All the rage

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© DNA Films / Fox Searchlight Pictures

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 2)

 

© Penguin

 

One nice thing that’s happened to me during the past couple of years has been my discovery of how good a writer Daphne du Maurier was.  I’d long been aware of her reputation, but until recently the only thing I’d read by her was her famous short story The Birds (1952).

 

However, I have lately rectified this by working my way through her best-known novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951), as well as her short-story collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories (1971).   Regarding the collection, I didn’t think its title story was quite as good as the famous film it inspired, also called Don’t Look Now, in 1973 – but I thought some of the other stories in it, like A Border Line Case and The Way of the Cross, were crackers.

 

Now I’ve just completed another book of du Maurier’s short fiction called The Blue Lenses and Other Stories, which was originally published in 1959 as The Breaking Point.  I’m happy to report that the tales in it are every bit as satisfying.

 

Much of the Don’t Look Now collection had a common theme, that of English people travelling abroad and having problems – by turns humorous, serious and horrible – as they leave their comfort zones and encounter the new and the strange.  This theme reappears in a couple of stories in the The Blue Lenses one.  Ganymede even uses the basic scenario of Don’t Look Now itself, i.e., an English visitor coming unstuck in Venice.  The tale, though, isn’t a macabre one but a painful comedy of errors.  An older gay Englishman lusts after a teenage Venetian waiter and gets his comeuppance from the lad’s shady relatives, who happily lead him on whilst milking him of his money.  Ganymede has a few uncomfortable moments where you wonder if it’s being anti-gay or, alternatively, anti-Italian.  But du Maurier – herself believed to have had a lesbian relationship with Gertrude Lawrence – gets away with it, balancing our sympathy for the pathetically naïve Englishman with our satisfaction at him getting his just deserts from the Italians.  For all his pitifulness, he is still a predator.

 

The Chamois has an English couple travelling to some far-flung Greek mountains because the man, obsessed with hunting the goat-antelopes of the title, has been tipped off about the sighting of a notable and shootable specimen there.  To get to the peaks that are its territory, they entrust themselves to the care of a goatherd-cum-mountain-guide with a primordial appearance.  The woman, narrating the story, describes him as “wrapped in his hooded burnous, leaning upon his crook…” with “the strangest eyes…  Golden brown in colour…”  There follows a series of psychological revelations about the couple.  The man hunts to make up for inadequacies in his psyche and the woman, shall we say, is simultaneously turned off and turned on by his hobby.  And a weird, almost mythical narrative unfolds wherein they find it harder and harder to distinguish between the beast they’re seeking and man-beast who’s escorting them.

 

Similar weirdness occurs in the stories The Pool and The Lordly Ones – the former about a pubescent girl staying at her grandparents’ country house and experiencing strange dreams involving a pond in the woods beyond the garden, the latter about a misunderstood mute child who runs off with some unidentified ‘beings’ who come in the night while he and his family are holidaying on a remote moor.  Both contain dashes of W.B. Yeats-style mysticism and Arthur Machen-style folk horror and are among the best stories in the book, even if in The Lordly Ones I saw the ending coming a mile away.

 

The remaining stories are admirably varied.  The Menace is a comedy with a slight science-fictional element, about a movie heartthrob called Barry Jeans who sets hearts aflutter by communicating as few words and expressing as little emotion as possible onscreen.  Offscreen he’s not much more vocal or expressive and listlessly leaves all decisions to his bossy wife and his sizeable entourage of hangers-on.  Then some new technology ushers in ‘the feelies’, which promise to be as game-changing for the film industry as the arrival of ‘the talkies’.  In the feelies, film stars are wired to a machine that transmits their sexual energy – what Austen Powers would call their ‘mojo’ – to the audiences watching them in the cinemas.  Barry’s entourage are horrified when preliminary tests suggest that the inscrutable star’s mojo is almost non-existent.  So, they embark on a drastic campaign to pep that mojo up.  The Menace sees du Maurier taking the mickey out of Hollywood and I suspect it might have been inspired by some unedifying experiences with the place – for example, she was sued for breach of copyright after Rebecca was made into a film in 1939.

 

The Alibi is the collection’s most twisted tale, about a well-to-do and respectable man who one day seemingly flips: “He was aware of a sense of power within.  He was in control.  He was the master-hand that set the puppets jiggling.”  He walks away from the routines, conventions and obligations of his upper-middle-class existence, invents a new identity for himself and secretly rents a room in a seedy part of London.  Initially, he plans to commit murder – but his Nietzschean madness subsides somewhat and instead he starts living a parallel life as an aspiring artist, using the room as his studio.  But his project gets knocked for six when the story reaches an unexpected and nasty conclusion.

 

Different again is The Archduchess, an exercise in magical realism.  It describes the final days of a ruling dynasty in a Ruritanian microstate called Ronda, somewhere in southern Europe, which has discovered the secret of immortality.  It’s difficult to know where du Maurier’s sympathies lie here.  Is she writing in favour of the dynasty and, by extension, of aristocracies and the status quo everywhere?  Or is she satirising it?  One thing I will say – her account of a devious revolutionary named Markoi, who edits the main newspaper and uses it to seed the minds of the population with doubts, suspicions and eventual paranoia, so as to engineer the downfall of the ruling order, strikes a chord today.  Markoi seems all too familiar in a modern world of fake news, where Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News helped propel Donald Trump into the American presidency and, in Britain, the Barclay Brothers’ Daily Telegraph did something similar with Boris Johnson.

 

Finally there’s the title story, The Blue Lenses, which I found terrifying.  Its set-up is a familiar one, about a woman in a hospital recovering from an eye operation who discovers that things suddenly aren’t as they’re supposed to be.  But unlike the hero in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), who removes the bandages from his eyes and finds that the world really has gone to hell, the nightmare experienced by the heroine of The Blue Lenses is ambiguous.  The surreal, if not grotesque things she sees have a subjective quality and you wonder about her sanity.  What makes the story more effective is her decision to pretend to the hospital staff around her that nothing is amiss, while she tries to figure out what’s happening.  Her desperate efforts to stay composed heighten the horror of the situation.

 

As a collection, The Blue Lenses and Other Stories ticks off the checklist of things I want to find in a collection of short fiction: clear, lucid prose, plenty of incident, a variety of tones and genres, the writer’s willingness to use their imagination whether the story is grounded in reality or not, and a commitment at all times to telling an entertaining yarn.  It’s another package of du Maurier marvelousness.

 

From famousauthors.org

Cinematic heroines 1: Barbara Shelley

 

© Hammer Film Productions / Warner-Pathé Distributors

 

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.

 

© Hammer Film Productions / Warner-Pathé Distributors

 

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.

 

© Hammer Film Productions / Columbia

 

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!”

 

© Hammer Film Productions / Seven Arts Productions

 

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 4th 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.

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Detours into dystopia

 

© Polaris Productions / Hawk Films / Warner Bros.

 

The world is in a dystopian condition at the moment.  It’s being ravaged by a deadly virus that’s especially rampant in countries run by authoritarian, anti-science, right-wing clowns like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro (and not forgetting the UK’s own right-wing pipsqueak Boris Johnson).  Meanwhile, propelled by manmade climate change, temperatures continue their remorseless rise.  Much of Australia was in flames at the start of this year while the recent record-breaking heat in the Arctic Circle indicates that ecological catastrophe could be bearing down on us rather sooner than we’d expected.

 

I feel glad that I’m a big fan of dystopian fiction.  I’ve read so many books set in dystopian futures over the decades that now, when I actually find myself living in the dystopia of 2020, I don’t feel in the least bit surprised.  None of this came as a nasty shock for me.

 

I’ve also been thinking about dystopian fiction recently because I’m currently halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994), which as its title suggests takes place in an authoritarian society where memory itself is policed.  Gradually, everyday items like flowers, perfume and photographs are deleted physically, from people’s everyday existences, and mentally, from their memories.  As the world loses its precious details and becomes drabber and greyer, the body enforcing these deletions, the Memory Police of the title, becomes ever-more oppressive.  I don’t know if Ogawa will manage to keep this premise interesting for the novel’s full 274 pages, but so far I’ve been impressed.

 

I’ve thought about it too because of the death last month of French author Jean Raspail, known for his apocalyptic novel The Camp of the Saints (1973).  I haven’t read Camp and don’t intend to, because from all accounts it’s the nightmare fantasy of an ultra-right-wing, ultra-Catholic, ultra-privileged white French male and is a bucket of racist slime.  Let me quote from its synopsis on Wikipedia.  Camp depicts France being swamped by a tidal wave of immigrants from India, who have names like ‘the turd eater’, have ‘monstrously deformed’ children, indulge in public fornication, are ‘filthy’ and ‘brutish’ and ‘flout laws, do not produce and murder French citizens’.  They’re aided and abetted in their takeover of France by lefty aid workers, journalists, politicians, ‘charities, rock stars and major churches’.   Needless to say, the book is much admired by the likes of Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen.  I only hope that, before he croaked, Raspail took a look at the rankings of the world’s strongest economies.  Because he would find that India, source of his racistly sub-human bogeymen in Camp, is now in fifth place, which is two places above his precious France.    Maybe one day an Indian author will write a reply to Camp, in which an affluent India is invaded by hordes of starving, third-world Frenchmen.

 

Anyway, all this has set me thinking.  If I had to name my favourite dystopian novels, what would they be?

 

© Penguin Books

 

I’d better start by defining my terms.  By dystopian fiction I mean a story set in a society that’s gone seriously off the rails, either because of hellish political oppression of some sort, or because of a natural or man-made cataclysm that’s turned life into a scramble for survival.  It has to be set at least a little way into the future, not in the present.  And there’s the issue of location.  The horribleness described in a proper dystopian story, for me, has to be widespread, if not global.  Therefore, books like William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954) or J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (1975), where the societal breakdown takes place respectively on an island and in a tower block, don’t qualify because they’re too localised in scale.

 

I will also disqualify novels where the setting for the story is pretty grim, but that’s all the dystopian element is – a setting, a backdrop against which the plot takes place.  We gets glimpses of bad stuff in the background, but we’re more interested in the narrative and in the psychology of the characters.  So for that reason I will exclude William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).  In a proper dystopian story, the world is in an awful state and that state has to be at the forefront, so vivid that it becomes an important character itself in the story, if not the most important character.

 

And I will leave out novels where, yes, present-day society has met its nemesis and collapsed, presumably bloodily and destructively, but where the narratives take place so far in the future that they feel like fantasy or fairy stories.  The settings are so distant and fantastical that there’s little or no link with our own world, and the reader isn’t disturbed by the thought of what happened to civilisation between now and then.  So that means H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962) are both out.

 

I’ve seen lists of dystopian novels that include ones set in alternative universes, like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).  But I’m excluding them too because, for me, a properly effective dystopian novel has to take place in a universe that’s recognisably our own one.  The thought, “This could happen to me or to my children, grandchildren or descendants” has to be prominent in the reader’s mind.

 

Finally, I’ve left out Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) because, although it’s set in a future New York that’s largely underwater thanks to global warming, and although it impressed me with its scale and ambition, I found it a bit too hopeful to qualify.  To hit the required nerve, dystopian fiction has to be depressing and pessimistic.  There’s no room on my list for nice dystopian fiction.  Sorry, Kim.

 

© Vintage Books

 

Right.  I’ve just disqualified nine or ten commonly cited classics of dystopian fiction.  Is there anything left to go on my list?  Well, actually, there is.  I’d have liked to present an alliteration-friendly number of titles, such as a ‘top ten’ or a ‘dystopian dozen’ or a ‘first fifteen’, but I’ve ended up with sixteen.  These are:

 

Greybeard (1964) by Brian Aldiss.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood.

Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood.

The Drowned World by (1962) J.G. Ballard.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.

A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess.

The Death of Grass (1956) by John Christopher.

Make Room!  Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison.

Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley.

Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing

The Iron Heel (1907) by Jack London.

I am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson.

The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy.

1984 (1949) by George Orwell.

Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) by Christopher Priest.

Day of the Triffids by (1951) John Wyndham.

 

A few books that are regarded as classics of dystopian writing aren’t on the list because, simply, I haven’t read them yet.  They include P.D. James’s Children of Men (1992), about a near-future world where mass sterility means that no children are being born and society is destabilising as the population ages.  A similarly-themed book is on the list, though, Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard, which takes the scenario further and imagines a future England where nobody is under 50, nature is quickly wiping out traces of human civilisation and the oldsters are finding it increasingly hard to distinguish reality from senility-induced fantasy.  Actually, the sci-fi writer Adam Roberts, who wrote the introduction to my copy of Greybeard, reckons it’s a better novel than the more acclaimed Children of Men.

 

© Signet Books

 

Some of my inclusions are predictable – Orwell, Huxley, Burgess, McCarthy.  Meanwhile, Margaret Atwood is the only person on the list with two entries, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, so Madge is officially the Queen of Dystopian Literature as far as I’m concerned.  I was tempted to include a couple of J.G. Ballard’s other works like The Drought (1964) and The Crystal World (1966), but I opted for The Drowned World because it’s the first and most famous of his surreal, psychological and hallucinogenic novels set during or after a global catastrophe.  And irrespective of their individual merits, The Drought and The Crystal World do feel like variations on a Ballardian theme.  Whereas with Atwood, the nastily patriarchal and reactionary society envisioned in The Handmaid’s Tale and the ecological disaster zone described in Oryx and Crake are two very different creations.

 

Many people would argue that Richard Matheson’s I am Legend is actually a horror novel, a vampire one, but the apocalyptic plague Matheson describes is given a scientific rationale; so it could happen, just about.  It was also a massive influence on George A. Romero’s zombie movies, which in turn gave rise to the zombie-apocalypse trope that’s now a major sub-genre of dystopian fiction, TV and cinema.

 

Nowadays it’s fashionable to knock Day of the Triffids because of the middle-class cosiness of its characters.  Their personalities manage to remain decent, upstanding and Radio 4-ish even after 99% of the population have been blinded and giant, mobile, flesh-eating plants have invaded the streets.  And even some of Wyndham’s admirers might argue that The Chrysalids (1955) and The Kraken Wakes (1953), both of which feature dystopias of their own, are better books.  But I think Day of the Triffids deserves its place in the list because of its impact on popular culture.  The word ‘triffid’ has entered the English language.  I’ve heard it used to describe everything from a noxious-looking weed growing in somebody’s garden to the state of Helena Bonham Carter’s hair.

 

On the other hand, I’ve picked John Christopher’s The Death of Grass and Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island because they offer an antidote to Wyndham’s cosiness.  Both books have characters who start out as respectable middle-class English types whose personalities undergo a breakdown as violent and frightening as the disasters – a plague that destroys cereal crops in Death, a refugee crisis caused by a limited nuclear war in Fugue – rocking the societies around them.

 

One novel I feel really deserves its place on the list is Harry Harrison’s disturbing meditation on the dangers of human overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room!  It just annoys me when people compare Make Room with its 1973 film version, Soylent Green, and pontificate that the book isn’t as good because it doesn’t have the film’s two big gimmicks.  These are a euthanasia clinic, to which the character Sol (Edward G. Robinson in the film) goes when he decides that he can’t handle any more of the world’s ghastliness, and the film’s twist ending when it’s revealed that the mysterious foodstuff Soylent Green, a major component of the future human diet, is… people!  (You have to shout it in Charlton Heston’s voice.)

 

© Penguin Books

 

However, as Harrison pointed out, and unbeknownst to the filmmakers, euthanasia clinics and suicide machines are a bit of a cliché in science fiction.  (Not so long ago, I read Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, published back in 1895, and it had something called a ‘government lethal chamber’ in it.)  And Harrison had researched Make Room meticulously to make its apocalypse seem as realistic as possible, so he knew that the idea of humanity relying on industrialised cannibalism to survive wasn’t feasible.  Human beings don’t fatten up quickly and require a lot of feeding and looking after, so as a form of livestock to meet the world’s dietary needs, they’re economically a bad idea.  And as this study shows, they’re not even that rich in calories.

 

On the other hand, one novel that nearly didn’t make my list was Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor because it feels rather dated now.  The problem is that the feral kids and gangs of violent youths that populate the novel seem a bit, well, hippy-ish.  Sorry, Doris, but when I try to imagine a Mad Max-style dystopia I don’t normally see crowds of hippies running at me with chainsaws.  Of course, Memoirs was written in the early 1970s when memories of the Summer of Love, Woodstock, flower power, etc., were still fresh.  It’s a pity Lessing didn’t write it a couple of years later, after the much more dystopia-friendly punk rockers had appeared.  Still, I like the novel for its psychological depth, with the narrator escaping from the claustrophobic confines of her apartment by concentrating on a wall until she’s able to ‘pass through’ it into an imaginary realm.  And considering that dystopian novels are frequently dominated by male characters, it’s good to see one where female characters are at the forefront.

 

Incidentally, my brother, who works in the building industry, once told me that while he was attending a health-and-safety seminar about the dangers of asbestos, the speaker mentioned Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  He said that in 1953, as a publicity gimmick, the publisher Ballantine produced 200 numbered and signed copies of Fahrenheit 451 that were bound in asbestos.  The joke was that in a future society where are books had to be burned, these 200 copies of the novel couldn’t be burned.  Obviously, at the time, people were unaware of the links between asbestos and lung cancer.

 

Now that sounds like a truly dystopian book – one that tells a story about a totalitarian future society whilst having the power to induce a dystopian-style breakdown inside the reader’s body.

 

© Ballantine Books

 

This is an updated version of an entry that first appeared on this blog in July 2014.