Jason and the Argonauts – Blood and Porridge

October 6, 2026

Things that terrified the young me

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros Entertainment

We’ve entered October, the month that ends with the spooky and supernatural-tinged festival of Halloween. I usually mark this time of year by posting some entries related to the macabre – well, I am a published writer of horror stories. So, here is a piece listing the various things, in real life, in print, on TV or in the cinema, that terrified me as a kid and, possibly, affected my development and made me the person I am today.

The Tom and Jerry cartoon Heavenly Puss (1949)

When I was five or six years old, popular children’s cartoons that suddenly and without warning turned creepy were like booby traps for my delicate psyche. For example, I remember watching an episode of The Inspector, which was part of The Pink Panther Show (1969-78), where the Inspector’s sleepy sidekick Sergeant Deux-Deux accidently drinks a mad scientist’s potion and turns into a hulking Mr Hyde-like monster. This horrified me.

But my all-time cartoon nightmare came when I watched a Tom and Jerry short called Heavenly Puss, in which Tom is terrorised by a horned, red-pelted, green-eyed devil-dog – basically a satanic version of Spike the Bulldog – who keeps appearing and threatening to boil him alive in a cauldron. I was living in Northern Ireland at the time, and was already having my head filled with warnings about the devil by the multiple religious personages who populated the place. Seeing a similar, infernal figure intrude on something as innocuous as Tom and Jerry was deeply upsetting.

Incidentally, the 1942 Tom and Jerry short Fraidy Cat freaked me out too, though not quite as much as Heavenly Puss did.

Mij gets it in Ring of Bright Water (1969)

With this one I was less terrified than traumatised. Many people my age go on about how they were reduced to quivering wrecks when they watched the animated, leporine bloodbath Watership Down (1978). But a far worse experience for me was the movie Ring of Bright Water, based on the 1960 book of the same name by Gavin Maxwell, in which Bill Travers plays a hapless Londoner who rescues a rambunctious otter called Mij from a pet shop and ends up moving with him to the more otter-friendly environment of Scotland’s remote west coast. Not only Mij thrives there – Travers does too, especially when he makes the acquaintance of the fanciable local doctor (Virginia McKenna).

© Palomar Pictures International / Rank Film Distributors

I saw Ring of Bright Water on TV in the early 1970s. For most of its running time, it’s an amiable comedy in which Travers and Mij get up to amusing high-jinks. Nothing prepares you for the ending. McKenna is taking Mij for a walk when he gets his head flattened in a random act of violence by a shovel-wielding ditch-digger who regards otters as vermin. It’s made even worse by the fact that Travers is in London at the time. In the next scene he returns, cheerfully believing all is well, and McKenna has to interrupt his garrulous blather with the bald statement, “Mij is dead.”

It’s a sobering reminder of the fact that, no matter how much we sentimentalise animals, they frequently live or die – more often die – by the whims of humans beings. But sneaking that reminder into what’d been, for the most part, a fun, good-natured family film seemed a bit rotten.

Playing the ditch-digger was the Glaswegian actor Archie Duncan, who passed away in 1976. I wonder if that’s inscribed on his headstone: ‘HE KILLED MIJ.’

The Northern Irish satanic panic in 1973

According to the 2014 book Black Magic and Bogeymen by Richard Jenkins, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, a “wave of rumours about black magic, Satanism, animal sacrifice and child abduction… swept across the north of Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.” Jenkins notes that “(b)etween 5^th August and mid-December 1973, sixty-five items about witchcraft and black magic appeared in the mainstream press north and south of the Irish border: news reports, features, editorials, letters to the editor, church reports, and what appeared to be religious announcements… The reports peaked between mid-October and the third week in November, clustering around Hallowe’en.”

© Cork University Press

This was a classic example of what today we’d call a ‘satanic panic’ though, with the Northern Irish Troubles in progress at the time, Jenkins offers intriguing evidence that the British Army was stirring the pot with ‘black propaganda’ operations – i.e., trying to convince superstitious Northern Irish parents that the province was overrun with devil-worshippers so they wouldn’t let their kids outdoors at night. Keeping them indoors meant there was less chance of them getting into genuine bother with the paramilitaries or the security forces.

Jenkins also observes that children were among the worst culprits for spreading the rumours. I can testify to that. I remember a girl in my class gleefully assuring me there was a family in nearby Enniskillen who drew their curtains as soon as it got dark and then spent all night performing ghastly black-magic rituals. She also told me about goat-carcasses being found beside the river in Enniskillen with their hearts cut out and, worst of all, a child being abducted there, sacrificed and chopped into pieces. Needless to say, gullible me swallowed every word of this and, for the next few months, the prospect of visiting Enniskillen petrified me.

The trailer for Penda’s Fen (1974)

Today, Penda’s Fen is regarded as a visionary piece of TV drama. Time Out magazine has described it, rather pompously, as a “multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines…” that fuses “Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness.” Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, it was, however, seriously offbeat even by the standards of Play for Today (1970-84), the anthology series whose fourth season contained it as an episode. Maybe that’s why I remember the trailer the BBC showed prior to its broadcast being so scary – the channel couldn’t make head nor tail of it and decided to market it as a folk-horror film.

© BBC

Two creepy moments of Penda’s Fen were included in that trailer. Firstly, there was a sequence where the young hero (Spencer Banks) sits by the edge of a pool and sees reflected in it a statue of an angel – the statue stands behind him, but when he looks around it suddenly isn’t there anymore. I wonder if the TV writer Steven Moffat saw this as a kid and, three decades later, it inspired him to create the Weeping Angels for the 21^st-century reboot of Doctor Who (2005-25). Even worse for my tender sensibilities was a sequence where Banks cowers in his bed while a devilish face hovers over him. Living in super-religious Northern Ireland, I had no doubt at the time that devils and demons were real. I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and be confronted by a face like that.

Haunted by the images in its trailer, I didn’t watch Penda’s Fen when it was broadcast a few evenings later. In fact, I didn’t see it in its entirety until several years ago and, of course, it was nothing like what my eight-year-old self had been led to believe.

Talos comes to life in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

In my childhood I loved the movie Jason and the Argonauts, based on the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. I especially loved the mythical creatures in it like the hydra and harpies, which were animated by stop-motion-animation / special effects genius Ray Harryhausen. One scene absolutely creeped me out, however, and has stuck in my memory ever since. That’s when Jason and co. arrive on an island populated by gigantic bronze statues and Hercules (Nigel Green) and Hylas (John Cairney) not very smartly steal a giant broach from a treasure chamber inside the plinth of the statue of Talos. They’re discombobulated, to say the least, when the head of the titanic statue slowly turns and its bronze face gazes down at them, impassively but accusingly.

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

I think it’s the creaking noise that accompanies the twisting of Talos’s neck that gets me – every time I watch it.

The first half of Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966)

The horror movies made by the famous British studio Hammer Films aren’t regarded today as being particularly frightening. At their best, they have a wonderful gothic flamboyance. At their worst, they’re endearingly tacky. But genuinely frightening? Not really. However, when I was a kid, some of them turned up on TV for the first time and, to me then, they did seem scary. For instance, Quatermass and the Pit (1968) left me shaken. But it was the first half of Hammer’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness that truly gave me the willies. I say ‘first half’ because when I initially saw it on TV, that was all of it I could take. At its midpoint, I threw in the towel and retreated to bed.

In part, the film’s impact on me was due to misleading expectations. I knew Dracula was villainous but didn’t think he could be frightening. I’d already seen a couple of old black-and-white films featuring the character, made by Universal Studios, where he was played in a raffish fashion, by John Carradine in House of Dracula (1945), or in an urbane and slightly camp one, by Bela Lugosi in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). So I wasn’t ready for Christopher Lee’s portrayal of him in Dracula, Prince of Darkness, where he alternates between being chillingly imperious – he unsettlingly doesn’t utter a word of dialogue during the whole film – and being a hissing, spitting hell-fiend.

In fact, Dracula is hardly in the movie’s first half. It begins with a prologue showing him being reduced to ashes, by Peter Cushing, at the climax of the previous instalment in Hammer’s Dracula series. What follows is a grim tale in which four naïve English travellers (Francis Matthews, Suzan Farmer, Barbara Shelley and Charles Tingwell) end up spending the night at Castle Dracula and an acolyte (Philip Latham) slaughters one of them and uses his blood to revive his dead master. The sight and sound of copious blood splattering down onto the Count’s powdery remains inflicted another scar on my already heavily-scarred young psyche.

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

I’ll post about more things that terrified my juvenile self shortly.

June 29, 2020July 21, 2020

A happy one hundredth to Harryhausen

From facebook.com

I’ve just discovered that today would have been the 100^th birthday of filmmaking and special effects titan Ray Harryhausen. Without the presence of Harryhausen’s movies in my childhood, I suspect I would have developed into a very different, though possibly much more normal, human being. Anyway, to mark the great man’s centenary, here’s what I wrote about him on the sad occasion of his death, back in March 2013.

This week saw the passing of the movie special-effects veteran Ray Harryhausen. Younger filmmakers have been swift to pay tribute to Harryhausen, as they should do – the likes of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Sam Raimi, Tim Burton, Nick Park and Terry Gilliam owe him a huge debt in terms of inspiration.

Ray Harryhausen wasn’t just a special-effects technician – he was a special-effects titan, a man who turned the process of stop-motion animation into an art-form and became arguably the greatest backroom wizard in cinematic history. Harryhausen discovered his vocation when, as a kid in 1933, he was taken to a screening of King Kong. Obsessed with the movie, the young Harryhausen learned how the special-effects man and stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien had used small, intricately-jointed models of Kong to bring the ape to life. Slowly, methodically, incredibly painstakingly, O’Brien made slight adjustments to those models in between shooting them one frame of film at a time. The result of these countless tiny adjustments was that when the footage was played back you had Kong moving onscreen with life-like fluidity.

Harryhausen was soon making his own stop-motion models and eventually he became apprenticed to O’Brien. Before they won an Oscar for 1949’s Mighty Joe Young – a sort of King Kong-lite, about a giant gorilla who instead of swatting biplanes at the top of the Empire State Building rescues children from burning orphanages – O’Brien advised Harryhausen to work on giving his creations characters, not just mechanical movement. He even suggested that the the budding animator go and study anatomy.

Harryhausen took O’Brien’s advice and he strove to invest his animated figures with soul. As a consequence, in this modern era of CGI-drenched fantasy movies, critics commonly complain that today’s computer-generated monsters ‘lack the personality’ of Harryhausen’s creatures. At the news of Harryhausen’s death, the author and critic Kim Newman tweeted: “It now takes 500 pixel-wranglers to do what Ray Harryhausen did better singled-handed.”

My childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and early 1980s coincided with the final decade of Harryhausen’s film-work – Golden Voyage of Sinbad appeared in cinemas in 1973, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger in 1977 and Clash of the Titans in 1981. Such was the success of Golden Voyage of Sinbad that his original Sinbad movie, 1958’s Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, was subsequently re-released, so I saw that on a big screen too. Meanwhile, Harryhausen’s earlier movies from the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1952), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The First Men in the Moon (1964), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), had become fixtures on TV.

For some annoying reason, ITV insisted on showing many of these films on weekday afternoons, so that they started while kids like myself were still at school. I remember on one occasion I lied to my teacher so that I could get out of school early, run back to my house and catch the beginning of Jason and the Argonauts at half-past-two.

Though I liked monster movies, I quickly became critical of how their special effects were done. I hated films where the giant creatures were clearly men in suits, stomping on model cities composed of shoebox-sized buildings, as was the case with the Japanese Godzilla movies. I was also unimpressed by dinosaurs that were glove-puppets (see 1974’s The Land that Time Forgot) or magnified real-life lizards (as in 1960’s dreadful remake of The Lost World – “It’s a mighty tyrannosaurus!” cast-members would cry at the sight of something that was obviously a blown-up iguana with additional warts and frills glued onto it.)

But Harryhausen’s creatures were different. Their shapes were uniquely monstrous, so that they couldn’t have special-effects men operating them from the inside, and they moved with a strange, graceful autonomy. Furthermore, his dinosaurs were recognisable dinosaurs – brontosaurs, allosaurs, triceratopses – which was important when you were ten years old.

The movies were sometimes less-than-great in other departments. Most notoriously, One Million Years BC, which Harryhausen made for Hammer Films, wasn’t scripted with much attention to paleontological science. It had Raquel Welch and other Playboy Bunny-like cavewomen in fur bikinis living alongside dinosaurs in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch. Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s work elevated such films into the realms of low art.

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

Harryhausen came to Edinburgh a dozen years ago and gave a talk at the (now closed) Lumiere Cinema at the back of the National Museum of Scotland. Recently, a literary magazine called the Eildon Tree had published a story of mine that was about growing up in a small town in the 1970s and being dependent on the local fleapit cinema for escape into more exciting and more glamorous worlds. Because of the story’s theme and setting, Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies got mentioned in it a few times. So not only did I attend Harryhausen’s talk, but I brought along a copy of the magazine in case he was doing a signing session afterwards.

Although he was over 80 years old by then, Harryhausen was sharp-witted and good-humoured and he remained in good form despite some stupid questions from the audience. (“Why didn’t you make a movie about the Loch Ness Monster?”) The next day, Peter Jackson was flying him to New Zealand so that he could visit the set of the first Lord of the Rings movie, which was maybe why he was so jovial. There were a lot of kids present and they were entranced by the jointed monster-models from various films that he’d brought with him.

Afterwards, a long queue of people assembled before Harryhausen’s podium with movie memorabilia for him to sign. He observed drily that much of that memorabilia consisted of posters for One Million Years BC, in which Raquel Welch was displayed prominently in her fur bikini – so much for stop-motion animation. Finally, it was my turn. I handed over my copy of the Eildon Tree, open at the page where my story started, and asked if he could autograph it.

“It’s something I’ve had published,” I explained. “It name-checks your Sinbad movies.”

Harryhausen looked at me, chuckled and said, “You know, son, you look a bit like Sinbad yourself!”

That didn’t just make my day – it made my month.

Anyway, to finish, here are my five all-time-favourite Ray Harryhausen monsters.

The Cyclops in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

With its single eye, horn, squashed nose and fang-filled maw, the Cyclops in Harryhausen’s original Sinbad movie was a Satanic-looking thing. During the scene where he lashed one of Sinbad’s crew to a spit and started to roast him over a fire, I seem to remember him licking his lips with hungry anticipation. So evil did the Cyclops seem, in fact, that my ten-year-old self was quite pleased when Sinbad (Kerwin Matthews) finally thrust a flaming torch into his eye and blinded him, and then the bastard plunged over a cliff edge to his death.

Talos in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Everybody raves about the fight with the skeletons at this film’s climax, which is indeed spectacular. But it’s the earlier episode on the Isle of Bronze where the massive statue of Talos comes to life and goes lumbering after the crew of the Argo that’s my favourite part of the film. In particular, the moment where Talos awakens is wonderful. Hercules stands with the supposedly lifeless and inanimate Talos looming high in the background – but suddenly Talos’s head creaks around to look at him. It’s the stuff that childhood nightmares are made of. But I mean that in a good way.

Gwangi in The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

“Not as good as The Valley of Gwangi,” was my disappointed reaction after watching Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993. The earlier film, which has cowboys discovering a lost valley in Mexico where prehistoric life has somehow survived to the present day, was originally an unrealised project by Harryhausen’s mentor Willis O’Brien. The scene where the cowboys, on horseback, manage to lasso an allosaurus — the Gwangi of the title — is a brilliant cinematic moment that’s been stuck in my head ever since.

Kali in Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

The second of the Sinbad movies has John Philip Law in the title role. He’s up against a villainous sorcerer, played by Tom Baker, who was subsequently picked to play Doctor Who on the strength of his performance here. Baker’s villain, like Harryhausen himself, specialises in bringing inanimate objects to life. In the film’s best scene, he animates a statue of the many-armed Hindu Goddess Kali, equips her with half-a-dozen swords and sends her into battle with Sinbad and his men like a giant, whirling lawnmower of death.

Medusa in Clash of the Titans (1981)

Clash of the Titans was Harryhausen’s final film and also one of his most underrated. Indeed, I’ve read that the hostile reviews given to Clash were one reason why he decided to retire at this time. (“An unbearable bore of a film,” bitched Variety, “that will probably put to sleep the few adults stuck taking the kids to it.”) Actually, in the years since, it’s become one of his best-remembered pictures and a little while ago it was remade, though inevitably with loads of crap CGI. Its highlight is the scene where Perseus blunders into Medusa’s darkened lair, which is grotesquely populated by the figures of her turned-to-stone victims, and tries to outwit the serpent-haired, serpent-tailed and asthmatic-sounding monster. And with that memorably scary sequence, the great Ray Harryhausen bowed out of film-making.