Robert Bloch – Blood and Porridge

September 18, 2024September 19, 2024

Mither

Today, September 18^th, is the tenth anniversary of 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence. Yes, a decade has now passed since the Scottish electorate voted, by a majority of 55% to 45%, in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom.

In the referendum’s aftermath, I was inspired to write a short story entitled Mither. This poked fun at a narrative peddled by the mainstream media that the referendum had turned Scotland into a bitterly divided country – parents, children, siblings who’d previously lived together in harmony suddenly transformed into rabid yes-sers and no-ers who were at each other’s throats, families in turmoil, that sort of thing. It also paid homage to a classic and highly influential movie. Needless to say, the story was too weird and too daft to ever get published.

However, ten years on, I thought I would take advantage of the occasion and post it here. I now give you… Mither.

© Labour for Independence / From wikipedia.org

I must have dozed while I sat in the office and read the literature that’d landed on our porch floor that morning. I hadn’t heard her go out. I only heard the porch door scrape open and shut as she came back.

‘Mither,’ I said when she entered the office. ‘You were outside.’

She settled into the armchair with the tartan-patterned cushions that’d been her seat – her throne, we called it – when she ran the business by herself. Now that I was mostly in charge, I had my own seat in the office but I kept the throne there should she want to use it. She smoothed her skirt across her knees. She was a modern-minded woman – at times too modern-minded because she had some ideas you’d expect more in a giddy teenager – but she avoided trousers and stuck to old-fashioned long skirts. ‘Aye, Norrie. I’ve been out and about.’

I didn’t like the sound of that but before I could quiz her she leaned forward from the throne and took the leaflet out of my hand. ‘What’s this you’re reading? Don’t say they’ve shovelled more shite through our door.’

It pained me to hear her genteel voice soiled by coarse language. But I stayed patient. ‘It’s actually interesting, Mither. It’s an interview with a normal young couple, a professional young couple, about what might happen if the referendum result is…’ I searched for a word that’d cause minimum offence. ‘Unexpected.’

Mither sighed and her eyes swivelled up in their sockets.

‘Now I ken you’re sceptical, Mither. But they seem decent. He’s called Kenneth and she’s called Gina. And they’re worried about the effect independence would have on them.’

Mither’s eyes swivelled down again. Then I saw them twitch from side to side while they scanned the text on the leaflet.

I pressed on. ‘It wouldn’t have a good effect, Mither. It’d be bad for them.’ Why did my voice tremble? Why was I afraid? ‘The financial uncertainty. How would decent hardworking people like them – like me – cope if all the business fled south and the prices shot up? And the banks… Why, I read in the paper the other day about an expert who said the bank machines would stop dispensing cash if the vote was yes.’

‘Does,’ asked Mither, ‘this say what Kenneth does for a living?’

‘And even if we still have cash, Mither, what would our currency be? We won’t have the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls down in Westminster won’t allow it. We’ll have to make do with some banana-republic-type currency. Or worse, the euro!’

‘Norrie,’ said Mither, ‘calm down. Does this leaflet actually say what Kenneth’s job is?’

‘Aye, of course it does.’ I faltered. ‘Well, no. Maybe it doesn’t.’

She sighed. ‘It certainly doesn’t, Norrie. And I’ll tell you why.’ She raised the leaflet so that I could see a picture of Kenneth, Gina and their children on it. She placed a fingertip against Kenneth. ‘It’s because he’s Kenneth Braithwaite, who’s one of our local councillors. One of our Conservative Party councillors. But that fact isn’t mentioned here. It pretends that he’s an ordinary unbiased person like you or me.’

I chuckled nervously. ‘Now Mither. I wouldn’t say you were unbiased.’

Mither rose from her throne. ‘I am unbiased. My mind’s open to facts and I form opinions and make decisions based on those facts. Facts, mind you. Not the propaganda, smears and scaremongering that’s poured out of the political, business and media establishments during the last year. Not the drivel that’s clogged and befuddled your impressionable young mind.’

Before I could reply, she tore the leaflet down the middle and returned it to my hands in two pieces. Then she hustled out of the office and shut the door behind her with enough force to make a stuffed owl wobble and almost fall off a nearby shelf. I heard her shoes go clacking up the stairs and then another door slam, presumably the one leading into her room.

I seethed. How I hated, how I loathed this referendum! Setting family members against one another day after day! I looked at the leaflet again and realised that by a creepy coincidence Mither had ripped it down the middle of the family-picture. Now Kenneth and a little boy occupied one half of it while Gina and a little girl were sundered and separate in the other half.

A family literally torn apart.

***

I hated the referendum but I couldn’t wait for the day of it, September 18^th, to come – and take place and be over with. The problem was that the time until then seemed to pass very slowly. And during this time it felt like a war of attrition was being waged against me. I grew more tired and depressed the longer those separatists raved in the media and on the streets and from the literature they popped through the slot in our porch door. A rash of yes stickers and posters spread along the windows in the street-fronts of our neighbourhood. Some of them even appeared on the houses of people I’d thought were decent and sensible.

I began to panic. God, could it happen? I had visions of the doors padlocked and the windows boarded up on the old family business and Mither and I living in poverty alongside hundreds of thousands of other suddenly-penniless Scots. While around us, food prices and fuel prices skyrocketed, the banks and financial companies whisked all their offices away to London, the housing market disappeared into a giant hole, the hospitals became like those in the developing world, and terrorist cells congregated in Glasgow and Edinburgh and prepared to attack England across the new border.

But worst of all was the madness this referendum campaign inspired in Mither.

She sensed when I was worn out. While I was napping, or nodding off behind the desk in the office, or slumped in a stupor in front of the TV, she’d leave her room and creep down the stairs and do things.

These might be wee things. If I wasn’t in the office, she might use the computer and I’d discover hours later that it was open at frightful separatist websites like Bella Caledonia or National Collective or Wings over Scotland. The day’s Scottish Daily Express might disappear from the kitchen table and turn up, scrunched into a ball, in the recycling bin in the corner. Or if the Express was left on the table, any photographs in it of Alistair Darling or George Osborne might have shocking words like tosser or bampot graffiti-ed across them in Mither’s curly handwriting.

More worrying was her tendency sometimes to sneak outdoors. It would’ve been bad enough in normal times because she was too old and frail to be wandering the streets alone. But in these dangerous times, who knew what she was up to and who she was associating with?

© National Collective / From Stirling Centre of Scottish Studies

The evidence disturbed me. When I visited her room I found a growing collection of things that she could only have acquired during trips outside – little Scottish saltire and lion-rampant flags, booklets of essays and poems written in support of independence, brochures for events with sinister titles like Imagi-Nation and Yestival, posters where the word can’t had the t scrawled out so that they read can instead. She’d amassed badges, stickers and flyers with the word yes emblazoned on them. What a disgusting-sounding word yes had become to me. I’d contemplate Mither and imagine that horrible word spurting from her lips –

‘Yes! Yes! Yes – !’

And she’d argue. Goodness me, what had got into the woman to make her so bloody-minded? In between quoting names of people I’d never heard of, but who were undoubtedly up to no good, like Gerry Hassan, David Greig and Lesley Riddoch, she’d taunt me mercilessly.

‘So go on. Tell me. Explain. Why can we not be independent?’

‘Because… We can’t! We just can’t! We’re too… too…’

‘Too wee?’

‘Aye! Well, no. Not that, not only that. We’re also…’

‘Too poor?’

‘Aye, that’s true, Scotland’s too poor to be independent. But the main reason is that we’re…’

‘Too stupid?’

‘Och stop it, Mither! Stop! You’re putting words in my mouth!’

‘But you agree with that basic proposition? Scotland can’t be independent because it’s too small, its economy’s too weak and its people aren’t educated enough?’ She sighed. ‘That’s what we’re up against. A mass of our fellow Scots, yourself included, brainwashed by the establishment into believing their own inferiority!’

I stormed out of the room at that point. What horrible people had she been talking to?

A few weeks before the referendum-day, her madness reached what I assumed was its peak. After the last guests had left the premises and after I’d washed and put away the breakfast things, I took the vacuum cleaner into the porch and started on the carpet there. It took me a minute to notice something odd about the rack on the porch wall where I stored leaflets about local attractions that our guests might be interested in: Rosslyn Chapel, Abbotsford, Traquair House, Melrose Abbey and so on. The leaflets in the rack had changed. The tourist ones had disappeared. In their place were different ones. Political ones.

© Women for Independence / From wikipedia.org

I put down the vacuum-hose and approached the rack. Crammed into it now were leaflets I’d seen in her room advertising those sinister-sounding events like Imagi-Nation and Yestival and other ones promoting the unsavoury websites she’d consulted on the computer like National Collective, Bella Caledonia and Wings over Scotland. Also there were leaflets for organisations with different but strangely-repetitive names: Women for Independence, Liberals for Independence, Polish for Independence, Asians for Independence, English for Independence, Farmers for Independence… One organisation, whose leaflets were merely sheets of photocopied and folded-up A4 paper, was even called Hoteliers for Independence.

I couldn’t help reading that Hoteliers for Independence leaflet. It ended with the exhortation, ‘Please contact Hoteliers for Independence for more information at…’ and gave an address. My insides turned cold as I read the address. I found myself pivoting around inside the porch and facing different internal doors that led to different parts of the guesthouse. I half-expected one door to have hanging on it a sign that said HOTELIERS FOR INDEPENDENCE – THIS WAY.

Then I peered up towards the first floor, where a certain bedroom was located, and lamented, ‘Oh, Mither.’

***

One afternoon, close to September 18^th, I woke from an unplanned doze at the desk in the office. I’d been dreaming. A voice in the dream had droned about – what else? – that ghastly referendum. Disconcertingly, back in the conscious world, the voice continued to talk to me. I realised it came from a shelf above me, where the radio was positioned between a stuffed gull and a stuffed pheasant. The radio was tuned in to a local station and the voice belonged to a newsreader. He was explaining that a politician, a Labour Party MP, was visiting our region today.

This MP had toured the high streets and town centres of Scotland lately. To get people’s attention he’d place a crate on the pavement, stand on top of the crate and deliver a speech from it. He’d speak bravely in favour of Great Britain and the Union of Parliaments and denounce the separatists and their vile foolish notions of independence. And I’d heard from recent news reports that the separatists hadn’t taken kindly to his tour. Well, as bullies, they wouldn’t. They’d gone to his speaking appearances with the purpose of heckling him and shouting him down.

Then the newsreader named the town the MP was due to speak in this afternoon. It was our town.

And immediately I felt uneasy because I realised I hadn’t seen or heard anything of Mither for the past while. I went upstairs and knocked on her door. There was no reply. The guesthouse was empty that afternoon and so I hung the BACK SOON sign in the porch-window, went out and locked the door after me. Then I headed for the middle of town.

It wasn’t hard to find where the Labour MP was speaking because of the hubbub. The MP seemed to have turned his microphone’s volume to maximum so that he could drown out the heckling and shouting from the separatists in his audience. I emerged from a vennel, onto the high street, and saw the crowd ahead of me. It contained fewer people than I’d expected. Some of them wore no badges and carried no placards – among them, I thought I glimpsed Kenneth and Gina from the brochure that Mither had ripped up – and some had badges and placards saying yes. Looming above everyone was the MP on his crate.

© Thomas Nugent / From wikipedia.org

The separatists present were trying to make themselves heard – without success, thanks to the MP’s bellowing voice and the amplification provided by the microphone. It wasn’t until I reached the edge of the small crowd that I could understand what they were saying.

‘Answer the question, Murphy!’

‘He won’t answer the question!’

‘Quit shouting, man, and answer the question for God’s sake!’

Then I saw a figure standing at the back of the crowd a few yards along from me. The figure wore a long flowing skirt, a woollen cardigan and a lacy Sunday bonnet that obscured its face. A handbag dangled from one of its elbows and a small egg carton was clasped in its hands. As I watched, the figure prised the lid off the carton, lifted one of the six eggs inside and stretched back an arm in readiness to throw it –

I rushed at her and shouted, ‘Mither! Oh my God!’

What happened next is confusing. I remember reaching her and knocking the carton from her hands so that eggs flew in all directions. I remember not being able to halt myself in time and crashing into her so that she fell and I fell too, on top of her. But then, somehow, I found myself lying alone on the ground. Mither had disappeared. She must’ve been sprightlier than I’d thought. She’d gathered herself up and hurried away and left me there.

One of the eggs had made its way into my right hand. Now it was a ruin of broken shell. Meanwhile, the yolks, whites and shell-pieces of other eggs formed a gelatinous mess on the front of my woollen cardigan.

Then I was being helped to my feet. Around me, I heard voices:

‘Who is it?’

‘Some auld lady.’

‘No, wait… Christ! It’s a man!’

‘It’s young Bates. You ken, Norrie Bates? Him that runs the Bates Bed and Breakfast?’

‘Why’s he togged out like that?’

Someone took my arm and led me away. Behind us, the MP, who seemed not to have noticed the commotion with Mither and me, kept roaring into his microphone. We turned a corner into a side-street and paused there. I identified the man steering me as Dougie Bremner, who was the proprietor of another B and B in the town, a few streets away from ours. He’d always seemed a gentle friendly type and it surprised me to see a yes badge stuck to his jacket lapel.

© Yes Scotland / From wikipedia.org

Dougie looked perplexed. He scanned me up and down as if my appearance was a puzzle he wanted to solve. ‘Norrie,’ he said at last. ‘I think you need to go home. As fast as you can manage.’

My head ached. Something was squeezing my skull, which in turn was squeezing my brain. I raised a hand and found my head enclosed in a lady’s bonnet. It exuded two ribbons that were knotted under my chin. In a final gesture of spite Mither must’ve fastened it on my head before she’d escaped. ‘Aye,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll go home.’

‘By the way,’ added Dougie, who seemed greatly troubled now. ‘How’s your mither? I haven’t seen her for a while.’

***

It was the morning of September 19^th. The radio had disappeared from the office and I guessed it’d travelled upstairs to Mither’s room and informed her of the result. Still, in case she hadn’t heard, I felt obliged to go to her room and let her know.

She looked very small, thin and frail as she huddled there amid the paraphernalia she’d acquired, the flags, placards, badges, posters, leaflets and booklets. On the floor around her, in a serpentine coil, there even lay a blue-and-white woollen scarf with a pair of knitting needles embedded in one unfinished end of it. That was another lark she’d been up to. Knitting for independence.

Because she looked so weak and unwell now, I understood that she knew. The result seemed to have drained the life from her, leaving her a husk.

But I repeated the news. ‘Mither. It’s a no.’

She didn’t answer. No sound came from her mouth, which was stretched back in a rictus – if I hadn’t known she was grimacing in pain and dismay, I’d have thought she was grinning. I looked into her eyes, trying to find a glimmer of acknowledgement for me, a spark of recognition that I was standing before her. But the eyes were blank and gaping, almost like they weren’t eyes at all but two dark holes.

And although I was relieved and delighted about the result, I suddenly and inexplicably felt as though a part of me was dead.

© Paramount Pictures / From tvtropes.org

With apologies to Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins. No apologies to Jim Murphy.

And tomorrow, on September 19^th, I’ll raise a glass to the memory of the late Charlie Massie, who cheered me up after the result ten years ago by taking me on a pub crawl in Delhi. Though it probably wasn’t wise to go into the bar in the British High Commission, where we ended up stuck at a table in front of a giant TV screen, showing the news, with a lengthy interview in progress with Boris Johnson. Bojo was spewing shite about how great it was that the Jocks had embraced the Union and all the benefits that went with it. Those future Union benefits would include Brexit and having him as Prime Minister.

October 19, 2023October 24, 2023

A Russell-ing in the dark

© Penguin Classics

Another post for Halloween…

Even if the American horror, science-fiction and mystery writer Ray Russell hadn’t done any writing, it’s likely he still would have had an impact on one of his preferred genres.

In the 1950s, after serving in the wartime US Air Force, studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and working for the United States Treasury, he became fiction editor for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine. Playboy was an odd combination of smutty pictures of hot ladies and seriously well-written stories and articles. The magazine’s detractors have dismissed this as a cynical ploy on Hefner’s part, propagating the idea that you could simultaneously be an unsavoury male lech and a connoisseur of the literary and intellectual. Hence, by perusing the latest fiction by Philip Roth or an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, its readers didn’t have to feel bad about jerking off to a picture of the Playmate of the Month a few pages earlier.

Whatever. During the 1950s, Russell must have kept many horror and fantasy writers, such as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, afloat by regularly buying their short works and printing them in Playboy‘s glossy – if sometimes ejaculation-splattered – pages. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, those guys had moved onto television and were writing scripts for shows like The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller (1960-62). (In Robert Bloch’s case, his 1959 novel Psycho also became something of a hit when it was adapted for the cinema screen by a chap called Alfred Hitchcock). These shows imprinted themselves on the DNA of the kids watching them, who occasionally grew up to be popular filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg, or popular novelists, like Stephen King.

In effect, indirectly, Russell helped cultivate an unsettling, mid-20^th-century American gothic. This was one in which the world suddenly and inexplicably turned dark and weird for the citizens of post-war, suburban America – for office-bound men in grey-flannel suits, dutiful housewives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses, wholesome kids playing behind white picket fences. And it’s one whose influence is still felt today.

But it’s Ray Russell the writer, rather than the editor, whom I want to discuss here. I’ve just read a collection of his short stories, first published in 1985 and now reprinted as a ‘Penguin Classic’, entitled Haunted Castles. Yes, I bet nobody working for Penguin Books back in 1985 imagined their prestigious publishing company would one day consider a book called Haunted Castles a ‘classic’. Its seven stories show Russell’s love for a different type of gothic fiction – the full-blooded, 19^th-century variety exemplified by such books as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1821), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Russell’s tales here take place in a world of wild, sparsely-populated mountains and forests, fearsome thunder-and-lightning storms, nightmarish coach-rides and remote settlements inhabited by superstitious villagers. And, as the collection’s title suggests, castles. Each one is a “vast edifice of stone” exuding “an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay.” In fact, four of these stories feature castles and they’re all equipped with torture chambers: “There stood the infernal rack, and branding irons and thumbscrews, and that grim table called in French peine forte et dure, whereon helpless wretches were constrain’d to lie under intolerable iron weights until the breath of life was press’d from them.”

Occupying the first two-thirds of the book are three novellas that are frequently regarded as a trilogy, though they don’t have anything in common apart from their gothic settings and trimmings and the fact that they have single-word, polysyllabic titles beginning with ‘s’: Sardonicus, Sagittarius and Sanguinarius.

© Columbia Pictures

Kicking off the proceedings is Sardonicus, Russell’s best-remembered story. It’s told in the first-person by a 19^th-century London physician called Sir Robert Cargrave, who specialises in treating muscular disorders. The title character summons him to – surprise! – his castle in ‘a remote and mountainous region of Bohemia’. Sardonicus suffered a nasty mishap in his youth. Following his father’s funeral, he discovered that prior to his death the old man had purchased a winning lottery ticket. Inconveniently, the ticket was pocketed in his burial clothes. The avaricious Sardonicus dug up his father to retrieve it, and claim the attendant fortune, but paid a hideous price. Seeing a terrifying death’s-head grin on his parent’s decaying face, he was so traumatised that his facial muscles froze and fixed his mouth in an identical, grotesque rictus. Now resembling a 19^th-century version of the Joker in Batman, he tasks Cargrave with finding a cure for his affliction.

Channelling Dracula with its setting and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909) with its disfigured central character, Sardonicus benefits from both an irresistible set-up and Russell’s knowingly-florid prose-style. Also, he manages to sustain the reader’s sympathy for Sardonicus despite it becoming clear early on that he’s an evil shit who probably got what he deserved. Sardonicus’s unfortunate wife is someone Cargrave once loved from afar, and the smiley-faced cad soon makes clear to the physician that unspeakable things will be done to her if he fails in his mission.

Meanwhile, Sagittarius and Sanginarius channel other macabre literary and historical characters. With Sagittarius, it’s the dual personage described in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), though the setting isn’t Victorian London but decadent fin-de-siecle Paris – well, Paris in 1909, to be exact. Russell has a lot of fun evoking the city’s simultaneously sophisticated and sleazy theatrical world at the time, though when the Jekyll-and-Hyde trope surfaces, it’s not difficult to guess how the story will end.

Sanguinarius focuses on Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious 16^th / 17^th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered girls and women, believing it was a beauty treatment that’d hold the ravages of old age at bay. Interestingly, Russell’s take on the legend depicts Bathory as, initially at least, an innocent victim. The goodness gets gradually squeezed out of her, and she becomes corrupted, by an evil entourage around her. Russell also downplays the idea that she bathed in blood to stay young. Rather, the slaughter is mostly fuelled by sheer badness, by the thrill of being ‘steep’d… in reeking devilish rites, and vilest pleasures… sharing both dark lust and blame.”

Of the other stories, Comet Wine is the most substantial. Set in a community of composers and musicians in 19^th-century St Petersburg, this one draws on the Faust legend and reflects the love Russell – a student at the Chicago Conservatory of Music – had for classical music. The remaining three pieces, The Runaway Lovers, The Vendetta and The Cage, are comparatively brief affairs and are best described as gothic fairy stories. But each comes with a nasty barb in its tail.

Reading these stories, there’s a sense of Russell having his cake and eating it. He describes horrible, bloody, perverted goings-on in stylised prose and with obvious relish, but at the same time doesn’t go into detail and rub our noses in the gore. Elizabeth Bathory merely laments, for example, about “the manner by which these hapless prisoners were put to death: not with the swift, blunt mercy that is dealt even to dumb cattle, but by prolong’d and calculated tortures, which I have not stomach to set down here, so degraded and inhuman were they.” A fine line is trod between the erudite and the sordid – a line that, come to think of it, Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

Incidentally, Russell also wrote for the movies but, sadly, no one properly managed to capture his flamboyant gothic visions onscreen. He scripted a film version of Sardonicus in 1961, with the title slightly adjusted to Mr Sardonicus. The film terrified me when I saw it on late-night TV at the age of ten. However, as it was directed by William Castle, a filmmaker more fondly remembered for the outrageous gimmicks with which he publicised his movies – plastic skeletons flying above cinema audiences’ heads in The House on Haunted Hill (1959), special ‘Illusion-o’ viewing glasses to allow audiences to see the ghosts of the title in 13 Ghosts (1960), a 45-second ‘fright-break’ near the end of Homicidal (1961) so that cinema-goers who couldn’t handle the horror could flee the auditorium (and get a refund on the way out) – rather than for the quality of the movies themselves, I imagine it wouldn’t stand up well today.

Around the same time, Russell penned scripts for two directors who’d recently made their names pioneering a newer, bolder, more vivid form of gothic-horror cinema – Terence Fisher, who’d helmed Hammer Films’ revivals of Dracula and Frankenstein, and Roger Corman, who’d launched a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for American International Pictures. The results, alas, represented neither director at their best. Russell wrote The Horror of It All (1964) for Fisher while he was moonlighting from Hammer and working for the low-budget Lippert Films. A horror-comedy about an oddball family getting murdered one-by-one in a dilapidated mansion, it was evidently designed to cash in on a remake, released the year before, of the 1932 classic The Old Dark House. (Confusingly, 1963’s Old Dark House remake had been produced by Hammer and directed by William Castle.) Again, I found The Horror of It All scary enough, and funny enough, when I saw it as a ten-year-old, but I hate to think what it would seem like now, 48 years on.

Russell scripted an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation for Roger Corman, 1962’s The Premature Burial. It has its moments but lacks the flair of Corman’s best Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) or Masque of the Red Death (1964). This is partly due to it not having the energising presence of Corman’s usual Poe-movie star, Vincent Price. And it’s hamstrung by a lame ending.

I prefer a non-gothic film Russell wrote for Corman, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). This is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the visual spectrum that’s perceptible to humans. Nothing good comes of this, of course. Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distant edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk. How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions. They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals. The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude. Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.

Ray Russell died in 1999, before there’d been a truly impressive cinematic version of his work. Actually, there still hasn’t. But returning to Haunted Castles… I notice that the forward to my edition of it has been written by none other than the Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, who specialises in making horror and fantasy films.

So… How about it Guillermo?

May 27, 2022May 27, 2022

A Lee-centennial

The British actor Sir Christopher Lee, who was born on this day exactly 100 years ago, was a man who embodied evil to generations of film-goers. He played Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Scaramanga, Comte de Rochefort, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Blind Pew, Saruman, Count Dooku, the Jabberwocky, the Devil and, in the 2008 adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, Death himself. But up until his passing in 2015, I didn’t so much regard him as the embodiment of evil as one of the coolest people on the planet.

Lee did a lot during his 93 years and not just in terms of acting – though his movie resume was awesome, with some 275 titles to his name by the time he entered his tenth decade.

He was, incidentally, an incredibly literary actor too, because his massive film and television CV contained adaptations of stories by Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Alexandre Dumas, Rider Haggard, Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Jules Verne. In real life, he was step-cousin of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming; and by the time Peter Jackson got around to filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-2004), he could boast that he was the only member of the movies’ cast and crew who’d actually met J.R.R. Tolkien. He was also good friends with Robert Bloch, author of Psycho (1959), the fabulous Ray Bradbury, and posh occult-thriller-writer Dennis Wheatley, whose potboiler The Devil Rides Out Lee would persuade Hammer Films to adapt to celluloid in 1968. And he was one of the last people alive who could claim to have met M.R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in English literature. As a lad Lee encountered James, who was then Provost of Eton College, when his family tried, unsuccessfully, to enrol him there. Lee obviously didn’t hold his failure to get into Eton against James because in 2000 he played the writer in the BBC miniseries Ghost Stories for Christmas.

Before getting into acting in the late 1940s, Lee did military service during World War II, which included attachments with the Special Operations Executive and the Long Range Desert Patrol , the forerunner to the SAS. He kept schtum about what he actually did with them. Decades later, though, he may have unintentionally dropped a hint about his secret wartime activities to Peter Jackson when, on set, he discreetly advised the Kiwi director about the sound a dying man would really make if he’d just had a knife planted in his back.

His first years as an actor did not see much success, due to his being too tall (six-foot-four) and too foreign-looking (he had Italian ancestry). During this period he at least learned how to swordfight, a skill he drew on when appearing in various low-budget swashbucklers. During the making of one such film, 1955’s The Dark Avenger, the famously sozzled Errol Flynn nearly hacked off Lee’s little finger; although later Lee got revenge when, during a TV shoot with the same actor, a slightly-misaimed sword-thrust knocked off Flynn’s toupee, much to the Hollywood star’s mortification and no doubt to everyone else’s amusement. Incidentally, I love the fact that Lee could boast of being the only actor in history who’d conducted sword fights with Errol Flynn and Yoda.

And I’ve read somewhere that when he made the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade for Hammer Films in 1963, Lee taught a young Oliver Reed the basics of sword-fighting. I’m sure fight-choreographer William Hobbs and the stunt crew who worked on The Three Musketeers a decade later quietly cursed Lee for this. (Lee starred alongside Reed in the film, playing the memorably eye-patched Comte de Rochefort.) From all accounts, the ever-enthusiastic Ollie threw himself into the Musketeers’ sword-fights like a whirling dervish, and eventually one stuntman had to ‘accidentally’ stab him in the hand and put him out of action before he killed someone.

In 1956 and 1957 Lee got two gigs for Hammer films that’d change his fortunes and make him a star – playing the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein and then, on the strength of that, Bram Stoker’s famous vampire count in Dracula. Apparently, Hammer wanted originally to hire the hulking comedic actor Bernard Bresslaw to play Frankenstein’s monster. I suppose there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where Bresslaw actually got the job; so that the man we know as Little Heap in Carry On Cowboy (1965), Bernie Lugg in Carry On Camping (1969) and Peter Potter in Carry On Girls (1973) went on in that universe to play Count Dooku in the Star Wars movies and Saruman the White in the Lord of the Rings ones.

Playing Baron Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein and Van Helsing in Dracula was the legendary Peter Cushing and he and Lee would hit it off immediately, become best mates and make another 18 films together, in which for much of the time they did bad things to each other. As a mad-scientist-cum-asylum-keeper in The Creeping Flesh (1972), Lee brought a monster to life and then, after the monster had attacked Cushing and driven him insane with terror, he coolly incarcerated Cushing in his asylum. Whereas in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) Cushing chased him, as Dracula, through a prickly hawthorn bush – hawthorns are apparently harmful to vampires and the experience, Lee recalled in his autobiography Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977), left him ‘shedding genuine Lee blood like a garden sprinkler’ – before impaling him on a sharp, uprooted fence-post. Meanwhile, the 1972 British-Spanish movie Horror Express featured a decomposing ape-man fossil that’d come back to life, was possessed by an alien force and had the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs. It was such an evil motherf***er that Lee and Cushing had to join forces, for once, to defeat it.

Lee was famously uncomfortable about being branded a horror-movie star and about being associated with Dracula, an association that might thwart his ambitions for a serious acting career. He did, though, play the character another six times for Hammer, and an eighth time in the Spanish production El Conde Dracula. Tweeting a tribute to him when he passed away, Stephen King said, “He was the King of the Vampires.” So sorry, Sir Christopher, but when the man who wrote Salem’s Lot (1975) says you’re the King of the Vampires, you’re the King of the Vampires.

As Dracula, he got to bite Barbara Shelley, Barbara Ewing, Linda Hayden, Anouska Hempel, Marcia Hunt, Caroline Munro and Valerie Van Ost. Last-minute interventions by Peter Cushing in Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) prevented him from biting Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley, which must have been frustrating. Meanwhile, the 1965 movie Dracula, Prince of Darkness was the first really scary horror movie I ever saw, on TV, back when I was eight or nine years old. I’d watched old horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), in which everything was discreetly black-and-white and bloodless, so I wasn’t prepared for an early scene in Dracula, Prince of Darkness where Lee / the count is revived during a ceremony that involves a luckless traveller (Charles Tingwell) being suspended upside-down over a coffin and having his throat cut. The sight and sound of the blood splattering noisily onto the supposedly dead vampire’s ashes traumatised me.

Thanks to Hammer’s success in the horror genre, the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s saw a boom in British, usually gothic, horror filmmaking. And during that boom, Lee did many memorable, often evil, things. He drove his car into Michael Gough and squidged off Gough’s hand in Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (1965). He forced Vincent Price to immerse himself in a vat of acid in Scream and Scream Again (1969). He turned up as a snobbish senior-civil-servant type and tormented Donald Pleasance in Deathline (1972).

Lee was probably Britain’s most linguistic actor, speaking German, French, Italian and Spanish and also knowing a bit of Swedish, Russian and Greek. Thus, he also found it easy to find employment making horror movies on mainland Europe, where the gothic tradition was raunchier, more lurid and looser in its plot logic than its counterpart in Britain. He worked with the Italian maestro Mario Bava in 1963’s The Whip and the Body and on several occasions with the fascinatingly prolific, but erratic, Spanish director Jess Franco. Despite Franco’s cheeky habit of shooting scenes with Lee and then inserting them into a totally different and usually pornographic movie – something Lee would only discover later, when he strolled past a blue-movie theatre in Soho and noticed that he was starring in something like Eugenie and the Story of her Journey into Perversion (1970) – Lee held the Spaniard in esteem and championed his work at a time it wasn’t fashionable to do so. Since his death in 2013, Franco’s reputation has improved and art-house director Peter Strickland’s movie The Duke of Burgundy (2014) is a tribute, in part, to him.

Franco directed the later entries in a series of movies about Fu Manchu that Lee made in the 1960s, in which he played Sax Rohmer’s supervillain in un-PC Oriental makeup and spent his time barking orders at Chinese minions, who were usually played by Burt Kwouk. As well as retaining some of the racism that was prominent in Rohmer’s books, the series generally wasn’t up to much in terms of quality. However, the film’s endings have always haunted me. Invariably, Fu Manchu’s secret headquarters would blow up and then Lee’s voice would boom imperiously through the smoke, “The world will hear of me again!”

In the early 1970s, Lee finally got opportunities to make the sort of films he wanted to make, including Richard Lester’s two Musketeers movies (1974 and 1975); the ninth official Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun (1975), in which he taunted Roger Moore, “You work for peanuts – a hearty well-done from Her Majesty the Queen and a pittance of a pension. Apart from that, we are the same. To us, Mr Bond. We are the best… Oh come, come, Mr Bond. You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”; and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), regarded by many as the best attempt at bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing super-sleuth to the screen.

In that latter film, Lee played Holmes’s snooty brother Mycroft. Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself several times, including in a couple of early-1990s TV movies with Dr Watson played by the impeccable Patrick Macnee, whom decades earlier had been Lee’s schoolmate at Summer Fields School in Oxford. And he played Henry Baskerville in the 1959 Hammer adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which had Peter Cushing in the role of Holmes. But for some strange reason, nobody ever thought of casting Lee as Professor Moriarty.

In 1973, he also played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, a film that needs no introduction from me. Actually, next year is the film’s fiftieth anniversary. I trust the Scottish Tourist Board will celebrate this fact on May 1^st, 2023, by lighting lots of wicker men, with lots of sanctimonious, virginal, Free Presbyterian policemen inside them, along the coasts of Scotland.

Later in the 1970s, no longer so typecast in horror movies and with the British film industry on its deathbed, Lee decamped to Hollywood. He ended up appearing in some big-budget puddings like dire 1977 disaster movie Airport 77 and Steven Spielberg’s supposed comedy 1941 (1979), but at least he was able to rub shoulders with icons such as Muhammad Ali and John Belushi. And he didn’t, strictly speaking, stop appearing in horror movies. He was in the likes of House of the Long Shadows (1982), The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985), The Funny Man (1994) and Talos the Mummy (1998). Amusingly, Lee usually explained this by arguing that these weren’t really horror films. The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf wasn’t a horror film? Aye, right.

Though he never relented in his workload, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Lee experienced a late-term career renaissance – no doubt because many of the nerdish kids who’d sneaked into cinemas or stayed up late in front of the TV to watch his old horror movies had now grown up, become major players in the film industry and were only too happy to cast him in their movies: Joe Dante, John Landis, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton. Hence his roles in two of the biggest franchises in cinematic history, the Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit ones, plus five movies directed by Burton.

When he was in his eighties, Lee must have wondered if there were any territories left for him to conquer – and he realised that yes, there was one. Heavy metal! He had a fine baritone singing voice but only occasionally in his film career, for example, in The Wicker Man and The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), did he get a chance to show it off. In the mid-noughties, however, he started recording with symphonic / power-metal bands Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar and soon after he was releasing his own metal albums such as Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, which had contributions by guitarist Hedras Ramos and Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner. He also released two collections of Christmas songs, done heavy-metal style. The festive season will never seem the same after you’ve heard Lee thundering his way through The Little Drummer Boy with electric guitars caterwauling in the background.

Obviously, the heavy metal community, which sees itself as a crowd of badasses, was flattered when the cinema’s supreme badass – Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, etc. – elected to join them and they welcomed Lee with open arms. They even gave him, as the genre’s oldest practitioner, the Spirit of Metal Award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods ceremony in 2010.

So: singing heavy metal, speaking eight languages, being perhaps the 20^th century’s greatest screen villain and, probably, bayoneting Nazis to death. Was there anything this man couldn’t do? Well, it seems the only thing he couldn’t quite manage was to live forever. Mind you, for someone who spent his cinema career dying – even when he penned his autobiography in his mid-fifties, he reckoned he’d been killed onscreen more than any other actor in history – but kept coming back, it feels a bit odd to be writing about Christopher Lee in the past tense.

Actually, if anybody wants to congregate in a Carpathian castle after dark and perform a blood-soaked ritual to resurrect the great man, I’m up for it.

From the Independent