Their Satanic Majesties Request

THE HELLFIRE CLUB (1961)

TERROR (1978)

French A style poster for New World's THE HELLFIRE CLUB, more pulp adventure than demonic horror.

THE notorious real-life Hellfire Club was famed for its debauchery and devil worship, the name given to several exclusive establishments in Britain and Ireland as meeting places of "persons of quality" who wished to take part in immoral acts. Founded in 1719 London, The Club motto Fais ce que tu voudras (Do what thou wilt) was a philosophy associated with François Rabelais' fictional abbey at Thélème, and later adopted by infamous magus Aleister Crowley. Set in 18th century England, THE HELLFIRE CLUB tells the story of circus acrobat Jason (Keith Michell) in his attempt to reclaim the estate of his estranged father Lord Netherton (Andrew Faulds), leader of the Hellfire Club. Years earlier, Jason as a boy (Martin Stephens) is whipped by his father after walking in on an orgy held by The Club, and together with his mother (Jean Lodge), flees with Timothy (David Lodge). Jason discovers that his villainous cousin Thomas (Peter Arne) has stolen his rightful inheritance, and together with lawyer Merryweather (Peter Cushing) plans to bring an end to the deceit, and brake the grip of The Club on King George II’s rule. 

Although billed as a guest star, Cushing's fussy but erudite character is pivotal to the fate of English society. In fact, the actor later adapted Merryweather's demeanor for his takes on Doctor Who and Abner Perry. Because of Cushing's presence and its lush staging, the film is often mistaken for a Hammer production. But there is no bite to THE HELLFIRE CLUB, with no satanic overtones, and the picture limits itself to a handful of lame orgies where most of the participants remain fully clothed. Directed by Robert S.Baker and Monty Berman from a script by Leon Griffiths and Jimmy Sangster, the production is more swashbuckling melodrama, using The Club as a pinning to hang its elaborate fight scenes and love interests (redheads Adrienne Corri and Kai Fischer). Like most cinematic heroes brandishing a sword, Jason is not only morally perfect but also irresistible to all women, and Michell gives a likable performance as he gathers his circus comrades to do battle with the evil hierarchy.

With a running time of only 80 minutes, TERROR is a whirlwind of gore, semi-nudity and in-jokes. Amazingly, the film topped the UK box office charts for a week in early 1979.

TERROR takes a much more direct approach to its satanic theme. Reuniting director Norman J.Warren with scriptwriter David McGillivray - after their exploits on SATAN'S SLAVE - TERROR is not so much an unashamed rip-off of Dario Argento's operatic gore noir SUSPIRIA but a star-struck reaction to it. The picture starts with a witch hunt and a beheading, subsequently revealed to be a "film within a film" being watched in the same house where hundreds of years before the events being portrayed on screen took place. The witch exacts her revenge on the ancestors of her persecutors, one of whom is the production's director, James Garrick (John Nolan). After a makeshift hypnosis goes awry, the curse takes on a more direct approach, including death by lighting equipment, murderous film cans (in reality nine faulty prints of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER specially supplied by Rank Laboratories) which leads to a very Argentoesque window-pane decapitation, and aspiring actress Carol (Glynis Barber) is impaled to a tree trunk with knives.

The performances are generally competent, but James and Ann Garrick (Carolyn Courage) both have too little screen time to develop the family curse scenario, even if Warren was more interested to do so. Instead, the focus is on Les Young's coloured filters to provide TERROR with a suitably garish tableau for its elaborately bloody murders, and enhance the hallucinatory disregard for logic. The opening "film within a film" narrative acts both as a Hammer Gothic pastiche and a expostulation of it, but this is not the only nod to a cinematic heritage; the viewer is also treated to snatches of a ficticious soft-core film called BATHTIME WITH BRENDA, scenes heavily indebted to experiences not necessarily enjoyed by Warren and McGillivray in their careers. Other points of interest are a nightclub act you won't forget in a hurry, and a red herring sequence culminating in a Peter Mayhew cameo.

Beware the Eyes that Paralyze

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963)
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1995)

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED typifies British science fiction in that - unlike the comic book and serial traditions of American fare - the films adhere to sombre threats in drab settings. The work unfolds Quatermass-style, slowly adding the uncanny to a normal rural setting.

DIRECT echoes of H.G. Wells' obsession with catastrophe and its aftermath appear time and again in John Wyndham's oeuvre. Christopher Priest famously summed up the most frequently voiced criticism of Wyndham's work when he described him as "the master of the middle-class catastrophe." But while the tone of the author’s stories may occasionally strike modern readers as quaint, their cosiness serves a serious purpose. His innocuously English backdrops are central to the power of his novels, implying that apocalypse could occur at any time - or, indeed, be happening in the next village at this very moment. Wyndham was also redefining the science fiction genre; up until the late 1940s, sci-fi was almost exclusively set in space and involved what Wyndham himself described as "the adventures of galactic gangsters."

Wolf Rilla's 1960 VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is a beautifully restrained adaptation of Wyndhams The Midwich Cuckoos issued three years previously. It is the story of a mysterious, hours-long fainting spell among the inhabitants of a small community, which is followed by the pregnancies of every local woman of childbearing years - including virgins. After short gestations, the women give birth to ten-pound babies with blonde hair and "arresting" eyes who, as they rapidly mature, are discovered to share a single consciousness, read people's minds, and be very dangerous when crossed. Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) - the aging father of the apparent spokesman of the group, David (Martin Stephens) - is entrusted by the government to educate the children in a remote house, while trying to determine their purpose.

A year before his performance in THE INNOCENTS, Martin Stephens is the tweed-suited spokesman of the children in the original VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. Stephens' flicker of an almost-smile after forcing a motorist to kill himself is one of the nastiest shots in British cinema.

As the children grow, so do their powers. Nevertheless, there are some inconsistencies. Early on, sensing that the grocer is frightened of them, they show unexpected consideration in promising to stay away from her shop. But when a man accidentally almost strikes one of the children with his car, they instantly band together and force him to kill himself by driving into a wall. Conversely, after more acts of violence, Zellaby’s brother-in-law Alan Bernard (Michael Gwynn) forces his way into the children's presence and threatens them, but they do not kill him, instead punishing him with a dose of temporary paralysis. Whether this is because of some kind of feeling for Gordon or wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley) is not stated; the only thing that is clear is that the children, like all children, do not have full command of themselves, however other they may be.

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is a film that has managed to enter the collective unconscious because of the portrayal of the Midwich Children. With identical blonde wigs (an unsettling effect is achieved by casting real-life brunette kids whose colouring is subtly wrong for their hair), staring eyes (in some prints a glowing effect was added) and choreography of movement, they are disturbingly other. Their origin is left ambiguous, and when Zellaby interrogates them on the subject, their only response is lowered eyes and a calm "It would be better if you didn’t ask these questions" from David. Although alien impregnation is the favoured theory, it is implied that the children are the result of mutation, representing the next stage in human evolution.

CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED develops the original film’s political subtext, and transports the action to a damp and grimy London.

Much of the power of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED comes via two pieces of serendipity. Firstly, when the project was in the planning stages, the Catholic Legion Of Decency objected to the central theme of mysterious impregnation. Consequently, the film could not be produced in the United States, and was instead made on location in Hertfordshire; the resulting shoot lends an uncomfortable air of authenticity. Secondly, filming in England meant the presence of some marvellous British character actors: Laurence Naismith as Dr Willers, Bernard Archard as the tormented village minister, Richard Vernon as the Home Secretary, and Peter Vaughn as a bicycling policeman. Sanders gives a suitably rounded performance but Barbara Shelley is not given all that much to do; Anthea seems to spend most of the film being sent out of the room. In contrast, Gwynn makes the most of his far more substantial role as a man with a foot in both camps, and Stephens'' air of cool, detached superiority makes us comprehend the extent of the threat. Stephens was eleven when the film was shot and, like many good child actors, both looked younger than he was, and seemed older.

A product of its time - the domestic scenes between the Zellabys now seem particularly dated - VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED dares not even hint at abortion. In perhaps the film's most indelible moment, we see the affected villagers – one man accompanied by his wife and his daughter – filing silently in and out of the clinic, not one person making eye contact with any other. On one level this is a story about rape and the consequences; and yet other than in a few scenes with Anthea, the film is never about its women. On the contrary, its focus is divided between the village men and the male authority figures. It has a power that many of its followers lack, perhaps because unlike them it is not merely a family drama, but deals with broader issues such as government action in times of crisis, how people's perceptions of themselves can affect their actions, and where the moral line should be drawn. If the film's resolution is a soft option, the hard questions asked nevertheless remain.

John Carpenter’s VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED remake marked another notch in his downward spiralling of a career.

In CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED, the youths identified by a research initiative are gathered from around the world and housed in London for collective study. After international and Cold War tensions lead world governments to return the children to their respective embassies, the children escape and hide out in an abandoned church in Southwark, where the situation escalates into a final showdown with the armed forces. Here, the youths are no longer malevolent, but merely misunderstood. Where VILLAGE was a variant on INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and its subgenre of aliens subverting the human norm, this film belongs to the type of alien contact personified by THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and STAR TREK, about defusing xenophobia and prejudice. Subsequently, it lacks any of the sense of sinister thrill of the original, and the film offers up the ludicrously improbable notion of having the children build a deadly sonic weapon out of a disused church organ.

Both Wyndham’s source novel and Rilla's film were very much a reaction to their place and time. John Carpenter's 1995 American remake of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED approached no such social issues, relocating the story to "Midwich, California," and adding a dash of the director’s trademark shock tactics. The mis-casting of the film is its greatest talking point, however, which is amusing in its outlandishness. Just prior to his horse-riding accident, it is awkward to watch the limited dramatic range of Christopher Reeve as Midwich's resident M.D. Kirstie Alley displays little presence as the cold-hearted, secretive epidemiologist, and if Crocodile Dundee's main squeeze (Linda Kozlowski) is difficult to recognize as one of the expectant mothers, what better camouflage could there be for Luke Skywalker than as the local minister?

Bly Spirit

THE INNOCENTS (1961)

The BFI’s Region 2 DVD of THE INNOCENTS includes an introduction and commentary by Christopher Frayling, and one of the very few booklets that can be celebrated as a true DVD extra.

JACK Clayton’s ambiguous THE INNOCENTS, adapted from Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, builds suspense slowly, subtly, and inexorably. It tells the story of repressed Victorian governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), who is hired by a wealthy and irresponsible man (Michael Redgrave) to assume charge of his country manor, Bly House, and his orphaned niece and nephew - Flora (Pamela Franklin), and Miles (Martin Stephens). Giddens sees the ghostly apparitions of her late predecessor Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop) and former groundskeeper Quint (Peter Wyngarde) and, knowing that the children were exposed to this sadomasochistic relationship, she becomes convinced that this memory must be purged before it contaminates them.

The films’ gothic angst and creep-outs manipulate its traditional ghost story ethic with remarkable freshness. Metaphor is one of cinema’s richest streams, and Kerr takes perfect advantage of her respectable facade wrestling with unspeakable turbulence. Prim and sexually straitjacketed, her character is corrupted by the old house. The ambiguity is consequently fascinating or maddening - according to taste - with critics labelling Giddens insane to even a paedophile. Whatever your conclusion, it is an unforgettable portrayal, and with Franklin and Stephens delivering performances of astonishing maturity, THE INNOCENTS may well be the finest-acted horror film.

The possible otherworldly intervention of Quint in the life of Miles is one of THE INNOCENTS’ many ambiguous threads.

Photographed by Freddie Francis in CinemaScope, THE INNOCENTS’ musters its frisson by both candle and daylight, its oil-black and snow-white compositions teasing the eye toward faces haunting the periphery or deep background. Francis’ self-made red iris filter deliberately frames in oval twilight, making outer edges appear shadowy and mysterious. Most haunting are the glimpses of Jessel, sobbing uncontrollably at her lectern, or standing forlorn among the reeds, and Quint’s initial unexpected surge toward the camera (and Giddens) gives the distinct impression of movement within another dimension. The audio effects are also noteworthy, with the natural sounds of the house’s garden amplified so that even bird song becomes unsettling.

Deborah Kerr passed away on October 16th at the age of 86. Kerr’s angular beauty and self-possessed femininity distinguished more than fifty films in four decades. Though her poise might be ruffled in scenes of passion (most famously by her encounter on the beach with Burt Lancaster in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY), her well-bred airs and graces made Kerr a model of British womanhood in Hollywood. Yet her refined sensuality proved refreshingly attractive, since it hinted at hidden desires and forbidden feelings, giving an extra edge and interest. If she still looked more at ease on screen as a nun than as a nymphomaniac, or as a governess rather than a seductress, Kerr loved to hint at what she called "banked fires," the volcano steaming away beneath the surface. Never was this more evident than in THE INNOCENTS.