The Simpsons – Blood and Porridge

May 28, 2024June 7, 2024

The writer on the edge of forever

I’ve just discovered that yesterday, May 27^th, would have been the 90^th birthday of writer Harlan Ellison. I don’t know if nowadays I’d describe Ellison as one of my all-time favourite writers, but he was certainly a massive influence on me when I was growing up and trying to write stuff myself. Here’s an updated version of something I wrote about him in 2018, just after he’d passed away at the age of 84.

Harlan Ellison was often categorised as a science-fiction writer, although he once memorably warned anyone who called him a science-fiction writer that he would come to their house and ‘nail’ their ‘pet’s head to a coffee table’. In his lifetime the Cleveland-born Ellison authored some 1800 stories, scripts, reviews, articles and opinion pieces, but it’s as a short story writer that he was best known. In fact, when he was in his prime, from the 1960s to 1980s, he was responsible for some of the boldest and most exhilarating short stories I’d yet come across. He seemed to push both his imagination and his writing energies to the very limit.

Describing his stories is difficult, but the nearest comparison I can think of is the fiction of Ray Bradbury. However, Ellison’s work also had counter-cultural and radical political tones that encompassed both the idealism of the 1960s’ civil rights movement and Summer of Love and the cynicism and despair that came with the Vietnam War and, in the 1970s, Watergate. His short stories frequently contained a palpable anger too. Yes, Ellison had a lot of anger in him. More on that in a minute.

By focusing on his short stories, I don’t wish to denigrate his occasional novels. Indeed, I’d rank 1961’s Spider Kiss alongside Iain Banks’ Espedair Street (1987) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008) as one of the best rock ‘n’ roll novels ever.

Ellison wasn’t a big name in the UK but in the 1970s – perfectly timed for my development as a teenager – Britain’s Pan Books brought out editions of several of his short story collections, like The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969), Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975). All had gorgeously psychedelic covers by (I think) the artist Bob Layzell. It’s fair to say that my 14 or 15-year-old mind was blown by them.

© Pan Books

I also loved how Ellison prefaced each story with a short essay describing how it had come into being. These pieces gave insight not only into his combative personality but also into the rich life-experiences he’d had, or claimed to have had. Before establishing himself as a writer he’d been, among other things, a truck driver transporting nitro-glycerine, a hired gun and a tuna fisherman. This inspired me when I was a budding writer to try my hand at different jobs and build up my experiences, though the stuff I ended up doing – stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s, working in a shoe warehouse, serving as a warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel – was rather less glamorous than the items on Ellison’s CV.

Some of his work also appeared on television, although TV was a medium he generally had a low opinion of. In a 2013 interview he accused it and other modern forms of entertainment and communication of having “reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form that it is beyond my notice.”

For instance, he scripted the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which has Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy catapulted back in time to 1930s America and confronted with an agonising time-travel-related moral dilemma. Do they intervene in an accident and prevent the death of a woman called Edith Keeler who (despite being played by Joan Collins) is a noble political activist dedicated to peace, pacifism and public service and with whom, predictably, William Shatner’s horn-dog Captain Kirk has fallen in love; or do they let her die, which means her political movement won’t gain power in the USA, delay her country’s entry into World War II and allow the Nazis to become masters of humanity, which will happen otherwise?

Thanks to its inventive and thought-provoking spin on time travel, The City… is the best episode of the original series of Star Trek. In fact, as I don’t like any of the later TV incarnations of Star Trek, I’d say it’s the best Star Trek episode, full stop. Ellison, however, was unimpressed with how the show’s producer Gene Rodenberry and his writing staff rewrote his script and watered down some of its themes and was never slow to sound off about it afterwards. It may be significant that his later short story How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? (1977) features William Shatner attempting to make love to a revolting-looking alien creature. Shatner’s toupee falls off in the process.

© Desilu Productions

More time-travelling figures in the Ellison-penned episodes Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier that he wrote for the TV anthology show The Outer Limits (1963-65). Years later, he was incensed at what he saw as plagiarism of elements of his Soldier script by James Cameron while he was making the first Terminator movie in 1984. Ellison threatened to sue and got a payment of 65-70,000 dollars from Cameron’s financiers and an acknowledgement on The Terminator’s credits. By 2014 Ellison had mellowed to the point where he could see the funny side of it. He played himself in an episode of The Simpsons in which he gets into an argument with Milhouse Van Houten. When Millhouse comments, “I wish someone would have come from the future and warned me not to talk to you,” Ellison grabs him by the throat and screams, “That’s my idea!”

In fact, Ellison was highly litigious. After discovering his writing, I found an interview with him in an American magazine called Future Life where he talked about suing Paramount Television for stealing an idea of his, about a robot policeman and a human one who are partnered together, and turning it into a TV show called Future Cop (1976-78). “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” he declared in the interview. Later, when I was playing rugby for my school and while we were trying to psych ourselves up against our opponents, I inadvertently let slip with Ellison’s phrase: “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” I exclaimed. That earned me some strange looks from my teammates. Nailing asses to barn doors was not part of the common vernacular on south-of-Scotland rugby pitches.

I can honestly say that for a period when I was a teenager, Harlan Ellison, with his mind-bending fiction, his braggadocio, his adventurous backstory and his take-no-shit-from-anyone attitude was the person I wanted to be. Of course, as I grew older and became less impressionable and more mature, and learned more about Ellison, that changed. I began to appreciate that Ellison’s persona involved a fair bit of self-mythologizing, egotism and unwarranted bloody-mindedness. When Stephen King observed that he knew one writer who was convinced that Ellison was the reincarnation of Jonathan Swift and another writer who referred to him as a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, I found myself in sympathy with both viewpoints.

And by the time I read a profile of him in a non-fiction book called Dream Makers (1980), written by Charles Platt, I was disappointed but somehow unsurprised to encounter a character rather too driven by vanity and rather too desperate to impress. Ellison and Platt later fell out badly, violently it’s said, though not as far as I know about the Dream Makers profile.

Also falling out with Ellison was the late English writer Christopher Priest, who took issue with Ellison’s editorship of the Dangerous Visions series of science fiction anthologies in the early 1970s. There was supposed to be a third volume in the series but for reasons known only to Ellison himself it never appeared, leaving a lot of commissioned stories in limbo and depriving a lot of authors of potential earnings. This seems hypocritical of Ellison, considering how famously touchy he was about payment for his own work – he’s said to have once mailed a wayward publisher ‘213 bricks’ and a ‘dead gopher’ as a protest. Priest even wrote a short, investigative book about Dangerous Visions 3’s non-appearance, inevitably entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever (1994). Priest’s website notes how an anonymous review of his book on Amazon, headlined Mean-Spirited Jealousy and giving it one star, “bears all the hallmarks of Mr Ellison’s own unmistakable style: florid overstatement and a fog of half-truths intended to cloud the issue. Well worth a visit to witness the great man in action, a rare sight!”

© Fantagraphics Books

And although Ellison was a vocal supporter of the USA’s Equal Rights Amendment, much of that good work was undone in 2006 when he groped the writer Connie Willis onstage at an awards ceremony. I’ve seen a clip of the incident and am inclined to think Ellison believed he was indulging in some harmless japery, but that’s not to say he wasn’t massively disrespectful towards Willis and didn’t make a colossal arse of himself. He also did himself no favours when, after he’d issued an apology – one commentator described it as something that “could only loosely be construed by a chimpanzee whacked on smack as an apology” – and after Willis hadn’t acknowledged it, he ranted abusively about her on his official message board.

Still, as I came to know the artist’s failings, and revised my opinion of him, I focused more on the quality of the art itself. And with Ellison, some of that art was amazing. Here’s a list of ten of his short stories that bowled me over when I read them.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966). An unremarkable little man suddenly finds his soul transplanted into the body of a Conan-the-Barbarian-type swordsman in a blood-and-thunder fantasy land. What follows is a merciless dissection of the inadequacies of the nerdy males who read sword-and-sorcery stories. I actually write sword-and-sorcery stories, so I’m allowed to make sweeping generalisations like that.

Pretty Maggie Money Eyes (1967). This sad, haunting story is about a woman’s spirit inhabiting a Las Vegas slot machine and the down-on-his-luck gambler whom she – possibly – takes pity on.

© LQ / Jaf Productions

A Boy and His Dog (1969). A post-apocalyptic satire that’s a spot-on blend of anarchy and irreverence, featuring as its main character a young hoodlum and an intelligent, telepathic and sarcastic canine. It was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, with a youthful Don Johnson in the lead (human) role. Though the movie version isn’t perfect, it still holds up better than a lot of other, more portentous sci-fi films made in the same decade.

Along the Scenic Route (1969). A biting analysis of the relationship between Americans and their cars, Scenic Route details how a couple out for a leisurely drive end up competing in a lethal demolition derby. It prefigures a lot of ‘dystopian-vehicle’ movies like Death Race 2000 (1975) and the Mad Max ones.

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). Another of Ellison’s time-travel tales, this grippingly melancholic one is about a man going back in time and befriending his younger self while he’s a bullied, insecure child.

Bleeding Stones (1973). This is quite simply a story that made my jaw drop with its combination of brutality, blasphemy and surrealism.

© Pan Books

Hindsight: 480 Seconds (1973). End-of-the-world stories are a dime-a-dozen in science fiction, but the brilliantly simple yet elegiac concept behind this one has always stayed with me. It’s about a poet who volunteers to stay on an about-to-be-destroyed earth after the rest of humanity have been evacuated, so that he can provide a commentary on his planet’s dying minutes.

I’m Looking for Kadak (1974). This Kurt-Vonnegut-meets-Woody-Allen-type comedy is about the tribulations facing a group of blue, eleven-armed aliens on a far-flung planet who’ve converted to Judaism. The minyan – quorum – for communal Jewish worship is ten, and they want to sit shiva, i.e., conduct the rituals of mourning for a departed friend. The problem is that there’s now only nine of them on the planet. So the hero sets off on an epic quest to find a long-lost Jew, Kadak, in the hope he’ll serve as the tenth.

Shatterday (1975). In this unsettling tale, a man accidentally phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself. In fact, this other self is a sinister doppelganger who’s appeared from nowhere and is planning to usurp him from his existence.

Count the Clock That Tells the Time (1979). Taking its title from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, this describes how a lethargic never-do-well gets trapped in a weird, ghostly netherworld. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of wasting time and frittering your life away – something you couldn’t accuse the famously prolific Ellison of doing.

So, thank you for the entertainment and the inspiration, Mr E. May you rest in un-cantankerous and non-litigious peace.

© Pan Books

November 13, 2023November 15, 2023

Jiggery-wokery

From abc.net.au / © BBC

‘Woke’… What does that word even mean?

Here’s failed US presidential candidate and failed insurrectionist Donald Trump using it to denigrate the American women’s soccer team, who do un-Trumpian things like ‘taking the knee’ during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner. “Woke equals failure!” he barked on TruthSocial, his minor social-media platform, when the team was knocked out of this year’s Women’s Football World Cup.

And here’s John Cleese grumping about the BBC being woke because it banned that episode of Fawlty Towers (1975-79) where the Major uses some unfashionable language to describe the West Indies cricket team. (In fact, the episode was temporarily pulled from the BBC-owned streaming service UKTV, and reviewed, and reinstated with a content warning.) Cleese is so incensed by wokeness that he’s started hosting a TV chat-show in which he fulminates against it. His show is called The Dinosaur Hour (2023) and it’s broadcast on the right-wing, alleged ‘news’ channel GB News. Amusingly, Cleese was peeved to discover that his new employers at GB News had just signed Boris Johnson, whom he considers a ‘serial liar’, to host a show too. Well, John, when you lie down with dogs, expect to get up with fleas. In this case, big, blonde, bloviating, bonking Boris-fleas.

Another household name much concerned about woke behaviour is Elon Musk, who last year purchased Twitter (or X, as he calls it now) and set about purging it of wokeness. He’s certainly done that. He’s also purged the platform of half of its advertising revenue and half of the value of its acquisition price. Musk has described wokeness as a ‘mind-virus’ and ‘communism rebranded’ – and communism, he’ll tell you, is a very bad thing. Though that hasn’t stopped him opening a big Tesla plant in communist China, in Shanghai, and being warmly welcomed every time he visits the country, and declaring that democratic, capitalist Taiwan is actually Chinese property. Musk is also introducing to Twitter a ‘snarky, anti-woke AI chatbot’ called ‘Grok’, which sounds like a character from the sci-fi comic 2000 AD (1977-present).

From britishcomic.fandom.com / © Rebellion Developments

I don’t agree with Musk on much but he’s right to liken wokeness to a virus. Because the moment that people with his right-wing politics come into contact with it, they seem to turn red-eyed, froth at the mouth and gibber insanely, like the infected did in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2003).

© DNA Films / UK Film Council / Fox Searchlight Pictures

But if you need refuge from wokeness, just move to Florida. There, Governor Ron DeSantis has been pushing a ‘Stop-Woke Act’ in the hope that the state will be ‘the place where woke goes to die’. In fact, DeSantis’s Florida is now so anti-woke, and so determinedly opposed to the teaching of wokey things like Critical Race Theory, that its State Board of Education has kids learning in school that slavery was a good thing because it helped the black slaves to develop ‘skills which, in some cases, could be applied for their personal benefit‘. Wow. Who knew?

I’m sure DeSantis’s achievements in Florida are admired by Suella Braverman, the belligerent and self-serving British Conservative politician who was very recently sacked from her position as the UK’s Home Secretary. During her time in office, she slammed the British police force for being too woke. One example was when she claimed to have reprimanded officers in Essex for the woke act of raiding a pub and removing a display of racist golliwogs. (Except that she didn’t – it turned out that Suella had been disingenuous, or stupid, or both, which is perfectly possible in her case.) Suella, or ‘Sewer-ella’ as I like to think of her, also famously condemned a faction she called the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’. Supposedly, these have formed a ‘coalition of chaos’ with the opposition parties and are responsible for all of Britain’s ills. She said this whilst serving in the brief but tumultuous government of Liz Truss. Accusing someone else of being part of a coalition of chaos? That’s a bit rich, given the context.

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has complained that woke builders are daring to ‘enjoy yoga, muesli, listening to Radio 4 and sharing their feelings’ rather than ‘devouring greasy-spoon breakfasts and discussing sport.’ Xbox games consoles have been accused of being woke for getting updated with an ‘energy saver’ mode to lessen their power consumption – because, as you know, attempting to be more environmentally-friendly just drips with contemptible wokeness. The makers of The Simpsons (1989-present) have been lambasted for being woke, coincidentally by Cleese’s associates at GB News, for no longer having scenes where Homer loses his rag at Bart, picks him up by the throat and strangles him until his eyes bulge and tongue protrudes. Not wanting to strangle children? How hideously woke.

So, what does ‘woke’ actually mean? Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s “an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism and LGBT rights.” Fascinatingly, the phrase ‘stay woke’ goes all the way back to 1938, when it was first heard on a recording of a song called Scottsboro Boys by the legendary blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, aka, Lead Belly.

From wikipedia.org / © William P. Gottlieb Collection

Though how the term ‘woke’ became elastic enough to encompass eating tofu, and builders talking about their feelings, and Xboxes having energy-saving modes, and Homer Simpson not throttling his offspring, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a simpler definition of the term – certainly when you look at the people mentioned above who’ve railed against it, like Trump, Musk, DeSantis, Braverman, the Daily Mail and GB News – might be: ‘Anything that right-wing tossers don’t like.’

Indeed, as somebody who considers himself partly Scottish, I felt a surge of pride a while ago when Gavin McInnes, founder of the neo-fascist American militia the Proud Boys, denounced Scotland as ‘the most woke country in the world.” No wonder Scottish novelist Christopher Brookmyre responded to McInnes’s ravings by saying: “That delighted me…”

Unfortunately, nobody ever lost money by underestimating human beings’ intelligence. There’s clearly political mileage in ranting endlessly about wokeness. Gradually, you brainwash millions of people, mainly older ones who don’t get out much, and sit and watch Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News all day, into believing that dark, malevolent woke forces do indeed lurk in the world, planning to deprive them of their Bibles, guns, gas-guzzling automobiles, Big Macs, racist jokes, un-politically-correct 1970s TV shows, etc. It’s also convenient for the likes of Trump (currently facing 91 felony counts) and Britain’s Conservative government (trying to justify why the country is such a horrible, unhappy mess when they’ve been in charge of it for the past 13 years) to peddle the narrative that the establishment is riddled with hostile woke agents. The civil service, the courts, the police… A giant woke conspiracy is being implemented from society’s corridors of power and it’s trying to discredit them and stymie their every move.

I’m not claiming, by the way, that stupidity is confined to right-wingers. The left is also capable of it. In recent years the American right has infiltrated school-boards and removed books they disapprove of from syllabuses and libraries, books deemed too woke, often written by people of colour or members of the LGBT community, and often featuring characters of colour or LGBT characters. There was even a book suspended in Alabama because officials didn’t like the sound of the author’s name, Marie-Louise Gay. But left-wing educators have done themselves no favours by trying to ban books that offend their sensibilities too.

For example, I lately came across the case of a school board in Washington State pulling Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) off its required reading list for ninth-graders because a group of ‘progressive’ teachers objected to it. Sure, you can argue that To Kill a Mockingbird portrays its black characters with less depth than its white characters and has a ‘white saviour’ narrative that’s offensive to many. But shouldn’t teachers focus on developing their students’ powers of critical thinking, argument and self-expression so that they can articulate why they object to the book? Engaging with – certainly, studying – literature shouldn’t be limited to books you’re personally comfortable with. You should have to experience ones you find discomforting too, whilst developing the ability to formulate logical and coherent responses to them.

I don’t deny there are works that some people will find upsetting because of their beliefs or backgrounds or difficult experiences they’ve had in their lives. And I don’t see anything wrong with books and stories having trigger warnings, which inform readers the content they’re about to immerse themselves in may be uncomfortable or even traumatising. I say that as a writer who’s had trigger warnings attached to his fiction in the past. But banning books altogether? I don’t agree with censorship, unless it’s of something that’s completely off-the-scale in promulgating odious stereotypes and stirring up hatred.

Otherwise, I don’t have much of a problem with wokeness. Especially as it seems to annoy all the right – and I mean ‘right’ – people. So, now, it’s time to sign off and grab some lunch. What will I have…? Why, tofu of course. Up yours, Sewer-ella.

From wikipedia.org / © UK Government Web Archive

March 7, 2023March 8, 2023

Anvil show their mettle on metal

Warning — this post contains spoilers for Anvil! The Story of Anvil.

2008’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil is surely one of the best rock-music documentaries ever made. It unflinchingly charts the multiple mishaps that befall Toronto heavy-metal band Anvil during the early 21^st century. Two decades earlier, Anvil had seemed on the cusp of making the big time – for instance, they’d headlined the 1984 Super Rock Festival in Japan alongside Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and the Scorpions – but then they’d faded into obscurity. However, they never stopped playing and recording, albeit for small (sometimes non-existent) audiences and a very limited fanbase. Watching The Story of Anvil, I got the impression that the reason for the band’s lack of success was simply a run of bad luck, both catastrophic and comical.

For its first 20 minutes, I found The Story of Anvil hilariously funny. It was as amusing as the legendary spoof ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap (1984). Indeed, it seemed ironic that Anvil’s drummer had the same name as This is Spinal Tap’s director, Rob Reiner. Well, almost – Robb the drummer has two ‘b’s in his first name, whereas Rob the director has one ‘b’.

But as the disappointments, disagreements and disasters mount up, as the viewer is subjected to a relentless series of empty concert venues, booking mishaps, record label rejections and scenes where singer / lead guitarist Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow gamely struggles on with his day job, which is delivering trolleys of pre-packaged, catering-company meals through Canadian blizzards, the film stops being funny. As the fact sinks in that Anvil is a real band, not a fictional one like Spinal Tap, whose middle-aged members are striving to do the thing they love in the face of massive and soul-destroying odds, the film becomes rather tragic. Particularly gruelling is the scene where, trying to scrape together some money to fund the recording of a new album, Kudlow takes on one of the worst jobs on earth, as a telemarketer. When it comes to giving people unwanted phone calls and trying to persuade them to buy unwanted products, he’s as successful at it as I would be – he’s miserably crap at it.

As the film neared its end, I found myself pleading for the band to have one, just one sustained piece of good luck. When they’re invited to perform at a three-day music festival in Japan, it looks like the good luck has finally arrived. But no, they’re then informed that they’re scheduled to play the very first slot on the very first day, coming onstage in the morning when it’s unlikely that most of the audience will have turned up yet… By this point, I’d concluded that The Story of Anvil was an exercise in utter nihilism, warning about the folly of trying to chase your creative dreams and not accepting your fate as a catering-company delivery man or (in Reiner’s case) a construction worker. However, in a final twist, the documentary shows the band trudging despondently onstage at the Japanese festival, just before noon, and discovering to their joy that the auditorium is in fact packed with appreciative fans. Talk about a cathartic finale. I exhaled such a huge sigh of relief that I almost deflated over my cinema seat. (Though now that I think about it, and having lived in Japan, I could have told Kudlow and Reiner that you can always depend on the Japanese to show up on time.)

It probably wasn’t how they’d wanted to re-establish their name, but The Story of Anvil was such a critical and commercial success that the band got their second wind on the back of it. Since then, they’ve played at major heavy-metal festivals like Download, Hellfest and Wacken Open Air, provided support for the likes of Metallica and AC/DC and had their songs featured in the soundtracks of movies like It (2017) and TV shows like The Simpsons (1989-present). Currently, the band is on its Impact is Imminent tour, the East Asian leg of which brought them to my current abode, Singapore, a week ago.

The weather that evening was the sort of thing that could have appeared in The Story of Anvil as a bad-luck factor stopping an audience from attending one of their gigs. It’d rained torrentially since the start of the afternoon and there was still no sign of it easing off when I arrived at the venue, the Esplanade Annex Studio, just before eight o’clock. At least the rain-drenched view outside the studio, of Singapore’s skyscraper-choked Central Area on the far side of the waters where the Singapore River reaches Marina Bay, had an evocatively Blade Runner-type vibe.

I was dreading what I’d find when I entered the Annex Studio. An empty or near-empty auditorium, signalling that the Curse of Anvil had returned? Or a strictly regulated, typically Singaporean venue with row upon row of seats, where there was no space to get up, move around and shake a leg – imagine having to sit during a heavy-metal concert? Or worst of all, a combination of both, a place packed with seats but devoid of people? Thankfully, the interior was seat-less and, while it wasn’t full yet, it seemed to be filling at a steady pace. I was also pleased to see that a makeshift bar had been installed in a back corner, courtesy of Singapore’s premiere heavy metal-themed pub, the Flying V Metal Bar on Coleman Street. Among the offerings on its menu were ‘Iron Maiden Trooper Beer’. Well, with a name like that, I just had to sample a pint of it. And then I sampled another pint. And then I sampled another….

There was a decent-sized crowd present when the support band, local outfit Deus Ex Machina, came on and performed a well-received set. I liked how the standard heavy-metal T-shirts, long hair and beards sported by 80% of the band contrasted with the appearance of the singer, who had a sensible haircut and was in a sensible short-sleeved shirt and looked like he’d just arrived after a (slightly dress-down) day at the office. This being Singapore, perhaps he had.

Then Anvil came onstage and it was immediately clear how much love there was for them in the room. While they opened with their instrumental number March of the Crabs (which wasn’t inspired by pubic lice or even by the horror novels of Guy N. Smith, but by Kudlow’s observation that his hand had to move crab-like up and down his guitar strings as he played it) from the 1982 album Metal On Metal, Kudlow wasted no time in leaving the stage and joining the audience below. At which point, he disappeared amid a sea of adoring fans and amid a forest of arms holding smartphones aloft to film him.

There ensued 90 minutes of gloriously old-school heavy metal, the tunes interspersed with crowd-pleasing banter from Kudlow. He got a knowing and affectionate cheer when he introduced one song as being about sticking with your dreams and never giving up, which obviously he knew all about. He also delivered an anecdote about an encounter with the late, legendary Lemmy, though to be honest his Lemmy impersonation sounded more like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-sweep in Mary Poppins (1964) than the famously gravelly tones of the frontman of Motorhead. Generally, after the indignities they’d suffered in The Story of Anvil, it was a tonic to see them up on stage 15 years later, thoroughly enjoying themselves – even if a moment where Kudlow and bassist Chris Robertson saluted each other got a bit Alan Partridge-esque. The gig also demonstrated what an excellent drummer Robb Reiner is. A couple of times during the film, he’d been shown at the end of his tether and threatening to quit the band. Well, I’m glad he didn’t.

The closing number was probably their best-known song, the title track of Metal on Metal, which was the one featured on The Simpsons and which kicks off with the memorable lines, “Metal on metal / It’s what I crave / The louder the better / I’ll turn in my grave!” After which, Kudlow couldn’t resist descending into the crowd again. This time, it seemed like everyone in the venue managed to take a selfie with him. Well, not everyone. I didn’t want to break my phone-camera by taking a picture of my bleary, aged, worse-for-wear features. But I did make a point of going up to him, shaking his hand and thanking him and his band for a job well done tonight.

It’s a job he’s still doing, against the odds, and a job he obviously loves. A lucky man – at last.

August 17, 2022August 17, 2022

Respect South Park’s authority

© South Park Studios

I remember the moment I fell in love with Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV comedy show South Park, which first aired a quarter-century – yes, 25 years! – ago last weekend.

It was 1998 and I was watching episode twelve, entitled Mecha–Streisand, of the show’s first season. Until then, South Park had seemed amusing enough. Chronicling the adventures of four kids – ‘everyman’ Stan Marsh, sharp-tongued Jewish lad Kyle Broflovski, parka-shrouded, working-class Kenny McCormick (whose relationship with life, and death, is complicated) and the epically sociopathic Eric Cartman – in the Colorado town of the title, its low-fi animation had been enlivened by some moments of outrageous, by 1998 standards, bad taste.

But for me, with Mecha-Streisand, South Park seemed to become something altogether more audacious and surreal. The episode has Barbra Streisand transforming into a giant Godzilla-style kaiju and stomping all over the town until Robert Smith of the Cure – referred to as ‘Robert Smith of the Cure’ – arrives and transforms too. He becomes a giant moth and ejects the monster-Streisand into outer space. No wonder Kyle cries out in gratitude, “Disintegration is the best album ever!”

© South Park Studios

Since then, I’ve been a big fan of the show, though it definitely enjoyed its glory years during the noughties, when over seven or eight seasons it went into overdrive and churned out magnificent episodes on a regular basis. It’s never quite scaled the same heights afterwards. One problem is that since 2016 American politics have been so insane and, well, South Park-like, that the country has existed beyond the show’s powers to satirise it. Indeed, in a 2015 episode, while the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president still seemed a joke, the show killed off the orange-skinned tycoon. When the real Trump ended up in the White House the following year, South Park had to run an unconvincing parallel-universe storyline where the kids’ unhinged teacher Mr Garrison becomes US president and behaves like Trump for four years.

That’s not to say it isn’t good these days. Unlike other long-running cartoon shows I could mention, which have declined into weary irrelevance, the twenty-something South Park has nobly, if not always successfully, tried to experiment. It’s had full-season story arcs and, during the Covid-19 pandemic, longer-length specials satirising America’s response to the virus. It’s spent much time exploring the topic of political correctness, with surprising depth considering how crudely the show started out in 1998. In 2015, to increase its commentary on this, it introduced the character of PC Principal (“Watch your micro-aggressions, bro!”), who could have been portrayed as just a woke idiot but was rather more nuanced.

© South Park Studios

And it hasn’t been afraid to take much-loved characters off on dark tangents. Witness Stan’s dad Randy, once a gormless but lovable dolt, now a ruthless, profit-obsessed dealer in marijuana. In 2019, Randy even accepted the filthy lucre of the Disney Corporation and murdered Winne the Pooh, whose unfortunate resemblance to Xi Jinping had been holding back Disney’s fortunes in China.

Here, then, are my ten favourite episodes of South Park – though picking just ten has been an almost impossible task.

Scott Tenorman Must Die (2001)

Scott Tenorman Must Die is the first South Park episode to show the full, depraved depths of Cartman’s sociopathy. Glib older kid Scott Tenorman humiliates Cartman, who then plots his revenge. This culminates in Scott being tricked into eating the bodies of his dead parents, which Cartman has cunningly turned into chili. To make things that bit worse, Scott’s favourite band Radiohead show up just as he discovers the truth and bursts into tears. “You know, everyone has problems, but it doesn’t mean you have to be a little cry-baby about it,” snorts Thom Yorke before he and his bandmates walk off in disgust.

Casa Bonita (2003)

More top-notch Cartman sociopathy. He convinces the sweet but idiotically naïve and gullible Butters Stotch – South Park’s unofficial ‘fifth Beatle’ to Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny – that a huge meteor is on a collision course with earth and hides him away in a secret bunker. To keep him hiding there, he later convinces him that the post-collision earth has been overrun by ravenous, radioactive cannibals. The reason? Butters is on the guest list for Kyle’s birthday party at the kitschy Mexican-themed restaurant Casa Bonita and Cartman isn’t. Casa Bonita is, weirdly, Cartman’s idea of heaven and he reasons his name will be added to that precious guest list if Butters disappears. Trey Parker and Matt Stone actually bought the real-life Casa Bonita in 2021.

You Got F’d in the A (2004)

This is the perfect South Park episode if you felt you were the terminally uncool kid at school, forever overshadowed by much trendier schoolmates. Stan is challenged to a ‘dance-off’ by a squad of obnoxiously hip kids from Orange County, California, and is humbled when the best he can do is shuffle his feet to Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart (1992). Urged on by his dad Randy – back then hapless but good-hearted, rather than the out-and-out arsehole he is nowadays – Stan puts together a team to represent South Park and take on the Orange County kids at an official dance competition. The team includes one of the town’s Goth Kids (catchphrase: “If you want to be one of the non-conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do”), a dancing chicken called Jeffy, and Butters, who’s been suffering from severe PTSD since a tap-dancing routine went wrong. Therefore, hopes of success are not high. The outcome is unexpected, brutal and gratifying.

© South Park Studios

AWESOM-O (2004)

Butters receives a mysterious present, a sentient robot called AWESOM-O. It’s really Cartman in disguise, the little scumbag intent on digging up more dirt on Butters so that he can humiliate him further. What he discovers, though, is that Butters has a secret video of Cartman, showing him cross-dressing as Britney Spears. Thus, Cartman has to remain in disguise for longer than planned, until he learns the location of the incriminating video. During the episode, Butters and his new robot pal end up in LA, where AWESOM-Os remarkable artificial intelligence earns him the attention of, first, some Hollywood executives, and then the top brass in the military-industrial complex. None of the adults seem to notice that AWESOM-O is, in fact, a portly kid wearing a couple of cardboard boxes. AWESOM-O is another classic featuring the Cartman-Butters double-act. As is…

The Death of Eric Cartman (2005)

Cartman does something even more reprehensible than tricking Scott Tenorman into eating his parents – he scoffs all the delicious, crispy chicken-skins on a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway when the other kids aren’t looking. (Kenny is so upset when he finds out that he bursts into tears.) The kids retaliate by totally ignoring Cartman the next day. Cartman, trying to fathom why everybody appears not to see or hear him anymore, decides it must be because he died during the night. For some reason, though, his spirit remains marooned on earth just like Patrick Swayze’s was in Ghost (1990). However, the kids have forgotten to tell Butters that no one’s speaking to Cartman. When he finds himself able to communicate with Cartman as usual, the duo conclude he’s the equivalent of the medium in Ghost played by Whoopi Goldberg. Much hilarity / stupidity ensues as Butters and Cartman try to get the latter’s spirit to pass on to the great hereafter.

Erection Day (2005)

If The Death of Eric Cartman spoofs Ghost, the closing minutes of Erection Day provide a piss-take, both funny and gruelling, of the most famous scene in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). This episode centres on Jimmy Valmer, the crutch-using, stuttering kid in class whose catchphrase is, “I’m not handicapped, I’m handi-capable!” and whose ambition is become a stand-up comedian. Obviously, Jimmy is determined to win the school’s annual talent contest – other contestants include Cartman doing an impersonation of Tony Montana from Scarface (1983) and the Goth Kids performing a synth number called Talent Shows are for Fags – but a strange affliction threatens to ruin his act. He keeps suffering sudden, unprovoked and massive erections. Some misguided advice leads him to believe that the only way to cure the affliction is to lose his virginity. Then, venturing into South Park’s red-light district, he becomes involved with a decrepit prostitute called Nutgobbler and her ultra-violent pimp.

© South Park Studios

Tsst (2006)

One reliably depressing character in South Park is Eric Cartman’s spineless mother Liane, devoted to her hideous offspring while he bullies, manipulates and torments her. In Tsst, Liane Cartman finally tries to tame her son by enlisting the help of some reality TV show hosts. She brings in Jo Frost from Supernanny (2004-08), who ends up in an asylum eating her own faeces. (“It’s from hell!”) Then she tries Cesar Millan from Dog Whisperer (2004-12). Millan’s approach, of treating Cartman like a badly-behaved canine, has better results.

Go God Go / Go God Go XII (2006)

An ambitious two-parter making fun of everything from Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (2006) to hoary old sci-fi TV show Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1979-81), Go God Go has Cartman unable to wait a few weeks until the new Nintendo Wii console appears in the shops. Instead, he has himself cryogenically frozen until it goes on sale. Inevitably, things go wrong and he overshoots his target-date by 500 years and wakes up in a strange future world where everyone is an atheist and Richard Dawkins is hailed as a prophet, yet different factions with different interpretations of Dawkins’ pronouncements fight their own ‘holy’ wars. For funniness, though, nothing quite matches an early scene where Ms Garrison (who by this time has had a gender re-assignment) reluctantly teaches the kids the theory of evolution: “So there you go. You’re the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt-sex with a fish-squirrel. Congratulations!”

© South Park Studios

Breast Cancer Show Ever (2008)

The finest hour of Wendy Testaburger, Stan’s prim, pink-clad but formidable girlfriend. One morning she gives a speech to her class about the threat breast cancer poses to women and gets heckled by Cartman, who’s greatly amused by her repeated use of the word ‘breast’. Enraged, she challenges him to a fight after school. Cartman agrees, then gets increasingly worried about what’s coming to him and tries increasingly desperate strategies to wheedle out of it. Breast Cancer Show Ever ends the way it should, with Wendy beating the crap out of the evil little shit.

The Ungroundable (2008)

The Ungroundable uses a common South Park trope, that of the confusion caused when the kids interpret the grown-up (or more grown-up) world according to their own juvenile and fanciful logic. Butters assumes that some older kids at the school, obsessed with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and modelling themselves on vampires, really are vampires. To destroy them, he joins forces with the Goth Kids – who merely object to the Vampire Kids on the grounds of them being douchebags. Before then, Butters mistakenly believes he’s been bitten and has become a vampire himself. And whose blood must he drain? Cartman’s, of course: “…if someone must die so that I can feed… I choose thee!”

I know – all the episodes I’ve listed are more than a decade old. But give 2020s South Park a go. It’s still pretty funny. And it’s a hell of a lot funnier than The Simpsons is these days.

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.

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.