent when the Gorgon appears uninvited in the grounds of the lodge in which the room is located. Within this rather fraught situation, the two most likely candidates for the post of Hammer professional are Namaroff and Professor Heitz (Michael Goodliffe), both of whom are men of maturity and knowledge. Both of them prove resoundingly ineffective. While Cushing in this film retains from the Frankenstein cycle in particular his pragmatic attitude to physical and medical matters, he is shown to be dangerously, and in the end fatally, narrow-minded in his emotional refusal to confront the problem of the Gorgon. Professor Heitz is much more flexible and openminded: ‘I believe in the existence of everything which the human brain is unable to disprove,’ he says at one point. Unfortunately, he is turned to stone before the film has run more than half its course. In the latter part of the film, Professor Meister, yet another man of knowledge, arrives in Vandorf. A surrogate father to Paul and, as played by Christopher Lee, much closer to the decisive authority figure one expected of Hammer at this time, he does finally succeed in destroying the Gorgon. That this act does not function, however, as even a nominal restoration of patriarchal authority is suggested not only by the somewhat arbitrary way in which Meister is introduced into the narrative but also by the fact that, at the end of the film, every important male character – with the exception of Meister himself – is either dead or dying.

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The Gorgon speaks then of a fairly comprehensive male defeat. But, importantly, this is entangled within the film with an ­unwillingness to project the cause of men’s troubles on to either an idealised female (as was the case with Ananka in The Mummy) or a wicked woman (Cecile in The Hound of the Baskervilles). One can note in this respect the importance of mirrors and reflections in The Gorgon. This is part of the original myth of course – in order to guide his sword accurately, Perseus used the reflection of the Medusa on his shield. But it is taken up in this film in a more complex way. A mirror features prominently in the decor of the castle interior, the Gorgon’s home, and reflected in it at one point or another, and always just before their fateful encounters with the Gorgon, are Professor Heitz, Paul Heitz and Dr Namaroff. Also, Paul’s first glimpse of the monster occurs when he looks into a pool and sees its reflection next to his own (Figure 3.2). Here, explicitly, the Gorgon is given us as a ‘male’ problem, arising as it does from a man looking at himself. Unlike Isobel/Ananka and Cecile, both of whom are tied inextricably to strong paternal figures, Carla, The Gorgon’s romantic heroine, is autonomous, with her own somewhat confused feelings

Figure 3.2  Paul (Richard Pasco) sees the reflection of the Gorgon (Barbara Shelley) next to his own in The Gorgon (1964)

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and desires. Various men seek to control and possess her: they fail. But, crucially, Carla is unable to rid herself entirely of their attempts to objectify her, mainly because she herself is already possessed by the Gorgon (with this the knowledge from which Namaroff is attempting to shield her). The Gorgon functions in this respect as an ultimate symbol of female passivity and objectification. She does not actually do anything in the film. The horror deriving from her arises from a male reaction to her presence. Indeed she herself arises from a male reflection. It can be argued that she figures in the film as the logical endpoint of Namaroff’s and Paul’s desires – she is what they want Carla to become, the female as object, as an extension of their own being. But here the fearfulness of the objectified woman, something only implicit in The Mummy, has become an altogether more visible monstrousness. This splitting – between woman as object and the nascent female subjectivity embodied by Carla – entails a recognition, both by the male characters in The Gorgon and in a sense by Hammer itself, that the woman as previously figured in the classic Hammer oedipal scenario was very much a male projection or fantasy, with this projection now perceived as itself a monstrous imposition. This recognition, coupled as it is in The Gorgon with the absence, so to speak, of the absent father, provokes a collapse; that is, the structure that has previously guaranteed a patriarchal order – within which representations of a troubled masculinity could be contained and managed – disappears. It is because of this that when, at the end of the film, Paul turns to look at the Gorgon, even though he knows he will die because of it, his look is particularly charged inasmuch as it is the most visible enactment within the film of that recognition; for Paul and, to a certain extent, for the classic Hammer horror, it is actually a kind of suicide. After Meister has beheaded the Gorgon, he makes the dying Paul look at the severed head as it turns back into Carla. ‘She’s free now,’ he says. Given that Carla is dead, this is a somewhat ironic statement. However, in symbolic terms if nothing else, Carla is free of the Gorgon, the object-woman. Meister’s climactic act is the final moment of a particular patriarchal decisiveness. After The Gorgon an acknowledgement of female subjectivity, of female characters existing apart from or resisting male definitions of them, becomes

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a significant element in Hammer horror, not overnight of course nor in every film, but instead as a general mobilising concern. The ‘man-problem’ which powered The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles has been brought to a moment of crisis and then dispersed.

Other horrors The changes taking place in British cinema in the 1950s were not exploited by Hammer alone. Other companies and individuals, also seeing a potential new market opening up, moved into horror production in the mid to late 1950s (although none to such a great extent), with others following after Hammer in particular had proved that substantial profits could be earned in this area. A survey of these films reveals that there was no alternative tradition that could have offered even the remotest challenge to the dominance of Hammer. Many of the non-Hammer horrors did in fact attend to issues also being dealt with by Hammer, although none succeeded in articulating as attractive an aesthetic formula as that devised by Hammer’s filmmakers. What these films do represent, however, are various possibilities for the British horror genre which, while they might not have been taken up in any significant way, comprised an important part of British film production at this time. In particular, their existence testifies to the heterogeneity of the British horror genre in this period. Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker, two producers working in partnership, were active in British horror in the latter part of the 1950s. Their films included Blood of the Vampire (Henry Cass, 1958 – featuring Barbara Shelley, later to star in The Gorgon, with a screenplay by Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster), The Trollenberg Terror (Quentin Lawrence, 1958 – taken, Hammer-style, from a TV play, with screenplay again by Sangster), Jack the Ripper (Robert Baker, 1958 – from yet another Sangster screenplay) and Flesh and the Fiends (1959, the story of grave robbers Burke and Hare, directed by John Gilling, a frequent contributor to the genre). While these films all have some connection with Hammer, in terms either of creative personnel or of a vaguely equivalent period

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setting, one cannot detect any stylistic or thematic elements that bind them together into a coherent body of work. What is apparent in the first and last listed above, however, is a similar agenda to that addressed by Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle, namely the abuse of the individual in the name of a presumptuous medical science. The figures of Donald Wolfit’s Callistratus in Blood of the Vampire and Peter Cushing’s Dr Knox in Flesh and the Fiends, no matter how differently they are played, signal a shift away from the monsters of the Universal period on to a more visibly human agency of evil.32 The producer John Croydon, who had been an associate producer on Ealing’s Dead of Night, collaborated with director Robert Day (later to make She [1965] for Hammer) and British-born horror star Boris Karloff on two films shot back-to-back and released in 1958, The Grip of the Strangler and Corridors of Blood. In these one finds yet again an absence of the more traditional monster figure and a concern with the doctor-scientist. Perhaps Corridors of Blood’s closest companion piece in the Hammer canon is Revenge of Frankenstein (also 1958); in both the working-class patient functions as the object for the scientist’s often very painful experiments; this in turn might be read as enacting a suspicion and fear of the notion of the nurturing Welfare State which, as our earlier analysis of The Quatermass Experiment has demonstrated, was apparent in many areas of British cinema in the 1950s.33 The differences between the two films are quite striking, however. Corridors of Blood was (like Grip of the Strangler) shot in black and white and strives for a realism which rarely concerned Hammer. The operations – done without anaesthetic – in Corridors of Blood are painfully authentic; the image of Karloff frantically attempting to conduct the operation as quickly as possible stands poles apart from Cushing’s cool relish of his surgical skills in the Frankenstein cycle. It is in this difference between Corridors of Blood and Revenge of Frankenstein and the implications it has for the way in which their respective narratives develop that one can arguably locate a reason for Hammer’s greater success in the genre. The Karloff figure in both of Day’s films is a man crushed by the world in which he lives and works. Cushing’s Frankenstein, on the other hand, effortlessly dominates the world through which he moves. His eventual and inevitable failure is caused not by any flaw or weakness in his own

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character but rather by the inability of the world around him to live up to the demands of his indomitable will. As we have already seen, this domination and mastery of the environment is one of the distinguishing features of 1950s Hammer horror. These non-Hammer films – Blood of the Vampire, Flesh and the Fiends, Corridors of Blood and Grip of the Strangler – certainly deal with issues that are also handled by Hammer: for example, the questionable authority represented by the figure of the scientist (in a nuclear age that saw the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and the cruelty implicit in the medical objectification of the patient. But the stress laid by these productions on failure and defeat, especially in Corridors of Blood, immediately sets them apart from a more robust and assertive Hammer horror. Commencing in the late 1950s, Anglo-Amalgamated produced three important horror films: Horrors of the Black Museum (Arthur Crabtree, 1959), Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960) and, perhaps most notoriously, Peeping Tom. All three had contemporary settings, utilised garish colour schemes and drew heavily on the iconography of 1950s pornography. All three have also been criticised (and praised) for their representation of ‘sadistic’ violence and have subsequently been dubbed by David Pirie ‘the Sadian trilogy’.34 An awareness of these films as a constituent part of the horror genre is perhaps made difficult by the formidable presence of Michael Powell, a British cinema ‘auteur’ whose film has for various reasons come to be regarded in certain circles as one of the greatest British films ever made.35 Panned by critics on its initial release, it (and indeed much of Powell’s earlier work with Emeric Pressburger) has played a key part in the critical remapping of British cinema that has taken place since the early 1970s, and which, as has already been shown, has involved the recovery of fantastic elements from the margins of previous critical histories. Within this context, Peeping Tom’s belonging to one of the more disreputable of genres, as well as its self-reflexivity, the way in which it offers itself as a meditation on the nature of cinema, has marked it as a particularly charged example of a type of British filmmaking that can be used to challenge a critical privileging of the documentary tradition in British cinema.

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While acknowledging the virtuosity and thematic complexity of Peeping Tom, it can in fact be argued that it fits in very tightly with the two other films that comprise this short Sadeian cycle. The self-referentiality of Powell’s film – in which a cameraman murders women as he photographs them – can be aligned with a self-­reflexivity inherent in the cycle as a whole, and one that was becoming ever more explicit before Powell’s entrance into the horror genre. The significance of Peeping Tom in this respect is that it accelerated and to a certain extent transformed a process or movement already in existence, providing a suitably accomplished endpoint to a group of films that were already heading, albeit in a far less distinguished and almost certainly unconscious manner, in that direction. An examination of the opening sequences of all three films is helpful here. Horrors of the Black Museum commences with a woman having her eyes gouged out by spikes that emerge unexpectedly from a pair of binoculars. Circus of Horrors begins with a screaming, horribly scarred woman (a victim of Dr Rossiter, an unscrupulous plastic surgeon) smashing a mirror, refusing to look at her own reflection. The first shot of Peeping Tom is a close-up of an eye which opens to the sound of a camera shutter. The following sequence, which depicts the murder of a prostitute, is seen almost entirely through the ‘eye’ of a handheld camera. Two factors that work to bind this trilogy together, aside from those of colour and iconography mentioned above, are immediately apparent. The first is the repeated references to looking: the binoculars in Horrors of the Black Museum, the mirror in Circus of Horrors and the camera/eye in Peeping Tom. Only in the last is the link between looking and cinema spectatorship made explicit, but this parallel is available in the other films, particularly in the way they conceive of the audience. David Pirie has observed how Circus of Horrors plays on the dual response of a circus audience to seeing, on the one hand, success and survival, and on the other, death and disaster.36 As the film progresses and the body count increases – the beautiful lion tamer mauled to death by her lions, the beautiful trapeze artist plunging to her death, the beautiful female ‘target’ for the knife-thrower receiving a knife in the neck – the circus, not surprisingly, becomes known

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as ‘the jinxed circus’ and consequently becomes more popular with its audience, who clearly have an appetite for such ‘entertainment’, for such horror. Similarly, in Horrors of the Black Museum Michael Gough plays a demented writer who engineers a series of particularly unpleasant murders and then writes books about them, books which inevitably turn out to be bestsellers. In an important sense, both the circus-goers and Gough’s avid readership stand in for us, the audience for horror cinema. Like us, they have come to see the violence and gore. It is as if we, that is the British cinema-going public of the 1950s, have actually been placed in the drama of each film. In this way, the films offer us a means of access into the horror, a position from which we can safely view gratuitous acts of violence, as well as providing for themselves a guarantee of a need or desire for this type of entertainment. Yes, Circus of Horrors and Horrors of the Black Museum seem to be self-reassuringly saying, there is a public demand for the horror product. On this level, these films are just as much about a new market for horror as they are about more traditional generic concerns. The particular self-reflexivity of this approach is taken on to another level in Peeping Tom, where the audience that is literally in the drama disappears and the film’s energies are directed instead towards an exploration of the nature of vision and looking in the cinema. The limited distancing from the intense death scenes given us in the first two films, their essentially exhibitionistic nature (most obviously in Circus of Horrors where all the victims are quite literally on show), is lost – hence the disturbing qualities of Powell’s film. As spectators of Peeping Tom, the cinema audience becomes implicated in a way that the circus audience never does. The second binding factor apparent from an appraisal of these three films’ respective opening sequences lies in the aggression and violence against women represented therein, and particularly the independent woman. In Horrors of the Black Museum it is the woman gazing, appropriating the look to herself through the binoculars, who is punished by losing her eyes. In Circus of Horrors a woman before the mirror is forced to recognise herself, in what might be read as a sadistic reply to Dead of Night’s ‘Haunted Mirror’ sequence, as scarred, a woman moreover clad only in her

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underwear, inviting an audience to gaze at her semi-naked body while at the same time being repelled by the scar on her face. As a final turn of the screw, the image is juxtaposed within the frame with a photograph of the woman unscarred. In the photo she is passive and complete, in reality she is active (smashing the mirror) and mutilated. Finally, in Peeping Tom, the women who die, from the prostitute onwards, all break the first cinematic ‘rule’: they look directly at the camera, that is, they resist being the objects of its voyeuristic gaze, and it is Mark Lewis (Carol Boehm), the psychopathic cameraman, who puts them ‘back in their place’ with the assistance of a sharpened and decidedly phallic tripod leg. Here, as in so many other areas of cinema, to look is to be male and to be looked at female, with any attempted circumvention of this registering as a transgression.37 It has already been noted that the problem of identifying the role of women at this time revolved largely around a contradiction between the ideological placing of the woman within the home and family, and the economic necessity for women to work outside that institution in order to support it and the economy within which it was located. In dramatising this, these three films, and in particular Circus of Horrors and Peeping Tom, where all the female victims are working women, equate the figure of the working, independent woman with the woman actively looking. It is a condition of the undoubted powerfulness of these representations, and a limitation inherent throughout the cycle, that they are posed as threats to a male order that inevitably provoke acts of repressive violence. The sadism in these Sadeian films is directed then almost entirely at women by men. This immediately problematises a reading of Peeping Tom which sees it purely and simply as a self-reflexive meditation on the nature of cinema. Certainly Powell’s film exhibits a much greater awareness of the gender-specific issues with which it is dealing than do the preceding two films. But, as Linda Williams has noted, the fact that the only woman to survive Mark’s murderous hobby is offered us as essentially non-sexual as opposed to the sexually assertive female characters found elsewhere in the film demonstrates that Peeping Tom, despite its undoubted cleverness and brilliance, is still to a certain extent caught up with some of the more questionable attributes of its companion films.38

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If Peeping Tom provided the spectacular conclusion to this trilogy (and one doubts whether it could have gone any further, even without the hostile press reception for Powell’s work), it did not staunch the flow of non-Hammer horror that had begun in the mid-1950s. However, a survey of the films produced in this period reveals no other approach that engages with a British social reality in as meaningful and significant a way. Certainly there are further groupings to be found. For example, the influence of 1940s horror producer Val Lewton is felt in three films: Night of the Demon (1957, directed by one-time Lewton associate Jacques Tourneur), Cat Girl (1957, directed by Alfred Shaughnessy and featuring Barbara Shelley in her first British film) and Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers, 1962, a tale of witchcraft on a university campus adapted from a Fritz Leiber novel by American writers Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont). Lewton’s horror films were often structured through an ambivalence regarding the existence of the monster: a real, independent entity, or an externalisation of a psychological state?39 An equivalent ambiguity is reproduced within and provides much of the narrative drive in the three British ‘Lewton’ films. Such ambivalence, and the chiaroscuro lighting associated with it, was, like the disturbing and provocative self-reflexivity of Peeping Tom, alien to the Hammer approach. Again this suggests that one of the defining characteristics of Hammer period horror, that which separated it out from other horror films, was the sense of certainty that it projected. More peculiarly British in the relation they bore to an indigenous strain of SF/horror developed in the 1950s, most notably by Nigel Kneale (creator of Quatermass) and John Wyndham, were two film versions of Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) and Children of the Damned (Anton M. Leader, 1963), and their close companion piece, Joseph Losey’s Hammer film The Damned (1961). All three, through representations of social violence directed against alien and/or mutated children, constructed a critique of a more general social repressiveness. However, the limitations inherent in their shared subject matter – children with unnatural powers – precluded any development of this approach into a substantial body of work.

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One other film worthy of mention here is City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1960), not only because it marked producer Milton Subotsky’s entrance into the genre (he would later make a series of anthology horror films for the Amicus company) but also because of its bizarre expressionist style which seemed to have more in common with the contemporaneous Italian horror films of Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda and others. Lacking influence in itself, it is nevertheless symptomatic of the variety of approaches that characterised British horror production. To this can be added inert films such as Dr Blood’s Coffin (Sidney J. Furie, 1961) and Konga (John Lemont, 1960), whose existence at the very least testified to the currency of horror as an established category of production in the British film industry.

Conclusion The Hammer horror films from this period bound together within a distinctive and original aesthetic form ideas about national identity and gender. While some horror films with contemporary settings, most notably Circus of Horrors and Peeping Tom, were clearly working with similar issues, registering the contradictory position of women in relation to broadly patriarchal definitions of their role in Britain of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hammer, liberated from such settings although equally locatable within a particular sociohistorical context, concerned itself far more systematically with the psychological consequences of certain shifts in gender position for a male identity. The male wounds and symbolic castrations around which it constructed its oedipal narratives functioned essentially as metaphors, permitting in the interests of entertainment a coded engagement with the social reality within which Hammer found itself. It was the metaphor of castration, and the male-centred view of the world that it involved, that both enabled and, on another level, blocked off the Hammer text, acting both as the axis around which it revolved and the point beyond which it could not see. The Hammer films from this period offered a variety of responses to it, but it was not until The Gorgon’s recognition of the repressiveness

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at the heart of Hammer horror that Hammer (and, one can argue, British horror in general) was set free to progress and develop. That this decisive shift occurred in the very year of Harold Wilson’s coming to power had about it a certain degree of irony. This is not only because Wilson, responsible in the late 1940s for the government’s dealings with the film industry, had expressed a dislike of the sensationalist trend in British cinema that was later exemplified so well by British horror, but also because it was at the commencement of the premiership of Wilson, the ‘professional manager’, that the discourse of the professional within Hammer horror became much less effective.40 In subsequent years, there were to be further substantial shifts in the ways in which male and female identity were commonly understood. Later chapters will detail how the post-1964 British horror film, through responding to these and other social and economic changes, ensured its continued aesthetic vitality and commercial success. Before this, however, we turn to the two principal stars of British horror whose careers in British cinema endured, in varying degrees of health, through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: namely Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula.

Notes  1 The three would be reunited in 1967 for Planet’s Night of the Big Heat. Cushing and Lee would not appear together again in a Hammer horror film until Dracula AD 1972, directed by Alan Gibson, in 1972, although they would both feature in the non-horror She, directed by Robert Day, in 1965.   2 In my judgement only ten British horror films were produced between 1945 and 1955, while in the next nine years seventy-two were released. These figures are necessarily approximate and none of the points I make in this chapter rely on their absolute accuracy. This is because while there is a body of work in British cinema that clearly offers itself as horror, certain films have an ambiguous status; for example, Hammer’s own psycho-thrillers. Some of these I have included in my grand total while others, which I have judged less important, have been excluded. However, these marginal cases are only few in number, and neither their exclusion nor their inclusion causes the figures for British horror production to fluctuate to any great extent.

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  3 Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945–1960 (London: Methuen 1981), 127.   4 ‘The spring of 1955 was the zenith of Britain’s post-war boom and it seemed legitimate, after all that had gone before, to the average Englishman to feel entitled to relax and anticipate the fulfilment of Butler’s prophecy of a dramatic and imminent rise in the standard of living. Any such mood of complacency was to be rapidly dissipated during 1956, one of the most momentous years in post-war history and one which sharply and uncomfortably upset many of the attitudes and assumptions established in the ten years we have been examining.’ T. E. B. Howarth, Prospect and Reality: Great Britain 1945–1955 (London: Harper Collins, 1985), 237; for an account that is more ambivalent about the ‘shock’ to Britain of 1956, see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Holmes and Meier, 1978), 233–4.   5 John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 25.   6 Ibid., 20–7.   7 D. E. Cooper, ‘Looking Back in Anger’, in Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence: 1951–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 257.   8 Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, 25.   9 Stuart Hall, ‘Reformism and the Legislation of Consent’, in National Deviancy Conference, Permissiveness and Control – the Fate of Sixties Legislation (London, 1980), 23. 10 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 235–8. 11 Hammer produced a series of ‘psycho-thrillers’ from 1961 onwards – in the period under discussion: Taste of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961), Maniac (Michael Carreras, 1963), Paranoiac (Freddie Francis, 1963) and Nightmare (Freddie Francis, 1964). These were usually filmed in black and white and, more often than not, written by Jimmy Sangster. Clearly designed – in their short, emotive titles and their concentration on themes related to insanity and mental illness – to exploit the enormous success of Hitchcock’s Psycho, in fact the plot variations played out in each bore a closer resemblance to HenriGeorges Clouzot’s classic French thriller from 1954, Les Diaboliques (although, to be fair to Hammer, they can also be seen as deriving from that company’s own The Man in Black – 1949, directed by Francis Searle with Jimmy Sangster in the production team – which was itself adapted from the famous BBC radio series). The central character in a Hammer psycho-thriller is usually made to doubt his or her sanity

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as he/she w ­ itnesses a series of apparently inexplicable occurrences. After a  number of complicated plot twists, these are shown to have a perfectly natural  explanation, one that is rooted firmly within the criminality or psychopathology of one character or a group of characters. (Fanatic – made in 1965 and directed by Silvio Narizzano – is one exception to this.) 12 Vincent Porter discusses the influence of Hammer’s studio set-up on its working methods in ‘The Context of Creativity: Ealing Studios and Hammer Films’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 194. 13 Raymond Durgnat on Hammer’s Dracula: ‘Count Dracula becomes then the “soul” of erotic egoism, at bay in a Victorian era which, far from being characterized as, in contrast to ours, puritan and repressive, is opulent, materialist and rationalist (very like ours). Even the cross which destroys the vampire is despiritualized. It’s used like a special kind of hypodermic needle, a ritual prophylactic.’ A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 224. 14 Anthony Hinds has been acknowledged by many Hammer personnel as a key creative figure at the studio. For example, Michael Carreras: ‘I suppose Tony [Anthony Hinds] was really the major force, particularly in the horror field. He wrote a lot of them under another name (John Elder), he produced most of them and he had a marvellous relationship with Terry Fisher. I think you’ll find that on all the so-called classic Hammer horror films it was a combination of Tony Hinds and Terry Fisher.’ Quote taken from John Brosnan, The Horror People (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976), 116.   It is not easy to ascertain the importance of Hinds’s creative input into Hammer horror. His writing pseudonym appears both on some of Hammer’s most interesting films (Frankenstein Created Woman [Terence Fisher, 1967], for example) and on its least successful (The Evil of Frankenstein [Freddie Francis, 1964]); much the same can be said for screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, who after writing The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula went on in the 1960s to write some uninspired psycho-thrillers.   The biographical material on Hammer filmmakers in this chapter is largely drawn from Brosnan’s book and Little Shoppe of Horrors, 4 (April 1978). 15 David Thomson’s well-known designation of Hammer filmmakers as ‘decent men who did the garden at weekends’ can be read in this sense  as a backhanded acknowledgement of Hammer’s professional/

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journeyman identity. See David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), 191. 16 Quoted in Variety, 28 May 1958. 17 Michael Frayn, ‘Festival’, in Michael Sissons and Philip French (eds), Age of Austerity 1945–1965 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 331. 18 Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (London/Newton Abbot: Cameron and Tayleur in association with David and Charles, 1977). 19 Arthur Koestler (ed.), Suicide of a Nation? (London: Hutchinson, 1963), 24. 20 Ibid., 14. 21 Hall, ‘Reformism and the Legislation of Consent’, 37. 22 Quoted in David Childs, Britain Since 1945: A Political History (London: Law Book Co. of Australasia, 1979), 105. 23 Financial Times, 7 January 1966. 24 The authority of Hammer’s Dracula is of a different, although related, nature and will be discussed in the next chapter. 25 For examples of some of the marketing gimmicks used by Hammer to attract young audiences, see David Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case Study (London: British Film Institute, 1980). 26 Again Count Dracula, the greatest parasite of all, will be discussed in the next chapter. 27 The Mummy stands at the end of a tradition of narratives dealing with objects removed from the far-flung corners of the empire causing destruction in Britain; for example, see Wilkie Collins’s classic novel of 1868, The Moonstone. 28 The Mummy can to a certain extent be aligned with another horror film in which a swamp plays an important part, namely Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Both comprise highly complex explorations of gender identity within different national contexts (although some critical accounts of Psycho tend to universalise or ‘denationalise’ its content). 29 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 55. 30 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 273. 31 Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 109. 32 Clearly the scientist is also an important figure in Universal horror, but there he usually features as ‘the mad scientist’, someone whose project is marked from its inception as insane. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about British horror’s scientists is that their motives tend to be,

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initially at least, quite humane. What is questionable are their methods and the usually disastrous outcome of their experiments. 33 A 1950s newspaper review of The Revenge of Frankenstein made this connection in the headline, ‘Will Dr Frankenstein join the Health Scheme?’ (News of the World, 31 August 1958). 34 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 99–106. 35 In Gilbert Adair and Nick Roddick’s A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film (London: Columbus Books, 1985), 140–3, a number of critics selected their top ten British films. Peeping Tom came second in the aggregate list (with Kind Hearts and Coronets [Robert Hamer, 1949] coming first). For a discussion of Powell’s work, see Ian Christie (ed.), Powell, Pressburger and Others (London: British Film Institute, 1978); and Ian Christie, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (London: Waterstone, 1985). 36 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 102–3. 37 See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods – Volume 2 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 303–15. 38 See Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Mary Ann Doane et  al. (eds), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: American Film Institute, 1984), 83–99. 39 For a discussion of Lewton’s work, see Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (London: Viking, 1972); and J. P. Telotte, Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 40 For a discussion of some of the critical implications of Wilson’s likes and dislikes in British cinema, see Charles Barr, ‘Amnesia and Schizophrenia’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 1–29.

4

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Frankenstein and Dracula

Frankenstein (or the Monster that often goes under his name) and Dracula are without doubt the two ‘stars’ of the horror genre as well as being the most influential and widely known products of literary gothic. This fact raises the question of how Hammer’s Frankenstein and Dracula cycles relate to the earlier novels and films which originated and developed these figures. To put it another way, how can one conceive of Frankenstein’s and Dracula’s historical passage from their nineteenth-century literary origins to their entrance into British cinema in the 1950s? In an essay on the various adaptations of Frankenstein, Paul O’Flinn remarks, ‘There is no such thing as Frankenstein, there are only Frankensteins, as the text is ceaselessly rewritten, reproduced, refilmed and redesigned.’1 If this is true, what needs to be considered is whether relating the various film Frankensteins directly to Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel, or for that matter to a broader eighteenth-and nineteenth-century gothic sensibility, has any explanatory force. It has already been noted that in many ways the horror film genre in the form that we understand it today was founded by Universal in the early 1930s. This company established various monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy) within cycles of films, with their destruction and subsequent reconstitution built into a particular generic pattern that commanded the movement from one film to another. It was this model with which Hammer was working when it commenced its cycles. It invoked a structure, a set of expectations (which involved the names of monsters, aspects of iconography) in order that its audience, for whom Universal

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horror was in many ways the norm, would recognise Hammer’s films as belonging to that genre. However, at the same time Hammer worked to differentiate its product from American horror, directing its films at a particular audience. Hammer’s Frankenstein and Dracula films exist then not as one of a number of historically specific variants or interpretations arranged around an originating literary text or cultural myth, but rather as part of a chain of interpretations which runs through particular social and historical contexts. Clearly this works against any notion of an unbroken continuity that links either literary gothic or a more diffuse gothic sensibility directly to British horror cinema. (While Hammer’s filmmakers might on occasion rescue elements which had been lost in earlier stage and film adaptations of either Mary Shelley’s or Bram Stoker’s work, such activity needs to be located within this broader project of product differentiation.) Bearing this in mind, what we need to look for in our account of these films is, first, the ways in which Hammer established its own versions of the Baron and the Count, how it differentiated them from earlier versions; and secondly, how these figures were developed throughout the cycles in which they featured. As far as the latter is concerned, one often finds – particularly in the Frankenstein cycle – that there is rather more innovation and rethinking than one might have supposed. For example, one of the more obvious elements that bind Hammer’s Frankenstein and Dracula films together is the presence of Peter Cushing as Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as Dracula (Lee does not appear in The Brides of Dracula [Terence Fisher, 1960]; Cushing is replaced by Ralph Bates in The Horror of Frankenstein [Jimmy Sangster, 1970]: Cushing also appears as Van Helsing in Dracula, The Brides of Dracula, Dracula AD 1972 [Alan Gibson, 1972] and The Satanic Rites of Dracula [Alan Gibson, 1973]). However, the attitude adopted towards them by  the various films is never fixed but, on the contrary, is  constantly being modulated and reworked in relation to changes going on both within the genre and in society in general. In fact, the eventual fate of each cycle can be traced to the degree to which it can sustain such a reworking and rearticulation of its constitutive elements.



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Frankenstein Critics dealing with the novel Frankenstein and subsequent theatrical and cinematic versions often seem to be searching for elements that link all the works together. For David Pirie, writing about Hammer’s early Frankenstein films, continuity is provided through relating these to a gothic tradition which is seen as permeating the last two hundred years of British culture (although elsewhere he displays a clear awareness of the historical specificity of Hammer’s films): ‘Terence Fisher and his collaborators transformed the Baron into a magnificently arrogant aristocratic rebel, in the direct Byronic tradition, who never relinquishes his explorations for one moment.’2 For other critics, there is a continuity in the meanings (psychological and cultural) that run beneath what are in this case seen as historically specific variants of the Frankenstein myth, which itself symbolises and crystallises a modern consciousness of the world. In an essay on stage and film versions of Frankenstein, Albert Lavalley attempts to establish what exactly these various adaptations have in common with Shelley’s novel: ‘they share a vision of man as victim and outcast, innately good and open to the joys of nature and human society, but cut off from positive emotional responses and severed from society, a tormented and pitiful creature’.3 However, at the same time he also identifies a problem in the adaptive process from book to stage/screen which, regardless of the degree of its faithfulness to the story, ensures that each adaptation of Frankenstein can be only partial and incomplete: Almost any visualising of the Monster makes him the focal point and a point that is perforce primarily physical. The book may gradually present us with a fully formed human psyche whose feelings, yearnings, and logic are often more profound than those who reject its outward husk, but the stage and film must fix that outward appearance from the very start … the problem of make-up in dramatizing Frankenstein would remain both an occasion for drama and spectacle and a barrier against the deeper themes of the novel.4

What Lavalley recognises (although he does not develop this insight in his article) is that the visibility of the creature that results from

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theatrical and cinematic adaptation is necessarily destructive of much, if not all, of the novel’s distinctive identity. In particular, what is lost is the way in which in the novel the Monster functions as a sort of tabula rasa, a blank space (descriptions of it are conspicuously lacking in detail) within and around which various moral and political debates can be staged.5 In both stage and film versions the Monster or creature is more visibly, materially present, leading its own independent existence, the nature of its monstrosity fixed, there for all to see. Connected with this, a fascination with its physical appearance and especially with its creation and destruction becomes far more important than in Shelley’s work: it is no accident that the most ‘spectacular’ and intricate – the most arresting – mobilisation of ‘trucage’ centres so frequently either on the initial appearance of the monster or on its ultimate destruction; or even more tellingly, on its birth, the process of its construction ‘there before our very eyes’, an essential ingredient of the Frankenstein films, of the Jekyll and Hyde versions, the werewolf films and Hammer’s Dracula series.6

One does indeed find in Universal’s 1931 version of Frankenstein (directed by James Whale and based on Hamilton Deane’s stage play rather than Mary Shelley’s novel) and its 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein (also Whale) moments of visual spectacle associated with the creation of both male and female monsters. This does not mean, however, that it is in the nature of film versions of Frankenstein to be less complex or worthwhile than Shelley’s novel. Rather, we need to be aware of and sensitive to the different ways in which literature and cinema go about the production of meaning and significance. As has been noted by many critics, the Universal Frankenstein cycle centred on the Monster rather than on Frankenstein himself, a Monster whose appearance was fixed from the beginning by Jack Pierce’s now famous make-up (the large forehead, the bolts through the neck, etc.). This Monster, which survived across a range of films with ersatz mid-European settings, is signalled – through its hobolike costume and its position within the various narratives  – as a proletarian figure, this of course having a particular signifying force during the American Depression, and each film in the

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cycle can be seen as exhibiting an ambivalent attitude towards this proletariat-monster. On the one hand, the working class is, literally, monstrous, destructive and dangerous; in this sense, the films adopt a reactionary position, warning as they do against positive class action. On the other hand, however, the Monster is also a figure of sympathy and pathos, mutely (although temporarily acquiring some basic linguistic skills in Bride of Frankenstein) suffering social injustice, a potential locus for an audience identification which is essentially masochistic. In the Universal cycle as a whole, the fixing of the Monster’s appearance mainly in class terms results in an approach in which gender-based issues – interwoven with a class discourse in the first two films, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (with Frankenstein’s wife and a female monster mediating between the scientist and his male creation) – are marginalised or excluded as the cycle progresses. Significantly in this respect, it is the male monster which survives the explosion that concludes Bride of Frankenstein while the female monster, defined through her gender rather than through her class, perishes. Between 1957 and 1973 Hammer released seven Frankenstein films: The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1958), The Evil of Frankenstein (Freddie Francis, 1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (Fisher, 1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (Fisher, 1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (Jimmy Sangster, 1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (Fisher, 1973). Peter Cushing starred as Baron Frankenstein in six of these productions, and his presence was obviously important in binding the films together into a recognisable unity. To this can be added those formal properties which characterised the work of Terence Fisher, who directed five of the seven, and, more generally, what might be termed a studio ‘house style’ – which included the use of particular settings, actors, etc. –  that emerged from the formative activity of the 1950s (and towards which both Cushing and Fisher were extensive contributors). Hammer’s construction of a Frankenstein cycle takes on elements of the pre-existing Universal cycle; most notably, the foregrounding of the name of ‘Frankenstein’, which is widely recognisable as a generic category, a marketable horror ‘star’. In addition, as the cycle

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develops, a movement or pattern from (re)constitution to destruction becomes evident both within and between films, although in Hammer it is Frankenstein himself, rather than the Monster, who is caught up in and defined through this constitutive-destructive process (but, importantly, not always destroyed at the end of any film). This change of emphasis is connected with and contributes to a wider shift of focus away from concerns of class towards a set of historically determined and specific gender problematics, thereby aligning the Frankenstein cycle with the characteristic concerns of the British horror genre in the 1950s. The process of product differentiation, of negotiating with a preexisting version of Frankenstein, is most apparent, as one would expect, in the earliest part of the cycle. In fact it is in The Curse of Frankenstein and The Revenge of Frankenstein that, through this negotiation, a conceptual and thematic framework is established upon which subsequent productions are founded. What these films are doing is articulating the figure of Frankenstein within and making it relevant to a particular sociohistorical context, bringing him back to Britain, so to speak. The opening sequence of The Curse of Frankenstein, in which a priest visits the Baron in the prison where he is awaiting execution for a murder (which, we later learn, was actually committed by his Creature) and the Baron proceeds to tell him his story, has a twofold function. First, it invokes memories of the moralistic dimension of the early Universal horror films, the stress laid there on the dangers of straying outside social and moral norms (which, of course, is also an important aspect of the original novel). Secondly, it explicitly announces a rewriting of the Frankenstein myth, a return to and reworking of origins which will result – as is hinted by the fact that it is Frankenstein himself who tells his own story – in the privileging of the creator over the monster. In this sense, the priest’s ‘Perhaps you’d better start from the beginning’ refers as much to Hammer as it does to the Baron. This combination of pre-existing and innovatory generic elements is reiterated in the relationship between Frankenstein and his tutor then friend, Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart). On one level, this reproduces the moralistic element present in Frankenstein’s encounter with the priest, with Paul frequently arguing for the

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social responsibility of the scientist and Frankenstein supporting an idea of ‘pure’, socially uncommitted scientific research. There can be no doubt that this debate had a particular resonance in the period which saw the birth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.7 In this sense, Victor Frankenstein operates as yet another of Hammer’s male authority figures. As was the case with the Hammer films discussed in the previous chapter, this authority manifests itself in the organised, professional manner with which the Baron pursues his scientific activities; clearly he is a very different sort of scientist from the more melodramatically emotional Frankenstein portrayed by Colin Clive in the first two Universal films (Figure  4.1). But Hammer’s Frankenstein exhibits only a limited number of the bourgeois-professional virtues, as is demonstrated by his eventual alienation from the far more conventionally (and literally) b ­ ourgeois Krempe. The latter’s wishing to take Elizabeth (Hazel Court), Frankenstein’s wife, away from the scene of the Baron’s experiments displays a bourgeois concern with separating work from domesticity which Frankenstein resists and challenges. One can note in this respect the several occasions on which the Baron goes happily from his gory work to a scene of ­domesticity

Figure 4.1  Peter Cushing’s ‘organised, professional’ Baron Frankenstein in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) is ‘a very different sort of scientist’ to Colin Clive’s portrayal in Universal’s version from 1931

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and the moments where, first playfully and later seriously, he considers inviting Elizabeth to be his assistant as examples of this nonbourgeois mobility. Christopher Lee’s Creature, mindless, without speech, malevolent and destructive from its first moment of life (when it attempts to strangle its creator), functions in this respect as a symbol of the anti-social nature of Frankenstein’s ambitions. (Of course, this is true for Frankenstein films generally, although the forms which this  anti-social behaviour takes in Hammer, the deployment of notions of class and gender therein and the way in which all these elements are valued, are specific to Hammer itself.) The dramatic conflict posed here goes beyond any concern displayed in the film about the social responsibility of the scientist, caught up as it is with the more characteristic Hammer preoccupation with male authority. The sort of male authority represented by the Baron – powerful and attractive but also anachronistic and disruptive – is shown to be at odds with the more socially viable but far less authoritative and less attractive masculinity embodied in this case by Krempe. That Frankenstein’s experiments involve the displacement of the woman from the processes of biological reproduction suggests – as, more obviously, does the near-contemporaneous Dracula – the possibility of a non-reproductive female sexuality, although this possibility is ruthlessly circumscribed by a male authority which is dependent upon the woman’s silence or submission. So in The Curse of Frankenstein Elizabeth is never aware that Krempe and the Baron are struggling over her, never sees the Creature, never even suspects its existence. In this, as well as in some of its other attributes, The Curse of Frankenstein can be aligned with other Hammer period horror films, although, as will be shown, the absence of any distinct oedipal structures in Curse ensures a different, potentially more questioning approach to this placing of the woman. The defining opposition between different forms of masculinity is elaborated and refined in The Revenge of Frankenstein. In this film, the Baron confronts the medical council. This, with the exception of Hans who quickly defects to Frankenstein, comprises respected members of the bourgeoisie in a society characterised by immutable class boundaries. That Frankenstein moves freely from his middle-class practice to a working-class hospital, while the

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council members who at one point visit him in the latter location seem distinctly uncomfortable in the presence of the proletariat, underlines the Baron’s separateness from social structures. At the same time  these same council members are shown as being weak as regards their domestic authority over their wives, who continue to visit the fashionable Baron Frankenstein despite the council’s disapproval of him. (A similar moment occurs in The Curse of Frankenstein, where the burgomeister, a symbol of male social authority, is given us as a hen-pecked husband when he appears at the Baron’s eve-of-wedding reception.) In this context, Frankenstein becomes an ambivalent figure. On the one hand he is signalled as monstrous; his first appearance after his ‘execution’ (from which he escapes by bribing the executioner to execute the priest accompanying him) scares a grave robber to death; he ruthlessly uses the bodies of the poor for his own ends and appears largely indifferent to his creature Karl’s (Michael Gwynn) suffering;8 and at the end of the film, when his brain has been transplanted into another body, he becomes his own creation, his own monster. But on the other hand he is also given us as a heroic figure. He represents a male authority that is no longer socially viable – hence his anti-social status, his exile to the outskirts of society – but which remains enormously attractive when placed alongside either the hypocritical, petty and ineffectual maleness of the medical council or the degraded brutality of the working-class hospital patients. Also, while the medical council is a professional body, its members clearly embody the gentlemanly amateurism – particularly in their unquestioning acceptance of the status quo – so derided by Hammer films of this period. It is instead the Baron who approaches his work in a professional fashion, Cushing’s meticulous performance aligning itself with Fisher’s ordered mise en scène to privilege that figure in the narrative. As with The Curse of Frankenstein, the heroine Margaret (Eunice Gayson) is a troubling element in the relationship between Frankenstein and his male assistant. Like Elizabeth in the earlier film, Margaret tempts the assistant away (although only temporarily in this case) as well as intruding into spaces where she is not made welcome by the Baron (the laboratory in the first film, the hospital in this). However, the Creature is substantially different,

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human and articulate, serving a different end, for here, in a fully realised urban and non-feudal setting (which can be contrasted with the feudal castle that provides the main location for Curse) the humanness of the ‘creature’, the way in which, initially at least, it (and the monsters from Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed) looks no different from human beings, functions both as an expression of the Baron’s need to disguise himself and his research – the Baron acquires a variety of false identities throughout the cycle – and as an eloquent commentary on the Baron’s own inhumanity, the impossible demands he makes upon the human body. In line with this, Hammer’s ‘monsters’ are often more human than their creator. The scene in which Karl, his body deteriorating, bursts into a party and screams out Frankenstein’s name, thereby revealing his identity to the members of the bourgeoisie present, perhaps shows most clearly the key element in Hammer’s version of Frankenstein, the necessary and inevitable exclusion of the Baron from the essentially bourgeois social order that he, through his nature and his experiments, disrupts and threatens (although, as already noted, the films’ attitude to this disruption is decidedly ambivalent, part fascinated, part appalled). By the end of the 1950s, Hammer had succeeded in establishing an identity for the Baron. This was in part signalled through Peter Cushing’s authoritative performance, but, crucially, it also involved the construction of a set of class and gender relations, within which the actions of Frankenstein were positioned, defined and valued.  The Baron’s aristocratic title served to place him in relation to the invariably bourgeois society within which he was compelled  to live and work (with The Revenge of Frankenstein responsible for  introducing him into this world). He was a patriarch, a confident, sardonic, dandyesque figure who, while displaying some of the professional attributes favoured by Hammer, also threatened a bourgeois social order: in this he shared some of the characteristics of Hammer’s more obviously parasitic aristocrats from this period (Lord D’Arcy in Phantom of the Opera and, of course, Count Dracula). The Hammer Frankenstein formula as sketched out here, with the Baron defined in relation to the monster, the woman and other

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men, does seem to offer more opportunities for development than does the Universal Frankenstein cycle. In the latter, the Monster, ‘a shambling goon with a forehead like a brick wall and a bolt through his neck’,9 its appearance and status fixed from the start, stumbles from one film to another. In Hammer’s cycle, however, there are substantial changes of emphasis from film to film, with these changes signalled through the different ways in which each film identifies the creature (more often than not human) and the woman (increasingly foregrounded). This in turn permits an increasingly eloquent interrogation of all the values that the Baron represents, one which ensures the cycle’s continuing vitality and social relevance. The third film in the cycle, The Evil of Frankenstein, was released in 1964 – a year already identified as marking the end of what we have designated the classic period of British horror – and seems content merely to reproduce pre-existing formulaic structures, infusing them with a sense of defeat which can be seen to arise from the disintegration of the authority of the male professional apparent in other Hammer films of the period (in particular The Gorgon). Again Frankenstein is opposed to a society dominated by bourgeois values and characterised as petty and hypocritical, having as his companions a faithful male assistant who seeks after knowledge and a servant girl whose muteness underlines her passivity. However, this Frankenstein appears to be experiencing an identity crisis. Relinquishing his grand ambitions, he has become instead petty, concerned more with the possessions stolen from him than anything else (and foolishly revealing his identity to the local burghers in his attempts to retrieve certain items). In addition, his pride and hubristic arrogance have been replaced by self-pity: ‘Why won’t they leave me alone?’ he asks at one point. Throughout the film he lacks substantial motivation, even stumbling across his Monster (played by Kiwi Kingston), a left-over from a previous experiment, by accident. The Monster itself is the least human of all in the cycle, a return to the lumbering creature of Universal horror, with no sense of any relation or complicity between creator and his creation. The film’s conclusion, in which this listless Baron is destroyed by unsympathetic burghers – ‘They beat him at last,’ comments his young assistant – only underlines the lifeless, uninspired quality of the film as a whole.

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But Hammer’s Frankenstein was by no means as exhausted a figure as The Evil of Frankenstein suggested, as would be ­demonstrated by Terence Fisher’s triumphant return to the cycle. His Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) together mark one of the creative highpoints of the British horror genre, systematic and uncompromising explorations of the potentialities and limitations of Hammer’s ­conceptualisation of Frankenstein. Frankenstein Created Woman opens with an ominous low-angle shot of a guillotine. The execution that follows – throughout which the liveliness of the condemned is favourably contrasted with the meaningless words of an accompanying priest and the brusqueness of the guards – suggests that the social order that provides the film’s setting is a particularly repressive one. In line with this, in the later trial scene, in which Hans, Frankenstein’s young assistant, is accused of a murder of which he is innocent, those in positions of social authority, most notably the police chief, are shown as vindictive, petty, self-important and ignorant. (One partial exception to this is the judge who wants to help Hans but because of his position within this unforgiving court is compelled to pass the death sentence on him.) Perhaps not surprisingly when located within such a context, Frankenstein becomes a more sympathetic figure than he is at any other point in the cycle; indeed many of the police chief’s undesirable qualities are made apparent through Frankenstein’s resistance to them in his appearance before the court. However, these sympathetic qualities need to be seen as arising from a weakening of that absolute and arrogant male authority which previously in the cycle had characterised Frankenstein’s actions. That such a shift has taken place is made clear by the nature of the Baron’s first appearance in the film. He emerges deep-frozen from a coffinlike box, a willing object of one of his own experiments (which can be contrasted with his medical objectification of other people elsewhere in the cycle), with the gloved hands that cover his face signifying an uncharacteristic degree of passivity and subjection.10 Consequently the Baron is far less threatening to a social order than he is elsewhere. He seems more concerned to create a space for himself where he can work undisturbed, showing little interest

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in money (as opposed to the previous film in the cycle, The Evil of Frankenstein), supported financially by his two associates, neither of whom is the knowledge-hungry acolyte who accompanied him in Revenge and Evil. Significantly, this work – soul transplantation – is not ­physically orientated but instead to do with the spirit. So while a familiar opposition between aristocratic decisiveness and bourgeois pettiness and ineffectuality is reiterated here, much of the pre-existing mutual animosity has been siphoned away. A key factor behind this change, which is also an engagement with a possibility already present within Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle, is the transformation of the woman from passive object to problem subject. Her being moved centre-stage causes other elements in the film to be revised, so that what previously had been a contest between different forms of masculinity becomes an investigation of the basis upon which masculinity in general is founded – namely sexual difference, itself understood in terms of a particular ­masculine positioning of the woman. Christina (Susan Denberg), the only woman of any importance in the narrative, daughter of the local innkeeper, is scarred, and, as the film makes clear, this scar – conventionally a sign of castration, especially when used to mark the female body in horror films – does not stand for castration and sexual difference in itself but rather signifies only in relation to a male perception of it.11 This is clear from the response of the town ‘cads’ to Christina, which is part fascination, part repulsion, their apparent need constantly to return to her suggesting that their own masculine identities are (re)established through an awareness of the difference represented by her. Later, after Christina has witnessed the execution of her lover Hans (Robert Morris) and has herself committed suicide, Frankenstein resurrects her minus the scar (and, incidentally, transforms her from brunette to blonde), making her ‘whole’, so to speak. But, crucially, the condition of this wholeness within this patriarchal world is that she now has a male soul (transplanted from Hans’s dead body). ‘Who am I?’: the resurrected Christina’s question is never answered by any man in the film (Figure 4.2), and the attempts she makes to assert her own identity, to establish a coherent subjectivity for herself, are doomed from the beginning, precisely because she

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Figure 4.2  ‘Who am I?’, asks the resurrected Christina (Susan Denberg) in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

can only speak from a male position (and on occasion with a male voice), with all her efforts inevitably leading her back to that starting point. For example, in her murderous encounters with those men responsible for the crime for which Hans was executed, she, as David Pirie has noted, becomes a fatal woman or Lamia, which is here figured, through Fisher’s mise en scène, as, like the Gorgon, an externalisation of male fears, another object in a male discourse. The film discovers a dilemma for the constitution of female subjectivity which has more recently been theorised by Luce Irigaray: The masculine can partly look at itself, speculate about itself, represent itself and describe itself for what it is, whilst the feminine can try to speak to itself through a new language, but cannot describe itself from outside or in formal terms, except by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself.12

Throughout this, Frankenstein remains largely a passive and, at the film’s conclusion, helpless spectator. While it is his soul transplant that facilitates an investigation of gender identity, the Baron himself seems unaware of the implications of his actions. (At one point he, ‘creator’ of woman, brusquely asks Christina to make him breakfast.) In a sense, he becomes a peripheral figure, servicing a narrative which centres on Christina rather than himself. A significant detail in

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this respect is that his hands, nearly always covered by gloves, have been injured in a past experiment. This impairing injury marks a diminution in his power and authority which must now be seen as a condition of and consequent upon the entrance of woman-as-subject into the cycle at this point. However, the conceptual framework which defines the cycle and sets the terms for and thereby limits this female incursion (and which is connected with the indispensability of Frankenstein, the way in which his presence is required to bring in an audience familiar with Hammer’s earlier Frankenstein films) is made clear at the end of the film when Christina throws herself off a cliff while Frankenstein looks helplessly on. The camera, instead of following the woman into the waterfall beneath the cliff, stays fixed on the Baron as he walks away from the cliff’s edge. Like the Baron, the filmmakers cannot save Christina. Having provided a sensitive and sympathetic portrayal of her plight, with this involving a representation of the difficult existence of female subjectivity in a patriarchal world, they are in the end unable to transform their insights into the more radical investigation of gender identity and definition that Christina’s survival would have necessitated. To do this would involve a questioning and perhaps abolition of Frankenstein himself and the fixed identity and absolute authority he represents (which would mean effectively the end of Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle). It is the defining presence of Frankenstein then that both enables and encloses the possibilities for Christina – permitting her to speak but only in a male voice – so that the only autonomous act left open to her is suicide. In this sense, the title Frankenstein Created Woman contains a bitter irony, pointing as it does to what for the cycle is quite impossible. Like Frankenstein Created Woman, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed opens with a decapitation, although in the first film this is a socially sanctioned act, against which the Baron to a certain extent stands opposed, while in the second it is Frankenstein himself, in search of fresh body parts, who is responsible. The change of attitude towards the Baron thereby registered – also apparent from the film’s title, which transforms him from what was previously a creative subject to an object requiring ­destruction – is underlined by Frankenstein’s first appearance after the decapitation when, wearing a disguise, he grapples violently with a burglar

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who has strayed into his laboratory. Here Frankenstein himself, through the grotesque mask that is his disguise, is seen as monstrous. Moreover, the physicality of the fight, with glass smashing and, at the end, a human head being kicked across the floor, signals a move away from the poetic abstraction of Frankenstein Created Woman to a more characteristic (for Hammer) physically orientated realism; here the transference of souls has been replaced by the gorier business of brain transplantation. As has already been noted, Hammer’s Frankenstein is defined in relation to particular understandings of society, the monster and the woman; and it is through shifts in this network of relations (alongside subtle modifications in Cushing’s performance and ­appearance – an increased iciness and darker hair, the latter signifying here a renewed vitality) that the Baron is repositioned and revalued. One change that is significant in the light of Frankenstein’s ‘monstrousness’ is that the society in which the film is set, while not presented uncritically, contrasts favourably with the vindictive and ignorant lawgivers of Frankenstein Created Woman. In the later film the figures of social importance are doctors (Thorley Walters’s policeman is a blustering bully who proves to be completely ineffectual and disappears before the film’s conclusion) who, despite their narrow-mindedness, exhibit a degree of humanity. This is most apparent in the scene in which the director of the asylum gently advises Ella Brandt (Maxine Audley) to cease her distressing visits to her incurably ill husband. Compared to this, Frankenstein is progressive and effective (he does cure Brandt), seeing beyond the cry of ‘Absolutely impossible’ with which Karl (Simon Ward), the young doctor who becomes his unwilling assistant, greets his plans. However, in this film to go beyond these limits is to become inhuman, monstrous. In line with this, Richter/Brandt, the film’s ostensible ‘monster’, is extremely articulate, bestowed with complex emotions and in every sense more human than its monstrous creator. A consideration of the position of the woman in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed shows that the film has a twin focus. On the one hand, it is the story of Frankenstein’s endeavours in the field of brain transplantation, his authoritative search after knowledge. But on the other hand, it is also about Frankenstein’s subjection of the film’s heroine, Anna (Veronica Carlson), with the romance between

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Anna and Karl providing the link between these two aspects; and it is in the relation between these two strands, which are only tenuously connected within the narrative itself, that the film establishes its position regarding the particular type of authority represented by the Baron. At this point one can in fact argue that while the earlier Frankenstein Created Woman presented a tentative exploration of the possibilities – and eventual impossibility – of female subjectivity within the cycle’s constitutive structures, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed stands as a reaction against this, a self-destructive implosion by which the certainty and sense of professional purpose which had characterised earlier Hammer productions (and especially the work of Terence Fisher in the 1950s), and which had been largely dissipated in The Evil of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Created Woman, is restored, but only at the cost of the explicit destruction of the woman, an act which enables the hero/professional to come into being and at the same time marks him as completely, irredeemably monstrous. Unlike Christina in Frankenstein Created Woman, Anna is, initially at least, permitted a degree of autonomy in running her own house, in which all thè guests are, significantly, given us as stereotypically weak men, weak, that is, in relation to the decisive Baron. That this autonomy – the space in which Anna is able to move freely – is extremely limited is underlined by Fisher when he cuts from Anna in her home to a woman screaming in an asylum. But even this limited domestic space, which represents a tacit and partial acknowledgement of a femininity separate from male definitions, is intolerable within Frankenstein’s mission in the film, which is nothing less than the reconstruction of an unquestioned patriarchal authority ­previously disrupted, as we have seen, by the  female subject. His incursion into and destruction of Anna’s space begins shortly after his installation as paying guest in her house when he blackmails her into evicting her other guests, the weak men who accept Anna’s ownership of the property in which they live. As a demonstration of his mastery of the house, the Baron then appears, Dracula-like, in a commanding position at the top of the stairs during the eviction. Later he will rape Anna and later still stab her to death, events which at an early stage are hinted at in his reply to Karl’s questioning of his need for Anna’s assistance, a reply, mundane in itself, which r­epresents

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the beginnings of an eventually murderous subjection: ‘I need her to make coffee.’ Significantly,  both the rape and the murder were excluded from the official plot synopsis issued by Hammer. They do not substantially further the narrative of Frankenstein’s medical experimentation – that is the more conventional plot which the synopsis centres on as a selling point – but they are inextricably linked with it, a necessary condition of Frankenstein’s activities elsewhere. The conclusion of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed – with Anna dead, Karl either dead or unconscious and the Baron carried screaming into a burning house by his own creation – exhibits a nihilism which, as with the near-contemporaneous Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), signals simultaneously a recognition of the destructiveness of a particular type of masculinity, the negative qualities of which are largely defined through the representation of relations between Frankenstein and the female, and an inability to find a credible alternative within the cycle’s terms of reference. Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed can be placed as one half of an unofficial quartet of late 1960s British horror films, the other half consisting of The Devil Rides Out and Witchfinder General (for a discussion of these, see the next chapter), which addresses in a variety of imaginative ways the introduction of notions of female subjectivity into pre-existing generic structures. (If nothing else, the fact that three of these were directed by Fisher confirms, if such confirmation is needed, his importance to the genre.) In a sense, the Frankenstein cycle as a whole can be read as a paradigm for much wider changes in the genre that were made as a response and contribution to a historical transformation of gender identities. The instability of the figure of Frankenstein in the late 1960s – from progressive creator in one film to a monstrous, destructive force in the next – results then from an instability within generic structures as their ideological foundations begin to crumble. One can go on from this to argue that Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed – both of which combine a questioning of the old certainties of the 1950s with an inability finally to jettison these – function as a bridge between British horror of the 1950s and the 1970s version, which would prove to be more open-ended, less dependent upon an absolute male

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a­uthority. Frankenstein’s destruction at the end of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed can be read in this way as a symbolic and necessary casting out, opening the way for a potential distancing from a patriarchal authority conceived by this stage as utterly monstrous. The final two films in the cycle, The Horror of Frankenstein and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, only confirmed the redundancy of the Baron within the context of 1970s horror production. Indeed, The Horror of Frankenstein, which returned for its subject matter to the Baron’s initial experiments and replaced Peter Cushing with the younger Ralph Bates, clearly demonstrated an awareness on the part of Hammer of a need for a reorganisation within the cycle. However, the film itself, a commercial failure, was marred aesthetically by an unevenness of tone and attitude (with lurches from horror into the characteristic camp humour of much of British horror of this period). Hammer’s final Frankenstein film, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (also Terence Fisher’s final directorial project) was not as ambitious, contenting itself with a representation of the Baron as a senescent figure trapped within an asylum, his ineffectuality coming to stand for the irrelevance of those cyclical structures which define him and once bestowed on him enormous power.

Dracula As with Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle, the first film in its Dracula cycle – Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) – both responded to and differentiated itself from the commercially dominant Universal approach. Fisher himself describes this process when he discusses how he went about introducing Hammer’s version of Dracula: In my film, when Dracula made his first appearance, he took a long time to come down the stairs but it seems a short time because you’re waiting to see what he’s going to look like. Because, the first time, everybody was ready to laugh their bloody heads off – I’ve seen it in cinemas again and again – they thought they were going to see fangs and everything. They didn’t, of course. Instead they saw a charming and extremely good-looking man with a touch, an undercurrent, of evil or menace.13

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The mise en scène described by the director stresses the physicality of Dracula: the shot under discussion is structured around the decisive movement from the mysterious first appearance of its principal figure to a revealing close-up of his physical features (Figure 4.3). One can contrast this with the carefully composed oneiric images to be found in Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922) and Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932); for example, in the first of these the vampire is filmed emerging slowly from darkness. At the same time, however, the effect of this sequence relies on an audience’s expectation of seeing something different.14 What is involved is a transformation of what in the Universal version was foreign and alien  – one can note here the ‘foreignness’ of Bela Lugosi’s performance, deriving most of all from his Hungarian accent – into a figure that is at once familiar and much closer to home. This is achieved not only through Christopher Lee’s conventional attractiveness but also through his having an impeccable English accent.15 (In Fisher’s Dracula, unlike the Universal Dracula, the vampire’s castle is only a short ride away from the home of the bourgeois family he threatens, and the customs office which separates them is ineffective and presented comically.) Another important difference, as David Pirie has remarked, is that Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) is no longer the ­unsuspecting

Figure 4.3  Charming and extremely good-looking – the first appearance of the Count in Hammer’s 1958 version of Dracula

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innocent he is in Stoker’s novel.16 Instead he is a knowledgeable and fully prepared, although in the end ineffectual, vampire hunter. In fact, his failure points to some of the innovative work done by Hammer filmmakers in order to make their version of the myth connect with the social reality of Britain in the latter part of the 1950s. As has been noted in a previous chapter, Harker’s death scene, in which he is caught in the presence of a woman he has just staked by the Count, contains distinctively oedipal elements. It is as if Harker – who is framed from above, his size thereby diminished – has been found in the bedchamber of an older woman (the mother) by an older man (the father). In this sense, the stake which Harker drops becomes a symbolic castration before the father’s punishing gaze. Such an oedipal configuration immediately places this film alongside others produced by Hammer in this period. But in these other films (most notably, The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles, both released in 1959), the oedipal elements constitute a narrative which moves towards a resolution (sometimes imperfectly or half-heartedly realised) whereby male authority and an accompanying objectification of the female are restored or reinforced. In Dracula, however, there does not appear to be any such clear-cut narrative progression. Rather, the oedipal quality of Harker’s death underlines the way in which throughout the film masculinity is seen (with two notable exceptions) as arrested, in a permanently weakened state. In this respect, Harker’s ineffectuality  – even with knowledge of the vampire, he fails – ­ can be aligned with the inability of Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough), another of Van Helsing’s assistants, to defeat Dracula by himself. Initially Arthur is, like Joseph Whemple in The Mummy, a Hammer unbeliever, unwilling at first to face something that is, within the terms of the film, palpably real and urgently needs to be recognised. Significantly, his marriage with Mina (Melissa Stribling) is childless; the only child in the house – who is often treated as if she is their child – actually belongs to the housekeeper. His impotency is further signalled by his helplessness in the face of his sister Lucy’s (Carol Marsh) vampiric attack on him (an attack which has decidedly incestuous qualities) and in his reaction to her death; as she is staked he clutches his chest, his identification with her at

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this moment, when she is restored to a passivity which is conventionally feminine, suggesting a femininity within him that the film equates with weakness.17 Moreover, the only two representatives of legitimate social authority in the film – a policeman and a customs ­official – prove completely ineffective. In its response to this weakened masculinity, Hammer recovers an aspect of Stoker’s novel which had been lost in the Universal version, and that is the correspondence and similarity (often implicit) between Dracula and Van Helsing, authority figures who in this case can be seen as two faces of the symbolic father, guarantor of a patriarchal system: ‘the existence of two fathers, Dracula and Van Helsing, is a kind of wish fulfilment, allowing the hunters both to kill and to obey the father at the same time’.18 In the novel, this recognition, albeit an unconscious one, signals an awareness of how the threat posed by Dracula, the acquisitive patriarch with three wives, arises from within those patriarchal assumptions and structures which guide the actions of the band of good vampire hunters.19 In Universal’s Dracula the Count is completely isolated from the world of social normality and the role of Van Helsing is downplayed; in Hammer’s version, because of the way in which masculinity is represented elsewhere in the film, these two figures embody essentially the same male authority, their conflict arising from the uses to which this authority and power are put. Clearly Van Helsing is a consummate Hammer professional, with the appropriate skills and knowledge with which successfully to combat the vampire. It is he who authoritatively ‘names’ Hammer’s version of the vampire in the sequence in which he dictates details of the laws surrounding its existence into his recording machine. These laws are in fact broken in later films: what is important is that there has to be an authoritative recognition of the vampire’s existence. Moreover, it is an authority which is reinforced by Fisher’s ­distinctive mise en scène which through editing and framing often stresses Van Helsing’s dominating control – for example, his appearance during Lucy’s attack on Arthur when his hand is thrust in suddenly and decisively from the side of the frame. It is a dominance which, significantly, is also on occasion assigned to Dracula (his already discussed first appearance, for example). Notionally celibate, nevertheless the condition of Van Helsing’s

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authority is a potency which has decidedly sexual implications. Throughout, only he and Dracula are accomplished penetrators of the female body, an act which is invariably symbolic – Dracula with his teeth, Van Helsing with a stake. (Jonathan Harker tries but dies in the attempt.) Like Van Helsing, Dracula is a figure who exists on the periphery of a world characterised by a normative masculine weakness (and is also, apparently, monogamous, with only one wife at the beginning of the film) and whose actions are defined in relation to this. What he does is prey on this world, and more particularly on its women. That both Mina and especially Lucy are not unwilling victims demonstrates the ineffectiveness of a male hold over them, and involves an acknowledgement of female desire, most notably in the scene in which Lucy waits longingly for Dracula. However, it is important to realise that Dracula does not represent liberation per se but rather that he attempts to place these women within a different power hierarchy, where they have power over mortal men but are subservient to him. (His first act of violence in the film is directed against a woman, his first bride, when he throws her across the room.) This defining structure – in which Dracula attacks and Van Helsing defends, against a background of a widespread masculine ineffectuality – has particular relevance to the way in which ­understandings of gender were shifting in the 1950s. As has already been noted, the growth of consumerism in this period was often seen as a feminising process which threatened masculine authority and identity. At the same time the main social roles available for women – the housewife and the working woman, the former the locus of consumption, the latter helping to fund the consumer boom – were contradictory insofar as many individuals had simultaneously to fill both. This real contradiction registers in Dracula in the perceived and (within the terms of the film) inexplicable uneasiness of the females within the bourgeois household; this can also be read as a projection of male anxiety over the detachment of the female from her traditional social position. In this context, Dracula and Van Helsing, each in his own way, guarantee a system of male power which is elsewhere seen as weakened. This situation is symbolised through the Holmwood house,

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in which Arthur, the nominal head, is weak and unable to prevent Dracula’s incursions and from which the women are beginning to wander. In this sense, defending the women is equated with defending the house. One can note in this respect the resonances of the scenes in which Mina is lured away from the Holmwood house and subsequently introduces the Count into the cellar. Dracula’s disturbing project is to restore male authority over women by taking the latter away from the weak men, establishing himself as immortal, sole patriarch (an early version of the greedy fathers of 1970s British horror, who are not willing to share their patriarchal power with other men), while Van Helsing’s task consists of protecting these same men but without, crucially, doing anything to restore their strength and authority. Hammer’s Dracula thus establishes a narrative pattern – as well as a distinctive iconography to do with Dracula’s physical appearance – which because of a perceived inherent weakness in the male and the general absence of fully fledged oedipal elements cannot lead to a final resolution. Dracula attacks and is defeated by Van Helsing, but the situation from which the vampire arises and to which he is responding is left unchanged. Arthur Holmwood does  very little to help in the tracking of the Count and during the climactic battle he does not even enter Castle Dracula. The conclusion of the film, in which Arthur is reunited with his wife, must be seen – even outside of our knowledge of the sequels that were to follow – as only provisional. Comparing this with Hammer’s version of Frankenstein (where Frankenstein often undergoes a symbolic rebirth at the narrative’s beginning and is in each film inserted into a different set of dramatic relationships, with, in particular, the growing prominence of the woman in the cycle altering our perception of the Baron), there seems less potential in the Dracula formula for either development or modulation. Hammer’s Dracula and Van Helsing are deeply conservative figures insofar as their actions work to buttress a patriarchal system that appears incapable of supporting itself without their presence. Perhaps the splitting of male authority into good and evil, and the repeated ritualistic punishment of one by the other, encouraged in those filmmakers working within the cycle a complacent, less questioning attitude in regard of those patriarchal

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power structures that enabled the cycle to come into being. Even the wavering, uncertain position of the woman – because of the absence of oedipal elements she is not as rigorously objectified as she is in other Hammer films of this period – is finally circumscribed by her constantly being defined in relation to the activities of either Dracula or Van Helsing. The next two films in the cycle, The Brides of Dracula in 1960 and Dracula – Prince of Darkness in 1965, can be seen to reproduce these structures, enriching them with innovative and elaborative detail but not questioning their determining ideological parameters. That is to say, the battle between vampire and savant-professional over the woman within a weakened patriarchy is restaged twice over, with no sense of the increasing redundancy of this formula as the cycle moves into the 1960s. For example, in The Brides of Dracula an ineffectual male social authority is again apparent, represented here by the blustering but ineffective head of the girls’ school and the bumbling doctor who attends one of the vampire’s victims; it is this state of affairs that Van Helsing has to defend. The film lacks even a notional male romantic lead with whom the heroine can finally be united, so that at the film’s conclusion she is simply led away by Van Helsing. One of the film’s innovatory elements lies in its presentation of the vampire, for here Count Dracula has been replaced by a Baron Meinster (David Peel), a decadent aristocrat who has contracted vampirism and has been locked away by his mother (the Baroness, played by Martita Hunt). However, despite this difference he does serve much the same function as his predecessor in his relation both to Van Helsing and the world of ‘normality’. The theme of incest which lurked beneath the surface in Dracula is here made more explicit when, released by the unsuspecting heroine, the Baron attacks and vampirises his own mother. In the earlier film, Lucy’s incestuous attack on her brother showed his weakness: the attack in Brides displays the Baron’s power. (Later in the film Van Helsing stakes the mother, a perverse enactment of his function elsewhere which is to destroy a sexuality which, according to patriarchal definitions, is misplaced, usually in the body of the marriageable woman but here in the Baroness’s old body.) Like Dracula, Meinster proceeds to vampirise or attempt to vampirise a

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series of young women, thereby placing them in a new social order with himself at the head. In this film, with a degree of irony, this process is seen as a rebirth from the constraints of an old way of life equated with death to the joys of a new subservience: the peasant girl scrabbles up from her grave, urged on by the Baroness’s housekeeper, now a monstrous midwife, and as Gina (Andree Melly), the heroine’s friend and one of the Baron’s victims, awaits her ‘liberating’ resurrection, the locks slowly fall away from her coffin/womb. Dracula himself returns in Dracula – Prince of Darkness, Terence Fisher’s final contribution to the cycle. However, the role of savantprofessional is filled not by Van Helsing (who appears only briefly in the film’s pre-credit sequence which reprises the ending of Dracula) but instead by a Father Sandor (Andrew Keir), a monk whose earthly qualities and practicality are signalled by, among other things, the gun he carries. Like Van Helsing, his notionally celibate status allows him to be a non-vampire penetrator of the female body, most notably in the scene in which Helen (Barbara Shelley), the film’s sole female vampire, is staked.20 It is a privilege which he jealously guards: the film begins with his preventing a group of villagers from staking the body of a woman they mistakenly believe to have fallen victim to a vampire. Their blind superstition – which is also their impotency – is contrasted with his superior practical knowledge, just as in earlier films Van Helsing stands opposed to the weakness and narrow-mindedness of those around him. The major instance of elaboration is the film’s restoration of the normative heterosexual (and middle-class) couple and its doubling of it. Two brothers and their wives stray from the safe world of normality represented by the map upon which Castle Dracula does not appear. One couple, Helen and Alan (Charles Tingwell), is victimised and destroyed, the other, Charles and Diana (played by Francis Matthews and Suzan Farmer and, in retrospect, a rather unfortunate pairing of names), with the aid of Sandor, survives. This doubling – which is underlined by the fact of the couples sharing the same surname – enables an enactment of the threat posed by the vampire, with the husband killed and the wife sexualised and made strong under the authority of the Count, while at the same time permitting the institution of the couple, and the broader social relations it implies, to remain safely intact at the film’s conclusion.

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(The scene in which Alan’s blood pours on to Dracula’s ashes and revivifies the vampire – the heterosexual male victim is in a sense resurrected as Dracula – underlines the way in which the vampire ‘stands in’ for weak men.) In Fisher’s hands, this never becomes schematic, however. The couples are subtly differentiated, so that, for instance, Helen’s abrupt transition, never fully explained, from scoffing at superstition to an apparently irrational fear suggests an unease in and unhappiness with her socially assigned role which is not apparent in the other wife, Diana. Significantly, only the latter survives. In The Brides of Dracula, Van Helsing destroys the vampire by causing it to stand in the crucifix formed by the shadow of a windmill, while in Dracula – Prince of Darkness, Sandor shoots a hole in the ice upon which Dracula is standing so that the vampire is drowned. Both of these actions display the same qualities that were seen in the actions of the vampire hunter in Dracula, namely knowledge (of what will destroy the vampire), skill (physical agility in Brides, marksmanship in Prince of Darkness) and an ability to improvise. Significantly, in these and subsequent productions it is the means of destruction rather than the fact of destruction itself which appears to be of central importance and is the source of much innovation on the part of filmmakers. (Compare this with Frankenstein, who is not compelled to die at the end of each of his films.) One can connect this with the role played by ritual throughout the cycle, which rather than being a religious one involves the  outlining of a network of laws and conventions which determine the conditions of the vampire’s existence. This can be seen to serve a twofold function. First, the vampire- hunter’s specialist knowledge of it, an absolute structure which permits no ambiguity (if one applies the correct procedure, the vampire will inevitably be destroyed), is the source of his certainty and authority. Secondly, it provides a degree of stability, a set of assumptions about vampire behaviour (aversion to light and the crucifix etc.) within which the limited degree of innovation necessary for the preservation of the cycle can take place. As will be seen, the latter function becomes increasingly important as the discourse of male professional authority disintegrates in the mid-1960s. Later films are more concerned with the mechanics

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of the vampire’s resurrection and destruction: instead of the professional defining himself through laws which are at the same time a sign of his authority, the ‘naming’ of the vampire becomes largely arbitrary, detached as it is from any overarching thematic structure. Innovations around the accepted rules – for example, the need for an assertion of faith simultaneous with the act of staking in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (Freddie Francis 1968) or the deadly powers of the hawthorn bush in The Satanic Rites of Dracula – are made mainly to permit moments of distinctive spectacle or frisson at either the beginning or end of particular films. This process is already apparent to a certain extent in Dracula – Prince of Darkness in the elaborate ritual by which Dracula is resurrected. While in this film the sacrifice of Alan does make a thematic point, the form which it takes, the casual blasphemy of the inverted crucifixion – Dracula as son of the devil is certainly not developed by any of the films in the cycle – seems to work more on the level of spectacle and dramatic effect (which can also be connected with a testing of what was permissible in terms of censorship).21 The fact that Dracula has no dialogue at all further indicates the growing subjection of the vampire to the demands of this type of spectacle, and perhaps provides an explanation for the actor Christopher Lee’s increasing dissatisfaction with the role as the cycle developed through the 1960s and 1970s. Hammer’s Dracula formula – with vampire and vampire hunter mutually defining an endangered male authority, and the woman functioning in part as the site of their struggle – was forged within and responded to British social reality of the middle and late 1950s. When this situation changed, and the horror genre as a whole had to deal in particular with the ‘problem’ of female subjectivity, the elements which constituted the cycle – the vampire, vampire hunter, (weak) hero and heroine – and which up until then had been in dynamic interaction, became detached from each other. The resultant lack of coherence coincided with an increasing concern with what might be termed mechanical, non-thematic innovations within the formula. This is apparent in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, in which the authoritative ‘good’ man, the Monsignor, is narrow-minded, bombastically rejecting the hero Paul’s (Barry Andrews) honest

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announcement of his own atheism. He displays little specialist knowledge of the vampire and eventually falls easy prey to one of Dracula’s followers. As far as Paul is concerned, he proves as ineffectual as had been previous Hammer heroes in his dealings with Dracula, and yet, significantly, his relationship with the heroine Maria (Veronica Carlson) seems very much to embody a reassuring, untroubled heterosexual norm. This immediately sets him apart from earlier troubled men like Arthur in Dracula and Alan in Dracula – Prince of Darkness. It also makes a nonsense of the stress laid by the film on Dracula’s supposedly transforming Maria from child to woman. As the Count bites her for the first time, the camera closes in on a doll, offered here as a symbol of childhood and innocence, which Maria pushes away from her. However, it is elsewhere made clear that, like Paul, she is quite at home within sexual and social norms. This couple’s only problems are conventionally romantic ones. It would seem from this that the film’s interests lie elsewhere. Perhaps the most noteworthy sequence in this respect is the one which shows Dracula able to remove a stake that has been embedded in his chest because it was placed there by a non-believer. Clearly, the intention behind this sudden overturning of audience expectations is to provide a moment of frisson. But equally clearly this moment lacks a coherent thematic function, for the Dracula cycle as established by this date does not deal with religion and faith in themselves but rather utilises these as a means of defining and supporting an essentially secular male authority, so that, for example, Father Sandor is first a savant-professional, only second a priest. By the end of the 1960s, then, innovation within the cycle was increasingly focusing upon the provision of variation in the rituals involved in the resurrection and destruction of the vampire rather than in the exploration of what by this stage was a largely defunct disturbance in gender definitions. At the end of Dracula Has Risen From the Grave Dracula is staked by a giant cross and cries tears of blood, a conclusion that relates not so much to the somewhat confused thematic framework of the film as it does to our expectations of how vampires are conventionally made to die. (Appropriately enough for a film in which a savant-professional does not appear, this comes about more or less by accident.)

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One of the results of this tendency, and an accompanying disintegration of a network of relations which assigned the vampire a particular place, is the marginalisation of Dracula. When in his presence, hero and heroine tend to react as they did in previous films, but this behaviour tends not to arise from their lives elsewhere. Because the conditions of the vampire’s existence – his motivations and reason for being – no longer stand in organic relation with the social norms reproduced by the film in question, he becomes a peripheral, often mute figure. The next film in the cycle, Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1969), was released in the same year as Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and to a certain extent can be aligned with that film in its rejection of paternal authority as irredeemably monstrous. However, while Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed exhibits the conceptual clarity which one associates with the best of Fisher’s work, Taste the Blood is characterised by a degree of confusion and even contradiction in its handling of Dracula, and this can be seen to arise from that cycle’s inbuilt inflexibility in the face of social change, in this instance expressed in the film’s attempted movement away from an obsessive concern with masculinity to a consideration of the relations between the generations. Taste the Blood contains many of the important themes of late 1960s and early 1970s British horror: in particular, a concentration on the repressiveness of familial structures and the notion of innocent youth corrupted and destroyed by monstrous father figures. (See Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of this.) In this context Dracula functions as a catalyst. His intervention causes the film’s oppressed young people to turn on their own parents – all three fathers are weak and hypocritical – and destroy them. But then, in order to ensure their own survival and freedom, those children left alive must turn on Dracula, the ultimate patriarch, and destroy him too. Dracula’s resurrection within the body of the decadent aristocrat Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates) would at first appear to be a logical part of this programme, underlining – as does Alan’s sacrificial death in Prince of Darkness – the way in which Dracula emerges from within social tensions. Yet when reborn, Dracula’s motivation for his murderous actions, which is to obtain revenge on the three men who inadvertently caused the death of Courtley, is simplistic

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(if not incredible, even within the film’s own terms) when compared to the subtle psychologising that is found elsewhere in the film, most notably in the presentation of the Hargood family. Dracula’s intoning of ‘The first’ and ‘The second’ after the appropriate deaths both underlines the minimal quality of this motivation as well as serving as a near parody of the narrative process itself. A further example of his estrangement from normative structures, be they social or narrative, can be found in the way in which, while clearly related to the ‘bad’, hypocritical fathers, he exists in relation to the young people very much as an external, alien threat. A misalignment or absence of desire within a conventional heterosexual relationship which had in the past enabled Dracula to intervene, in a sense to feed through complicity, is absent here. If one returns to Dracula’s resurrection in this light, one can see how to all intents and purposes it forms part of another ­narrative  – the story of Dracula’s destruction, reconstitution and final ­destruction – which runs alongside and is distinct from the drama of generational conflict, with only occasional intersections of the two. Taste the Blood begins with a slightly revised version of the final sequence of Dracula Has Risen from The Grave, with this in turn followed by the inevitable resurrection and then, finally, after the hero’s resanctification of the church in which the Count is hiding, an equally inevitable destruction. Like Dracula Has Risen, Taste the Blood lacks a savant-professional, relying instead on one of the fathers reading up on the subject of vampires; its fascination with the means of destruction does not signify an exercise of professional male authority, but rather demonstrates a concern to provide the audience with original forms of reconstitution and destruction. In fact one can argue that this bipartite structure represents a tacit recognition of, to use Robin Wood’s term, the ‘obsolescence’ of Count Dracula, the impossibility of his existing within the same dramatic space as those individuals whose actions embody the ­characteristic generic themes of the period.22 The final three films in the cycle only accelerate tendencies already apparent in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula. Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970) returns the Count to Transylvania and gives him, apparently at Christopher Lee’s insistence, more speech than usual. But again

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the young lovers’ relationship is ‘healthy’ and unquestioned, and the lovers themselves are kept apart from Dracula, who remains a marginal figure and dies another accidental death, on this occasion struck by a bolt of lightning. Much the same can be said for Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, both of which move Dracula to contemporary London and match him against Cushing’s Van Helsing. As might be expected by this stage, the first, and less interesting, rigorously separates Dracula from the lives of the youths upon whom he preys. Dracula is seen only in the grounds of a desacralised church while the young people congregate in nightclubs and at parties. Again Dracula is assigned what is in effect a secondary narrative beginning with his destruction in Hyde Park at the end of the nineteenth century, followed by his resurrection in 1972 and concluding with his destruction at the hands of Van Helsing. In The Satanic Rites Dracula adopts, tantalisingly, the disguise of the capitalist D. D. Denham and, it is suggested, his own death wish leads to his attempt to destroy the whole world by unleashing a deadly bacillus upon it: this would indeed be a suitable epitaph for Hammer’s Dracula. However, the film as it stands is over-plotted, incoherent and fails even provisionally to develop any of these potentially fascinating ideas. Instead, as was the case with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, it serves only to confirm the ultimate redundancy of its central figure and the inability of the filmmakers to rejuvenate the Count any further.

Notes   1 Paul O’Flinn, ‘Production and Reproduction: the Case of Frankenstein’, in Peter Humm et al. (eds), Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London: Methuen, 1986), 197.   2 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 70.   3 Albert J. Lavalley, ‘The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: a Survey’, in George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds), The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), 224.

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  4 Ibid., 249.   5 For example, David Punter has noted the ambiguous nature of the Creature: he sees this as arising from an unreconciled conflict within the novel between Rousseauistic and Godwinian theories of innate human ‘innocence’ and a revulsion from what is perceived as non-human: ‘Principally, there is an intense fear of the ugly, the unpredictable, the disruptive, which prevents the author from dealing fairly with the monster. Frankenstein may have committed a heinous sin, or a social crime, but in the end he is “one of us”: the monster may not be wholly blameworthy, even for his later acts of violence, but nonetheless he is different, and must be chastised as such.’ David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980), 125.   6 Steve Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 45.   7 While Pirie acknowledges the ways in which nuclear power becomes an issue in Hammer SF/horror, somewhat surprisingly he does not explore this issue in relation to Hammer’s Frankenstein films; Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 30–4.   8 This dehumanising objectification of the patient within a medico-­ scientific discourse is also apparent in a film discussed in a previous chapter, Corridors of Blood (Robert Day, 1958) and can possibly be connected with anxieties arising from the growth of the National Health Service. See also my analysis in Chapter 2 of The Quatermass Experiment (Val Guest, 1954).  9 O’Flinn, ‘Production and Reproduction’, 212. 10 On one level, this is a moment of self-reflexivity, as the filmmakers remove the Baron from cold storage for another profitable adventure. 11 See Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, Representations 20 (autumn 1987), 187–228; Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Mary Ann Doane et al. (eds), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: American Film Institute, 1984), 83–99. 12 Luce Irigaray, ‘Women’s Exile’, Ideology & Consciousness 1 (1977), 74, quoted in Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, Screen 23.3–4 (1982), 74–87. 13 John Brosnan, The Horror People (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976), 113. 14 Roger Dadoun has argued that the first appearance of Dracula – the play between absence and presence that this involves – connects with a disavowal of lack/castration/the archaic mother; see Roger Dadoun, ‘Fetishism and the Horror Film’, in James Donald (ed.), Fantasy and the Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 39–62. However,

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Dadoun’s remarks, while intriguing, are perhaps too general. In their concentration on an ‘archaic’ level of meaning, they fail to take account of the way in which the figure of the Count is caught up in and transformed by different social contexts. 15 The first part of the film contains several equivalent effects; for example, the close-up near the film’s opening of Dracula’s grey tomb which is suddenly spattered with blood signals the transition from black and white horror to a ‘full-blooded’ colour variety; see Gregory Waller, The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 113–23. 16 David Pirie, The Vampire Cinema (London: Hamlyn, 1977), 74; as Gregory Waller has noted, the fact that Harker is forewarned, forearmed and yet is defeated underlines his ineffectuality; Waller, The Living and the Undead, 114. 17 Significantly, in the novel it is Arthur himself who stakes Lucy, there his fiancée rather than his sister. In Hammer’s film he is unable to do this, and Van Helsing performs the task for him. 18 Richard Astle, ‘Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History’, Substance 25 (1980), 102. 19 See Christopher Croft, ‘“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations 8 (autumn 1984), 107–33. 20 S. S. Prawer has discussed this sequence at some length in Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford: Perseus Books, 1980), 240–69. He notes its ‘rape-like’ qualities but does not extend this remark into a consideration of the film’s sexual politics. 21 For the British Board of Film Censors’ remarks on Alan’s death scene in Dracula – Prince of Darkness, see David Pirie, Hammer – a Cinema Case Study (London: British Film Institute, 1980), item 27. 22 Robin Wood, ‘Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula’, Mosaic 16.1–2 (1983), 175–87.

5

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1964–69: horror production

1964–66 By the mid-1960s the British horror film, largely because of Hammer’s unprecedented success, had become firmly associated in the public’s mind with period settings. What one finds between 1964 (the year of The Gorgon) and 1966 is a cluster of films which seek, presumably in the commercial interests of product differentiation, to relocate horror in a recognisable present-day world while at the same time appealing to the already established market for that period horror. One of the first of these ‘modernising’ films is Witchcraft (Don Sharp, 1964), the plot of which revolves around a long-standing feud between two families, the Whitlocks and the Laniers. In the seventeenth century the Laniers burn one of the Whitlocks, Vanessa (Yvette Rees), as a witch and move into the Whitlocks’ mansion where they are still living when the film opens. As far as they are concerned the feud is over, but for Morgan Whitlock (played by an ageing Lon Chaney Jnr), who is later revealed as a warlock, the enmity still stands. During the course of the film, Vanessa Whitlock is revived and causes two deaths – the aunt and business partner of Bill Lanier (Jack Hedley) – before perishing along with Morgan and Morgan’s niece, Amy (Diane Clare). The film ends with the destruction by fire of the Whitlock/Lanier home. This plot exhibits a degree of self-consciousness, especially in its opening, about its attempt to rework and modernise British horror. The assault of the new upon the old represented by contractors bulldozing aged gravestones at the beginning of the film promptly leads

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to a debate between Lanier and Myles Forrester (Barry Liehan), his business partner, as to the advantages and disadvantages of progress and modernisation. Lanier, who is a planner/architect, wants to respect the past: ‘We can still make money without desecrating a cemetery,’ he says. An exploitative Forrester, on the other hand, has no such scruples. The warlock Morgan Whitlock, the conservative, is rooted firmly and irrationally in the past – his costume could have come from a Hammer period horror film – and is against modernisation of any kind. In this context, Lanier, trying to bring together Forrester and Whitlock, could conceivably operate as a stand-in for the filmmakers insofar as both are here attempting to negotiate between pre-existing horror conventions and the need for profitable innovation. However, in the end, Witchcraft does not make much of this promising dramatic situation. Instead, after its opening scenes, it falls back on to one of the more traditional of horror scenarios, that of the dead hand of the past reaching out into the present. It is appropriate then that for its conclusion it relies on yet another staple of the horror genre, namely fire. Don Sharp, the director of Witchcraft, has been identified by David Pirie as one of the stylists of the British horror genre.1 Indeed his horror films from this period and before – Kiss of the Vampire (1962), The Curse of the Fly (1965) and Rasputin – the Mad Monk (1965) – do contain moments of stylistic innovation. For example, The Curse of the Fly begins with a slow-motion (and voyeuristic) sequence depicting the escape of its heroine from a mental home clad only in her underwear. The mannered sluggishness of her flight might be read as suggesting the illusory nature of her escape. Significantly, however, as Pirie has noted, such a reading is not at all developed in the remainder of the film, which is much more concerned with depicting some of the disastrous consequences of a series of teleportation experiments: ‘there is no question here of an organically successful film’.2 It arguably makes more sense to place moments like this, and Sharp’s work in general, within a broader generic context, to see them as comprising just one part of a more pervasive concern with updating some of the conventions of British horror at this time. This reworking, certainly up until 1966, takes place largely in the area of style rather than theme. So, to provide another example

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from a film not directed by Sharp, in Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling, 1966), in a much-quoted, often-imitated dream sequence, zombies rise up from their graves in a misty cemetery. Thematically the sequence has little to do with the rest of the film, which centres upon the exploitation of the ‘dead’ labour of the working class by the wicked squire. Its oneiric qualities, like those found in the opening sequence of The Curse of the Fly, remind one instead of certain pre-1960s European horror films (for example, Vampyr); but here these qualities do not connect in any meaningful way with the broader thematic preoccupations of the British horror productions in which they appear.3 The modernising impulse evident in Witchcraft was also apparent in two films also released in 1964, Devils of Darkness (Lance Comfort) and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis). Devils of Darkness was the first British-made vampire film with a contemporary setting (and, other than that, it is insignificant in terms of the influence it has wielded over the genre). The second, Dr Terror, in which five men assemble in a railway carriage and are shown prophetic stories about themselves by the mysterious Dr Schreck (Peter Cushing), was much more significant on several accounts. First, it was made by Amicus Productions, which rapidly became Britain’s number two horror production company. Secondly, it initiated a series of portmanteau horror films – which included Torture Garden (Freddie Francis, 1967), The House That Dripped Blood (Peter Duffell, 1970), Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972), Tales from the Crypt (Freddie Francis, 1972), From Beyond The Grave (Kevin Connor, 1973), Tales that Witness Madness (Freddie Francis, 1973) and Vault of Horror (Roy Ward Baker, 1973). Most of these were produced by Amicus and based upon the work of American writer Robert Bloch or EC horror comics of the 1950s and can be seen as constituting a recognisable type within British horror. Thirdly, like Devils of Darkness, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors was a horror film with contemporary settings that was made in colour. There had been such films in the early 1960s (the Sadeian trilogy – discussed earlier – and Dr Blood’s Coffin, for example), but these had usually been filmed in the garish tones of an Eastmancolor system. However, the move into a more ‘realistic’ use of colour can be seen as a part

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of a wider technological and aesthetic shift within cinema that had important implications for the development of the horror genre. As Steve Neale has noted, it was not until the mid-1960s, ‘when television had converted to colour, that the use of colour in the cinema became virtually universal’.4 He goes on to trace some of the aesthetic consequences of this: ‘the overwhelming association of colour with fantasy and spectacle began to be weakened: colour acquired instead the value of realism’.5 The historical development of colour as aesthetic spectacle, he argues, has often been associated with the visual representation of the woman, with the female functioning as the object around which certain colour effects were organised.6 Significantly in this respect, Horrors of the Black Museum (Arthur Crabtree, 1959) and Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960), the first two films of the Sadeian trilogy, were  largely centred upon an unabashedly voyeuristic gaze at the female body, while in Dr Terror, in which all the tales centre on and are told for the benefit of men, this is not the case. Clearly the aesthetic judgement implied by Hammer’s decision to film its period horror films in colour and its more realistic contemporary psychothrillers in black and white was no longer tenable. (Fanatic, directed by Silvio Narizzano and released in 1965, was the first of Hammer’s psychothrillers to be made in colour.) The most obvious connection that can be drawn as far as Dr Terror is concerned is with the earlier portmanteau horror film Dead of Night. However, as has already been demonstrated, in that film the separate stories are complexly interrelated, while in Dr Terror one finds instead a simple accumulation of short, discrete narratives dealing, respectively, with werewolves, killer plants, vampires, voodoo and a reanimated severed hand. Each segment consists of an already-familiar monster or theme inserted into a 15–20-minute narrative, with this relatively short length enabling an avoidance of some of the credibility problems that the use of such monsters within a colour contemporary setting might entail at a time when colour itself was beginning conventionally to signify realism. (Of course, all these monsters are, on a very basic rational level, incredible: however, an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief seems to have been easier at this time in relation to distant, period settings.) The film’s strategy regarding the maintenance

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of a sense of credibility in this context can be seen to reside in its carefully constructed joke-like qualities. Each segment sets out a situation, initiates a short narrative and ends with an ironic twist which functions as a kind of punchline. In some of the stories this is quite literally a line of dialogue: examples include a triumphant doctor-vampire saying (to the camera), ‘This town isn’t big enough for two doctors – or two vampires,’ and, at the conclusion of the severed hand segment, as an art critic is pulled alive from a car wreck, someone cheerfully remarking ‘Could have been worse. He’s lucky. There’s a lot of things a blind man can do nowadays.’ These moments of irony are part of a broader play with belief and disbelief. In the vampire story, for instance, the drama and humour is generated not through the more traditional and conventional themes of vampire movies but instead almost entirely from the sheer incredibility of the vampire’s actual existence. Much the same can be said of the werewolf and voodoo episodes. This connects with the stress on storytelling evident throughout Dr Terror, where this vacillation between belief and disbelief is reproduced in the reactions of the characters to Dr Schreck’s stories, both as they listen to Schreck and as they act out their own encounters with the monstrous and the supernatural within the stories themselves. It can further be argued that inasmuch as the audience for the film is encouraged to identify with these characters – in a sense, it is as much Dr Schreck’s audience as are the characters – it too is caught up in this process. The ending, in which the five main characters discover that they are dead and that Schreck the storyteller is Death himself, finally closes down this play, but it is an arbitrary intervention, something arising from outside the film’s world – the figure of Death ensures that the film is the requisite ninety-minute length – rather than emerging dramatically from within it. This arbitrariness is made necessary because Dr Terror’s narrative structure, in which a play around questions of belief is repeated in slightly different forms both within the stories told by Schreck and in the film’s framing story, does not proceed logically towards a final resolution. In this it can be contrasted with its portmanteau predecessor Dead of Night, the framing story of which enables a much more complex and charged narrative.

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1967–69

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David Pirie has identified this period as decisive in the history of the genre, with an influx of young, new talent which transformed and regenerated British horror: by the middle of the 1960s the horror genre was just about the only part of the British film industry vital enough to really have a chance of sustaining new directorial talent at grass roots level. This does not mean that it was the only possible sector for promising young directors, or that it gave countless opportunities (‘Swinging London’, for one, provided more of these), but it did represent an established cinematic field in Britain, where almost for the first time the aspiring filmmaker could work within a tentative cultural tradition. What was more, it was a tradition that by about 1966 had lost some of its original rigidity and was beginning to hunt for new talent and new ideas.7

Our reading of this stage in the genre’s history will be different. Undoubtedly, new talent was to be found in the genre; for example, the brilliant young director Michael Reeves. But older hands, in particular Terence Fisher, were still producing significant work. Neither can the films of this time be seen as simply moving on from the outmoded and inflexible certainties of previous horror productions. Instead, their relation to earlier horrors is decidedly ambivalent. Three of the major horror films produced in this period – namely The Sorcerers (Michael Reeves, 1967), Witchfinder General (Reeves, 1968) and The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) – although operating from different perspectives, are simultaneously drawn towards and repelled by figures of absolute male authority. (In this they can be aligned with both Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.) It was surely no accident that these films were produced at a moment in British social history when the ways in which both youth and gender – very much fixed categories in 1950s Hammer – were understood in society were becoming increasingly contested. As Stuart Hall et al. have noted: ‘1964 was … the year of the Beatles’ rise to cultural pre-eminence; of massive record sales and the “beat” boom; of “mod” styles, the ­flourishing artisan capitalism of the Kings Road boutiques, and the

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whole phenomenon of “swinging London”’.8 An incipient counterculture, whose membership was largely drawn from middle-class youth, was becoming visible: a study of post-war youth subcultures lists 1965 as the first year in its chronology of the counter-culture.9 The historical passage of various youth groupings through the revolutionary activities of 1968 and their subsequent, although intermittent, connections with radical politics has been discussed elsewhere.10 Importantly, as far as horror is concerned, out of this arose the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Within this context, the formal innovations of the 1964–66 period were incorporated (especially by younger filmmakers) into a more or less coherent, on occasion deeply felt, response to these social shifts (shifts which, of course, impinged most upon horror’s predominantly youthful target audience). Two of the key figures caught up in and contributing to the genre’s development at this time were the young Michael Reeves and the somewhat more senior Terence Fisher. A comparative study of their work in this period reveals some striking differences and also, surprisingly, significant similarities.

Generations apart? Michael Reeves and Terence Fisher After all, in this age of Youth, when young actors and actresses are coming forward in such great numbers, why not directors too? (Michael Reeves)11

Michael Reeves was born in 1944. After a British public school education, he worked in minor capacities in the American and British film industries. From there he went to Rome, where he rewrote some scripts, and in 1964 was hired as a second unit director for a film starring Christopher Lee, Warren Kiefer and Luciano Ricci’s Il Castello dei Morti Vivi (Castle of the Living Dead). By some accounts, he ended up directing almost half of the film himself. There followed in 1965 his first complete feature, another horror film by the title of La Sorella di Satana (Revenge of the Blood Beast), which starred Barbara Steele and Ian Ogilvy. Returning to Britain, Reeves spent a year trying to set up various projects before

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completing The Sorcerers with Boris Karloff in 1967, which was followed in 1968 by Witchfinder General. He was to direct The Oblong Box but fell ill and was replaced by Gordon Hessler. In February 1969 Michael Reeves died of a drug overdose. The contrast between the career paths of writer-director Reeves and director Terence Fisher is striking. While the latter worked his way up slowly and methodically through the British industry, and as a director made films in a variety of genres before specialising in horror, Reeves’s experience of the industry was both international and rapid – with his first feature completed in Italy by the time he was twenty-one – and from the beginning he appeared committed to the horror genre. He can in fact be located within a growing cosmopolitan and counter-cultural fascination with Hollywood and genre cinema. (Time Out, a voice of this counter-culture, was first published in 1968.)12 We have already seen how with Fisher, and indeed with Hammer in general, a particular notion of professionalism provided a potent image of self-definition. In the case of Reeves, a different, altogether more ambitious and provocative understanding of horror was proposed. The difference between the approach of Reeves and that of Hammer is apparent in an exchange of views between the criticwriter Alan Bennett and Reeves himself that took place in the pages of The Listener. In a brief review of the recently released Witchfinder General (Reeves’s third and, as it turned out, final feature film), Bennett listed some of the acts of violence contained within that film and went on: Of course blood and guts is the stuff of horror films, though, as with Victorian melodramas, what makes them popular and even healthy are the belly laughs which usually punctuate them … There are no laughs in Witchfinder General. It is the most persistently sadistic and morally rotten film I have seen. It was a degrading experience by which I mean it made me feel dirty.13

In the following week’s edition, a response from Michael Reeves was published. It concluded: Surely the most immoral thing in any form of entertainment is the conditioning of the audience to accept and enjoy violence? Is this not exactly the attitude that could lead to more and more casual

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Horror production 179 i­ ndulgence in violence, starting with individuals, and thence spiralling nauseatingly upwards to a crescendo of international blood-­letting? To sit back in one’s cinema seat and have a good giggle between Mr Bennett’s bouts of ‘healthy’ violence, as he so strangely advocates, is surely immoral to the extent of criminality. Violence is horrible, degrading and sordid. Insofar as one is going to show it on the screen at all, it should be presented as such – and the more people it shocks into sickened recognition of these facts the better. I wish I could have witnessed Mr Bennett frantically attempting to wash away the ‘dirty’ feeling my film gave him. It would have been proof of the fact that Witchfinder works as intended.14

Bennett’s views replay the critical response to the earlier The Curse of Frankenstein, where the critics standing against the film were on the whole appalled by the increased verisimilitude of Hammer horror. While for them the type of horror to be laughed at would presumably have meant Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, for Bennett, one assumes, it is Hammer, so vilified ten years previously, which has become safe and non-threatening. Reeves’s approach, on the other hand, is quite different and original insofar as he is attempting to mark his work as ‘art’. Witchfinder General, he argues, has something important to say, something that might shock its audience, an experience that will change them in some way. These are hardly the terms used by Hammer personnel in discussing their work. Yet, paradoxically, Reeves was working within – and, as his letter testifies, was committed to – a genre which was at that time generally held to be of little, if any, artistic value. As far as Reeves’s films are concerned, one finds that while their preoccupations are characteristic of British horror generally at this time, the director’s treatment of his subject matter, both its sheer energy (which no written analysis can hope to capture) and the particular aesthetic and thematic strategies deployed therein, marks his work as a significant new departure in the genre.

The Sorcerers A pavement. A pair of feet walk into the frame. A handheld camera moves shakily back and it is revealed that the feet belong

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to an aged Boris Karloff. One might want to compare this with the opening shot of Terence Fisher’s 1958 film of Dracula, a smooth, magisterial camera movement up to the entrance of Dracula’s tomb which signifies on a formal level a clarity and certainty which manifests itself on other levels throughout this and other Hammer films of the period. The Sorcerers, on the other hand, begins with an image that is, quite literally, unstable. Although, as was the case with Lon Chaney Jnr in Witchcraft, Karloff inevitably stands for an earlier horror cycle, the film places him firmly (especially through his ­contemporary costume) within this grey, urban world. This is developed in the next two short scenes, the first of which takes place in the seedy, claustrophobic newsagent’s where Professor Marcus Monserrat, the character played by Karloff, advertises his trade of hypnotist (Figure 5.1), and the second in the cramped Monserrat flat which appears as aged and faded as its inhabitants. The transition from this opening sequence to the next, which takes place in a nightclub full of young people dancing to live pop music, is sudden and shocking. It involves an abrupt movement from quiet – the only sound in the Monserrat flat other than the couple’s voices is the ticking of an unseen clock – to loud, grey to bright colours, old to young, stasis to movement; with the violence

Figure 5.1  An icon of an earlier horror cycle: Boris Karloff as Professor Monserrat in The Sorcerers (1967)



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of this contrast suggesting that these two different lifestyles can be related only antagonistically. These two worlds – that of the old and that of the young – can in fact be read as a representation of a contradiction or fissure in mid-to-late-1960s British society: This was an altogether different – puzzling, contradictory – world for the traditional middle classes, formed in and by an older, more ‘protestant’ ethic. Advanced capitalism now required not thrift but consumption; not sobriety but style; not postponed gratifications but  immediate satisfaction of needs; not goods that last but things that are expendable; the ‘swinging’ rather than the sober lifestyle. The gospel of work was hardly apposite to a life increasingly focussed on consumption, pleasure and play … The counter-cultures were born within this qualitative break inside the dominant culture.15

The Monserrat flat can be seen as representing the Protestant work ethic. The furniture it contains signifies thrift; it is old, used, ‘made to last’ and it can be compared with the briefly glimpsed interior of the flat of Mike Roscoe (Ian Ogilvy), which is functionally bare, decorated with throwaway posters. The ‘meat and two veg’ meal which Marcus’s wife, Estelle (Catherine Lacey), serves him on his return to the flat in the opening sequence also testifies to a domestic economy that structures their lives. Again this separates them from the young characters in the film who, when they do eat, consume convenience food outside the home. The bitterness of the Monserrats’ situation lies in the fact that Marcus’s work has come to nothing, that their thrift and diligence has been a waste of time when time, as symbolised by the quietly ticking clock always heard in the background, is now short. Their planned escape from this involves taking control through hypnosis of a young person’s mind. In what turns out to be the film’s central plot device, they will then be able to command that person from a distance and share in his or her physical experiences. The other world given us in the film is that which belongs to and is symbolised by youth, which is seen in terms of consumption, sensation and instant gratification. As Marcus and Estelle characterise it in describing the intended outcome of their own experiments: ‘Dazzling, indescribable experience. Complete abandonment with

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no thought of remorse … Intoxication with no hangover. Ecstasy with no consequence.’ Very little time is spent on showing the young characters – the hero Mike, his girlfriend Nicole (Elizabeth Ercy), their friend Alan (Victor Henry) – at work. Mike shuts his antique shop whenever he wants (we only see him with a customer once) and Alan takes time off from the garage where he works to go and see Nicole at a moment’s notice. For most of the film these characters are presented as consumers, not only of food and drink but also of lifestyle and experience. Bearing in mind the relative youth of the film’s director, one might argue for the following reading of The Sorcerers: the innocent young, represented here most visibly by Mike, enjoying a lifestyle that is free and centred on pleasure and consumption, are threatened and eventually destroyed by the jealous, repressive older forces in society. In this way the film might be seen as predicting the increasing repression directed against various aspects of youth culture as the decade progressed. However, a closer examination of The Sorcerers reveals that in fact the film is much more ambivalent than this. The Monserrats, rather than being destroyers, are themselves destroyed by this sensational world. On one level, this destruction involves a critique of the lifestyle and values of a consumption-centred youth culture which is seen to encourage a desire for sensation that can never be satisfied. On another, more submerged level, what one also finds is a concern with shifting understandings of gender, and in particular female sexuality Taking the question of the youth lifestyle first, the film suggests that a barely hidden violence lurks beneath the colourful hedonism. It can be found in some of the songs heard during the narrative. Pirie has already indicated this in respect of the sequence in which Reeves cuts from Roscoe stabbing a woman to death with a pair of scissors (intercut with Estelle’s reaction to this) to a female nightclub singer singing ‘Boy, you’re coming on strong now’; another lyric relevant to Mike’s increasingly schizophrenic actions is ‘You’re tearing me apart.’ It can also be located in some of the tensions arising from the triangular Mike–Nicole–Alan relationship. This is apparent from the beginning when Mike rudely leaves Nicole behind in the nightclub; later he will be repeatedly rude to and contemptuous of

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Alan. In this sense later developments – such as a hypnotised Mike yet again standing up Nicole or fighting with Alan in the garage – are only extensions of elements that were already present before the Monserrat intervention. The notion of the Monserrats as preying upon youth culture is further undercut by the fact that their principal victim, Mike, is clearly shown as an untypical representative of that way of life. He exists on the periphery of the world of normality that is represented by Alan and Nicole. At the beginning of the film he sits alone in the nightclub, excluding himself from social interaction, an observer looking in. In this way he is in a similar position to the Monserrats. ‘How long do you think all this can last?’ he asks as he surveys the club – his remark ostensibly directed at female fashion but having distinctly apocalyptic undertones – and then announces his boredom and his intention to go for a solitary walk. Alan’s response to this moodiness is significant. ‘Bloody artistic temperament,’ he retorts. This connects with other remarks directed against Mike, mainly in jest by Alan – for example, when he refers to him as both a Boy Wonder and a ‘poor misunderstood lad’ – and suggests that Mike Roscoe is supposed to be viewed as a youthful artistic figure, albeit a non-productive one. To a certain extent, he functions as a stand-in for Reeves himself (another Boy Wonder), Reeves, that is, as an artist-director. This is announced not only through the similarity of names but also by the presence of Ian Ogilvy in the role. This actor, a close friend of the director who bears a distinct physical resemblance to him, is used in a similar way in the later Witchfinder General. It should be stressed here, however, that what is being constructed in this instance is a particular image of the artist which functions figuratively within the text, and we actually need to know very little about Reeves’s personality, about Reeves the real person, to understand how this image works. For Mike, the sensitive artistic personality, the excluded observer, the youth culture of the day is ephemeral, superficial, without substantial meaning. He moodily wanders the streets in search of an indefinable something. In this sense he fulfils the requirements the Monserrats have of their first guinea pig. ‘He must be someone whose mind is pliable, someone who is basically willing … A boy who is bored, out looking for something.’ The hypnosis which will

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render Mike the tool and surrogate of the Monserrats takes place in Marcus’s laboratory – its psychedelic visual and aural presentation connoting a drug experience – and Mike becomes an extension of the Monserrats, who are eventually destroyed by Estelle’s increasingly monstrous desires for new sensual experiences. It has been argued that within contemporary industrial society, where art exists on the margins, the artist only has two choices: ‘to refuse the marginalised position allotted to artists and organise with other artists to make a political intervention into society; or to accept the futility of artistic production and continue to work entirely for his or her own sake, a retreat from politics into solipsism’.16 These remarks occur in a discussion of the work of Ingmar Bergman but are applicable, despite the different generic context, to The Sorcerers inasmuch as the figure of the artist, the Romantic (or rather romanticised), politically uncommitted artist, is shown as having no way forward.17 More particularly, the film can be seen as speaking from Reeves’s class position, operating as both a variant of and a response to one of the two pathways available within the essentially middle-class counter-culture of the period. ‘The two most distinctive strands flow, one way, via drugs, mysticism, the “revolution in lifestyle” into a Utopian alternative culture; or, the other way, via community action, protest action and libertarian goals into a more activist politics.’18 While The Sorcerers – with its psychedelic imagery – clearly refuses the overtly political route, neither does it produce a Utopian answer to social ills. Instead, society is seen as incurably sick and destructive, polluted by a contagious violence that leaves the artist impotent. Beneath this despairing response, however, there lies a more literal impotence connected with the possibility of an active female desire, a desire which resists male definitions and thereby threatens and undermines male identity. In many ways, this constitutes the real issue around which The Sorcerers is constructed and to which it is a response. One can in this respect point to the weak men who appear throughout the film: Mike, Marcus Monserrat (crippled, dominated by his wife) and the policemen, conventional figures of male authority but here quite ineffective. Predictably, one can place alongside these representations of a troubled heterosexual masculinity the presence of several

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i­ndependent women. The most obvious example of this is Estelle, a character who dominates her husband Marcus both mentally and physically through most of the film and is increasingly driven by her own selfish desires (which stand opposed to Marcus’s avowed humanitarian aims in initiating their experiment); her demands for more intense experience lead to Mike’s committing socially transgressive acts on her behalf, first theft and then murder. Eventually this results in her own and Marcus’s death when Mike, fleeing from the police, is burned to death in a car crash and the Monserrats, still bound to his physical sensations, suffer the same fate. (The crash is in fact willed by Marcus in order to stop his wife. It is one of his few effective acts in the film, albeit in this case a suicidal one.) Significantly, the two women murdered by Mike are also shown as independent. The first of these, Audrey, an old friend, apparently lives alone. When she lets Mike in, she is only partially dressed and yet she stands before him quite unselfconsciously, an image of autonomy (albeit limited – the bedsit is very small). The second murder victim is a nightclub singer whom Mike lures to her death by pretending to have found her a job. Just before he strangles her, he taunts her professional aspirations: ‘Sing for us. Sing!’ he shouts. A ribald joke made by Alan’s boss is revealing in this respect. As Alan leaves for a date with Nicole, he calls after him ‘Make sure she’s on the pill.’ The oral contraceptive, introduced in Britain in the late 1950s, had transformed the lives of many women. As Jeffrey Weeks notes: it opened up more decisively the possibility for the incorporation of the active, if male-defined, sexuality of women into the repertoire of public debate, including advertising and publishing. The eroticisation of modern culture could focus on the female body without most of the consequences which in earlier days had been feared and expected.19

The ‘male-defined’ part of this statement is important for as Weeks notes elsewhere: ‘There was little in the original American or British counter-culture that indicated any rejection of stereotypes of women and gays.’20 In fact, one can go further and argue that the figure of the sexually active woman was to function as a symbol of the permissive society, just as the mother in the domestic household

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had come to symbolise much of consumerist society in the 1950s; and that the women’s movement arose within this context in part as a reaction against this objectification. That there is a cruel, secondary punchline to this ‘joke’ becomes apparent when Reeves cuts from the garage to a close-up of Estelle’s aged face. The non-reproductive sexuality associated with the oral contraceptive is thereby given us in two contrasting ways. First, it is seen as enabling the sexual availability of women to men (Alan, in this case) in what is essentially a restructuring of male-centred discourses of femininity. Secondly, through an image of a woman who is because of her age ‘non-reproductive’, Reeves points to the potential for a disruption and undermining of these discourses that a shift away from reproductivity might entail; significantly in this respect, the first command Estelle gives to Mike is to break an egg. Estelle is the only character in The Sorcerers who exhibits decisiveness and ambition. Consequently, the film very much centres on and is driven by her desires; and it is the prospect of a woman actively desiring rather than being the desired object that it finds alternately so appalling and so enthralling, and which it works both to signify and manage. It is a condition of this recognition that Estelle is old and conventionally unattractive, so that what is a gender problem can be displaced on to a generational division. But it should now be clear that to all intents and purposes, Estelle’s desires – which lead to theft and then murder – constitute the dark, transgressive possibilities of a particular male-centred definition of gender which has also produced the young, sexually available women found elsewhere in the film (two of whom are murdered by Mike). The prospect of femininity breaking the bounds of male ­discourses  – subsequently materialised in the various forms of the Women’s Movement – is the crisis which the film identifies and with which it is working. In this sense, Mike’s repeated acts of violence against women are more an expression of his own male fears than they are the result of Estelle’s commands. For example, at a moment when his mind is temporarily free of the Monserrat influence, he refers to the nightclub singer as a ‘slag’. That Estelle is notionally in charge of Mike when he commits his murderous acts does not undermine such a reading, although importantly it does reveal that a condition of the film’s (often disguised) insights into

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c­ ontemporaneous shifts in gender definition is its inability to develop these in any potentially radical direction. Estelle does not recognise herself in the murdered women; this failure of recognition, and the rigorous separation of Estelle’s situation from that of other females it involves, effectively depoliticises the film in which it appears. Also contributing to a process of displacement is the tendency of the film – which it shares with Witchfinder General – to lapse into an all-encompassing, nihilistic despair, with this providing a useful and reassuring escape route from more disturbing, necessarily political considerations. The film concludes with the simultaneous deaths of Mike and Estelle. Mike dies very publicly in a car crash, with Nicole and Alan looking on; Estelle, by way of contrast, lies dead alongside her husband in the privacy of their home. Her death is secret and hidden, just as the threatening female desire she represents is, in a sense, the film’s secret, that which is hidden behind the more visible story of an artistic sensibility despairing in a corrupt world.

Witchfinder General Witchfinder General is a fictionalised account of the activities of real-life witchfinder Matthew Hopkins (played in the film by Vincent Price), who operated in East Anglia during the English Civil War.21 The film’s hero is Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), a soldier in Cromwell’s army who swears revenge against Hopkins after the witchfinder has hanged as a witch the uncle of Sara Lowes (Hilary Dwyer), Marshall’s fiancée, and slept with Sara herself; the narrative is concluded by a bloody scene in a torture chamber where Hopkins is brutally attacked by an axe-wielding Marshall and is then shot dead by another soldier. Despite the move from the contemporary London settings of The Sorcerers to the seventeenth-century English countryside that provides the locations for Witchfinder General, both films can be seen as dealing with the same issue: namely, the difficulties involved in  the maintenance of a male authority that is largely dependent upon female submission in the face of an increased female resistance to this submissive role. In the case of The Sorcerers, a representation of violent generational conflict to a certain extent works to cover

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over an awareness of shifts in the ways in which gender identity was understood at the time of the film’s production; the prospect of the desiring woman is simultaneously invoked and hidden away within the film. In this way the film seeks to legitimise the despair of Mike Roscoe, the ‘Romantic’ artist figure over what is offered, on one level at least, as an irredeemably corrupt world. A similar situation is evinced in Witchfinder General. On the one hand, there is in this film an even more powerful and wideranging investigation of issues relating to gender, particularly in its representation of a violently repressive male denial of a female subjectivity. But on the other hand, one also finds attempts to construct a ‘despairing’, that is, non-gendered reading of this situation, one in which the pain and suffering so clearly in evidence are not marked as specifically ‘male’ or ‘female’ but instead seen in toto as ‘human’ and existential. In this way, the film, like The Sorcerers, seeks to avoid some of the more disturbing implications of its own insights. However, the analysis of Witchfinder General that follows will demonstrate that these attempts to contain or efface gender-related issues are not as effective as they were in The Sorcerers. Consequently Witchfinder General is an extremely fractured, disturbed film. In this it can be aligned with Hammer’s The Gorgon; both offer a recognition of the female’s separateness from male-centred definitions and placings of her which threatens a male authority and identity upon which the films are themselves founded. A crucial difference between the two is that Reeves’s film – fasterpaced than Fisher’s and a great deal more violent – comprises a more complex and troubled acting out of this situation. An examination of the opening minutes of Witchfinder General reveals some of the tensions – which in the end will prove ­irreconcilable – operative within the film. The first shot of the film gives an initial impression of tranquillity: the sun shines through tree branches while hammering and sheep bleating are heard on the soundtrack. After a near-complete scaffold is shown (the source of the hammering sound), there is a cut to the village where the ‘witch’ is being dragged screaming down a street. These unsettling ­transitions – from an image of nature to an image of social violence, from the quiet of the countryside to the woman’s screams, from peace to violence – occur throughout the film and can be aligned

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with Reeves’s juxtaposing the opposed worlds of young and old at the beginning of The Sorcerers: in this sense, the violence in these films is as much an effect of mise en scène as it is a result of characters’ actions. Perhaps more importantly, this strategy also involves the juxtaposition of images of a society seen as endemically violent with images of a pacific Nature, with the natural world providing a calm and indifferent backdrop to the events of the drama.22 One of the possible effects of this is to render the violence in the film, most of which is actually directed against women, a general factor of this ‘alienation’ from nature; that is, humanity as a whole is marked as brutalised. (In support of this, one can note that the crowds who provide the audience for this and other public executions in the film comprise both men and women.) The gender-specific qualities of violence are thereby avoided or hidden. Having said this, however, it is questionable whether such a strategy succeeds to any great extent in the opening sequence, or for that matter at any other point in the film. Much of the undoubted impact of the film’s various hangings and other atrocities arises from the helplessness and terror of the female victim (which can be contrasted with the more restrained reactions to torture later in the film of John Lowes, a male victim). This tension between vivid and shocking images of women oppressed and suffering and attempts to universalise (i.e. ‘­ degender’) this suffering is further elaborated in Witchfinder General’s striking credit sequence (which follows immediately on from the hanging of the ‘witch’). In this one finds an assertion of a particular mystificatory notion of authorship and the artist akin to that embodied by  the character of Mike Roscoe in The Sorcerers. This credit sequence consists of distorted, grainy photographs of various individuals, male and female, suffering and in pain (with one image of Stearne, the witchfinder’s assistant, laughing). The final image shown is that of a human face – it is difficult to say whether it is male or female – contorted into a scream. Over this face appears Michael Reeves’s directorial credit. The statement thereby implied could not be clearer. The artist is in despair, a despair which is ­existential, outside history, ungendered, beyond analysis. While such a reading of the credit sequence is available if one views it in isolation, this visualisation of generalised, universal

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despair becomes questionable when seen in the context of the sequence that has preceded it, a sequence that so obviously centres on the victimisation of the woman. Indeed this is the case throughout the film, as ‘despairing’ moments (often associated with the representation of an indifferent Nature) constantly give way to a compelling portrayal of the repressions involved in a male objectification of the female. This portrayal – which can be seen as the film’s other project, that which sits alongside and threatens to overwhelm the artist’s despair – is developed in the sequence that follows the credits. Like the hanging sequence, it relies for much of its effect on counterpointing an act of human violence – in this instance Richard Marshall’s killing of a sniper – with an incongruously beautiful Nature.23 The essential difference between these two sequences, that is underlined precisely by these similarities, arises from the social spheres within which the depicted actions take place. In the first sequence this is the civil world, whereas in the second the setting is one of military conflict. What this suggests is that the collapse of social order attendant upon the Civil War is not only played out in a conventional military fashion – with Cromwell (who, played by Patrick Wymark, makes a brief appearance in the film) as the new symbolic father, the father of the nation, leading the fight – but also has disturbing implications for social definitions and understandings of gender, with Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder, as the authority figure in this case. Perhaps the most important point to note about the scenes dealing with military life is that they are exclusively male. Women do not even appear as extras. What one finds instead is a male bonding that exists within, and is legitimated by, a tightly organised power structure (with an authoritative but fair Cromwell at its head), with all this reminiscent of certain British war films from the 1950s. In this case it would be going too far to argue, as Andy Medhurst has done for those war films, that: In the same way that the Western foregrounds intense relationships between men, the war film could be seen as occupying an equivalent position in British cinema, a licensed space for the otherwise inexpressible. Both genres depend on assumptions of masculinity ­ that protected their characters from ‘accusations’ of homosexuality.24

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The military scenes in Witchfinder General are too perfunctorily done for that (this might have something to do with extreme budgetary restrictions, but could also reflect the film’s lack of faith precisely in those institutions it desires to value). Nevertheless, the existence of an all-male space that is separate from civil society is important for the progression of the film as a whole, operating as it does as a place of relative safety where the only danger comes from other men and from which Marshall ventures at his peril. Within the army he is a hero, outside he becomes psychotic. This is made clear when, on returning from the army on leave, he embraces Sara. ‘The army has taught you rough manners,’ she exclaims as she pushes him away, a temporary act of resistance that marks the separateness of Sara’s world from that of the male militia and the need for modified behaviour therein. Connected with this, and achieved in much greater detail, is the relationship between the Witchfinder and his assistant Stearne (Robert Russell), which, while having distinct homoerotic qualities, can also be seen as a parody of a heterosexual union. This is apparent in the incessant, semi-comic ‘rowing’ that goes on between them. More particularly, Hopkins’s affair with Sara clearly provokes Stearne’s jealousy – ‘I hear tell you’ve been a-wandering, Matthew’ – which is directed principally at Hopkins rather than at the woman. Stearne’s subsequent rape of Sara, when seen in this light, is a tactic designed to win Hopkins back to him more than a display of lust and male power (although it is also that). The threat to this male couple then, and also, implicitly, to the relationship between Marshall and his fellow soldiers, that which threatens to break the male bond, is the female. At the same time, it is the woman – the woman as object – through whom these relationships, and male identity in general, are often figured. One thinks here of a short scene near the film’s beginning where Marshall and a fellow soldier Swallow discuss the absent Sara; later Marshall and John Lowes and then Hopkins and Stearne will also talk of Sara in her absence. In these moments, the figure of the woman is used to bind together and support male relationships, but she does not herself actively participate in this. (Significantly, Sara is never seen talking to another woman.) The way in which Witchfinder General positions itself in relation to this exclusion and objectification of the woman becomes clearer

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when one turns to its presentation of its one developed female character, Sara Lowes, later to become Sara Marshall. Sara is presented to us – through script, direction and most of all through Hilary Dwyer’s sensitive performance – as intelligent and articulate, sufficiently strong-willed to resist some of Richard’s rougher advances, quick-witted and worldly enough to negotiate her uncle’s remission from torture by offering herself sexually to Hopkins. One can also note in this respect the scene of her lovemaking with Richard, with its stress on her pleasure as well as his. However, she is surrounded by men who objectify her in various ways. Her uncle sees her as an innocent young woman, unaware as he is of her physical relationship with Richard and her obvious knowledge of the ways of the world as displayed in her scenes with the Witchfinder. For Hopkins, she is first a sexual object, then an object of a thwarted romantic fantasy (implied by the sadness on his face after being informed of Stearne’s rape of her) and then an object of torture, a weapon to be used against her husband. Finally, for Richard, after Hopkins’s intervention, she becomes that upon which his desire for revenge is constructed. This is apparent in the wedding ceremony when, after having solemnly declared their union and without pausing for breath, Richard swears a bloody oath of vengeance. For him, Sara and his own wild justice are inextricably connected. (The expression on Sara’s face indicates that she is disturbed by this but, traumatised as she is, she remains silent throughout the ceremony.) This reaches its logical conclusion when, towards the end of the film, Richard allows Sara to be tortured before him rather than confess to the hated Witchfinder. The final tableau of the film – which takes place in a torture  chamber – comprises a particularly charged enactment of those irreconcilable tensions that structure the film as a whole. Stearne is on the dungeon floor, one of his eyes kicked in by Marshall’s spur. Hopkins is dead, victim of Marshall’s axe attack and Swallow’s merciful bullet. Sara is lying face down on a slab, tortured, almost certainly insane. Richard too is mad, shouting at an ­uncomprehending Swallow who has just shot Hopkins, ‘You took him from me. You took him from me.’ Throughout its running length, Witchfinder General has represented male identity as essentially a narcissistic construct, a meeting

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of men in which the woman as object is central but the real woman, woman as subject, is absent. This situation, hardly a desirable one, is reiterated in the physical configuration of the final scene: two soldiers staring at each other, with another dead man between them. The woman is to one side, excluded from this drama (although it is because of her – or rather Hopkins’s and Marshall’s emotional investment in her – that all this has happened). It is another malecentred world in which women are troubling objects/subjects within the relationships between men. By this time Sara has more or less ceased to exist for Richard, whose sole concern is the prolongation of Hopkins’s suffering, as if it is only through this that he can achieve a degree of completeness. But this, extraordinarily powerful in itself, is by no means the  whole story, for this scene also brings about a final undoing of the other project of the film, namely the construction of a discourse of ‘despair’ – expressed via the film’s mise en scène, the insistence therein on the intractable division between the beauty of Nature and a degraded humanity – by which woman-as-subject and the disruption of the genre she brings can be effaced. At the end of Witchfinder General the camera cuts away from a close-up of Sara screaming to shots of the interior of the castle. It then cuts back to her. The image freezes and the end credits and music begin, with Sara’s screaming continuing in the background. The scream functions on one level as a sign of Sara’s final traumatic objectification. On another, however, it resists the directorial control marked by the freeze frame. The existential, despairing scream in the credit sequence has here become a real scream, that is, a scream arising from a vividly portrayed male violence, a violence which seeks to preserve a certain masculine stability and power. It is a sign of the irrefutable presence of the woman-as-subject within this world, and it marks a recognition on the film’s part that the reinstatement of certainty in gender definition around which classic Hammer horror had been structured involves the violent (re)objectification of the woman. Of course, such a recognition was already present in Witchfinder General’s depiction of the monstrously repressive actions of certain male characters – most notably Hopkins and Stearne, but by the film’s conclusion Marshall as well. But at this concluding moment, the moment of Sara’s scream, Witchfinder

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General, unlike The Sorcerers at its conclusion, relinquishes its hold on even the possibility of returning to the certainties embodied in an earlier type of horror film. The despair of the conclusion in this sense arises from an inability to go further, to put something else, something more positive, in its stead. The reasons behind this urge to return to classic Hammer have already been noted in our discussion of The Sorcerers; in particular, the shifting position of the woman and definitions of femininity within 1960s Britain, the contradiction between her desire and her as symbol of the permissive society. It is significant in this respect, although one cannot suppose a direct, causal connection, that Witchfinder General was produced at the very beginning of the women’s movement, which itself arose in part as a reaction against the male-centredness of certain permissive discourses.25 It can be argued that Reeves, in making Witchfinder General, exhibited both a sensitivity to strains and tensions within British society at this time and an awareness of the challenge these presented for a type of filmmaking to which he was artistically committed, and the film that resulted from this is an intensely imagined struggle – and ­eventual failure – to pull these elements together into a coherent whole. One can speculate endlessly on how Reeves might have proceeded, if indeed he could have, from the apparently intractable blockage that his final film identifies and which it is unable to transcend. However, as a partial antidote to such speculation, we can now turn to a director who in The Gorgon, made four years before Witchfinder General, had engaged with a similar problem, albeit in a less charged and violent way. The director is Terence Fisher, whose Hammer film The Devil Rides Out was released in the same year as Witchfinder General.

The Devil Rides Out At first glance, Terence Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out, a notable product of the old school, appears to have little in common with Reeves’s Witchfinder General. Indeed it would seem to represent a type of horror film against which Reeves and other young filmmakers were reacting. Made by an older director (Fisher was

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s­ ixty-four in 1968), with many of the creative personnel responsible for Hammer horror from the mid-1950s onwards, it embodied all those qualities associated with Hammer in the 1956–64 period, and, in particular, films directed by Fisher himself. Devices that characterise Reeves’s work – particularly the use of zooms and a handheld camera – are alien to Fisher’s approach: indeed he has openly expressed his dislike of such techniques.26 His films are characterised instead by compositional balance, smooth tracks and symmetrical editing patterns, with these in turn linked with a moral certainty whereby good (represented in this film by the Duc de Richleau/Christopher Lee) and evil (represented by Mocata/Charles Gray) are implacably and unambiguously opposed. Nevertheless, it can be argued that The Devil Rides Out is engaging with socially and historically specific issues and causes for concern which overlap with those identified by Witchfinder General. That each offers a different treatment of these issues can be ascribed to the different ideologies (of class, gender and cultural production) within and through which they are produced. Some structural parallels are immediately apparent. Both films centre upon a young man and woman – Richard and Sara in Witchfinder General and Simon (Patrick Mower) and Tanith (Nike Arrighi) in The Devil Rides Out – who are caught between two father figures, one good and the other bad – Cromwell and Hopkins in Witchfinder General, Richleau and Mocata in The Devil Rides Out. Differences arise from the way in which these young characters are treated and valued. Reeves, the young director, invests them, initially at least, with a degree of psychological autonomy, although, as has been shown, this is by no means an unproblematic support for a youth revolution. Fisher’s younger characters, on the other hand, are viewed as weak and unstable, requiring the steadying assistance of a benevolent father figure. Both Simon and Tanith are susceptible to the evil influence of Mocata, and whatever Richleau and his assistant Rex (Leon Greene) do to them is for their own good. These actions range from simple commands through hypnosis – Richleau hypnotises Simon and controls Tanith’s spirit via a hypnotised Marie (a sort of hypnosis by proxy) – to physical violence – Simon knocked unconscious by Richleau, Tanith tied up by Rex.

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However, the view of Richleau as an essentially benevolent figure is consciously undermined by the film through the stress it puts on similarities between Richleau and Mocata. Both are welldressed, knowledgeable figures of authority. Both make extensive use of hypnosis, with each hypnotising Simon, Tanith and Marie during the film. Both talk of Simon as a son; Richleau, who promised Simon’s father he would look after his son, on discovering Simon’s involvement with black magic remarks, ‘I feel like a father who sees his child trying to pick live coals out of the fire’; Mocata on Simon’s return to the coven greets him with ‘Welcome back, my son.’27 What both Richleau and Mocata represent is a clarity and force of vision, a certainty lacking in the younger characters. It is interesting in this respect to note the changes that Hammer made to the character of Mocata. In Dennis Wheatley’s original novel he is described by Richleau thus: ‘He’s a pot-bellied, bald-headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp. He reminded me of a large white slug.’28 In the film he is transformed through the casting of the suave Charles Gray in the part; handsome in appearance, precise in diction, his power and authority stressed as is that of Richleau by Lee’s characteristically authoritative performance. Both Tanith and Simon oscillate helplessly between the Satanists and Richleau. At the same time Marie Eaton (Sarah Lawson), Richleau’s niece, and her husband Richard (especially the latter, played by Paul Eddington) exhibit scepticism in the face of Richleau’s learned warnings against demonic forces. In the climactic scene within the circle, it is Simon, Marie and Richard who are pressured by Mocata, while in each case it is the knowledgeable Richleau who leads the resistance. This clear vision is, appropriately, often signalled through a visual play on eyes and looking,  most obviously in the various hypnosis scenes but also elsewhere. For example, when Richleau first appears he is looking  through a pair of binoculars. Later two important scenes take place in an observatory with a telescope clearly visible in the background. In the second of these, a demon appears whose power seems to emanate from its eyes. Richleau orders Rex not to look, as later he will instruct the Eatons and Simon not to look.

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Only he has the requisite knowledge, the visionary ability, to dispel the power of evil. Both good and bad father figures exhibit an absolute authority, the film implies, but in the right hands that power over the young, which on occasions takes the form of physical violence, is necessary. Needless to say, it is an equation that leaves youth incapable of self-determination, and in this the film is clearly supportive of a paternalist ideology that is perfectly in keeping with both the age and gender of the filmmakers and the positive valuing of the social authority deriving from the male professional which, as has been demonstrated, characterised Hammer production in the late 1950s and 1960s. It is reported that Fisher chose actress Nike Arrighi for the part of Tanith in the face of resistance from the studio.29 Certainly she is an unconventional Hammer lead with her fragile features and deep voice. This break with tradition can be seen as marking a shift in the position of the woman within Hammer horror that can be linked to shifts observable in The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General, and some of the implications of this can be traced in the penultimate sequence of The Devil Rides Out which takes place within the  Satanist temple. Richleau, Rex, Marie and Richard  enter and look on helplessly as Mocata prepares to sacrifice Peggy (Rosalyn Landor), Marie and Richard’s young daughter. Marie implores Richleau to speak the magical words which saved them before, but Richleau, afraid of the consequences of such an action, refuses. At this point Marie speaks with the voice of the recently deceased Tanith: ‘Only those who love without desire shall have power granted them in their darkest hour.’ She then says the magical words herself, Peggy repeats them, the temple crumbles, the Satanists are destroyed and, in the next sequence, Tanith is restored to life. The important thing to note here is that Tanith’s spirit is not summoned by Richleau, as it is earlier in the film when the Duc’s commands to her are particularly forceful. Instead it comes of its own free will. It is her first free action in the film, that is, one not ordered by Mocata or Richleau, or arising as a direct consequence  of their actions. A ‘speaking union’ of three women is thereby formed in order to protect Peggy and destroy Mocata. In this way the film creates a space for the exercise of a female power

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and desire and the acknowledgement of woman as an independent speaking subject (posited earlier in The Gorgon but not there achieved), something that an anguished Witchfinder General could only imagine in the form of a scream. That The Devil Rides Out is by no means as disturbed a text as Witchfinder General, that it can accommodate with apparent ease an acknowledgement of these shifts within a progression to a satisfying narrative conclusion (as opposed to Witchfinder’s collapse into insanity) can largely be put down to the film’s unwavering faith in and identification with an essentially patriarchal power and authority. So, at the film’s conclusion, Richleau can reveal that the events in the temple took place in another time, their transportation to this other place being caused by his own utterance of those words which later he dared not repeat. The space in which the female exercises power and from which the ethereal Tanith speaks is thereby marked as an illusory space outside the dramatic world of the film. ‘Only those who love without desire shall have power granted them in their darkest hour’; in assigning these lines to Marie/Tanith the film a­ uthoritatively sets limits. Desire – that which made Estelle so threatening, Sara Marshall so appealing – is, quite simply, ­magicked away.30 *** The Sorcerers, Witchfinder General and The Devil Rides Out (as well as Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed) all articulate a situation in which the securing of a fixed male identity depends upon a violent objectification of the woman who previously in the genre had been taken completely for granted. In each, this produces an  ambivalence regarding figures of male authority: on the one hand, guarantors of a reassuring security; on the other, monstrously repressive. The intense and charged qualities of each film arise from the complex imaginative strategies adopted by Reeves and Fisher, which, in the main, hold together in a dynamic relationship tensions that are unresolvable within the films’ terms of reference. Hence the violent contrasts in Reeves’s mise en scène; hence too the clear parallels drawn by Fisher between Richleau and Mocata.



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Notes  1 For a discussion of Sharp’s ‘authorship’, see David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 114–19. For an interesting account of the opening of Kiss of the Vampire, see V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Da Capo, 1972), 176–7.   2 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 116.  3 John Gilling’s companion piece to Plague of the Zombies, the similarly Cornish The Reptile (1966), falls into the same category, although here taking as its central theme the ‘alienness’ of female sexuality within a British setting.  4 Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (London: Macmillan, 1985), 143.  5 Ibid., 144.  6 ‘The role of the female body within the regime of representation inaugurated by the introduction of Technicolor was one both of focusing and motivating a set of colour effects within a system dependent upon plot and narration, thus providing a form of spectacle compatible with that system, and of marking and containing the erotic component involved in the desire to look at the coloured image.’ Ibid., 155.  7 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 155–6.  8 Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis – Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 237.  9 Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (Birmingham: The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1976), 58–9. 10 See David Caute, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Hamilton, 1988); and Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988). 11 Quoted in a publicity handout on Michael Reeves issued for the release of Witchfinder General (available in BFI library). 12 It is significant in this respect that one of the first people approached by Reeves when he went to America looking for work was director Don Siegel. As Pirie notes, the genre films of Siegel had provided a particular focus of interest for British cineastes of the late 1960s and in this can be seen as one part of the counter-cultural ‘scene’: Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 146–7. 13 The Listener, 23 May 1968, 657–8.

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14 The Listener, 30 May 1968, 704. 15 Hall and Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals, 64–5. 16 Pam Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 117. 17 Historically, of course, artists of the Romantic period had a number of complicated political allegiances; see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 18 Hall and Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals, 61. 19 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (London: Longman, 1981), 260. 20 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out (London: Quartet, 1977), 187. 21 Reeves’s film was based loosely on Ronald Bassett’s novel Witchfinder General (London, 1966), itself a part-fictionalised account of Hopkins’s activities. 22 One striking example of this occurs later in the film when a wounded Stearne – the Witchfinder’s assistant – removes a bullet from his arm with a torturing spike. As he screams in agony, the camera moves slowly away to a group of trees nearby. In his account of Witchfinder General, Pirie suggests that nature functions as a positive force. It seems to me, however, that nothing in the film offers itself as unequivocally positive, and that this is both the film’s strength and its principal limitation. Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 153. 23 The similarity between the two sequences is underlined by the presence in each of slow fades and tracks – rhetorical devices usually associated with a more leisurely content, their use here accentuating the violence of the drama. 24 Andy Medhurst, ‘1950s War Films’, in Geoff Hurd (ed.), National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 37. 25 For a tracing of the emergence of the Women’s Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (London: Pan, 1982), 9–47. 26 Terence Fisher on the handheld camera: ‘It leaves me cold. The camera moves all the time, and one quite rightly wonders why’; on the zoom, ‘a gadget’. Quoted in Harry Ringel, ‘Hammer Horror – the World of Terence Fisher’, in Thomas R. Atkins (ed.), Graphic Violence on Screen (New York: Monarch Press, 1976), 37. However, Fisher has elsewhere expressed an admiration for Witchfinder General: see Harry Ringel, ‘Terence Fisher Underlining’, Cinefantastique 4.3 (1975), 19–26.

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27 One of the posters for the film showed a photograph of Lee balanced in the composition against a photograph of Charles Gray, with ‘The Devil’s Adversary’ printed under the former and ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ under the latter. Even here an awareness of a connection and similarity between these two figures is being signalled. 28 Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out (in four–novel compendium, The Devil Rides Out, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, Gateway to Hell, To the Devil a Daughter) (London, 1980), 15. 29 Pirie, A Heritage of Horror, 63. 30 Two films made in this period – Corruption (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1967) and Scream and Scream Again (Gordon Hessler, 1968) – both depict the surgical destruction of young bodies by monstrous father figures (Peter Cushing in the first-named film, Vincent Price in the second). However – and this is the crucial difference between these films and The Devil Rides Out – here this is unquestioningly conflated with the destruction of the independent woman – most notably the policewoman murdered by Michael Gothard’s android in Scream and Scream Again – resulting generally in a reactionary tone.

6

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Horror and the family

The marginalisation of both Count Dracula and Baron Frankenstein in British horror cinema of the 1970s was only one part of a much wider rejection and casting out of those male authority figures who had been so important in earlier Hammer horrors. At the same time the question of the woman’s desire – a troubling element in The Sorcerers (Michael Reeves, 1967) and The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) – became a more pressing and unavoidable issue in 1970s horror, with this sometimes having surprising consequences for the sorts of films actually produced. Clearly an important factor in this disruption of male authority, one that impinged on horror from outside, was the historical challenge delivered by the feminist movement of the early 1970s. But this needs to be linked with other influential factors, both those within and those outside the film industry. For instance, one can point to the increasingly politicised and rebellious youth culture of this period (youth, of course, being the principal target audience of British horror), with its vociferous dissatisfaction with and alienation from many of society’s traditions and institutions and the often paternal authority embodied by these. As far as the film industry itself was concerned, there was a general withdrawal of American finance in the early 1970s, coupled with steadily decreasing admission figures. This precipitated a series of crises in the industry. Because of both this and the decreasing popularity of its films in the States, Hammer, still the leading British horror company, although now much less of a force in world horror, made fewer films with US money, turning instead to British companies such as EMI for finance. (Indeed, some of

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its later films – The Satanic Rites of Dracula [Alan Gibson, 1973] and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires [Roy Ward Baker and Chang Cheh], for example – did not receive a wide US release.)1 In the context of a decreasing home market and uncertain US sales, more exploitable trends came to the fore. To a certain extent, this explains the proliferation of nudity and violence found within the genre in the 1970s.2 It also explains why there was a general lowering of budgets, which had never been generous, as the decade progressed. One result of these financial pressures on the genre was the blandness of style which permeates many 1970s horror films. Nevertheless, significant work was still being done. This chapter will explore in particular the often ambivalent response of British horror filmmakers to the diminution or ‘death’ of the genre’s fictional fathers. Of course, this sort of ambivalence had been seen before in the genre – in some of the later Frankenstein films, for example – but by this stage the possibilities for recuperation, for a covering over or an evasion of problems associated with male identity and authority, appear to have become extremely limited. A figure who appears in British horror for the first time in the 1970s and expresses in a very concise way many of the ambiguities and contradictions of this period merits some discussion here. She is Carmilla, the lesbian vampire.

Carmilla ‘I have never had a friend – shall I find one now?’ She sighed, and her fine dark eyes gazed passionately on me. Now the truth is, I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, ‘drawn towards her’, but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging. (Carmilla)3 By showing the lesbian as a vampire-rapist who violates and destroys her victim, men alleviate their fears that lesbian love could create an alternate model, that two women without coercion or morbidity might prefer one another to a man.4

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The ‘ambiguous feeling’ of the female narrator of J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872), the novel upon which Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970) was based, betrays an ambivalence towards the figure of the lesbian vampire. On the one hand, indeed a ‘vampire-rapist’, a destroyer of young, innocent women; on the other, a sexual liberator of females trapped within patriarchal households and definitions of the feminine.5 The novel acknowledges the strictly limited social confines of the woman’s existence, with father and daughter leading a near solitary existence in a lonely castle. It is precisely these limits that Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt) challenges. Throughout she is characterised both by movement – she enters the tale in a careering carriage, the heroine Laura deduces that she has travelled great distances – and an ability to transcend boundaries; for example, the scenes in which she mysteriously disappears from a locked bedroom. The conclusion of the tale, in which she is trapped within her own coffin by various father figures, staked, decapitated and her body burned, marks the cessation of that threatening mobility (threatening, that is, to patriarchal definitions of the place of the woman). However, it is a conclusion which does not fully contain that threat. Disturbing elements escape: for example, the fact that Laura is related on her mother’s side to the vampiric Karnstein family; and stylistically, in the haunting qualities of the final lines: ‘and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door’. One significant change made in the adaptation from novel to film was the characterisation of Carmilla. In LeFanu’s tale she gives the appearance of being eighteen years old, ‘slender and wonderfully graceful’, while in the film, as played by Ingrid Pitt, she is obviously older and with a much more aggressive physical presence (a ‘sexual juggernaut’ according to one critic). This connects with a greater stress in the film on the inadequacy of male authority and power in the face of the threat she presents. Significantly, as was the case with the earlier Dead of Night (Cavalcanti et al., 1945) and Hammer’s own The Gorgon (Terence Fisher, 1964), this male inadequacy often takes the form of a diminution of the power of a man’s vision. The film’s opening sequence, in which Baron Hartog (Douglas Wilmer) attempts to destroy the vampiric Karnsteins, is instructive

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in this respect. That Hartog is doing this to avenge his beloved sister rather than a lover hints perhaps at a degree of sexual immaturity, the nature of which becomes clearer as the sequence progresses. Hartog steals the vampire’s shroud and retires to a nearby tower where he awaits the undead’s return. Eventually it appears, covered from head to foot in a voluminous white garment, moving through the mist in slow motion, one of the moments of ‘intense dreamlike beauty’ discerned by Pirie throughout the Karnstein trilogy.6 Hartog leans out of a window and waves the shroud in the air – a curiously childish gesture, which is followed by a close-up of the vampire’s bloody mouth. He waits, sword in hand, as the vampire approaches. It turns out to be a beautiful woman (Kirsten Betts). Hartog is transfixed as she advances, smiling, upon him. Suddenly his crucifix brushes against her breast, she bares her fangs and is promptly decapitated by the Baron. This sequence clearly deploys sexually charged imagery. The bloody mouth, and the fanged, phallic power it represents, can be read in this respect as a vagina dentata, with the decapitation which comprises the male response to this functioning as a kind of symbolic castration (Figure 6.1). Significantly, as far as some of our later remarks are concerned, the abrupt transition of the female vampire from beauty to destructiveness, especially when combined

Figure 6.1  Fanged, phallic power: The Vampire Lovers (1970)

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with Hartog’s childish attributes, also suggests an alternation between a good, loving mother figure and a bad, devouring mother figure. The power of this ‘phallic’ woman, it is implied, is in part the power of the mother over the child before the intervention of the Law of the Father – symbolised in this instance by the crucifix. (This approach can be associated with the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, some of whose ideas feature later in this chapter.) This configuration – man looking at woman followed by images of powerlessness – recurs throughout the film. For example, on the death of his niece, General Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing), who has been looking at Carmilla, drops his gaze. When he raises it, Carmilla, impossibly, has vanished. As Spielsdorf shouts her name, a succession of shots show empty rooms and corridors, the absence of Carmilla from all these reiterating her absence from the place of Spielsdorf’s gaze. Here the patriarch is ‘de-throned’ through a revelation of the inadequacy of his gaze. Later, towards the end of the film, Carl (Jon Finch), the film’s notional hero, confronts Carmilla – whose mouth is bloody – with a sword which she promptly knocks out of his hand. In this revision of the opening sequence, the significance of this act could hardly be clearer. The conclusion to the film, in which Spielsdorf, Roger Morton (George Cole) and Baron Hartog together destroy a sleeping, unresisting Carmilla is, when seen in this context, hardly the climactic heroic victory of good over evil that one found in the earlier Dracula. Here instead the patriarchal order attains victory only through the total passivity of the threatening woman, a further sign of the inadequacy of that order as revealed in the film. Placed alongside this vivid depiction of male inadequacy are scenes – usually taking place in domestic settings such as bedrooms and corridors – in which male characters are either marginal or absent and where female characters look at each other in an erotically charged way. The central scene here is that in which Carmilla and Emma (Madeline Smith), the latter the daughter of Roger Morton, romp, semi-nude, through Carmilla’s bedroom in the Morton household. On one level, these scenes service the commercial requirement for an exploitable female nudity.7 But at the same time they signal a split in the film regarding the way in which the  female body is represented. In some sequences (most notably

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the opening), it is, traditionally for British horror, the focus for childlike male fears and anxieties. In other sequences, it is the site for an essentially narcissistic female desire which the film insistently equates with lesbianism (this narcissism underlined by the fact that the female characters are often dressed alike, in long white nightgowns). In its representation of female desire, The Vampire Lovers can be aligned with The Devil Rides Out: both acknowledge a female desire that is, to a certain extent, independent of male control while at the same time banishing this desire to a separate, ‘manless’ space. But unlike The Devil Rides Out, The Vampire Lovers lacks an authoritative figure such as Christopher Lee’s Duc de Richleau (or even Mocata) to guarantee a patriarchal order. Hence the relative paucity of action in The Vampire Lovers: until near the end of the film no male character seems capable of doing anything to defeat Carmilla. However, despite this, The Vampire Lovers does place distinct limits on Carmilla’s mobility and the female desire that she both represents and provokes. One can point here to the relentlessly voyeuristic way in which she and other women are portrayed in the film (with all this presumably presented for the gaze of a male audience). Also significant are the repeated cutaways to a mysterious male figure whom we presume is Count Karnstein (John ForbesRobertson), although we are given no firm information to support that supposition. These shots, which are only faintly motivated by the character’s brief appearance at the ball near the beginning of the film, mark him as a final, somewhat arbitrary guarantor of the male look – he seems to have some sort of power over Carmilla – which, implicitly, underlines its weakness elsewhere in the film. A sequel to The Vampire Lovers followed quickly. Compared to its predecessor, Lust for a Vampire (Jimmy Sangster, 1971) proved to be a distinctly reactionary project, concerned as it seemed to be to undermine the power of Carmilla. One consequence of this is that Carmilla (now played by Yutte Stensgaard) in Lust for a Vampire is a much more passive figure than she was before, submitting herself as she does not only to an evil lord (presumably Count Karnstein, played by Mike Raven) but also to what can only be described as her boyfriend, the film’s hero Richard Lestrange (Michael Johnson). (It is significant that Lestrange turns out to be a horror novelist, an

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authoritative master of the very same discourse within which he himself appears.) At the same time, however, the film shows little interest in portraying a dynamic male authority in action. Instead it offers an increasingly complicated plot combined with elements of jokiness which together render Lust for a Vampire more an example of early 1970s camp, a curious hybrid of romance, comedy and thriller, than a horror film.8 The final Karnstein film, Twins of Evil (John Hough), was released in 1971. It marked a further move to an unqualified objectification of the woman. This is most obviously signalled by the positioning of the twins in relation to the male characters. The fact that the rebellious, independent twin is presented as unequivocally evil while the obedient twin, the one who in effect knows her place, is virtue personified immediately lends a misogynist tone to the proceedings. The action of the film arises out of a conflict between the all-male Puritan group, led by Peter Cushing’s Gustav Weil, and the decadent, vampiric Baron Karnstein (Damien Thomas). Both of these seek to dominate women in various ways. At the film’s conclusion, the evil twin is beheaded and both Weil and the Baron are killed. Weil is replaced by Anton (David Warbeck), the local schoolmaster, who had initially opposed the Puritan witchhunts but by this stage is leading the Puritans into battle against the v­ ampires. The model of arrogant, domineering masculinity represented by Weil and the Baron is replaced by his more understanding and sensitive leadership, which in the end, it can be argued, functions as merely another form of domination. It is significant in this respect that Carmilla herself – played by Katya Wyeth – makes only a fleeting appearance and that the lesbianism which previously had signalled, albeit in a compromised fashion, a female desire separate from male definitions has been almost entirely removed. Carmilla’s reign as a powerful and independent female character in British horror was, perhaps not surprisingly, a relatively short one. But the very fact of her existence signalled that a change had occurred in the genre; quite simply, Carmilla would have been an unthinkable development a mere decade before. Importantly, the Karnstein films were not alone in addressing some of the problems and anxieties thrown up by what was by any standard

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a troubled moment in British social history. Neither were they unique in identifying the woman as a figure of instability in British horror. Recurrent preoccupations in horror at this time included a perceived weakness in paternal authority, a sense of fathers as both  brutal and petty, and a conception of female power as a quality bound up with the maternal. The most striking thing about these films, that which binds them together into a group, is that they take quite explicitly as their focus something that, to a lesser extent, also concerned the Karnstein films – namely, the nuclear family.

Family horrors Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, ‘family’ became an increasingly contested term. For the Women’s Movement, it was the prime institution of patriarchal repression of women: ‘Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.’9 For psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper, it enforced a more general repressiveness: The bourgeois nuclear family unit (to use something like the language of its agents – academic sociologists and political scientists) has become, in this century, the ultimately perfected form of non-meeting and therefore the ultimate denial of mourning, death, birth and the experiential realm that precedes birth and conception.10

For the various conservative moral movements of the time, however, it was the beleaguered repository of religious and moral value, that which bound modern society together and which had to be protected: In the Christian view of society the family is one of the vital parts of the structure. Church, state and family are the three institutions divinely ordained for the preservation of society … There must, at the centre of society, be a social unit where everyone can feel safe. Men and women are not given the emotional strength to live without the security which comes from love and trust.11

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Horror films have often explored familial tensions. For example, there are some rather obvious parallels to be drawn between American and British horror productions in the 1970s. Both use family dramas to address in a variety of ways and from a number of different positions a widespread sense of social fragmentation. But while American horror films of the 1970s – which included, to name but a few, The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977), It’s Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) – with their present-day settings and their relatively realistic depiction of violence, tended to explore the social dimensions of this situation (with in particular the monstrous family used to symbolise a wider social corruption and bankruptcy), British horror, usually set in the past, away from everyday reality, dealt more with the psychological effects of the family structure.12 For example, all the films to be discussed here take as their subject matter the ways in which individual characters enter into identification with familial roles – mother, father, daughter, son. This process is usually conceived of as repressive, often involving a violence which emanates from the older generation and is directed against the young. What emerges from this series of ‘family’ films are two different treatments of these issues: on the one hand, some films which contemplate a mother figure and her power, and, on the other hand, another set of films which take as their shared subject the rule of the father.

The power of the mother Mother is ancient history.13

The drama in these films turns on the threatened or actual collapse of an already weakened patriarchal order provoked by the emergence of a very powerful and threatening mother figure (with fathers either ineffectual or absent). The principal conditions of this figure’s existence are, first, that the characters around her are rendered childlike in some way or other, and, secondly, that the realm of maternal power is associated with the past, both the past (i.e. infancy) of the individual and of society in general. A knowledge or memory of this past has been repressed via the establishment of

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a patriarchal order. But now the mother returns with a destructive vengeance, and in representing this return the films in question, consciously or otherwise, tap into what are essentially pre-oedipal fantasies about maternal power. The pre-oedipal mother – as variously theorised by Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein and Susan Lurie – is primarily an object, the mother of the infant seen through that infant’s eyes as a very powerful being. Although there is disagreement as to the relation this mother bears to the father, she is generally seen as embodying phallic attributes and, connected with this, bestowing a sense of completeness and plenitude. Significantly for the purposes of our argument, Klein further argues for her as a part-threatening, devouring object, as the child projects upon her its own innate aggression.14 The trajectory of the British horror genre as described in previous chapters, with the woman as object beginning to speak in films such as The Gorgon and The Devil Rides Out, takes in these ‘mother’ films a new direction. Each film in its own way depicts one of these archaic mother figures – who by definition is an object for others, that which exists in the inaccessible past of each adult – as someone who is struggling towards an autonomous female identity. As one might expect, this project turns out to be an impossible one: the distance between an archaic past and the present day is simply too great to traverse and, in the end, this version of the pre-oedipal mother is altogether too destructive, too anti-social, to be accepted. It is as if when detached from her traditional role in British horror, the figure of the woman has here become unstable and liable to disintegration. The three maternal dramas to be discussed here were all produced by Hammer. The first of these, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (Seth Holt, 1971) was adapted from Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars. It opens with Margaret Fuchs, its contemporary heroine, asleep and speaking an unintelligible language. There follows a sequence in ancient Egypt in which Tera, Margaret’s double (both are played by Valerie Leon), is ritually poisoned and has her hand cut off (Figure 6.2). As the film progresses, it becomes clear that this destruction of a female physical integrity marks the founding of a patriarchal order. That this order is weak and subject

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Figure 6.2  Tera (Valerie Leon) in Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)

to regression is immediately made apparent, however, by the fatal attack launched against the male priests responsible for Tera’s execution. Margaret’s own mother is absent from the film (she dies giving birth to Margaret). Margaret’s family is presented to us as a maledominated institution with the woman therein an object to be transferred from her father to her boyfriend. In the face of this situation, Tera embodies an awesome power from the past. As she herself puts it, ‘I, Tera, Queen of Darkness, priestess of Ancient Egypt, have lived before. My spirit has never rested through all these weary centuries. My soul has wandered among the boundless stars while my mortal body waited.’ She is separated, divided and seeking to regain that lost unity. One can note in this respect the stress laid in the film on restoring the physical integrity of Tera’s body, which is reenacted on another level in the gathering of objects plundered from her tomb – the jaw of the ass, the cat, the serpent – so that the resurrection ritual can be carried through. What her prospective return threatens is the Law of the Father: ‘no scheming and malignant priesthood, no repressive archaic laws or endless rituals of death. A land where love is the divine possession of the soul.’ Moreover, the present-day manifestation of male authority is shown as already weakened: paralysis afflicts Margaret’s father shortly after the film begins and the doctor attempting to treat Margaret is ineffectual

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and is eventually killed by her. Of her father’s male archaeologist colleagues, one is confined to a lunatic asylum and another collapses at the mere sight of Margaret/Tera. Insofar as Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb identifies the nuclear family as an institution which favours male authority (albeit an ineffective one), it aligns itself with much feminist thought of the day. However, at the same time, and arguably as a condition of the former, it offers no ideas about how this unjust situation might be rectified. Instead it exhibits a fascination with, and a subjection before, the power of an ancient matriarchal figure. This fascination, and the move into the distant past that it involves, enables the film to avoid some of the pressing political issues, especially those to do with the family, that are implicit in its scenario. Inevitably perhaps, the only solution it can envisage is the total collapse of Margaret’s family. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb ends with Margaret/ Tera, badly burned in a fire, completely swathed in bandages and mumbling incoherently. This decidedly ambiguous image – is this Margaret or Tera and will the threat posed by Tera be renewed? – is symptomatic of a wider inability in the film to develop a coherent attitude to those feminist ideas which elsewhere it has either sought to incorporate or at the very least acknowledged. Countess Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1970) arguably displays a more critical awareness than does Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb of the relation between fantasies of maternal power and the familial and social roles assigned to women in a patriarchal society. Sasdy’s film opens with the funeral of the Count, Countess Elizabeth Bathory’s husband, the feudal patriarch of the region. As the priest intones the burial service, the Countess (Ingrid Pitt), an aged woman, looks out from behind her veil at Imre, a young, handsome soldier. This initial catching of the male body by the female gaze signals the prospect of the desiring female, which earlier horror films (particularly The Sorcerers, in which desire is also ‘misplaced’ in an old woman) had found threatening in the extreme. However, the centring of Countess Dracula on the female character sets it apart from these and thereby initiates a different approach. As the film progresses, Elizabeth’s look, and the desire it signals, is increasingly identified as a transgression against patriarchal definitions of the feminine which are seen to be founded on a

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­ ouble-standard opposition between virgin and whore. As Captain d Dobi (Nigel Green), the Countess’s major-domo, puts it, ‘Why should a man be slave to one woman when he can have the pick of any?’ ‘But if that woman embodies all the virtues?’, Imre (Sandor Elès) asks in return. Dobi again, asserting an inalienable patriarchal splitting of the woman: ‘Mistress, friend and mother in one. Does such a woman exist?’ ‘You know she does!’, replies Imre, thereby, and quite inadvertently, identifying the precise nature of Elizabeth’s transgression. She wishes to cut across these definitions and identities, filling them all (mother, daughter, lover etc.) and contained by none, acquiring a unity that is conceived of as, yet again, essentially maternal. Restored to a youthful beauty by bathing in the blood of female virgins, Elizabeth takes on aspects of the pre-oedipal mother, in this case a Kleinian devouring figure – most explicitly at the film’s conclusion when she attempts to consume her own daughter. She constantly seeks to acquire a plenitude which is only occasionally and temporarily realised; for example, in the scene in which she, newly restored to youth after having murdered a gypsy, rides to meet Imre by the lake, a brief use of slow motion suggests both the fullness and the transience of her satisfaction. The pain of her necessary and inevitable return to her previous state works to underline the imaginary and unrealisable qualities of her escape. Elizabeth, whether young or old, is often placed behind bars and trapped within claustrophobic compositions. Her beauty is always temporary – dependent as it is on a constant replenishment of virgin’s blood – and her satisfaction is consequently also temporary. The instability of her position is perhaps most cruelly expressed in the scene in which the local prostitute asks Imre whether he is thinking of his ‘lady love’. This is followed by a sudden cut to an aged Elizabeth staggering through her bedroom. The moment suggests the impossibility of abolishing these divisive and defining roles through what is essentially a regression, an attempted escape, rather than an engagement with the conditions which have brought these roles about in the first place. The doomed quality of Elizabeth’s plan is further stressed by the film’s intertwining of her crimes with her position of authority within a feudal society. Like her vampiric namesake, Countess Dracula terrorises the helpless peasants of the ­ surrounding ­ countryside,

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with her blood-letting activities depending on the absolute power that derives from her occupation of the castle. In a very important sense, Elizabeth’s desire is a function of and stems from her class position. Connected with this is the fact that the majority of her victims, while certainly not of her own class, are of her own gender (her climactic killing of Imre is clearly accidental); appropriately enough, at the film’s conclusion a line of peasant women line up to condemn her. In attempting to elude patriarchal definitions of femininity and constrictions of desire, Elizabeth is, like Tera, shown to be guilty of an egotistical selfishness. She ends in the film as she begun – confined. Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (Roy Ward Baker, 1971) is a curious concoction of a number of horror themes and motifs: Jack the Ripper, Burke and Hare and elements of Frankenstein as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s original literary source mingle in its convoluted plot. The film exhibits a camp humour which was becoming increasingly visible within the genre in the early 1970s, possibly as a response to the outdatedness of some of its conventions; and this, along with the plot, often distracts the film from the implicit logic of its own narrative proposition as announced in the film’s title. However, inasmuch as Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde does hold to that transexual proposition, it can be recognised as another maternal drama. Perhaps the most surprising absence in a film about a man turning into a woman is anxieties around castration. Instead one finds the transformation signalled here as pleasurable, with Sister Hyde (Martine Beswick) languorously admiring herself in a mirror; a return to an imaginary maternal plenitude, one which, as with Countess Dracula, is only temporary and achieved at the expense of murder. (Possibly the dagger that Sister Hyde carries is a distinctly phallic compensation for what is lost in Jekyll’s [Ralph Bates] transformation into a woman.) Jekyll/Hyde lives in a house conspicuously lacking in father figures; the Spencer family who live upstairs comprise only mother, son and daughter, while Jekyll’s surrogate father, Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim), is often absent and generally ineffective throughout. Like Countess Elizabeth, Hyde exists within and challenges standing definitions of femininity constructed around a double standard, in this case the absolute

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Victorian division between virgin, represented here by the genteel Susan Spencer (Susan Brodrick), and the working-class whores who become Jekyll/Hyde’s victims. This is most evident in Hyde’s mobility, as she moves freely between domestic interior – into which she brings a bright red dress, the colour signifying her dangerous ­sexuality – and fog-laden streets. She can be contrasted with Susan who, after having moved into the house at the beginning of the film, only ventures forth alone into the streets once and then narrowly escapes death at the hands of Hyde herself. However, the potential posed by Hyde for a challenge to the social values (both those of the Victorian era and the 1970s) that have produced her is circumscribed by the fact that she is constantly seen as enacting a regression on the part of Jekyll: in an important sense, she belongs to him. It is significant in this respect that throughout the film Jekyll is constantly verbalising while Hyde remains comparatively silent. This is underlined by the childlike qualities of Jekyll, Susan and Susan’s brother, Howard (Lewis Fiander), and the way in which these further position Hyde as mother-object in their eyes; indeed she is often seen from either Howard’s or Susan’s point of view. While it is true to say that there are moments which resist this, which work to suggest the possibility of a female subjectivity speaking from within this objectification – Hyde before the mirror, Martine Beswick’s noteworthy performance in the part – these exist only in isolation. The climactic intervention of the police at the end of the film, and Jekyll/Hyde’s subsequent fall from a building, stands as the final point of a narrative of objectification, from which Sister Hyde, never as formed as Elizabeth in Countess Dracula, always something less than a subject, cannot escape. In all three of these films, a disorder within the family arises from a weakening of paternal authority. This in turn entails a recognition on the part of the filmmakers of a wider social shift in understandings of the family and in particular the position of the woman within this, which can be aligned with but is not reducible to the Women’s Movement. In centring on a mother figure the films acknowledge the possibility of a new female subjectivity, but as a condition of this acknowledgement turn this gender-­transformation, this ­ coming-into-being, into, paradoxically, a regression. The

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c­ onsequent sliding between woman as object – held in the gaze of children and ineffectual men – and as matriarchal subject structures the progression of the films. It also explains the inconclusiveness of their respective conclusions: a bandaged Margaret/Tera in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb; Countess Elizabeth awaiting execution in Countess Dracula; Jekyll/Hyde irrevocably split, with half of the face that of Jekyll, the other half that of Hyde, at the end of his/ her film. Immobility, waiting and splitting: each of these marks an inability to decide, to choose between a fantasy of maternal power and a more questioning and overtly political engagement with those social shifts which, to a large extent, have moulded these films. It is in the articulation of these apparently incompatible elements – of present-day social reality and archaic mothers – that these maternal dramas acquire their peculiar contradictory character.

The law of the father Operating alongside these depictions of the maternal is a group of films that find their way into problems associated with the family via the figure of the father, with this time the mother either marginalised or absent. In particular, these films concentrate on the difficult relations between fathers and their children, with the father often seen as preventing his children from becoming adults. The images of passivity with which they often conclude signal in this respect an inability to progress and develop within such a situation, where the only outcome possible is a violence that is often turned against the father himself, who in refusing to pass on his power, investing it totally in himself, isolates himself from the framework of relationships and identifications through which such power can be transmitted down through the generations. Seen in this way, these father-fixated films can be related to classic Hammer horror (even though of the four films discussed here only Demons of the Mind [Peter Sykes, 1972] and Hands of the Ripper [Peter Sasdy, 1971] were actually produced by that company), insofar as the latter also often dealt with a problematised transmission of patriarchal power from one generation to the next. However, in 1970s horror the antagonism between generations has become much  more intense and violent; moreover, as already indicated,

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these – and other British horror films of this period – lack those decisive p ­ roblem-solving professionals who in earlier horror films had worked to manage this troubled situation. What this means in effect is that historically specific problems in defining the family as a site for the transmission of patriarchal authority and values are here being dealt with in quite a different way from the way in which they are handled in those films which centre on the mother. In the latter, one finds recurrent images of regression to an archaic past, whereas in the present instance the notion of the father as absolute tyrant serves to freeze the family’s development, permitting no interaction between generations: the generation gap with a vengeance, so to speak. If a text was required that could sum up many of the attributes displayed by these ‘father’ films, one need look no further than the conclusion of And Now the Screaming Starts! (Roy Ward Baker, 1973) when the camera closes in on a passage in an open Bible: ‘For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ In the case of the film within which it is located, the iniquity derives from the actions of the feudal lord Sir Henry Fengriffen (Herbert Lom) and falls upon his grandson Charles (Ian Ogilvy). A flashback informs us how Sir Henry raped the bride of a servant and then cut off the servant’s hand. The servant curses him; and this curse is finally realised many years after Henry’s death when Catherine (Stephanie Beacham), Charles’s new wife, is raped by the servant’s ghost and eventually gives birth to a one-handed son. The grandfather is the lord of the manor, a tyrant answerable to no one. The house into which the newly wed Charles and Catherine move is dominated by his forbidding portrait. This portrait in turn is associated with images of bodily (male) mutilation – a face without eyes, a severed hand. In earlier Hammer films, with their distinctive oedipal qualities, such wounds functioned as symbolic castrations dealt by a father figure as a punishment for the desire for a mother figure. Here, however, these wounds symbolise instead a more general and undirected interdiction, a refusal of adulthood. The  outcome of this is that there is no way forward for the young people in the film; their desires, their emotions, are

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rendered ­ineffectual. This, it appears, is especially the case for the young male. At the end of the film Charles, who has been insistently denying the efficacy of the curse, sees the one-handed baby. Immediately, he rushes to his grandfather’s tomb and disinters his skeleton. Unable to father a child, to become a father himself, he rants against the figure who selfishly held that power to himself. Male potency is no longer available – is realisable only in flashback form – and Charles has no option but insanity. Catherine’s function within this is to serve as the vessel for the execution of the curse. Although it is her voice that initiates the ­ narrative – with the Rebecca-like ‘In my dreams I go back to the year 1795 …’ – and her actions, the search for the truth about the family into which she has married, constantly further the narrative, in the end she actually discovers very little. In this, And Now the Screaming Starts! differs from other ‘father’ films which deal more with the troubled relations between fathers and daughters, with the family identified both as an arena for male tyranny and as a prison for women, the latter doubly powerless insofar as they are both young and female. One product of this way of seeing is that, unusually for period horror, two of these films, The Creeping Flesh (Freddie Francis, 1972) and Hands of the Ripper, lack even a notional male romantic lead to which the heroine-daughter – Penelope (Lorna Heilbron) in The Creeping Flesh and Anna (Angharad Rees) in Hands of the Ripper – can be linked at their respective conclusions. To this can be added, in a qualified sense, Demons of the Mind: its heroine Elizabeth’s (Gillian Hills) romantic interlude with Carl (Paul Jones) near the beginning of the film is characterised, through an unnaturalistic absence of dialogue, as unreal and dreamlike. This general absence of normative heterosexual relations can be seen to derive from the father’s refusal in each film to share his power with any other male; insofar as these films conjure up a domestic world that is bounded by the authority of the father, the very possibility of a young male rival to challenge successfully this authority seems unthinkable. The conventional ‘career trajectory’ of the woman – from daughter to wife – is thereby made unavailable, and Penelope, Elizabeth and Anna are shown in the main as motherless daughters whose eventual insanity functions as a

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response to their fathers’ refusal to accept them as separate and independent beings. Because there is no hero as such who can save the daughter and restore patriarchal authority in a more just (i.e. less visibly domineering) form, an incurably violent antagonism between father and daughter often ensues. As with other horror films of this period, the positioning of the woman within the family is identified as both repressive and troubled; but one of the conditions of this is that the films in question are unable to offer any credible solution to this problem. The first half of The Creeping Flesh depicts with considerable economy and intelligence the Victorian archaeologist-explorer Emmanuel Hildern’s (Peter Cushing) loving oppression of his daughter, Penelope, whom he regards as solely his possession. As he puts it, ‘Ever since your dear mother died, you’ve been everything to me.’ Penelope has been kept in ignorance of her mother’s confinement to a lunatic asylum, a confinement, it is hinted, motivated by Hildern’s fear of an active female sexuality. This daughter’s main domestic function, the management of household affairs on inadequate funds, clearly imposes a great strain upon her, one that is not recognised by a father more interested in scientific research. Her nascent rebellion against her father’s domination is signalled through her rediscovery of her mother and the independence she represented. She reads a magazine called Romance – a genre conventionally associated with female desire – that belonged to her mother and then, disobeying her father, ventures into her mother’s room. There she finds the letter which earlier in the film had informed Hildern of his wife’s death. Letting down her hair and putting on her mother’s red dress, she begins to play the piano. On entering the room, Hildern initially mistakes her for his wife, but then he chastises her for her disobedience. She responds angrily, crying ‘All the time she was a prisoner, like me!’ It is at this point, in a shot which could be read as showing Hildern’s subjective image of his daughter, that he observes in her the first signs of insanity. This is promptly followed by a more obviously subjective flashback depicting Hildern’s wife’s descent into madness, identified here with both her sexual licentiousness and her career as a dancer. The problem for Penelope at this point is, quite simply, that she has nowhere to go. The film makes it clear that she knows nothing of the outside

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world, indeed is forbidden to stray far from the house, and there is no hero who can rescue her (unless one counts the escaped lunatic Lenny whom she eventually encounters and who can arguably be seen as a parody of such a figure). Hildern’s response to the threat to his authority posed by his daughter is intertwined with his experiments on the ancient skeleton he has brought back from his archaeological expedition. This object is described as being one of ‘the Evil Ones’ who walked the earth  before mankind. Water is spilled accidentally on to one of the skeleton’s fingers and, miraculously, flesh and blood appear there. Using this blood, Hildern manufactures a serum against what he believes to be the ‘pure evil’ bacillus alive in the Evil One and promptly injects this into his daughter in order, as he sees it, to protect her from her mother’s insanity. The serum fails and she becomes ‘evil’, that is, like her mother, wearing a red dress, letting down her hair, dancing. Needless to say, the equation made here – between female independence and archaic, absolute Evil – is hardly a progressive one. Importantly, however, it is an equation not supported by the film but rather located firmly within Hildern’s somewhat questionable logic. It is significant in this respect that while in the throes of the madness induced by her father, Penelope attacks three men (a drunken sailor, a lecherous ‘cad’ and the lunatic Lenny), each of whom, in their greed and self-centredness, can be seen as stand-ins for her own father. Appropriately, at the end of the film it is she, now entirely an object, without speech, who lets the Evil One – by this stage resurrected as a vengeful monster – into the house in which a terrified Hildern is hiding. Hildern’s attempted objectification of his daughter within both the home and a scientific experiment backfires when he loses one of his own fingers to the monster. This punishment is offered to us as having a certain amount of justice to it, not only because earlier Hildern had severed one of the monster’s fingers but also because we have seen what Hildern has done to his own daughter. Here, with the monster’s incursion into the house that was previously Hildern’s domain, he is, in a sense, made to suffer for his selfishness. In the film’s remarkably bleak conclusion, which takes place in an asylum earlier identified as repressive and inhumane, Penelope is pronounced incurably insane and locked up with her father; this

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family has failed. In what can be seen as both a patriarchal damagelimitation exercise and an inability to produce a more positive ending, a brutal form of patriarchal authority is reinstated in the form of Christopher Lee’s asylum director. Similar tensions and ambiguities gather around the father in Demons of the Mind. In the credit sequence, for example, photographs of a cruel-looking Baron Zorn and his two children, Elizabeth and Emil, are joined together in the frame. This juxtaposition is repeated at the film’s conclusion when in rapid succession one finds images of Zorn impaled by a giant, flaming cross, the son he has just shot dead and the daughter screaming insanely. In this and other ways, Demons of the Mind displays a self-consciousness in its representation of the family as a repressive institution, in so doing drawing on a Laingian critique that turns on the idea of familial repressiveness causing youthful insanity: at one point Carl, a student, remarks to Zorn (Robert Hardy), ‘Elizabeth’s not mad now, but you and this house will drive her mad.’ However, while Laing often identified the mother as the main agent of this repression inasmuch as she refuses to let her children go, here the mother is absent, accessible only via the Baron’s subjective and lascivious memories of her.15 These in turn can be linked with Hildern’s memories of his ‘insane’ wife in The Creeping Flesh: in both, insanity is equated with a threateningly independent female sexuality. Like And Now the Screaming Starts! and The Creeping Flesh, Demons of the Mind locates the problem with the family in the figure of the selfish, tyrannical father. Here, as is the case in a slightly different way with Countess Dracula, this function is doubled by his position as the head of a feudal social hierarchy. Hence the peasant revolt at the end of the film can be seen as a re-enactment on another level of the children’s attempted, and thwarted, rebellion against the father. The precise nature of this tyranny is made clear in the Baron’s first appearance after the credit sequence. When Elizabeth arrives home, he is found praying at his wife’s tomb. Associated from the beginning with death, and a concomitant objectification of the mother, he greets his daughter thus: ‘Child of my flesh, my blood.’ As is confirmed later by an incredulous doctor who remarks of the children, ‘They’re extensions of your being in some grotesque way,’ Zorn is unable to see either her or Emil as individuals separate

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from himself. Referring at one point to his ambitions for his family, he says ‘I want it to be as it was.’ Like Hildern in The Creeping Flesh, he selfishly stands in the way of his children’s maturation. The film as a whole moves away from the bourgeois d ­ omesticity that characterised the settings of The Creeping Flesh and And Now the Screaming Starts!. It opens instead with Elizabeth reaching up to the sky through the bars of a coach window: a poetic representation of her entrapment as opposed to the domesticated realism found in The Creeping Flesh. More revealing comparisons can be made between Cushing’s restrained performance as Hildern and the more melodramatic acting style evident in Demons of the Mind, Hildern’s claustrophobic household and Zorn’s spacious baronial hall. Demons of the Mind’s setting would seem then to enable a more overtly symbolised portrayal of the father’s activities. This is perhaps most clear at the film’s conclusion when, unlike Hildern in The Creeping Flesh who merely loses a finger, Zorn is staked with a giant cross, which also aligns him with that other aristocratic figure of absolute feudal authority, Count Dracula. However, while the form of the father’s punishment might be different, its function remains much the same. The tyrannical father is destroyed, but only at the cost of the destruction of his failed family: hence the insanity of its sole surviving member (Figure 6.3). A violently repressive patriarchal system, represented here by an itinerant priest who is at first weak and disorientated but gains authority as Zorn declines, is put in its place. The despair of the conclusion stems yet again from a simultaneous recognition of this reinstatement of repression and an inability or unwillingness to offer anything in its stead. Henry Fengriffen, Emmanuel Hildern and Baron Zorn, in their selfishly holding on to the women in their power, all exhibit characteristics of the primal father as identified by Freud in Totem and Taboo, his account of the founding of a patriarchal order. In Freud’s version, the selfish father keeps all the women in the tribe to himself. This situation is finally overcome when the sons – the primal horde – kill and eat the father: ‘and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength’.16 However, these films conclude differently: in both The Creeping Flesh and Demons of

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Figure 6.3  The tyrannical father (Baron Zorn, played by Robert Hardy) is ‘destroyed’ (impaled by a cross) in Demons of the Mind (1972)

the Mind the bad father is punished by another father figure. (The mob in Demons of the Mind is less a primal horde – little time is spent elaborating on the relationship between the Baron and the ­peasants – than it is a generically conventional device which functions here as an extension of the priest’s influence.) It is also the case that the agencies of this punishment are only partially motivated by the narratives in which they appear, or rather that motivation takes a more nakedly ideological form than had been seen before in the genre. The monster in The Creeping Flesh can be related to a Lovecraftian horror tradition that was generally alien to British horror and is filmed in an accordingly strange way, with the camera positioned in one instance behind its eyes (a repetition of an effect in the 1965 film The Skull: both this film and The Creeping Flesh were directed by Freddie Francis); it is also not destroyed at the end of the film. In Demons of the Mind the priest’s appearance – he is first seen ­wandering through the forest – is never fully explained, although his thematic function – the punishment of Zorn – is clear. This partial arbitrariness, which is arguably the only means by which these films can produce an ending, functions as a final

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abrupt closing down of some of the possibilities for a more intensive interrogation of the family and male authority within it that have been raised earlier in each film. The closure thereby attained is an ambivalent one, usually seen as the inevitable return of a social and psychological repressiveness: hence the far from happy endings of And Now the Screaming Starts!, The Creeping Flesh and Demons of the Mind. Perhaps more than any other film in the group, Hands of the Ripper, which tells of the exploits of Jack the Ripper’s daughter, reveals and to a certain extent dwells upon this inability to see beyond a certain point. The bad, selfish father is present in Hands of the Ripper in the forms of both Jack the Ripper and the psychoanalyst Dr John Pritchard (Eric Porter). (The similarity in names is, I think, significant.) Like Hildern, Pritchard is the authoritative head of a Victorian household. Also like Hildern, he balks at the prospect of his offspring’s independence: hence his lack of enthusiasm over the forthcoming wedding of his son Michael (Keith Bell), and his coolness towards Michael’s blind fiancée, Laura (Jane Merrow). This quality of Pritchard’s character also manifests itself in his attempts to cure Anna, Jack the Ripper’s daughter, of her apparent insanity. This in itself seems a perfectly laudable aim, particularly when compared with the hypocrisy of Dysart (Derek Godfrey), an MP and as such a spokesperson for the Victorian establishment. However, as the film progresses, Pritchard’s actions become increasingly questionable. For one thing, he covers up several of the murders that have been committed by Anna. For another, his professional relationship with Anna is clearly informed and undermined by his desire for her. This is apparent from the beginning when he moves Anna into his dead wife’s room and has her dressed in his dead wife’s clothes. (Importantly, this room was reserved for Laura, his prospective daughter-in-law; Pritchard’s installing Anna there is another way of forestalling a youthful encroachment on his space.) It culminates in the scene near the end of the film in which Pritchard finally kisses Anna and in so doing inadvertently triggers her murderous attack on him. If Pritchard’s motivations are not what they initially seem, neither is the cure he seeks for Anna’s illness necessarily a good thing. Hands of the Ripper’s pre-credits sequence, in which Anna’s

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real father, Jack the Ripper, stabs her mother to death while she, a child, looks on, suggests that this illness arises from Anna’s misidentification before what is signalled – through non-conventional fighting and music, its organisation around a child’s gaze – as a primal scene, the moment, it has been argued by Freud, when a child either witnesses or fantasises witnessing its parents making love. Freud also indicates that the child views the sexual act as one involving violence. In Hands of the Ripper’s primal scene, this violence has become literal; the gender roles offered therein assigning the male the active part and the female the passive, and ensuring that Anna has only two identificatory options, two ways into the scene: mother-victim or father-aggressor.17 She chooses the latter, and the film subsequently interweaves this with Pritchard’s activities. In a very important sense, what Pritchard is trying to do is put Anna back in her proper, gendered place, ‘emasculating’ her in order that she can become ‘a lady’. This is made clear when on their first meeting, in an action replete with symbolically castrating overtones, he treads cruelly on her foot.18 Throughout Hands of the Ripper Anna resists being precisely what Pritchard wants her to be, that is a mother/wife, the object of his own desire: as the doctor says, ‘All you have to do is learn to become one of the family.’ Later, when Dolly (Marjie Lawrence), Pritchard’s housemaid, calls her a lady, Anna uneasily replies ‘But I’m not a real lady yet.’ In fact, much of her violence is directed against women who refer to her femininity or beauty or attempt to put her before a mirror: she actually kills Dolly the housemaid with a broken mirror. These killings enact a symbolic rape, with sharp objects – a poker, hat pins – piercing the female body, and are accompanied by the voice of the Ripper calling Anna’s name in what can be read here as a psychological interpellation, a calling of her to a particular male identity. In this respect, Anna is contrasted within the film to Laura, the ‘good’ woman, who is blind, ­dependent on men for her vision. The latter knows her place, having already entered into a socially correct identification of femininity. In the Victorian world of the film, where femininity is arranged and defined through the double standard, Anna’s actions could be seen as a transgression of and challenge to patriarchal structures of oppression that has distinct feminist possibilities. Like the mother

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figures discussed above, she has a mobility that is not available to the constantly chaperoned Laura, moving as she does from domestic middle-class household to working-class street, from virgin to prostitute; she can see the undesirability of woman’s place, unlike Laura, who literally cannot see anything. However, these possibilities, and the critique of patriarchy they necessarily entail, are not realised within Hands of the Ripper because, quite simply, Anna, the reluctant woman, in resisting a patriarchal defining of her identity, acts as a male would. The symbolic rapes of other women have already been noted. In support of this, one can add the scene in which Anna punishes Pritchard by running him through with a sword, an act that aligns her with the monster in The Creeping Flesh and the priest in Demons of the Mind. The only possibility of action within a world-view that assigns the woman to passivity – and here, on one level, Hands of the Ripper’s ideological position, or rather the horizon beyond which it is unable to see, seems to be bound to the Victorian patriarchal society which elsewhere it criticises – is conceived as masculine, and because Anna cannot in the end actually be a man, her resistance is rendered impossible, with no hope of a successful resolution. The form of such a resolution cannot be envisaged within the film’s terms of reference; it is literally unthinkable. Instead Anna vacillates between male and female positions in an increasingly violent series of events that culminates in her own death. The conclusion of the film, in which Anna and Pritchard die in each other’s arms to the strains of Verdi’s Requiem Mass, finally transforms this impossibility into a despairing acquiescence in the face of a deeply felt social injustice. But at the same time Hands of the Ripper does exhibit an awareness of its own inability to portray activity within this society in anything other than masculine terms. The most visible example of this is the ‘Votes for Women’ slogan that appears on an East End wall past which Anna and Pritchard walk shortly after Anna’s murder of a prostitute (Figure 6.4). A sign of political organisation, it is juxtaposed with Anna’s individualist, ‘masculine’ solution; however, the juxtaposition is arbitrary, a directorial comment made behind the backs of the characters, which underlines the separateness of Anna’s approach from a more overtly politicised strategy.

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Figure 6.4  ‘Votes for Women’: progressive graffiti in Hammer’s Hands of the Ripper (1971)

In addition, Pritchard’s single-minded pursuit of the truth about Anna – a pursuit which takes him through all levels of Victorian society, from the royal medium to the East End of London, and which finally leads him to Jack the Ripper, one of the guarantors, as it were, of the Victorian double standard – always has the possibility within it of revealing and interrogating social structures of power and subjection. (Indeed the film does dwell in some detail on Victorian sexual hypocrisy and repressiveness.) But in the end, both Pritchard and the film itself retreat from this possibility: a dying Pritchard renounces his scientific quest and states that Anna is possessed, a view which puts him alongside the reactionary Dysart, whose suggested solution to Anna’s problem is to have her hanged. Finally and inevitably, Anna and Pritchard, each in his or her own way socially transgressive figures, perish while Laura and Michael, the morally and sexually conventional couple, survive; meanwhile  the identity of the Ripper and the truth about p ­ atriarchal attitudes that he embodies remains concealed.19 Like their maternal counterparts, Hands of the Ripper, Demons of the Mind, The Creeping Flesh and to a lesser extent And Now the Screaming Starts! explore a crisis of authority within the family. That these films’ treatment of this is ambivalent and often

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­ ownright contradictory can be assigned to a general unwillingness d or inability to jettison completely those fathers/patriarchs (while at the same time representing them as monstrous) who in the past had been so important in defining the identity of British horror. To do such a thing would involve a radical rewriting of the genre which no film appears capable of initiating. Seen from this perspective, the Karnstein and ‘mother’ films from the 1970s, which do tend to push aside such figures of patriarchal authority, are far more challenging to pre-existing generic structures and conventions in their positing of a desiring, active, female subject. As has already been demonstrated, it is a challenge which is quickly contained and neutralised. Female desire in The Vampire Lovers is made increasingly subject to a male authority as that mini-cycle progresses, while the power of the mother is even more tentatively presented. What these films offer then is a definite rupture within British horror, a moment of potential change, a partial moving away from an objectification of the female, which is quickly closed down. Conversely, in the ‘father’ films one finds a constant objectification of the woman accompanied by an often revealing presentation of patriarchal institutions of repression. The categorisation of ‘mother’ films as radical and ‘father’ films as reactionary or conservative is clearly reductive, taking no account of the structuring contradictions of each group. In effect, these films offer a variety of responses to the same problem, namely the threat posed by the possibility of a desiring female subject, of female identity separate from male definitions of it, in the broadest sense to patriarchal definitions of gender, but more particularly to an unquestioning objectification of the female upon which the genre in the past had profitably constructed itself.

Notes  1 Hammer also underwent a change of ownership at this time.   2 The increasing permissiveness of British film censorship was another factor in this.  3 J. Sheridan LeFanu, Best Ghost Stories (New York: Dover, 1964), 289.

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  4 Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film’, in Barry K. Grant (ed.), Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 156.  5 An undoubted influence on the composition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Carmilla shares with that work the notion of the vampire as sexual liberator coupled with an inability to conceive of that liberation as anything other than death.  6 David Pirie, The Vampire Cinema (London: Hamlyn, 1977), 98–123.  7 This exploitative intent on the part of the filmmakers is revealed by the following remarks made by Tudor Gates, the writer of all three Karnstein films: ‘I went to see a number of Hammer films. While I enjoyed them, the one thing that struck me was that they were terribly outdated, at least for the modern cinema-going public. That was the time over here when the floodgates of censorship opened. I felt that the thing to do was to bring Hammer Films up to the seventies. So I deliberately threw in the nudes and the lesbians and all the rest of it.’ Little Shoppe of Horrors, 8 May 1984, 43. This entire issue of this valuable fanzine is dedicated to the Karnstein trilogy and provides useful background information.  8 For discussions of camp, see Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), 275–92; George Melly, Revolt into Style (London, 1970).  9 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Doubleday, 1971), 33; see also Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1970) (‘Habits are perpetuated in that bastion of social conservatism, the family’, 169); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: Bantam Books, 1971) (‘unless revolution disturbs the basic social organization, the biological family – the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled – the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated’, 12); and Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: McGraw-Hill, 1971), esp. 219–38. 10 David Cooper, The Death of the Family (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1971), 5–6; see also R. D. Laing, The Politics of the Family (London, 1971). 11 Sir Frederick Catherwood, ‘A Christian View’, in Pornography: The Longford Report (London: Coronet, 1972), 140. 12 See Robin Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods – Volume 2 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 195–220; and Tony Williams, ‘Family Horror’, Movie 27–8 (winter 1980/spring 1981), 117–26.

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13 Susan Lurie, ‘The Construction of the “Castrated Woman” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema’, Discourse 4 (1981–82), 59. 14 See J. LaPlanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), section on ‘preoedipal’. For a formulation of the notion of the devouring mother, see Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921–1945: Developments in Child and Adolescent Psychology (London: Hogarth Press, 1964). 15 For a critique of Laing which argues that his work takes insufficient account of the role of the father within the family, see Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1975), 277–92. 16 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London, 1950), 142. 17 For a discussion of the multiple identifications offered by and available within the fantasy of the ‘primal scene’, see John Fletcher, ‘Poetry, Gender and Primal Fantasy’, in V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy (London: Methuen, 1986), 109–41. It appears that Hands of the Ripper’s primal scene is much more rigid and constrained in this respect, permitting only an either/or (male/female, active/passive, murderer/victim) identification for Anna; to a certain extent, this is one of the limitations that the film is unable to transcend. 18 In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights the rebellious Cathy suffers a similar ‘wound’. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), for a discussion of this novel which bears some relevance to Hands of the Ripper. 19 For a historical reading of the Ripper in these terms, see Judith R.  Walkowitz, ‘Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence’, Feminist Studies 8.3 (1982), 543–74.

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Conclusion

David Pirie concluded his 1973 study of British horror cinema with an optimistic call for a regeneration of the genre: ‘On present reckoning at least (although it is much too early to say with any certainty), the gothic cinematic revival in England looks like having a more lasting popular success than the original literary movement from which it derives.’1 Unfortunately, Pirie’s optimism was misplaced. British horror as a distinct category of a national cinema was not to survive the widespread collapse in British film production that occurred in the mid-1970s. This ‘demise’ of British horror was all the more unfortunate in that around the time of Pirie’s writing there were isolated signs of new approaches appearing within the genre. Films from this period which exhibit decidedly innovatory qualities include The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), Frightmare (Peter Walker, 1974) and Death Line (Gary Sherman, 1972). The latter two are particularly notable for taking as their principal subject matter cannibalism – a theme usually associated with American and Italian horror of the 1970s – and working to locate this within a recognisably classridden British social reality, often with extremely disturbing results (Figure 7.1). More recently, two films in the genre have achieved a degree of critical and commercial success. The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) draws on a variety of sources (fairy tales, Breughel, Arthur Rackham, surrealism etc.) in its stylised depiction of a young woman’s awakening sexuality. Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) is part of what has been termed by some critics ‘body horror’. Characteristically for this type of horror, the film utilises ­sophisticated cosmetic effects to

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Figure 7.1  Cannibalism meets the British class system in Frightmare (1974)

construct extremely realistic images of the human body torn apart and rearranged. It has been argued that this fascination with bodily destruction is an expression of a broader inability to find an Other upon which inner fears can be projected and materialised.2 While both The Company of Wolves and Hellraiser are in many ways impressive, it is significant, however, that neither attempts to engage in any meaningful sense with a specifically British reality. Unlike, say, Hammer horror which did very much locate itself in relation to nationally specific issues and anxieties, these recent British horrors look elsewhere for their effects and meanings. This book has sought to demonstrate that the horror films produced up until and through the 1970s, and most notably those associated with Hammer, comprised an important – albeit ­controversial  – intervention into British cinema and British film culture. From the perspective of today, they remain fascinating documents of a particular period in British cultural history. If there is to be a regeneration of British horror understood in a nationalistic sense – and with the current state of the British film industry this seems most unlikely – the individuals involved would do well to think carefully about these earlier horrors, both their characteristic

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Hammer and beyond

strengths (for example, their liberating iconoclasm) and their limitations (especially their fatal fascination with the law of the father). In the meantime we have the films themselves to view, enjoy (possibly), discuss. However, I do think there should be limits to this process of reviewing and remembering, limits that I have tried to respect throughout this book. In particular, we must constantly be aware of British horror’s disreputability, for this quality comprises an integral part of the genre’s working. It is a fundamental condition of British horror’s existence that no one ‘really’ takes it seriously; therein lies dispensation for its transgressions, its often very lucid uncoverings and explorations of structures and assumptions that otherwise would have remained hidden. ‘I read many reviews of our films with total amazement. I really do. For instance, when the National Film Theatre gave us a twoweek season I was horrified. I thought if they made us respectable it would ruin our whole image.’ Michael Carreras is quite right to be worried. Rendering these films worthy and respectable would be doing them a disservice. More, it would be like forcing them into the light and then watching helplessly as they crumble into dust.

Notes 1 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema ­1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 165. 2 On ‘Body Horror’, see two articles in Screen 27.1 (1986): Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality – the Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, 2–13; and Pete Boss ‘Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine’, 14–24.

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Part II

Selected writings on British horror film

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The Amicus House of Horror

Originally published in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds), British Horror Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), 131–44. There comes a moment in the British horror film Tales from the Crypt (Freddie Francis, 1972) when a Christmas carol radio broadcast is broken into by the following words: ‘We interrupt this programme for a special announcement. A man described as a homicidal maniac has escaped from the hospital for the criminally insane … and may be wearing a Santa Claus costume.’ This is not the sort of thing that one expects in a Hammer horror film. It is not just Tales from the Crypt’s contemporary settings that separate it out from Hammer’s period horror; the announcement’s bizarre juxtaposition of elements not usually conjoined – namely, homicidal mania and Santa Claus – also seems alien when placed in the context of Hammer’s relatively sober view of the world. By way of a contrast, Amicus, the company actually responsible for Tales from the Crypt, was firmly wedded to a sense of the grotesque and the absurd, and the horror films it produced stand as a testament both to the heterogeneity of British horror cinema and to the way in which a range of British horror films differ from and in certain respects offer a challenge to what might be termed the Hammer hegemony. Of all the British film companies that sought to emulate Hammer’s success in the horror genre throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Amicus was one of the most prolific and distinctive. Between 1964 and 1974 it produced fourteen horror films; these included both portmanteau/anthology films and single-plot dramas.

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The ­predominantly British casts and settings of Amicus horrors, the presence in many of them of the British horror stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and the fact that they were all directed by British directors (notably the horror ‘auteurs’ Freddie Francis and Roy Ward Baker) working with British crews in British studios, suggest that Amicus should be seen as an integral part of the British horror movement of the 1960s and 1970s.1 Despite this, Amicus horror films have not played any significant role in the critical re-evaluation of British horror that was inaugurated by David Pirie’s groundbreaking book A Heritage of Horror in 1973. In particular, the Amicus films do not sit easily with those critical accounts that have sought to identify British horror as a purely indigenous cultural phenomenon, as – in David Pirie’s words – ‘the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own’.2 To put it bluntly, there is something suspiciously ‘foreign’ about Amicus. For one thing, it tended not to adapt British gothic tales in the manner of Hammer but turned instead mainly to America for its source material. For another, the company itself was founded and managed by two Americans. Doubts about the extent to which Amicus horror is rooted in British culture have arguably relegated it to the margins of much writing on British horror. A possible response to this marginalisation might be to assert the Britishness of the Amicus product, bringing the films into the ‘national fold’, so to speak, by identifying those thematic or stylistic properties that bind them to other British films or to British culture in general. In this way, any ‘foreign’ elements could be effaced or contained. This chapter offers a somewhat different approach, however; one that is less concerned to establish the ‘purity’ of Amicus’s Britishness and is more interested instead in the precise nature of its dependence on American-sourced material and the extent to which this material is reworked within a British context of production. Such an approach can potentially highlight aspects of British horror that are obscured by those accounts that have centred on Hammer. A good starting point for this is the Amicus company itself. Amicus’s two founders, the producer Max J. Rosenberg and the producer-writer Milton Subotsky, had first worked together in American television in the 1950s and had subsequently co-produced

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The Amicus House of Horror 239

a number of low-budget American feature films.3 In 1960 Subotsky came to Britain to be executive producer of, and provide the screen story for, the horror film City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey). Remaining in Britain, Subotsky teamed up again with Rosenberg (who had done some uncredited work on City of the Dead) and together they formed Amicus. Its first productions were two youthorientated musicals of the kind for which Subotsky and Rosenberg had been responsible in the United States: It’s Trad Dad (1962) – the directorial feature debut of American director Richard Lester, later responsible for such 1960s ‘classics’ as A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and The Knack (1965) – and Just for Fun (Gordon Flemyng, 1963).4 Then, in 1964, the company switched to horror production with Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis). Thirteen more horrors were to follow – The Skull (Francis, 1965), The Deadly Bees (Francis, 1966), The Psychopath (Francis, 1966), Torture Garden (Francis, 1967), The House that Dripped Blood (Peter Duffell, 1970), I, Monster (Stephen Weeks, 1971), Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972), Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror (Baker, 1973), From Beyond the Grave (Kevin Connor, 1973), And Now the Screaming Starts! (Baker, 1973), Madhouse (Jim Clark, 1974) and The Beast Must Die (Paul Annett, 1974). The American input apparent in Amicus from its inception was maintained throughout its horror productions. Ten of these had screenplays either by Subotsky himself or by the distinguished American horror writer Robert Bloch, and many drew either upon EC horror comics (Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror) or Bloch’s own short stories (The Skull, Torture Garden, The House that Dripped Blood and Asylum). As if to underline Amicus’s distance from British culture, its main writer, Bloch, rarely visited Britain, preferring instead to post his scripts over from Hollywood. The fact that Amicus specialised in horror films with contemporary settings – it made only two period horrors, And Now the Screaming Starts! and I, Monster – distanced it yet further from the British genre mainstream, represented at the time by Hammer’s period costume horrors, and again appeared to align it more with 1950s American horror fiction. Given this, it is ironic that even as its American sources militate against it being seen as properly British, the very trappings of Britishness apparent

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in Amicus horror – in the form of actors, directors, settings – seem to have worked against it being thought of in relation to American cinema and American culture. Indeed, when Amicus is mentioned at all in critical histories of the horror genre, it is usually as a minor addendum to Hammer. Too American to be properly British and too British to pass for American, Amicus hovers uneasily between the two national cinemas. However, what might be termed here the alien or foreign nature of Amicus horror can arguably be related to, and perhaps even typifies, a broader hybridity within the British horror cycle. It is certainly the case that those critics concerned to establish the ‘Britishness’ of horror have often failed to take into account, not just the input of American individuals such as Subotsky, the screenwriters Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson, the director Jacques Tourneur and the producer Louis ‘Deke’ Heyward, but also a more general reliance both on American finance and on ideas first developed within American horror. For example, Hammer, ostensibly the most British of British horror companies, was heavily ­dependent on American financing throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s, and the Hammer filmmakers took as much inspiration from 1930s and 1940s American horror as they did from more obviously British sources. Understanding the way in which American and British influences intermingle within Amicus horror can, arguably, aid an appreciation of the way in which British horror in general does not exist as a discrete national object but is instead caught up in a generic history that involves a constant crossing of national borders as both ideas and personnel circulate between countries. Bearing this in mind, it seems appropriate that the initial idea for making a new 1950s version of the Frankenstein story did not come from Hammer but, instead, from an American who approached Hammer with his own screenplay. This was rejected by Hammer, which subsequently commissioned Jimmy Sangster to come up with another script for what would eventually become The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), the first of Hammer’s gothic horrors. It is worth mentioning this here because the American in question was none other than Milton Subotsky, co-founder of Amicus. While Subotsky had no creative input into The Curse

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The Amicus House of Horror 241

of Frankenstein, this American can, in a limited but nonetheless significant sense, be seen as the man who started the British horror boom. Amicus’s horror output can readily be divided into two samesized groups – the single-plot films and the portmanteau films. So far as the former are concerned, there is something to be said for the claim that ‘Amicus’s talents do not lie in the production of singleplot features’.5 None of the company’s seven single-plot horror films are wholly successful in what they set out to do; nor do they cohere, thematically or stylistically. Their achievements, such as they are, turn out to be fragmented and isolated. The most interesting are the first two, The Skull and The Psychopath. Both benefit from superb scores by Elizabeth Lutyens and both contain highly effective moments in which the resources of cinema are deployed to genuinely unsettling effect.6 In the case of The Skull one thinks of a disturbing, stylised dream sequence and what was, for the time, an unusually open ending, with the skull left free to continue its evil work. The Psychopath also boasts an unnerving concluding scene in which John Standing, paralysed because of a broken back and with his face made up to look like that of a doll, is shown helplessly repeating the word ‘Mama’. However, none of these unsettling moments is successfully integrated into the films’ overall narratives, and one is left with the impression that the filmmakers are uncertain about what to do with some of the more intriguing features of the scenarios with which they are working. This is particularly the case with The Psychopath. Written by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho (1960), and featuring a case of severe mother fixation, the film was clearly intended to evoke memories of Hitchcock’s film. Yet its fascination with the quirkily inventive staging of various murders at the expense of narrative coherence points to another type of horror, one most associated with the Italian filmmakers Mario Bava and Dario Argento.7 However, while Bava and Argento at their best can conjure up a delirious mise en scène within which scenes of spectacular violence make an expressive sense, a more prosaic Freddie Francis seems hard pressed to incorporate the moments of spectacular violence that punctuate his film into a cohesive view of the characters and their desires.8

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Of the remaining Amicus films, The Deadly Bees and I, Monster (the latter an ill-advised version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) are dreadfully dull. And Now the Screaming Starts! is better, but in its treatment of a family curse weighing heavily upon the young, it is indistinguishable from, and less bold in its execution than, similarly themed Hammer films that had been appearing since the late 1960s  – notably Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1970), Demons of the Mind (Peter Sykes, 1971) and Hands of the Ripper (Sasdy, 1971). Madhouse affords Vincent Price an opportunity to camp it up as a horror film star, but the film ends up covering ground that is more effectively covered by other Price vehicles, particularly The Abominable Dr Phibes (Robert Fuest, 1971) and Theatre of Blood (Douglas Hickox, 1973). The Beast Must Die, a whodunnit in which we are invited to guess which of the characters is a werewolf, is rather silly, although, intriguingly, its having a black man (the American actor Calvin Lockhart) as its hero suggests, uniquely for British cinema, an attempted alignment with the American blaxploitation horror cinema of the early 1970s which included films such as Blacula (William Crain, 1972) and Abby (William Girdler, 1974).9 Amicus horror’s claims for distinctiveness reside largely in its portmanteau/anthology films – Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Torture Garden, The House that Dripped Blood, Asylum, Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror and From Beyond the Grave.10 The idea that several separate and distinct stories could be joined together in one film had been circulating in cinema for a long time (D. W. Griffith’s 1916 classic Intolerance being an early example). What Amicus did was to use this as a showcase for a range of horror stories, four or five in each film, featuring a mixture of traditional horror themes – vampires, werewolves, reanimated corpses, black magic, voodoo, and so on – along with tales of crime and revenge. Broadly speaking, there are two types of portmanteau, both of which have had a part to play in British cinema. In the first group are those films in which the separate stories are not related directly to each other but are instead connected via the authorship of the original material upon which the stories are based. So, to give some British examples, the stories that make up Quartet (Ralph Smart, Harold French, Arthur Crabtree, Ken Annakin, 1948),

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The Amicus House of Horror 243

Trio (Annakin, French, 1950) and Encore (French, Pat Jackson, Anthony Pelissier, 1951) are all connected through their being based on Somerset Maugham’s work.11 The second type of portmanteau – to which Amicus films belong  – connects its story segments via a link-narrative. This is usually done by creating an event or setting to which all the stories in some way relate, with this often involving an encounter between the protagonists from the various story segments. Within British cinema, one thinks of a cluster of films that appeared in the late 1940s, a boom period for the British portmanteau; these included Bond Street (Gordon Parry, 1948), where all the stories relate to a woman’s preparations for her marriage; Marry Me! (Terence Fisher, 1949), in which a marriage bureau provides the link; and Train of Events (Sidney Cole, Charles Crichton and Basil Dearden, 1949), where the protagonists are linked via their involvement in a train accident. Perhaps the best-known example of this second type of portmanteau, and one very pertinent to an understanding of Amicus, is Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945). In this, a group of individuals meet at a house in the country and proceed to tell each other about their own encounters with the supernatural, with each encounter generating a story segment. Given Dead of Night’s considerable status within the British horror genre, it is unsurprising that it is often invoked in critical responses to the Amicus portmanteau, with the Amicus product usually seen as somewhat plodding in the face of Dead of Night’s virtuosity. For instance, David Pirie argues of Amicus’s From Beyond the Grave that: [I]n general the stale repetition of trite supernatural themes demonstrates the limitations of Amicus’ basic approach, and the reason why – despite so many attempts – they have yet to come up with anything as good as Ealing’s Dead of Night. A uniquely feeble linkstory hinges together a script in which no attention at all is paid to character, exposition or dialogue, with the result that everything is dependent on the limited visual suspense of the material.12

Putting aside judgements about the film in question (I personally would rate it as one of Amicus’s best), it does seem that Pirie,

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in using Dead of Night as a yardstick of quality, does not take sufficient account of the ways in which Amicus portmanteau films are different from their glorious predecessor. Ultimately, thinking of Amicus in terms of Dead of Night obscures as much as it reveals.13 It is true, as Pirie suggests, that while Dead of Night shows us in some detail its characters interacting with each other within its link-narrative, Amicus generally spends as little time as possible on its link-stories. Milton Subotsky, who once described Dead of Night as ‘the greatest horror film ever’, spoke rather dismissively of these parts of his films: ‘we always find that we cut those sections shorter and shorter because we find them boring when we get them to the cutting stage’.14 In line with this, there is an arbitrariness to the encounters of those characters whose individual stories are going to form the Amicus portmanteau’s segments. Barely sketched characters just happen to find themselves in the same location – a train carriage (Dr Terror), a fairground show (Torture Garden), a subterranean room (Vault of Horror) and catacombs (Tales from the Crypt) – with these settings usually abstracted from any social context. There – in a manner akin to Dead of Night – they either recount their own experiences or have visions of what is going to happen to them or what might already have happened to them. This is accomplished in a series of 15–20-minute scenarios, usually with a twist ending to each. The House that Dripped Blood, Asylum and From Beyond the Grave offer a different version in which the key protagonists never meet each other; in House and From Beyond the Grave they are, respectively, successive inhabitants of a house and customers at a sinister antiques shop. Asylum is the main exception in that its link-story – in which a psychiatrist has to identify which of four mental patients is the now-insane asylum director – is lengthier and more elaborate, and, to all intents and purposes, operates as a distinct segment in its own right to be placed alongside those other segments generated by the patients’ own stories. (Significantly, this is the only Amicus link itself based on a pre-existing short story, Robert Bloch’s ‘Mannikins of Horror’.) In a twist that became increasingly predictable as the Amicus portmanteau cycle progressed, the majority of the characters in each film eventually discover either that they are already dead (Dr Terror, Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror), or are probably

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The Amicus House of Horror 245

going to suffer some horrible fate soon (Torture Garden), or else they die or go mad in the course of the film (the remainder). These ‘gimmick’ conclusions clearly owe something to Dead of Night’s famous ending in which it is revealed that all that has happened in the film is part of someone’s dream. Even so, it is hard to think of many other films that cheerfully kill off so many of their main characters. The feature that most clearly distinguishes the Amicus portmanteau from Dead of Night, and one that sets the general tone of these films, is the presence in many of them of a character who acts as a kind of horror host or master of ceremonies. The horror host – a sinister but also humorous figure who introduces a tale of horror – was often used on 1950s American television as a way of presenting horror films: examples included Vampira and Roland (a.k.a Zacherly), the latter ‘a vampire television host who moved about in a set designed to resemble a subterranean crypt, appearing for commercial breaks, and signing off with the line, “Good night, whatever you are!”’15 The horror host was also a significant feature of the American EC horror comics which Amicus itself would adapt for the cinema in the early 1970s. In comics such as Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, the crypt keeper, the vault keeper and the old witch provided ghoulish, lip-smacking prefaces to, and commentaries on, various horror stories.16 To a certain extent, this was the model adopted by Amicus in its portmanteau films even before its EC adaptations, although it tended to rein in the ghoulishness of these figures and to integrate them more fully into the narrative, permitting them a limited degree of interaction with other characters. It also ‘neutralised’ their American-ness via casting, the very British Peter Cushing (even when sporting a German accent as he does in Dr Terror) and Ralph Richardson doing duty as hosts, the only recognisably American host being the one played by Burgess Meredith in Torture Garden.17 In Doctor Terror the horror host is Doctor Schreck (played by Peter Cushing; ‘Schreck’ is, of course, German for ‘terror’), in Torture Garden the fairground stall holder Doctor Diabolo (Burgess Meredith), in Tales from the Crypt the crypt keeper (played, rather improbably, by Ralph Richardson) and in From Beyond the Grave the proprietor of the antiques shop (played by Cushing again). In

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all these cases the host initiates the various stories that comprise the portmanteau – Doctor Schreck through his tarot predictions, Diabolo with his fairground exhibit, the crypt keeper by his sinister questions, and the shopkeeper by selling objects to his customers that will lead them to their doom. This figure is ultimately revealed as a supernatural entity: Doctor Schreck turns out to be Death, Diabolo is the Devil himself (Amicus was never particularly subtle when it came to character names), while the crypt keeper is obviously a denizen of Hell, albeit of unspecified rank. From Beyond the Grave is not quite as explicit as this, but even here we are led to believe that the shopkeeper is not entirely human. (For one thing, he seems unaffected by being shot point blank.) This horror host also has a special relationship with the camera and the audience, showing an awareness of both that is not available to the films’ ‘normal’ characters. At the end of Torture Garden, Tales from the Crypt and From Beyond the Grave the hosts speak directly to the camera (and, by implication, directly to us, the audience). In each case they intimate that we are equally liable to the fate suffered by those in the films. In Torture Garden Diabolo explains why he warns his potential victims of their likely fate – ‘It’s only fair, you know, to give them a chance to escape my domain’ – before turning to the camera and asking, ‘But will you?’ The crypt keeper is equally blunt. Having consigned his victims to Hell, he demands, ‘Who’s next?’ Then he looks at the camera: ‘Perhaps you?’ At the end of From Beyond the Grave the shopkeeper looks up at the camera as it enters, addressing it (and us) as a new customer. ‘Come in,’ he says, ‘I’m sure I have the very thing to tempt you. Lots of bargains. All tastes catered for. Oh – and a big novelty surprise goes with every purchase. Do come in. Any time. I’m always open.’ Doctor Schreck also looks into the camera, although this time he is seen via the point of view of another character who, near the end of the film, asks him who he really is. ‘Have you not guessed?’, replies Schreck as he stares unnervingly out at us, the question as much for our benefit as for that of any of the characters in the film. This concluding direct address to the camera/audience is also a feature of those Amicus portmanteau films that do not include a horror host. Here this role is assigned temporarily – and somewhat arbitrarily – to a character who, in every other way, is dissimilar

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The Amicus House of Horror 247

to the likes of Schreck and Diabolo. So in The House that Dripped Blood an estate agent invites us to consider applying for the house’s tenancy; in Vault of Horror one of the dead narrators explains to the audience how they are all compelled to repeat their stories ‘night after night for all eternity’; and in Asylum the mad Doctor Starr, closing the door on his next victim, looks out at us and says, ‘Better keep the door closed and keep out the draughts – as Doctor Starr used to say.’ The effect, in all cases, is to put the audience at a distance from the drama. This goes hand in hand with in-jokes and moments of mild self-reflexivity – so, in Vault of Horror a writer wearily remarks that ‘There’s no money in horror’ and reads the novelisation of Tales from the Crypt, Amicus’s previous portmanteau, while in The House that Dripped Blood an entire episode is given over to the antics of a horror film star (played in high camp style by Jon Pertwee), providing an opportunity for some none-too-subtle digs at Hammer. In a different way Torture Garden reminds us of our status as audience through an opening sequence in which the camera is used subjectively to give us a sense that we are approaching Diabolo’s show and buying a ticket for the entertainment which it offers. The reason for this distancing becomes all too clear when we look at the films’ protagonists and realise that there are very few individuals with whom one would want to identify. Venality and greed are the order of the day, and there is also a comprehensive lack of regard for the family unit. In the Amicus world wives kill husbands (Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror), husbands kill wives (Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Vault of Horror), brothers kill sisters (Vault of Horror), sisters kill brothers (Asylum), nephews kill uncles (Torture Garden) and children kill parents (The House that Dripped Blood) or arrange to have their parents killed (From Beyond the Grave). Even by the standards of 1970s US horror – where the family unit is often figured as monstrous – there is something remarkable going on here. While 1970s American horror frequently used the broken or corrupt family to symbolise a wider social breakdown, Amicus horror preferred instead to isolate its families from any discernible social context. A good example is the ‘And All Through the House’

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segment from Tales from the Crypt. This opens with a loving husband placing a present – labelled ‘To Joanne, the best wife in the world’ – by the Christmas tree in the family home. He then sits down and reads the newspaper until the beloved wife sneaks up behind him and smashes in his head with a poker. ‘Merry Christmas’, she says to the corpse. (We quickly learn that she has done this so that she can claim on her husband’s life insurance.) A radio announcement informs us that a homicidal maniac ‘disguised’ as Santa Claus is on the loose; meanwhile Joanne, the wife, seeks to calm her young daughter who, unaware of her father’s death, is looking forward to Santa Claus’s arrival. Predictably enough, Joanne soon realises that the killer (or rather, the other killer) is outside the house trying to get in. However, she cannot call the police until she has made her husband’s death look like an accident. This she achieves by pitching him down the cellar stairs. She then cleans up all signs of the murder only to find that her daughter has let Santa Claus into the house. Santa Claus proceeds to strangle Joanne. This segment could well be used to illustrate David Pirie’s ­dismissal – quoted above – of this type of film. Characterisation is minimal, the exposition basic and the dialogue functional. However, it can be argued that the depth of characterisation sought by Pirie (and which he finds in Dead of Night) would be inappropriate for what this segment is actually trying to do. We are not meant to identify or empathise with any of these characters; instead we view from a distance what is essentially a parody of the traditional family Christmas, one in which both the wife and Santa Claus turn out to be murderers. The incongruity of this particular Christmas scene is further underlined by the carols we hear on the soundtrack – ‘Away in a Manger’ for the arrival of the homicidal Santa Claus, ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ as the wife pushes her husband’s body down the stairs. There is no sense of any critique of the family unit; instead, what one finds is an overturning of a conventional, normative understanding of both Christmas and familial relationships in order to produce a series of shocks. These shocks are not necessarily ‘scares’ – although the segment does contain some of these – but, rather, relate to a disruption of expectations that is both violent and witty.

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A comparable disregard for and violation of a particular sense of propriety is also apparent in these films’ treatment of their ostensibly moralistic message – namely that those individuals who do bad things suffer because of them. In most cases, a sense of justice being done is undermined by the sheer excessiveness and cruelty of the punishment handed out. For example, the shop customers in From Beyond the Grave might well be greedy, but, by any reasonable moral code, they do not deserve to die. The key line in From Beyond the Grave in this respect is not the homily delivered by the shopkeeper near the end of the film: ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ Instead it occurs earlier, in a comment made to a customer who, through an act of minor deception, has purchased an expensive snuff box at a cheap price. ‘I hope you enjoy snuffing it’, the shopkeeper says cheerfully to the customer who, unsuspecting, is on his way to certain doom. The joke is on the customer, of course; he won’t enjoy snuffing it at all – but we will enjoy watching him snuffing it. This is not because he is morally culpable, nor because we feel morally superior to him (we are certainly not being positioned as judges here, and the film offers constant reminders that any one of us could be the next victim). If there is cruelty in this joke, it is not the audience’s cruelty nor even that of the shopkeeper. Rather, it derives from a situation in which the punishment for sin is so ridiculously excessive that the moral message – honesty is good – becomes meaningless, and our pleasure has to do with an enjoyment of this meaninglessness. In this sense, the joke is on us and on our own values. A phrase used by Martin Barker in his discussion of an EC horror comic story (both Tales of the Crypt and Vault of Horror were based on EC horror comics) is apposite here: ‘It shocks us into a momentary awareness, without in any way telling us what in particular to think.’18 It is clear that these films – much like those EC horror tales which conclude with moralising messages – do not expect us to take them seriously as ‘morality plays’. If they shock us into a momentary awareness of anything (and I think they do), it is of the contingency and arbitrariness of everyday life. In the Amicus portmanteau, the family unit is simply a series of relationships (parent/child, brother/sister, wife/husband, etc.) which do not appear to carry any inherent emotional charge. There is no

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such thing as family unity or solidarity here; the family is just a social structure and nothing else. Similarly, morality comprises a set of laws or rules. These might be broken, and punishment might subsequently ensue, but these rules do not connect with or express transcendent notions of good and evil. They are just rules, nothing more, and as arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless as the family unit. (This makes for an interesting comparison with 1970s US horror which, for all its criticisms, still tended to view the family unit as a fundamental source of social meaning.) In this respect, what all the distancing devices and techniques deployed in the Amicus portmanteau do is to lead the audience to a position both of scepticism about society’s ostensible value system and of an amused indifference in the face of this. While Hammer, for all its iconoclastic sensationalism, always exhibited a sentimental attachment to a moralistic way of seeing, the Amicus portmanteau offered a different view – cynical, sardonic, cruel, modern. It might well be said that Amicus’s debts to American horror are such that it could be seen as an outpost of American film production that just happened to be located in Britain. At the same time, however – and at the risk of being impressionistic – these films feel very British, not just in terms of their casts and settings but also in their attention to and familiarity with the minutiae of British life. In particular, many of the portmanteau tales depend for their effectiveness upon a clear awareness of British class d ­ ivisions  – both in the British-sourced stories such as the Ian Bannen/Donald Pleasence episode in From Beyond the Grave (adapted from the work of the British writer Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes and described by Pirie as ‘superbly Pinterish’) and in the EC adaptations. For example, note the class tension apparent in the ‘Poetic Justice’ episode from Tales from the Crypt, in which a middle-class ­householder terrorises a working-class man who, he feels, is lowering the tone of the neighbourhood. There is also an undeniably British sense of humour at work here: after all, how could a film which offers a pun on the term ‘snuffing it’ not be seen as British on some level? The changes wrought by Amicus upon the EC horror stories, Bloch’s work and other US influences stand, in this respect, as more than just a superficial Anglicisation, a simple replacement of American accents with British ones. In their attempts to appeal

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to what was in the 1960s and early 1970s a substantial market (both nationally and internationally) for British horror, the Amicus filmmakers had necessarily to offer a more fundamental reworking of non-British material than this, albeit one in which American influences still remain visible. Seen in this way, as a kind of hybrid enterprise operating within British cinema, Amicus horror as expressed in the portmanteau format provides a salutary reminder not only that there is more to British horror than Hammer, but also that there is considerably more to British horror than indigenous British c­ ultural traditions. In the ‘Neat Job’ segment from Vault of Horror, a woman murders her obsessively tidy husband, dissects his body and neatly puts the remains away in labelled jars. At the end of the segment, the camera moves past jars marked ‘Hands’, ‘Brain’, ‘Nose’ and ‘Eyes’ before alighting on a jar containing some unrecognisable body parts. The jar label reads ‘Odds and Ends’. Obviously we are being invited to speculate that these ‘bits’ are the husband’s genitalia, ‘bits’ which, in the film’s terms, cannot be named or easily classified, and which, for 1970s British cinema at least, have to remain ‘unmentionable’. So far as classifying Amicus horror is concerned, one cannot help but feel that it, too, belongs in the ‘Odds and Ends’ jar. In all sorts of ways it does not easily fit in – in the stories it tells and in the way it tells them – and yet, at the same time, it is undoubtedly an important part of the British horror scene. In particular, a consideration of Amicus necessarily problematises the relation between British cinema and the horror genre – the first by definition nationally specific, the second international, a visible presence in a range of national centres of production. As noted above, definitions and evaluations of British horror have often been based on its relation to British cultural traditions. It does seem that so far as horror is concerned, a stronger sense of the international dimension of the genre is required, of the ways in which ideas, influences and creative personnel (as well as the films themselves) move in and out of national contexts of production. The resulting view of British horror is one more attuned to its place in both national and international histories and contexts. Amicus provides a useful starting point for this in that its non-British influences are especially visible. To locate it within British horror

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requires a certain rethinking of British horror in general. The ‘Amicus House of Horror’ might well be smaller than and stand in the shadow of the better-known Hammer House of Horror, but it exists in the same neighbourhood, and thinking of Amicus in these terms suggests that the neighbourhood itself might be a somewhat less parochial area than was previously supposed.

Notes  1 In addition to its horror films, Amicus also produced science fiction films – The Terrornauts (Montgomery Tully, 1967), They Came from Beyond Space (Freddie Francis, 1967), Scream and Scream Again (Gordon Hessler, 1969 – a co-production with American International Pictures) and The Mind of Mr Soames (Alan Cooke, 1969) – as well as an adaptation of Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone entitled A Touch of Love (Waris Hussein, 1969). In 1974 the company abandoned horror production and embarked on what would turn out to be its final projects, a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ adaptations – The Land that Time Forgot (Kevin Connor, 1974), At the Earth’s Core (Connor, 1976) and The People that Time Forgot (Connor, 1977). Amicus founders Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky also produced films away from Amicus – notably two Doctor Who adaptations that featured Peter Cushing as the doctor – Dr Who and the Daleks (Gordon Flemyng, 1965) and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD (Flemyng, 1966).   2 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, ­1946–72 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 9.   3 These included the youth musicals Rock, Rock, Rock (Will Price, 1956) and Jamboree (Roy Lockwood, 1957).   4 If nothing else, these films help to explain the otherwise inexplicable presence of British disc-jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman in the cast of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. He had previously appeared in both It’s Trad Dad and Just for Fun.   5 Phil Hardy, The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror (London: Aurum, 1985), 275.   6 Lutyens also composed the score for Dr Terror’s House of Horrors; her sinister, quietly haunting music stands worlds apart from the more brash scores frequently provided for Hammer by James Bernard.   7 Subotsky has claimed that the identity of the murderer in The Psychopath was changed during post-production in order to make the

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mystery harder to solve. This might explain why it is that, at a certain point, the narrative simply ceases to make any sense.   8 For an interesting contrast, see a later Italian horror film, Profondo Rosso (Dario Argento, 1975), which contains some Psychopath-like elements such as a killer associated with dolls and an ‘unhealthy’ mother–son relationship, but which responds much more imaginatively to the fetishistic possibilities of such a scenario.   9 As if to underline this appeal to the market for black horror, The Beast Must Die was released on video in the US with the title Black Werewolf. (I am indebted to Steve Chibnall for drawing my attention to the blaxploitation connection.) 10 Another portmanteau, Tales that Witness Madness (Freddie Francis, 1973), is mistakenly attributed to Amicus on occasion. 11 Other films of this type use the authorial presence of the director to bind together the various story segments. The French film Le Plaisir (1952) – which combines its adaptation of Maupassant stories with the formidable authorial presence of the director Max Ophuls – is a good example. Two American horror portmanteau films of this type – Tales of Terror (Roger Corman, 1962), based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, and Twice Told Tales (Sidney Salkow, 1963), based on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne – might well have alerted Amicus to there being a market for the anthology horror film. 12 David Pirie, ‘From Beyond the Grave’, Monthly Film Bulletin 41.483 (1974), 72. 13 One might well concede that the Amicus portmanteau films are uneven in quality, and that some films and some segments within films are more effective than others. However, it could be argued that it is anyway in the nature of the portmanteau (and not just the ones made by Amicus) to be uneven and inconsistent. Even those critics who see Dead of Night as the apotheosis of the portmanteau tend to focus on the ‘haunted mirror’ and ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’ segments and leave the rest of the film well alone. 14 Subotsky quoted in John Brosnan, The Horror People (London: MacDonald and Jane’s, 1976), 239–40. 15 Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 127. 16 Kim Newman, The BFI Companion to Horror (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 160–1. 17 It is also worth mentioning that Britain had its own horror host, albeit on radio, in the series Appointment with Fear (1943–55), in which each episode was introduced by the sepulchral Man in Black. While there is

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no evidence that Subotsky, the writer of the first Amicus portmanteau, knew of the Man in Black, the actor who played the part – Valentine Dyall – had in fact appeared in the Subotksy-produced City of the Dead. 18 Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 115.

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American vampires in Britain: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Hammer’s The Night Creatures Originally published in Dan North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 53–69.

I Am Legend: on (and off) screen ‘Begone! Van Helsing and Mina and Jonathan and blood-eyed Count and all.’ (The Night Creatures)

The story of the relation between the vampire novel I Am Legend (1954) and horror cinema is, to put it mildly, convoluted. It begins in 1957 with the American horror and fantasy writer Richard Matheson, who was responsible for writing the novel in the first place, coming to Britain to prepare a screenplay adaptation for Hammer Films. Hammer had just had a notable success with its first colour gothic horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), which starred Peter Cushing as the scientist and featured a then unknown Christopher Lee as the creature, and the company already had Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958), its next gothic horror, in pre-production. In retrospect, Matheson’s tale of a contemporary world overrun by vampires seemed to sit somewhat uneasily within this period horror context, but these were early days for Hammer horror and the company’s distinctive gothic format had not yet been fully established. In any event, Matheson completed his screenplay, with the title The Night Creatures replacing the more cryptic I Am Legend. Dracula, Hammer’s other

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vampire film, went on to become a huge commercial success and confirmed the company’s status as a leading purveyor of horror. By contrast, The Night Creatures went no further than Matheson’s screenplay. The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) made it clear to Hammer that any film of the screenplay would be rejected outright, while the slightly more muted Motion Picture Association of America complained, in a letter dated 4 December 1957, about the screenplay’s ‘over-emphasis on gruesomeness’.1 Hammer promptly abandoned the project. Like any good vampire, the I Am Legend story refused to die easily, however. An economical Hammer sold the screenplay to American producer Robert Lippert, with whom the company had had an association throughout much of the 1950s. Lippert was subsequently responsible for the Italian version of I Am Legend, now retitled The Last Man on Earth (1964); this starred Vincent Price as the lone human fighting against a world of vampires, with direction credited to Ubaldo Ragona in Italian release prints and Sidney Salkow in American prints. In protest at changes made to his work, Matheson had his name removed from this film’s credits and was billed instead as ‘Logan Swanson’. It was the last time that he had any direct connection, even pseudonymous, with cinematic adaptations of his novel. Yet another film version appeared in 1971. This time it was The Omega Man, which starred Charlton Heston and was directed by Boris Sagal. A third version was mooted in the early 1990s as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, to be directed by Ridley Scott, although it was eventually abandoned because of its projected cost. More recently, directors Rob Bowman and Michael Bay have both been associated with attempts to resurrect this project. At the time of writing, the third screen adaptation of Matheson’s novel – after The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man – is finally in production under the title I Am Legend, with Will Smith in the lead role and Francis Lawrence as director. The original novel I Am Legend has over the years acquired a canonical stature within modern horror literature. It is also acknowledged by George A. Romero as an influence on his seminal modern American horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968). Given this, the possibility that the first, and the most faithful, screen adaptation of this horror classic might have been produced in 1950s

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Britain is undoubtedly tantalising. If The Night Creatures, the only screen version of I Am Legend to be scripted solely by Matheson, had actually been filmed by Hammer, would our understanding both of British horror and of the wider development of modern horror cinema have been altered as a consequence? In other words, is The Night Creatures the one that got away, the one that might not just have changed the direction of Hammer horror at the very moment of its formation but also have introduced into horror cinema themes that in actuality were only fully realised later in the 1960s and 1970s? Excitable questions of this kind usually go hand in hand with critical accounts that mourn the loss of something perceived as valuable. After all, if the unrealised project does not have at least the potential to be striking and important, then what is the point in spending time thinking about it and, indeed, lamenting its nonexistence? Hence the need not merely to talk about an incomplete film on the basis of what are essentially fragments – ideas, screenplays and incomplete sequences – but in some cases virtually to will the film into imaginary existence in an ideal form unsullied by those constraints and compromises that generally characterise film production. However, before we rush to install The Night Creatures in the canon of ‘unfilmed greats’, it is instructive to note the response to its abandonment from some of the key figures involved in its creation. Val Guest, who had been signed to direct the film, did not even mention it in his 2001 autobiography So You Want To Be In Pictures,2 while the Hammer producer Michael Carreras reflected ruefully that ‘from that moment on, we never made a film without submitting the script first’,3 and Matheson himself grumbled, ‘I got very little of the deal back then. I got a trip to England out of it and some pocket change.’4 There is not much in the way of artistic lamentation here then, but instead just expressions of annoyance at the time and money wasted on the project. It is precisely the attitude that one might expect of jobbing directors, producers and writers, all of whom had busy careers and quickly moved on to other ­projects after The Night Creatures was closed down. Locating The Night Creatures in relation to the working practices of those people who tried to make it has the potential to offer a more nuanced account of the project. This is likely to involve

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less emphasis on speculation about the loss to British cinema and horror cinema that the film’s non-completion might have entailed, and instead a focus on what might be thought of as the presence of The Night Creatures in British cinema, with a different set of questions consequently emerging. Why was Hammer interested in the project in the first place? Why did it go to the trouble of bringing Matheson over from the United States? What does this suggest about the pattern of production within the company during the late 1950s and, more broadly, about the relation between British and American models of horror and indeed between horror literature and horror cinema? Such questions direct us to I Am Legend as a commercial property as well as an innovative horror text, and a consideration of the circumstances of its acquisition and development by Hammer can enhance our understanding of the relation between these two distinct aspects of its existence. A logical starting point for this is the original novel itself.

I Am Legend as modern horror text The narrative of I Am Legend revolves around Robert Neville, the lone survivor of a mysterious plague that has converted the rest of the population into vampires. Neville spends his nights besieged in his fortified house and his days staking as many vampires as he possibly can. Eventually he discovers that vampirism is caused by a bacillus, and that a group of the infected have worked out how to contain and live with their disease. The novel concludes with Neville committing suicide as he realises that in a world of vampires, the one ‘normal’ human has become the monster: ‘Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.’5 Mark Jancovich has identified Matheson as a key American horror writer who, during the 1950s, ‘brought together the elements which would distinguish modern horror literature and differentiate it from the horror writing of earlier periods’. Jancovich adds, ‘Normality is always relative within his fiction and, usually, it is monstrous. For these reasons, his fiction displays a general

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concern with paranoia, loss of control and estrangement.’6 Such a reading of Matheson’s fiction works well for I Am Legend, with its relativisation of normality and its emphasis on the increasingly disturbed psychological state of its main protagonist. Moreover, this all takes place within a recognisable modern setting and is accompanied by an apparent debunking of what might be termed traditional horror conventions. There is a moment in the novel – a moment preserved in The Night Creatures – where Neville casts aside in disgust a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The old model of vampirism will not do any more, it seems, and in the course of the narrative it is supplanted by a scientific-rational explanation of the vampire. This, along with the novel’s post-nuclear war setting, has often seen I Am Legend classified as science fiction, as if Neville’s own science-based investigation has successfully dispelled the old legends. However, this process of demystification only goes so far, as the novel’s conclusion effectively installs a new version of the legend and a new monster. I Am Legend emerges from this as a thrilling and innovative take on vampirism that features many of the properties that would subsequently be associated with post-1960 horror cinema, especially in its American version. Historians of the horror film have commonly distinguished pre-1960 horror from post-1960 horror on the basis that the former tends to present scenarios in which good and evil are separable and distinct and where good usually prevails, while the more modern forms of horror offer an uncertain world where normality itself is harder to identify or value positively and where the forces of good do not always intervene successfully. The transition from one to the other is obviously not meant to be seen as instantaneous but instead in terms of a gradual shifting of emphases, with the 1960 date invoked more as a marker of transition than as a moment of absolute change, and also because it was the year that saw the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a key early text in the modern horror canon. The ways in which these two periods in horror’s development are outlined and discussed vary from one genre history to another. For example, Andrew Tudor has applied the terms ‘secure’ and ‘paranoid’ to the two periods, while Isabel Cristina Pinedo offers instead the terms ‘ classical’ and ‘postmodern’.7 However, along with other

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writers on horror, they tend to emphasise particular horror films as crystallisations of key themes of the modern period. Although there is nothing intrinsically American about ‘paranoid’ or ‘postmodern’ horror, many of these films tend to be both American and from the late 1960s or 1970s – among them Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), It’s Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977). It might be argued that the existence of a very ‘paranoid’ or ‘postmodern’ I Am Legend in 1954 underlines the shortcomings of an approach to any genre that focuses just on one medium – in this instance, cinema – rather than considering both how a genre might exist across different media and how these media relate to each other. Instead of seeing I Am Legend as an isolated example of a radical new approach to horror, one can readily place it, as distinguished and original as it is, within a predominantly literary but also cinematic context, as part of a collective response to social and cultural change in the United States.8 The novel’s combination of science fiction and horror themes was also common in the decade, especially in US cinema where films such as The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks, 1951) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (Edward L. Cahn, 1958), among many others, proved popular (although perhaps no other text collided the genres in the provocative manner of I Am Legend). If I Am Legend has its place within US cultural history, the issue remains of its attractiveness to Hammer as a property worthy of adaptation in the late 1950s. Put another way, in what ways did I Am Legend make sense in the context of British cinema and British culture?

Hammer in the 1950s The anti-Dracula rhetoric transferred from I Am Legend to the screenplay of The Night Creatures is especially striking given that if the film had gone ahead, it would have nestled alongside Dracula in Hammer’s production schedule. In fact, one wonders whether,

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for this reason alone, the scene in which Robert Neville casts aside a copy of Stoker’s Dracula would have survived in the finished film. Be that as it may, the association of I Am Legend/The Night Creatures with Dracula on the grounds that both dealt with vampires seems unavoidable in retrospect, but in Britain in the summer of 1957 there were other ways of thinking about I Am Legend. It is significant in this respect that Matheson came to Hammer fresh from successfully adapting another of his novels, The Shrinking Man (1956), as The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957). Although thematically connected with I Am Legend, this story – of a man exposed to a radioactive cloud who subsequently shrinks away – was much more readily classifiable as science fiction, and, even before reading the screenplay of The Night Creatures, there is some evidence to suggest that Hammer was positioning the project in relation to its own 1950s science fiction cycle. Hammer’s two major releases just prior to the summer of 1957, when Matheson wrote his screenplay, were The Curse of Frankenstein and Quatermass II. The first was a period horror shot in colour and directed by Terence Fisher, who would become the key director of gothic horror for the company. The second was a contemporary science fiction drama shot in black and white that, as directed by Val Guest, possessed realist qualities in its depiction of an alien invasion of Britain. The success enjoyed by Hammer’s version of Dracula in 1958 ensured that the company would subsequently focus its attentions on its colour gothic product, and critical accounts of Hammer horror have commonly seen its mid1950s science fiction cycle – which also included The Quatermass Experiment (Val Guest, 1955) and X – The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956) – as a dry-run for the gothic horror to come. Such a dismissal arguably does these films a disservice, for they have a distinctive character of their own. On the one hand, they offer a peculiarly British way of dealing with an alien invasion theme that had effectively been dominated by American films throughout the 1950s. In particular, the location of these films within recognisable British landscapes and in relation to British social conventions and character types tended to bestow a realism on proceedings that helped to distinguish them from the American treatments. At the same time, however, the Hammer films also sought to connect

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themselves with the commercially successful American approach, primarily through casting American actors in key roles, with Brian Donlevy starring in both Quatermass films and Dean Jagger featuring in X – The Unknown. This extended a practice initially adopted by Hammer in the early 1950s when it often cast fading or minor American stars in the thrillers that were then its major output. The absence of American accents from Hammer’s colour gothics  – from The Curse of Frankenstein onwards – along with their frequent reliance on British sources has supported readings of this type of cinema as itself quintessentially British. For example, David Pirie has characterised the British horror film, and Hammer horror in particular, as ‘the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America’.9 In comparison, the all-too-obvious Americanness of I Am Legend stands out like a sore thumb, even from the Quatermass films which, notwithstanding their American leads, were adapted from BBC television serials. Fashioned right at the beginning of Hammer’s transformation into a gothic horror specialist, The Night Creatures might reasonably be seen as the final expression of a soon to be outmoded method for engaging with the American market. However, such proudly nationalistic accounts fail to take sufficient notice of the fact that throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s Hammer was heavily reliant on American finance, and in some instances American sources: in fact, the original idea for The Curse of Frankenstein had come from Milton Subotsky, an American producer. Indeed, British horror cinema of the 1950s and 1960s more generally often drew upon American talent and American material. For example, Richard Matheson himself would go on to write the psychological thriller Fanatic (1965) and the Satanic thriller The Devil Rides Out (1968) for Hammer, and also co-write, with fellow American author Charles Beaumont, the British witchcraft drama Night of the Eagle (1962); the Americanbased director Jacques Tourneur made Night of the Demon (1957) in Britain, with American Dana Andrews starring; and American producer Milton Subotsky set up the Amicus company in Britain, for which American writer Robert Bloch worked regularly and which later adapted US horror comics for the British screen. Within

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such a context of transnational impurity, Hammer’s purchase of I Am Legend and its hiring of American ‘hotshot’ writer Matheson fitted into an ongoing, if changeable, financial and creative engagement with the US film industry. The signing up of Val Guest as director of The Night Creatures is also suggestive so far as Hammer’s positioning of this project was concerned. Guest was a prolific and versatile director who worked regularly for Hammer during the 1950s, and occasionally in the 1960s and 1970s, but never on the colour gothic series for which Hammer became famous. His Hammer films included comedies (Life with the Lyons [1954], The Lyons in Paris [1955], Up the Creek [1958] and Further Up the Creek [1958]), adventure stories (Men of Sherwood Forest [1954] and the prehistoric tale When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth [1970]), thrillers (Break in the Circle [1955], Hell is a City [1960] and The Full Treatment [1961]), and war films (The Camp on Blood Island [1958] and Yesterday’s Enemy [1959]). However, Guest’s Hammer credits most relevant to The Night Creatures project were The Quatermass Experiment (1955) and Quatermass II (1957). (Guest also directed the 1957 black and white Hammer fantasy The Abominable Snowman which was based, like the Quatermass films, on a television play by Nigel Kneale.) Both of these were SF-themed alien invasion fantasies that contained horror elements, especially in their representation of ghastly and fearful alien monsters. To a certain extent, they – along with their television sources – offered a type of science fiction/ horror that was comparable with that offered by Matheson’s I Am Legend inasmuch as they were all contemporary, had realistic qualities, featured anxiety-ridden scenarios, and sought to distance themselves from some of the more traditional genre conventions. They also shared a level of ambition, which in Hammer’s case was connected with an upward mobility in the film industry as the company improved production values and began to move away from its beginnings in B-movie production. It seems from this that far from being an alien intrusion into a cosy British set-up, the I Am Legend project did make sense in relation to Hammer’s 1957 production schedule and its general way of working at that time. Moreover, this was a moment of relative fluidity for the company with a science fiction cycle and a horror

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cycle in profitable coexistence. What remains to be considered is the extent to which the screenplay written by Matheson fitted into what Hammer was doing elsewhere. In other words, how successfully did a 1954 American novel translate into a 1957 British screenplay?

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From I Am Legend to The Night Creatures Setting We move into the soundless desertion of Hudson Town, Canada. A cheerful, if somewhat weatherbeaten sign welcomes us to ‘the fastest growing community in northern Canada!’10

The opening scene of The Night Creatures presents us with our first surprise. I Am Legend was set in the United States, but the screenplay relocates the drama not – as one might have expected – to Britain but instead to Canada. There is very little in the original story that would not work in a British setting, and indeed it would not take much more than an Anglicisation of some of the dialogue to convert the screenplay into a British-set project. One can speculate that in this instance Canada signifies an area that is simultaneously not the United States and not Britain; not the United States because setting a film there might appear presumptuous (and Hammer never did set a film in the United States, for all its attempts to connect with and pander to the US market), and not Britain perhaps as a way of distancing some of the disturbing events of the narrative – although the fact that Hammer personnel seemed genuinely surprised when the project was turned down by the censors suggests that they did not view it as especially problematic. More likely then, it was not Britain because at the time Hammer was being pressured by its American financial backers about what was viewed as the problematic ‘Britishness’ of its colour gothic films. In the period leading up to the production of The Curse of Frankenstein, there had been a flurry of correspondence between the American producer Eliot Hyman and Hammer chief executive James Carreras about the extent to which the British accents of the cast might be a problem for American audiences.11 Presumably, Canadian settings would prove less of a problem, although they were unlikely to be c­ ompletely free

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of British accents, at least in the world of British horror. The nonHammer horror film Fiend without a Face (1958) – set in Canada but filmed in Britain – brought together American and British actors, and the Hammer psychological thriller Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960) did something similar. Canada seems to function there, and potentially in The Night Creatures, as a neutral space where Americanness and Britishness might profitably coexist and engage with each other.

The hero, Robert Neville Mark Jancovich has argued that I Am Legend places ‘its readers in an uneasy relationship to Neville in which they are not only deeply involved in his thought processes and responses, but are also able to identify their limitations and omissions’.12 The simultaneous closeness to and distance from Neville is achieved in the novel through a third-person narration that is organised entirely around Neville’s perspective and from which he is never absent. The Night Creatures maintains this focus on Neville, who is present in every scene, and it also makes some attempts to reproduce the interior monologues found in the novel, although this is often rather strained and associated as much with exposition as it is with character insight. In fact, the whole screenplay struggles to translate into cinematic language a literary narrative which for the most part involves one man existing by himself with very little interaction with any other living (or for that matter undead) creature. For example, the film begins with Neville dictating into a tape recorder, an activity that even he acknowledges is pointless: ‘I know there’s no one left but me but I set this down anyway: my history. Maybe, someday, someone will listen to it. Probably not. It doesn’t matter.’13 There are also some lengthy voice-overs which again offer exposition and are also used to compress the lengthy timespan of Neville’s scientific experiments on various vampires. A drunken monologue in which Neville sings a ditty entitled ‘Ohhh I’m a little vampire’ gives a more direct sense of his troubled state of mind (this is also the scene in which Stoker’s Dracula is mocked). More perverse, and probably the most effective use of monologue in the screenplay, is a scene in which Neville conducts experiments

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on a trapped female vampire, causing her what the screenplay describes as ‘agony’. This is disturbing enough – and was probably one of the many scenes that upset the censors – but it is made worse by the way in which Neville speaks to the vampire throughout the experiment: ‘You can see, can’t you. But your brain is gone. You don’t recognize yourself.’14 Here the fact that the animalistic vampire is clearly incapable of understanding what is being said to her bestows on Neville’s statements a monological quality that underlines, and gives dramatic shape to, his violent subjection of her. The first half of The Night Creatures also contains a series of flashbacks which economically convey Neville’s family life and the gradual spread of the plague. These provide some much-needed opportunities for character interaction, pathos (as Neville’s daughter and wife die) and fear (when Neville’s wife returns as a vampire), and are generally faithful to incidents depicted in the novel. What is lost, understandably given that it would have slowed down the film, are the novel’s lengthy opening descriptions of Neville’s daily routines, which include repairing and refortifying his house, expeditions outside, staking vampires, etc. These give a very clear sense of the character desperately clinging on to these routines as a way of staving off acceptance that his normal world has been irrevocably lost. A sense of masculine helplessness and a kind of passive aggression is maintained, however. Although Neville experiments cruelly on vampires, he is clearly no Frankenstein (or Professor Quatermass for that matter), lacking both the focus and the indomitable will of the Hammer version of the scientist. In both novel and screenplay, he is not a trained scientist at all but instead someone who reads up on science and learns what he does learn by trial and error. (To make this more plausible, The Last Man on Earth actually made its central character a professional scientist.) While he does discover the vampire bacillus, this represents the limit of his endeavour. He finds no cure, and in any event the narrative’s conclusion reveals that some of the vampires are already aware of the nature of their infection and are working to deal with it. If anything, Neville is more like some of the weak men who populate Hammer horror, more like Jonathan Harker or Arthur Holmwood in Hammer’s

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Dracula than the authoritative Van Helsing. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hammer did offer up the spectacle of the helpless male on a fairly regular basis – even giving him the central role in The Man Who Could Cheat Death (Terence Fisher, 1959) and The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961) – with this functioning as a counterpoint to, and in some ways a precondition of, the powerful male authority figures who were capable of successfully taking on the monsters. Weakness of this kind was usually associated with a surrender to sexual drives and desires, and although The Night Creatures removes I Am Legend’s numerous references to Neville’s sexual frustration, its conception of Neville fits into this category.  Neville is presented as largely reactive, prone to maudlin self-pity, and barely in control of his emotions, and the screenplay does not shy away from his unnerving habit of experimenting on and staking female vampires (with his first victim being his own wife). How this would have been manifested in a finished film is hard to say, although the screenplay’s critique of Neville is consistent and unavoidable. In part, it would have been a question of casting. Canadian setting notwithstanding, Peter Cushing, the main Hammer star of the period, could undoubtedly have captured the character’s tormented quality, although whether Hammer would have wanted him in a role so different from his parts in The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula is uncertain. Apparently Matheson had thought of Jack Palance in the role, with an American accent and a brooding intense presence the attraction here. (Palance did later work for Hammer on the 1959 production Ten Seconds to Hell [Robert Aldrich], and went on to appear in numerous American and British horror films, including a creditable turn as Dracula in the 1973 television film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula [Dan Curtis], written by none other than Richard Matheson.) In an uncertain world, the casting might not have proved as ideal or as exciting, however. For example, The Abominable Snowman, the film completed by Night Creatures director Val Guest just prior to the writing of the screenplay, had featured as its American lead Forrest Tucker, who was an altogether more forgettable presence and might just have been available for Guest’s next film. Of such accidents are classics made or unmade.

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Vampires The vampires in The Night Creatures are initially presented as a mindless, shambling mob, entirely bereft of the deceptive charm or sexual allure of Count Dracula and his gothic ilk. From the perspective of the horror genre today, they actually seem to function more like zombies than they do vampires. The influence of I Am Legend on Romero’s classic modern zombie film Night of the Living Dead has already been mentioned, and much of what Romero took from Matheson’s novel is preserved in The Night Creatures. It is interesting in this respect that the scenes depicting the vampire attacks in The Last Man on Earth, a later version of the Night Creatures screenplay, look a lot like outtakes from Night of the Living Dead. Of course, the vampire’s bite in Stoker’s Dracula and its numerous film adaptations is a source of infection, but it is an infection with a distinctly individualistic character. By contrast, The Night Creatures introduces the concept of plague – the film’s opening sequence features a sign indicating that ‘All Plague Victims Must Be Put In The Fire’ – and an uncontrollable geometric progression of the vampire disease (which here, as in the novel, is quite literally a disease) that leads inevitably to social breakdown. Other vampire films – notably F. W. Murnau’s 1922 production of Nosferatu – also associate the vampire with plague but do not make the modern jump to vampirism as plague. This sense of escalating d ­ isorder is an unambiguous expression of what Andrew Tudor called ‘paranoid horror’, and the fact that there is no master vampire as the source of the infection renders the threat of vampirism yet more impersonal and uncontainable.15 In addition, the novel’s vague references to there having been a war are removed from The Night Creatures, giving instead a sense that this disease has just happened rather than being brought on by any particular traumatic event. I Am Legend offers a second type of vampire, however. While Neville does not distinguish between undead vampires (those mindless creatures that have actually risen from their graves) and living vampires (those infected but not yet dead), the latter turn out to have the ability to control their disease and build a new social

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order for themselves, one in which Neville is marked as monstrous. In setting this out, the novel establishes a sense of difference – between vampires and humans, the living and the dead – that is only partially retained in Matheson’s screenplay. In both novel and film, Neville drunkenly speculates about the possibility of rights for vampires, before concluding with ‘But would you let your sister marry one?’, although this direct reference to the civil rights movement in the United States is not really followed up elsewhere in the narrative. However, a more disturbing sense of the insurrectionary quality of the new vampire movement is made explicit towards the end of I Am Legend when a female vampire who is described as ‘a ranking officer in the new society’ comments: ‘New societies are always primitive … You should know that. In a way we’re like a revolutionary group – repossessing society by violence. It’s inevitable.’16 Again, it is not clear what the politics of the new vampire world will be – is this a left-wing or right-wing uprising? – but nevertheless it is this sense of radical social change that provokes Neville’s realisation of his own redundancy and leads to his suicide. Although the novel again makes little of it, the fact that this new world features a woman as one of its leaders, as opposed to the 1950s gender conventionality represented in the pre-plague flashbacks where men are dominant and women are housewives, is at the very least suggestive that the changes underway involve rather more than just a ­distinction between humans and vampires. By contrast, the conclusion of The Night Creatures is much more  muted and tentative. Neville is wounded during the final vampire assault on his house, but not mortally, and Ruth, the vampire woman who has infiltrated his household, reassures him that he will be safe, if not particularly popular, in the new vampire world: ‘You assumed that because we were infected, we’d want to kill you … I won’t lie to you, Robert. Most of my people do. But you’re too valuable to kill. You [sic] immunity to the germ is worth more to us …’17 Neville is led out of the house and driven away, and the film ends. Clearly a lot is lost in this ending, not least the self-aggrandising ‘I Am Legend’ moment – hence, one suspects, the title change to The Night Creatures – and the suicide of the hero. Also missing is Ruth’s

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elevation to a position of authority and an accompanying sense of vampirism as a viable alternative social order. In part, this new ending was probably driven by a need for a more affirmative ending than that found in the novel, although the disturbing implication that Neville himself is about to become an experimental subject also lurks in it. In any event, it offers a decidedly ambiguous conclusion and, in dramatic terms, a fairly anti-climactic one. Arguably the hesitation apparent here manifests a broader uncertainty about how to fit some of the more disturbing and difficult aspects of the literary narrative into what passed for conventional cinematic form during the 1950s.

Another one for the fire Perhaps it was the dead bodies that did it. Lots of them, with Neville’s house and the street outside littered with corpses by the end of the screenplay. Or perhaps it was the torture of a shackled female vampire. Or was it the municipal fire into which corpses were unceremoniously thrown, including the corpse of Neville’s young daughter? Or the contemporary settings, which somehow made this seem more disturbing than it might have been in period garb? Or the mob of animalistic vampires who entirely lacked the civilised virtues of their gothic counterparts? Or Neville’s habit of referring to vampires as ‘bastards’? Or the staking, or to be more precise, the multiple stakings? Or, more probably, was it an accumulation of all these things that so upset the British censors? Hammer might have been surprised by the BBFC’s displeasure, but at the time the company was relatively new to the horror genre. In any event, the critical controversy surrounding the release earlier in 1957 of The Curse of Frankenstein might well have prompted the BBFC to fire a warning shot across Hammer’s bows. If that was the intention, it worked well, because the most noticeable consequence of the Night Creatures affair was that Hammer worked more closely with the censors in the future. This led to a series of exchanges throughout the 1960s and 1970s about what should or should not be cut from certain horror films which in retrospect often seem absurd

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and pedantic, but which at the time enabled Hammer to function without costly interference from the BBFC. This still does not address the issue of the value or likely impact of what was lost when The Night Creatures was abandoned. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, this is a very hard thing to ascertain, perhaps impossible given all the variables and imponderables involved in film production and reception. Not that this stops the speculation, of course (although, so far as exhibition is concerned, it is worth noting that the compromised version of the screenplay offered by The Last Man on Earth had no noticeable impact at all when it opened in the mid-1960s). However, three films subsequently made by Val Guest, for and away from Hammer, do potentially give a tangible glimpse of how he might have handled aspects of Matheson’s screenplay. The Hammer production Hell is a City (1960) was a tough police thriller set in Manchester that featured a powerful portrayal of introspective masculinity from Stanley Baker that could readily have been transferred on to the character of Robert Neville (and if one wanted to pursue the imaginary casting route, then surely Baker as Neville is about as good as it gets). The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) was a doom-laden science fiction film in which nuclear tests cause the Earth to move towards the sun. Scenes of social breakdown accompanied by the hero’s general sense of helplessness again connected with some of the material evident in The Night Creatures. Finally, 80,000 Suspects (1963) dealt with an outbreak of smallpox. Here the portentous dialogue, the emotionally impaired hero and also the use of voice-over, along with the theme of infection, reproduced elements present in Matheson’s work. There is no evidence at all to suggest that Val Guest was consciously responding to the loss of The Night Creatures in any of these films. However, if we are thinking about the project in terms of surviving fragments, these after-the-fact fragments are arguably just as evocative as Guest’s earlier Quatermass films. This is especially the case given that The Night Creatures project does offer itself in certain respects as a transitional work, moving from science fiction and horror themes on to something more ambitious and desolate.

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Finally, it is worth quoting one more line from The Night Creatures. It is not a line that appears in I Am Legend, although oddly – perhaps coincidentally – it does feature in Night of the Living Dead. On seeing a body being taken away, Neville’s neighbour Ben Cortman, who will later become a vampire himself, remarks: ‘Another one for the fire.’18 Eleven years later, at the end of Night of the Living Dead, a redneck sheriff delivers the same line just after the film’s hero has been mistaken for a zombie and shot dead. In both instances, the line responds to an apocalyptic collapse that is draining away our emotion and empathetic humanity, with vampires or zombies functioning as an extreme expression of an inner deadness. The presence of this evocative line in a classic modern American horror and a Hammer horror (albeit an unfilmed one) suggests that these two types of horror might not be as distinct and separate from each other as has sometimes been supposed. Such a realisation might well cut across national borders and common periodisations of horror history, but at the same time it also draws our attention to some of the localised interactions and complexities that in reality drive the development of the horror genre. It is within an impure and transactional context of this kind that The Night Creatures, far from being an idiosyncratic project, really starts to look like a British horror film.

Postscript by Johnny Walker At the time of its initial publication in 2008, the present essay was the only piece of academic criticism in existence dedicated to exploring (one of) Hammer’s (many) ‘unfilmed’ projects. Since then, an entire study has emerged on this fascinating area in the form of Kieran Foster’s forthcoming monograph, Hammer Goes to Hell: The House of Horror’s Unmade Films. Foster, having carried out empirical research at the Hammer Script Archive, the British Board of Film Classification and the Margaret Herrick Library, ­reconsiders the significance of The Night Creatures, arguing for the film’s ­‘importance’ in ‘shaping Hammer’s trajectory’.



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Notes  1 Cited in Richard Matheson, Bloodlines: Richard Matheson’s Dracula, I Am Legend, and Other Vampire Stories (Colorado Springs, CO: Gauntlet Publications, 2006), 217.   2 Val Guest, So You Want To Be In Pictures: The Autobiography of Val Guest (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2001).   3 Denis Meikle, A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 56.   4 Matheson, Bloodlines, 210.   5 Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (London: Gollancz, 2001 [1954]), 160.   6 Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 130.   7  Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 211–24; Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 14–16.   8 For a discussion of this context, see Jancovich, Rational Fears.   9 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973), 9. 10 Matheson, Bloodlines, 221. 11 Cited in Peter Hutchings, Terence Fisher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 5–6. 12 Jancovich, Rational Fears, 149. 13 Matheson, Bloodlines, 225. 14 Ibid., 285. 15 Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, 217. 16 Matheson, I Am Legend, 157. 17 Matheson, Bloodlines, 321–2. 18 Ibid., 233.

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Putting the Brit into Eurohorror: exclusions and exchanges in the history of European horror Originally published in Film Studies 15.1 (2016), 54–65.

The concept of Eurohorror In 2007 the British Film Institute published, as part of its Screen Guide series, 100 European Horror Films.1 Other Screen Guides have focused on traditional genres such as the western, science fiction, the musical and documentary, on non-Western products such as anime and Bollywood films, and on more critically constructed groupings, including cult films, film noir and road movies. Where precisely 100 European Horror Films fits into this eclectic mix is not immediately clear. To date, it is the only volume in the series to take a traditional genre – horror – and inflect it geographically. Yet if one delves into the book, one finds that its sense of geography is on occasion decidedly idiosyncratic. As one might expect, the majority of the book’s 100 entries come from western Europe, where most genre production has taken place throughout European film history – notably Italy (which dominates the book with thirty-eight entries) followed by Spain, Germany and France, with a smattering of entries from other European countries, including East European ones. But there are also three entries from Russia. One of these is Dark Waters (Mariano Baino, 1994), a Russian/Italian production that was shot mainly in the Ukraine by an Italian director and which arguably merits inclusion as a marginal entry influenced by European practices (and in the interests of disclosure, I wrote the entry on this film largely from

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that ­perspective). However, the other two Russian entries, The Viy (Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, 1967) and Night Watch (Timur Bekmambetov, 2004), turn out to be wholly Russian in terms of funding and creative personnel. While this extension of the category of European horror eastwards might surprise some readers, an accompanying reluctance to venture westwards is potentially yet more startling. Put bluntly, Russian horror is put into European horror, at least to a certain extent, while British horror is excluded, with no wholly British horror film featuring anywhere in 100 European Horror Films. The main reason why this particular exclusion might seem unwarranted is that the histories of British and continental European horror movements have often been seen by genre critics and historians as being entwined, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s when an international cycle of gothic horror films both dominated the horror market and helped to launch, in particular, both British and Italian horror cycles.2 However, from another perspective, one that is expressed very clearly by 100 European Horror Films, British horror is a much less welcome presence in the world of European horror, and indeed its exclusion helps to underpin in a fundamental way a sense of what European horror actually is. In the face of this exclusion, this chapter seeks to identify and characterise the relationship between British horror cinema and European horror cinema, and in so doing it also explores a particular and influential critical understanding of European horror. It argues that the complexities associated with this relationship, such as it was in the past or is now, connect not just to the historical development of various national horror cinemas in Europe but also, perhaps more importantly, to how European horror cinema has been discussed, defined and discursively shaped since the 1980s. Throughout this period, the ways in which a wide range of European horror films have been circulated, received, interpreted and valued have undergone significant transformation. To get a sense of what this transformation has entailed, it is worth returning to 100 European Horror Films, and in particular its introduction. Here we find that the ‘European horror’ of the book’s title – which one might presume refers to horror films produced in Europe – has been replaced by the label ‘Eurohorror’. As

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the editor Steven Schneider puts it, ‘“Eurohorror” is a term that has been used primarily by reviewers and fans – and fans who are reviewers – to refer to post-1960 horror cinema emanating from Italy, Spain, France and, to a lesser extent, Belgium, Germany and other European nations.’3 It is clear from what follows that Eurohorror is primarily meant as a concept rather than a geographical designation. It refers to a particular type or category of horror film which might have nationally specific inflections, but which shares a range of characteristics and properties and which at the same time transcends national borders (hence the possibility of finding manifestations of it in Russia). While acknowledging the variety of formats within Eurohorror, Schneider characterises it thus: ‘the films in question – whatever their subgenre – showcase a greater degree of explicit violence, sexuality and transgressive, alternative imagery than earlier examples of their form’.4 He also notes that these are horror films ‘that manage to be simultaneously artistic and generic, innovative and derivative, highbrow and lowbrow’.5 Comparable sentiments can be detected in a range of books, articles and reviews both from before and after the publication of 100 European Horror Films. For example, Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’s influential 1994 book Immoral Tales: Sex and Horror Cinema in Europe 1956–1984 also finds extreme imagery, transgression and a challenge to traditional cultural hierarchies in these films, which are ‘too lowbrow to be considered arty, but too intelligent and personal to be described simply as Eurotrash’.6 More recently, Ian Olney’s Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture has argued that ‘the character of European art cinema is not so different from that of Euro horror cinema. Both tend to favour loosely structured plots and intense psychological subjectivity, and both push the envelope of what was then considered acceptable with regard to the onscreen depiction of sex and violence.’7 Running alongside this are frequent acknowledgements of the importance of fan cultures that emerged from the 1980s onwards – and associated terms such as ‘cult’ and ‘paracinema’ – and the recirculation of Eurohorror films on DVD and Blu-ray to the development of the Eurohorror category. However, the extent to which the category is itself viewed as a critical construction

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imposed r­ etrospectively on European horror cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, or instead offered as a historical discovery of something that was visible at the time of these films’ production and initial release, is often left vague and unresolved.8 Nevertheless, the attractiveness of Eurohorror for these critics seems to be that it offers experiences not found in what are usually presented as conservative or predictable mainstream forms of entertainment that are often associated with Anglo-American product. So for Tohill and Tombs, the European horror film of the 1960s and 1970s produced ‘a tidal wave of celluloid weirdness that was destined to look even more shocking and irrational when it hit countries like England and the USA’;9 while Olney notes that ‘there are certain shared formal and narrative characteristics that set classic European horror movies apart from contemporaneous British and American horror movies’.10 It appears, then, that British horror is necessarily located outside Eurohorror because, for reasons that are never really made clear, it intrinsically lacks the transgressive delights of continental European horror films. This might surprise those critics who found iconoclastic and shocking qualities in Hammer’s original gothic horrors of the late 1950s and early 1960s, or later film historians who found yet further innovative and challenging work in 1970s British horror.11 But there you have it. No British horror shows up in 100 European Horror Films, while the one British film to feature in Mathijs and Mendik’s similarly themed 2004 collection Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945 is the unreleased and obscure Queen Kong (1976).12 One might have thought that I. Q. Hunter’s recent book British Trash Cinema would have challenged this exclusion. However, Hunter’s account maintains the separation of the British from the European and the erotic transgression associated with the latter: British trash cinema is arguably distinct from the disreputable cult cinema of the US and continental Europe … Although this book trolls through a cinema of transgression, not all of it is a wild ride into excess, subversion and lurid erotic defiance. British trash is also, and perhaps mostly, a cinema of routine underachievement, of stupid sub-B movies, austerity thrillers, unfunny comedies and failed grabs at naughtiness.13

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As I have suggested elsewhere, the Eurohorror approach has certainly been productive and effective in bringing to critical attention a wide range of hitherto obscure films.14 At the same time, it does raise issues, to put it mildly. Not least is the relation between national horror styles or schools within Europe (however one defines Europe) and what in Eurohorror sometimes appears to be a vague pan-continental conceptualisation of a generic identity. Coupled with this is a seemingly simplistic notion of the mainstream, against which the delightful excesses of Eurohorror tend to get defined. A striking feature of Eurohorror-based criticism in this regard is that most of it has been generated by British and American critics and fans rather than by continental Europeans (and indeed, the majority of the contributors to 100 European Horror Films are British or American), to the extent that ‘Eurohorror’ can reasonably be considered primarily as an Anglo-American concept that is predicated on there being a distance between the films concerned and the home culture of the critics invested in those films. As a concept, it is therefore reliant on notions of the exotic and the foreign, on there being something out there that is a lot more exciting than whatever we have here, wherever here is. A corollary of this is that Eurohorror films perceived as strange and transgressive by non-Europeans can sometimes seem considerably more mundane to the inhabitants of the countries that produced those films. Take  the  Italian giallo, for example. This is usually understood within the context of Eurohorror as a lurid and violent form of psychological or horror thriller, with the foreignness of the word arguably helping to denote an exotic distance from the quotidian. However, in Italy itself, giallo, which of course ceases to be a foreign word, is instead a catch-all category for crime fiction in general. Any assessment of the adequacy of Eurohorror as a concept necessarily involves thinking about European horror in terms of its historical development and the relation of Eurohorror to this history. Broadly speaking, there are two significant historical periods in European horror cinema, both of which arguably feature British input. The first period runs from the mid-1950s through to the mid1980s, with a high volume of horror production evident throughout Europe, especially in Britain (if you want to think of that as part  of Europe), Italy and Spain, but elsewhere as well. After

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the mid-1980s, European (including, if you wish, British) horror production dwindles to virtually nothing, before returning, in its second period, at around the turn of the millennium. (There is also a possible earlier period for European horror, a proto- or prehorror moment in the 1920s and 1930s where, for example, art movements such as German Expressionism and surrealist cinema offered innovations that would subsequently be taken up in horror cinema, both in Europe and elsewhere, and to which British cinema contributed little.) It is interesting that much of the critical work on Eurohorror, and an associated exclusion of British horror, is founded on the first period – the 1950s–1980s – and not the second. This is unfortunate, given that British horror seems to fit much more comfortably with the rest of European horror during the second, more recent period, and is generally more European-facing at that point in its development. This is particularly reflected in a number of co-production deals involving British and continental European countries – for example, Creep (Christopher Smith, 2004), Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall, 2001), Severance (Christopher Smith, 2006), Black Death (Christopher Smith, 2010) and Resident Evil (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2002). International co-productions were common in continental European horror throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but those involving British companies in collaboration with Europe were much rarer. Some Anglo-German productions of Edgar Wallace thrillers that hover on the margins of the Eurohorror category, the Spanish-British co-production Horror Express (Eugenio Martín, 1972), the Anglo-German co-production To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976) and the Anglo-French co-production of the telekinetic thriller The Medusa Touch (Jack Gold, 1978) are the only ones that spring to mind, with the British instead tending to seek out co-production deals with American companies. Perhaps more importantly, the kind of European horror that emerges during the contemporary period largely comes out of the same internationalised, fan-based culture that much of Eurohorror criticism comes out of as well. These filmmakers, be they Spanish, French or British, often self-identify as horror fans, have been influenced by the same internationally eclectic band of older cult horror films, and define their own work in relation to this material. In fact,

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one can argue that many of the new British horror films have more in common with continental European or American horror films than with older forms of British horror cinema. For examples, one can look to Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004), which exudes a nostalgic regard for both American and Italian versions of the zombie movie, as well as rural/survival horrors such as The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), Doghouse (Jake West, 2009), Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008), Severance and Wilderness (Michael J. Bassett, 2006), all of which draw on non-British sources for inspiration as much as on British ones. National differences are still important, not just in Britain but in other sites of horror production such as France, Spain and Sweden, but arguably more as a form of product differentiation within international markets organised around particular generic formats. In this sense, horror productions in Britain and Europe might have nationally distinctive qualities but are generally operating in relation to similar frameworks and understandings of what horror cinema is.15 It follows that the separation out of British horror from the excesses of the Eurohorror category, while operative in the contemporary scene, emerges from what is primarily a retrospective mapping of European horror cinema of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Yet in historical terms this period does contain a series of exchanges or connections between the British film industry and various continental European film industries so far as horror ­production is concerned. But what is the significance of these for any assessment of a Eurohorror category that excludes British horror?

British horror into Europe (and vice versa) Most obviously, relationships here can involve cross-border influence and emulation, the movement of creative personnel between countries, and financial co-production deals that cut across national borders. Potentially, they can also be characterised in terms of parallel activity, with different national cinemas producing similar kinds of films even if there is no evidence of any direct international connections underpinning them. So far as influence and emulation

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are concerned, an important factor is the international circulation of British and continental-European horror films. From 1957, with the release of Hammer’s first colour gothic production The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher), to the mid1960s, the British Hammer company was the main international market leader in horror, and the commercial success enjoyed by its films in many countries inspired an international cycle of period horror productions, especially in Europe. No matter how much one wants to argue that the European gothic horrors of the 1960s were different from their British counterparts, aesthetically or ideologically, they were at the very least acutely aware of the British product. It is therefore unsurprising that British actors started showing up in European gothic horror films during the 1960s – for example, the established British horror star Christopher Lee, who worked on similar projects in Germany, Italy and Spain, or Robert Flemyng, who starred in Ricardo Freda’s Italian horror The Terror of Dr Hichcock (1962). Perhaps the best-known British horror export to the continent in the early 1960s was Barbara Steele, a minor starlet for the Rank Organisation in the late 1950s who, once in Italy, became a major and iconic horror star following her first horror film, Mario Bava’s The Mask of Satan (1960). She came to embody the perverse, necrophile delights of 1960s Italian gothic cinema in a series of Italian horror films but, in an international career, also appeared in British and American horror films. This exporting of British talent can be seen as supporting, at some levels, an attempted emulation of an Anglo version of horror  – hence Steele and another British actor John Richardson as the stars of The Mask of Satan, the first commercially successful Italian horror film (and indeed European horror film); hence also the adoption by many European filmmakers, particularly in Italy, of British-sounding pseudonyms, for example, Mario Bava becoming John M. Old, Riccardo Freda transforming himself into Robert Hampton, and Antonio Margheriti becoming Anthony M. Dawson. It is now commonly assumed that these attempts at Anglicisation were decidedly half-hearted and did not convince anyone. Indeed, British and American reviews of these films on their initial release usually identified them as Italian imports (although The New York Times review of The Mask of Satan – which was released in the USA

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as Black Sunday – managed to mistake the film for ‘a British-made melodrama’),16 although, importantly, not really fundamentally or significantly different from the British product. Directors too were moving between Britain and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, but less frequently than actors. British horror directors Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis and Michael Armstrong all worked in Germany, the latter on the notorious Mark of the Devil (1970), a film that does merit an entry in 100 European Horror Films. The young British filmmaker Michael Reeves began his directing career in Italy with Revenge of the Blood Beast (1966) before returning to Britain to make The Sorcerers (1967) and Witchfinder General (1968), the latter a significant influence on Mark of the Devil. Continental European directors were coming to Britain as well, mainly during the 1970s. There were flying visits from the Spaniard Jorge Grau, who shot location material for the Eurohorror classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (1974); from the Spanish-based, Argentinian-born Leon Klimovsky to shoot scenes for the Paul Naschy vehicle Dr Jekyll versus the Werewolf (1972); and from Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci for sequences in his giallo A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971). Spanish director Jose Larraz experienced a longer stay in Britain, with his striking horror film Vampyres (1974) featuring a predominantly British cast and crew. Unsurprisingly, Tohill and Tombs have viewed Larraz’s British films as, in essence, continental European films in exile, primarily because of their dream-like and erotic qualities, which are viewed as antithetical to everything that British horror represents.17 Similarly, the account of The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue in 100 European Horror Films – where it is discussed as an Spanish/Italian production under an alternate title Let Sleeping Corpses Lie – makes little of its British setting, although the fact that the film, while mainly shot outside Britain, takes place in a ‘foreign’ location surely merits more discussion than it actually receives.18 In any event, Vampyres in particular can also be seen as fitting well into a British horror cycle that, during the 1970s, was becoming noticeably looser and both more exploitative and more experimental.19 It is not difficult to find other instances of cross-Channel influence or of a blurring between British and European forms of

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horror. For example, Adam Locks has traced the influence of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) on some of the 1970s work of British director Norman J. Warren, especially Terror (1978), and one might also detect some Suspiria-like qualities in the British horror film The Legacy (1978).20 In both Terror and The Legacy moments of stylisation and design strongly reminiscent of Argento’s film mingle with recognisably British settings and characterisations in a manner that suggests, at the very least, that different kinds of horror can coexist with each other. In a different way, Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy – The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970), Lust for a Vampire (Jimmy Sangster, 1970) and Twins of Evil (John Hough, 1971), all scripted by Tudor Gates, who had earlier worked with Mario Bava, and featuring European actresses as their leads – can credibly be placed alongside other continental horror films as part of a 1970s ‘sex vampire’ horror cycle.21 It seems clear from this that British horror was not hermetically sealed off from the continental versions of the genre, or vice versa. One might go further and argue that British horror in the 1960s and 1970s was, certainly in commercial terms but also to some degree creatively as well, a part of a European horror mix, at some points a market leader, at other points emulating or running parallel with European developments, or simply going its own distinctive way. This helps to explain the continued presence of British actors in Spanish and especially Italian horrors in the 1970s and 1980s, decades in which British horror itself was by no means the commercial force that it had been during the 1960s. Such actors included, among others, Judy Geeson (in the 1973 Spanish production Candle for the Devil), Richard Johnson (in the Italian horrors The Devil Within Her [1974], The Night Child [1975] and Zombie Flesh Eaters [1979]), Suzy Kendall (the Italian productions The Bird with the Crystal Plumage [1970], Torso [1973] and Spasmo [1974]), Catriona MacColl (Lucio Fulci’s Italian horrors City of the Living Dead [1980], The Beyond [1981] and The House by the Cemetery [1981]), and Ian McCulloch (Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Holocaust [1980] and Contamination [1980]). Only rarely is anything made of their Britishness in these films. Instead they are best seen as belonging to what, by the 1970s, had become a fully internationalised, indeed global, melange of talent that existed both

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before and behind the camera throughout European exploitation cinema. Even within such a context, however, a fascination with other countries and associated notions of the foreign is evident throughout this whole period of British and continental European horror production, with this often going beyond commerce-driven attempts to copy the genre films coming out of those other countries. This chapter has already pointed out that a sense of foreignness, of a gap between the home culture of a film and another culture, is an important element in some of the continental European horror films of this period. It is worth remembering here that most of the original Hammer horrors were set in continental Europe and tended to render those settings in exotic terms, in a manner that might be seen as anticipating the ways in which critics and fans subsequently responded to European horror films: in terms of distance, strangeness and mystery. To this end, Sue Harper has noted that for Hammer a sense of ‘European-ness’ permitted fantasy-based landscapes in a manner that more familiar British landscapes did not, ‘as a means of signifying an unknown geographical space where myths and archetypes might be made flesh’.22 By the same token, some of the later incursions from continental Europe into Britain reflected a fascination with Britain that went beyond any attempts to emulate Hammer in commercial terms. As previously noted, Eurohorror discourses of Anglo-American origin often endow the cultures of other countries with an exotic allure, but there is no reason to assume that this exoticisation cannot be directed back from those countries. Certainly, there is a powerful sense in some European horror and giallo films – including All the Colours of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972), Cold Eyes of Fear (Enzo G. Castellari, 1971), Dr Jekyll versus the Werewolf and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin – that London in particular has become, not unlike Hammer’s version of Europe, a strange, mysterious and alluring location and an appropriate site for fantasy. Additionally, as noted by several critics, giallo films often featured non-Italian characters as their protagonists, even when the films were set in Italy. One can also reference the German Edgar Wallace thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s in this regard, which clearly anticipated the Italian giallo (with some gialli marketed in Germany as Edgar

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Wallace thrillers), which were nearly always set in Britain and were often partly filmed there as well. In fact, two of these – Circus of Fear (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1966) and The Trygon Factor (Cyril Frankel, 1966) – turn out to be Anglo-German productions featuring a mix of British and German actors.23 At the very least, this brief account of exchanges and journeys between Great Britain and continental Europe suggests that what might be viewed as the transgressive purity of Eurohorror has regularly been sullied by British blood, while British horror has itself on occasion exhibited some continental-like elements. There is no obvious continuity to this, however, and it has happened in different ways at different times. Indeed, perhaps the best way to view this area is through a focus on specific instances or relationships and, where appropriate, the economic structures that underpin these. Elsewhere I have argued that it can be productive to view European horror cinema not as a singular entity, not in fact as ‘Eurohorror’ at all, but rather as a complex set of relationships and associations operative within and across various national borders.24 From such a perspective, confronting the Eurohorror category with some of the messy contingencies of actual Euro-British horror production can help to open up that category to a more historicised scrutiny of the genre, especially as it existed from the 1950s through to the 1980s. A final example of Channel-crossing Euro-Brit activity is useful here, partly because it offers a particular challenge to the identity of Eurohorror, but also because it returns us to the giallo, which is a key Eurohorror format (with seventeen of the titles in 100 European Horror Films Italian turning out to be giallo films). It relates to the British actress Suzy Kendall who, alongside her British and American film credits, appeared during the 1970s in three Italian giallo films by noted Eurohorror directors, Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Sergio Martino’s Torso and Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo. Amid this apparently exotic activity, Kendall also starred in the British thriller Assault (1970), a film which features some decidedly giallo-like qualities – including sexualised violence and nudity, an eyewitness to murder (played by Kendall) who does not understand what exactly she has witnessed, and a killer who wears black gloves. In their study of 1970s British horror cinema, Fenton and Flint disparage the film thus: ‘At a

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stretch, Assault could be described as a British giallo – the Italian thriller form which achieved its peak of international success in the early Seventies – but whilst imitating the form’s conventions it is doggedly devoid of the delirious excesses which true gialli embrace.’25 Here we have an all too familiar juxtaposition of plodding British dullness and delightful Euro-excess that is emphasised through Kendall’s presence linking them together; but at the same time, interestingly, we are presented with giallo not really as a descriptive category but more as an evaluative or qualitative one: all true gialli embrace excess, it seems, and that is a good thing. In the face of a seemingly self-evident idealisation of the giallo format, one can argue that many films now thought of as Italian giallo are not particularly distinguished or excessive (however one defines excess), and whatever one makes of Assault as a film, it is clearly deploying conventions also deployed by many gialli. There is no evidence in this case that this was an attempt to emulate an Italian format, and in fact Assault fits perfectly well into a 1970s cycle of British ‘women-in-peril’ films that includes a range of other giallo-like moments.26 In the same vein, albeit more positive in tone, Philippe Met has also identified as gialloesque Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), a British production set mainly in Venice, and Alfred Sole’s American horror film Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), although he seems frustrated by the fact that Sole in particular does not acknowledge any debt to or even knowledge of the Italian giallo film.27 However, the very idea of the British giallo, or the non-Italian or even non-European giallo, is arguably more productively thought of as a provocation, as an idea that has the power to disrupt a category which can be seen, not unlike Eurohorror itself, as an AngloAmerican categorisation imposed retrospectively on what is actually a very loose grouping of Italian thrillers made mainly during the 1970s and 1980s. In such a context, Suzy Kendall’s b ­ order-crossing presence alerts us to the fact that the giallo as defined since the 1980s might not be as unique a form as is sometimes supposed in Eurohorror criticism, and that comparable sensationalist thrillers can be found in many national cinemas during this period, not just in European ones.

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Putting the Brit into Eurohorror 287

Suzy Kendall shows up again in Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Peter Strickland’s feature-length homage to Italian horror, or at least her voice does; she is billed as ‘Special Guest Screamer’. Strickland’s film is one of three recent productions that appear to have bought into many of the ideas associated with Eurohorror through a nostalgic engagement with 1970s European horror; the others are Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer (2009) and The  Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (2013), both of which fixate on the giallo. Berberian Sound Studio is a British production, filmed in Britain but set in an Italian sound studio during the 1970s, and it features an internationally eclectic cast that would not shame a 1970s Italian horror film. Superficially it seems to offer, yet again, the Eurohorror juxtaposition of British uptightness – embodied by an English sound engineer (played by Toby Jones) who has travelled to Italy to work on a Suspiria-like horror film – and European excess, which is represented not just by the very violent film within the film, but by the mysterious, emotional and sexualised activities of the film’s continental European characters. However, the film gradually breaks down these distinctions between the British and the European, finding disturbing parallels between them, and in some scenes having the monolingual sound engineer inexplicably acquire fluency in the Italian language. Berberian Sound Studio’s ambiguous conclusion, in which the engineer stands transfixed before a flickering cinema screen, suggests both a collapse of his identity and of all the national distinctions set out so clearly at the film’s beginning. In a film that takes us deep into the subjectivity of its British protagonist, one might argue that Eurohorror emerges from this as a crazed British dream. Suzy Kendall is the only other Brit in this film, and as a Brit in Europe stands as a kind of double for the sound engineer. Heard but not seen, her casting is both iconic and historical, linking Berberian Sound Studio to Eurohorror – with two of Kendall’s Italian films featured in 100 European Horror Films – but also connecting it directly to 1970s Italian horror and giallo. In effect, her career journey through British and Italian cinema, like that of the film’s sound engineer, has created connections that can sometimes be used to support the Eurohorror category but that can also throw that category into question, showing it up as unduly

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hermetic and susceptible to disintegration. It is therefore appropriate that Kendall, who was present at the highpoint of the production of giallo, Eurohorror’s favourite format, shows up at what, in Berberian Sound Studio, looks a lot like Eurohorror’s collapse into disordered fantasy and chaos. This chapter began by noting the absence of British horror cinema from 100 European Horror Films. It should now be clear that just adding a few British horror films to the list is not the point. Instead, bringing British cinema into Eurohorror destabilises the whole category and reveals its founding assumptions about what is valuable, not just about the cultures of others but also about one’s home culture. It is worth noting that Eurohorror as a significant category might have been developed mainly by Anglo-American critics, but it is now accepted as a discourse by some Europe-based critics, who also contribute to 100 European Horror Films. However, there is more to be said about European horror cinema than can be said from a Eurohorror perspective. There is profit in going back before the discursive reshaping of European horror that took place from the 1980s onwards and discovering the economic and creative interactions and associations evident across a range of national sites of production in all their messy and contingent detail. This chapter contends that such an approach has the potential to produce not just enhanced nuance and historical awareness but also new sets of challenges about how we understand and value the kinds of horror films being made in Europe from the 1950s through to the 1980s. Needless to say, Great Britain will be present throughout.

Notes  1 Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), 100 European Horror Films (London: British Film Institute, 2007).   2 For a relevant discussion of horror cinema’s ‘gothic revival’, see Rich Worland, ‘The Gothic Revival (1957–1974)’, in Harry M. Benshoff (ed.), A Companion to the Horror Film (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 273–91.   3 Schneider (ed.), 100 European Horror Films, xx.   4 Ibid., xxi.

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  5 Ibid., xxii.   6 Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: Sex and Horror Cinema in Europe 1956–1984 (London: Primitive Press, 1994), 5.   7 Ian Olney, Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 7–8.   8 For a fuller discussion of this, see Peter Hutchings, ‘Resident Evil? The Limits of European Horror: Resident Evil versus Suspiria’, in Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick and David Huxley (eds), European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe since 1945 (London: Wallflower, 2012), 13–23.   9 Tohill and Tombs, Immoral Tales, 5. 10 Olney, Euro Horror, 47. 11 For example, see Steve Chibnall, Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker (Guildford: FAB Press, 1998). 12 Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945 (London: Wallflower, 2004). 13 I. Q. Hunter, British Trash Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2013), 3–4. 14 Hutchings, ‘Resident Evil?’, 13–24. 15 For more on this, see Peter Hutchings, ‘Northern Darkness: The Curious Case of the Swedish Vampire’, in Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson (eds), Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 54–70. 16 Howard Thompson, ‘“DOLCE VITA” DUE IN HENRY MILLER’S: Film Here April 19 to Be Legitimate House’s First – “Black Sunday” Opens’, New York Times, 8 March 1961, 37. 17 Tohill and Tombs, Immoral Tales, 193–207. 18 Schneider (ed.), 100 European Horror Films, 133–4. 19 See, for example, the account of the film in Harvey Fenton and David Flint (eds), Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of the 1970s (London: FAB Press, 2001), 222–4. While acknowledging the director’s non-Britishness, this emphasises heavily the film’s British elements. 20 Adam Locks, ‘Anglo Argento: A Critical Reassessment of the films of Norman J. Warren’, in Laurel Foster and Sue Harper (eds), British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 213–24. 21 For example, see David Pirie, The Vampire Cinema (London: Galley Press, 1977), 96–123. 22 Sue Harper, ‘Beyond the Forest: Terence Fisher and Transylvania’, Studies in European Cinema 3.2 (2006), 144. One might also put this

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in a broader cultural-historical context, with many classic British gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set in continental Europe. 23 For a discussion of the relation of Edgar Wallace krimi thrillers to Eurohorror, see Ken Hanke, ‘The “Lost” Horror Film Series: The Edgar Wallace Krimis’, in Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe (London: FAB Press, 2003), 111–23. 24 Hutchings, ‘Resident Evil?’ 25 Fenton and Flint, Ten Years of Terror, 13. 26 For a discussion of these other British films, see Peter Hutchings, ‘“I’m the Girl he Wants to Kill”: The “Women in Peril” Thriller in 1970s British Film and Television’, Visual Culture in Britain 10.1 (2009), 53–69. 27 Philippe Met, ‘“Knowing Too Much” about Hitchcock: The Genesis of the Italian giallo’, in David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer (eds), After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), 196.

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Russ Hunter

Inspector: But what if one of you is the monster? Dr Wells: Monster? We’re British, you know! Horror Express (Eugenio Martín, 1974)

Whether we like to admit it or not, academia has a star system. There are names you learn as an undergraduate or a graduate student that are the equivalent of studio stars, the top people in their field who feel a career (and more) away from you. When I started working at Northumbria University in 2010, Peter Hutchings was one of those ‘stars’. As an undergraduate I’d studied politics at the University of Essex and then moved to London where, ultimately, I took up a job as an operations manager at an IT support company. Yearning to do something that I loved, I reflected on my private passions and decided to go back to higher education, to try to do a PhD and see where it took me. I eventually wrote a doctoral thesis at Aberystwyth University about the Italian and UK reception of the work of Dario Argento. The name of Peter Hutchings loomed large as a star in the firmament of Film Studies. Peter was eventually the external examiner for my doctoral thesis. He seemed a natural choice given his own work in this area (in fact, his chapter ‘The Argento Effect’ was, in part, responsible for my own academic engagement with Argento). Naturally, as soon as Peter was appointed as my examiner I became nervous. This guy was not only a big name in Film Studies but one of the world’s leading experts in horror cinema. What would he be like? Would he pick apart every argument I’d tried to make? Would I end up running from the exam with my academic tail between my

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legs? I phoned a friend, who had recently had his PhD examined by Peter, to see what he was like. I needn’t have worried. When my viva finally arrived, I found Peter to be astute and searching in his line of questioning, but keenly interested to talk about my work because discussions about horror cinema genuinely interested him. He was kindly, patient and extremely knowledgeable – qualities I would later come to appreciate not only as a colleague but also as a friend. In 2010, while he was on research leave, I took over his longstanding Horror Film module (a module he had developed and taught for many years). To say I was nervous is an understatement. Here I was, an inexperienced and somewhat green early career researcher, trying to stand in for one of the key figures in the study of horror cinema. While I did the best I could, Peter’s were impossible boots to fill. He could recall film names, production details and a whole variety of interesting facts about various aspects of horror cinema at the drop of a hat. But, despite that, he was never precious or possessive about his module, and when I ended up teaching it for a second time he was generous in listening to my ideas (although, I admit, I was too in awe of his work at that stage to really change very much!) Like all successful scholars, Peter’s academic career was filled with the usual markers of distinction: several important monographs (this volume key among them), conference keynotes, numerous invitations to contribute to special editions of journals and edited collections, as well as a host of other honours. These were, of course, important milestones in Peter’s career. But Peter was much more than the sum of these professional parts. Academics can be professional butterflies, flitting from one institution to the next in search of some kind of Holy Grail of employment satisfaction. Not Peter. From the moment he started at Northumbria he was dedicated to the institution, taking on a number of leadership roles that culminated in him being a long-standing Director of Research for the Department of Arts. If his dedication to his job and the myriad of responsibilities that came with it curbed his ability to produce as much research as he might have wanted, his colleagues benefited. They benefited from his time, they benefited from his advice, and they benefited from his insightful takes on how best to navigate the

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profession and all its foibles. Peter was extremely generous with his time and took care to mentor younger academics and doctoral students with equal care. Although his admin duties were heavy, he never turned away colleagues who wanted to seek his advice, chat about their research or who wanted to draw on his vast experience of working at the institution. In meetings, if he had to deliver some relatively banal operational presentation, Peter liked to bookend his comments with film quotes. For the keen observer, these were always entertaining and well chosen, ranging from the Marx Brothers (‘I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it’) to The Exorcist (‘What an excellent day for an exorcism’). While a large part of Peter’s success as an academic was the result of his naturally incisive intelligence, he was also extremely rigorous and methodical in how he approached his work. No one who worked with Peter could forget walking by his office after the proofs of his Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema arrived, and seeing him very slowly and with great care using a ruler to check the entire book line by line. His approach to thorny academic problems, particularly those involving writing woes, would often be to very gently urge the writer to ‘Put an amen to it.’ This practical sense that writing would never be perfect and that to make progress you needed sometimes just to move on to the next thing typified Peter’s clear-headed approach. Indeed, Peter was all about perspective. On occasions when I would come to him with this or that work frustration, or when I would rail against what I perceived to be a particularly irrational aspect of academia, his words were always the same: ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.’ Above all else, Peter was driven by a love for cinema, and his life was defined by it. His love of film and his unparalleled work ethic meant that his knowledge of horror cinema was second to none. He could instantly tell you not only which year any film he had watched came out but also who the third actor from the left in the first scene was, what else they had been in … and possibly what their favourite colour was. Peter kept fastidious notes of everything he watched, jotting down what he saw and when. His house was full to the brim with DVDs and Blu-rays – dozens upon dozens still in their wrappers but in line to be viewed as soon as possible. As we would sit having lunch at work, the conversation would very

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quickly turn to film and not deviate until he had finished his lunch and returned to his office. This personal fascination was mirrored by his professional standing. He was an unparalleled expert in his field. His research genuinely changed the study of cinema, showing that studying popular films (particularly horror films) was worthwhile and that it told us something important about the society that produced them. For people like me – and many of his colleagues – what we study, what we do on a daily basis would not have been possible without work like Peter’s. In short: he was a giant in his field. This work and stellar career was underlined by kindness, patience and generosity of spirit. For all that Peter considered himself – and I quote – ‘not very good with people things’, he was an excellent mentor. He listened and always tried his very best to suggest some practical solution to whatever problem was presented. His legacy lives on in all of the students he inspired, all of the researchers he helped up the career ladder, and all those who he shared his joy of film with. Neither will we forget him rehearsing arguments with himself behind his closed office door (so he could get the words just right), or blasting out Tiny Tim’s ‘Tip Toe Through the Tulips’ and imploring us all to listen. Or his absolute insistence on the merits of Iron Man 3. Peter was, above all else, generous. Generous with his time, generous with his knowledge and generous in thinking about how best to help his team. Each of us gained something different from our time with Peter. Each of us was a better person, a better academic for knowing him. There are few people who can say they changed quite so many lives. Late in his life, Peter found immense pleasure in attending Abertoir Horror Festival (Aberystwyth, Wales). Although he strenuously resisted calling himself a horror fan (I think for him it was loaded with too many academic connotations), in reality he had found his tribe and it was a pleasure to enjoy several festivals watching films with him and sharing drinks in the bar. In 2013 Peter gave a talk at the festival on the career of Peter Cushing, an actor who he admired immensely. Peter spoke with passion, knowledge and genuine affection and even began to well up a little as he finished his talk. Such was the power of his presentation and the passion with which he spoke that he received a standing ovation.



Afterword 295

In the preface the Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema, which was published shortly after he was taken ill, Peter noted that:

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sometimes being an academic can limit your perspective, but Abertoir has opened mine to the ways in which horror lives on in the enthusiasm of its audiences, who, contrary to the way they have sometimes been written about in the past are knowledgeable, witty, passionate, good humoured and great company […]

This was typical of Peter’s scholarship in its desire to see the good in an often maligned part of popular culture. But, although he never intended them to be taken that way, these words also describe the man himself and his legacy.

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Select bibliography

Adair, G., and Roddick, N., A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film (London: Columbus Books, 1985). Aldgate, T., ‘Comedy, Class and Containment: The British Domestic Cinema of the 1930s’, in J. Curran and V. Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 257–71. Armes, R., A Critical History of the British Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Aspinall, S., ‘Sexuality in Costume Melodrama’, in S. Aspinall and R. Murphy (eds), Gainsborough Melodrama (London: British Film Institute, 1983), 29–39. Astle, R., ‘Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History’, Substance 25 (1980): 98–105. Balio, T. (ed.), The American Film Industry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976). Barber, S., ‘The Pinnacle of Popular Taste? The Importance of Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974)’, Scope 18 (2010), www.nottingham.ac.uk/ scope/documents/2010/october-2010/barber.pdf (accessed 12 March 2021). Barker, M., A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto Press, 1984). Barr, C., ‘Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and the Critics’, Screen 13.2 (1972): 17–31. Barr, C. (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986). Berger, J., Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Betts, E., The Film Business: A History of British Cinema 1896–1972 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973). Biskind, P., Seeing is Believing (London: Pluto Press, 1983). Bogdanor, V., and Skidelsky, R. (eds), The Age of Affluence: 1951–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1970). Bordwell, D., Staiger, J., and Thompson, K., The Classical Hollywood

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Index

21st Century (film distributor) 9 28 Days Later (2002) 14 80,000 Suspects (1963) 271 Abominable Dr Phibes, The (1971) 242 Abominable Snowman, The (1957) 263, 267 Adams, Mark 25 n.60 Alice, Sweet Alice (1979) 286 Alien (1979) 9 All the Colours of the Dark (1972) 284 Amazon Prime 18 Amer (2009) 287 American International Pictures 252 n.1 Amicus Productions 85 n.8, 131, 173–5, 237–54, 262 And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) 218–19, 222, 223, 225, 228, 239, 242 Anderson, Michael 77 Andrews, Barry 164 Andrews, Dana 262 Annakin, Ken 242, 243 Annett, Paul 239 Appointment with Fear (radio series, 1943–55) 253 n.17

Argento, Dario 19, 241, 253 (n.8), 283, 285 Arliss, Leslie 85 n.11 Armes, Roy 39–42, 53 n.5 Armstrong, Michael 282 Arnfield, Jane 16 Arnold, Jack 261 Arrighi, Nike 195, 197 Arrow Video (distributor) 16 Asher, Jack 94 Asquith, Anthony 85 n.10 Assault (1970) 285–6 Aster, Ari 19 Asylum (1972) 173, 239, 242, 244, 247 At the Earth’s Core (1977) 252 n.1 Atkins, Pete 12 Audley, Maxine 152 Awful Dr Orloff, The, see Gritos en la Noche Aylmer, Felix 107 Bailey-Bond, Prano 15 Baird, Anthony 62 Baker, Robert 124 Baker, Roy Ward 4, 7, 96, 167, 173, 203, 204, 215, 218, 238, 239, 271, 283 Balcon, Michael 99 Barber, Sian 22 n.27

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Index 305

Barker, Clive 6, 43, 232 Barker, Martin 23 n.42, 249, 266 n.18 Barr, Charles 34, 45, 61, 68, 76, 85 n.4, 85 n.7, 98, 136 n.40 Bassett, Michael J. 280 Bassett, Ronald 200 n.21 Bates, Ralph 138, 155, 166, 215 Bava, Mario 46, 50, 131, 241, 281, 283 Bay, Michael 256 Beacham, Stephanie 218 Beast Must Die, The (1974) 239, 242, 253 n.9 Beaumont, Charles 130, 262 Beaumont, Gabrielle 9 Bells Go Down, The (1943) 68, 85 n.10 Bennett, Alan 178–9 Berberian Sound Studio (2012) 287–8 Bergman, Ingmar 184 Berman, Monty 136 Bernard, James 88 n.40, 94, 252 n.6 Beswick, Martine 215, 216 Betts, Ernest 39, 53 n.5 Betts, Kirsten 205 Beyond, The (1981) 283 Beyond Bedlam (1994) 13, 23 n.40 Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) 283, 285 Black Death (2010) 279 Black Werewolf, see The Beast Must Die Blair Witch Project, The (1999) 13 Bloch, Robert 173, 239, 240, 241, 244, 250, 262 Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) 211, 212, 213, 217 Blood of the Vampire (1958) 124–6 Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) 6 Blood Tide (1982) 9, 10, 12

Blumhouse (production company) 18–19 Bond Street (1948) 243 Boulting, John 88 Bowman, Rob 256 Boyle, Danny 12, 14 Boyle, Raymond 24 n.52 Break in the Circle (1955) 263 Brexit 15–19 Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 45, 140, 141 Brides of Dracula, The (1960) 93, 138, 161, 163 Brief Encounter (1945) 61 British New Wave 75, 87 n.25, 91, 97 Brodrick, Susan 216 Brophy, Philip 3 Bryanston (production company) 44 Bulger, James 23 n.41 Cahn, Edward L. 260 Calibre (2018) 15 Camp on Blood Island, The (1958) 263 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 4, 75 Candle for the Devil (1973) 283 Cannes Film Festival 9 Canterbury Tale, A (1944) 56, 85 n.6, 109 Captive Heart, The (1946) 68 Carlson, Veronica 152, 165 Carmilla (novel) 203–4, 230 n.5 Carradine, John 8 Carreras, Enrique 96 Carreras, James 96, 97, 99, 264 Carreras, Michael 51, 92, 93, 96, 133, 134, 234, 257 Carry On (film series) 5, 6, 8, 29, 30 n.2 Cass, Henry 124 Castellari, Enzo G. 284

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Index

Castello dei Morti Vivi, Il (1964) (Castle of the Living Dead) 177 Castle of the Living Dead, see Il Castello dei Morti Vivi Castle Sinister (1932) 55 Cat Girl (1957) 130 Cattaneo, Peter 12 Cattet, Hélène 287 Cavalcanti, Alberto 4, 56, 94, 204, 243 Celluloid Screams (film festival) 16 Censor (2021) 15 censorship, 50 55, 71, 83, 87 n.26, 164, 229 n.2, 230 n.7 Chaney, Lon, Jr 49, 171, 180 Cheh, Chang 7, 203 Cherry Tree Lane (2010) 14 Chibnall, Steve 7, 21 n.19 Children of the Damned (1963) 130 Christie, Ian 34, 52 n.2, 85 n.6, 136 n.35 Church, David 26 n.67 Circus of Fear (1966) 285 Circus of Horrors (1960) 126, 127–8, 131, 174 City of the Dead (1960) 131, 239, 254 n.17 Clairvoyant, The (1934) 55 Clare, Diane 171 Claydon, Phil 14 Clive, Colin 143 Clover, Carol J. 3 Clownface (2020) 18, 25 n.60 Cohen, Larry 210, 260 Cokliss, Harley 11 Cold Eyes of Fear (1971) 284 Cole, George 206 Cole, Sidney 243 Comfort, Lance 173 Company of Wolves, The (1984) 6, 7, 11, 232, 233

Conboy, Martin 22 n.23 Confessions of (film series) 8 Connaught International (production company) 9 Connor, Kevin 173, 239, 252 n.1 Conrich, Ian 11 Contamination (1980) 283 Cooke, Alan 252 n.1 Cooper, D. E. 91, 133 n.7 Cooper, David 209, 230 n.10 Corman, Roger 45, 46, 50, 94, 101, 253 Corridors of Blood (1958) 125, 126, 169 n.8 Cottage, Ian 16 Countess Dracula (1971) 4, 213–17, 222 Covid-19 (coronavirus) 15–16 Coward, Noël 85 n.10 Crabtree, Arthur 85, 126, 174, 242 Craven, Wes 13, 210, 260 Creative Scotland 15 Creed, Barbara 3 Creep (2004) 15, 279 Creeping Flesh, The (1972) 219–28 Crichton, Charles 56, 243 Crimes of Stephen Hawke, The (1936) 56 Croydon, John 125 Cruel Sea, The (1953) 77 Curse of the Fly, The (1965) 172–3 Curse of Frankenstein, The (1957) 4, 34–8, 46, 52, 69, 72, 89, 92, 94, 101, 134 n.14, 141, 142–5, 179, 240, 255, 261–2, 264, 267, 270, 281 Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The (1960) 93 Curse of the Werewolf, The (1960) 93, 103–5, 109, 267



Index 307

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Cushing, Peter 8, 29, 89, 94–5, 101–4, 106–11, 114, 119–21, 125, 132 n.1, 138, 141, 143, 145–6, 152, 155, 168, 173, 201 n.30, 206, 208, 220, 223, 238, 245, 252 n.1, 255, 267, 294 Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966) 252 n.1 Dambusters, The (1955) 77 Damned, The (1963) 92 Dark Waters (1994) 274 Davies, Rhys 14 Day the Earth Caught Fire, The (1961) 87, 271 Day, Robert 125, 132 n.1, 169 n.8 de Souza, Edward 105 De Wolff, Francis 114 Dead of Night (1945) 4, 59–69, 84, 94, 125, 128, 174, 204, 243, 244, 245, 248, 253 n.13 Deadly Bees, The (1966) 239, 242 Dean, Margia 79 Deane, Hamilton 140 Dearden, Basil 56, 68, 85 n.10, 243 Death Line (1972) 5, 232 Decker, Lindsey 24 n.45 Dehn, Paul 37, 38, 88 n.40 Demons of the Mind (1972) 217, 219, 222–5, 227–8, 242 Denberg, Susan 149, 150 Descent, The (2005) 15, 280 Devil Rides Out, The (1968) 34, 154, 176, 194–5, 197–8, 201 n.30, 207, 211, 262 Devil Within Her, The (1974) 283 Devils of Darkness (1964) 173 Diffring, Anton 104 Dixon, Campbell 35 Doctor in the House (1954) 77 Dog Soldiers (2001) 14, 279

Doghouse (2009) 280 Don’t Look Now (1973) 6, 286 Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984) 9, 12 Donlevy, Brian 74, 82–3, 262 Donner, Richard 260 Doyle, Arthur Conan 112–13 Doyle, Gillian 24 n.52 Dr Blood’s Coffin (1961) 173 Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) 215–16 Dr Jekyll versus the Werewolf (1972) 294 Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) 85 n.8, 173, 239, 242, 247, 252 n.4 Dr Who and the Daleks (1965) 252 n.1 Dracula (1931) 49, 107, 158 Dracula (1958) 2, 34, 38, 69, 92, 94, 108, 109, 113, 134 (n.13), 138, 144, 157, 160, 163, 165, 180, 206, 260, 267 Dracula (novel) 95, 157, 158, 230 n.5, 259, 261, 265, 268 Dracula AD 1972 (1972) 132, 138, 168 Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) 164, 165, 167 Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1965) 161–6, 170 n.21 Dream Demon (1988) 11–12, 13 Dreyer, Carl 58, 156 Duffell, Peter 173, 239 Dust Devil (1992) 12 Dwyer, Hilary 187–92 Ealing Studios 6, 40, 42, 56, 60, 68, 69, 85 (n.7), 94, 98, 99, 100, 125, 243 Eddington, Paul 196 Eden Lake (2008) 14, 280 Egan, Kate 22 n.23, 23 n.32

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Eggers, Robert 19 Elès, Sandor 214 Elvey, Maurice 55 Ercy, Elizabeth 182 Eurohorror 274–80, 285–8 Evil Dead, The (1981) 11 Evil of Frankenstein, The (1964) 93, 134 n.14, 141, 147–9, 153 Exorcist, The (1973) 210, 293 Face at the Window, The (1939) 56 Fairlie, Henry 99 Fall of the House of Usher, The (1960) 50 Falvey, Eddie 26 Fanatic (1965) 134 n.11, 174, 262 Fangoria (magazine) 9 Farmer, Suzan 162 Fenton, Harvey 285 Ffilm Cymru Wales 15 Fiala, Severin 19 Field in England, A (2013) 14 Fiend without a Face (1958) 265 Finch, Jon 206 Fisher, Terence 4, 34, 41–2, 69, 72, 89, 92–4, 96, 101, 103–4, 106–9, 119–20, 134 n.14, 138, 139, 145, 148, 150, 153–6, 158, 162–3, 166, 176–8, 180, 188, 194–5, 197, 198, 200 n.26, 202, 204, 240, 243, 255, 261, 267, 273, 281, 282 Flemyng, Gordon 239, 252 n.1 Flemyng, Robert 281 Flesh and Blood Show, The (1972) 6 Flesh and the Fiends (1959) 124–6, 227 Flint, David 285 Forbes-Robertson, John 207 Forzani, Bruno 287 Foster, Kieran 272 Four-Sided Triangle (1953) 72

Francis, Freddie 85, 92, 93, 96, 133 n.11, 134 n.14, 141, 164, 173, 219, 224, 237, 238, 239, 241, 252 n.1, 253 n.10, 282 Franco, Jesus 50 Frankenstein (1931) 49, 140, 141, 143, 147 Frankenstein (novel) 49, 54 n.29, 137–40 Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) 134 n.14, 141, 146, 148, 150–4, 176 Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973) 141, 155, 168 Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) 141, 146, 148, 151–5, 166, 198 Franz, Veronika, 19 Frayn, Michael 98–9 Freda, Riccardo 46, 50, 131, 281 French, Harold 242, 243 Frend, Charles 77, 85 n.10 Freud, Sigmund 211, 223, 226 Frieda (1947) 68, 86 n.18 Friedkin, William 210 Frightmare (1974) 5, 232–3 From Beyond the Grave (1973) 173, 239, 243–7, 249–50 Fuest, Robert 242 Fulci, Lucio 282, 283 Full Monty, The (1997) 12 Full Treatment, The (1961) 263 Furneaux, Yvonne 103, 110 Further Up the Creek (1958) 263 Gainsborough melodramas 40, 43, 60, 64, 68, 85–6 n.11 Garden, The (2020) 16 Gates, Tudor 230 n.7, 283 Gayson, Eunice 145 Geeson, Judy 283 Gerrard, Steve 22 n.27 Get Out (2017) 18

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Index 309

Gibson, Alan 132, 138, 203 Gifford, Denis 45, 84 n.1, 87 n.35 Gilliat, Sidney 85 n.10 Gilling, John 96, 124, 173, 199 n.3 Godfrey, Derek 225 Godsend, The (1980) 9 Gold, Jack 279 Goodliffe, Michael 121 Gorgon, The (1966) 89, 93, 94, 102, 103, 105, 119–24, 131, 147, 150, 171, 188, 194, 198, 204, 211 Gough, Michael 128, 157 Goulding, Alfred J. 72 Granger, Derek 37 Grant, Barry Keith 21 n.8 Grau, Jorge, 282 Gray, Charles 195, 196, 201 n.27 Grayson, Godfrey 72 Greene, Graham 56 Greene, Leon 195 Grierson, John 68 Griffith, D. W. 242 Grip of the Strangler, The (1958) 125–6 Gritos en la Noche (1962) (The Awful Dr Orloff) 50 Grotjahn, Martin, 47 Guadagnino, Luca, 19 Guest, Val 37, 69, 87 n.32, 92, 257, 261, 263, 267, 271 Haggard, Piers 6 Hall, Stuart, 91, 100, 176 Hamer, Robert 56, 85 n.10, 136 n.35, 243 Hammer House of Horror (TV series, 1980) 8 Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (TV series, 1984) 8 Hammer censorship 83, 84, 164, 229 n.2, 230 n.7

company history/industry 8, 9, 18–19, 42, 44, 46, 281, 283–4 in critical/press discourse 33–52 entertainment value 51–2 questions of national cinema 4–5, 44–51, 277 unfilmed projects 255–72 Hands of the Ripper (1971) 217, 219, 225–8, 231 n.17, 242 Hard Day’s Night, A (1964) 239 Hardware (1990) 12 Hardy, Robert 222, 224 Hardy, Robin 6, 232 Harlin, Renny 12 Harper, Sue 22 n.23, 85 n.11, 284 Harper, Tom 19 Harris, Amy 24 n.47 Haunting, The (1963) 45 Hawks, Howard 260 Hayers, Sidney 126 130, 174 Hedley, Jack 171 Heffernan, Kevin 25 n.64 Heilbron, Lorna 219 Hell is a City (1960) 263, 271 Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) 12 Hellraiser (1987) 6–7, 12, 43, 233 Henry, Victor 182 Hereditary (2018) 19 Hessler, Gordon 178, 201, 252 n.1 Heston, Charlton 256 Hewison, Robert 90 Hibbin, Nina 34, 38 Hickonbottom, Joe 26 Hickox, Douglas 242 Higson, Andrew 43–4, 59 Hill, John 8, 70, 87 n.26, 90–1 Hills Have Eyes, The (1977) 210, 260 Hills, Gillian 219 Hills, Matt 22 n.23, 25 n.65 Hinds, Anthony 94, 96, 134 n.14 Hinds, William 96

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310 Hitchcock, Alfred 50, 133 n.11 135 n.28 241, 259 Holt, Seth 92, 133 n.11, 211 Hooper, Tobe 210, 260 Horror Express (1972) 279 Horror of Frankenstein, The (1970) 138, 141, 155 Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) 126–8, 174 Host (2020) 16 Hough, John 208, 283 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (1959) 4, 34, 69, 92, 94, 95, 102–5, 112–19, 122, 124, 157 House by the Cemetery, The (1981) 283 House of Whipcord (1974) 6 House That Dripped Blood, The (1970) 173, 239, 242, 244, 247 Howes, Sally Ann 63 Hunt, Leon 7 Hunt, Martita 161 Hunter, I. Q. 20 n.4, 21 n.19, 22 n.22, 24 n.48, 277 Huntington, Lawrence 56 Huntley, Raymond 107, 108 Hussein, Waris 252 n.1 Hutchings, Peter 1–7, 18–19 Hysteria (1965) 92 I Am Legend (film, 2007) 256 I Am Legend (novel) 255–72 I, Monster (1971) 239, 242 Incredible Shrinking Man, The (1957) 261 Inseminoid (1980) 6 Intolerance (1916) 242 Invaders from Mars (1953) 74 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) 74, 88 n.40 Irigaray, Luce 150

Index It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) 260 It’s Alive (1974) 210, 260 It’s Trad Dad (1962) 239, 252 Jack the Ripper (1958) 124 Jackson, Pat 243 Jamboree (1957) 252 n.3 James Bond films 40 Jancovich, Mark 258, 265 Jean, Vadim 13 Jewel of the Seven Stars (novel) 211 Johnson, Michael 207 Johnson, Richard 283 Jones, Paul 219 Jones, Toby 287 Jordan, Neil 6, 11, 232 Just for Fun (1963) 239, 252 n.4 Karloff, Boris 49, 55, 125, 178, 180 Keir, Andrew 162 Kendall, Suzy 283, 285–8 Kennedy, Robert 35 Kill List (2011) 14, 15 King, George 56 Kingston, Kiwi 147 Kiss of the Vampire (1964) 93, 172, 199 n.1 Klein, Melanie 206, 211, 214, 231 n.14 Klimovsky, Leon 282 Knack, The (1965) 239 Kneale, Nigel 130, 263 Koestler, Arthur 99 Konga (1960) 131 Kubrick, Stanley 9 Lacan, Jacques 47, 211 Lacey, Catherine 181 Laing, R. D. 209, 222, 231 n.15 Laing, Stuart 70

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Index 311

Land that Time Forgot, The (1974) 252 n.1 Landi, Marla 103, 113 Last Man on Earth, The (1964) 256, 266, 268, 271 Last Page, The (1952) 96 Launder, Frank 85 n.10 Lavalley, Albert 139 Lawrence, Francis 256 Lawrence, Marjie 226 Lawrence, Quentin 124 Lawson, Sarah 196 Leader, Anton M. 130 Lean, David 61 Lee, Ang 12 Lee, Christopher, 8, 29, 34, 89, 94, 101–9, 113, 117–21, 132 n.1, 138, 144, 156, 164, 167, 177, 195, 196, 201 n.27, 207, 222, 238, 255, 281 LeFanu, J. Sheridan 204 Legacy, The (1978) 283 Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) 7, 21 n.22, 203 Leggott, James 22 n.23 Leiber, Fritz 130 Lejeune, C. A. 36 Lenzi, Umberto 285 Leon, Valerie 211–12 Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009) 14 Lester, Richard 239 Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, see The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue Lewton, Val 94, 130, 136 n.39 Liehan, Barry 172 Life with the Lyons (1954) 263 Lippert, Robert 256 Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, The (1974) 282 Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, A (1971) 282, 284 Lockwood, Roy 252 n.3

Lodge, The (2019) 19 Lom, Herbert 104 Losey, Joseph 92, 130 Lowe, Alice 14 Lugosi, Bela 49, 156 Lurie, Susan 211 Lust for a Vampire (1971) 207–8, 283 Lyons in Paris, The (1955) 263 MacColl, Catriona 283 Macnab, Geoffrey 23 n.37 24 n.51 Madhouse (1974) 239, 242 Man in Black, The (1950) 96, 133 n.11, 253 n.17 Man in Grey, The (1943) 60, 85 n.11 Man Who Changed His Mind, The (1936) 55 Man Who Could Cheat Death, The (1959) 92, 103–5, 109, 267 Maniac (1963) 92, 133 Manvell, Roger 39–40 Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn (1935) 56 Mark of the Devil (1970) 282 Marry Me! (1949) 243 Marsh, Carol 157 Marshall, Neil 14, 279, 280 Martín, Eugenio 279 Martino, Sergio 284, 285 Maschera del Demonio, La (1960) (The Mask of Satan) 50, 281–2 Mask of Satan, The, see La Maschera del Demonio Masque of the Red Death, The (1964) 45 Massie, Paul 104 Mastorakis, Nico 9 Matheson, Richard 130, 240, 255–72 Mathijs, Ernest 277

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Matter of Life and Death, A (1946) 61 Matthews, Francis 162 McCulloch, Ian 283 McGuire, John 65 Medhurst, Andy 190 Medusa Touch, The (1978) 279 Meikle, Denis, 22 n.28, 273 Melly, Andree 162 Melly, George 230 n.8 Men of Sherwood Forest (1954) 263 Mendik, Xavier 277 Metrodome Films (production company/distributor) 13 Metz, Christian 67–8 Michael, Ralph 63 Michell, Roger 12 Midsommar (2019) 19 Midwich Cuckoos, The (novel), 87 n.32, 130 MIFED (film market) 9 Mind of Mr Soames, The (1969) 252 Moonraker, The (1958) 38 Morris, Robert 149 Mower, Patrick 195 Moxey, John Llewellyn 131, 259, 285 Mukarovsky, Jan 48 Mummy, The (1959) 4, 69, 92–4, 102, 103, 105–12 Murnau, F. W. 156, 268 Myrick, Daniel 14 Nakata, Hideo 14 Nash, Mark 58 National Film Theatre 18, 51, 234 Neale, Steve 47–8. 50, 174 Newman, Widgey 55 Night Child, The (1975) 283 Night Creatures, The (unmade film) 255–72

Night of the Demon (1957) 130, 262 Night of the Eagle (1962) 130, 262 Night of the Living Dead (1968) 46, 256, 260, 268, 272 Night Watch (2004) 275 Nightmare (1981) 9 Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, A (1988) 12 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (film series, 1984–2010) 11 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984) 13 Nosferatu (1922) 156, 268 Notting Hill (1998) 12 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 45 Nyby, Christian 260 O’Flinn, Paul 137 Oakley, Charles 39, 53 n.5 Oblong Box, The (1969) 178 Ogilvy, Ian 177, 181, 183, 187, 218 Old Dark House, The (1963) 92 Olney, Ian 276, 277 Omega Man, The (1971) 256 Omen, The (1976) 260 Oxley, David 113 Palace Films/Video (production company, distributor) 11–12 Palmer, Matt 15 Paranoiac (1963) 92, 96, 133 Parry, Gordon 243 Pasco, Richard 119, 120, 122 Peckinpah, Sam 34 Peel, David 161 Peele, Jordan 18 Peeping Tom (1960) 34, 36, 39, 94, 126–31, 136 n.35 Peirse, Alison 22 n.22 Pelissier, Anthony 243

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Index 313

People that Time Forgot, The (1977) 252 n.1 Perry, George 39 Petley, Julian 1, 7, 23 n.32, 43 Phantom of the Opera, The (1962) 93, 102–5, 109, 146 Pierce, Jack 140 Pinedo, Isabel Cristina 259, 273 n.7 Pirie, David 3, 4, 7, 15, 22 n.23, 33, 35, 41–2, 44, 46, 74–6, 87 n.28, 94, 114, 126–7, 135 n.26, 139, 150, 156, 169 n.7, 172, 176, 182, 199 n.1, 200 n.22, 205, 232, 238, 243, 244, 248, 250, 262 Pitt, Ingrid 22 n.23, 204, 213 Plague of the Zombies, The (1966) 173, 199 n.3 Polanski, Roman 46, 260 Porter, Eric 225 Porter, Vincent 22 n.23, 31 n.2, 134 n.12 Powell, Dilys 36 Powell, Michael 34, 43, 56, 61, 94, 109, 126–30, 136 n.35 Power, Hartley 65 Pressburger, Emeric 43, 56, 61, 109, 126, 136 n.35 Prevenge (2016) 14 Prey (1977) 5 Price, Vincent 8, 101, 187, 201 n.30, 242, 256 Price, Will 252 n.3 Profondo Rosso (1975) (Deep Red) 253 n.8 Psycho (1960), 50, 133 n.11, 135 n.28, 259 Psycho (novel) 241 Psychopath, The (1966) 239, 241, 252 n.7 Purdom, Edward 9 Purge, The (franchise, 2013–18) 18

Quartet (1948) 242 Quatermass and the Pit (1967) 96 Quatermass Experiment, The (1955) 37, 57, 69, 72–84, 88 n.40, 95, 105, 125, 169 n.8, 261, 263 Quatermass II (1957) 69, 73–5, 82–3, 92, 96, 261, 263 Queen Kong (1976) 277 Radcliffe, Daniel 19 Radford, Basil 64–6 Ragona, Ubaldo, see Sidney Salkow Raimi, Sam 11 Rasputin – the Mad Monk (1965) 172 Raven, Mike 207 Reach for the Sky (1956) 79, 81 Redgrave, Michael 65 Reed, Michael 94 Reed, Oliver 104 Rees, Angharad 219 Rees, Yvette 171 Reeves, Michael, 33, 97, 176–9, 182–4, 186, 188, 189, 194–5, 198, 199 n.11, 200 n.21, 202, 282 Regional Development Agencies 15 Resident Evil (2002) 279 Revenge of Frankenstein, The (1958) 92, 125, 136 n.33, 141, 142, 144, 146 Revenge of the Blood Beast, see La Sorella di Satana Richards, Jeffrey 55 Rigby, Jonathan 7, 15 Rilla, Wolf 130 Ring (1999) 14 Ripper, Michael 112 Ritual, The (2017) 1, 15, 17 Rivette, Jacques 46 Robinson, Bernard 94, 96

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Robinson, David 100–1 Rock, Rock, Rock (1956) 252 n.3 Roeg, Nicolas 6, 286 Romero, George A. 46, 256, 260, 268 Rosemary’s Baby (1968) 46, 260 Rosenberg, Max J. 238, 239, 252 n.1 Rosmer, Milton 56 Russell, Robert 191 Sagal, Boris, 256 Salkow, Sidney 253 n.11, 256 San Demetrio London (1943) 68, 85 n.10 Sánchez, Eduardo 13 Sangster, Jimmy 92, 94, 96, 97, 124, 133 n.11, 134 n.14, 138, 141, 207, 240, 283 Sasdy, Peter 4, 166, 213, 217, 242 Satanic Rites of Dracula, The (1973) 138, 164, 168, 203 Savage, Rob 16 Scars of Dracula (1970) 167 Schlesinger, Philip 24 n.52 Schneider, Steven Jay 276 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 256 Scott, Ridley 9 Scream (1996) 13 Scream and Scream Again (1968) 201 n.30, 252 n.1 Screen Yorkshire 15 Sense and Sensibility (1995) 12 Severance (2006) 15, 279, 280 Shadow of the Cat (1961) 96 Sharp, Don 93, 171, 172 Shaughnessy, Alfred 130 Shaun of the Dead (2004) 14, 280 She (1965) 125, 132 n.1 Shelley, Barbara 103, 119, 124, 130, 162 Shelley, Mary 137–40, 162, 168 Sherman, Gary 5, 6, 232

Shining, The (1980) 9 Shrinking Man, The (novel) 261 Shudder (streaming platform) 18 Sightseers (2012) 14 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) 13 Sim, Gerald 215 Skeggs, Roy 8 Skull, The (1965) 224, 239, 241 Skyline Video (video distributor) 9 Slaughter, Tod 56 Smart, Ralph 242 Smith, Christopher 15, 279 Smith, Madeline, 206 Smith, R. D. 36–7 Smith, Will 256 Solon, Ewen 112 Sorcerers, The (1967) 176, 178, 179–89, 194, 197, 198, 202, 213, 282 Sorella di Satana, La (1965) (Revenge of the Blood Beast) 177, 282 Space-ways (1953) 72 Spasmo (1974) 283, 285 Spraos, John 70 Stanley, Richard 12 Steel, John 22 n.23 Steele, Barbara 50, 177, 281 Stensgaard, Yutte 207 Stevenson, Robert Louis 215 Stevenson, Robert 55 Stoker, Bram 95, 138, 157, 158, 211, 230 n.5, 259, 261, 265, 268 Stolen Face (1952) 72 Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, The (2013) 287 Stranglers of Bombay, The (1959) 34, 35, 38, 92, 107 Straw Dogs (1971) 34 Stribling, Melissa 157 Strickland, Peter 287

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Index 315

Subotsky, Milton 131, 238, 239, 240, 244, 252 n.1, 254 n.17, 262–3 Suez 75, 90, 106 Suspiria (1977) 19, 283, 287 Suspiria (2019) 19 Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) 56 Sykes, Peter 217, 242, 279 Tales from the Crypt (1972) 173, 237, 239, 242, 244–8, 250 Tales of Terror (1962), 253 n.11 Tales that Witness Madness (1973) 173, 253 n.10 Taste of Fear (1961) 92, 133 n.11 Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) 166–7, 242 Ten Seconds to Hell (1959) 267 Terror (1979) 5, 283 Terror of Dr Hitchcock, The (1962) 281 Terrornauts, The (1967) 252 n.1 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974) 210, 260 Thatcher, Margaret 8 Theatre of Blood (1973) 242 They Came from Beyond Space (1967) 252 n.1 Thing from Another World, The (1951) 260 Thomas, Damien 208 Thomas, Ralph 77 Thomas, Sarah 22 n.23 Tingwell, Charles 162 To the Devil a Daughter (1976) 279 Tohill, Cathal 276, 277, 282 Tombs, Pete 276, 277, 282 Torso (1973) 283, 285 Torture Garden (1967) 85 n.8, 173, 239, 242–7 Touch of Love, A (1969) 252 n.1

Tourneur, Jacques 130, 240, 262 Tower of Terror (1941) 56 Train of Events (1949) 243 Trainspotting (1996) 12 Trevelyan, John 71 Triangle (2009) 15 Trollenberg Terror, The (1958) 124 Trygon Factor, The (1966) 285 Tudor, Andrew 259, 268 Tully, Montgomery 252 n.1 Twentieth Century–Fox 9 Twice Told Tales (1963) 253 n.11 Twins of Evil (1971) 208, 283 Twitchell, James B. 47 Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, The (1960) 93, 103–5, 109 UK Film Council 15, 25 n.52 Universal Studios horror films 45, 49, 50, 54 n.28, 55, 95, 102, 110, 125, 135 n.32, 137, 140–3, 147, 155–6, 158, 179 Up the Creek (1958) 263 Urquhart, Robert 142 Us (2019) 18 Valk, Frederick 65 Vampire Lovers, The (1970) 4, 204–7, 229, 283 Vampiri, I (1956) 50 Vampyr (1932) 58, 156, 173 Vampyres (1974) 282 Variety (film industry publication) 13 Vault of Horror (1973) 173, 239, 242, 244, 245, 247, 249, 251–2 Village of the Damned (1960) 130 Vimeo 18 Viy, The (1967) 275

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Walker, Alexander 39, 40, 53 n.5 Walker, Johnny 22 n.23, 23 n.42, 24 n.43, 26 n.65, 272 Walker, Pete 5, 6, 7, 8, 232, 289 n.11 Wallace, Edgar 279, 284, 285, 290 n.23 Walters, Thorley 152 Warbeck, David 208 Warner Bros. 9, 22 n.28 Warner, Jack 74 Warren, Norman J. 5, 6, 177, 283 Watkins, James 14, 25, 280 Wayne, Naunton 64, 66 Weeks, Steven 239 West, Jake 280 Wheatley, Ben 14 Wheatley, Dennis 196, 201 n.28 Wheatley, Helen 22 n.23 When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) 263 Wicker Man, The (1973) 6, 232 Wilderness (2006) 280 Williams, Linda 86 n.14, 129, 136 n.38, 169 n.38 Williams, Paul Andrew 14 Williams, Tony 230 n.12 Wilmer, Douglas 204 Wilson, Elizabeth 77 Wilson, Harold 4, 100, 132, 136 n.40 Wise, Robert 45

Witch, The (2015) (The VVitch) 19 Witchcraft (1964) 171–3, 180 Witchfinder General (1968) 154, 176, 178–9, 183, 187–9, 191–5, 197–8, 199 n.11, 200 n.21, 282 Withers, Googie 63 Wolfit, Donald 125 Woman in Black, The (2012) 15, 18–19 Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014) 19 Wood, Robin 3, 22 n.8, 167 Woodfall (production company) 44 Wordsworth, Richard 79 Wright, Edgar 14, 280 Wroot, Jonathan 26 Wyeth, Katya 208 Wymark, Patrick 190 Wyndham, Francis 29 Wyndham, John 87 n.32, 130 X – The Unknown (1956) 4, 69, 72–7, 81–4, 92, 97, 261–2 Yesterday’s Enemy (1959) 263 YouTube 18 Zombie Flesh Eaters (1980) 283 Zombie Holocaust (1980) 283 Zombie Undead (2011) 14