Gerry Anderson – Blood and Porridge

October 10, 2025

The best of the Bonds (Part 2)

© Penguin Books

Continuing my look at On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, both the best James Bond novel (published in 1963) and best Bond film (released in 1969). We rejoin the book and film at the moment in their plots when Bond attempts to infiltrate the headquarters of his arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, high in the Swiss Alps…

Bond duly goes to the Piz Gloria, pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray – and here the film glaringly contradicts the continuity established by its predecessor. At the climax of You Only Live Twice-the-movie Bond and Blofeld have a face-to-face confrontation, but in OHMSS Blofeld doesn’t recognise Bond at all. Actually, Bond might be forgiven for not recognising Blofeld either, for the filmmakers decided to recast the role of Blofeld too. Not only do we have Sean Connery replaced by George Lazenby in OHMSS, but we have the goblin-like Donald Pleasence replaced by the bigger and more physical Telly Savalas. To be honest, Savalas is a shade too thuggish-looking for the role, but he’s believable when doing the strenuous things required by the script, such as leading a group on skis in pursuit of Bond and wrestling with him during a breakneck bobsleigh ride. Much as I like Donald Pleasence, I couldn’t imagine the sinister English character actor bouncing about on a bobsleigh.

What’s officially going on in Blofeld’s clinic, Bond learns, is that a group of young female patients are receiving treatment for food allergies. What’s unofficially happening is that Blofeld is brainwashing them whilst simultaneously developing various destructive bacteriological agents in his laboratories. The brainwashed ladies are to become his ‘angels of death’ and, when they return home, they’ll release those agents to decimate whole species of livestock and crops. Blofeld finds out who Bond really is but the secret agent manages to grab a pair of skis and stages an epic night-time escape from Piz Gloria. Blofeld’s henchmen pursue, but Tracy turns up in time to rescue him. Afterwards, he links up with Draco again and persuades him to launch an audacious attack on Piz Gloria using helicopters and his Unione Corse men. Blofeld’s plans go up in smoke, although Blofeld himself escapes – despite Bond’s best efforts – using a bobsleigh. Mission accomplished, Bond proceeds to marry Tracy, and things hurry to their tragic conclusion with Blofeld making an unexpected appearance during their honeymoon.

Both the book and film proceed along similar lines here, although it’s interesting to see how certain aspects of the 1969 film are expanded from what Fleming put in his 1963 book. In 1963, Blofeld was content to wage bacteriological warfare against Britain and Ireland, devastating their wheat, chickens, beef, potatoes, etc. By 1969, Blofeld has widened his horizons – it’s the whole world’s food supply he wants to decimate. Accordingly, the ‘angels of death’ undergo an upgrade too. In the novel they’re a prim, middle-class, goody-two-shoes bunch, all from the British Isles. Rather disdainfully, Bond reflects: “The girls all seemed to share a certain basic girl guidish simplicity of manners and language, the sort of girls who, in an English pub, you would find sitting demurely with a boyfriend sipping a Babysham, puffing rather clumsily at a cigarette and occasionally saying, ‘Pardon’. Good girls who, if you made a pass at them, would say, ‘Please don’t spoil it all’, ‘Men only want one thing’, or, huffily, ‘Please take your hand away’.” One of them even takes umbrage when Bond jokingly compares them to the girls in the St Trinian’s films: “Those awful girls! How could you ever say such a thing!”

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

In the film, the angels come from all over the world and they’re way more glamorous. Indeed, a good number of the actresses went on to brighten up my adolescence during the 1970s with appearances in various cult films and TV shows. There’s Angela Scoular, who also starred in an ‘unofficial’ Bond movie, the dreadful, zany, swinging-1960s comedy Casino Royale (1967); Catherine Schell, who’d be a regular in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975-77); Norwegian actress Julie Ege, who appeared in the kung-fu horror movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production between legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers and legendary British studio Hammer Films; Jenny Hanley and Anouska Hempel, both of whom appeared in Hammer’s ultra-tacky Scars of Dracula (1970); and the impeccable Joanna Lumley. In the late 1970s, of course, Lumley would play Purdey in the revival of The Avengers (1961-69), The New Avengers (1976-77). In fact, you could argue that OHMSS-the-move features three Avengers actresses. In addition to Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley, the face of Honor Blackman – who played Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger – is shown fleetingly during the credits sequence.

Nobly, mindful of Bond’s relationship with Tracy, Fleming has his hero seduce just one of the girls – something he does purely in the line of duty. The filmmakers are less inhibited and for a little while on Piz Gloria Lazenby behaves like a fox in a chicken coup, shagging left, right and centre. The movie also plays up the humour of the situation. Sir Hilary Bray is supposed to be Scottish, so Bond dons full Highland dress before going to dinner with his hosts and their supposed patients. Yes, after having a Scotsman play Bond for five films, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wait until he’s played by an Australian before they pop him into a kilt. This enables the Angela Scoular character to use her lipstick to write her room number on the inside of Bond’s thigh, under the table, which prompts the following exchange: “Anything the matter, Sir Hilary?” “A momentary stiffness… caused by the altitude, no doubt.” If the dialogue for this Bond movie sounds sharper than usual, it’s probably because Simon Raven, the famously dissolute English author, was hired to polish it.

When Bond escapes from Piz Gloria, Peter Hunt and his crew predictably pump up the action scenes beyond what was in the book, but I’m not complaining. Even 45 years later, the scenes where Lazenby skis, runs, drives and fights for his life are very impressive and Hunt makes good use of his experience as a film editor – the action has a frenetic quality that, viewed now after the Bourne movies (2002-16), seems far ahead of its time. Similarly ramped up is the climactic assault on Piz Gloria mounted by Bond, Draco and his gang. In the book it comes across as a brief ‘smash-and-grab’ raid but in the film it’s a full-on battle, complete with grenades, flame-throwers and flying bottles of acid. Rarely does the pulse quicken as much as it does here when Monty Berman’s James Bond Theme kicks in in the midst of the mayhem.

One change the filmmakers made to the plot that I think improves on the book is Tracy being captured by Blofeld. In Fleming’s original, after Tracy come to Bond’s aid, she disappears into the background again. In the movie, Blofeld triggers an avalanche that leaves Tracy unconscious and at his mercy, and Bond missing, presumed dead. When Bond, who of course isn’t dead at all, goes to Draco for help, the Corsican mafia boss has a very real reason for giving him help – his daughter’s life is at stake. It also allows Peter Hunt to show Savalas flirting, with an obviously menacing undercurrent, with Rigg at his mountaintop HQ. Again, I don’t think poor old Donald Pleasance would have done the flirting bit very convincingly.

Fleming depicts Bond and Tracy’s wedding as brief and low-key, but again the film makes it a big, opulent affair. M, Q and Miss Moneypenny (who’s tearful, for obvious reasons) are in attendance, as are Draco’s henchmen, many of whom spent the early part of the film getting the shit beaten of them by Bond. However, both the book and the film converge for the ending, which is as melancholy and understated as it is shocking. There hasn’t ever been an ending to a Bond film like this one – well, not until 2021’s No Time to Die.

© Eon Productions / United Artists

Indeed, it’s annoying that the filmmakers saw fit to follow this with 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, which gets Bond’s revenge on Blofeld out of the way in the first ten minutes, and then becomes a big, lazy, jokey and ludicrous Bond epic that would be the blueprint for Bond films later in the 1970s after Roger Moore had inherited the role. For a proper, spiritual sequel to OHMSS, I think you have to look to the gritty Timothy Dalton Bond movie Licensed to Kill in 1989.

OHMSS-the-film received some unfavourable reviews and made less money than its predecessors, and for years it was regarded as the runt of the litter for the 1960s Bond-films. Much of the animosity towards the film was because George Lazenby played Bond in it for the first and only time. (By Diamonds are Forever, Broccoli had managed to patch things up with the truculent Connery and got him back into the role.) Lazenby certainly isn’t a great actor, but I would argue that because this is a different sort of Bond movie, one where its hero appears vulnerable and wounded, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits the film. He’s believable in terms of what the character has to endure. I couldn’t imagine ‘Big Sean’ breenging through the movie in his usual manner and having the same emotional impact.

Happily, though, OHMSS has been re-evaluated and today is regarded as one of the best of the series. In fact, when 007 Magazine ran a poll in 2012, it was voted the greatest James Bond film ever. Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, who were running the Bond franchise in 2021, were so aware of OHMSS’s improved reputation that they tried grafting bits of it onto No Time to Die. Both films share, for example, a figure grasping a trident in their credits sequences, Louis Armstrong singing We Have All the Time in the World on their soundtracks and, obviously, downbeat endings. Though I feel No Time to Die’s nods to OHMSS only highlight the fact that it’s the lesser of the two movies.

A happier tribute to OHMSS occurs in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). When Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy and co. hit the ‘third level’ and find themselves on a snowy mountaintop battling opponents on skis, it’s obvious what film is being referenced. Indeed, Nolan has more-or-less said that OHMSS is his favourite Bond movie. (He’s also named Dalton as his favourite Bond actor, so he’s clearly a 007 fan after my own heart.)

And much of the film’s greatness is due to the fact that, no matter what innovations were brought to the table by the talented Peter Hunt and his crew, it owes a lot to the original Ian Fleming novel – which, for me at least, is the best of the Bond books too.

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

September 22, 2025

Nostalgic wallows 5: Gerry Anderson

From gerryanderson.com / © Anderson Entertainment

This entry in my Nostalgic Wallows series of blogposts was inspired by something I learned recently. Earlier this month, on September 4^th, 50 years exactly had passed since the first broadcast of the first episode of the science-fiction TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).

Practically every week now, anniversaries of something or other pop up that serve as depressing reminders of how long ago my youth was and how long-in-the-tooth I’m getting. But being reminded that the first time I watched Space: 1999 – and heard the opening chords of its urgent theme tune by composer Barry Gray, which went: “DUH…! DUH…! DUH-DUH…!” – was a whole half-century ago seemed to hit particularly hard. Anyway, I guess this is an appropriate time to pay tribute to Gerry Anderson, who was responsible for Space: 1999 and was also, perhaps, the greatest producer of children’s shows in British TV history.

Gerry Anderson is, of course, remembered as ‘the puppet man’. He and his wife Sylvia began making kids’ puppet TV shows such as The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-59) and Torchy the Battery Boy (1959) in the monochrome, still-austerity-affected 1950s. Back then, every second children’s programme on British TV seemed to feature cheap-looking wooden figures jerking around in a jungle of marionette strings: Muffin the Mule (1946-55), Flower Pot Men (1952-53), The Woodentops (1955-56) and Pinky and Perky (1957). What set the Andersons apart from their competitors, however, was their ambition. Their audiences might have been children and their characters might have been puppets, but that didn’t mean their shows weren’t allowed to be spectacular. Within a decade, the Andersons refined their puppetry to an art-form – they called their techniques ‘supermarionation’ and began each show with the proud declaration, Filmed in Supermarionation – and the result was Thunderbirds (1965-66).

The cast of Thunderbirds might’ve been marionettes, but in all other respects this show – about the adventures of International Rescue, a late-21^st century organisation run by the heroic Tracy family who used their fabulous and futuristic vehicles and gadgets to save people from crashing airliners and burning skyscrapers – was like the James Bond movies tailored for children. As well as gadgetry, explosions and skin-of-the-teeth escapes, it had a secret island hideaway (Tracy Island), an exotic villain (The Hood), a glamorous heroine (Lady Penelope) and a brash 1960s swagger, epitomised in Barry Gray’s strident theme music. Children’s television had never seen the likes of this before. No wonder Anderson’s boss at ITC Entertainment, the cigar-loving impresario Lord Lew Grade, informed Anderson after seeing the first rushes of Thunderbirds that he wasn’t making TV anymore, but feature films. Grade knew showmanship when he saw it.

© Century 21 Television / Associated Television / United Artists

Another feature that Thunderbirds shared with the best Bond movies was that while it gave international audiences the spectacle they wanted, it retained a certain wry British-ness. The Tracy family might’ve been Americans – indeed, voicing Anderson’s shows surely kept Britain’s small community of North American actors, like Ed Bishop and Shane Rimmer, in employment for years – but for British audiences the real stars of Thunderbirds were Lady Penelope and Parker, her butler and chauffeur of her pink Rolls Royce.

Lady Penelope and Parker represented opposite tiers of Britain’s class system. She was a posh glamour-puss, he was a working-class Cockney and ex-convict. Parker was loyal but sometimes downtrodden, though at least his employer tolerated his less socially acceptable talents, which included being light-fingered and knowing how to crack a safe. Indeed, on occasion, Parker’s talents helped her to escape from a tight corner. Lady Penelope was famously voiced by Sylvia Anderson and it’s significant that, following their divorce in the mid-1970s, Gerry Anderson claimed that among all his puppet characters Parker (“Yes, m’ lady”) was the one he identified with most.

Sure, Thunderbirds looks creaky when viewed today – what film or TV show from the 1960s doesn’t? The special effects seem slightly dinky, the puppets’ heads are too big for them to be comfortably lifelike, and their manner of walking always elicits amusement. Any drunkard having difficulty getting from the bar to the toilets in a British pub is invariably likened to a ‘Thunderbirds puppet’. I can only testify that, as a kid, once each episode began with that famous countdown (“Five… Four… Three… Two… One!”), that famous catchphrase (“Thunderbirds are go!”) and that pulse-quickening theme music, even a real-life crashing airliner or burning skyscraper wouldn’t have diverted my attention from the television set.

Anderson also knew the value of merchandising tie-ins. It wasn’t uncommon to find myself standing with my nose pressed against a toyshop window, wishing my pocket money was lavish enough to buy all the miniature Anderson spacecraft and air-and-land vehicles displayed in front of me – Thunderbirds 1, 2 and 3, plus items from other Anderson shows like the SPV vehicle, the Interceptors, the Mobiles, Skydiver and the Eagles. The technicians who operated the models of those spacecraft and vehicles and brought them to life in Anderson’s shows, men like Derek Meddings and Brian Johnson, later became the backbone of Britain’s movie special-effects industry. It was thanks to Anderson’s protégés that even after the indigenous British film industry died on its arse in the late 1970s, international studios at least kept coming to Britain to make movies like the Star Wars and Alien ones because of the technical expertise there.

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / ATV / ITC Entertainment

Along the way from The Adventures of Twizzle to Thunderbirds, the Andersons had made Supercar (1961-62), Fireball XL-5 (1962-63) and underwater extravaganza Stingray (1964-65). Stingray is probably the second-best remembered of Anderson’s shows, partly because it was the first British children’s programme to be filmed in colour and partly because of its camp value. It was never more camp than at the close of each episode, when the ballad Aqua Marina was sung in honour of the mute and enigmatic mermaid Marina, who helped out the Stingray crew in their battles against the despicable Aquaphibians, and on whom hero Captain Troy Tempest obviously had something of a crush. However, it’s Anderson’s post-Thunderbirds show that I like best.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) also served up spaceships, gadgets, explosions and general spectacle. The tone was darker, however. It had a high body-count – well, a high puppet body-count – and the Mars-based Mysterons whom Captain Scarlet and his gang fought off in every episode were, basically, terrorists. Spookily, their habit of taunting the ‘Earthmen’ with messages threatening death and destruction seemed to prefigure Osama Bin Laden’s mode of operation decades later. I suspect little Osama owned all the Gerry Anderson toys when he was a kid in Riyadh in the 1960s.

On the other hand, Joe 90 (1968-69) was a charming kids’ espionage show with a likeable juvenile hero. It was just unfortunate that, on account of Joe’s oversized glasses, ‘Joe 90’ became the nickname of every bespectacled child in a British playground during the next few decades.

From wikipedia.org / © Century 21 Productions

In Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, the puppets had exact human proportions – Anderson’s puppet work had achieved perfection. Accordingly, with nowhere else to go with puppetry, Anderson moved into live action. His 1970 show UFO was basically a remake of Captain Scarlet with human actors. Although UFO is fondly remembered for its kitsch notions of what future fashions would look like, such as Gabrielle Drake’s silver mini-skirt and outrageous purple bob, and although it tapped into every frustrated middle manager’s secret fantasy – Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) pretended to be a film producer, but at the touch of a button his office would descend a giant lift shaft into the huge underground headquarters of anti-alien defence force SHADO, of which he was the secret boss – the show was, like Captain Scarlet, pretty bleak.

The aliens who attacked the earth in UFO only did so because they wanted to harvest human organs, and there was frequently a high death-toll among the guest cast. One episode, The Psychobombs, even had the aliens brainwashing a handful of ordinary human beings and turning them into superhuman suicide bombers to take out SHADO. Elsewhere, the harrowing episode A Question of Priorities showed how Straker’s devotion to duty indirectly caused the death of his son.

For a little kid like me, the show was very scary at times. For example, an episode called The Sound of Silence had a UFO concealed in the waters of a lake amid the bucolic English countryside and an alien stalking the surrounding woodland like a serial killer. Even the whirring, pulsing sound that emanated from the UFOs while they were in flight was sinister. Hilariously, Independent Television (ITV), which broadcast Anderson’s shows in the UK, assumed from his past record that UFO was a children’s series and broadcast repeats of it on weekday afternoons, when kids were arriving home from primary school. That’s how I first saw UFO – I’d come home, switch on the TV and be traumatised by it.

From gerryanderson.com / © ITV Studios

By the mid-1970s Anderson was putting together Space: 1999, which at the time was the most expensive show in TV history. It should have given him a franchise of Star Trek proportions and made him a fortune. It didn’t, alas, and the show’s problems were mostly self-inflicted. Though its special effects were the best yet – some compared them to the space scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – its scripts often strayed into the metaphysical and ended up muddled and impossible-to-understand.

Another issue was that its leads, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, were unaccountably doleful and uninteresting. That said, the supporting cast, consisting of Nick Tate, Prentis Hancock, Clifton Jones, Ziena Merton, Anton Philips and the excellent veteran character actor Barry Morse, were amiable. (Sadly, Hancock and Jones died within a week of each other earlier this year.) And the guest cast – which included Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Julian Glover, Anthony Valentine, Richard Johnson, Roy Dotrice, Ian McShane, Leo McKern and the loudest man on the planet, if not in the universe, Brian Blessed – was among the best ever featured in a TV series.

But Space: 1999’s worst problem was that, scientifically, it was rubbish. Its premise was that a massive explosion on the moon’s surface in 1999 caused it to be blown out of the earth’s orbit, along with a moonbase and its 300-strong crew. From there, the runaway satellite and its reluctant passengers careered across the galaxy, managing to encounter a new solar system, and an earth-like planet, and a usually unfriendly alien civilisation, in nearly every episode. The scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov condemned the show for being preposterous, but even at ten years old I didn’t need Dr Asimov to tell me that. I knew already that outer space was rather bigger than a fairground ride and a hurtling moon wasn’t going to encounter star-systems with habitable planets as frequently as dodgem cars bumping into one another.

Despite its faults – the pretentious claptrap, the dour leads, the scientific nonsensicality underpinning everything – there was something weirdly compelling about the first season of Space: 1999. Daft and pompous though much of it was, it was at least unrepentantly so and it deserved kudos for serving up, occasionally, some of the trippiest moments ever seen on British TV. And it sometimes scared the shit out of me, even more than UFO had. See the episodes Force of Life, where, near the end, Ian McShane was gruesomely frazzled by a laser beam before coming back to life as a blackened, tattered zombie; or Death’s Other Dominion, which climaxed with Brian Blessed suddenly decaying into a revoltingly putrefied corpse. Most terrifying, though, was Dragon’s Domain, where the moon blundered into a graveyard of derelict spaceships. The graveyard was really a giant web, inhabited by a nightmarish spider – a shrieking, tentacled thing that swallowed its victims, drained them and spat them out again as lifeless, desiccated husks.

Unwisely, Anderson hired American producer Fred Freiberger to oversee Space: 1999’s second series. Freiberger, who was known in American TV circles as ‘the Series Killer’ thanks to his habit of taking over shows shortly before they got cancelled – he produced the last and worst season of the original Star Trek (1966-69) – dumped the things that were good about Space 1999’s first season, including Barry Gray’s theme tune and poor old Barry Morse. It turned into a tacky, embarrassing piece of juvenilia and was duly cancelled in 1977.

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

After that, Anderson continued working but never quite captured the zeitgeist as he had in the 1960s. Into Infinity was a 1976 special that was meant to launch another live-action science fiction series. It had Brian Blessed, Nick Tate and Ed Bishop on board and was supposed to be based on proper astronomical knowledge of the universe – maybe Anderson was atoning for the scientific absurdities of Space 1999 – but it never got beyond the pilot stage. In the 1980s he returned to making puppet shows and the result, Terrahawks (1983-86), was a fun but unoriginal rehash of his past glories. Inevitably, ‘Zelda’, the intensely wrinkled villainess of Terrahawks, became another nickname in Britain, this time for ladies of a certain age who’d crumpled their skins by smoking too many cigarettes and spending too long on the sunbed. In the 1990s he made the underwhelming live-action show Space Precinct (1994-95), while in 2005 a computer-generated version of Captain Scarlet failed to generate much interest, possibly because, at the time, it was lost amid the fuss made over the rebooting of another classic British science-fiction TV show, Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25).

During this period Anderson was financially as well as creatively unlucky. He no longer held the rights to Thunderbirds when the BBC got around to rescreening it in the early 1990s. Presumably, when yet another generation of British children went Thunderbirds-daft, and the country’s toyshops filled up again with Thunderbirds merchandising, he didn’t profit as much from it as he should have. Similarly, Anderson was denied any participation when a live-action film version of Thunderbirds was made in 2004. The resulting film was directed by an American (Jonathan Frakes) and was aimed only at young children – as opposed to older children and nostalgic adults. It was, predictably, dreadful.

Hopefully, before his death in 2012, Anderson was at least aware of the great affection the British public had for him and his TV shows and of how his work was stamped on the DNA of modern popular culture. For instance, you knew immediately what Nick Park was referencing in the opening scene of Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) when, accompanied by some rousing Barry Gray-type music, his titular heroes got to the seats of their pest-control van via a series of chutes, pulleys and lifts, just as the Tracy brothers had been transported to the cockpits of the International Rescue vehicles. Even Wallace and Gromit’s garden gnomes parted before their van’s path like the palm trees on Tracy Island used to do when Thunderbird 2 rumbled into view.

And Team America – World Police, the scabrous 2004 puppet movie from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the men behind South Park (1998-present), might have had as its heroes a bunch of gung-ho terrorist-blasting commandoes rather than the benign and upstanding Tracy family, and as its villain Kim Jong-Il rather than the Hood, but it was basically a grown-up version of Thunderbirds. I just hope Gerry Anderson was able to see beyond the blood, vomit, swearing and graphic puppet-copulation scenes, get the joke and appreciate the love Parker and Stone obviously had for his work.

And I’ve just heard some news that also makes this post timely. To mark the 60^th anniversary of Thunderbirds, two of its 1965 episodes, Trapped in the Sky and Terror in New York City, have been remastered and released as a double-bill in British cinemas. The Guardian review of them is here.

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / Associated Television

March 19, 2025March 19, 2025

Eggers’ banquet

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector. This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses. The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title. A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great. At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector. When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws. But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen. And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula. That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old. 13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life. Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu. More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese. That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema. I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t. Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula. However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu. There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen. Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template. Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok. Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host. He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination. These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there. Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him. Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals. Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg. Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple. Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated, escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city. Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well. Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene. As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16). Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task. You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19^th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss. But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula. And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter. His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock. The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore. (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.) If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do. More on that in a minute.

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing. When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught. Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz. Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok… I can see why it’s been controversial. Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair. Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok. During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness. But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time. Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché. As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss. (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent. At least it’s different… And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing. But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys. (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged. The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives. Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces. Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte. If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought. In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok. But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy. It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much. This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

January 31, 2024February 6, 2024

Some fleeting success for Rab Foster

The January 2024 edition – Issue 144 – of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is now available online and it contains a new story by Rab Foster entitled The Fleet of Lamvula. Rab Foster is the alias by which I write fantasy fiction and, by my calculations, The Fleet of Lamvula is the 20^th piece of fiction I’ve had published under that name.

The first Rab Foster story to get into print was one called The Water Garden, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Sorcerous Signals in 2010. Back then, I thought fantasy – and particularly the sub-genre of it I enjoyed most, sword and sorcery – was something I might experiment with once or twice, but no more than that. I certainly didn’t expect it to develop into a major strand of my writing, which it is today. One thing that’s helped is the fact that there are a lot more outlets publishing sword and sorcery in 2024. There seemed to be hardly any back then. Let’s hope this happy situation continues.

The Fleet of Lamvula, to quote Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s new editorial, “is the tale of a band of mercenaries exploring a pirate fleet stranded on the bottom of a dried-up sea.” The original idea for the story was an image of some explorers on camel-back crossing a psychedelically-coloured desert – the ‘dried-up sea’ angle hadn’t occurred to me yet – under a psychedelically-starry sky. This image came to me one day while I was listening to the trippiest song of all time, 1970’s Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.

Also shaping the story was the fact that I’m a sucker for ‘graveyards of lost ships’ stories. Ships’ graveyards exist in real life, of course, but I find fantastical, fictional examples of them irresistible. For instance, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the 1968 Hammer movie The Lost Continent, wherein a tramp steamer full of British character actors wanders into a Sargasso Sea ridden with marooned ships, monster crabs, monster octopi, carnivorous seaweed and the murderous descendants of Spanish Conquistadores, was the best thing ever. The dreamy, Hammond-organ-heavy theme song by the Peddlers has a certain charm too. I also love an outer-space variation on this trope, the episode Dragon’s Domain from the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77). This had the crew of Moonbase Alpha stumbling across a sinister graveyard of lost spaceships, with a tentacled monstrosity lurking inside it. Even when I was a kid, I knew Space: 1999 was a deeply silly show, but that episode still scared the crap out of me.

And one other source of inspiration for The Fleet of Lamvula was the film-work of one of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen…

For the next month, The Fleet of Lamvula can be read here, while the main page of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue 144, is accessible here.