Echoes from Beyond

BBC2 PLAYHOUSE - THE BREAKTHROUGH (1975)
BBC2 PLAYHOUSE - MRS ACLAND'S GHOSTS (1975)
BBC2 PLAYHOUSE THE MIND BEYOND (1976)

Irene Shubik's Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama is an account of her career that has become the standard reference work on the subject. Shubik had devised ABC's OUT OF THIS WORLD before moving to the BBC, where her influence on the development of the single play encompassed OUT OF THE UNKNOWN, THE WEDNESDAY PLAY/PLAY FOR TODAY, WESSEX TALES and PLAYHOUSE.

DAPHNE Du Maurier's THE BREAKTHROUGH tells of Saunders (Simon Ward), sent to a remote government lab to help prove a theoretical energy. The experiment involves a subject close to death, as well as in a computer-induced hypnosis and telepathic communication. The person is a mentally deficient but psychically gifted child - possibly affected by the death of her twin - who can report the dying sensations posthumously. Lacking any resolution and suffering from studio sets and stifled performances, there is too much scientific speculation for the drama to breath; THE BREAKTHROUGH reminds of THE ASPHYX, which also documents spirits and near-death experiences before similarly descending into absurdity. Far more interesting is William Trevor's MRS ACLAND'S GHOSTS, where Mr Mockler (John Bluthal) receives numerous letters from stranger Mrs Acland (Sara Kestelman). The woman tells of how the three ghosts of her childhood siblings have continued to make appearances to her; Mockler discovers that Mrs Acland is in a mental institution - placed there by her husband - and was in fact an only child. The notion of ghosts showing themselves on the basis of yearning and suggestion is far more embracing than THE BREAKTHROUGH's babble, with Kestelman giving a heartfelt showing of emotional neglect.

After these tryouts, BBC2 PLAYHOUSE mutated into THE MIND BEYOND. In the first three tales Meriel the Ghost Girl explores the contradictory nature of psychic experiences, opening with George Livingston (Donald Pleasence) witnessing a convincing séance, only for the authenticity to be questioned in a film noir pastiche and re-evaluated by young reporter Robina Oliver (Janet Street-Porter, of all people); Double Echo sees autistic teenager Alison Fisher (Geraldine Cowper) treated by Harley Street Dr Mallam (Jeremy Kemp), only for the pair to develop a telekinetic bond that can see into the future; and in The Love of a Good Woman, after the death of his first wife, Henry Ridout (William Lucas) remarries and builds a new life in a harbour town. But his dead wife's restless spirit communicates with him through his young daughter.

Penguin released The Mind Beyond to accompany the series, which was edited by Shubik. All the writers provided prose versions of their teleplays, with the exception of Stones, which was adapted by the producer herself.

The second half of the series starts with The Daedalus Equations, where mathematical variables from a dead scientist are channelled into money-grabbing psychic fraud Eileen Gray (Megs Jenkins), yet the equations continue; Stones details the plans of a Stonehenge relocation to Hyde Park to boost tourist revenues, with academic Nicholas Reeve (Richard Pasco) realising that the disappearance of three children is linked to their fathers ownership of the last-known copies of Stonehenge Defended; and The Man with the Power is a second coming of a (black) Christ story, where Boysie (Willie Jonah) embarks on a divine quest, leaving his girlfriend, home and job.

The opening titles of THE MIND BEYOND usher the viewer into a world of haunted faces and electrical impulses, a twilight domain away from rational human senses. The eight PLAYHOUSE's under consideration here typify the giddy pseudoscientific and paranormal so prevalent in 70s BBC drama, but the centre staging of mentally-disturbed characters - and Livington's questionable interest in the naked Meriel the Ghost Girl - clash with the more conventional yarns of mysteries better left alone; and in The Man with the Power, religious allegory seems a leap too far. But the productions are a goldmine for familiar faces: Anna Massey is the brittle wife of Henry Ridout, Linda Hayden's sister Jane admits to being Meriel, and Michael Bryant and Peter Sallis appear in The Daedalus Equations as earnest professor and lurking intelligence man respectively.

"Analyse a spook?"

DEAD OF NIGHT - THE EXORCISM (1972)
THE STONE TAPE (1972)

Anna Cropper plays Rachel in the DEAD OF NIGHT episode THE EXORCISM. Cropper also appeared in the 1975 West End stage version of the story, after Mary Ure died from an alcohol and barbiturate overdose following a disastrous opening night.

DEAD OF NIGHT was a series of self-contained supernatural stories broadcast on BBC2 in 1972. Taking its name from the Ealing film of 1945, this incarnation ran for seven fifty-minute episodes, and only three - THE EXORCISM, RETURN FLIGHT and A WOMAN SOBBING - are known to survive in the BBC archives. RETURN FLIGHT - shown on the 12th of November - is a surprisingly banal and predictable aviation-based story from the pen of Robert Holmes; A WOMAN SOBBING - shown on 17th December - is a solid yarn which greatly benefits from the wide-eyed performance of Anna Massey as a bored housewife and mother who hears a female voice crying from the attic space. The two programmes under consideration here have a fluid association with the series: THE EXORCISM was conceived as a stand-alone work but shown as the DEAD OF NIGHT opener, and THE STONE TAPE was included in the same production block for "internal" reasons, but was broadcast as a singular play on Christmas Day.

THE EXORCISM begins with Edmund (Edward Petherbridge) and wife Rachel (Anna Cropper) showing Dan (Clive Swift) around their recently renovated cottage. As Dan's partner Margaret (Sylvia Kay) helps prepare Christmas dinner, Rachel plays a clavichord, but realises that she has no idea what the tune is. There is a power cut, and the telephone is suddenly inoperable. After their meal, all four suffer shooting pain; Dan finds that the door won't open, the windows can't be unlocked, and the outside has been plunged into blackness. Rachel falls into a trance, and relates the experiences of a woman whose husband was hanged when trying to obtain food for her and their two starving children, while the squire and his family indulged in sumptuous meals. We learn that the wife locked herself and the children in their house and waited to die from starvation, hoping that the house would recall the injustice of their deaths.

After appearing uncredited as a six-year-old child in Hammer's film version of THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, Jane Asher is reunited with the work of Nigel Kneale in THE STONE TAPE.

Written and directed by Don Taylor, THE EXORCISM is the standout surviving episode of DEAD OF NIGHT, and different in tone to the famous run of ghost stories made by Lawrence Gordon Clark for the BBC in the 70s. Instead of the seeping vistas of M.R. James and Charles Dickens, THE EXORCISM is reminiscent of Luis Buñuel's absurdist 1967 comedy THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL. A socio-political spook story, the programme is highlighted by some choice but resonant dialogue; after Dan surmises that the couples "should concentrate on how to be socialists and rich", he later tells Margaret not to be afraid as they have been privileged. The coda, where a newscaster reports that the four friends have been found dead apparently from starvation, provides a chilling conclusion to a real time, claustrophobic play which has been enhanced by a sparse but solid cast: Swift is particularly suited to his role, and Cropper's performance in her possessed state is alarmingly believable.

THE STONE TAPE has Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), head of Ryan Electrics research, working on a new recording medium. Scientists move into Taskerlands, an old Victorian mansion, that has been renovated to act as their facility. Foreman Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson) says that the refurbishment of one of the rooms remains uncompleted, as builders refuse to work on the grounds that it is haunted. The researchers explore the area and hear the sounds of a woman followed by a scream. Computer programmer Jill Greeley (Jane Asher) - who is susceptible to the paranormal - sees an image of a woman running up the steps in the room and falling, apparently to her death. Inquiring with the local villagers, they learn that a young maid died there, and Brock realises that somehow the stone has preserved an image. Becoming more desperate under mounting pressure to deliver results, Brock wipes the image. Jill realises that the maid was masking a much older recording, and is confronted by a malevolent presence. Transported to a proto-Stonehenge, she falls to her death, with the elder force claiming a replacement for the ghost girl.

The BFI's STONE TAPE DVD of 2001 includes an audio commentary by Nigel Kneale moderated by critic Kim Newman. Containing an array of interesting trivia and asides, Newman states that this programme - however dated in equipment and fashion - remains seminal because it portrays a technological development we are still living through.

Written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Peter Sasdy, THE STONE TAPE is a landmark slice of supernatural television. A central theme in Kneale's stories are conflicts that stem from some primal yearning, effecting the past, present, or future. In fact, THE STONE TAPE can be considered the final part in a trilogy of Kneale tales - together with QUATERMASS AND THE PIT and his lost masterpiece THE ROAD - that refine and counteract the notion of haunting by applying scientific evaluation. It was also one of the first stories to promulgate the hypothesis of residual haunting, that ghosts may be explained as recordings of past events made by the physical environment. Amazingly, this science babble has come to be known as the Stone Tape Theory by parapsychological researchers, and in the 2004 BBC7 Radio Serial Ghost Zone, a character refers explicitly to the theory as an explanation for the way an invading alien intelligence is "replaying" scenes from the past. For what is ostensibly a ghost story, THE STONE TAPE explores the living; how humans interact in such a situation - particularly in relation to business and money - and, if indeed, a human presence is required to amplify the process. This is effectively bought to the screen by an excellent ensemble cast, whose intense performances often border on the melodramatic.

Hitchcock Comes Home

FRENZY (1972)

Strangulation as art in Hitchcock’s penultimate picture.

IN England for his first feature since STAGE FRIGHT in 1950, Alfred Hitchcock's FRENZY seized the opportunity for what most critics term a return to form. Adapted by playwright Anthony Shaffer from Arthur La Bern's novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, FRENZY is the story of a series of rape-murders committed by suave Covent Garden fruit-merchant Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who throttles women with a necktie. Being Hitchcock - himself the son of a greengrocer - suspicion falls on the wrong person, ill-tempered former-RAF officer turned bartender Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). The screenplay is crafted a little too deliberately, as the detective plot seems mechanical underneath its oh-so-English tone. But the film has long been greatly undervalued, and resurrects many conventions of the director's first hit, THE LODGER.

Hitchcock had laboured under censorship restrictions throughout his career, yet FRENZY was made when controls had eased. Consequently, the rape and murder of Blaney's ex-wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is as explicitly nasty as the director ever got, and after this scene the film doesn't need to portray subsequent killings. This enables Hitchcock to execute one of his finest shots, as Blaney's girlfriend Babs (Anna Massey) is killed off-screen ("you're my type of woman") while the camera retreats backwards down the stairs, through the front door, and then across the street to join the people outside. And the sequence where Rusk has a tussle in a potato truck with Bab' uncooperative corpse - clutching the discriminating evidence of a tie pin - is the most black comedic scene Hitchcock ever filmed. It's rewarding to see Hitch - after fifty years in the business - still executing with such aplomb.

"Lovely, lovely”; Barry Foster is The Necktie Killer.

Claims that Hitchcock was a misogynist - or at least had a neurotic compulsion to mistreat women in his films - had increasingly haunted the auteur; true, Tippi Hedren's ordeal in the attic with THE BIRDS is gratuitous, but arises inevitably from dramatic situation. Even Hedren, despite her quarrels over the director's possessiveness, had no complaints about the support he normally gave her. In his private and professional live Hitchcock was always surrounded by women; he and his wife had one child, a daughter, and she produced three grandchildren, all females. There was a succession of women personal assistants, as well as the usual complement of secretaries, but his wife Alma was the most professional aid of all, and always the ultimate authority in the cutting room.

Similarly, Hitchcock's hatred of actors has been exaggerated. The director believed that performers should only concentrate on their artistic presentation and leave work on the script to the director and screenwriter. Before filming began, tensions grew between Hitchcock and Finch, with the actor earnestly telling reporters that the director seemed past his prime, and that the cast might have to improvise to improve the quaint script. Hitchcock never forgot this violation, and gave Finch no warmth on set, so the actor remained as off balance as Blaney throughout the story. Over the years, there was a persistent rumour that the director had said that actors were cattle; Hitchcock denied this - typically tongue-in-cheek - clarifying that he had only said that actors should be treated like cattle. For him, like the props, the performers were part of the film's setting.

"The Governor" shooting in Covent Garden.

In contrast, Foster relishes his role as the psychotic market trader, a character who is deliberately made more agreeable than the unappetising man he is framing for his crimes. Massey is genuinely touching as the naive girlfriend, and there are plenty of recognisable faces in the supporting cast, such as Clive Swift, Billie Whitelaw and Bernard Cribbins as a sleazy pub landlord. Best of all, however, is Alec McCowan as Inspector Oxford, an old-fashioned copper right down to the ironic final line (“Mr Rusk, you‘re not wearing your necktie”). The scenes between him and his gourmet wife (Vivien Merchant) extend the films obsession with food, as well as portraying a cinematic equivalent of Mr and Mrs Hitchcock.

There is little hope in FRENZY, reflecting a world which is irrevocably fallen; women are harridans or naive lambs for the slaughter, while the men are either brutes (the hero Blaney is an implied wife-beater) or simpletons telling rape jokes over the bar, and the nicest people end up dead. Somehow the world seems to be at the end of its tether, where human beings are reduced to the same level as food and waste, and abandoned - as the rape scene suggests - by any rationale. In fact, FRENZY can be viewed as the culmination of a hostility against the world that Hitchcock begun back in the 1920s.

The Crypt of Horror

TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1971)
THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973)

In a rare appearance under heavy make-up Peter Cushing is Grimsdyke, an avenging zombie, in TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

ONCE targeted as agents of juvenile delinquency by righteous politicians - and tossed into bonfires by outraged parents across North America - the banned in Britain EC Comics provided the drive behind two of Amicus' seemingly endless stream of portmanteau: Freddie Francis' TALES FROM THE CRYPT and Roy Ward Baker's THE VAULT OF HORROR. Essentially McCarthy-era morality tales, the publications were obsessively consistent in punishing corruption in the sickest way possible. Yet while Amicus provided some thrills, you need only look at a handful of the originals to realise that the literary source were more cinematic than cost-conscious Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky would care or cater for.

TALES FROM THE CRYPT was the biggest commercial success of all Amicus multi-tale terrors. Francis' visuals mix bright, basic colours with grey to approach the look of a comic book panel, but the masterstroke is how well the EC style of divine retribution fits into the festering middle-class resentment of the working classes in Edward Heath-era Britain. Opening to the ominous chords of Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D Minor, the framing story sees five visitors losing their way in a labyrinthine set of catacombs, who are shown glimpses of their pasts - or futures? - by the cowled Crypt Keeper (Sir Ralph Richardson). Best remembered for its lively opening story And All Through the House - pitting a murderous wife (Joan Collins) against a killer Santa - the other four segments are split equally between the cumbersome and the classic. Reflections of Death and Wish You Were Here are both weak fillers, the former featuring a philandering husband (Ian Hendry) and the latter a wife (Barbara Murray) using an Oriental idol to bring back the dead. The remaining two episodes are so superior they seem to be from a different production altogether.

Everything in its right place. THE VAULT OF HORROR’s The Neat Job is the highlight in an otherwise bland production.

Poetic Justice sees kindly old Grimsdyke (Peter Cushing) driven to suicide by loathsome neighbours covetous of his land, who send him malicious Valentine rhymes. A simple tale of walking-corpse vengeance in the tried and tested EC tradition, the story is given extra resonance by Cushing's delicate performance, which has a quality rarely seen within the usually character-restraining portmanteau film. The actor was newly widowed at the time, and used a photograph of his late wife Helen, which he addresses by name on screen. Blind Alleys also has wonderful performances at its core, with Rogers (Nigel Patrick) - a retired army officer taking charge of a home for the blind - and Carter (Patrick Magee) - a spokesman for the unsighted. A slow-burning tale of redemption, Rogers' new rules for efficiency (food rationing, no heating) ultimately has him forced to choose between confronting his hunger-crazed Alsatian or hurtling to safety down a narrow corridor bristling with razor blades, set up by the spectrally-portrayed blind.

In comparison, THE VAULT OF HORROR is formulaic at best and signalled the end of any EC endorsement for Amicus. Five men inexplicably find themselves locked in the basement of a skyscraper, and pass the time by recounting their nightmares. Bargain In Death is a weak insurance scam story, while Midnight Mess is an allegedly humorous tale of small-town vampirism starring Daniel and Anna Massey. This Trick'll Kill You is a none-too-subtle allegory about a married pair of magicians murdering fakirs in India, but the other two stories fare better because they subscribe more to the twisted EC mythos. Drawn and Quartered features a struggling artist (Tom Baker) in a voodoo-laced variation on The Picture of Dorian Gray, but the only story that really seems in its element is The Neat Job, in which a disorderly housewife (Glynis Johns) tries to cope with her fussy, perfectionist husband (Terry-Thomas); it’s a delicious presentation of domestic EC-style terror.

Scoptophilia Now

PEEPING TOM (1960)

Director Michael Powell. Speaking of PEEPING TOM: "It vanished for twenty years, and I vanished with it."

MICHAEL Powell’s collaboration with Hungarian Emeric Pressburger – which gave the British film industry a string of hits such as A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, THE RED SHOES and THE TALES OF HOFFMAN – reveals strong elements of the fantastic. The work of Powell and Pressburger is often fragmented with emotional excess and hysterical behaviour, defying any classical sense of balance or order; their cinema is instilled with a magical and transcendent quality, in which the relationship between image and music is closely linked. In what Powell has called ‘the composed film,’ editing, dialogue, camera and actor movement all take on a strongly predetermined rhythmic and choreographed dimension. But the filmmakers also concerned themselves with documenting anxieties about the highly industrialised post-war British culture in which connections to the mythical and mystical past are suppressed or denied. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP is perhaps the richest example of the tendency for them in creating a film which is at once a highly stylised fantasy, an analysis of British culture, and a meditation on the meaning and construction of cinematic images.

Few releases have as strange and tortured a destiny as Powell’s PEEPING TOM. Made without the involvement of Pressburger, and scripted by Leo Marks, the film was unanimously savaged by critics – branded everything from "destructive" to "necrophilic." Powell's sympathetic portrait of mild-mannered serial killer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) was a bold and subversive risk that instantly destroyed the heralded director's career (this treatment apparently extended to Powell dressing the character in his own clothes). Mark ultimately emerges as a disturbed but very human figure, and such sensitivity was too much for the critics, who were unable to see past its foreground prurience and wicked humour. Today, thanks largely to a 1980 revival by Powell enthusiast Martin Scorsese, the film is rightly seen as one of the genre’s key achievements. Lewis, working as a focus puller, is the victim of a monstrously dominating father, who remorselessly subjected him to a campaign of constant monitoring during childhood in the name of scientific research. These experiences have turned Mark into a voyeur with an obsession with fear, and his killing is fed by a compulsion to capture on film the exact expression of his victims at the moment of death.

There are subtle hints of Peter Lorre in Carl Boehm’s portrayal of serial killer Mark Lewis. The character approaches life like a director, suffering for his art and being a technician of emotions.

PEEPING TOM is the first meaningful monograph about the act of watching horror films. In her feminist essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey analyses the way movies tend to film women and argues, among other things, that the camera’s view point is rarely gender neutral, but usually has a "male gaze". Although it predates Mulvey’s essay by fifteen years, PEEPING TOM manifests many of the kind of criticisms she discusses, making it an exercise that also critiques the form and practice of movie making and spectatorship. The fact that Powell is implicating the filmgoers - along with Lewis - as voyeurs was not missed by the critics. As the blind alcoholic Mrs Stephens (Maxine Audley) warns - "all this filming isn't healthy" - Powell's own understanding of the motion picture impulse allows him to explore this idea, implicating the filmmakers, and his audience, in Mark's pathology. This ‘viewer-as-participant’ notion can also be attributed to Eli Roth’s HOSTEL, with the connection between the ticket-buying cinemagoer and the paying-for-torture of its narrative. But hostility for PEEPING TOM was further fuelled by the fact that Powell cast himself as Mark's sinister father, and his own son, Columba, as the young Mark. Brian Easdale’s racing, silent film style piano music intensifies these nightmarish home movies of systematised child abuse even further.

PEEPING TOM was released in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO, and signalled the start of horror films moving away from gothic mansions and monsters into a more contemporary world where evil is an aspect of the human psyche. In both of these films sex functions as a dirty secret, and it is possible to argue that Hitchcock’s commercial success at exploiting this secret despite initial critical disfavour was a crucial factor in determining the future sensationalism of sex and violence in American cinema, just as much as Powell’s commercial failure closed off a similar avenue of representation in Britain. The two films share certain thematic similarities - voyeurism, an unusually frank (for the time) treatment of sexuality - but the two leading anti-heroes, Mark and Norman Bates, are both timid, young, lonely men, who appear polite, tidy and reserved. Indeed, Mark’s awkward and childlike romance with Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) seems to have reverted to the only level in which Lewis can communicate with women without killing them. Metaphorically, the camera is portrayed as a phallic symbol. When we first see Mark’s camera it is held in his coat at waist level; later, when he is about to go out on a date with Helen, she tries to convince him to leave it behind, saying it is too much a part of him, "I though it was growing into an extra limb." Even the way Mark kills women is phallic: his weapon is a spike concealed in the leg of a tripod, which must be raised and then unsheathed before he can kill. Consequently, PEEPING TOM implicates that cinema itself can become an instrument of violence. Because of this, it is heartening that the film will, proudly, never be respectable.