The Devil Rides Out – Blood and Porridge

July 22, 2023

People who stunted my development

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers. A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23). He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations… Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen.”

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie. This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff. The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house. For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to. I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage. I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road. Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert. To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films. Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire. If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards. And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes. It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work. (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns. However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work. Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him. As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself. This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck. Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur. And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman. It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland. (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.) That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff. He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS. Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three). He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago). These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.” I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003. Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church. In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman. He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years. He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish. He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights. I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts. Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career. (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it. But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself. She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer. Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto. Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double. His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible. He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992). Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

© Titan Books

October 28, 2022October 29, 2022

The man who mentored Wheatley

© Senate Books

With Halloween just three days away, here’s a timely book review.

When I was 12 or 13 years old, you couldn’t keep me away from the novels of Dennis Wheatley. More precisely, you couldn’t keep me away from Wheatley’s occult novels, such as The Devil Rides Out (1934), To the Devil a Daughter (1953), They Used Dark Forces (1964) and Gateway to Hell (1970). They were crammed with things that at the time seemed utterly cool to me, things such as astral projection, demonic possession, revived corpses, evil slug-like elemental beings from other planes of existence, diabolic homunculi needing virginal blood to be brought to life, chalk pentacles offering shelter from assaults by the powers of darkness, unholy talismans with the potential to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and devil-worshipping Sabbats climaxing in the summoning of the Goat of Mendes.

Incidentally, among Wheatley’s huge catalogue, which included war, espionage and historical-adventure stories, these are the only books of his that anyone remembers today.

There was a problem with getting hold of Wheatley’s fiction, however. In the 1970s, his occult thrillers were published by Arrow Books in a variety of saucy covers. Each book was adorned with a picture of a naked, big-breasted lady dancing about a flame while some Satanic-looking artefact – a skull, a ghost’s head, a broken cross, a pagan devil-mask – hovered in the foreground. With so much naked female flesh displayed, I felt extremely awkward as a 12 or 13-year-old boy buying those novels in Whitie’s, which at the time was the main bookshop on Peebles High Street, near where I lived in Scotland. In fact, when I bought my first Wheatley novel, The Devil Rides Out, I remember Mrs Whitie, a formidable old lady who could probably have taken on a coven of Wheatley’s devil worshippers and beaten them up, staring over the counter at me with a withering mixture of pity and contempt. Then she sighed and said, “I suppose we’d better stick this in a brown paper bag for you.”

From wikipedia.org / © Allan Warren

Dated and corny though they seem today, Wheatley’s Satanic potboilers surely unsettled many genteel readers in 1930s, 40s and 50s Britain with their premise that in mansion houses and estate grounds across the land, beastly, posh devil-worshippers were getting up to hijinks during unspeakable black-magic rituals. Ever the showman, Wheatley made his subject matter seem that little bit more threatening by prefacing his novels with a solemn warning: “All of the characters and the situations in this book are entirely imaginary, but, in the inquiry necessary to writing of it, I found ample evidence that Black Magic is still practised in London, and other cities, at the present day… Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject, and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real and concrete nature.”

“The inquiry necessary to the writing of it”, i.e., the research Wheatley conducted prior to The Devil Rides Out, brought him into contact with author and clergyman Montague Summers, who’d written a History of Witchcraft and Demonology in 1926 and translated the notorious witch-hunters’ manual Malleus Maleficarum (1486) into English in 1929; with the occultist Aleister Crowley, the notorious self-styled ‘Great Beast’ and ‘Wickedest Man in the World’ whose antics in the early 20^th century had terrified God-fearing folk who believed everything they read in Britain’s popular press; and with one Rollo Ahmed, whom Wheatley would later describe as “a man of profound knowledge and one whose very presence radiates power” and “a Master, who had devoted a lifetime to acquiring a first-hand knowledge of that grim ‘other world’ which lies so far from ordinary experience, and yet is so very near for those who have the power to pierce the veil.”

Ahmed claimed to have been born in Egypt and was of Egyptian and Guyanese parentage. Before his arrival in Britain, he’d knocked around South America and the Caribbean, where he’d supposedly gained knowledge of everything from lycanthropy to Voodoo and Obeah. With his opportunities to earn proper money in a proper job in Britain stymied by the era’s widespread racism, he had to play up his dark-skinned exoticness to survive – which meant selling himself as a yoga teacher, herbalist and general authority on the occult. Despite his own racist attitudes, which sometimes bubbled up in his novels, Wheatley took a shine to Ahmed, started learning Raja Yoga from him, and happily embroidered his memories of the man with little details that suggested, yes, there was something other-worldly about him.

For example, Wheatley alleged that one night Ahmed accepted an invitation to dine with him and walked a long way across London to his house. The evening was freezing, yet Ahmed arrived without an overcoat or gloves, completely unaffected by the cold and with hands that were ‘as warm as toast’. A more alarming claim by Wheatley was that, after introducing Ahmed to an acquaintance in the Society for Psychical Research, the acquaintance worriedly asked Wheatley if he too had seen the ‘little black imp’ that he’d seen standing next to Ahmed.

Wheatley did Ahmed a favour when, after the success of The Devil Rides Out, he was approached by Hutchinson, the publisher, and asked if he would like to write a non-fiction book about the occult. Wheatley declined, feeling he wasn’t knowledgeable enough. (Three-and-a-half decades later, he obviously did feel he had the knowledge, for in 1971 he published a book on the subject entitled The Devil and All His Works.) Instead, he advised Hutchinson to hire Ahmed for the job. They did, and the result was The Black Art, originally published in 1936, with an enthusiastic introduction by Wheatley.

I recently read a 1994 reprint of Ahmed’s The Black Art, mainly because of my interest in Wheatley. It’s an exhaustive and, dare I say it, exhausting book. Its 22 chapters explore every historical period from ‘antediluvian times’ to the modern day, with plenty of detail in between about the ancient Egyptians and Jews, the Greeks and Romans, and the practitioners of the Middle Ages. Geographically, they cover North and South America, India, ‘the East’ and the British Isles. And they examine the associated phenomena of ‘vampirism and werewolves’, ‘symbols and accessories of magic’, ‘sex-rites’, ‘necromancy and spiritualism’ and ‘the Black Mass’, as well as the church’s reactions to these shenanigans.

Ahmed’s technique with the book is to throw in everything bar the kitchen sink, so that the reader is bombarded by one anecdote or snippet of information after another, sometimes two or three barely-related items cropping up in the same paragraph. This makes it difficult to process more than a few pages of The Black Art in one sitting. At the same time, no effort is made to attribute sources to all the anecdotes and information – there’s no footnotes or appendix. Indeed, I’ve seen one brutal review online where Ahmed is accused of filling the book with material plagiarised from the works of the afore-mentioned Montague Summers.

Still, if you’ve enjoyed Wheatley’s novels and you make it to near the end of The Black Art, it’s fun in the final chapters to encounter information that Wheatley apparently incorporated into The Devil Rides Out. For example, there are instructions on how to create a ‘protective circle’ in which you can carry out, say, an exorcism ceremony without being attacked by the forces of darkness: “a large, five-pointed star should be drawn with chalk and a circle of double lines drawn around it… The participants should wear garlands of asafoetida and garlic flowers, and where the disturbances are of a material nature they should on no account leave the circle until peace and harmony have been restored.” Perhaps the most famous scene in The Devil Rides Out involves the Duc De Richleau and his followers taking refuge in such a circle, while the villainous Mocata directs his satanic powers against them.

© Arrow Books

There’s also an interesting chapter on elementals, supernatural entities that are created, Ahmed says, by humans’ “unexpressed thoughts… upon the mental plane.” Thus, “evil and destructive thoughts produce ugly and revolting forms as malevolent and harmful as any ‘demon’ could be.” I suspect that’s what inspired the evil, slug-like thing that plops out of nowhere in a scene during Wheatley’s To the Devil a Daughter.

Interestingly, Ahmed doesn’t try to gloss over the multiple failings of famous alchemists and sorcerers of yesteryear. The 18^th-century Italian adventurer and magician Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, who “evolved a masonic system of his own which he called ‘Egyptian Freemasonry’” (and whom, incidentally, Aleister Crowley claimed was a previous incarnation of his), gets six pages dedicated to him. During these, Ahmed makes it pretty clear he was a thief, vagabond, womaniser, opportunist, manipulator and all-round fraud. Of Cagliostro’s Egyptian Masonic Lodge, which became quite the thing in Paris for a while, Ahmed notes: “the fair intimates” had “to undergo some very remarkable experiences of an enthralling and slightly ridiculous nature, after having sacrificed large sums of money on the altar to the grand copt.” Meanwhile, he makes a cutting observation about Franz Mesmer, proponent of ‘animal magnetism’, the man who lent his name to the term ‘mesmerism’ and inventor of the supposed healing device the magnetic tub (again, popular in Paris): the tub “was a very profitable craze for its creator”.

Even Dr John Dee, who was genuinely remarkable, gets short shrift from Ahmed, mainly because of his association with the disreputable, alleged scryer Edward Kelley: “In the course of time… he (Dee) became hopelessly credulous, and after he had taken Kelly into partnership he allowed himself to be involved in various nefarious schemes, completely under the domination of the other.” Dee’s achievements as a cartographer, mathematician, antiquarian and political advisor get no mention.

I suspect Ahmed was jaded about his occult predecessors because he knew all too well himself that establishing yourself as a master of the black arts required more than a little self-promotion and grift. No matter how genuinely interested you were in the field, you were aware that, to keep the money rolling in to feed you and your family, and pay the rent, you depended on the interest of other people – and especially the interest of gullible people, who could be easily exploited, manipulated and parted from their cash. And while Ahmed undoubtedly cut a striking figure around bohemian 1930s London, his story had a sordid side too. He was arrested for fraud several times and, later in life, was reduced to posing as a fortune teller and preying on gullible old ladies. Along the way he lost all his teeth, an indignity he put down to a black magic operation going wrong – it’d happened while he’d been trying to trap a demon. Anything to shore up those occult credentials.

The Black Art is a slog, then, and I’d recommend it only to Dennis Wheatley completists. However, Ahmed wrote one other, very different book that I’d like to read sometime. It has a self-explanatory title: I Rise: The Life Story of a Negro (1937). Dedicated to the mighty Paul Robeson, no less, the autobiographical I Rise chronicles the racism that Ahmed and other people of his ethnicity had to endure in 1930s Britain. It’s a reminder that, while he spent much of his time in an exotic, esoteric and largely make-believe world, where he mentored Dennis Wheatley and wrote knowledgeably of protective circles and elementals, he had a depressingly real and hostile world to negotiate too – its attitudes “ugly and revolting… as malevolent and harmful as any ‘demon’ could be.”

From horroraddicts.wordpress.com

August 13, 2021August 19, 2021

Richard Matheson – he was legend

Something has got me thinking about Richard Matheson, the science-fiction and horror author and screenwriter who passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.

What thing? Well, the news that the anti-Covid-19-vaxxers in America, determined to plumb the depths of stupidity to find new reasons for not getting vaccinated, have found the stupidest reason yet. Speculation is rife that the vaccine could turn you in a zombie. You know, like one did in the 2007 sci-fi / horror movie I am Legend, with Will Smith, which was based on Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name. This has prompted one of the movie’s scriptwriters, Akiva Goldsman, to step up and announce on social media: “Oh. My. God. It’s a movie. I made that up. It’s not real.” In fact, the source of the contagion in the movie wasn’t a vaccine but a virus, genetically reprogrammed by Dr Emma Thompson to combat cancer, going spectacularly rogue.

In Matheson’s novel I am Legend the monsters are vampires, not zombies. Also, what turns people into those vampires isn’t the movie’s lab-reprogrammed virus, but a mysterious pandemic. However, the book’s premise of the world being suddenly and nightmarishly turned upside down and a small number of uninfected humans finding themselves menaced by those who’ve been infected and turned into monsters, including their own loved ones, was one that a young George Romero appropriated for his seminal 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead. In doing so, Romero made it the blueprint for at least 80% of the zombie movies that have lurched across cinema and TV screens ever since.

In the novel, the number of uninfected humans is small indeed: just one, Richard Neville, who is alone in the world during the daytime and then under siege in his fortified house at night, by the vampires that everyone else has turned into. Gradually, Neville, researching the plague, stumbles on scientific explanations for the vampire-like symptoms of its victims, why they drink blood, why they can only be killed by stakes through the heart, and why they have an aversion to sunlight, garlic and crucifixes. I am Legend also ends with an unnerving psychological twist. Neville, who’s spent his days roaming the surrounding city and staking the slumbering vampires, realises that the vampires are now the normal ones and he’s become the monster of everyone’s nightmares, the deadly legend of the title.

It’s a pity that though I am Legend was filmed on several occasions, and though Matheson lived to a venerable age, he never got to see a satisfactory celluloid version of it. The novel received its first film treatment in Italy, where Rome unconvincingly stood in for Los Angeles, with the cheaply and incompetently made L’Ultimo Uomo della Terra (The Last Man on Earth). Neville was played by Vincent Price, whom Matheson admired as an actor but thought was miscast in the role. L’Ultimo Uomo della Terra was at least fairly faithful to the book, unlike the subsequent film versions, 1970’s The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and the 2007 one. In The Omega Man the vampires have become a group of demented albino mutants called, with an unsubtle reference to Charles Manson, the Family. In the Will Smith version of I am Legend they’re even less impressive, a bunch of bald, hyperactive zombies animated by some shoddy CGI.

Both the later movie versions lack the courage to portray Neville as being totally alone and eventually have him encounter other, as yet uninfected survivors. They also lack the courage to include Matheson’s game-changing ending. Instead, they close with Heston and Smith depicted as Christ-like figures who nobly sacrifice themselves for the good of what’s left of humanity. Neville was a more interesting character when he discovered he’d become a bogeyman. Still, disappointing though all three film versions are, there’s at least a good graphic-novel adaptation of I am Legend available.

The more I reminisce about Matheson, the more I realise what a wonderful and influential writer he was. His other big – though ‘big’ perhaps isn’t the most appropriate adjective – novel of the 1950s was The Shrinking Man (1956). Its hero, an archetypal middle-class American male called Scott Carey, is exposed to a radioactive cloud that causes his body to shrink at the rate of a seventh of an inch every day. Thereafter, Carey’s world turns nightmarishly upside down too, though at a more gradual rate than Richard Neville’s. First, he experiences psychological and sexual humiliation as he finds himself increasingly dwarfed by his normal-sized wife. Following an assault by the family cat, no longer a loveable moggie but a carnivorous monster, the now-tiny Carey loses all contact with humanity and finds himself trapped in his house’s basement where the dangers facing him become formidable indeed. A common spider, for instance, takes on elephantine proportions. And Carey’s shrinking doesn’t stop, let alone get reversed. At the book’s close, he muses, “If nature existed on endless planes, so also might intelligence.” Thereafter, he dwindles away into infinity.

A year after its publication, the novel was filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold and with Matheson providing the script. Matheson was unhappy with how Arnold structured the film. He told the story in linear fashion, whereas Matheson wanted it to begin with the shrunken Carey in the basement, reliving what had happened to him via a series of flashbacks. However, it’s still one of the best science fiction movies of the 1950s. It crucially retains the novel’s bleakly philosophical ending. I can remember seeing the film on TV as a kid and being genuinely upset when the ending defied my expectations that things would finish on an upbeat note. The Incredible Shrinking Man was, incidentally, one of the great J.G. Ballard’s top ten favourite sci-fi movies.

As well as novels, Matheson was a prolific writer of short stories, many of which were collected in four books called the Shock series. Shock 1-4 were published in Britain in the 1970s by Sphere Books, who decorated the covers with lurid and gory images – the antithesis of the unsensational, non-violent and thoughtful works inside. The stories I remember best include Long Distance Call, about a woman plagued by mysterious phone calls that, she discovers, emanate from a local cemetery into which the telephone wire has blown down; The Children of Noah, about a motorist who finds himself in Kafkaesque predicament when he breaks the 15-miles-per-hour speed limit of a tiny American town called Zachary; and the brilliant The Splendid Source, in which a man embarks on a quest to find out where dirty jokes really come from.

Long Distance Call was one of several Matheson stories that were turned into episodes of the celebrated TV anthology series The Twilight Zone (1959-64). The best of these, adapted by Matheson himself, was of course Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. In this, William Shatner essayed his second-most-famous role, that of a just-released psychiatric patient who’s on board a plane and, looking out of the window, sees a gremlin dismantling one of the engines on the wing. Whenever he tries to alert the crew and fellow passengers, the beastie inconveniently disappears from view. Particularly memorable is the moment when the traumatised Shatner dares to peek through the window again and discovers the gremlin pressing its face, which resembles that of a hare-lipped teddy bear, against the outside of the glass and staring in at him. The episode was remade as a segment of the movie version of The Twilight Zone in 1983, with John Lithgow in the Shatner role, and ten years later it received the ultimate accolade – it was spoofed in a Treehouse of Horror edition of The Simpsons, with Bart Simpson the only passenger on the school bus able to see a gremlin sabotaging its engine. This version was called Nightmare at 5½ Feet.

Other episodes that Matheson penned for The Twilight Zone were also influential. A World of Difference is about a businessman who makes the mind-blowing discovery that he’s a fictional character and his life is actually a movie. Furthermore, the movie has just had its production halted, meaning he’ll have to live in the ‘real’ world as the declining, drunken movie star who’s been playing him. This clearly informs Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. Meanwhile, Little Girl Lost tells the tale of a child who, one night, falls from her bed and into another dimension, a mysterious, misty void from which she can hear her parents’ concerned voices but can’t escape. A young Steven Spielberg no doubt saw and remembered this one, because the same idea features in 1982’s Spielberg-produced Poltergeist, though this time the little girl is sucked into the other dimension through the household TV set. And yes, The Simpsons spoofed it too in Treehouse of Horror.

Steven Spielberg has much to thank Matheson for. Matheson’s short story Duel, based on an experience he had on November 22^nd, 1963 – of driving home depressed at the news of Kennedy’s assassination and being harassed by a large, tailgating truck – was filmed as a TV movie in 1971 by Spielberg and gave the young director his first big critical success. Again, Matheson wrote the script. Duel-the-movie has motorist Dennis Weaver and the psychopathic driver of a 1955 Peterbilt 281 truck get into a deadly game of cat and mouse around the roads and highways of rural California. We never see the truck driver himself, just his immense, bellowing, dinosaur-like vehicle. Duel is the archetypal man-versus-machine story and, again, has been influential. Stephen King basically rewrote it (but upped the ante by adding lots of malevolent vehicles) with his short story Trucks, which he later filmed as Maximum Overdrive (1986).

The made-for-television movies that filled American TV schedules in the 1970s kept Matheson busy. As well as Duel he scripted The Night Stalker (1972) about a reporter called Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) who investigates a series of killings in modern-day Los Angeles and discovers that the perpetrator is a vampire. The Night Stalker was successful enough to eventually spawn a TV show called Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75), also starring McGavin, in which Kolchak investigated other strange cases involving monsters and supernatural phenomena. Though short-lived, the show was a major inspiration for Chris Carter, whose massively popular The X-Files (1993-2018) had a similar theme. Carter acknowledged his debt to Kolchak by having Darren McGavin guest-star in two X-Files episodes.

Meanwhile, the TV anthology movie Trilogy of Terror, from 1975, was based on three of Matheson’s short stories. The first two segments are unmemorable, but the third one, which Matheson scripted from his story Prey, is great. It stars Karen Black as an insecure woman who tries to shore up her relationship with her boyfriend, a lecturer in social anthropology, by buying him an antique ‘Zuma fetish doll’ as a birthday present. The doll is a hideous-looking thing and sports a many-fanged grin resembling a Venus flytrap. Before she can give the doll to its intended recipient, it comes to violent, gibbering life and she spends the evening fighting it off in the confines of her apartment. Black’s plight is the inverse of the shrinking man’s. She’s normal-sized and the threat she faces is tiny, but terrifying. This also creates the template for Joe Dante’s movie Gremlins in 1984. In particular, the scene in Gremlins where Frances Lee McCain fights off a horde of the sneering, reptilian mini-monsters in her kitchen, employing a blender and a microwave oven as weapons, is very reminiscent of Trilogy of Terror.

When he wasn’t writing novels, short stories and television scripts, the ever-industrious Matheson was writing for the cinema. In the early 1960s, he scripted several of the movies based on works by Edgar Allen Poe that were made by American International Pictures and directed by Roger Corman: The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963). All told, Matheson did a good job of preserving the original stories’ gloomy, clammy spirit, whilst meeting the commercial demands of a studio and a director who were already famous for their exploitation movies, and keeping engaged a star – Vincent Price – whose performances tended to slip into the knowingly hammy when his material bored him. The movies aren’t the most faithful adaptations of Poe, but they’re surely the most fondly remembered ones.

Matheson also worked on British movies. For AIP’s trans-Atlantic rival, Hammer Films, he scripted The Devil Rides Out in 1968 and managed to turn Dennis Wheatley’s bloated, reactionary novel about upstanding Anglo-Saxon aristocrats fighting a bunch of ghastly Satan-worshipping foreigners into something rather good. And in 1973, he adapted his haunted-house novel Hell House for the screen. The result was The Legend of Hell House, directed by John Hough and starring Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, Pamela Franklin and Gayle Hunicutt as psychic investigators trying to get to the bottom of terrifying supernatural manifestations in the titular mansion. The movie’s ending, which has the surviving investigators finding a hidden sanctum where the psychic forces are emanating from an embalmed body, played by a very un-embalmed-looking Michael Gough, is pretty stupid, which Matheson himself admitted. Still, John Hough directs the film’s scary set-pieces with vigour and there’s an unsettling electronic score by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.

Matheson was a modest soul and in interviews he usually seemed puzzled that so many people could be so inspired by his work. He might have ended up a very rich man if, like his famously litigious contemporary Harlan Ellison, he’d bothered to sue every filmmaker and writer who’d ripped off his ideas. Mind you, he’d probably have spent all his time in court, so I’m glad he just turned the other cheek and devoted that time instead to writing his marvellous stories.