Demons of the 1970's (Part II of II)

SYMPTOMS (1974)
FULL CIRCLE (1977)

"Changes in the weather always upset me ... I don't know why;" Angela Pleasence battles with her twisted psyche in SYMPTOMS.

UNLIKE his exploitative VAMPYRES, José Larraz’s SYMPTOMS is a slow-burning triumph, a film that was unexpectedly chosen as an official British entry at Cannes. Neurotic waif Helen Ramsey (a mesmerising Angela Pleasence) has invited girlfriend Anne (Lorna Heilbron) to stay at her English woodland estate. Anne is welcoming the retreat to write and evaluate the end of a romance, but Helen's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic as questions are asked of the portrait of Cora - Ramsey's disappeared friend and possible lover - and the brooding presence of handyman Brady (Peter Vaughan). Helen's manifestations of Cora mirror Anne's unease in the house, under the shadow of Cora's body festering in the lake after a passionate embrace with the burly handyman.

Larraz has long favoured mansions in his pictures, and the warring of the sexes; here they are quite literally foundations for exploring the horror motif of characters yearning for lost loves. Taking several inspirations from REPULSION, the director uses a mirror and the ticking of a clock to replicate Roman Polanski's idea of lulling the viewer into a false sense of security, before delivering bludgeoning shock tactics. Vanity Celis points out in her essay which accompanies the BFI Blu-ray that Larraz' contribution to the sexual anxieties of the Gothic tradition is "a safety net found in the auxiliary subtext of lesbian love," and the production - similar to Jorge Grau's THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 WEEKS LATER and Alfronso Cuaron’s CHILDREN OF MEN - captures the English landscape more effectively than native filmmakers, creating an agitation that resonates more deeply in the outsider's eye.

Mia Farrow brings a tragic vulnerability to her role in FULL CIRCLE, part of a Seventies Anglo-Canadian co-production deal which yielded lesser pictures THE UNCANNY and DEATH SHIP.

An eerie atmosphere of love and loss is also central to Richard Loncraine's FULL CIRCLE, based on Peter Straub's 1975 novel Julia. A decade on from her subjection to Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY, Mia Farrow is again entangled with an unearthly child, playing a mother grieving the loss of daughter Katie (Sophie Ward) who chokes to death at breakfast. During her self-imposed isolation at an old house in Kensington, Julia is stalked by another girl ghost, who led a gang in the brutal murder of a German boy in 1938. As a "feeling of hate" infiltrates the dwelling, the murderous infant is identified as Olivia Rudge, and Julia traces Olivia's mother (Cathleen Nesbitt) to a Swansea mental institution, who admits to killing her offspring and accuses her visitor of doing the same.

In a moving final scene Julia welcomes the ghostly Olivia into her arms, the camera then pans around an armchair to reveal that Julia has a fatal neck wound. This not only brings us full circle from Katie's demise, but leaves the viewer wondering if Olivia has claimed another victim from her otherworldly plane, or the tortured mother has committed suicide. The willowy Farrow carries the whole burden of grief superbly, and quite rightly male players are kept to the margins (husband Magnus (Keir Dullea) is purely abandoned, and friend Mark (Tom Conti) suffers an unnecessarily sensationalised death)). The film also benefits from beautiful cinematography and a piano/synthesiser score which manages to underpin and elaborate on the unease.

"What a strange evening it is"

A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS (1972)
A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - LOST HEARTS (1973)

Peter Vaughan plays a treasure hunter stalked by an ancient protector in A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS.

EACH Christmas from 1971 to 1978, the BBC broadcast late night, self-contained supernatural dramas which would become known under the umbrella of A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS. The first five episodes were all based on stories by M.R. James - THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER, A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS, LOST HEARTS, THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS and THE ASH TREE. Charles Dickens' THE SIGNALMAN was chosen for the 1976 episode, but the final two installments were original teleplays in contemporary settings: Clive Exton's STIGMA and John Bowen's THE ICE HOUSE. The first seven entries were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and the transmissions under consideration here are two of the most fondly remembered and pivotal in the evolution of the series. A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS is a masterpiece and, considering it was broadcast between 11.05 and 11.55pm on Christmas Eve 1972, attracted an astonishing nine million viewers. Because of its critical and public success, all subsequent entries were shifted from General Features to the BBC's Drama department proper, and as Clark has lamented, despite larger budgets, his vision for the tales was suddenly imposed upon by screenwriters and script editors.

A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS tells of Mr Paxton (Peter Vaughan) - a clerk who has lost his job in the great depression - travelling to the East Anglian coast hoping to discover a last surviving Saxon crown, one of three that were put in place to protect England from invasion. Following in the footsteps of an archaeologist who was murdered twelve years previously searching for the crown, Paxton boards in a hotel which only has one other guest, Dr Black (Clive Swift, playing a returning character from THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER). Increasingly haunted by a mysterious figure, which may be the ghost of William Ager whose job was to guard the relics, Paxton actually finds then - with the aid of Dr Black - returns the crown, only to be bludgeoned to death at the point of excavation. Black leaves on a train, with the station guard opening the carriage door under the misapprehension that there was someone wishing to board the same compartment...

LOST HEARTS ghost children Giovanni and Phoebe - played by Christopher Davis and Michelle Foster - peer through windows with their Chinaman's Fingernails, drawing on the age-old fallacy that fingernails continue to grow after death.

Inspired by the bleak open beaches and dreamy isolation of Jonathan Miller's OMNIBUS adaptation of James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad,' A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS works both as a classic ghost story and as an enduring piece of drama. As David Kerekes notes in Creeping Flesh: The Horror Fantasy Film Book Volume 1, the chilling shot of a man hunched over in Paxton's hotel room predates the finale of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT by close on thirty years, and the sequence where Paxton encounters a machete-bearing farmer is an illustration of how an effectively-staged scene can win over anything effects-laden. What makes Paxton's demise all the more starling is that you feel for a man who just wants to make a name for himself, driven by hurt pride rather than by any malicious intent. Surprisingly, the biggest change from the source story is Paxton himself: far from Vaughan's down-trodden, working-class adventurer, the Paxton of the original tale - first published in 1925 - is young and scholarly, but without personal connection. This leaves another layer to the printed story's undertones of post-WWI invasion and young lives lost.

LOST HEARTS, written by Robin Chapman, is based on one of James' earliest and less subtle tales. In fact, the writer once told his illustrator James McBryde that he "didn't care much about it," and the story was only included in his first collection at the insistence of the publisher. Stephen (Simon Gripps-Kent), a young orphan, is sent to live with his eccentric relative Mr Abney (Joseph O’Conor). Stephen is haunted by the spirits of two children - both orphans like himself who had briefly lived at the house - and learns that Abney dabbles in ritual sacrifice to seek immortality. The ghostly children are wondrous, swaying in unison to ethereal hurdy-gurdy music, but away from the obvious Faustian element there is a child abuse sub-text that won't go away, no matter how often Clark denies this oft-made reading. Instead, the director sees it as a children's fear of monsters and that "[their] father or mother may turn into an ogre or a witch."

Die Screaming, Susan George

DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE (1971)
FRIGHT (1971)
STRAW DOGS (1971)

Susan George in Pete Walker's DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE. George was astutely described by Leslie Halliwell as "British leading lady, former child actress; usually typed as sexpot."

BLOND, olive-skinned Susan George made the most of her nymphet/spoiled girl demeanour in this trio of cult films, two of which were cheap exploitation, the other a masterpiece which defined her career. DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE begins with Marianne 'Hips' McDonald (George) - working as a go-go dancer in Portugal - almost run over by sports car driving tourist Sebastian (Christopher Sandford). Returning to England, Sebastian impulsively proposes marriage, and in a Pythonesque turn of events, Marianne marries best man Eli (Barry Evans) instead. Back in Portugal, Sebastian tells Marianne's disgraced magistrate father (Leo Genn) of her whereabouts; The Judge and Marianne's unhinged half-sister Hildegarde (Judy Huxtable) are willing to kill the dancer unless she reveals a Swiss bank account number containing an inheritance of £700,000 and damning evidence on her father, which Marianne's mother secreted away before dying in mysterious circumstances.

DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE is an antiseptic mystery thriller which never lives up to its title. The film was a troubled production which was suspended because of frictions between its young cast, according to director Pete Walker, yet screenwriter Murray Smith suggests the problems were more financial. Whatever the reason, the meandering script surprisingly lacks nudity, sex and violence after an appealingly garish opening credits sequence, which sees George gyrating to the theme music in a black bikini against a glowing red backdrop. With its extensive location shooting its all too glossy and respectable to ever create the erotic charge Walker yearned for, though the incestial relationship between The Judge and Hildegarde provides some memorable tensions ("I ought to spank you - only you'd like it.")

"The scream you can hear is your own." The scariest thing about FRIGHT is that the dream sequence from THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES plays on television. This is the cover to Optimum's R2 DVD, released in January 2010. 

One of the first films to explore a babysitter tormented by an escaped psychopath, Peter Collinson's FRIGHT is another dull affair. Amanda (George) is hired as a babysitter for Tara (Tara Collinson, the director's son), the infant of Jim and Helen Lloyd (George Cole and Honor Blackman). But unknown to Amanda, Helen and Jim are not a married couple heading out to celebrate their anniversary, but are going to meet a psychologist to discuss Helen’s husband Brian (Ian Bannen), who has been placed in an asylum. Back at the house, Amanda is harassed by would-be boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman), and spooked by various noises. When she finds Chris battered unconscious, in her panic she lets in an apparently friendly neighbour. But that person is in fact Brian, who has escaped from custody.

Amanda is a plucky heroine, paving the way for the multitude of final girls to come, and Tudor Gates' script deals with a good many plot elements that would become staples of the bludgeoning slasher genre: the beleaguered babysitter, the boyfriend playing pranks and/or pestering the heroine for sex, the friendly neighbour/visitor who may not be what they seem, phone cords cut et al. Yet it all feels too dated; 'Nanette' sings a tepid song (Ladybird) over the opening titles, Waterman is embarrassing in pink flares and cardigan ("Oi reckon you've got a lovely pair of Bristols"), and Bannen overacts to a point of parody (in his Video Watchdog review, Charlie Largent is more lenient, likening his growls to Karloff while referencing SON OF FRANKENSTEIN). The film also has the most ineffective police force you're ever likely to see, and it is amusing to note that the Constable is played by Roger Lloyd ('Trigger') Pack.

George in STRAW DOGS. Sam Peckinpah's Westcountry Western was accused of glamouring rape and glorifying misogynistic sadism. 

Cast on the strength of these minor outings, George gives an extraordinary performance as Amy in Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS. The film exists at the heart of Amy's world, a rural West of England of which her and American mathematician husband David (Dustin Hoffman) have relocated. The couple soon realise that his intellect and her girl next door image cause resentment, factors festering with the couple's own marital problems. In the final act, David runs over suspected paedophile Henry (an uncredited David Warner) and takes him home, unaware that he has broken the neck of a flirtatious teenager. When the girl's drunken father (Peter Vaughan) discovers that the couple are hiding Henry, a whiskey-fuelled posses besiege David and Amy's abode of Trencher's Farm.

Shot by John Coquillon - who similarly gave us a tableaux of rural English violence for WITCHFINDER GENERAL - STRAW DOGS is a draining experience. The notorious double rape sequence is still troublesome, particularly because of its ambiguity: after initially resisting her first assailant - former boyfriend Charlie Venner (Del Henney) - Amy appears sympathetic toward him, seemingly on the grounds of their past relationship during her formative years. During the climactic pitched battle - which includes a shotgun blast to the father's foot and Venner dispatched in the giant jaws of an antique poachers trap - David becomes as bestial as the raiders, and loves it. David's regression - or progression? - to feral state defending his home feeds Peckinpah's career-long blood lust. The director had read books by Robert Ardrey, who hypothesised that man's voracious appetite for violence is not the product of environment or childhood trauma as Marx or Freud believed, but pure instinctual drives, creating a murderous ape who fashions ever more sophisticated weaponry to satisfy a desire for control of territory. It is this need for territory, not women, that subscribes most to Peckinpah's oeuvre, and the climactic chaos leaves Amy suitably abandoned at film's end.

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?