Andrew Keir – Blood and Porridge

February 28, 2025March 10, 2025

The Moore, the merrier

© Bloomsbury

I first came across the works of Alan Moore in the mid-1980s, while I was a student in Aberdeen. One day, I discovered a ramshackle shop on the city’s King Street selling tatty second-hand paperbacks and comics out of cardboard boxes at ridiculously low prices.

There, I managed to buy most of the 26 issues of a comics anthology called Warrior, which had appeared monthly from 1982 to 1985. Initially, I was attracted to Warrior because its contents included the continuing adventures of Father Shandor, a comic-strip character I’d been obsessed with in my early teens. (Shandor was a 19^th-century Transylvanian monk who fought vampires and demons. He’d actually started as a movie character, played by the gruff, no-nonsense Scottish actor Andrew Keir, who was the foe of Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the 1966 Hammer horror movie Dracula: Prince of Darkness. He became the hero of a comic strip in the late-1970s magazine House of Hammer, whose editor Dez Skinn would later edit Warrior. At an even younger age, I’d been a big fan of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange and Shandor seemed a darker, more serious and more violent version of that.) However, it was only one of many serials in Warrior and the most striking of these sprang from the pen of Alan Moore.

These included Marvelman, a revival of a British superhero who’d originally been the lead character in a comic book that’d run from 1953 to 1964, and The Bojeffries Saga, about a family of Munsters-like misfits and monsters living in a council house in Northampton, which incidentally is Moore’s hometown. But it was the dystopian V for Vendetta, penned by Moore and drawn by David Lloyd (with occasional contributions from Tony Weare) that made me re-evaluate what comics were capable of doing.

Set in a neutral Britain that’s managed to avoid destruction in a nuclear war but now, in a dire situation after the subsequent nuclear winter, is under the heel of a fascist, totalitarian government, V for Vendetta was the first comic-book serial I’d encountered that seemed both utterly serious and utterly adult. Yes, this was a time when it was still assumed anything drawn as a series of cartoons, in a series of boxes, with speech bubbles, could never be adult and must always be juvenile. It also made uncomfortable reading – again, ‘uncomfortable’ was an adjective I hadn’t previously associated with comics – because (a) it was inviting its readers to associate with a hero who was, ostensibly, a terrorist, and (2) the authoritarian society depicted in V for Vendetta didn’t seem that far down the road from the one a certain Margaret Thatcher was engineering in Britain in the time.

Ironically, if the world of V for Vendetta was to come about, Thatcher wouldn’t have been in power for most of the 1980s. Presumably the story had been conceived before the 1982 Falklands War, which gave a massive boost to Thatcher’s popularity. Back then, it’d looked possible she’d lose the next British general election and the Labour Party, led by the pacifistic Michael Foot, could win it, which would have set up V for Vendetta’s neutral-Britain-survives-a-nuclear-war scenario.

Anyway, 40 years later, it’s highly unlikely anyone would only find out who Alan Moore is after rooting around in a box of second-hand comics in a shop in Aberdeen. After V for Vendetta (published in its entirety by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint in 1988-89), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-86), Watchmen (1986-87), From Hell (1989-98) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019), and his acclaimed work with established comic-book characters like Batman, Superman and Swamp Thing, and his authorship of the tomes Jerusalem (2016) and The Great When: A Long London Novel (2024), and his reputation as a magician and occultist, and his popularity as an interviewee and a social commentator, and his being garlanded with accolades such as ‘national treasure’, ‘sage’ and ‘world’s greatest living Englishman’, it’s fair to say we’re living in an era of Alan Moore ubiquity. And we’re all the better for it.

From wikipedia.org / © Quality Communications

Anyway, I’ve just read his 2022 collection of short stories, Illuminations. Of the nine pieces it contains, eight are good or great in my opinion. Also, one of the stories, What We Can Know About Thunderman, isn’t a short one but a 240-page novel. It’s about 30 pages longer than the other stories put together.

Fortunately, given its length, What We Can Know About Thunderman isn’t the story I consider to be a dud. No, I think the dud is the penultimate one, American Light – An Appreciation, which purports to a poem by an imaginary Beat poet called Harmon Belner, choc-a-bloc with references to the ‘San Franciscan and Beat culture’ and the ‘post-Beat counterculture that prevailed in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s’, plus an introduction and copious footnotes by an imaginary scholar called C.F. Bird. Connoisseurs of all things Beat may find it a delightful pastiche, snapshot and celebration of the movement, but it simply didn’t appeal to me, someone who finds most Beat writers tedious, pretentious and arsehole-y. (How I cheered when I read what Keith Richards said of Allen Ginsberg in the former’s autobiography: “…Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”)

What We Can Know About Thunderman on the other hand is a fictionalized history of the American mainstream comic-book industry where the foundational superhero of that industry isn’t Superman but a Superman-like character called Thunderman. It’s also an indictment of the business, which has inflicted indignities and belittlements on numerous writers and artists, including Moore, over the decades. For instance, Moore is justifiably bitter about losing ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to DC Comics. (When he made a guest appearance in a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, Milhouse Van Houten was shown making a grievous faux pas by asking Moore to autograph a DVD featuring the DC Comics characters, Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation.)

Although the characters in Thunderman have unfamiliar names, comics fans won’t have difficulty linking many of them to real-life publishers, editors, writers and artists. I’m not particularly knowledgeable, though even I recognized one Sam Blatz “…in his tilted hat, his jacket slung over one shoulder like Sinatra…” and wearing ‘snazzy sunglasses’. Blatz’s chief talent is for titling characters: “…at least Sam’s monsters looked great, drawn by Gold or Novak, so that all he had to do was think up whacky names…” Yes, Blatz is Moore’s sour reimagining of Marvel Comics’ head-honcho Stan Lee. That would make the artists ‘Gold’ and ‘Novak’ the more talented, but less financially rewarded, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. There has been writing online, some of it in great detail, about who the cast-members of Thunderman represent in the real comics world. If your expertise in the field is lacking, as mine is, it may be useful to have one of those online pieces handy, for consultation, while you read the story.

Thunderman is impressively bilious as it charts its characters’ progress during the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. They start as young, naïve comic-book enthusiasts, become comic-book creatives, and wind up as middle-aged predators or victims: variously corrupt, grasping, sociopathic, perverted, ridiculous, embittered or crushed. The story is told from a range of perspectives and in a range of styles and formats, including interviews, monologues, reviews, playscripts, internet-forum discussions, psychoanalysis sessions and comic-book panels (described in written form), as well as in conventional prose. If not every part works equally well, the assorted viewpoints and formats keep it fresh. Fear not if something isn’t quite engaging you – something different will be along in another few pages.

My favourite sections were the comic-book panels, which chronicle how the creators of Thunderman, Simon Schuman and David Kessler – thinly-veiled versions of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster – were conned out of the rights to the lucrative Thunderman franchise by American Comics, the story’s stand-in for DC Comics; and a series of reviews that evaluate how Thunderman has been adapted to the large and small screens. Again, Thunderman’s exploits in the cinema and on TV mirror Superman’s. I particularly enjoyed the review of Thunderman IV: The Search for Love, obviously inspired by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. However, while Superman IV had the late Chrisopher Reeve in the title role, trying to preserve his dignity in a poor film, Moore brilliantly imagines Thunderman IV featuring Robin Askwith, star of those dire British 1970s sex-comedies, the Confessions films: “…most of the supposed humour rests in the mullet-styled hero using his Thundervision to see through the walls of ladies’ changing rooms, complete with BOI-OI-OING sound effects.”

© Canon Group, Inc. / Warner Bros.

Elsewhere in Illuminations, Moore stretches his imagination and writing abilities with The Improbably Complex High-Energy State. This is both a cautionary tale and a riff on the paradox put forward by 19^th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who mused that it was statistically more likely for a self-aware brain, perceiving an infinite universe, to come into being through random fluctuations of particles than it was for an infinite universe itself, as postulated under conventional cosmological theory, to exist. In other words, we’re more likely spontaneously-created entities thinking we see an infinite universe than we’re actual parts of an infinite universe. Moore’s story has such a brain – and a lot of other stuff – appearing soon after the universe does. As it becomes aware of its unique situation, it rapidly develops human, and depressingly familiar, personality traits.

From the birth of the universe in The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, Moore moves to the end of the world in Location, Location, Location. He describes the apocalypse in majestically vivid Book-of-Revelation fashion, but sets the action in the unassuming English market-town of Bedford. This is where the real-life Panacea Society, believers in the teachings of the 19^th-century prophetess Joanna Southcott, believed the site of the original Garden of Eden to be. They also maintained a house on Bedford’s Albany Road as a residence for the Messiah to move into after the Second Coming. In Location, Location, Location, it transpires that, yes, the Panacea Society got it right and Jesus Christ – who’s presented like a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing ‘cool dad’, with a pierced ear and a T-shirt saying ‘I may be old, but at least I got to see all the best bands’ – has just arrived in Bedford to claim the house. The story is told through the eyes of an understandably distracted solicitor called Angie, who’s been given the task of overseeing the handover. This she has to do while images of giant winged beasts with lions’ heads and battling squadrons of angels fill the sky above. Location, Location, Location is an excellent example of Moore’s ability to combine the jaw-droppingly fantastical with the humdrum and mundane.

But the stories I enjoyed most in Illuminations were a trio of tales that struck me as belonging to a school of spooky British fiction that stretches from Arthur Machen, via Robert Aickman, to Ramsey Campbell, in that they present the supernatural in very British settings: everyday, awkward, slightly rundown and tawdry. Not Even Legend features an organization of hapless paranormal investigators called CSICON (the Committee For Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal), who are trying to get to grips with some cryptid-type beings so adept at hiding themselves that no one, until now, suspects they even exist. Not Even Legend has a complicated structure that rewards the reader’s patience when it becomes clear how clever the story’s premise is. And Moore’s enthusiasm for inventing strange new types of monsters is endearing. He mentions such creatures as Snapjackets, Mormoleens, Jilkies and – most prominently – Whispering Petes.

More conventional is Cold Reading about a phony, but pathetically self-justifying, clairvoyant who spots an opportunity to make easy money when a man asks him if he can contact the spirit of his deceased twin brother. A twist can be seen coming, but the story’s mixture of cynicism and melancholia, and its evocation of a bleak wintry night in Northampton, make it very atmospheric. Finally, I greatly enjoyed the title story, which takes place in a dilapidated, seen-better-days British seaside resort. Moore obviously relishes describing the setting. The tale of a middle-aged man returning to the coastal town in which, during his childhood, he used to holiday with his parents, it reminds me slightly of the Harlan Ellison short story One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). And there’s something about it that calls to mind the Gerald Kersh story The Brighton Monster (1948) too.

Your enjoyment of Illuminations may depend on your willingness to spend half of it reading a novel that’s a diatribe against the American comic-book industry. I was happy to do so, and I got a lot out of that story and out of the collection generally. Illuminations really did light up my reading life for a few days.

From wikipedia.org / © Matt Biddulph

June 9, 2023June 14, 2023

Remembering Iain Banks

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Duncan

Ten years ago today, on June 9^th, 2013, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks passed away at the age of 59, struck down by a gall-bladder cancer that’d only been diagnosed two months earlier. Here’s a slightly updated version of the tribute to him I wrote at the time.

Iain Banks became a big thing for me, and for many people like me, when he found success, fame and a certain notoriety with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. This was because he seemed to tick a lot of important boxes.

Like me and the crowd I hung out with, he came from a Scottish background, so we were familiar with many of the places he wrote about. Like us, his politics were left-of-centre, with a leaning towards the cause of Scottish independence because independence seemed the best way to avoid being saddled with right-wing Tory governments whom few people in Scotland ever voted for. And like us, he was obviously into literature, but he was also into some strange, off-beat writers whom stuffy literary critics would dismiss as being too ‘genre’ for serious consideration – Mervyn Peake, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, and so on.

You could argue that Alasdair Gray had blazed the same trail a few years earlier with his 1980 novel Lanark, but there was one important difference. Gray had been a young man in the 1950s. Banks, like us, was clearly of the 1980s. Like it or not – and we did not – Banks and us, his readers, were Maggie Thatcher’s children.

The Wasp Factory made an immediate stir with its blackly funny plot about Frank Cauldhame, a maimed delinquent living in a remote part of Scotland, who amuses himself with the shamanistic killings of insects, seagulls, rabbits and young children. In quick succession Banks followed it with Walking on Glass (1985), which showed the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946-59); The Bridge (1986), a paean to both the Forth Rail Bridge and Gray’s Lanark, with a healthy dose of the J.G. Ballard short story Concentration City (1957) mixed in; and in 1987 Consider Phlebas, the first of many epic outer-space novels about an interstellar anarcho-utopian society called the Culture. The Culture novels were attributed to Iain M. Banks, a move by his publisher to help fans of ‘serious’ mainstream fiction and fans of science fiction identify what was what in his output. At the time, the speculative fiction magazine Interzone remarked that it was delighted to see Banks at last ‘come out of the closet’ as a sci-fi writer.

In August 1987 Banks was scheduled to appear on a discussion panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Around the same time I’d agreed to edit the latest edition of a small literary magazine called Alma Mater, published by some fellow-students at the University of Aberdeen’s English Literature Department. Dr Isobel Murray, who’d been my tutor at Aberdeen for the past year, was chairing the Book Festival panel and I used my connection with her to persuade Banks’s agent to let me interview him after the panel, for Alma Mater. I later offered Dr Murray a grovelling apology for brazenly using her name as my calling card.

© Abacus Books

The panel, which I attended, produced a few sparks. In addition to Banks and Murray, it featured the Glaswegian writer Frederic Lindsay, whose 1983 novel Brond had recently been made into a TV series, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring a very young John Hannah. (By a sad coincidence, Lindsay also died in 2013, just ten days before Banks did.) And it was rounded off by another Glaswegian, Ronald Frame, author of the just-published novel Sandmouth People. If it’s unfair to say that the tweedy Frame was a young fogey at the time, he certainly gave the impression of being one. When somebody in the audience asked the authors about their views on self-censorship, he said pompously: “I would never include anything I might regret in five years’ time.”

Banks immediately spluttered, “But those are the best bits!”

Afterwards I met up with Banks and a few of his friends and conducted the interview in a pub in Edinburgh’s Rose Street – either the Kenilworth or the Auld Hundred, if I remember correctly – with Banks speaking into the mic of the clunky tape recorder I’d bought with me, transferring his voice onto a crackly cassette tape that, like almost everything else I possess, now resides inside a cardboard box somewhere in my Dad’s attic.

I asked him about the hostile reception that The Wasp Factory had received in some quarters. (The Irish Times had described it as ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’.) Banks had been surprised by this. He’d expected some flak from animal rights groups, but not from the critics. He’d learned that one reviewer who’d blasted the book as ‘the literary equivalent of a video nasty’ also worked in the Conservative Party office in London, which pleased him no end. Offending that guy had been an honour.

I also asked him about his fondness for peppering his novels with references to the popular culture of the time. In The Bridge, for example, just before the car accident that sets the surreal plot in motion, the hero slots a copy of the Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) into his car stereo. Wouldn’t that make the books look rather dated a few years later? “Yeah,” he agreed, “it’ll date them. But what the hell?” He believed that characters living in a particular time and particular place would be influenced by the current popular culture, so he didn’t see why he should shirk from mentioning the music, books, films and TV programmes of the moment.

I quoted Brian Aldiss at him – Aldiss had famously said that all good science fiction hovers at the edge of being something different from science fiction. Banks agreed with that, sort of, but he also disagreed. Enthusiastically, he told me how Consider Phlebas came with all the trimmings of the traditional Isaac Asimov / Robert Heinlein ‘space opera’: giant spaceships, laser cannons, inter-planetary battles.

© Little, Brown

Did he, I asked finally, worry about being pigeon-holed, with one half of the world viewing him as a ‘Scottish’ author and the other half viewing him as a ‘sci-fi’ one? Not at all, he said. He was quite at ease with being regarded as Scottish. And being seen as a sci-fi author didn’t bother him either, since science fiction was an ‘old love’ for him.

From Rose Street, we moved to Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar in Candlemaker Row, just behind the statue of the famous Edinburgh terrier who’d spent 14 years in the adjacent graveyard guarding the grave of his dead master. Poor wee Bobby, I remember musing, wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d been a character in The Wasp Factory. By then a good number of pints had been drunk and the conversation had descended somewhat from the lofty heights of literary discussion. I recall talking to Banks about Arthur Montford, the lugubrious Scottish TV football commentator famous for his eccentrically patterned sports jackets and for his catchphrases that included “What a stramash!” and (uttered all too often) “Disaster for Scotland!” At some point too we discussed the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula Prince of Darkness, which had featured the Scottish actor (from Shotts in North Lanarkshire) Andrew Keir.

The next issue of Alma Mater, containing my interview with Iain Banks, was published later that year. A series of cock-ups by the typesetter meant that it looked pretty ropey, though thankfully the pages featuring Banks were okay. The following year, I heard that Banks would be making an appearance at Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop in West Crosscauseway (now long vanished) and I went along to give him a copy of the magazine. To my surprise, he remembered me and enthused about the mini-pub crawl we’d done that day: “That was a good afternoon!”

After that I read several more Banks novels: Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993). The Crow Road, his stab at writing a sprawling family saga, is the book that everyone talks about, although I have to say that it’s not one of my favourites. Sure, it has one of the best opening lines in modern literature (“It was the day my grandmother exploded”), but as with most other sprawling sagas about eccentric families, I find it too contrived for its own good.

© Little, Brown

On the other hand, I think Espedair Street, which is about a hapless rock musician who’s found fame, fortune and much unhappiness and is now trying to live anonymously in a rough part of Glasgow, is marvellous. I also think it’s the warmest and most relatable Iain Banks book that I’ve read. Among my all-time favourite novels about rock ‘n’ roll, it’s up there with Harlan Ellison’s Spider Kiss (1961) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008).

And I like Complicity, which welds a serial-killer plot onto Banks’ intense distaste for the corruption and inequalities of the recently-ended Thatcher era. Much of it is set in Edinburgh, where scuzzy journalist-hero Cameron Colley boozes in a series of pubs ranging from the upmarket Café Royal on West Register Street to the desperate, late-opening Casbah in the Cowgate. By then I’d lived in Edinburgh and I knew Colley’s haunts well. I’d even had an experience similar to one he has in the Café Royal, when he stands in front of the bar’s gantry (which doesn’t contain a mirror although it looks as though it does), can’t see his reflection and in a drunken panic believes himself to be a vampire.

After Complicity, however, I stopped reading Iain Banks, probably because by then there were just too many young Scottish writers competing for my attention: Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Robertson. Banks’s success in the 1980s, of course, had helped pave the way for all these slightly younger Turks. It wasn’t until after his death that I read more of his stuff: the collection State of the Art (1991), whose stories lean towards science fiction, so the name ‘Iain Banks’ on the cover contains that all-important initial-letter ‘M’ to warn readers of serious mainstream literature to keep clear; The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007); Stonemouth (2012); The Quarry, published posthumously in 2013; and Banks’s one book of non-fiction, Raw Spirit (2003), which details his experiences while he works on the rather enviable assignment of visiting, and sampling the products of, as many of Scotland’s whisky distilleries as he can.

Among these later novels, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, another sprawling family saga, perhaps sticks most in my mind. That’s largely because of the following quote, wherein the narrator muses on the connection between being right-wing and not having an imagination, and which could be the manifesto for Banks’s own politics: “We got talking about how some people were selfish and some weren’t, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination. Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them. They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever. Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are. It’s all to do with imagination, empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning.”

Meanwhile, I found Raw Spirit so informative that, as I read it, I tried to record what it said about the distilleries Banks visited, the whiskies he drank, and his opinions on their flavours, in a series of mind-maps.

Banks was so prolific that, looking at his bibliography, I see there are still nearly 20 books of his that I haven’t read yet. That includes the entire series of Culture novels. So, I still have much catching up to do with the great man’s oeuvre.

January 10, 2021January 1, 2024

Cinematic heroines 1: Barbara Shelley

During the previous incarnation of this blog, before it had to be rebooted due to hacking issues, I published a series of posts under the title Cinematic heroes. This was about actors whom I admired, ranging from craggy action men like Rutger Hauer and James Cosmo to beloved old-school character actors like Terry-Thomas and James Robertson-Justice. Aware of a gender imbalance, I’d also intended to launch a parallel series of posts called Cinematic heroines, dedicated to my favourite actresses. But I never got around to it.

Anyhow, a week ago saw the death of the actress Barbara Shelley following a Covid-19 diagnosis. When I was a lad of 11 of 12 and a nascent film buff, Shelley was perhaps the first actress I developed a crush on. Thus, sadly and belatedly, here’s Cinematic heroines 1: Barbara Shelley.

As well as being my first movie crush, Shelly starred in the first horror movie I saw that properly horrified me, 1966’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness. Before I watched it, and before I reached my second decade, I’d seen some quaint old black-and-white horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1940s, including a couple that featured John Carradine as Count Dracula. Carradine played Dracula as a gentlemanly, well-spoken figure who could change from bat-form into dandified human-form complete with a top hat. This hardly prepared me for Dracula, Prince of Darkness, made two decades later in colour by Hammer Films. It was a decidedly more visceral experience… Almost traumatically so for my young sensibilities.

Cloaked in an atmosphere of dread from the word ‘go’, it has four English travellers getting lost whilst holidaying in Transylvania and spending the night at the seemingly empty Castle Dracula. There, an acolyte of Dracula strings one of them up over a tomb containing the dead vampire’s ashes, slashes his throat and sends blood splashing noisily onto those ashes to bring the monster back to life. And monster he certainly is. Played by the great Christopher Lee, Dracula lurches around, hisses and spits, and glowers through red contact lenses like a literal bat out of hell.

Barbara Shelley is the second-billed actress in the movie, after Suzan Farmer, but she’s as memorable as Lee is. She plays Helen Kent, a stereotypically repressed and prudish Victorian housewife who, the traveller least enamoured with the apparent comforts of Castle Dracula, comes out with the prophetic line: “There’ll be no morning for us!” Later, bitten by the Count, she transforms from Victorian housewife into voluptuous sexpot, tries to seduce the surviving members of the group and bares her fangs animalistically at the sight of their naked throats. However, Helen’s sexual awakening is shockingly punished near the film’s end when another memorable actor, Lanarkshire-born Andrew Keir, playing a very Scottish Transylvanian monk, re-asserts the puritanical and patriarchal status quo. He and his fellow monks tie her down and bang a metal stake through her heart in a scene that evokes the cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition.

After all that, my eleven-year-old self was shaken – but also stirred, into a lifelong fascination with horror movies. And thanks to Barbara Shelley’s performance as a saucy vampire, I was probably stirred in more ways than one.

Born in London in 1932 as Barbara Kowin, Shelley took up modelling in the early 1950s and by 1953 had appeared in her first film, Mantrap, made by Hammer Films, the studio that’d later become her most important employer. However, she subsequently spent several years in Italy, making films there. It wasn’t until 1957 that she got a leading role in the genre that’d make her famous. This was the British-American cheapie Cat Girl, an ‘unofficial remake’ of Val Lewton’s supernatural masterpiece Cat People (1942). Cat Girl’s director was Alfred Shaughnessy, who’d later develop, write for and serve as script editor on the British television show Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), essential TV viewing during the 1970s and the Downtown Abbey (2010-15) of its day.

Slightly better remembered is 1958’s Blood of the Vampire, a cash-in by Tempean Films on the success that Hammer Films had recently enjoyed with gothic horror movies shot in colour. Indeed, Hammer’s main scribe Jimmy Sangster moonlighted from the company to write the script for this one. Shelley isn’t in Blood long enough to make much impact, although her character is allowed to be proactive. Hired as a servant, she infiltrates the household of the mysterious Dr Callistratus (played by legendary if hammy Shakespearean actor Sir Donald Wolfit), who runs the prison in which her lover (Vincent Ball) has been incarcerated. Callistratus, it transpires, is harvesting the prisoners’ blood to sustain and perhaps find a cure for his secret medical condition – for he’s actually a vampire. An uncomfortable blend of mad-doctor movie and vampire movie, Blood at least gets a certain, pulpy energy from its lurid storyline and Wolfit’s OTT performance.

The same year, Shelley got her first substantial role in a Hammer movie, although this was a war rather than a horror one, The Camp on Blood Island (1958). A half-dozen years later, she’d appear in its prequel, The Secret of Blood Island (1964), a film whose policy of casting British character actors like Patrick Wymark and Michael Ripper as Japanese prison-camp guards prompted the critic Kim Newman to write recently: “Even by the standards of yellowface casting – common at the time – these are offensive caricatures, but they’re also so absurd that they break up the prevailing grim tone of the whole thing.”

Before making her first Hammer horror film, Shelley appeared in 1960’s sci-fi horror classic Village of the Damned, based on John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos. She plays Anthea Zellaby, while the impeccable George Sanders plays her husband George. Like all the inhabitants of the village of Midwich, Anthea becomes unconscious when the district is stricken by some inexplicable cosmic phenomenon. And like every woman of childbearing age there, she discovers that she’s pregnant after she wakes up again. The result is a tribe of sinister little children with blonde hair, pale skins, plummy accents, super-high IQs, glowing eyes and telepathic powers who resemble a horde of mini-Boris Johnsons (well, without the IQ, eyes or powers).

These are cinema’s first truly creepy horror-movie kids. Child-actor Martin Stephens is particularly creepy as David Zellaby, Anthea’s son and the children’s leader. Still effective today, the original Village knocks spots off the remake that John Carpenter directed in 1995. It was also amusingly sent up as The Bloodening (“You’re thinking about hurting us… Now you’re thinking, how did they know what I was thinking…? Now you’re thinking, I hope that’s shepherd’s pie in my knickers….”) in a 1999 episode of The Simpsons.

After making a horror-thriller called Shadow of the Cat (1961) for Hammer, about the murder of a wealthy old lady (Catherine Lacey), a conspiracy by inheritance-hungry relatives and servants, and a supernaturally vengeful pet cat, Shelley got her meatiest role yet in the same studio’s 1963 horror film The Gorgon. This was directed by the man who’d make Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Terence Fisher, and also featured that film’s star, Christopher Lee. In addition, it featured Hammer’s other horror legend, Peter Cushing. Atypically, Lee plays the good guy here rather than the bad one, and Cushing plays the bad guy rather than the good one. The Gorgon is about a mid-European village terrorised by an unknown person who’s possessed by the spirit of Megaera, one of the three monstrous Gorgons from Greek mythology. (In fact, in proper Greek mythology, Megaera was one of the Furies.) Her victims are regularly found transformed into stone.

Since the Gorgon’s female, and since Shelley plays the only prominent female character, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that she turns out to be the possessed villager. Oddly, Shelley doesn’t get to play the character in Gorgon form. That honour goes to actress Prudence Hyman, sporting a headful of very unconvincing rubber snakes. While the monster is a big disappointment, and isn’t a patch on cinema’s scariest representation of a Gorgon, the Ray Harryhausen-animated Medusa in 1981’s Clash of the Titans, The Gorgon makes partial amends by having some wonderfully atmospheric moments.

In 1966, besides appearing in Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Shelley appeared in Rasputin, the Mad Monk, which was shot back-to-back with the Dracula film and used many of the same sets and cast, including Christopher Lee as the titular character. Despite some good performances, I find this film a confused, half-baked affair. Happily, two years later, Shelley’s final movie for Hammer was also her best one. This was 1968’s sci-fi horror film Quatermass and the Pit, based on an original 1958 BBC TV serial of the same name. Both the film and serial were written by the same man, Nigel Kneale.

Pit has an ingenious premise. Workers on a London Underground extension project dig up some skeletons of prehistoric ape-men and what proves to be an alien spacecraft full of dead, horned insect-like creatures. The insects are identified by the film’s scientist hero Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir again) as inhabitants of the now-lifeless planet Mars. Five million years ago, they came to earth and staged an invasion by proxy. Unable to survive themselves in the earth’s atmosphere, the insect-Martians programmed the apes they encountered to become mental Martians. Since these apes were the ancestors of modern human beings, Quatermass memorably exclaims, “We are the Martians!”

Unfortunately, it turns out that the Martians, in both insect and surrogate-ape form, conducted occasional culls whereby those with pure Martian genes / programming destroyed their fellows who’d developed mutations and lost their genetic / programmed purity. When the spacecraft is reactivated by a power surge from the cables of some TV news crews, it triggers a new cull. London becomes an apocalyptic hellscape where the human inhabitants who retain their Martian conditioning roam around, zombie-like, and use newly awoken telekinetic powers to kill those who no longer have that conditioning.

Shelley plays an anthropologist called Barbara Judd, a member of a team headed by Dr Roney (James Donald) studying the apes’ remains. They join forces with Andrew Keir’s Quatermass – sartorially striking in a beard, bowtie, tweed suit and trilby – who’s a rocket scientist come to examine the spacecraft. Shelley, Donald and Keir are endearing in their roles. It’s refreshing to see a film where the scientists aren’t cold-blooded, delusional, self-serving or plain weird. Instead, they’re decent human beings, working with an eager curiosity, a sense of duty and a very relatable sense of humour. Indeed, the film has a poignant climax, when the member of the trio who’s least affected by the influence emanating from the spacecraft makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to stop it.

Thereafter, Barbara Shelley made only a few more film appearances, most notably with a supporting role in Stephen Weeks’ Ghost Story (1974), a film with an unsettling atmosphere – perhaps because although it’s supposed to be set in the English countryside, it was actually filmed in India. It’s also interesting because it offered a rare screen credit for Vivian MacKerrell, the actor who was the real-life inspiration for the title character of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I (1987). However, she kept busy with appearances on stage, courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and on television. Fans of British TV science fiction of a certain vintage will know her for her appearances in the final season of Blake’s Seven (1981) and in Peter Davison-era Doctor Who (1983).

Barbara Shelley’s death on January 4^th led to her being described in the media as a ‘scream queen’ and ‘Hammer horror starlet’, but both labels don’t do her justice. For one thing, her characters rarely screamed – the impressive scream she produced in Dracula, Prince of Darkness was actually dubbed in by her co-star Suzan Farmer. Also, the ‘Hammer starlet’ moniker implies she found fame due to her looks and physical attributes rather than her acting abilities. The moniker is frequently applied to actresses like Ingrid Pitt, Yutte Stensgaard, Madeline Smith and Kate O’Mara who worked with the studio in the 1970s, when relaxed censorship rules allowed more bare flesh to be shown onscreen. But working in a less permissive time, Shelley projected sexuality when she had to, as in the Dracula film, the same way she projected everything else – through sheer acting talent. It was a talent that fans of the classic era of British gothic filmmaking, like myself, have much to be thankful for.