Alex Garland – Blood and Porridge

August 2, 2025

James Bond Island

© Eon Productions / United Artists

A while ago, my partner and I holidayed in the town of Khao Lak, 60 kilometres from the southeastern Thai resort of Phuket. We saw a brochure for a boat tour in the nearby Ao Phang Nga National Park, which encompasses a large, island-strewn bay in the Andaman Sea. Among the islands visited by the tour was Khao Phing Kan, a location used during the filming of the 1974 James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun. It’s now popularly known as ‘James Bond Island’.

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a connoisseur of all things Bond-related, especially the movies and the original books written by Ian Fleming. So, could I resist an opportunity to visit James Bond island? Of course not.

Not, I should add, that I’m a fan of The Man with the Golden Gun. I think it’s one of the worst films in the Bond franchise. It has Roger Moore in the main role, in only his second outing as 007 but already looking tired – you’re already waiting impatiently for him to regenerate into Timothy Dalton. It has Britt Ekland, required to fill out a bikini but not to do any acting. It has Hervé Villechaize as diminutive henchman Nick Nack (“Dom Perignon soixante-quatre…”) – according to Moore, Villechaize was a lecherous wee pain-in-the-neck in real life. It has Clifton James as redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper, who happens to be holidaying in Asia when he bumps into Bond – he refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs. Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!” Democrats? That’s a surprise. And it has Lulu hollering the inuendo-riddled theme song: “He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”

In fact, there are only two good things in The Man with the Golden Gun. One is its villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga: “Come, come, Mr. Bond. You disappoint me. You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?” The other is the spectacular scenery. Scaramanga’s island hideaway is supposed to be in waters belonging to ‘Red China’, but the sequence where Bond approaches it in a seaplane was filmed in Ao Phang Nga National Park, with Khao Phing Kan standing in for Scaramanga HQ.

Even if I had hated James Bond Island, the boat trip out to it, which first involved traversing a warren of creeks with mangrove trees cramming their sides, and then passing some of the bay’s islands – giant, towering rocks, their summits and all but their steepest slopes cloaked tightly in trees – was enough to make the day worthwhile. Those islands, which’d looked pretty spectacular during The Man with the Golden Gun’s airborne scenes, with the cameras tracking Bond’s seaplane, seemed absolutely awesome when I was looking up at them from sea-level. Among the things I compared the fantastic shapes of these islands to in my notebook entries that day were: ‘fangs’, ‘ruined, vegetation-shrouded fortresses’, ‘herds of grazing prehistoric beasts’, ‘monstrous haystacks’, ‘mossy tombstones’ and ‘giant standing stones’. We passed one vaguely curved island with curious round protuberances on either side, like ears. Our guide said it was nicknamed ‘The Dog’.

As it turned out, we spent just 25 minutes on James Bond Island, which felt an adequate length of time. It was very busy with tourists. We guessed as much when we approached it and saw the great number of long boats, with varnished hulls and club-shaped bows, lined along its landing area. If Scaramanga was around today, he’d be erecting angry signs saying GET OFF MY LAND in response to the hordes of visitors. Maybe even firing volleys of his legendary golden bullets at the trespassers.

Despite the crowds, I was delighted to see Ko Ta Pu, the 20-foot-high, precarious-looking limestone rock that stands off the island’s shore and is shaped like an extracted tooth. In The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga – who, unconvincingly, is depicted as a pioneer of green energy as well as a deadly hitman – has solar panels extend up from the top of Ko Ta Pu and collect enough sun’s energy to power an energy-beam gun, with which he destroys Bond’s seaplane. Getting a photo of this remarkable stub of rock was difficult, with so many people posing for selfies in front of it. But I managed in the end.

The island’s other striking feature is a huge, triangular opening behind the main beach, caused by seismic action. A giant slab of rock apparently broke free and ended up tilting steeply against the rest of the rock-mass there. Beneath it, looking up at its bulk and angles, you have a lurking fear it could topple the rest of the way and pulverize everything below, you included. It was here that we incurred the wrath of a large, bikinied and ignorant Western woman who’d been posing lasciviously for multiple photos in front of the formation and didn’t appreciate us strolling into her camera-frame.

As well as being infested with tourists, the island’s main beach was infested with stalls selling tourist tat. I was disappointed that no 007-themed merchandise was on sale – not even replicas of Christopher Lee’s golden gun. I guess then-Bond-producers Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman refused to license the Bond brand to the Thai tourist authorities and the vendors here could sell only generic, er, nick-nacks… Weirdly, one Western-movie item that was on sale were figurines of Groot, the tree-like creature that features in the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014-23) movies. That’s because if you look at Ko Ta Pu long enough, you begin to see its resemblance to the head of Groot.

In fact, Khao Phing Kan, James Bond Island, wasn’t the only movie-connected island we visited in the Andaman Sea. A few days later, we went on a second boat trip, this time to the Phi-Phi-Phi Islands south of Ao Phang Nga National Park. One of the stops we made there was at Ko Phi Phi Lee, home to the now-famous Maya Bay.

© Figment Films / 20^th Century Fox

This was where in 2000 Danny Boyle filmed The Beach, based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Alex Garland. This movie was troubled in a couple of different ways. Originally, Ewan McGregor was lined up to star in it but, to his disgust, he was ultimately passed over in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio, then seen as a much more bankable actor because he’d played the hero in James Cameron’s world-beating Titanic (1998). This led to McGregor falling out with Boyle and the pair didn’t talk to each other for many years afterwards. More seriously, it was alleged that during production the filmmakers caused serious damage to Maya Beach’s ecosystems by ‘landscaping’ – i.e., bulldozering – part of it to make it more ‘paradise-like’.

We arrived at the northern side of Ko Phi Phi Lee and disembarked onto a precariously swaying, floating quay. Then, filing along a slightly elevated wooden walkway – no doubt there to prevent the sand, soil, rocks and plants being pulverized under the feet of countless visitors – we made our way into the island’s interior. The walkway was divided into two narrow lanes, with tourists streaming along in both directions. It arrived at a wider wooden platform in the middle of the island, where there were facilities such as toilets, souvenir stalls and eateries and where you could step down onto the surrounding ground. Two further walkways bifurcated off on its far side, both leading to the bay. We followed the slightly less busy one.

Maya Bay itself was certainly picturesque, its white sand and turquoise water encircled by high cliffs and crags. But it swarmed with the inevitable tourists, taking the inevitable photos and selfies. Our guide told us we should visit it at the time of Chinese New Year. Then, apparently, it gets really busy.

Although The Beach received middling reviews, it was reasonably successful – enough for it to cause the heavy tourist traffic to Ko Phi Phi Lee and Maya Beach. Things got so bad that in 2018 the Thai government banned all tourists from it, so that work could be done to restore its now-shattered environment. It wasn’t reopened to visitors until 2022, at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Tour groups, like ours, are allowed only an hour on the island, and it also gets a two-month, tourist-free breather every year, from August 1^st to October 1^st.

This makes me wonder what would have happened if Danny Boyle had made The Beach with Ewan McGregor, rather less of a draw than Leonardo DiCaprio. (Sorry, Ewan.) It would have meant: (1) a less successful film, seen by fewer people; (2) fewer tourists flocking to Maya Bay, which would have put it under less environmental strain; and (3) Trainspotting 2 (2017) being made years earlier than it was, because Boyle and McGregor would never have fallen out and then needed ages to make up. Win-win all round, I’d say.

June 26, 2025

All the rage

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

Danny Boyle is a venerated British filmmaker. His resume includes nasty wee Edinburgh crime noir Shallow Grave (1993), zeitgeist-surfing ‘cool Britannia’ classic Trainspotting (1996), Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and the opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics that, briefly, gave Britain a little street credibility in the eyes of the world. Obviously, the small-minded and idiotic result of the Brexit referendum in 2016, when a narrow majority of British people voted to leave the European Union, put an end to that street cred.

However, as a connoisseur of zombie movies, I feel Boyle’s biggest cultural contribution might be directing the 2002 movie 28 Days Later, which was written by novelist and fellow-filmmaker Alex Garland. This follows events after the escape from a research laboratory of a virus that transforms its victims into wrathful, slavering, hyperactive zombies. 28 Days Later helped to establish the idea that zombies don’t have to lumber mindlessly and slowly, as they had in nearly all zombie movies prior to 2002. They could be fast. They could run. That’s although the film doesn’t actually feature typical, reanimated-corpse zombies, but virus-infected people who are duly referred to as ‘the infected’.

As in all good zombie movies, Boyle’s infected act as metaphors. In 28 Days Later, they symbolise the rage that’d lately become common in British society. Terms like road-rage, air-rage and even shopping-trolley rage had only recently entered the country’s vocabulary in 2002.

In the first sequel to 28 Days Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s underrated 28 Weeks Later (2007), the US Army occupy Britain after the epidemic. There’s an obvious metaphor at work here too. The Americans set up HQ (and marshal together the survivors) in a supposedly safe area of London they call the ‘Green Zone’, their efforts to end the contagion actually lead to it spreading among those who were hitherto uninfected, and their firepower ends up killing friend and foe alike… All horribly reminiscent of what the real-life American military was doing in Iraq at the time.

Now Boyle and Garland have reunited to make 28 Years Later, the first part of a projected new trilogy in the franchise – the second film is already in the can and will be released next January, and the third one will be made if the first two make money. Later in the trilogy, Cillian Murphy, the breakout star of 28 Days Later, is supposed to be returning in the role of Jim, the character he played in the original film. And before you read further, beware – from here on, there will be spoilers for all three movies made so far.

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

Well, 28 Years Later‘s metaphor is pretty on the nose. Britain, overrun by the infected, and with a few uninfected inhabitants surviving in isolated, heavily-fortified communities, has been quarantined from the rest of Europe. Other European countries’ navies patrol it to make sure nobody carries the infection off its shores. (28 Weeks Later ended with the virus making it to France, but we’re informed that that outbreak was contained.) So infected Britain in the 28 Years Later universe is a symbol of Brexit Britain in our universe.

Actually, an expository map shows Ireland infected and quarantined too, though nobody mentions this in the film. It’s a grim echo of the prediction once made by arch-Brexiter and gobshite Nigel Farage that, post-Brexit, Ireland would follow Britain out of the EU.

28 Years Later begins in a village on an island off the English coast, connected to the mainland by a causeway that, thanks to the tide, is underwater much of the time. The villagers are depicted living a low-tech lifestyle: rearing sheep and pigs, growing vegetables, cooking full-English breakfasts on wood-burning Raeburn stoves, sipping home-brewed beer in the local pub and participating in singalongs under an ancient portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. This would no doubt appeal to many of Nigel Farage’s supporters, longing for a simpler version of England back, say, in the 1940s, that never really existed – prior to multiculturalism, wokeness and other such evils. And no, I can’t recall seeing anyone in 28 Years Later’s village scenes who’s a person of colour.

The movie centres on Spike (Alfie Williams), a twelve-year-old lad who’s grown up on the island and is facing a daunting rite of passage. His father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is taking him for the first time to the mainland, where he’s expected to prove his manhood by using his bow and arrow on the infected and making a few ‘kills’. (Bullets have run out by this point.) Jamie’s timing of this seems tactless since his wife, Spike’s mum, Isla (Jodie Comer) is currently bedridden, stricken by a mysterious illness that has her oscillating between lucidity and delirium.

Following their sortie on the mainland, Spike learns of the existence of a man called Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been living there alone and has dedicated himself to building a spectacular ‘bone temple’ using the remains of, and commemorating, all those who’ve perished since the contagion began 28 years ago. Though evidently mad now, Kelson was, back in civilised times, a doctor – one thing Spike’s island home doesn’t have. So he brings his sick mother to the mainland, in search of Kelson, hoping he’ll be able to cure her. Along the way, they encounter a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding), stranded in England after the patrol-ship he was on sunk off its coast. They acquire a baby, birthed by an infected woman but somehow uninfected itself. And, predictably, they have contend with the infected.

These are mostly similar to the infected in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, but some have devolved and others evolved. There are swollen, leprous-skinned specimens called Slow Lows, crawling along the ground and stuffing their mouths with worms. Conversely, there are also Alphas: hulking, superstrong, superfast and relatively more intelligent, all beard, hair and muscles (and large, swinging willies), with a penchant for not only ripping their victims’ heads off but for pulling their spines out through their neck-stumps.

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

Well, I’ll say first of all that 28 Years Later certainly isn’t perfect. It has much that’s inconsistent and illogical. Firstly, scriptwriter Garland shifts the goalposts regarding the infected. In the 2002 film, the survivors realise they only need to stay alive for the length of time it takes for the infected to starve to death because, basically, they’re too crazy to eat. They bite and infect their victims but don’t munch on them. In 28 Weeks Later, they have all starved to death and the US Army decide it’s safe to enter Britain. When the virus strikes again, it’s because of a survivor (Catherine McCormack) who’s a medical anomaly – she unwittingly carries the virus without showing any symptoms of it. In the new movie, though, it transpires the infected can eat. They’ve sustained themselves mostly by preying on the red deer that now roam Britain in huge herds.

It’s Boyle and Garland’s franchise, so they can reboot it any way they like, I suppose. But it’ll be interesting to see how they square this with the return in the upcoming sequels of Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later.

Also, the contagiousness of the infected’s bodily fluids that was so dangerous in the earlier films – Brendan Gleeson succumbs when a drop of blood falls into his eye in 28 Days Later, Robert Carlyle when he gets saliva on his lips in 28 Weeks Later – is disregarded here. Humans cheerfully impale and hack at the infected at close quarters without fearing arterial sprays. Taylor-Johnson encourages his son to fire arrows into the infected practically point-blank. And I can’t see how a human embryo can gestate inside an infected mother for 40 weeks without the resulting baby emerging from the womb as a slavering, bite-y, red-eyed little monster itself. Science goes out of the window sometimes. The existence of the Alphas is explained as certain people reacting to the virus like they’re suddenly ‘on steroids’. But I can’t imagine a virus transforming some of its victims into what are basically deranged versions of Jason Mamoa.

Other things are illogical too. Fiennes’ character slathers himself in iodine until he’s almost as orange as Donald Trump because iodine seems to repel the virus. In this post-apocalyptic world, where does he get all his iodine from? He’s survived in the infected-infested wilderness for decades, gradually building his bone temple, but how? He refers to a river helping to keep the infected at bay, but late on an Alpha comes stomping into his abode without any apparent difficulty. And the temple’s centrepiece, a towering pillar of skulls, is alarmingly precarious when Alfie first encounters it. He touches it and a few skulls immediately fall off. Yet later, it’s strangely solid when Alfie has to climb to its very top.

But, despite all that, I did enjoy 28 Years Later and would probably give it eight out of ten. Boyle orchestrates the horror sequences with customary panache, while the tension is leavened with both humour and pathos. Much of the humour comes from Spike’s interactions with the Swedish soldier, who’s from an uninfected world where life has developed into the 2020s along lines we’re familiar with. He talks of smartphones, being online, using delivery drivers and ladies having ‘work done’, all to the bewilderment of poor Spike (and to the amusement of the Singaporean audience with whom I saw the film).

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

Meanwhile, there’s pathos when Spike finally gets his mum to Fiennes’ Dr Kelson. The latter is not, as we’d expected, a dangerous madman like Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, but a thoughtful, pacifistic man who, with his bone temple, has found an unconventional way of dealing with and acknowledging the massive horror he’s witnessed around him. And Kelson helps Spike learn some painful life lessons. I thought Gleeson’s death in 28 Days Later, caused by a freak accident that wouldn’t have happened if he’d been standing a few inches to the side, was one of the saddest scenes in horror movies. But there’s one here that equals or surpasses it for tragedy.

The performances greatly enhance the movie. Young Alfie Williams is a revelation as Spike, likeable from the start, but getting more likeable as we follow him through the often difficult and harrowing learning curves the plot throws at him. Taylor-Johnson is effective as Jamie, a man who’s a good dad but not a good husband, while Comer makes Isla a rounded and convincing character. During those moments when the script lets her be cogent, we understand why Spike takes the risks he does in getting her to a doctor. But Fiennes ultimately steals the show. After the intensity of the movie’s first two-thirds, his appearance as the kindly Kelson is a relief, indicating that some humanity and decency has survived in this brutal world.

But I’m not happy about the film’s ending, especially as it comes so soon after Fiennes’ gravitas. Its final minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that. I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script. Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar with the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously. This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).

One reason why I like 28 Years Later overall is its setting: northeast England, where I lived in the early 2000s. The island the survivors are holed up on is actually Lindisfarne, Holy Island, which as far as I know hasn’t appeared in a film since Roman Polanksi directed Donald Pleasence in Cul-de-sac there in 1966. I cycled to Lindisfarne once, and I can only assume that when Spike and Jamie go sprinting along the causeway to it in 28 Years Later, they don’t have a strong east wind blowing into their faces like I did when I struggled along it on my bike. Here are a couple of photographs I took then:

Meanwhile, I’m no expert on northeastern accents and I couldn’t distinguish between a Geordie one, a Mackem one and a Smoggie one. However, to me, most of the cast at least try to sound like they come from that part of the world, which is nice.

Also, the film is a welcome reminder of the northeast’s beautiful landscapes and I guess at least some of it was shot in Northumbria’s Kielder Forest. Its depiction of local geography is rather barmy, though, giving the impression that you can walk in a few hours from Lindisfarne to the Angel of North (which is south of Gateshead) or to Sycamore Gap (which is off the A69 from Newcastle to Carlisle, between Hexham and Haltwhistle). Sycamore Gap hit the headlines in 2023 when the iconic sycamore tree there was cut down by a pair of morons who deserved to have their heads ripped off and their spines pulled out of their neck-stumps. Sweetly, in 28 Years Later, Boyle digitally restores the tree because, in the movie’s timeline, that act of vandalism never happened.

This brings the series full circle for me because it was in northeast England that I originally saw 28 Days Later. Indeed, I saw it at a special premiere event at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which both Boyle and Garland attended. They introduced the film beforehand and answered questions from the audience afterwards. Boyle seemed laidback and was even unruffled when a member of the Geordie audience told him he hadn’t liked the look of the film, shot on digital video cameras, at all. Garland was more combative and sounded particularly pissed off when someone mentioned the makers of another 2002 zombie movie, Resident Evil, who’d claimed he’d copied the beginning of 28 Days Later from the beginning of their film. Garland pointed out that both films were obviously inspired by the opening chapter of John Wyndham’s classic end-of-the-world novel Day of the Triffids (1951).

After the screening, I was tempted to put up my hand and ask Garland why the infected took so long to die. If they were too crazy to eat, wouldn’t they be too crazy to drink too, and wouldn’t they die of thirst a lot sooner? But I decided not to, not wanting to infect him with the rage virus.

© DNA Films / Fox Searchlight Pictures

October 10, 2022November 1, 2022

Edinburgh Filmhouse fades to black

© Filmhouse Trading Limited

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.

© Theater Kino

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.)

© Tyneside Cinema

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.

October 27, 2021

King rat

From horrornews.net

Another slightly-updated reposting for Halloween… I originally wrote this in 2013, just after James Herbert’s death.

It’s fair to say that, back in the 1970s, the English novelist James Herbert increased literacy levels substantially among young males who otherwise wouldn’t have opened a book in their entire lives. Not that Herbert, who died in 2013, ever got any thanks from Britain’s educators. His X-rated novels of apocalyptic horror in the shabbier parts of 1970s London were the sort of items you furtively traded with your mates in school playgrounds, away from the prying and prudish eyes of teachers.

I was 13 when I bought a copy of Herbert’s second novel The Fog (1975), drawn by an irresistible reviewer’s comment on its back cover: “For goodness sake don’t leave this on Aunt Edna’s chair!” An accompanying quote from the book itself was good too: “Out of the yellowish fog a man appeared. His eyes were fixed straight ahead and his lips were frozen in a smile. In his hands he carried the severed, still bleeding head of his wife.” A few mornings later, sitting in my form class at school, I passed the book to the boy sitting next to me and instructed him to read a chapter that’d I’d read the previous evening. This was a chapter in which a group of boys at a posh boarding school go murderously insane and start beating and torturing their teachers to death.

I’d actually felt sick after reading that chapter, though by the next morning I was fortified and ready for more. Anyway, I spent the next five minutes smugly watching my classmate as the colour drained from his face. A final exclamation of disgust – “Yeee-uuuck!” – indicated that he’d reached the chapter’s last sentence. That would’ve been the bit where the snotty deputy headmaster gets castrated with a pair of hedge-clippers.

I should say at this point that it wasn’t just teenage boys who were into Herbert’s novels. For I remember a girl in my class called Alex Stassino who once, admirably, grossed out her female friends by reading aloud the description of the mass suicide at the start of Herbert’s 1980s novel The Dark.

Herbert’s first book was The Rats in 1974. Despite a hostile review in the Observer by a young Martin Amis, who considered the violence in its pages “enough to make a rodent retch… and enough to make any human pitch the book aside,” the Great British public bought it in droves. (Before The Rats’ publication, Herbert had worked at the same advertising agency as Amis’s chum Salman Rushdie.) Though rats certainly weren’t new in horror fiction and films, and even though, like all his work, it was essentially pulp fiction, Herbert’s novel had two major selling-points.

Firstly, as the son of a fruit seller in London’s East End and someone who’d grown up around the corner from Reggie and Ronnie Kray, Herbert clearly had first-hand experience of the character-types and the localities in his book. The story reeked of gritty and seedy authenticity as the rats – a strain of giant, mutant flesh-eaters – swarmed around disused canals, derelict buildings and plots of waste ground, preying on winos, down-and-outs, grubby comprehensive school kids and Jamaican immigrants working in the London tube. I should say that, later in the book, they graduated to eating middle-class people too. Secondly, Herbert’s approach to horror was a different one from that used by earlier British horror writers, such as the gentlemanly and clubbable Algernon Blackwood or Dennis Wheatley. Unlike them, he left nothing to the imagination.

The Rats was followed by The Fog, which recounts what happens when a vaporous and madness-inducing chemical weapon leaks out of a laboratory and floats around southern England. By the way, I remember how in 1982, after I’d left school, I was backpacking and hitchhiking around central and northern Europe in the company of a similar-aged guy called Andy, who was from Stevenage. At one point, Andy-from-Stevenage and I got into a furious argument about The Fog. By then we’d spent whole days waiting around entry roads onto various Autobahns without getting lifts and we’d managed to argue furiously about everything under the sun. Andy-from-Stevenage’s beef with The Fog was that it was silly. Especially silly, he reckoned, was the bit in it where an airline pilot goes murderously insane and, to get revenge on his wife’s lover, flies his passenger-filled jet-plane off course and smack-bang into a London skyscraper where that lover works.

“Jet-planes flying into skyscrapers,” raged Andy-from-Stevenage, “that’s too far-fetched! That’d never happen in real life!”

In 1976, Herbert penned his first novel of the paranormal, The Survivor. This had supernatural forces unleashed in the Berkshire town of Windsor after a devastating plane-crash there. One set-piece in the novel describes nearby Eton College, the real-life alma mater of Boris Johnson and David Cameron, succumbing to a demonically-orchestrated fire. Along with the gory boarding-school episode in The Fog, this suggests that working-class Herbert had a low opinion of England’s private-education system.

Meanwhile, The Spear (1978) was an updating of those old Dennis Wheatley occult thrillers like The Haunting of Toby Jugg and They Used Dark Forces, where the Nazis dabbled in black magic to help their war effort. For topicality, Herbert threw the Arab-Israeli conflict into the mix. Between The Survivor and The Spear, he wrote Fluke, an atypical fantasy story narrated by a dog suffering from troubling flashbacks to a previous life in which he’d been a man. Eventually, he meets a wise badger who explains to him that, basically, the Buddhists had got it right. Even Fluke contains streaks of grotty Herbert realism, though, with his canine characters spending their time hanging around London junkyards, eating garbage and getting down-and-dirty with on-heat bitches.

Herbert was not initially popular among traditional British horror writers and fans, no doubt because he upset cosy and middle-class notions of what horror should be about. For somebody steeped in classic British tales of the uncanny like Charles Dickens’ The Signalman (1866) or M.R. James’s Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to you, my Lad (1904), being subjected to the gnawed-off faces and exploding heads of The Rats and The Fog was probably akin to how bearded, cerebral fans of progressive-rock bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis and Yes felt in 1977, when they first heard Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols played loud.

It didn’t help Herbert’s image that his books’ success spawned a wave of badly-written and even bloodier imitators. In his wake, a whole paperback sub-genre became known in the book trade as ‘nasties’. This was years before the term was used in relation to films, as in Britain’s ‘video-nasty’ hysteria of the early 1980s. Among the writers cashing in were Shaun Hutson, whose breakthrough novel was Slugs (1982). This began with the yummy line: “The slug’s eye stalks waved slowly as it moved towards the crimson lump on which several of its companions were already feeding.” There was also Guy N Smith, who was both a tweedy pipe-smoking countryside game expert and a schlock-horror writer. When he wasn’t writing novels about giant carnivorous crabs – Night of the Crabs (1976), Killer Crabs (1978), Crabs on the Rampage (1981) – he was penning non-fiction tomes like Ferreting and Trapping for Amateur Gamekeepers (1976) and Moles and their Control (1980). Actually, I love the idea of Guy N. Smith (who, alas, passed away from Covid-19 at the end of last year) even if I never cared much for his books.

It wasn’t until 1981, when Stephen King wrote Danse Macabre, his non-fiction study of the horror genre, that Herbert finally got some respect in the field. In Danse Macabre, King said approvingly of Herbert that he “does not just write, he puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror.”

Around the early 1980s I lost interest in James Herbert, largely, I’m sure, because I was no longer a sensation-hungry teenager. The Dark (1980) seemed merely a supernatural retread of The Fog, while Lair (1979) was a perfunctory sequel to The Rats. I have to say, though, that his third Rats novel, Doman (1984), which was set in a near-future London after it’d been decimated by a nuclear attack, was about the bleakest and most gruelling thing I’d ever read. Even in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), the human survivors of the holocaust didn’t have to contend with giant carnivorous rodents. And during the 1980s and 1990s, Herbert’s books became increasingly concerned with supernatural themes and lacked the lethal edge of his earlier eco-horror ones. That said, people whose opinions I respect say that Creed (1990) and The Others (1999) are good.

Those 1970s novels could’ve become great films. Indeed, they appeared during a time when directors like Gary Sherman, who made 1972’s Deathline, and Pete Walker, who made 1974’s Frightmare, were moving British horror movies away from the realm of gothic costume dramas and making them more contemporary, nihilistic and graphic, just as Herbert was doing in fiction. But soon afterwards, the British film industry all-but-disappeared down the plughole. John Hough, who’d directed the well-regarded Twins of Evil (1972) and Legend of Hell House (1973), hoped to make a film of The Dark, with a script by the famous horror-movie starlet Ingrid Pitt (who was a good friend of Herbert’s), but the project came to nothing. The Rats and Fluke were eventually filmed in 1982 and 1995, but in North America, losing the working-class London ambience that’d made the books distinctive. The Survivor was filmed in 1981 in Australia and thus it didn’t work either.

Ironically, the film with the strongest flavour of his books isn’t a James Herbert adaptation at all. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) – at least during its first half, when Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris are stalked through a deserted London by victims of a ‘rage’-inducing virus – feels like The Fog without the fog. And during the scene in the tunnel, where Murphy, Harris and Brendan Gleason encounter a tide of scuttling rats, it’s obvious which 1970s horror paperback Boyle and his scriptwriter Alex Garland are tapping into.

Incredibly, considering the unsavoury things that went on in his books, the establishment saw fit to honour Herbert shortly before his death by giving him the Order of the British Empire. Perhaps somebody in the Royal Family had accidentally left a copy of The Fog on the Queen’s chair. And perhaps the Queen had enjoyed the bit with the hedge-clippers.

A while back, I read a James Herbert novel for the first time in decades. This was after I read a piece by the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker, in which Brooker suggested that Herbert’s novel ’48 (1996) was better than James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). He was joking, of course, but knowing Brooker I suspect he was only half-joking. My curiosity piqued, I tracked down a copy of ’48, which is set in a parallel universe in the year 1948, after London has been devastated by a ‘blood plague’ unleashed by Hitler in the final days of World War II. A tiny band of uninfected survivors are pursued around the empty, crumbling city by a larger band of infected and vampire-like survivors, who believe that by consuming the uninfected ones’ blood they can rid themselves of the plague before it kills them. The bad guys are led by a former associate of Oswald Mosley and style themselves on Mosley’s blackshirts.

Reading like a cross between Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and an Alastair Maclean war novel, I was surprised at how enjoyable ’48 turned out to be. Admittedly, Herbert’s meat-and-two-veg prose style would never win any literary awards. But it was hectically paced, it had just enough character development to maintain one’s interest in the players, its descriptions of a devastated 1940s London were convincing and it made shameless use of the city’s landmarks – Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge – when staging its action set-pieces.

It would, incidentally, make a pretty good film. Are you reading this, Danny Boyle?