Green and Unpleasant Land

PLAY FOR TODAY - ROBIN REDBREAST (1970)
THE SHOUT (1978)
THE MAD DEATH (1983)

Esteemed TV players Bernard Hepton and Anna Cropper's different world's collide in the rural horror ROBIN REDBREAST.

BROADCAST as part of the BBC's PLAY FOR TODAY strand, ROBIN REDBREAST is a folk horror rarity that acts as a precursor and influence to the more hard-hitting THE WICKER MAN and BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW. Written by John Bowen and directed by James MacTaggart, it is the story of Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), a London-based TV script editor who temporarily escapes to the country in order to recuperate after a break-up. But with mice scurrying in the walls, birds coming down the chimney and local eccentrics like housekeeper Mrs Vigo (Freda Bamford) and Mr Fisher (Bernard Hepton) dispensing weird customs, Anna becomes increasingly isolated and lost within her new environment. When she falls pregnant after a one-night stand with SS-obsessed gamekeeper Rob (Andrew Bradford) - who she first encounters practising karate in the woods wearing only his underpants - Anna is embroidered in a conspiracy to prevent her leaving the village.

The class struggle theme is amplified by Anna being such a liberated, modern woman and Rob a himbo who looks to the history of the Third Reich to generate monosymbolic conversation. They have nothing in common but sleep together in the onset of fear, instincts which adhere to the programme's yearning to turn back to more straightforward times. The countryside may be full of shunned micro societies, but can the urban development of "civilised" post-war Britain - and the intrusion of the outsider - really ever erode the colour of tradition and ritual from a brutal prehistory? Talky but engrossing, ROBIN REDBREAST's slow burning dictum - and the inclusion of snobbish London friends Madge (Amanda Walker) and Jake (Julian Holloway) - makes a case that our green and unpleasant land will always govern our prudish endeavours.

The soul of a housewife is manipulated by a magical stranger in THE SHOUT; reverting to an Aboriginal state, Rachel scuttles on all fours through her cluttered kitchen.

Though THE SHOUT is connected with Aboriginal Outback culture, and was the first British film of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, Englishness seeps through every frame. Shot in and around Braunton Burrows and Saunton Sands in North Devon - a stone's throw from this writer's home - the film shows a cricket match between the staff and inmates of an asylum. One of the patients, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates), is running the scoring hut, where he tells Robert (Tim Curry) a strange story ("every word of what I'm going to tell you is true. Although I'm telling it in a different way, it's always the same story … I vary it a little because I like to keep it alive.") Told in flashback, we see married couple Anthony (John Hurt) and Rachel (Susannah York); Anthony is a Church organist/composer, and Rachel a staid housewife. Crossley appears and announces that he has returned from eighteen years in the Australian outback, where he lived among the Aborigines and studied their magic. Even though the stranger tells the couple of him killing his own children, Crossley moves in with Anthony and Rachel permanently, establishing a spell over the household.

An ambitious but ultimately perplexing film, THE SHOUT opens with the featured couple asleep on a beach, both having the same dream of a witch doctor in a tailcoat. Crossley explains this was one of his teachers, and we learn more about the strangers powers: the ability to take another man's wife by simply keeping an item of her clothing - in this case a sandal buckle - and the secret of The Shout, a cry so despairing that it can kill. Crossley creates a disquieting, intimate awkwardness, made the more terrifying because his incantations are introduced naturally into country village life. The production's otherworldly quality is further enhanced by its use of an electronic and avant-garde score by Genesis linchpins Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. In fact the film's haunting central theme 'From the Undertow' was the opening track on Banks' solo debut album A Curious Feeling released a year later.

The THREADS of the Rabies world, the BBC Scotland drama THE MAD DEATH was made two years before its eventual transmission date.

In this age of bird flu and ebola, it is easy to forget that in the 80's Rabies was the virulent virus. The BBC had already featured the condition in a third season episode of SURVIVORS - MAD DOG by Don Shaw, screened in 1977 - which provided the already decimated population with another catastrophe, but THE MAD DEATH tackles Rabies full-on. Based on the Nigel Slater book of the same name, writer Sean Hignett and director Robert Young examine the effects of a notional outbreak of "the mad death" on our shores. Opening with a titles sequence where a voice whispers 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' over a distorted image of a fox, the terror begins when an infected cat is smuggled by her owner from France into Scotland. When the feline is run over by a car, its body is eaten by a fox. The spread amongst the animal population goes undetected until the first human, womanising American businessman Tom Siegler (Ed Bishop), befriends the infected animal. After Siegler is confirmed with the disease in hospital, the government calls in leading Rabies specialist Michael Hilliard (Richard Heffer) and Doctor Anne Maitland (Barbara Kellerman). Maitland's jealous partner Johnny Dalry (Richard Morant) creates a tepid love triangle which fails to hold interest against a number of alarmingly brutal scenes.

By addressing humanity's fear of disease with a love of animals, THE MAD DEATH has a solid premise. While most commentators mention the shopping centre containment in episode two as the highlight, the slow-burning demise of Tom in the first part is more dramatically satisfying. Benefitting from focuses on the declining health of the businessman for a continuous large portion of running time, we follow Siegler through the various stages of the disease, starting off with headaches, disorientation, and blurred vision; and in medical care, having hallucinations of being strangled, as hydrophobia takes hold. If the story seems pedestrian after the shopping centre sequence, it only serves as a foundation to the barnstorming final act, which depicts a still difficult to watch cull and creepy scenes within the home of Miss Stonecroft (Brenda Bruce) - the obligatory demented pet-obsessed loner - which includes the capture of Maitland and Stonecroft's attempt to feed her cat food and milk. Of the performances, Bishop shines as the charismatic American, as confident and chatty as the English cast are reserved and stiff upper-lipped. 

Hampden House of Horror

HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR (1980)

The House That Bled To Death is a double-twist shocker featuring a priceless scene where a pipe spurts blood over children at a party. A family move into the dilapidated abode where a man had carved up his wife with an ornamental machete, though the new owners have an Amityville-like agenda of their own.

TELEVISION always served Hammer films well. After all, if it wasn't for the success of their adaptation THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, it is likely that their vivid re-imaginings of Frankenstein and Dracula would have never been made. By the 1970s, Hammer's usual output of costumed gothique was in its death throes, slices of entertainment that seemed frozen in time. However, the studio's big screen spin-off of ON THE BUSES was a box-office phenomenon, leading the studio on a comedic vein which included LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR and MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE. Hammer's attempts to make TV projects of their own resulted in four separate ventures; the series under consideration here was followed by HAMMER HOUSE OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE, but earlier projects were TALES OF FRANKENSTEIN - an abortive pilot starring Anton Diffring - and seventeen episodes of JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN.

British horror had largely become past tense from the mid-70s; Tigon's last official release was the sex film COME PLAY WITH ME, and Amicus ceased production after THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT in 1979, the same year in which Hammer called in the receivers. But two former board members, Brian Lawrence and Roy Skeggs, assumed control and immediately began looking at ways to revitalise the company. Lawrence and Skeggs needed a new base of operations and leased Hampden House in Buckinghamshire - close to Hammer's spiritual home of Bray - to develop a new series for television. A former private house and exclusive Girl's School, the majestic property and surrounding areas are used ad infinitum, and most of the production, including the editing, was overseen there. Assembling their crew, the two men unsurprisingly drafted in a number of former Hammer employees, including directors Peter Sasdy, Alan Gibson and Don Sharp, visual effects man Ian Scoones, and James Bernard scored two stories.

Diana Dors and her brood in Children of the Full Moon, a long way from Oliver Reed and THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF.

Funded by ITC and screened between 13th September and 6th December 1980, the 13 episodes of the HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR were refreshingly bleak, mixing contemporary horror and titillation in the manner of Norman J. Warren (with Frankenstein and Dracula nowhere in sight). Hampered by meagre budgets, pedestrian scripts and flat direction, the fifty-minute stories are surprisingly watchable, thanks to their variety of topics - devil worship, time-travelling witches, cannibalism and Nazi pet shop owners - and stars such as Hammer favourites Peter Cushing, John Carson and Robert Urquhart, together with Brian Cox, Jon Finch and Warren Clarke et al (a young Pierce Brosnan appears as a randy jogger victim, a character so incidental that he's even denied an onscreen death).

HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR falls into that notion lovingly referred to as guilty pleasures. Even the worst entry, Carpathian Eagle, stars Suzanne Danielle as a psychotic seductress/writer who rips out the heart of her victims with a dagger. The best two episodes hold up as memorable slabs of TV horror: The Two Faces of Evil is a dazzling doppelganger yarn with a genuinely jolting prologue, and the delirious The Mask of Satan sees a morgue worker believing he has a disease engineered to bring Satan to Earth. The rest of the output fall somewhere in between; at least Rude Awakening attempts something different in its total abandonment of logic, with adulterous estate agent Denholm Elliott persistently accused of murdering his wife; and VAMPIRE CIRCUS helmer Robert Young brings some stylish flourishes to the voodoo-themed Charlie Boy.

The Circus of Nights

VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1971)

Bald, naked and coated in body paint, Serena is the Tiger Woman.

AS Hammer entered its wilderness years, Robert Young's VAMPIRE CIRCUS rediscovers the studio's vigour. Picking up the gauntlet thrown down by TWINS OF EVIL, this offering pushes Hammer further into the softcore sex and copious bloodletting required to maintain interest amongst pictures made outside of Elstree. Despite the film being Young's first picture, and the inevitable delays resulting from the extensive use of animals, Michael Carreras pulled the plug on the unfinished production when it had reached the end of its six-week shoot. The footage was subsequently spliced together, creating a Euro-horroresque charm of its own.

Opening with a twelve minute prologue which plays like a featurette, in 1810, vampire Count Mitterhaus (Robert Tayman) and his mistress Anna Mueller (Domini Blythe) are apparently destroyed by the villagers of Schtettel. Fifteen years later the village is riven with plague and quarantined, and The Circus of Nights, led by an enigmatic gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri), arrive to entertain the villagers nightly with a Tiger Woman (Serena), a Panther Man (Anthony Corlan), twin acrobats Heinrich (Robin Sachs) and Helga (Lalla Ward), and a clown dwarf (Skip Martin). In fact the troupe are undead, shape-shifting relatives of Mitterhaus, who seduce and procure the blood of the local young to resurrect him.

Written by Steve Parkhouse and illustrated by Brian Bolland, VAMPIRE CIRCUS was adapted into comics for The House of Hammer #17 (Feb 1978).

The Circus of Nights ("A hundred delights!") is one of the most subversive takes on the essential innocence of the carnival ethos. The villagers gasp in amazement at the antics of the troupe, and even though the performers change into bats and black panthers before their eyes, they take a remarkably long time to react to their visitors true nature. The villagers are portrayed as generally deserving of the various fates that the vengeful vampires see fit to bestow upon them. The undead are predominantly young, talented and sexy, whereas the town folk are sexually repressed, middle-aged, unattractive and riddled with fears and prejudices. When Anna watches her lover feed from the throat of a young girl in the prologue, watching in voyeuristic ecstasy in a prelude to making love with Mitterhaus, there is no question that she is truly liberated.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS is one of the few British horror films to understand the difference between nudity and eroticism. Not only does it break the taboo of unleashing violence to young children - a scene where two boys are lured to The Mirror of Life is particularly uncomfortable - it dares to be homoerotic, suggestively bestial and incestuous. Because of such lurid material the film has gone unappreciated, but this may be underscored by the lack of a name horror star. Laurence Payne's world-weary schoolmaster, the central heroic figure, only receives sixth billing in a large cast which includes David Prowse unsurprisingly as the circus strongman, Thorley Walters as the bumbling Burgomeister, John Moulder-Brown as the most unconvincing romantic lead in the whole Hammer canon, and Lynne Frederick as Dora.