Blood and Porridge – Page 14 – Ian Smith's blog on WordPress

November 21, 2022December 23, 2022

Only a few Duff moments

I’ve had a hellishly busy week. That’s why this report on Singapore’s big musical event of the month is reaching you nine days late…

It was with misgivings that I bought a ticket for the concert by the legendary – not always legendary for the right reasons – hard rock / heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium on November 12^th.

Like many things in Singapore, the ticket was not cheap and, given Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for pissing off gig-goers, I wondered if I would get anything near my money’s worth. I knew about, for example, their notorious 1992 appearance in Montreal when, thanks to both coming onstage late and leaving it early, they triggered a riot. (“Come Monday morning, the mayor was looking for apologies and fans were looking for refunds.”) Or their performance at the O2 in Dublin in 2010 when, after another late arrival onstage had angered the crowd, they played for 20 minutes, then walked off, and only returned an hour later after being strong-armed by the event organisers, by which time many fans had given up and gone home.

This year, the band was still being associated with crappy concerts. Two July spots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London suffered from “appalling sound, everything was muffled, couldn’t hear Axl’s voice, the support act was cancelled, GNR came on real late, kept fans later, no apologies, fans walking out.” Their next scheduled gig, in Glasgow, was then cancelled ‘due to illness and medical advice’.

Meanwhile, I’m not a fan of stadium rock shows, where the venue’s scale and the distance between most punters and the stage kill any sense of intimacy. And I was not enthused about seeing a band at Singapore’s National Stadium because I’d read some complaints about it on Trip Advisor. The main gripe was that the place doesn’t let people bring food or drink onto the premises, obliging them, inside, to spend ages waiting in queues at the stadium’s vendors, where refreshments are sold at predictably high prices.

I had to work on November 12^th until six o’clock. As Guns N’ Roses were officially due onstage at seven – “Huh,” jeered a colleague, “do you really expect Axl Rose to come onstage at seven?” – I hopped on a taxi and went straight to the stadium lugging a knapsack full of important work material. This meant I had to spend a couple of minutes at a security desk outside one of the stadium’s entrances while a lady went through every nook and cranny of the knapsack, rummaging among papers, books, stationery, my (empty) lunchbox, etc., with airport-style thoroughness. But that security lady was undeniably chatty and pleasant.

Having made it inside, at about 6.50, I joined a queue to get some beer – also airport style, with lines of people threading through twisting passages formed by retractable-belt stanchions – and spent the next 20 minutes glancing nervously down into the arena and at the distant, empty stage, hoping that Axl Rose and co. would come on a little late. I also feared that the beer would have run out by the time I reached the counter, although I was reassured when a guy propelled a trolley past me, laden with crates of Tiger beer, in the direction of the vendor. Presumably much needed.

Each customer, incidentally, was allowed to buy a maximum of four alcoholic beverages at a time. If you purchased four Tiger beers – as I did, not wanting to experience that queue a second time – these came in four plastic glasses planted in an eggbox-like tray. Transporting them without spilling anything, down to my seat near the bottom of one of the terraces, required mind-reader levels of concentration. Furthermore, I had to decide where to stash those drinks when I reached the seat. The only space for them was on the floor between my feet, which meant I spent the gig reminding myself, “Keep your legs apart! Keep your legs apart!”

Most of the stadium is roofed over. Only one section of it, directly opposite the stage, is exposed to the elements. The cheapest concert-tickets were for seats in that open area but, this being the wettest month in the Singaporean calendar, I’d decided not to risk it. There’d been a downpour earlier that day and, sitting there, it was possible that whilst listening to Guns N’ Roses performing their famous ballad November Rain, you’d be subjected to November rain for real. Thankfully, the bad weather held off that evening. The show’s most expensive tickets, meanwhile, were for the pitch, which was beyond the barrier a few rows below where I was sitting. Spectators there could snuggle against the front of the stage. Also, they were enviably unconstrained by having rows of seats all around them and could dance and jump and jig around as much as they liked. Although the folk passing on the other side of the barrier, heading towards the stage, seemed to be mainly moneyed, middle-aged expats and I doubted if Axl and the gang would be looking down on much mosh-pit action tonight.

So, there I was, weary from a long day at work, jaded after waiting in a lengthy refreshments queue, worried that an accidental twitch of my foot might knock over my hard-won quartet of beers, and wondering if the evening ahead would prove to be a giant waste of money. Then, at 7.30, the lights dimmed and… The general stadium-crowd roared with excitement. The well-heeled crowd pressing against the stage-front suddenly became densely spangled with light as hundreds of smartphone-cameras sprang into action. From the speakers rushed the blood-stirring chords of It’s So Easy, a song on the first and best Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction. And on the towering screens that flanked the stage, there appeared… Axl Rose! Duff McKagan! Slash! Or as someone sitting near to me exclaimed, “Sla-a-a-a-ash!”

I’d seen footage of Axl performing a few years ago, as temporary vocalist for AC/DC, and he’d looked worryingly porky. But he’s slimmed down since then and is in decent shape again. McKagan looked admirably lean and mean. As for Slash… Well, he’s evidently been putting too much middle-age spread on his sandwiches lately, not that the excess pounds affected his guitar-playing. He and Jacob Rees-Mogg remain the only two men on the planet in 2022 who aren’t embarrassed to wear top hats in public.

While Axl, Duff and Slash loomed large on the screens, I wondered why Dizzy Reed didn’t appear on them too. Keyboardist Reed, after all, has been in Guns N’ Roses since 1990. He remained in the band after Slash, Duff, guitarist Gilby Clarke and drummer Matt Sorum quit in the 1990s, and he even stuck with Guns N’ Roses throughout the seemingly never-ending recording of the Chinese Democracy album, finally released in 2008. This was when Axl operated a ‘revolving door’ policy regarding Guns N’ Roses membership – though guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer, recruited during this period, remain in the present line-up – and, apart from Reed, the band sometimes seemed to consist of Axl ‘and your granny on bongos’. So where was Dizzy? Did he have a hump on his back or a wart on his nose that made his bandmates too ashamed to show him off? It wasn’t until halfway through proceedings that Axl announced ‘Mr Dizzy Reed on keyboards’, and the screens finally gave us a glimpse of this elusive but long-time and loyal bandmember. I snatched a picture of the moment. Here’s Dizzy!

This evening, Guns N’ Roses played 27 songs over three hours, a very pleasant surprise. Considering some of those notorious past performances, I feared I might get three songs in 27 minutes before they called it a night. The lengthy setlist did have a few drawbacks, though. It meant we were treated to the whole musical smorgasbord that is the Guns N’ Roses experience, which in my opinion contains a few lows as well as numerous highs. There were a few too many wibbly, wanky guitar solos designed to remind us that Slash hasn’t lost his musical prowess, as if anyone needed reminding. That said, it was fun when he did an instrumental workout of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign.

Also, though the setlist was weighted towards their late 1980s / early 1990s stuff, with a half-dozen songs coming from the mighty Appetite for Destruction, it was inevitable that something would slip in from the long-awaited, then much-derided Chinese Democracy. I actually like the title track, which they bravely served up immediately after It’s So Easy at the start. But the same album’s Better, which came a few songs later, just sounded a mess.

And then there were the ballads. I realise that every heavy metal band in the world feels obliged to record a ballad now and again – well, every mainstream heavy metal band, as I don’t recall Cannibal Corpse ever recording something slow and smoochy to keep the ‘lay-deez’ sweet – but there is something about your average Guns N’ Roses ballad that sets my teeth on edge. Probably it’s Axl’s voice, a melodramatic beast at the best of times. When it’s emoting through the likes of Don’t Cry from the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I, for which tonight Axl donned a show-bizzy silver-lame jacket, I find it hard going indeed.

But my least favourite Guns N’ Roses ballad is the afore-mentioned November Rain, also from Use Your Illusion I, which seems to drone on forever. Two hours into the set, the song hadn’t been played, and I began to entertain hopes that I’d get through the evening without hearing it. Maybe the band would forget to play it? But no. Axl sat down at a piano and began tinkling its ivories and the bloody thing started. At this point, a large percentage of the crowd, who thought November Rain was the best thing ever, sprang to their feet and started waving their lighters, or phone-lights, en masse in the air above their heads. This made me feel like I’d suddenly been teleported into a Bryan Adams concert just as Bryan was starting to sing Everything I Do, I Do It for You (1991). At least, for this rendition of November Rain, Slash didn’t attempt to play his guitar on top of Axl’s piano, as he’d done in the song’s video.

But enough of the negatives. What of the positives? Well, there were plenty. Lots of spiffing tunes off Appetite for Destruction for a start: Welcome to the Jungle, Nightrain, Rocket Queen, etc. Though for some reason not Mr Brownstone, which, the show’s official statistics tell me, makes this the band’s first gig since 1993 that they haven’t played the song.

I was also pleased that they treated the crowd to their bombastic cover versions of Wings’ James Bond theme Live and Let Die (1974) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973). Yes, they throw all subtlety and nuance out of the window and, basically, murder both songs – but they murder them gloriously. For Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Axl put on a cowboy hat, which made me wonder if he was acknowledging the fact that Dylan originally wrote the song for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s masterly western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

Splendid too were their covers of the Who’s The Seeker (1970) and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969). The latter was sung by Duff McKagan with the instrumentation stripped back and it made for an impressively intense couple of minutes. Commendably, McKagan wore a Motörhead T-shirt for part of the show. Also, by coincidence, I’d just finished reading Sing Backwards and Weep (2020), the autobiography of the late, great grunge singer Mark Lanegan, in which Lanegan credits McKagan with helping to rescue him from homelessness and drug addiction in the late 1990s. An all-round top bloke, then.

And I was very happy that, for the third song of their set, they performed Slither (2004) by the underrated Velvet Revolver, the group Slash, McKagan and Matt Sorum formed with Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots during their estrangement from Guns N’ Roses.

Even with 27 songs played, it was inevitable that they missed out a few things I’d have loved to hear. They performed nothing off their album of punk and hard-rock covers, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), which nobody in the world seemed to like apart from myself. Their boisterous version of the UK Subs’ Down on the Farm (1982), which Axl sings in a hilarious ‘Mockney’ accent, would have slotted in nicely tonight.

And I’d have welcomed a rendition of the sweary, vitriolic and exhilarating Get in the Ring, off their other 1991 album, the imaginatively titled Use Your Illusion II. Get in the Ring is basically a rock ‘n’ roll update of the Scottish poetic tradition of flyting. It contains such lyrics as “I got a thought that would be nice / I’d like to crush your head tight in my vice,” and takes aim at all the “punks in the press” who “want to start shit by printing lies instead of the things we said… Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus Magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr at Spin…” If they updated that shit-list for 2022, which modern-day journalists would be on it, I wonder?

Oh well. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

As the band took the stage at 7.30 that evening, and as everyone around me went wild, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years I’d been at a concert. After all the restrictions imposed by that cursed bloody virus, it felt marvellous to experience live music again. Yes, I had a massive, uplifting sense of joy and relief… Just because I was seeing Axl Rose and the crew amble into view on two giant stadium screens. Not something I ever expected to happen, but it did. Thanks, guys!

November 8, 2022

Rab Foster gets starstruck

© Aphelion Webzine

I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the penname I attach to my fantasy fiction, has got a new story included in the November 2022 edition of the webzine Aphelion. The story is entitled The Tower and the Stars and is a sword-and-sorcery tale involving a bloodthirsty cult of star-worshippers, who are based in an ancient tower in the middle of a vast and desolate marsh. It’s also influenced by the celebrated American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, at least with regards to the entities that the cult is trying to invoke. The horrors in Lovecraft’s stories were famously ‘nameless’ and ‘unspeakable’ and generally so horrible as to be beyond description, which is very handy for a writer. If your villains are indescribable, you don’t have to spend time and effort describing them.

The story’s main characters are a benevolent witch called Gudroon, who previously appeared in a story of mine entitled The Foliage, which was included in last year’s collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3; and a swordsman called Drayak Shathsprey, who was featured in a story entitled Crows of the Mynchmoor that I had published at the start of 2022 in the online Swords and Sorcery Magazine. So, The Tower and the Stars is what in modern parlance is known as a ‘team-up’. Watch out, Marvel Comics Universe – here comes the Rab Foster Universe.

For the next month, The Tower and the Stars can be accessed here, while the contents page of the November 2022 issue of Aphelion can be accessed here.

November 2, 2022November 21, 2022

Jim Mountfield chimes in

© Cloaked Press LLC

Jim Mountfield, the nom de plume under which I write horror fiction, has just had another short story see the light of day. This one is called The Chimes and it appears in Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror, a new collection from Cloaked Press LLC. As the blurb for the collection explains: “Sometimes it’s not what goes bump in the night, but what lurks in plain sight that is the true horror. Come along for the chills and thrills as these Cloaked Press authors explore the terrors of such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…”

In The Chimes, the terror-generating mundane item is a set of wind chimes that somebody finds hanging in a garden behind a newly-bought house. Although wind chimes in other places and eras were believed to have positive powers, being able to scare off evil spirits, protect against the evil eye, bestow good fortune and facilitate good Feng Shui, these wind chimes, when they start tinkling sinisterly, have effects that are anything but good.

With 15 stories of supernatural-object-related horror and fun contained within its 258 pages, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in paperback or Kindle form here.

October 31, 2022October 31, 2022

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2022

© Dave Cockburn

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.

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.

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.

October 19, 2022October 19, 2022

In good company

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.”

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.

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.