October 2022 – Blood and Porridge

Today is Halloween. As usual, I’ll take advantage of the creepy spirit of the occasion and display ten pieces of macabre art that I’ve come across and liked during the past year.

I’ve sometimes heard the work of the great 18^th / 19^th German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich described as ‘occult’ and, yes, there is something strikingly metaphysical in his depictions of puny-looking humans confronted by the huge, bleak awesomeness of nature. I’ve never found his art particularly disturbing, though, until I encountered his 1814 painting The Chasseur in the Forest. It features the always foreboding image of someone – here a lost dragoon – about to venture into a mass of dark, towering, primordial-seeming trees. What awaits him in there? Something cosmically evil and terrifying? Quite possibly.

From commons.wikimedia.org

From the sublime to the (splendidly) ridiculous. Here’s a very different rendering of a spooky forest, courtesy of Catalan artist Vincenç Badalona Ballestar, who died in 2014. Ballester was responsible for the covers of many of the schlocky John Sinclair stories – Sinclair, according to Wikipedia, is “the name as well as the protagonist of a popular German horror detective fiction series (of the pulp fiction or penny dreadful variety). Sinclair, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, battles all kinds of undead and demonic creatures. The series appears weekly and has been running since 1973.”

From unquietthings.com

And more, sinister woodland appears in this pen-and-ink work by German artist Fritz Schwimbeck, which was inspired by – I don’t know if it actually illustrated an edition of – Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Drawn in 1917, it presumably depicts the bit near the beginning where Jonathan Harker is picked up by the Count’s mysterious coach and coachman. The tiny scale allowed for pictures on this blog doesn’t do justice to the glorious detail of the picture so, to appreciate it properly, please go to this entry on the horror-art website Monster Brains.

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

Speaking of Dracula, I feel I should show something by Swiss-born, UK-based artist Oliver Frey, who passed away in August this year. As a kid, I was very familiar with Frey’s work, since it adorned the covers of Hamlyn Books’ compendiums – ‘encyclopaedias’ is rather too sensible a word for them – of spooky stuff aimed at juvenile readers: The Hamlyn Book of Horror (1976), Hamlyn Book of Ghosts (1978), Hamlyn Book of Mysteries (1983) and Hamlyn Book of Monsters (1984). These commonly featured monsters and supernatural creatures of popular folklore and popular culture glaring out from their covers and going “Grrrr!”, as frighteningly as was permitted for children at the time. I recall Dracula on the cover of The Hamlyn Book of Monsters having a stake stuck, surprisingly bloodily, in his chest. Here’s a later picture by Frey of the vampirical Count, this time from the cover of issue 32 of Fear magazine in 1991. It’s done with Frey’s impressively melodramatic and sinewy flair.

© Newsfield / Oliver Frey

There’s more biting, and painful-looking clawing, going on in this work by the 19^th / 20^th century Polish painter Boleslaw Biegas, whose output included – I’m quoting Wikipedia again – “mythical, monstrous and female chimeras, which symbolised a battle of the sexes.” That’s a battle that the female chimera in this graphic and muscular picture is definitely winning. It’s entitled Le Baiser du Vampire, but come on – that’s not a vampire, but a harpy, a half-woman, half-bird creature from Greek mythology, who tormented the hapless King Phineus in the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. You may be able to see this picture for real in the Polish Library in Paris, which contains the Boleslaw Biegas Art Collection.

From oldpaintings.tumblr.com

From Greek mythology to Norse mythology. I like this elegant, anime-style depiction of Hel, the female goddess of death who rules the Norse underworld, which appears in the book Norse Gods (2017) by Swedish illustrator Johan Egerkrans. But who’s the giant, fearsome-looking canine beside her? Is it her brother Fenrir, the monstrous wolf who, it’s prophesised, will gobble up the sun on Ragnarōk, the Norse Day of Judgement? Both Hel and Fenrir were the off-spring of the giantess Angerboda and sneaky trickster god Loki, presumably before Tom Hiddleston started to play him in the Marvel superhero movies.

© Johan Egerkrans

In Christian mythology, Loki’s nearest equivalent is of course Satan, which brings me to my next pick. This is The Devil Skating When Hell Freezes Over, by the 19^th / 20^th century English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Collier – no relation to the writer John Collier, famous for his sardonic short stories, who was born 50 years later. I like this painting not only for its cheekiness – I love how that tail slips out through the split in the back of the overcoat – but also because it seems to be an ironic riposte to the celebrated painting by Henry Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch (or The Skating Minister), often cited as Scotland’s most iconic painting.

From tumblr.com

Still on the subject of Christian devils, here’s 17^th century Italian painter Salvator Rosa’s take on one of the most popular art-subjects in Christendom – The Temptation of St Anthony, which he painted in 1645. Rather than have the long-suffering saint under attack from a whole army of ghoulish creatures, which has been common in other renderings of the story, Rosa provides him with one main adversary. It’s a hideous-looking thing. Although it’s an amalgamation of different animals, with a bird’s body, horse’s skull-head, rat’s tail, boar’s tusks, plus a tiny set of human genitals, these disparate parts meld together and create something that looks disturbingly whole and unified. Indeed, it resembles something that could have crept out of the hold of the space-cargo-ship Nostromo in Alien (1980), had Ridley Scott decided to enlist an Italian Baroque painter to do the production design rather than H.R. Giger.

From linusfontrodona.com

This next item, which I believe is the work of modern Turkish artist Soner Çakmak, evokes the devil too. In its subtle, strangely melancholic way, it captures the childhood terror of being alone in your bedroom at night, when you’re still too young to figure out what’s real and what’s imaginary in the world around you. You can especially relate to that feeling if, like me, you spent your childhood somewhere like Northern Ireland in the 1970s, where there were plenty of loud-mouthed, red-faced religious idiots around you assuring you that some frightening concepts indeed, like Satan and his demons in hell, were real.

© Soner Çakmak

Finally, straight after Halloween comes Mexico’s delightful, skeleton-crazy Day of the Dead festival. In recognition of that, I usually try to include a picture featuring skeletons, bones and skulls. So, here’s an illustration from the 1901 calendar of the Antikamnia Pharmaceutical Company of St. Louis, Missouri, which supplied doctors and druggists with tablets for combatting fevers and reducing pain. It’s one of many skeleton-themed pictures by artist (and doctor) Louis Crusius that the company used in its marketing materials. It seems bizarre that a company peddling a medical product – meant to fight off ill-health – would use such an obvious symbol of death to promote itself. But then, the story of the Antikamnia Pharmaceutical Company was pretty bizarre. It was prosecuted and shut down after the discovery that its tablets contained a banned substance called acetanilide, which reduced the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen, which among many other bad effects caused takers of the tablets to turn blue.

From dangerousminds.net

And that’s it for another year. Happy Halloween!

October 30, 2022December 10, 2022

The sinister side of Singapore

© Marshall Cavendish

Here’s a review of another book that’d make an appropriate Halloween present tomorrow…

A while ago on this blog, I wrote, “When you’re in a new culture, a good way to get insight into that culture is to read a selection of traditional ghost and horror stories from the place. Finding out what makes people scared and finding out how they like to scare others give you some appreciation of their psychology.”

Thus, after I arrived in Singapore earlier this year, and found myself for the first time in a Singaporean bookstore (Kinokuniya in the Takashimaya Shopping Centre on Orchard Road), and saw a volume called The New Singapore Horror Collection by local author S.J. Huang, I immediately purchased it. Not that the 13 short stories inside are what you’d call ‘traditional’. They don’t have historical settings or folkloric ghosts or monsters. Huang’s stories take place in the 21^st century and in a modern-day Singapore that’s instantly recognisable to me. It’s the place I see every day from the windows of my apartment, my office and the bus I take to work. Also, while the horrors featured in many of these stories may be supernatural, they may equally be psychological, created by the minds of their beleaguered protagonists as events tip them over the edge.

Huang’s work still provides insight into the character and culture of the formidable city-state they’re set in. Boasting the second-highest GDP per capita in the world, Singapore is one of the biggest economic success stories of the past 50 years. But in a society where so much value is placed upon ambition, drive and work-ethic, there are inevitably a few casualties – people who can’t handle the pressure. And some of Huang’s most effective stories explore what happens when those casualties end up in dark places indeed.

The main character of The Office, for example, quickly unravels when he finds himself trapped and alone in his workplace one evening, 66 floors up. This is just after he’s heard that the former colleague he pushed aside in order to get a promotion has committed suicide by jumping off another tall building. In Penance, a man who’s always in a hurry – presumably for work-related reasons – causes a fatal traffic accident one day. He escapes prosecution, but then becomes the subject of a bizarre and madness-inducing haunting that has his mind working at ever-increasing speeds his body can’t keep up with: “His eyes and the corners of his mouth twitched as if they had a life of their own, quickened by a manic pulse of electricity that coursed through his features every few seconds. It was exhausting to watch, and I could only imagine what it had to be like for him.” In The Last Goodbye, a loser who messes up a lucrative business deal desperately summons supernatural forces and makes a bargain with them to turn the situation around. Or does he? Perhaps he merely imagines that he has. Then, after the business deal somehow turns good again and he’s rewarded with a promotion, he realises he has to honour his side of the supernatural bargain he (might have) made…

Elsewhere, there are many references to contemporary Singaporean life: national service, which provides the male characters with something to reminisce about, years later, as they start to slip into middle age; the country’s HDB (Housing and Development Board) public housing, which accommodates the majority of the population, but which high-flyers look down on (someone sneers in The Last Goodbye, “As the VP of Sales and Distribution, he was probably the most senior guy at the bank still living in public housing. It’s totally ridiculous”); the nightlife, which forms the starting point for Taken for a Ride, another psychological horror tale, one that has a nice, nasty twist; and the conservative social attitudes, which form the context for the sad ghost story Lines.

Singapore’s education system also gets a look-in with Lights, in which two teams of competitive schoolboys play a ‘wargame’ on one of their school’s sports fields, at night-time, with the floodlights turned off – carrying red or blue light-sticks to show their position and their team’s identity. There’s an uneasy undercurrent to the game because, some time before, one of their fellow pupils disappeared without trace while crossing the same field after dark. And when the spectators notice mysterious lights of a different colour starting to appear on the black field, while the game is in progress, things become truly creepy… In fact, I’d say Lights is my favourite story in the collection. There’s no explanation given for what ultimately happens, which makes it creepier.

Although there’s a Poe-esque emphasis on the psychological, Huang also finds room to experiment and a few stories go off on unexpected tangents. The Elixir is essentially an old-fashioned Egyptian-mummy tale, although the embalmed cadaver featured isn’t ancient Egyptian, but ancient Chinese, the concubine of a cruel, long-ago emperor. The Chinese authorities, it transpires, have entrusted her perfectly-preserved body to a ‘Singapore government research agency’ to determine the composition of her mysterious embalming fluid. Charmingly, The Elixir reminded me of the 1971 Hammer horror movie Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb which, similarly, didn’t feature a lumbering, bandaged mummy but a miraculously-undecayed lady from ancient times.

Meanwhile, The Legacy takes place in 2031. It has astronauts from “the Perses program… founded on 2^nd February 2025, as a joint initiative between the Republic of Singapore and the United States of America,” landing on Mars and discovering a cave that leads into a strange extraterrestrial cathedral or temple. Inevitably, things then take a dark turn. The Legacy is initially reminiscent of the movie Alien (1980) – or God help us, Lifeforce (1985) – but its final paragraphs made me think of the social satire / comet-disaster film Don’t Look Up (2021).

I felt The Elixir and The Legacy were the least effective stories in the collection, as they seemed a little too ‘far out’ to be properly disturbing, though I did find both of them good fun.

Overall, I really enjoyed The New Singapore Horror Collection. I especially appreciated S.J. Huang’s prose, which is straightforward, solid and unshowy – and all the better for that. I look forward to his next collection, which I trust will further explore, to good effect, the sinister side of Singapore.

October 29, 2022

Jim Mountfield goes guising

© The Sirens Call

Halloween is nearly upon us and, currently, I’m indulging in one of my traditional Halloween activities. That activity is getting cranky at British, or more accurately, English journalists, columnists and commentators who are doing their usual thing at this time of year and complaining about British people being too enthusiastic about Halloween. This shouldn’t be happening, say those journos, because Halloween isn’t a ‘British’ festival. Rather, it’s something that’s been ‘imported’ from America during the past couple of decades.

That’s right. Supposedly, there was no Halloween in Britain, ever, until British kids saw Hollywood movies like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) and decided that American trick-or-treating looked such good fun that they wanted to try it too. Here’s the latest of these ‘Halloween-is-American-not-British!’ moan-a-thons, published the other day in the Guardian.

Complete piffle, of course. Maybe the south of England, where Britain’s mainstream media and its scribblers are based, didn’t pay much attention to Halloween until recently, but it was always a thing elsewhere in Britain. After all, the concept of Halloween was originally brought to the USA by Scottish and Irish immigrants. All right, Ireland is not part of Britain, but technically Northern Ireland is part of the ‘United Kingdom’.

Way, way back in the 1970s, when I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I remember doing such Halloween-y things on October 31st as dunking for apples, trying to take bites out of other apples hanging on strings, and carving Halloween lanterns out of turnips. (I don’t think I laid eyes on a pumpkin until the late 1980s.) Also, I recall the local Young Farmers club using Halloween as an excuse to run amok – seemingly appropriating the customs of Mischief Night, which in many places had traditionally taken place the previous evening, on October 30^th – uprooting signposts, stealing people’s gates and generally making arseholes of themselves.

And a little later, my family moved to Scotland, where…

But here I have to change the topic slightly. Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has just had a short story published in issue 59 – the Halloween 2022 edition – of a dark fiction and poetry magazine called The Sirens Call. The story is entitled Guising and is set at Halloween in Scotland in the early 1970s. Here’s what the story has to say about the venerable Scottish custom of guising:

“Scottish people will tell you that guising isn’t the same as trick-or-treating, though it involves children dressed as ghosts, witches and monsters going to front doors and receiving confectionary or small sums of cash from householders. The Scottish custom is transactional. The children have to earn their rewards. This means putting on a show for whoever they’re visiting. A brief show, admittedly, like telling a story or singing a song. Guising has its roots in the activities long ago of mummers who’d turn up at houses and taverns on special days such as Christmas, Easter, Plough Monday and All Souls’ Day, stage short plays, and afterwards collect money from their audiences…”

Obviously, because Guising is a horror story, the kids who go out guising in it get rather more than they bargained for.

287 pages along, crammed with macabre goodies, and free to download, issue 59 of The Siren’s Call is available here.

October 28, 2022October 29, 2022

The man who mentored Wheatley

© Senate Books

With Halloween just three days away, here’s a timely book review.

When I was 12 or 13 years old, you couldn’t keep me away from the novels of Dennis Wheatley. More precisely, you couldn’t keep me away from Wheatley’s occult novels, such as The Devil Rides Out (1934), To the Devil a Daughter (1953), They Used Dark Forces (1964) and Gateway to Hell (1970). They were crammed with things that at the time seemed utterly cool to me, things such as astral projection, demonic possession, revived corpses, evil slug-like elemental beings from other planes of existence, diabolic homunculi needing virginal blood to be brought to life, chalk pentacles offering shelter from assaults by the powers of darkness, unholy talismans with the potential to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and devil-worshipping Sabbats climaxing in the summoning of the Goat of Mendes.

Incidentally, among Wheatley’s huge catalogue, which included war, espionage and historical-adventure stories, these are the only books of his that anyone remembers today.

There was a problem with getting hold of Wheatley’s fiction, however. In the 1970s, his occult thrillers were published by Arrow Books in a variety of saucy covers. Each book was adorned with a picture of a naked, big-breasted lady dancing about a flame while some Satanic-looking artefact – a skull, a ghost’s head, a broken cross, a pagan devil-mask – hovered in the foreground. With so much naked female flesh displayed, I felt extremely awkward as a 12 or 13-year-old boy buying those novels in Whitie’s, which at the time was the main bookshop on Peebles High Street, near where I lived in Scotland. In fact, when I bought my first Wheatley novel, The Devil Rides Out, I remember Mrs Whitie, a formidable old lady who could probably have taken on a coven of Wheatley’s devil worshippers and beaten them up, staring over the counter at me with a withering mixture of pity and contempt. Then she sighed and said, “I suppose we’d better stick this in a brown paper bag for you.”

From wikipedia.org / © Allan Warren

Dated and corny though they seem today, Wheatley’s Satanic potboilers surely unsettled many genteel readers in 1930s, 40s and 50s Britain with their premise that in mansion houses and estate grounds across the land, beastly, posh devil-worshippers were getting up to hijinks during unspeakable black-magic rituals. Ever the showman, Wheatley made his subject matter seem that little bit more threatening by prefacing his novels with a solemn warning: “All of the characters and the situations in this book are entirely imaginary, but, in the inquiry necessary to writing of it, I found ample evidence that Black Magic is still practised in London, and other cities, at the present day… Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject, and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real and concrete nature.”

“The inquiry necessary to the writing of it”, i.e., the research Wheatley conducted prior to The Devil Rides Out, brought him into contact with author and clergyman Montague Summers, who’d written a History of Witchcraft and Demonology in 1926 and translated the notorious witch-hunters’ manual Malleus Maleficarum (1486) into English in 1929; with the occultist Aleister Crowley, the notorious self-styled ‘Great Beast’ and ‘Wickedest Man in the World’ whose antics in the early 20^th century had terrified God-fearing folk who believed everything they read in Britain’s popular press; and with one Rollo Ahmed, whom Wheatley would later describe as “a man of profound knowledge and one whose very presence radiates power” and “a Master, who had devoted a lifetime to acquiring a first-hand knowledge of that grim ‘other world’ which lies so far from ordinary experience, and yet is so very near for those who have the power to pierce the veil.”

Ahmed claimed to have been born in Egypt and was of Egyptian and Guyanese parentage. Before his arrival in Britain, he’d knocked around South America and the Caribbean, where he’d supposedly gained knowledge of everything from lycanthropy to Voodoo and Obeah. With his opportunities to earn proper money in a proper job in Britain stymied by the era’s widespread racism, he had to play up his dark-skinned exoticness to survive – which meant selling himself as a yoga teacher, herbalist and general authority on the occult. Despite his own racist attitudes, which sometimes bubbled up in his novels, Wheatley took a shine to Ahmed, started learning Raja Yoga from him, and happily embroidered his memories of the man with little details that suggested, yes, there was something other-worldly about him.

For example, Wheatley alleged that one night Ahmed accepted an invitation to dine with him and walked a long way across London to his house. The evening was freezing, yet Ahmed arrived without an overcoat or gloves, completely unaffected by the cold and with hands that were ‘as warm as toast’. A more alarming claim by Wheatley was that, after introducing Ahmed to an acquaintance in the Society for Psychical Research, the acquaintance worriedly asked Wheatley if he too had seen the ‘little black imp’ that he’d seen standing next to Ahmed.

Wheatley did Ahmed a favour when, after the success of The Devil Rides Out, he was approached by Hutchinson, the publisher, and asked if he would like to write a non-fiction book about the occult. Wheatley declined, feeling he wasn’t knowledgeable enough. (Three-and-a-half decades later, he obviously did feel he had the knowledge, for in 1971 he published a book on the subject entitled The Devil and All His Works.) Instead, he advised Hutchinson to hire Ahmed for the job. They did, and the result was The Black Art, originally published in 1936, with an enthusiastic introduction by Wheatley.

I recently read a 1994 reprint of Ahmed’s The Black Art, mainly because of my interest in Wheatley. It’s an exhaustive and, dare I say it, exhausting book. Its 22 chapters explore every historical period from ‘antediluvian times’ to the modern day, with plenty of detail in between about the ancient Egyptians and Jews, the Greeks and Romans, and the practitioners of the Middle Ages. Geographically, they cover North and South America, India, ‘the East’ and the British Isles. And they examine the associated phenomena of ‘vampirism and werewolves’, ‘symbols and accessories of magic’, ‘sex-rites’, ‘necromancy and spiritualism’ and ‘the Black Mass’, as well as the church’s reactions to these shenanigans.

Ahmed’s technique with the book is to throw in everything bar the kitchen sink, so that the reader is bombarded by one anecdote or snippet of information after another, sometimes two or three barely-related items cropping up in the same paragraph. This makes it difficult to process more than a few pages of The Black Art in one sitting. At the same time, no effort is made to attribute sources to all the anecdotes and information – there’s no footnotes or appendix. Indeed, I’ve seen one brutal review online where Ahmed is accused of filling the book with material plagiarised from the works of the afore-mentioned Montague Summers.

Still, if you’ve enjoyed Wheatley’s novels and you make it to near the end of The Black Art, it’s fun in the final chapters to encounter information that Wheatley apparently incorporated into The Devil Rides Out. For example, there are instructions on how to create a ‘protective circle’ in which you can carry out, say, an exorcism ceremony without being attacked by the forces of darkness: “a large, five-pointed star should be drawn with chalk and a circle of double lines drawn around it… The participants should wear garlands of asafoetida and garlic flowers, and where the disturbances are of a material nature they should on no account leave the circle until peace and harmony have been restored.” Perhaps the most famous scene in The Devil Rides Out involves the Duc De Richleau and his followers taking refuge in such a circle, while the villainous Mocata directs his satanic powers against them.

© Arrow Books

There’s also an interesting chapter on elementals, supernatural entities that are created, Ahmed says, by humans’ “unexpressed thoughts… upon the mental plane.” Thus, “evil and destructive thoughts produce ugly and revolting forms as malevolent and harmful as any ‘demon’ could be.” I suspect that’s what inspired the evil, slug-like thing that plops out of nowhere in a scene during Wheatley’s To the Devil a Daughter.

Interestingly, Ahmed doesn’t try to gloss over the multiple failings of famous alchemists and sorcerers of yesteryear. The 18^th-century Italian adventurer and magician Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, who “evolved a masonic system of his own which he called ‘Egyptian Freemasonry’” (and whom, incidentally, Aleister Crowley claimed was a previous incarnation of his), gets six pages dedicated to him. During these, Ahmed makes it pretty clear he was a thief, vagabond, womaniser, opportunist, manipulator and all-round fraud. Of Cagliostro’s Egyptian Masonic Lodge, which became quite the thing in Paris for a while, Ahmed notes: “the fair intimates” had “to undergo some very remarkable experiences of an enthralling and slightly ridiculous nature, after having sacrificed large sums of money on the altar to the grand copt.” Meanwhile, he makes a cutting observation about Franz Mesmer, proponent of ‘animal magnetism’, the man who lent his name to the term ‘mesmerism’ and inventor of the supposed healing device the magnetic tub (again, popular in Paris): the tub “was a very profitable craze for its creator”.

Even Dr John Dee, who was genuinely remarkable, gets short shrift from Ahmed, mainly because of his association with the disreputable, alleged scryer Edward Kelley: “In the course of time… he (Dee) became hopelessly credulous, and after he had taken Kelly into partnership he allowed himself to be involved in various nefarious schemes, completely under the domination of the other.” Dee’s achievements as a cartographer, mathematician, antiquarian and political advisor get no mention.

I suspect Ahmed was jaded about his occult predecessors because he knew all too well himself that establishing yourself as a master of the black arts required more than a little self-promotion and grift. No matter how genuinely interested you were in the field, you were aware that, to keep the money rolling in to feed you and your family, and pay the rent, you depended on the interest of other people – and especially the interest of gullible people, who could be easily exploited, manipulated and parted from their cash. And while Ahmed undoubtedly cut a striking figure around bohemian 1930s London, his story had a sordid side too. He was arrested for fraud several times and, later in life, was reduced to posing as a fortune teller and preying on gullible old ladies. Along the way he lost all his teeth, an indignity he put down to a black magic operation going wrong – it’d happened while he’d been trying to trap a demon. Anything to shore up those occult credentials.

The Black Art is a slog, then, and I’d recommend it only to Dennis Wheatley completists. However, Ahmed wrote one other, very different book that I’d like to read sometime. It has a self-explanatory title: I Rise: The Life Story of a Negro (1937). Dedicated to the mighty Paul Robeson, no less, the autobiographical I Rise chronicles the racism that Ahmed and other people of his ethnicity had to endure in 1930s Britain. It’s a reminder that, while he spent much of his time in an exotic, esoteric and largely make-believe world, where he mentored Dennis Wheatley and wrote knowledgeably of protective circles and elementals, he had a depressingly real and hostile world to negotiate too – its attitudes “ugly and revolting… as malevolent and harmful as any ‘demon’ could be.”

From horroraddicts.wordpress.com

October 26, 2022November 1, 2022

Your last chance to see Jim Mountfield at Horrified

© Horrified Magazine

Some sad news I’ve heard recently is that Horrified Magazine, the ‘British horror website’, is closing down. Dedicated to media – films, television, plays, novels, short stories, comic books, etc. – involving the macabre and produced in the United Kingdom, Horrified has been a prime source of entertaining reading and valuable information during the past few years. A newly-appeared message on its main page informs readers that “From late October 2022, this website will no longer be updated with new content. Feel free to browse until such a time as the website is taken down.”

Horrified contains a short-story section, in which I’ve had two items published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, the name I put on my scary fiction. Both of these should still be accessible until the plug is finally pulled on the site. Therefore, this is your last chance (at least for a while) to read the following…

© Horrified Magazine

Published in 2020, Don’t Hook Now is a story set in the near-future where advances in technology, especially in the field of virtual reality, make it possible for people to take part in scenes from movies – the technology simulates the scenes, interactively, around them. For bona fide film fans, this would be magical. Imagine being on that rooftop near the end of Blade Runner (1982), beside Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) when he delivers his heart-breaking ‘tears in rain’ monologue, or being at the airport for the climax of Casablanca (1942), when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says goodbye to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). However, human nature being what it is, I suspect such wondrous technology would end up being used for trivial, if not sordid, purposes. Thus, Don’t Hook Now features an app that allows people to take part in simulations of sex scenes from certain movies, and is used by lowlifes, sociopaths and perverts in pursuit of their thrills.

Don’t Hook Now’s subject matter was such that Horrified decided to give it a trigger warning and recommend it only for ‘mature audiences’. In my opinion, though, the main reason for recommending it to mature readers was because only people of a certain age would be familiar with the masterly 1970s British horror movie that gives the story its grim twist later on.

© Horrified Magazine

From 2021, meanwhile, is Where the Little Boy Drowned, which belongs to a sub-genre I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’. This is where the main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, trapped in a dangerous situation where the odds are stacked against them getting out of it alive. I won’t give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, other than to say that its plot includes include a length of rope and a flooded river. There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

So, for a little while longer, Don’t Hook Now can be accessed here, and Where the Little Boy Drowned here.

And thank you to the staff at Horrified for all their hard work these last few years.

October 24, 2022November 21, 2022

Coltrane’s sweetest notes

© BBC

Actor and comedian Robbie Coltrane, who died on October 14^th, seemed part of the furniture in British TV shows and films when I was in my late teens and twenties. His performing talents, gallus manner and considerable physique made him impossible to ignore.

Also, as someone who’d grown up mostly in Scotland, I – and everyone I knew – appreciated the fact that he was a Scottish lad. Originally, he’d been one Anthony MacMillan from Rutherglen, with his stage name inspired by the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. It’s fair to say that Scotland did not get much attention in the London-centric media of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, except when it fleetingly made the news as the site of yet another factory or colliery closure. (Admittedly, things are only slightly better in 2022.) Thus, seeing Coltrane on popular, national telly or in movies reaching international audiences, and seeing him be unashamedly Scottish too, felt like a victory.

Anyway, here are a dozen of my dozen favourite TV and cinematic moments involving Robbie Coltrane.

The Young Ones (1984)

Coltrane made three appearances in the groundbreakingly anarchic BBC comedy show The Young Ones. I remember him best in the episode Bambi, which may have been the first time he registered on my radar. Bambi is the one where Rik (Rik Mayall), Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson), Neil (Nigel Planer) and Mike (Christopher Ryan) appear on University Challenge (up against a snooty team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’ comprised of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Ben Elton), while Motorhead play The Ace of Spades in their living room. Observing the shenanigans through a microscope is Coltrane as a genteel, old-fashioned Scottish doctor (“Absolutely amazing! Human beings the size of amoebas!”), possibly modelled on Dr Finlay in the 1930s stories by A.J. Cronin. Coltrane brings the episode to an abrupt end when he accidentally drops an éclair on the specimen slide, burying Rik, Vyvyan and co. in creamy goo.

Laugh??? I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984)

During the early 1980s, Coltrane featured in three TV comedy sketch shows, Alfresco (1983-84), which also featured the afore-mentioned Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Elton; A Kick Up The Eighties (1984); and Laugh??? I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984). In the latter, Coltrane made several memorable appearances as a West-of-Scotland Orangeman called Mason Boyne. With his imposing bulk and craggy features, and wearing a black suit, bowler hat and sash, Coltrane certainly looked the part. Laugh? was produced by BBC Scotland and this was one of the very few times when the broadcaster was bold enough to have a go at the Orange Order and its paranoia about all things Popish. “It’s all here, Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 1-10,” says Boyne, citing the Bible in support of his assertion that the Pope is the Antichrist. “All you have to do is… jumble the words up a bit.”

© BBC

Caravaggio (1986)

Throughout the 1980s Coltrane had supporting or minor roles in many British or made-in-Britain films. These include, incidentally, several forgotten fantasy and science-fiction ones: Death Watch (1980), Flash Gordon (1980), Britannia Hospital (1982), Krull (1983) and Slipstream (1989). Okay, Flash Gordon hasn’t been forgotten – unfortunately. Anyway, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he gives a performance that’s stayed in my memory more than most. He plays Scipione Borghese, the 17^th century cardinal who becomes the patron of the turbulent Italian painter. As usual with Jarman, there’s striking set design, deliberately littered with anachronisms, and the film sees the debuts of Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean.

Mona Lisa (1986)

Coltrane also provides good support in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. He plays Thomas, a garage-owner who offers sanctuary for the movie’s main character, old friend and harassed ex-convict George, played by the incomparable Bob Hoskins. Thomas has no bearing on the film’s plot, which sees George employed by a gangster (Michael Caine) to drive around and look after high-class prostitute Simone (Cathy Tyson), whom he gradually falls in love with. But the friendship Thomas offers George is one of the few specks of light in a bleak film. His best line comes when he walks in on George while George is watching a dodgy video he’s obtained – discovering to his horror that it features his beloved Simone in some hardcore porn. Innocently, Thomas asks, “Channel 4, is it?”

Tutti Frutti (1987)

The pinnacle of Coltrane’s 1980s work, the tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti is surely the best piece of television to come out of Scotland. At the time, I remember the New Musical Express hailing it as ‘the best TV show ever’, though sadly those know-nothing kids running the 2022 online version of the NME didn’t even mention Tutti Frutti in their Coltrane obituary. Written by John Byrne, Tutti Frutti has Coltrane as Danny McGlone, who’s drafted in to sing for a vintage Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, is killed in a car accident. The Majestics are on a death-spiral, largely due to the antics of guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves, who died last year). Driver styles himself as ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’, but his personal life is a destructive shambles. The band’s conniving manager Eddie Clockerty (a never-better Richard Wilson) doesn’t help things, either.

One consolation for Danny is another recent addition to the band’s line-up – guitarist Suzy Kettles, played by Emma Thomson with an impressively convincing Glaswegian accent. He gradually falls for the sassy Suzy, though she has her own issues – an abusive ex-husband, who happens to be a dentist. Can Danny and Suzy get together while, around them, everything descends into a hellhole of fights, farce, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and extreme dental violence? Due to copyright problems over its title song, written and recorded by Little Richard in 1955, Tutti Frutti didn’t get another airing for a very long time. Happily, it’s now available on DVD and three years ago was shown again on BBC Scotland.

© BBC

Blackadder the Third (1987)

Coltrane played the celebrated lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson three times on stage and screen. His best-remembered performance as the famously irascible Johnson is in the Ink and Incapability episode of the much-loved TV comedy Blackadder, wherein the crafty title character (Rowan Atkinson) and his hapless minion Baldrick (Tony Robinson) accidentally incinerate the one and only copy of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) prior to its publication. This leaves them with just one night to write a replacement dictionary before Johnson finds out and inflicts his wrath upon them. In the funniest scene, Johnson boasts that his dictionary “contains every word in our beloved language.” To which Blackadder offers him his “most enthusiastic contrafibularities.” He sticks the knife in by adding, “I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.”

Henry V (1989)

Sir John Falstaff, a prominent character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is actually dead at the start of Henry V. However, in this cinematic version, writer and director Kenneth Branagh couldn’t bear to leave out the portly, garrulous rogue, so he showed Coltrane as Falstaff in an all-too-brief flashback. Falstaff was a role Coltrane was clearly born to play and it’s a tragedy he never got cast in a proper adaptation of the two Henry IV plays (or for that matter The Merry Wives of Windsor).

Nuns on the Run (1990)

Nuns on the Run, which has Coltrane and Monty Python’s Eric Idle as criminals trying to escape some nastier criminals and taking refuge, and donning disguises, in a convent, is truly a one-joke film. That joke is seeing Coltrane dressed as and pretending to be a nun. It’s a pretty hilarious one, I have to admit. Though totally inconsequential, Nuns on the Run works better than another comedy he was in during the same period, The Pope Must Die (1991). North American distributors, nervous about the film’s sacrilegious title and noticing Coltrane’s girth, unsubtly renamed it The Pope Must Diet.

© HandMade Films / 20^th Century Fox

The Bogie Man (1992)

This TV film adapted to the small screen the Alan Grant / John Wagner comic book about a Scotsman with psychiatric issues who believes he’s Humphrey Bogart (or characters Bogie played in the movies) and goes around fighting crime. The TV version was panned by the critics, disowned by Grant and Wagner, and as far as I known has never been reshown. While I found it underwhelming, I enjoyed Coltrane’s performance as the lead character – occasionally, when not channelling Bogart, he lapses into impersonating Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger too. Also, Craig Ferguson, years before he became a superstar on American television, gives a nice supporting turn as the cop on Coltrane’s trail.

Cracker (1993-95)

Arguably Coltrane’s greatest role, his work in Cracker as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist helping out a dysfunctional team of detectives (Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville, Lorcan Cranitch) won him the British Academy Award for Best Actor three years in a row. Grim and intense, with the only humour coming from the arrogant, flamboyant and self-destructive Fitz, the show was at its most gruelling during its To Be a Somebody story at the start of season 2. This involves a terrifyingly credible killer (Robert Carlyle), who’s ended up the way he is largely because of trauma he suffered in the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster. It also features the murder of one of the show’s main characters.

© Granada Television

Goldeneye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999)

Coltrane’s entertaining turns as ex-KGB man Dimitri Valentin, now a would-be entrepreneur in post-Communist Russia, are among the highlights of these two Bond movies, which have Pierce Brosnan playing 007. Valentin certainly gets the best lines. In Goldeneye, when Bond holds a gun to the back of his head and he hears the click of its safety catch, he observes: “Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetre. Only three men I know use such a gun. I believe I’ve killed two of them.” And in The World Is Not Enough, when Bond interrogates him about sultry oil tycoon Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), whom Bond has recently bedded, and demands, “What’s your business with Elektra King?”, he retorts, “I thought you were the one giving her the business.” Valentin, who runs a hellish-sounding country-and-western club in one film and a caviar factory in the other, was devised at a time when Russian oligarchs could be depicted as lovable, comic Arthur-Daley-from-Minder-type grifters; and not sinister billionaires laundering mountains of dirty money in the City of London and buying their way into the heart of the British establishment.

From Hell (2001)

Like The Bogey Man, this movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s labyrinthine graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, published in instalments from 1989 to 1998, was disdained by its original creator. However, if you can erase all memories of Moore’s From Hell and focus solely on the film, it’s decent. For one thing, it looks at the Ripper’s hideous murders from the perspective of characters commonly neglected in previous films on the subject – his female victims. Coltrane gives a solid performance as Sergeant George Godley, the loyal, capable and intelligent assistant to the film’s hero, the vulnerable, opium-raddled Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp). A scene where Godley and Abberline are filmed from behind as they approach the funeral ceremony of one Ripper victim, dressed in black suits and bowler hats, even evokes Laurel and Hardy. (In fact, at one time, Coltrane and Robert Carlyle had tried unsuccessfully to get a Laurel and Hardy movie off the ground.)

Thereafter, Coltrane achieved global popularity playing Hagrid in eight Harry Potter movies and got regular gigs doing voice-work in items like The Gruffalo (2009) and Brave (2012). None of this was my cup of tea, but good on him for securing well-deserved fame and, presumably, fortune too. It’s just a pity that a few years ago ill-health caught up with him, which deprived our TV and movie screens of his always-welcome presence.

© Eon Productions

October 19, 2022October 19, 2022

In good company

© Palace Productions / ITC / Cannon

The fact that it’s almost Halloween, and the death a week ago of venerable film, theatre and TV actress Angela Lansbury, give me an excuse to repost this item that I originally wrote in 2018 about the elegant fantasy-horror movie The Company of Wolves (1984). I wasn’t a great fan of her long-running ‘cosy’ detective series Murder She Wrote (1984-96), so I consider this to be Angela’s finest hour.

The Company of Wolves, the 1984 werewolf movie directed by Neil Jordan, based on fiction by Angela Carter and co-scripted by Jordan and Carter, is one of my favourite films of the 1980s – of any genre, not just horror.

No doubt part of my fondness for the film stems from its source material, because I’m a big fan of the late Angela Carter and her sumptuous gothic prose. While I was doing an MA in 2008-2009 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where Carter had once taught creative writing, I was delighted one day when I got chatting with an elderly assistant at the campus bookshop and she reminisced about Carter and how she used to wander around “in a big billowy dress.”

© Penguin Books

The Company of Wolves began life as a short story featured in her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. Considering how other stories in the book are adult, gothic reworkings of such fairy tales and myths as Beauty and the Beast (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), Snow White (The Snow Child) and Bluebeard (the title story), it’s no surprise that The Company of Wolves is a version of Little Red Riding Hood with, as its villain, not a big bad wolf but an even bigger and badder werewolf.

Carter’s Company of Wolves takes its time getting to its main plotline, though. It begins by recounting several shorter tales and anecdotes that explore wolf and werewolf lore, and the Red Riding Hood character doesn’t set off into the forest to visit Grandmother’s house until halfway through its ten pages. Additionally, The Company of Wolves is part of a triptych of werewolf-related stories in The Bloody Chamber – it’s sandwiched between ones called The Werewolf and Wolf-Alice (which as well as being an Angela Carter story is the name of a not-bad alternative rock / indie band). Not only does Jordan’s movie copy the rambling, episodic and anecdotal structure of the fictional Company of Wolves, but it also borrows elements from its two hairy neighbours in the collection.

Translating into celluloid Carter’s ornate prose style – which, for example, describes a midwinter forest with “huddled mounds of birds, succumbed to the lethargy of the season, heaped on the creaking boughs and too forlorn to sing” and “bright frills of the winter fungi on the blotched trunks of the trees” and “a hare as lean as a rasher of bacon streaking across the path where the thin sunlight dapples the russet brakes of last year’s bracken” – was a job to which the Irish director and writer Neil Jordan was well suited. His CV includes atmospheric and flamboyant supernatural movies like Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Byzantium (2012), plus the twisted, gothic Irish psycho-comedy The Butcher Boy (1997); and many of his supposedly more realistic films like Angel (1982), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) are imbued with a phantasmagorical quality too.

With The Company of Wolves, Jordan and his production team – take a bow, cinematographer Bryan Loftus, production designer Anton Furst and art director Stuart Rose – excel themselves in crafting a physical setting for Carter’s stories. The movie mostly takes place in a pre-industrial village and a huge, surrounding, Ruritanian forest. It’s an environment that’s both quaint with thatched cottages, cobbled streets, mossy churchyards and humped stone bridges and lush with bright-coloured flowers, shaggy trees, trailing vines, beds of fallen leaves and nests of speckled eggs (which, disconcertingly, hatch and release tiny homunculi). Yet it’s also a claustrophobic place of misshapen branches, drifting fogs, deep snowbanks and, obviously, wolf-howls that pierce out of the dark recesses of the forest. In other words, it’s part Romantic poem, part fevered dream and part Hammer horror.

© Palace Productions / ITC / Cannon

If anything, the plotting in the film of The Company of Wolves is more disorientating than that in the original story. The central structure is similar. We get a clutch of little stories about werewolves – here told to teenage heroine Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) by her grandmother (Angela Lansbury) and then, later, told by Rosaleen herself – before the film settles down to its main narrative, which is what happens one day when Rosaleen dons a red woollen shawl, leaves her village and takes a walk through the forest to her grandmother’s secluded cottage.

However, the film places this within a framing device that has Rosaleen as a modern-day girl who, while taking an afternoon nap in her bedroom, dreams about being in a fairy-tale village in a fairy-tale forest. As we descend through Rosaleen’s subconscious to the main part of the dream, we also pass through a creepy transitional zone populated by human-sized versions of the dolls and toys in her bedroom, which calls to mind another Angela Carter work, the 1967 novel The Magic Toyshop. At the film’s end, this stories-told-within-a-dream framework collapses, for poor modern-day Rosaleen wakes from her dream to find real wolves crashing through the walls of her room. None of which matters, of course. The Company of Wolves isn’t a film to be processed logically. It’s one to be experienced.

It hasn’t much character development, since the characters are archetypes rather than proper human beings, but it’s still well acted by a first-rate cast. Sarah Patterson does what’s required of her as Rosaleen and German actor, dancer and choreographer Micha Bergese is appropriately lithe, flirtatious and predatory as the young hunstsman whom Rosaleen encounters on the way to her grandmother’s house. (His eyebrows meet above his nose, which is a dead giveaway.) Angela Lansbury makes a wonderfully spry and wily grandmother and the film also features the excellent trio of David Warner as Rosaleen’s father in both the dream world and the real one, Graham Crowden as the village’s amiable priest, and Brian Glover as the village’s resident Yorkshireman. At one point, Glover pontificates in true Yorkshire fashion: “If you think wolves are big now, you should have seen them when I were a lad!”

In the cast too are Terence Stamp and Jordan’s long-time collaborator Stephen Rea, both of whom appear in the first two stories narrated by Lansbury. Stamp has a cameo as the Devil, selling a youth a magical balm that, once applied, has lycanthropic consequences. Rea plays a man who mysteriously disappears on his wedding night and then equally mysteriously reappears seven years later, to discover that his wife has since remarried and sired a brood of children with her new husband. In the film’s most gruesome sequence, Rea shows his displeasure by becoming a werewolf – a painful process because, to facilitate the transformation, he has to tear his own skin off.

With the young, virginal Rosaleen setting out on a journey and being waylaid by a literally beastly male, but then taking control of the situation and resolving it in her own fashion, there’s obviously a lot happening beneath the film’s surface. However, I like the fact that while The Company of Wolves is concerned with themes of female empowerment and sexuality, it isn’t a polemic. Yes, one of Lansbury’s tales ends with an instance of domestic violence, and one of Rosaleen’s tales deals with a wronged woman getting her revenge on the cad responsible. But her parents are depicted as having a loving and sharing relationship. Despite coming to this film after villainous roles in Time After Time (1979), The Time Bandits (1981) and Tron (1982), Warner plays a gentle soul here; and Rosaleen’s mother (Tusse Silberg) points out to her that “if there’s a beast in man, it meets its match in women too.” Meanwhile, a village boy (Shane Johnstone) who takes a shine to Rosaleen, while evidently a lustful scamp, is good-hearted enough and shows concern for her safety.

This nuance extends to the film’s portrayal of the church. It’s hardly an institution of oppressive patriarchy. Rosaleen’s final tale has Graham Crowden’s priest showing kindness to a feral wolf-girl, played by experimental 1980s singer-musician Danielle Dax. “Are you God’s work or the Devil’s?” he asks her. “Oh, what do I care whose work you are. You poor, silent creature…”

You appreciate Jordan and Carter’s achievement with The Company of Wolves when you consider how many filmmakers since then have tried, and failed, to transform children’s fairy stories into darker, more adult and more gothic movies. I’m thinking of Terry Gilliam’s disappointingly uneven Brothers Grimm (2005) or the blah Kristen Stewart vehicle Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) or crud like Red Riding Hood (2011) and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013).

Probably the best effort has been Matteo Garrone’s Italian / French / British movie Tale of Tales (2015) which, like The Company of Wolves, isn’t afraid to confound expectations and twist and distort logic. Which, when you think about it, is what the original fairy tales and folk tales that inspired both films did in the first place.

October 16, 2022October 24, 2022

More Wordsworth’s ghosts

Another Halloween-inspired reposting about books of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories…

I’ve just read two more collections of ghost stories published in the excellent Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery and Imagination series. Other books in this series have featured work by still-celebrated writers like E.F. Benson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James and Edith Wharton; but also by writers like Gertrude Atherton, Amayas Northcote, J.H. Riddell and May Sinclair, who were prolific and / or acclaimed in their day but whose names slipped into obscurity following their deaths. Getting republished by Wordsworth Editions might, of course, help to rescue their names from obscurity.

The two latest Wordsworth collections I’ve read were both published in 2006. They are A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread by R. Murray Gilchrist and Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew.

Firstly, I’ll talk about the collection I enjoyed less. R. Murray Gilchrist was born in Sheffield but lived for much of his life in Holmesfield, 800 feet up in Derbyshire’s Peak District. By the time of his death in 1917 at the age of 50, he was responsible for 22 novels and about 100 short stories. However, A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread is something of a misnomer because most of the stories featured don’t particularly evoke feelings of ‘dread’. Rather, they are tales of darkly gothic romance, where the atmosphere – and, alas, the prose – is often stiflingly thick.

These are stories where every building is an imposing structure with ‘stacks of twisted chimneys’ and ‘great square windows’ and is ‘a vision of gables’ that’s ‘so covered in ivy that from a distance it seems like a cluster of rare trees with ruddy trunks and branches’; where every garden is adorned with statues of satyrs, nymphs, dryads, dragons and the goddess Diana; and where the air is always suffused with the sickly-sweet smells of flowers, such as roses, lilies, honeysuckle, ‘withering snowdrops’ and ‘scarlet poppies, with hearts like fingers’ that effuse ‘a close and sleepy perfume’. The villain of the story The Manuscript of Francis Shackerley even gives off ‘a rich smell of violets’ and it’s said that ‘his skin by some artificial means had been impregnated lastingly with their odour.’

Unfortunately, Gilchrist’s writing is frequently hamstrung by melodrama (“O the midsummer noontide; the trembling air; the golden dusk that clung around the fir trunks!”) and is occasionally, clunkingly awful (“My thoughts had withered, my words had grown unpregnant”). There’s an attempt to emulate the morbid, decadent intensity found in such tales by Edgar Allan Poe as Berenice (1835), Ligeia (1938), The Oval Portrait (1842) and Eleonora (1850), but while characters indulge in much internal and external pontificating and running hither and thither to no great effect, the impression you get is one of bluster rather than of anything genuinely, dissolutely macabre. Some of the stories I found a real chore to get through.

Still, there are a few items where Gilchrist dials it down a bit and manages to strike a properly creepy note. The Lover’s Ordeal is a tale of a dare that unexpectedly ends up featuring a vampire. The Grotto at Ravensdale sees a newly married couple encounter tragedy at the titular, and haunted, cavern. The Priest’s Pavan is about a harpsichordist forced to play some demonic music at a wedding party. And A Night on the Moor itself is an atmospheric piece where the main character experiences a time-slip.

Also, two additional stories, The Panicle and The Witch in the Peak, are tagged on in an appendix at the end. Presumably this is because they eschew the aristocratic characters, lavishly gothic settings and rather po-faced tone of the other stories and instead have straightforward and refreshingly humorous narratives where working-class people experience supernatural goings-on in the Peak District. The 19-century Derbyshire dialect is rather hard to decipher, but I enjoyed these two stories more than anything else in the collection and would have liked more with their flavour.

Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer is more modest in its ambitions and I have to say I found it the more enjoyable read because of that. It has eight stories, all connected by the recurring character of Aylmer Vance – ‘a curious-looking man, tall and lean in build, with a pale but distinctly interesting face’ – who as the title indicates is sensitive to paranormal activity and acts as a supernatural detective, trying to explain and put an end to hauntings suffered by other people. The narrator, however, is an acquaintance of Vance’s called Dexter. Vance tells the first three stories to Dexter, then Dexter becomes an unwilling participant in the fourth one, and then for the remaining four stories joins forces with Vance and serves as a Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

There’s nothing spectacular here, but there are some imaginative ideas – the fire-raising ghost of a frustrated poet in The Fire Unquenchable, for example, or the malevolent spirit of a pianist using his music to haunt the woman he lusted after when alive in The Indissoluble Bond. Meanwhile, The Stranger, about a young woman attracted to a mysterious figure she encounters in a local wood, is a nicely pagan affair with a hint of Arthur Machen; and the final story, The Fear, is impressively oppressive and ‘does what it says on the tin’.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Aylmer Vance as much as I might have done. This was because a year earlier I’d read a Wordsworth Editions collection called Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, written by William Hope Hodgson, which was a set of tales about, yes, another supernatural detective called Thomas Carnacki. The Carnacki stories were good enough to have influenced later writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley and the Vance stories can’t help but seem a little pedestrian in comparison.

Aylmer Vance also suffers from a problem that’s inevitable when you have a series of supernatural stories that are mostly self-contained and have different elements (ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, etc.) but also have the thread of a recurring character. If paranormal activity does happen, it must happen incredibly rarely. Otherwise scientists would have observed and recorded it and acknowledged its existence by now. So how does someone like Vance manage to defy all laws of probability and have eight full-blooded encounters with the supernatural in its different forms? William Hope Hodgson at least seemed aware of this credibility problem, for he interspersed his genuinely supernatural Carnacki stories with ones where the hauntings turn out to be hoaxes.

Vance writers Alice and Claude Askew, incidentally, were a husband-and-wife team who supposedly penned over 90 novels during a 14-year period in the early 20^th century. During World War One, they found themselves in Serbia and later in Greece, working at a British field hospital and then for the Serbian Red Cross and also writing war despatches for publications like the Daily Express. Like R. Murray Gilchrist, they died in 1917 but in a particularly tragic manner. Both were killed while they were travelling from Italy to Corfu, when their boat was torpedoed by a German submarine. Claude’s body was never found. However, Alice’s body was recovered and she’s buried on the Croatian island of Korčula.

October 14, 2022October 24, 2022

Wordsworth’s ghosts

I’ve just realised that two-and-a-half weeks from now it’ll be Halloween. Therefore, as I usually do at this time of year, I’ll be posting a few entries on this blog about the dark, the spooky, the supernatural and the macabre. To begin with, here’s something I originally wrote in 2019 about three collections of ghostly tales by three forgotten writers of yesteryear.

I’ve read a lot of 19^th century ghost stories recently. These have featured in collections published by Wordsworth Editions in its series Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural, which I’ve picked up in various library clearance sales and second-hand bookshops. The last time I checked, Wordsworth’s Mystery and the Supernatural series consisted of 80 different titles and they’re an admirable balance between works by authors who are well-known, like H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James, Edgar Wallace, Edith Wharton and Henry James, and works by authors who aren’t – or, in some cases, were famous once but have now disappeared off the reading public’s radar. By acquainting modern readers with writers in the latter category, the series performs an invaluable service. It was through reading one of its books a few years ago, for instance, that I discovered the excellent but now neglected writer May Sinclair, about whom I wrote here.

Anyway, I’ve just finished reading Wordsworth collections by Amayas Northcote, Gertrude Atherton and J.H. Riddell. How do their ghost stories measure up?

Amayas Northcote is the most elusive figure of the three. His Wikipedia entry merely states that he was the seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, who was Benjamin Disraeli’s Chancellor of the Exchequer; he was a businessman in Chicago at one time and a Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire at another; and he “wrote ghost stories in the line of those of M.R. James, which were compiled in his only book, In Ghostly Company.” One likely reason why Company was Northcote’s only book was because it was published in 1921 and he died soon afterwards in 1923, before he had much chance to follow it with further fiction, ghostly or otherwise.

I have to admit that while I found Northcote’s stories enjoyable, most of them feel a bit run-of-the-mill. Often, as in the case of Mr Kershaw and Mr Wilcox, The Late Earl of D., The Steps and The Governess’s Story, they involve manifestations of the supernatural linked to murders, untimely deaths and disappearances. The two most interesting stories are those that stray furthest from the formula. The Downs deals with a secluded stretch of British countryside that, one night a year, becomes the scene of a haunting on a spectacular scale; while The Late Mrs Fowke strays unexpectedly into the realms of devil worship and reads like a prototype for the occult potboilers that Dennis Wheatley would start writing little more than a decade later.

Considerably greater in range and ambition are the stories of American author Gertrude Atherton collected in The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories, originally published in 1905. These are tales that are by turns grisly (The Striding Place), phantasmagorical (The Dead and the Countess) and imbued with a psychological intensity reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe (Death and the Woman).

Some aren’t supernatural at all but are grim character studies. A Monarch of a Small Survey is about a sad and frumpy lady’s companion who suffers the double misfortune of being cut out of her employer’s will and becoming futilely besotted with a younger man. Similarly, The Tragedy of a Snob looks at the gulf between the haves and have nots, chronicling the efforts of a man of limited means to gain access to the world of high society. And The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number is about a physician who convinces himself that by eliminating the life of one worthless person he can improve the lives of all the decent people who’ve been blighted by her – but finds the execution of the deed harder than he’d expected. Simply but compellingly set up, The Greatest Good feels like a Roald Dahl story with a stern moral conscience.

I have to say, though, that my respect for Atherton was diminished by the inclusion of A Prologue, which is presented as the first part of an unfinished play. It’s a brooding, gothic piece set on a West Indian island about to be pulverised by a hurricane and is slightly reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It’s also racist, with a household’s black slaves cowering and wailing pathetically on the floor while their white owners stomp around, cursing them for their superstitious uselessness and trying to secure the premises without their help. Yes, I know the work simply reflects the attitudes of white people towards slaves and slavery back then and should be taken as being ‘of its time’. But it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’d been looking forward to J.H. Riddell’s Night Shivers, a volume that contains 14 short stories and is rounded off with a short novel, The Uninhabited House, which was first published in 1875. This was because Riddell originated in Northern Ireland, like I did. She was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, in 1832 and lived there until 1855, when she and her mother moved to London. She remained in England until her death in 1906 and during the intervening years established herself as a prolific author. Her Wikipedia entry lists some 40 novels and a half-dozen short story collections.

I’d been hoping that Ms Riddell’s ghostly fiction would have a strong Irish flavour and, occasionally, it does – to good effect. The Last of Squire Ennismore sees a dissolute Irish landowner come to an infernal end for his misdeeds, through the agency of a mysterious stranger with ‘an ambling sort of gait, curious to look at’ who leaves cloven hoof-prints on the sand of the local beach. Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning features that most Irish of supernatural creature, the banshee, though in the incongruous (but effective) setting of a Victorian London hospital. And Conn Kilrea features another Irish family haunted by a spectral, though non-banshee, harbinger of death.

However, most of the stories take place in England and, because I’ve read countless other English ghost stories over the year, their scenarios seem very familiar and they have the same generic feel as Amyas Northcote’s work. Riddell enjoys presenting her ghosts and supernatural phenomena as puzzles that the living characters have to solve. Invariably, they turn out to be traces and echoes of nefarious incidents – usually murders – that once upon a time occurred in the ‘real’ world.

One thing I like about Riddell’s fiction is her depiction of unusually (for the era) feisty and unconventional female characters, even if they come across as somewhat grotesque. The most notable of these are Miss Gostock, the hard-working, hard-bargain-driving and hard-drinking landlady in Nut Bush Farm; and the formidable Miss Blake, ‘the child of a Scottish-Ulster mother and a Connaught father’ who ‘had ingeniously contrived to combine in her person the vices of two distinct races, and exclude the virtues of both’, in The Uninhabited House.

Also, I like how she portrays the main character in Walnut-Tree House. He’s an unpretentious fellow who comes into possession of a haunted property in London after spending years as a ‘digger’ in the Australian goldfields. The snobby Londoners he has dealings with disdain him as ‘a rough sort of fellow’ who’s ‘boorish’ and has ‘never mixed with good society’. But when he encounters the ghost in his house, that of a child, he doesn’t react as characters normally do in these stories and cringe or flee in terror. Instead, he feels sorry for the poor child’s ghost and resolves to find a way to make it rest in peace.

October 10, 2022November 1, 2022

Edinburgh Filmhouse fades to black

During the two decades since I last lived in Edinburgh, I’ve spent a lot of time bellyaching about the fact that, for a city that likes to advertise itself as home to the world’s biggest annual cultural festival, Edinburgh has seemed ridiculously determined to rid itself of its live-music venues and make itself about as musically vibrant as, say, Luton.

Those two decades have seen the demise of such venues, or part-time or occasional venues, as the Cas Rock, the Tap O’ Lauriston, the Venue, the HMV Picturehouse, Electric Circus, the Citrus Club and – one of my favourite Auld Reekie hangouts – Studio 24. At one point, I even felt compelled to write on this blog: “So, music lovers of Edinburgh… Your once proud city has fallen… into the hands of a bunch of suits, nimbies and money-chasing ghouls whose iPods are no doubt crammed with Ed Sheeran, James Blunt and Coldplay songs and whose idea of musical edginess is probably to tuck into a salad in the Hard Rock Café while a paunchy, balding cover band play Hotel California in the corner.”

Now, sadly, the blight that’s struck down Edinburgh’s live music scene seems to have infected its film scene too, for last Thursday the news broke that the charity Centre for the Moving Image (CMI) had filed for bankruptcy, with the result that the city’s Filmhouse Cinema, which the CMI has run since 2010, is closing immediately. This has also meant the abrupt end of the 75-year-old Edinburgh Film Festival, the oldest continually-running film festival in the world, and the closure of the Belmont, the Filmhouse’s sister cinema in Aberdeen.

The Filmhouse is, or was, what’s commonly known as an ‘arthouse’ cinema. ‘Arthouse’ is a label I hate, as it suggests a place showing pretentious movies made by pretentious people who consider themselves ‘artistes’ rather than mere filmmakers – incidentally, Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) get my vote as the most up-their-own-arses films ever made. But it’s not about artiness. In reality, an ‘arthouse’ cinema is often the only place in your neighbourhood where films a little offbeat, non-Hollywood and daring to use a language that isn’t English have a chance of being seen. That’s while the multiplexes restrict themselves to showing movies about masked and / or caped vigilantes possessing superpowers, with lots of CGI and cameos by Stan Lee.

Unlike what’s happened to many of the music venues I mentioned above, the Filmhouse’s sad fate isn’t the result of corporate greed, gentrification, nimbyism and hostility or indifference on the part of the local authorities – although in these straitened times, I doubt if Edinburgh City Council will be swooping to the Filmhouse’s rescue. Rather, as this recent piece by Mark Cousins in the Guardian makes clear, the cinema’s demise was caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of economic and cultural factors: the huge hike in energy bills that’s currently panicking everyone in the UK bar the super-rich (you know, those people whom Liz Truss wanted to give generous tax cuts to), the loss of custom incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic and the slow return of custom afterwards, younger people preferring to watch movies on streaming services at home, and older people becoming, well, older and less likely to go out.

Besides offering you the opportunity to see certain films on a big screen that you wouldn’t otherwise see there, what makes cinemas like the Filmhouse precious is that they allow you to come out of the closet as a film nerd. They’re obviously run by folk with a genuine love for movies and, on their premises, you know you’re surrounded by like-minded punters too. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to live in several cities blessed with such establishments. I have happy memories of them and can still reel off the films I watched on their screens.

For example, in the Japanese city of Sapporo, there was the Theater Kino, which coincidentally must have been one of the smallest cinemas in the country. At it, I remember seeing David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog (1992), John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and – yay! – Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996). At Cinema City in Norwich, I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008), Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop (2009), Tom Hooper’s The Damned United (2009) and Sasha Gervasi’s hilarious but gruelling heavy metal documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008). And at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon Tyne, I saw Kitano Takeshi’s Zatōishi (2003), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), and, before it went on general release, a special screening of 28 Days Later (2002) attended by director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland, who answered questions from the audience afterwards. (I wanted to ask them how, if the rage-infected zombies had become so angry that they stopped eating food and eventually died of hunger, they didn’t also stop drinking water and die of thirst first, which would have ended the zombie apocalypse much sooner. However, not wanting to rain on Danny and Alex’s parade, I didn’t.)

I feel a bit hypocritical pontificating about the loss of the Filmhouse because it’s been a long time since I set foot there – as far as I can remember, the last movie I saw in it was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight back in 2016. But I have an excuse. For much of the last dozen years I’ve been living in Africa and Asia. Still, with the Filmhouse’s closure, as with the closure of many a lovely old pub or lovely old shop, I suspect there’s currently a lot of people expressing outrage and grief about it on social media and in below-the-line comments on news websites who actually haven’t bought a ticket and watched anything on its premises for many years. Unfortunately, there’s truth in the old capitalist adage: “If you don’t want to lose it… use it.”

Here’s a link to an online petition expressing support for the Filmhouse, Belmont and Edinburgh Film Festival and the 102 cinema and festival workers who have just lost their jobs. And if there is an unexpectedly happy ending, and someone with deep, movie-loving pockets steps in and pulls the Filmhouse back from the brink, let’s hope folk show their appreciation by going to it and putting their bums on its seats again.

Month: October 2022

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2022

The sinister side of Singapore

Jim Mountfield goes guising

The man who mentored Wheatley

Your last chance to see Jim Mountfield at Horrified

Coltrane’s sweetest notes

In good company

More Wordsworth’s ghosts

Wordsworth’s ghosts

Edinburgh Filmhouse fades to black