Vampires – Blood and Porridge

April 15, 2023April 18, 2023

A mish-mash from Mish

© Penguin Books

Anyone familiar with my wokey, lefty, liberal politics might be surprised to hear that I’m an admirer of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Indeed, I’d probably include his Sea of Fertility tetralogy – or at least, its first two entries, Spring Snow and Runaway Horses (both 1969) – among my top two-dozen novels of all time.

Yes, that’s Yukio Mishima, the ultra-right-wing Japanese nationalist who rejected democracy, formed his own militia, and in 1970 attempted to take over a military base in Tokyo while calling on the members of Japan’s Self-Defence Force to stage a coup and restore the Japanese Emperor to his former glory. And who, when it became clear that the attempted coup was a flop, committed seppuku, i.e., ritually disembowelled himself.

When I lived in Japan in the 1990s, I remember Japanese acquaintances who leaned leftwards in their politics wincing in horror when I said I liked Mishima’s books. One guy who was in his forties, and had been a ‘New Left’ student in the late 1960s, told me he’d been terrified when he first heard the news that Mishima was attempting a coup d’état. For a moment, he genuinely feared that Japan was going to end up under the heel of a right-wing, militaristic, Emperor-worshipping regime like the one that’d dominated the country in the 1930s and led it to disaster in the 1940s.

And I seem to remember reading an interview with the Japanese composer and occasional actor Ryuichi Sakamoto – now, alas, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto – in which he stated bluntly that he’d hated Mishima and was glad when he heard that he’d done himself in. This was despite Sakamoto supposedly basing his performance in the 1983 movie Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence on the author, and despite him titling the music he composed for the film Forbidden Colours, after Mishima’s 1951 novel of the same name.

I won’t deny that I find Mishima’s extreme politics as objectionable and doolally as the next person. (At least, the next sane person. In 1990s Japan, there were plenty of Uyoku dantai around, i.e., fascistic dingbats who prowled the streets in flag-emblazoned black vans, ranting and blasting patriotic music out of loudspeakers and generally making tits of themselves, and no doubt they thought Mishima’s ideas were wonderful.) But I can forgive him for his politics because I find his writing exquisite. That’s with a couple of exceptions. Forbidden Colours, a book I just could never get my head around, is one.

© Penguin Books

A friend and former colleague called Eiji Suenaga told me back then about the afore-mentioned Sea of Fertility novels and gave me some interesting advice about how to read them. Don’t, he said, try to read them until you’ve reached middle-age. Only at that stage in your life can you grasp their full significance and really appreciate them. Thus, I didn’t read them until I was in my forties. As I said, the first two in the series absolutely blew me away. However, the third novel, 1970’s The Temple of Dawn, gets rather bogged down with its copious musings on Buddhism, while the fourth and final one, the same year’s Decay of the Angel, feels slightly rushed and sketchy in comparison to its predecessors. Though to be fair to Mishima, he had rather a lot on his mind by then. It’s said that he penned Angel’s final lines on the morning of his suicide. (You can’t accuse Mishima of being a writer who talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk. I mean, he polished off his last novel in between attempting to overthrow his country’s government and ritually gutting himself… I couldn’t imagine Martin Amis doing that.)

One thing that makes Mishima an acquired taste is his bleak intensity. You don’t read his work if you’re looking for some laughs. Thus, in Confessions of a Mask (1949), you get a coming-of-age novel, an obviously autobiographical one, involving suppressed homosexuality and graphic, at times violent and macabre, sexual fantasies. In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963), you get a sect of young boys who quietly go Lord of the Flies, convince themselves they don’t have to abide by the rules of common morality, and start mutilating kittens – with the implication that soon they’ll be doing similar things to human beings. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), you get a mentally-ill Buddhist acolyte setting fire to the titular temple, the Kinkaku-ji, in Kyoto – an act of arson that’d actually befallen that temple in real life in 1950.

Admittedly, Mishima’s 1954 novel The Sound of Waves is a nice, happy love story. During my Japan days, I noticed how popular it was among certain Westerners living there. I suspect they liked Waves because it allowed them to boast they’d read a book by one of their host-country’s most important 20^th-century novelists – but it spared them having to grapple with that novelist’s normal, angsty, messed-up stuff. However, Mishima himself didn’t rate Waves highly. He once brutally dismissed it as ‘that great joke on the public’.

Well, I recently read Mishima’s 1968 novel Life for Sale and I now wonder if I should revise my ideas about him and the sort of literature he specialised in. It’s unlike anything I’ve read by him before. Unashamedly pulpy in content, wildly episodic in nature, quite outrageous in its plot-twists, the book often feels like Mishima wrote it with his tongue so far into his cheek that it’s a surprise the cheek didn’t burst. At times, it seems a million miles away from the gloom and seriousness of his other work. That’s ‘at times’, though. There are moments when the sombre, highbrow Mishima of old does resurface… But never for long.

It kicks off in the conventional Mishima style I’m familiar with. Page one has the hero, Hanio, attempting to commit suicide. He consumes “a large amount of sedative in the last overground train that evening. To be precise, he gulped it down at a drinking fountain in the station before boarding the train. And no sooner had he stretched out on the empty seats than everything went blank.” Mishima-esque too is the fact that Hanio is driven to this attempt on his own life by nothing of great significance: “Suicide was not something he had put much thought into. He considered it likely that his sudden urge to die arose that evening while he was reading the newspaper… he could only conclude that he had attempted to end It all on a complete whim.”

Hanio survives, however. With a rather more nihilistic mindset than before, he abandons his nine-to-five job and puts an advert in a newspaper: “Life for Sale. Use me as you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed. Will cause no bother at all.” And that’s when the fun starts. The advert’s first reply comes from an embittered old man with a much younger and voluptuous wife. The wife is currently cuckolding him with a mobster. The old man hires Hanio – who now considers his life both meaningless and expendable – to seduce his wife and make sure that her mobster boyfriend finds them both ‘at it’: “When he claps eyes on you, you’re sure to be killed, and she’ll probably be dead meat too.” Hanio does as he’s told, but things don’t go according to plan. Someone gets killed, but not him.

He then proceeds to his next case. A librarian, “an utterly nondescript middle-aged woman… more like an elderly spinster, perhaps someone who taught English literature at a girls’ college of higher education,” involves him in a plot with some criminals, a rare book about Japanese beetles that’s housed in her library, and a particular type of beetle that supposedly can be ground down and made into a deadly poison. Hanio, with zero interest in remaining alive, is asked to act as a guinea pig for the newly-manufactured poison. He agrees, but again the unexpected happens, and again he survives while someone else gets killed. Meanwhile, in both episodes so far, mention is made of a mysterious, secret crime syndicate called the ACS, the ‘Asia Confidential Service’.

From wikipedia.org / © Ken Domon

Things become yet more outlandish. Hanio is hired next by a schoolboy who wants him to look after his mother: “She’s ill, but she’ll recover right away with care from you.” What makes this life-threatening is the fact that the boy’s mother is a vampire. Hanio soon finds himself living with the pair, having his blood gradually and gently siphoned away by the vampirical mum, but he’s languidly happy as his death seems to draw near: “he truly enjoyed lounging around at home, basking in the family atmosphere.” This is the most baroque part of the book, but it actually works well. (Thinking about it, I’m not surprised that Mishima and vampires – at least, those of the brooding, aristocratic sort – are a good match.)

The next episode – following another death, again not Hanio’s – is less effective. He becomes embroiled in an espionage saga involving two foreign powers, ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’, a stolen necklace, an all-important cipher key, and several dead secret agents. It all feels a bit tired, despite Mishima throwing into the plot some mysterious carrots as a whacky extra ingredient. The ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’ stuff reminds me of old 1960s TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68), where the villains were often foreigners, but ones acting on behalf of ‘unnamed hostile powers’, to avoid the show offending anybody.

After that, Hanio ends up living in a new, lavish apartment – his ‘Life for Sale’ business has earned him a fair amount of yen by this point – which he rents off a rich, drug-addled hippy-chick called Reiko. (Reiko’s dotty old mum explains to him that her daughter takes “that drug beginning with L…”) This enables Mishima, through the character of Hanio, to express his opinion of hippies, which as you might expect is not high. “They were seekers after ‘meaninglessness’, all right, but he could not imagine them having the guts to confront the real thing when it inevitably came calling.” Hanio gets romantically involved with the unhinged Reiko who, for all her wild talk, has a worryingly conventional vision of what married life with him will be like: “Daddy comes home every day at six-fifteen, so I have to start cooking. When everything’s bubbling away nicely, I’ll hurry up and put on my make-up in time for when Daddy turns up…”

Hanio eventually flees from Reiko. In the book’s closing pages, becoming increasingly paranoid, he believes that it’s not just her who’s pursuing him. He might also have the ACS – the Asia Confidential Service mentioned by characters in the novel’s earlier sections – chasing him too.

Thus, Life for Sale is a mish-mash of crime, spy, horror, romance and comedy themes, leavened with a little of Mishima’s characteristic angst. If not every episode is successful, that’s not a great problem – a few pages later, another episode arrives, which the reader may enjoy better. Meanwhile, it suggests the books by Mishima that have long been available in translated form may have given English-language readers a blinkered view of him, i.e., that he was a humourless, cerebral misery-guts who specialised in Literature with a capital ‘L’. But Life for Sale, whose English-language translation didn’t appear until 2019, gives a rather different impression, that he was less of a literary snob, enjoyed genre fiction and had a playful side.

And I hear that last year saw the first English translation of another Mishima novel, a 1962 one called Beautiful Star. Its translator was Stephen Dodd, who also rendered Life for Sale into English. Beautiful Star sees Mishima having a go at science fiction. It’s about “a Japanese family who wake up one day convinced that they are each aliens from a different planet inhabiting human bodies.”

Mishima and aliens? I can’t wait to read that one.

© Penguin Books

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

© Orion Publishing Co

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.

October 8, 2020October 9, 2020

Into battle with Rab Foster

I’m a big fan of the American writer Ambrose Bierce, so I’m delighted to report that my Bierce-inspired short story No Man’s Land has been been published in the October 2020 issue of Schlock! Webzine.

During his lifetime, Bierce was best known for his journalism, although today he’s probably remembered most for his short fiction, and for two categories of short fiction in particular: his horror stories and his American Civil War stories. A good example of Bierce’s work in the former genre is 1893’s The Damned Thing, which has an irresistible premise – something monstrous and hideous is stalking the remote American West but nobody can see it because it’s a colour that exists beyond the spectrum of colours visible to the human eye. It’s an obvious influence on later writers of the weird and macabre such as H.P. Lovecraft.

However, I prefer Bierce’s short stories about the American Civil War, in which, as a young man, he’d fought on the Union side. They’re packed with unrelentingly grim detail about the conflict – and grim it certainly was, producing the greatest number of wartime deaths in the history of the United States, 620,000 (which is 200,000 more than the American death toll in World War II). Possibly my favourite of these stories is 1889’s Chickamauga, about a six-year-old child who wanders off from his family home and into a forest, becomes lost, and ends up in the aftermath of battle, where he witnesses all manner of terrible things.

Interestingly, perhaps Bierce’s most famous story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890), manages to combine a Civil War setting with psychological (and almost supernatural) horror. Kurt Vonnegut has praised it as ‘a flawless example of American genius’ and its twist ending has influenced novels, like William Golding’s Pincher Martin (1956), and movies, like Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990), ever since.

No Man’s Land grew out of a mad question that occurred to me one day: “What would a vampire story written by Ambrose Bierce have been like?” When I started writing it, I perversely tried to model it on one of his Civil War stories rather than on one of his horror ones. What’s interesting is that as the story developed, and as I tried to accommodate the machinations of the plot, and tried to incorporate the vampire element, it moved further and further away from the Civil War and from America itself. Eventually, it ended up being set on a battlefield in some imaginary kingdom in 19^th century Eastern Europe, rather like Ruritania in Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda. The result was more like a dark fairy tale. For that reason, the story published in Schlock! Webzine is credited to Rab Foster, the pseudonym I put on my fantasy (as opposed to horror) stories.

Because I wanted to focus on the soldiers, and to avoid making the plot too tangled, I refrained from giving the vampires personalities and made them as bestial and mindless as possible. They’re not the suave, eloquent figures you’d get in, say, the average Anne Rice novel. That said, I did pay homage to the more traditional school of vampire story-telling at the end of No Man Land, when I lifted (okay, pinched) an idea from Brian Clemens’ 1974 Hammer horror movie Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter about the reflective properties of sword-blades.

Despite the fairy-tale atmosphere of No Man’s Land, I hope that at least some of Bierce’s influence shows through. I’ve sprinkled the story with details that evoke his Civil War stories – a fleeing, defeated army of injured soldiers stumbling and crawling along, their uninjured and able-bodied comrades having run away from the scene already; a battleground littered with discarded and dropped items, including “blankets, knapsacks, canteens, rifles with broken stocks and bent barrels, hats, waist-belts, bayonets, bugles, cartridge boxes, rations of biscuits and sardines, a scattered set of playing cards”; the air filled with a fog of gun and cannon-smoke; the mud patterned with the criss-crossing footprints and hoof-prints of armies advancing and retreating.

No Man’s Land can be read in Schlock! Webzine for the rest of this month. The main page of the October issue is accessible here and the story itself here.

From the Clifton Waller Barret Library of American Literature