Nigel Kneale – Blood and Porridge

October 6, 2023October 19, 2023

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 1)

© Penguin Books

As Halloween is approaching, here’s a reposting of something I once wrote about the novella that inspired one of the greatest horror movies of all time – Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 tale Don’t Look Now, turned into the Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name two years later. And there’s mention of some other disquieting stories by her too.

I have a tiny sliver of a connection with Daphne du Maurier, the popular 20^th century English writer responsible for novels like Jamaica Inn (1936) and Rebecca (1938) and short stories like The Birds (1952) and Don’t Look Now (1971). When I was at college in the 1980s, I knew her great-nephew very slightly. Actually, I was better acquainted with her great-nephew’s flatmate and a few times, because of him, I visited their apartment. Its walls were slathered with pictures of George Michael and Andrew Ridgely from the then-massive pop duo Wham, cut out of popular teen magazines of the time like Smash Hits and No 1. I assume the young du Maurier and his flatmate had stuck up these pictures in an attempt to appear ironic. Unfortunately, it meant that thereafter when I saw his great-aunt’s name on the cover of a book, I couldn’t help but hear, by way of association, the irritatingly bouncy strains of such Wham pop-dance numbers as Club Tropicana (1983) or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984).

For a long time the only thing by Daphne du Maurier I’d read was The Birds (1952), a story that because of its remote Cornish setting feels even more claustrophobic and desperate than the North America-set film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. However, a while back, I got a chance to familiarise myself with more of her fiction when my partner gave me a copy of du Maurier’s 1971 collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories as a present.

A novella about a grieving English couple who’re taking a break in Venice when they’re approached by two strange women – one of whom claims to be a medium – and told that their dead daughter’s spirit is trying to warn them against danger, Don’t Look Now has been filmed too. Nicolas Roeg directed a movie version in 1973 and it’s now regarded as a classic, both as a horror film and as an example of Roeg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, which combined fragmented and elliptical narratives, haunting and recurrent images and scenes of violent and sexual intensity to unforgettable effect. Having seen the film several times over the years, I was keen to read the piece of fiction that’d inspired it.

My first impression when I started reading Don’t Look Now was that film and story felt like they belonged to different eras. The couple, John and Laura, seem more modern, liberated and chic in the film, though that may be because they were played by 1970s icons Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. On the page, John and Laura have an old-fashioned English starchiness and they try to get over their loss with stiff upper lips and a strained Keep Calm and Carry On cheerfulness. Also, the literary John and Laura are in Venice as tourists, so they seem less confident and more vulnerable. Their cinematic equivalents are there for work reasons – John is helping to restore a Venetian church – and thus know their way around better.

Then there’s the presentation of the story. Du Maurier’s novella is a briefer and more economical account of the events I was familiar with from the film. As it stands, it could easily have been made into a 45-minute TV play. (The film clocks in at 110 minutes.) It begins in Venice with John and Laura encountering the medium. The death of their daughter, by meningitis, is mentioned retrospectively. And the suggestion that the dead girl’s spirit is urging them to leave the city before something terrible happens feels like a simple device to kick-start the main story – wherein John doesn’t leave Venice, through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and further supernatural shenanigans; and then, when he tries to intervene in what he thinks is the mistreatment of a child, something terrible does happen.

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

The movie opens with a harrowing sequence showing the death of John and Laura’s daughter – not by meningitis but by drowning in a pond in the English countryside. Roeg and his scriptwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant create a sense of a cosmic, all-encompassing evil at work. Even as the girl dies, everything that’s still to happen in Venice seems to be prefigured. We see John studying pictures of the Venetian church where he’ll be working and discovering a mysterious figure wearing a red coat in one of the slides. When he spills water onto the figure, its redness spreads across the slide like a bloodstain. John’s daughter is also wearing a red coat when she drowns and, later, so too is the child-figure John sees scarpering alongside the night-time Venetian waterways.

Indeed, in the film, John clearly makes a connection between the two characters thanks to the coat. Is the red-clad figure by the canals the ghost of his daughter? But this association doesn’t appear in the original novella.

Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now is efficiently gripping. But I think Nicolas Roeg’s brooding cinematic version, spinning a web of portents, visions and uncanny coincidences in which John’s doom seems pre-ordained from the start, is better – a work of art. That’s despite the fact that, by changing the girl’s death from meningitis to drowning, the film can be accused of illogicality. As the website British Horror Films observes pithily: “If tragedy has struck and drowned your daughter, why go to a place with an excess of water?”

Actually, with Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, I preferred a couple of those ‘other stories’ to the title one. And interestingly, nearly all of them share a similar theme, in that they deal with English people going abroad and coming unstuck as they leave their cultural comfort zones.

Not After Midnight is about an amateur artist taking a holiday in Crete to do some landscape painting. In a manner reminiscent of the hero of John Fowles’s novel The Magus (1965), he encounters a strange man and becomes embroiled in some equally-strange activities touching upon ancient Greek myths. However, while Fowles’s novel is an airy and exuberant affair where a Prospero-like figure orchestrates spectacular and elaborate ‘masques’, Not After Midnight is altogether grungier. The man putting the events in motion is a drunken, debauched brute and, accordingly, the myths invoked concern “Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who, unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, reared Dionysus, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion.” Du Maurier doesn’t say explicitly what bacchanalian depravities her hero finally succumbs to; but as he’s a teacher at a posh English boys’ school, we can guess.

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

In A Border Line Case, a young woman who works as a theatre actress tries to honour the dying wish of her father. She goes in search of her father’s long-lost best friend, to tell him that her father had wanted to “shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.” She finds the missing friend in the Republic of Ireland, living as a recluse on an island, mysteriously lording it over a cohort of local men, and engaged in activities that are probably illegal and possibly weird. Unlike the hapless protagonists in the other stories, the heroine here is a resourceful type. She uses her skills as an actress to improvise, hide her identity and talk her way out of tight spots. However, when at one point she suspects she’s stumbled across a secret society of homosexuals (“They were all homos… It was the end. She couldn’t bear it…”), you feel surprised that a theatre actress should be so wary and intolerant of gay men. Still, A Border Line Case is well-paced and balanced nicely between an adventure story and a mystery one. It builds up impressively to a nasty, if slightly predictable ending.

The book’s most humorous story is The Way of the Cross, about a group of disparate English tourists making their way to and then around Jerusalem. The characters and plot seem slightly contrived at times. It’s unlikely that a progressive left-wing lady who’s worried about the plight of the Palestinians should be married to a hard-nosed right-wing businessman. Also, a climax where two characters are stricken by unconnected illnesses and a third one suffers a serious accident stretches credibility. Nonetheless it’s an enjoyably satirical account of English folk abroad.

The final story, The Breakthrough, is the exception to the rule. Its engineer hero doesn’t leave England for another country, although he is posted to the desolate flatlands and beaches of East Anglia. There, an ambitious experiment is underway in a scientific / military laboratory, ostensibly involving computers, but really about capturing a psychic energy that surrounds people when they’re alive and escapes when they die. The Breakthrough’s blending of the scientific and the supernatural calls to mind the famously frightening TV play The Stone Tape (1973), written by Nigel Kneale. Bravely, du Maurier opts for a non-sensational ending that prioritises character over action or horror. Admittedly, some readers might find that ending a bit of a let-down.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed reading Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, because of the author’s precise and no-nonsense prose, her ability to pack a lot of incident into her narratives without letting them get too convoluted, and her determination at all times to tell a rattling good yarn.

Indeed, on the strength of this, I’m now starting to think of Daphne du Maurier as being in the mould of Stephen King – and not so much in connection with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely. Yes, better the author of The Running Man (1982) than the authors of I’m your Man (1986).

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

Expect more on Daphne du Maurier very soon…

October 29, 2021October 29, 2021

Horror before it got panned

© Pan Books

One more horror-themed reposting just before Halloween…

Michael Gove, well-known cokehead, Aberdonian nightclub boogie-king and England’s Education Minister from 2010 to 2014, would be disappointed in me. When I was a lad, my usual reading material was not the likes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which in 2013 Gove famously said he wanted to see the nation’s youth reading.

Rather, when I was 11, 12 or 13, I commonly had my nose stuck in works by such authors as Sven Hassel, James Herbert and Guy N. Smith, meaning that I didn’t become conversant in the effects of the Great Reform Act of 1832 or in the gradual diminution of the ideals of Dorothea Brooke, which Eliot wrote about in her 1871-1872 masterpiece. I did, however, end up learning a lot about German Panzer divisions wreaking bloody havoc on the Russian front during World War II, about chemical weapons leaking out of military laboratories in the form of thick swirling fogs and driving all who come in contact with them murderously insane, and about giant mutant crabs going on the rampage and eating people. Knowing such things prepared me a lot for adult life.

I also spent a lot of time reading, in the form of tatty paperbacks that in the school playground and on the school bus were constantly borrowed, read, returned, borrowed again and read again, a series called The Pan Book of Horror Stories. The first of this series had been published in 1959, under the editorship of the strikingly named Herbert Van Thal, a literary agent, publisher and author whom the critic John Agate had once likened to ‘a sleek, well-groomed dormouse’. The first few volumes of horror stories that Van Thal edited for Pan Books consisted largely of classical stories from well-known horror writers and more ‘mainstream’ (whatever that means) writers who’d dabbled in the genre; and their quality was generally held to be high.

By the late 1960s, however, Van Thal was filling each new compilation with more and more stories from new writers, many of whom were taking advantage of a more permissive era to see what they could get away with in terms of violence, gore and general unpleasantness. Serious horror writers and fans became quite sniffy about the books. Ramsey Campbell, Britain’s most acclaimed living horror writer, has said: “I did like the first one when I was 13 years old, but I thought the series became increasingly illiterate and disgusting and meritless.”

When my schoolmates and I started reading them in the 1970s, the latest editions of The Pan Book of Horror Stories were low in literary quality but high in disgusting-ness, which suited our jaded, beastly little minds fine. I’m still psychologically scarred by Colin Graham’s The Best Teacher in the ninth collection, which was about a psychopath who decides to write a manual for aspiring horror writers, instructing them in what dismemberment, disembowelment and various acts of torture really look and sound like. To this end, he kidnaps a horror writer and starts dismembering, disembowelling and torturing him whilst recording everything with a camera and tape recorder. Anyone who thinks that the horror sub-genre of ‘torture-porn’ began with Eli Roth’s movie Hostel in 2005 ought to check out Graham’s grubby epic from a few decades earlier.

© Pan Books

To be fair, the later Pan collections did feature then-up-and-coming, now-well-regarded writers like Tanith Lee, Christopher Fowler and, ahem, Ian McEwan. However, by the 1980s (and after Van Thal’s death), the series was clearly on its last legs. It resorted to ransacking Stephen King’s famous anthology Nightshift (1978) and reprinting stories like The Graveyard Shift, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man. This was unwise, since anybody inclined to read the Pan horror series had probably read Nightshift already. The final volume, the thirtieth, had a very limited print run and if you ever lay your hands on a copy, it’s probably worth a lot as a collector’s item.

A while ago in a second-hand bookshop I discovered a copy of The First Pan Book of Horror Stories. This, alas, was unlikely to be sought by book collectors, since the copy looked like something had chewed, swallowed, partly-digested and regurgitated it. At least it was still readable, so I got a chance to sample the original instalment in this famous, or infamous, series. I was curious to know if it deserved the praise Ramsey Campbell had given it and also to see how different it was from the more disreputable stuff that came later.

My first impression was that the stories in this collection weren’t how I’d have organised them. I’ve heard writers whose works were printed in the later Pan books grumble about Van Thal’s abilities as an editor, and it’s hard to see why stories as similar as Hester Holland’s The Library and Flavia Richardson’s Behind the Yellow Door (both about hapless young women who are hired as private secretaries by older, plainly-batty women and who meet gruesome fates), or Oscar Cook’s His Beautiful Hands and George Fielding Eliot’s The Copper Bowl (both about exotic, grotesque revenges and tortures inflicted by East Asian people – at least one of them struck me as racist) should end up in the same book. In fact, Eliot’s story follows immediately after Cook’s, thanks to Van Thal’s strange policy of arranging the stories by the alphabetical order of their authors’ surnames.

I also noticed how stories I’d read elsewhere and greatly enjoyed in my youth now, sadly, seem a bit duff. I loved Hazel Heald’s The Horror in the Museum when I read it as a 13-year-old. Heald, incidentally, wrote it under the tutelage of H.P. Lovecraft, whose influence is obvious in the ornate prose-style. However, a modern rereading suggests that Heald (and Lovecraft) could’ve cut the story’s length by about 20 pages without losing any of its plot points.

Meanwhile, Bram Stoker’s The Squaw, another tale I had fond memories of, seems much poorer now thanks to one of its characters being an American tourist called Elias P. Hutchinson. If Hutchinson was what Stoker believed all Americans sounded like, spewing toe-curling things like ‘I du declare’ and ‘I say, ma’am’ and ‘this ole galloot’ and ‘durned critter’, I can only say that Stoker needed to go out and do some research. Still, despite some glaringly obvious failings, both The Horror in the Museum and The Squaw benefit from having cracking denouements.

From wikipedia.org

The Horror in the Museum is one of the few stories in the collection that contains a monster. (And what a monster it is: “globular torso… bubble-like suggestion of a head… three fishy eyes… foot-long proboscis… bulging gills… monstrous capillation of asp-like suckers… six sinuous limbs with their black paws and crab-like claws…”). Apart from The Kill by Colonel Peter Fleming, a werewolf story penned by none other than Ian Fleming’s older brother, the rest of the stories are fairly monster-free, depending on psychological terrors for their impact. Indeed, C.S. Forester’s The Physiology of Fear is a horror story in an unusually literal sense. It deals with a particularly horrific episode in human history, the Nazi concentration camps. It also features a German scientist engaged in research, with the Third Reich’s support and with prisoners from the camps as his guinea pigs, into the emotion of horror as it arises in the human psyche. And the story’s ending isn’t conventionally horrific. Instead, the scientist is ensnared in an ironic and satisfying twist worthy of Roald Dahl.

Also not a horror story in any conventional sense is Muriel Spark’s The Portobello Road. It qualifies as a ghost story, but most of all it’s a mediation on the nature of friendship as it survives, or doesn’t survive, from childhood into adulthood. This being Spark – whose most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie, was simultaneously a prim middle-class Edinburgh schoolmistress and a fascist – the story has a bitter, vinegary flavour. None of its characters are particularly pleasant and none seem to deserve long-term friendship. In fact, the one character who tries to keep those friendships alive is the one who, ultimately, commits the story’s single, shocking act of violence.

Meanwhile, I reacted to the sight of Jack Finney’s Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket as if an old friend had suddenly hoven into view. Not that I’d encountered this particular story before, but it conjured up fond memories of American writers like Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont, who in the 1950s seemed to keep their rents paid by pumping out short stories for the likes of Playboy magazine and TV scripts for the likes of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960-62). In admirably direct and diamond-hard prose, their tales would detail the world turning suddenly and inexplicably weird for citizens of conformist post-war America, for both dutiful suburban wives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses and office-bound men in grey-flannel suits.

From fictionunbound.com

Finney, most famous as the author of the sci-fi horror novel The Body Snatchers (1955), which has been filmed four times and shows conformity taken to a nightmarish extreme, starts his story thus: “At the little living room table Tom Benecke rolled two sheets of flimsy and a heavier top sheet, carbon paper sandwiched between them, into his portable.” A half-dozen pages later, events have lured Benecke away from his portable typewriter and embroiled him in a vertiginous life-or-death struggle just outside his apartment window. It calls to mind the Stephen King short story The Ledge, another one that appeared in his collection Nightshift. I doubt if the similarity between the two stories is a coincidence, King being a big admirer of work from this era of American story-telling.

Also deserving mention are Oh Mirror, Mirror, a claustrophobic item penned by the great Nigel Kneale; Raspberry Jam, Angus Wilson’s poisonous take on the snobbery of old people who no longer have anything to be snobbish about; and Serenade for Baboons, a colonial horror by Noel Langley.

Inevitably, a couple of clunkers find their way into the book too. Anthony Vercoe’s Flies wouldn’t be such a bad story if the writer hadn’t swamped his prose with exclamation marks. I can’t remember encountering so many of the damned things in ten pages of prose before and the result is almost unreadable. Meanwhile, The House of Horror is one of a series of short stories that American pulp writer Seabury Quinn wrote about a psychic investigator called Jules de Grandin. De Grandin is French and seemingly meant to be a supernatural version of Hercule Poirot (who, I know, was actually Belgian). Unfortunately, Quinn gives him a patois that is as cringe-inducing as Elias P. Hutchinson’s Americanisms in The Squaw: “Sang du diable…! Behold what is there, my friend… Parbleu, he was caduo – mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken!”

On the whole, though, I found The First Pan Book of Horror Stories a rewarding read. I now look forward to tracking down the other, earlier instalments in the series – those ones that came out before Herbert Van Thal decided to crank up the levels of nasty, schlocky stuff, in order to satisfy the blood-crazed savages amongst his reading public.

Blood-crazed savages such as my twelve-year-old self…

© Pan Books

January 10, 2021January 1, 2024

Cinematic heroines 1: Barbara Shelley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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