Horror Hospital

GARTH MARENGHI’S DARKPLACE (2004)

Unlikely defenders of the Earth: from left to right, Matt Berry as Lucien Sanchez, Richard Ayoade as Thornton Reed, Matthew Holness as Rick Dagless and Alice Lowe as Liz Asher.

FILMED in the 1980s, DARKPLACE has earned a cult reputation as one of the most terrifying and radical television programmes. Considered too subversive and scary, the show was suppressed for over twenty years – although it did enjoy a brief run in Peru - until it finally surfaced on Channel 4 in 2004. The brainchild of best-selling horror author Garth Marenghi – the writer of such chillers as The Ooze ("can water die?") and Black Fang ("Rats learn to drive!") - Marenghi not only scripted and directed the episodes but also starred as the lead character, Dr Rick Dagless MD, a maverick physician battling evil forces lurking beneath a post-apocalyptic Romford hospital. The series was produced by Marenghi’s publisher and business associate Dean Learner, who plays shotgun-toting administrator Thornton Reed in the show, together with devilishly handsome and velvet-voiced Todd Rivers as Dr Lucien Sanchez, and Madeleine Wool as psychic Dr Liz Asher.

In reality, the show is a razor-sharp parody of 80s TV from Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness, adapting the pretentious horror writer from their Perrier Award-winning GARTH MARENGHI’S NETHERHEAD. Marenghi (Holness) is painted as a super-egotistical Stephen King who happens to write like Guy N. Smith or Sean Hutson. He’s a man’s man, speaking in a constant husky whisper, and wearing leather jackets over dark shirts. One often thinks of THE EXORCIST director William Friedkin when looking at Marenghi, who is inadvertently self-incriminating (at one point he boasts that he’s written more books than he’s read).

DARKPLACE's dynamic duo: Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness.

Suitably ham-fisted, appallingly acted and badly written, DARKPLACE’s not so special effects adds to the cheesy fun as the characters battle everything from Scotch Mist to cosmic broccoli. Fashions, music, film stock and punchy audio are all captured with expert aplomb. The episodes themselves are funny enough, but the "new" framing interviews provide the real meat. Reminiscing about the show, Marenghi is presented as a blinkered genius and still thoroughly convinced that the show is a masterpiece; he adopts a highly defensive stance, aggressively justifying the material and the sub-texts behind it, while Rivers (Matt Berry) is portrayed as a washed-up theatre actor, whose experiences on the show have left him with an alcohol dependency and a hazy memory; a glass of whisky constantly in his hand, Rivers alternates between praising his own performance and having no recollection in actually starring in them. Learner (Ayoade), meanwhile, with his oddly-angled beret and extensive cigar, is the picture of a sleazy tycoon.

"He whisked off her shoes and panties in one movement, wild like an enraged shark, his bulky totem beating a seductive rhythm. Mary’s body felt like it was burning, even though the room was properly air-conditioned. They tried all the positions: on top, doggy, and normal. Exhausted, they collapsed onto the recently extended sofa bed. Then a hellbeast ate them" – Extract from Juggers by Garth Marenghi.

The Stones on TV

THE ROLLING STONES ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS (1968)
THE STONES IN THE PARK (1969)

An attractive French DVD cover of THE STONES IN THE PARK.

IN December 1968, The Rolling Stones turned the Wembley Intertel studios into a real live circus for a BBC special never to be broadcast. Shelved and only released on video in 1996, then on DVD in 2004, THE ROLLING STONES ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS is a masquerade of dwarves, trapeze artists, fire-eaters and headlining musical talent, with Mick Jagger as the Ringmaster. Set on a tiny stage just barely sufficient to accommodate the bands, the show nevertheless captures the spontaneity and communal spirit of swinging London in the late 1960s, as well as a project that delightfully ridicules the variety show conventions to which the stars so obediently adhered to when they were rising young turks. The appearance of Jagger’s then muse Marianne Faithfull - sitting mannequin-like in a floor length evening gown - is the only conventional moment in an otherwise glowing piece of entertainment.

The Who’s alleged up-staging of The Stones with A Quick One While He’s Away is often cited as the main reason Jagger pulled the plug. Even though the song is hardly one of The Who’s best - a patchwork telling a puerile but strangely resonant tale of adultery and absolution – it gives the CIRCUS its most primal moment. It is evident that the group is perfectly in tune with themselves and their surroundings, especially Keith Moon, tossing drums over his shoulder once they’ve outlived their usefulness, his eyes forever embroiled in mischief. The other stand-out, in his first public musical performance outside The Beatles, is John Lennon, who triumphantly tackles Yer Blues with rock’s initial supergroup The Dirty Mac - Eric Clapton on guitar, Keith Richards on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Yoko Ono caterwauling her way into some private apocalypse on Whole Lotta Yoko.

‘Dirty’ Keith Richards introduces The Who and Lovely Luna and the Fire Eater for THE ROLLING STONES ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS.

Today, one watches The Stones set and reflects that Jagger has been harsh on himself. Unlike the televised Beatles, Jagger has always acknowledged the camera, often stalking it like a cobra that might strike if the lens-eye pulled back or looked away, his grins and stares are both inviting and seductive – qualities of a great performer. But the appearance of Brian Jones is another story. Jones once gave The Stones glamour and their music texture; it was he, remember, who added sitar on Paint It Black and slide guitar on Little Red Rooster, but his failing was to be born without the steely ambition of Jagger and Richards. Consequently, the CIRCUS shows the Stones early leader reduced to an insignificant other; puffy-faced and looking totally defeated, it is only once – during a fine No Expectations - that he returns to the living.

When German actress, fashion model and alledged mistress of the black arts, Anita Pallenberg, left Jones for Richards, it created a mental shift within the Stones of which Brian never recovered. This also created musical changes, from the instrumental dandiness which epitomised Jones’ tenure, towards the rock and roll of the band’s first truly great album ‘Beggars’ Banquet’ and Richards' sulphurous brew of hard rock, pagan rhythms and badass writing. The Stones had been planning the free concert in Hyde Park to unveil Mick Taylor as Jones’ replacement, but Brian’s death only two days before overshadowed the event. Captured by a Granada Television documentary crew for THE STONES IN THE PARK, the gig is not a good one. In front of over 200,000 fans, Jagger takes to the stage in a white smock and releases hundreds of butterflies in honour of Jones, most of which are already dead through improper storage. The Hyde Park performance shows the group as woefully underpowered, under-rehearsed, and still in shock. It is obvious that Jones could not have survived within the Stones structure, but, as this film shows, perhaps they weren't quite ready for life without him.

He's Not the Messiah

MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979)

He’s got a very good friend in Rome...
Michael Palin’s star turn as Pontius Pilate.

IN July 1977, Mary Whitehouse – self-appointed guardian of national morals – won a blasphemy libel case against Gay News for publishing James Kirkup’s The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name, a poem which detailed a Roman Centurion’s homo-erotic meditations towards the crucified Christ. This had a personal resonance within the Monty Python camp, as Graham Chapman had helped launch the publication; yet both parties could never have foreseen the deluge when their paths would meet under similar circumstances two years later. The foulest-spoken yet best humoured Biblical epic ever, LIFE OF BRIAN shows that any subject can survive a sardonic tweaking, as long as it is done with intelligence and wit. Religion may be comedy’s last taboo, but the film does not lampoon Jesus Christ, his teachings or his importance as an icon. Less an attack on the Bible itself, it's more a scathing satire on mob mentality and cult ideology.

LIFE OF BRIAN captures the period in Python’s life when the group were at their happiest and most creative. Under the firm helm of Terry Jones, the picture is much more structurally sound compared to the troupe’s first "proper" theatrical release, MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, and therefore less faithful to the stream of consciousness spirit of their TV series. It isn't littered with Terry Gilliam animation or plot line tangents, and is a more serious attempt at linear comedy painted on a much broader canvas, with Gilliam’s inventive set design providing a constantly interesting backdrop. Brian Cohen (Chapman), the reluctant prophet, is a simple man constantly mistaken for the King of the Jews. From his birth in a manger right next door to Christ’s, to his unexplained rise as a spiritual emblem for Judea, Brian remains an incorruptible innocent; he is bemused by his contrasting Roman/Jewish ties, confused in love, and foiled by the very spirit of individuality he advocates.

Always look on the bright side of life;
the scene that cemented LIFE OF BRIAN’s infamy.

When LIFE OF BRIAN premiered in New York, the opening salvo in what would become a surreal war of words came from Rabbi Abraham Hecht, who said that the release was "produced in Hell." Hecht’s fear was that the film would weave a corrupting spell over the impressionable minds of young cinema-goers, leaving them with a contaminated view of religion. After the Rabbi’s denunciation, outraged religious leaders in America queued up to vent their spleen, from the Lutheran Council to the reactionary politics in the southern states of the Bible Belt. In Britain, the war against LIFE OF BRIAN was fought a little differently. The Nationwide Festival of Light - a watchdog association working in league with Whitehouse - lobbied the BBFC to refuse a certificate. When the film was passed, the Festival of Light, supported by the Church of England Board for Social Responsibility, began an insidious campaign, circulating anti-BRIAN literature and encouraging Christians to pray for the film’s downfall. When it opened across Britain, local authorities even exploited a loophole in the law through health regulations. Consequently, the film ended up being banned in Surrey, Swansea, Cornwall and East Devon (where councillors refused to even watch it, arguing that "you don’t have to see a pigsty to know that it stinks.")

Despite the uproar, the work is anything but blasphemous; on the contrary, it is a statement which reduces the religious beliefs of our society on the hearsay of people two thousand years ago, and argues that freedom of thought is rare and precious. Above all, LIFE OF BRIAN is very much Pro-Christ, but anti-Church, standing as a beacon for the right to criticise religion. Whether it’s Brian’s unwanted disciples arguing over whether to follow the shoe or the gourd he’s left behind as he runs away, or the anti-Roman factions who do more damage to each other than the Empire, the film stabs at the heart of comedy’s favourite target, conformity. What's endearing about the Pythons is their irreverence; LIFE OF BRIAN is so cheerfully inoffensive that it's blasphemous to take it seriously.

Into the Unknown

Quatermass at the BBC (1953-2005)

André Morell, the definitive Professor Quatermass, in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.

THE stories of Nigel Kneale explore science, superstition and social issues. Although hating the tag "science fiction writer", his work, nonetheless, takes us through experiences that leaves us brighter and more aware, speculating on all the mysteries that remain to be clarified. He was one of the genre’s most illuminating humanists, a confrontational individual who used his writing as a metaphor for our problematic times. Kneale often painted cynical landscapes of our future and developed into a masterful satirist, whose tweaks at mankind’s expense proved just as prophetic as his works undertaken in a more sombre mood. His abundance of intelligent ideas tapped into contemporary fears and a succinct observation of human behaviour. Comparisons to H. G. Wells cannot be underestimated; Kneale was a genuine seer, predicting the disintegration of broadcasting and society, typified by his depiction of Reality TV in THE YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS.

Kneale’s arrival as a staff writer at the BBC coincided with television’s post-Coronation mass appeal. Early drama was dominated by unambitious stage and literary adaptations, and there is some justification in Mark Gatiss’ claim that the writer invented popular television. During the 1950s, Kneale wrote three serials featuring his most famous character, British Rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass. Each broadcast live, THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, QUATERMASS II and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT all made a lasting impact on the nation’s consciousness, and were also subsequently made into films by Hammer. Manned space flights were years away, but THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT presented them as near docu-drama; viewers were terrified by the realistic presentation of astronaut Victor Carroon (Duncan Lamont) returning to Earth in the grip of alien infection. Its sequel, QUATERMASS II, features a heavily guarded government refinery, supposedly a factory for synthetic food, but in fact an alien-breeding colony nurtured on poison gas and processed human blood. And in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, a capsule unearthed on a London building site is found to contain the remains of Martians and augmented ape-men, tapping into the dormant Martian mental faculties bred into Mankind and provoking a gigantic race purge. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is the most complex and bleakest in the trilogy, portraying the human condition as an irreversible alien experiment, and Kneale’s only remedy is restraint against the ancient destructive urges implanted in us. This last serial was shown at a time when newly arrived Caribbean immigrants – the so-called Windrush Generation – faced widespread daily abuse.

The Quatermass Memoirs were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1996. The series mixes a new monologue by Kneale - in which he discusses the genesis and development of Quatermass - together with archival material and a dramatised strand in which the Professor discloses his reasons for reclusion and discusses his demons with a persistent reporter.

THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT evokes the wartime blitz spirit, while QUATERMASS II tackles the threat of an Orwellian "enemy within." Unlike the bombastic spectacle of American horror films of this period, Kneale’s aliens use humans as involuntary symbiotic hosts as part their life cycle, or as a means of continuing their species. Consequently, the strongest emotion evoked by the Quatermass stories is one of disgust. The tales create images that allude to things that are universally repulsive: faeces, urine, rotting flesh, foul odours and deformed bodies, a literary technique used more by writers of horror and supernatural fiction. In THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, there is the physiological deterioration of Carroon whose arm resembles an exfoliating cancer, not to mention the gelatinous remains of the missing crewmembers, the slime the creature leaves in its wake, and the deformed bodies of those it has drained of life. Similarly, QUATERMAS II has foul-smelling gases and faecal aliens writhing in the excremental "food" inside pressure domes, and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT takes place almost entirely in a mud-filled excavation in which the decomposing bodies of the Martians are discovered.

In April 2005, BBC4 aired a new QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, the BBC’s first live drama broadcast since a series of lunchtime plays in 1983. Shown as the centrepiece of the channel’s ‘TV on Trial’ season – a re-evaluation of the medium from the 1950s to the 2000s - like almost everything involving Kneale’s character, the production is literally an experiment; it takes risks, suffers from underfunding but certainly is heroic. With only the first two episodes of the original series surviving, the idea of creating a two hour condensing of the writer’s scripts was a fine one, if only for the nerve of its staging and to have a more complete document for posterity. The setting is a notional present day via 1955, leading to an almost alternate feel to the 21st century in which there has seemingly been little space exploration and terms like "pressure suit" are still in use. Kneale’s references are only lightly updated, like casting Anglo-Indian actress Indira Varma as the astronaut’s wife, who delivers her 1953 dialogue without seeming as comically cut-glass as the original actress, Isabel Dean. And as a replacement for the Coronation-friendly Westminster Abbey, which saw the mutated Carroon’s demise in the original, the finale takes place at the Tate Modern Gallery, an inspired choice in finding an equivalent symbol of pride in an era where Royal association is forever receding. Not only does it provide a vast, shadowed space for Quatermass (Jason Flemyng)’s "casting-out" of the alien lifeform within its fabric and air, the Tate acts as a stringent metaphor in a cultural shift from religion to art.

Jason Flemyng is the Professor in BBC4’s rendering of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT.

Other changes, however, are less successful. In the year Christopher Eccleston became the new DOCTOR WHO, the casting of Flemyng as a younger Professor seems to appeal to the same primetime mentality. Flemyng delivers his high-tech speak as well as anyone, but being the same age as the actors playing the astronauts and his colleagues creates both a symbolic and plot problem. Most of his scenes are with seasoned performers as Adrian Dunbar, David Tennant and Mark Gatiss, over whom he cannot adhere to the same boffin-like authority of Reginald Tate’s Quatermass from the initial serial. Tate was undeniably in charge, but Flemyng is too often on the defensive, as if any of his co-stars could challenge his role.

Heavy Metal

DOCTOR WHO – THE INVASION (1968)

As iconic as scenes from THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH,
Cybermen descend the steps of St Paul’s in THE INVASION.

DEVISED by DOCTOR WHO’s unofficial scientific adviser Kit Pedler, and story editor Gerry Davis, the Cybermen personified one of Pedler’s own phobias – dehumanising medicine. The scientist foresaw a time when spare part surgery would reach such a level that people would become uncertain whether they were man or machine, including the notion that cybernetically enhanced brains would lose the capacity for emotion. The Cyberman, DOCTOR WHO’s second most dreaded enemy after the Daleks, are the embodiment of this detached, heartless, logic. Tending to invade by stealth, and often employing human agents, these silver giants would become the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton)’s most recurrent foe, take a long rest during the tenure of the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), and show up for token engagements with most subsequent Time Lords. Dubbed by the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) as "a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship" in their comeback REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN, their subsequent serials did little to make them more formidable, consigning the once persistent to also-ran. Plagued by inconsistent characterisation, by the time of THE FIVE DOCTORS the denizens of Mondas are reduced to cannon fodder, and in DALEK, a Cyberhead is mounted on display in a storehouse of alien technology, "the stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit."

THE INVASION, however, is a strong outing for the Cybermen. Arriving on Earth in 1975, the Second Doctor discovers that the component manufacturer International Electromatics have a grip on the world’s technology. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) is aware of unusual activity within IE, which is run by Tobias Vaughan (Kevin Stoney). Vaughan is, in fact, in alliance with the Cybermen, who are massing in the sewers below London, with IE technology set to paralyse the population. But Vaughan is developing the Cerebration Mentor, a machine designed to generate emotional impulses as a weapon against the invaders. While THE INVASION may not be your standard Cybermen story – they don’t even appear until episode four, and have only a couple of brief lines of dialogue – the idea of the Earth being attacked through its electronic equipment is perfectly in tune with the concepts underlying the creatures. Despite existing in the scriptwriting quagmire that so typified late 1960s DOCTOR WHO, at eight episodes it is easily at least two segments too long, but it is a serial that builds a future for the show. In many ways, it is a sequel to THE WEB OF FEAR, in which the TARDIS crew first encounter Lethbridge-Stewart and an embryonic form of the UNIT forces deployed here. In UNIT, the production team had found the key to continuing the Doctor’s adventures into the 1970s – by repeating invasion of Earth stories and consequently controlling the budget - making it a dummy run for the early part of the Third Doctor’s era.

For the 2006 release of THE INVASION on DVD, Cosgrove Hall Films created two animated episodes (with original soundtracks) to replace those missing from the BBC archives. This reconstruction of the famous St Paul’s Cybermen walk is from a trailer that was part of initial tests. The resulting animated episodes 1 and 4 – using differing shades to re-create the textures of black and white television – take the story in a striking noir direction, and play as achievements that can be enjoyed in their own right.

THE INVASION benefits from strong direction, outstanding performances, and distinctive incidental music. It has a true sense of scale, although we only really see London, Vaughan’s compound and the airfield housing UNIT’s temporary base. Vaughan is a superb Bond-like villain - his air of avuncular charm never quite masking the underlying threat he represents – and Troughton seems to relish having a single figure for the Doctor to pit his wits against. The contrast between Troughton’s slightly anarchic Doctor and his military friends is also rather charming, as he generally bumbles happily around whilst the Brigadier seems to regard him with a mixture of amusement and a respect established by THE WEB OF FEAR. Because of this, the Doctor need waste no time proving himself, which from a dramatic point of view allows him to play with helicopters and canoes with the aid of military backup, resulting in something of a romp.

James Bond Will Return

GOLDENEYE (1995)
CASINO ROYALE (2006)



Famke Janssen is Xenia Onatopp in GOLDENEYE. Larger than life and played with enormous zeal, the scenes between her and Bond feature the type of double entendres that were so much part of the Connery era.

JAMES Bond was born within the pages of 1953's Casino Royale, and not even its author, Ian Fleming, could have predicted that this modestly promoted thriller would be the catalyst for an international literary and cinematic phenomenon. Fleming had many traits in common with the hero he created – not least a love of action, exotic travel and beautiful women – and in post-war Britain, Bond gave the public much-needed escapism as the Empire continued to shrink. At least in the pages of novels time stood still, and a lone Englishman could still be counted on to save the world. In the 1990s, with the Soviet Union now a democratic state, and the Cold War officially over, alterations were needed at the box office for this very mid-century secret agent. Yet Bond is ageless and indefatigable; the world needs a hero just as much now as it did in 1953. Subsequently, Pierce Brosnan was installed as the new 007 for GOLDENEYE, a fine re-introduction and a massive financial success. Brosnan’s Bond is a return to the roguishly charming days of Sean Connery; impeccably cool (he merely flicks his head as bullets ricochet around him), defiantly sexist and as destructive as ever, it is a dynamic action entry in its own right. It's clear that this revamp, which features many new hands both behind and in front of the camera, including director Martin Campbell, is intent on giving the character an invigorating transfusion. Everything, including the wild conceptualisation of the action sequences (the tank chase is fittingly breathless), the impudence, the sexual pugnaciousness and the willingness to have a little fun, is pushed a bit further.

Although GOLDENEYE strives to keep up with the modern blockbuster, it also plays to subtler undercurrents. The film tells the story of a powerful satellite system that falls into the hands of a former ally-turned-enemy. The most unusual touch is the motivation for 006 (Sean Bean)’s treachery: treatment of Cossacks returned to Stalin after WWII, including his parents, an episode Bond freely admits was not "Britain’s finest hour." Such a reference to possible homegrown fallibility was previously unheard of in the series, as is reference to 007’s own parents dying in a climbing accident – this is taken from the novels, and the first time it’s been acknowledged on screen. Another welcome aberration is that women give him a hard time, and nearly all the exchanges are characterised by feisty sparring. GOLDENEYE neutralises any politically-incorrect feminist fallout - the female M (Judi Dench) condemning Bond in her famous "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" speech, and Miss Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) knowingly parries sexual innuendo on an equal standing. And the film presents the franchise with an outstanding female foe, Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen). Deliciously sadistic, Xenia assumes an almost unique position in the pantheon as a potential Bond girl gone bad. Onatopp is a killing machine who crushes her lovers like a praying mantis, and orgasms every time she pulls a hot machine gun trigger. A wonderful pulp creation, one scene has her stepping from an armoured train in a black-leather wasp-waisted outfit brandishing a cigar and bad attitude. She’s the sort of adversary that takes a sexist, misogynist dinosaur to handle.

Daniel Craig is the most talented actor to be assigned the prestigious role of James Bond, and is a revelation in CASINO ROYALE. Craig’s Bond seems happiest, perversely enough, in the infamous torture scene, where vampiric villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) ties him naked to a chair and whips his testicles.

Brosnan’s final Bond DIE ANOTHER DAY – following TOMORROW NEVER DIES and THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH - could have also been the last 007 movie. This quartet set financial high-water marks for the series that may not be matched again, but Pierce’s curtain call was a cynical, weary best-of concert, offering copious nods to the past without offering anything new. With CASINO ROYALE, also directed by Campbell, the casting of Daniel Craig comes closer to the author's original conception than anyone since early Connery. The film asks us to forget that there has ever been another Bond movie, while at the same time expecting the viewer to know its mythology. It's comparatively low-tech, with the intense fights mostly conducted up close and personal, and the killings accomplished by hand or gun. Bond is now more of a lone wolf, a deadpan executioner with a penchant for letting his guard down too quickly. "I have no armour left" he tells love interest Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), with whom he actually falls in love rather than merely lures into bed. And this Bond has little interest in living up to the legend: when a bartender asks him if he'd like his martini shaken or stirred, Bond shoots back, "Do I look like I care?" In that instant, it's as if the part had never been played by anyone else.

Civil Warlock

WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968)

WITCHFINDER GENERAL was released as THE CONQUERER WORM in the United States, as illustrated by Midnite Movies’ busy DVD case art. AIP had Vincent Price recite Poe’s poem The Conqueror Worm over the credits, in the aim to cash-in on their success with the Roger Corman pictures (note the totally redundant Pendulum motif).

WITH the exception of PEEPING TOM, no British horror film carries more critical baggage than WITCHFINDER GENERAL. Dubbed "the most persistently sadistic and morally rotten film I’ve seen" by Alan Bennett, rarely has movie violence been used so legitimately. Co-produced by Tigon – British exploitation’s most endearingly downmarket film company - and AIP, only Michael Armstrong’s MARK OF THE DEVIL suggests the same rural cruelty in the witch-torturing subgenera. Set in pastoral East Anglia during the Civil War between Cromwell's Roundheads and King Charles's Cavaliers, Vincent Price stars as pious opportunist Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed General who profited from the chaos by ‘discovering’ witches among the peasantry. The film has long been a cult item, in part because its talented 25-year-old director, Michael Reeves, died of an accidental barbiturates overdose shortly following release, but mainly because it is an extraordinarily bleak story of political evil.

Often described as a Suffolk Western, the film has a robust autumnal quality that perfectly suits its setting, and cinematically it bears the mark of the late 1960s - there's an overabundance of zooms, and an easy reliance on the brutality of brightly hued gore. The white-gloved Witchfinder is both implacable and terrifying, a distillation which is simultaneously unfathomable and, sadly, recognisable. With the character of Hopkins at its centre, WITCHFINDER GENERAL takes a despairing view of the human condition every bit as gruelling as the outbursts of violence which punctuate it. Reeves shows bloodshed as a communicable disease, engulfing everyone from young and old; when Roundhead Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy) tackles brutal henchman John Stearne (Robert Russell), and then hacks Hopkins to death with an axe, his initial boyish likeability seems like a forlorn memory.

The sinister figure of Matthew Hopkins casts a long shadow over horror fiction, folklore and history.

Reeves’ reputation quickened almost immediately after his death. Whether he was cinema’s Keats or its Ian Curtis, we are, however, in the same light-constricted forests, and under the low thatched ceilings, that are forever Terence Fisher’s Slavic Europe. Yet WITCHFINDER GENERAL equates the English Civil War with the culture clashes of the 1960s. Witchfinders are allowed to call victims’ perpetrators as part of a moral vacuum that exists on the ungoverned fringes of any unrest. Loitering military bands, and forgotten human carcasses decaying in the bracken, are both social consequences in the breakdown of the system, allowing starvation and criminal behaviour. There is no Evil Incarnate, only perpetual corruption.

No matter how well the director captures the atmosphere of 17th century religious upheaval and moral hysteria, the real Hopkins – and the social context in which he operated – remain less well known. Qualifying his actions through religion, and aided by Stearne’s boiling Puritan blood, between 1645 and 1647 it is suspected that Hopkins was associated with as many as 200 executions - if not by his direct "examinations", then by his murderous, and seemingly omnipotent influence. It can be said that Stearne was the adrenalin of Hopkins, but not the greed. One of the most significant contributions to the legend was Ronald Bassett’s Witch-finder General, a 1966 novel which posed as source material for the film, where Hopkins is portrayed as a middle-aged Ipswich lawyer who reinvents himself as "a black-winged Attila, leaving behind him a trail of gibbet-hung corpses." But Hopkins was not so much the leader of the movement as an adjutant. It took a lot of people to hang a witch – witnesses, magistrates, clerks, executioners et al – so the witchfinder gave confidence to act. To call Hopkins a vindictive monster is to refuse to understand the hazardous potential of his followers; the same could be said about Hitler and Osama-bin-Laden. It was only after his death that people slowly began to see the error of their ways. The undertones of misery and guilt pushed the Hopkins persona into a legendary rather than historic mindset; children’s fairy tales would take on characters with tall buckled hats, knee-length boots and long knotted staffs, manifesting into an incubus. One could even suggest that the Child Catcher (Robert Helpmann) in CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG has something of Hopkins about him.

In one of his most humourless roles, Vincent Price was never better as the screen Hopkins.

Price classically renders Hopkins here, romanticising the events around the character, but WITCHFINDER GENERAL is extremely accurate in its interpretation of the accusation, torture and forced confession. The General is unshakeably matter-of-fact as he hangs, drowns, burns and has needles pushed into his victims, his face and voice convey comparatively little, even the sexual subtext implied by his interest in Sara (Hilary Dwyer). Price’s performance is not so much restrained but stone cold, and it can be argued that Peter Cushing’s interpretation of the Hopkins character, as Gustav Weil in Hammer’s TWINS OF EVIL, is closer to the real-life person. Price, by 1968, was inseparable from carnival-host and Freudian-camp. Reeves, who had wanted the tyrant to be played by Donald Pleasence, felt that Price’s tongue-in-cheek approach to horror was wrong for the role. Exactly how Reeves achieved this radical shift in the actor’s tone is now legend. Clearly, he and his star did not get along, but the friction is attributed to various causes. One publicity photo taken on set shows the two antagonists together - Price in full costume clad in black, hunched over and solemn, and Reeves in a white polo-neck facing in the opposite direction - the impression is of two figures worlds apart.

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.

Going Underground

DEATH LINE (1972)
CREEP (2004)

Franka Potente misses the last train in CREEP.

BY the early 1970s, Hammer was stumbling toward an open grave. This decline was illustrated by DRACULA A.D. 1972, a misguided attempt to lure back some patronage by locating the Prince of Darkness among the groovy Chelsea set. Placed alongside the burgeoning new wave of American horrors - socially relevant releases such as Wes Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT – Hammer perished because of this inability to adapt to a world beyond Home Counties Transylvania. But British horrors also typically endured disastrous relations with everybody from their distributors downward. Two important UK releases – PEEPING TOM and WITCHFINDER GENERAL – were both badly mishandled on release, and vilified in the national press. 

Although labelled repellent by British critics, DEATH LINE nevertheless tapped into the new-style unpleasantness being perfected by the US independents. Directed by Chicago-born Gary Sherman - who would go on to helm DEAD & BURIED and POLTERGEIST III - the film is the tale of a lone cannibal stalking Russell Square tube station, as Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence), Detective Rogers (Norman Rossington) and Inspector Richardson (Clive Swift) uncover a truth that the authorities would prefer remain buried. The Man (Hugh Armstrong, in a role for Marlon Brando before his son contracted pneumonia) – riven by septicaemic plague and given to biting the heads off rats - is a sorrowful survivor of a race who have incestuously bred and fed on each other and hapless Londoners. A dispossessed spectre from a Victorian past, the only vocabulary at his disposal – “mind the doors” – is typical of DEATH LINE’s uncomfortable blend of pathos and black humour. 

One of the partially consumed cadavers suspended from a wall in DEATH LINE (affectionately released as RAW MEAT in the United States).

DEATH LINE’s political themes - collapse of Empire, class exploitation and high level corruption - were particularly relevant in the early 1970s. The humanity of the film’s aboveground characters is questioned from the outset: backed with kitsch striptease music, bowler-hatted civil servant James Manfred OBE (James Cossins) tours Soho and propositions women on platforms; we later learn that his luxurious home has closed-circuit TV to view any bedroom action. Pleasence is typically superb as the teabag-hating Calhoun, who initially dismisses the input from students Alex (David Ladd) and girlfriend Patricia (Sharon Gurney), and Christopher Lee’s cameo as Stratton-Villiers MI5 - complete with furled umbrella and Old Etonian tie - sneers at the proletarians. Conditions belowground are explored in the virtuoso 360-degree long, leisurely malingering pan of The Man’s den, culminating in his moaning over a dying companion (June Turner); the skeletal sets and fetid atmosphere clearly acted as a key inspiration behind Robert Burns’ design for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Christopher Smith’s modestly budgeted CREEP also held its own against the US independent releases of the early noughties. The eponymous Creep (Sean Harris) has played an involuntary part in a programme within a covert surgical unit beneath Charing Cross station. The Creep becomes a surprisingly complex character: the absence of light, language, and love has turned this pale boy into a feral freak. More animal than man, his speech consists mostly of inhuman screeching as he hunts, snares and tortures anything in his path. But he also retains an unusual curiosity - at times almost sportive, as if playing hide and seek with his quarry. When Creep straps a homeless female (Kelly Scott) to an obstetrician’s chair, he prepares to operate as would a child playing doctor; donning a gown and surgical gloves, he pretends to anaesthetise before one of the most unmitigated acts of violence ever committed to celluloid. Regrettably there are plot holes large enough to drive a train through, but CREEP is fast-moving fare which benefits greatly from its haunting perspectives of the tube's otherworldly look, focusing on ominous low arches, ambiguous sewage tunnels and oppressive crawlspaces.

Beast and beauty: Hugh Armstrong and Sharon Gurney in DEATH LINE.

DEATH LINE and CREEP both successfully adapt a particular legend to the screen. The subterranean tunnels of London are rich in urban myths - ghosts searching platforms for loved-ones, killer rats of phenomenal size, and walled-up trains with cargoes of skeletons - but its most famous story remains that of a race of Troglodyte dwellers. Viewing these films, we can appreciate the sensitive process that eventually manifests as local legends. By means of these myths, we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are, a romantic response to our perception of the London Underground that manifests a certain fear in contrast to what we can see and touch. As cinematic experiences, they are cannibal films with a conscience. Analogies between man and monster – and how far a man can degenerate and remain human – are not difficult to draw. Yet society is the real villain, the kind of capitalist state that abandons its disenfranchised children, and denying them their essence.

Thatcherite Phantom

V for Vendetta (1982-85, 88-89)
V FOR VENDETTA (2006)

An appealing portrait for V FOR VENDETTA, depicting V in a Phantom of the Opera-like enveloping of Evey.

WRITTEN by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, the comic strip V for Vendetta debuted in the launch issue of Warrior in March 1982. Set in (the then) distant 1997, it depicts a Britain which has been spared from nuclear destruction, but is ruled by the fascist Norsefire regime, who have restored peace at the cost of personal freedom and privacy. This government have rounded up and killed everyone they consider subversive – blacks, gays and radicals – leaving a docile and scared populace held by a combination of a super-computer (state-owned radio broadcasts its propagandistic and reassuring lecture to the people as ‘The Voice of Fate’) and the secret police (‘Fingermen’). Into this mix arrives V, an anarchist and terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask, who is enacting an elaborate and specific revenge. Speaking largely in rhyme, quotation and lyric, V rescues young Evey Hammond from the secret police, and introduces her to the ‘Shadow Gallery,’ an underground hideout filled with his large collection of banned and suppressed books, music and art.

Although the original impetus for its dystopian vision was a passionate protest against Thatcherite greed and anti-unionism, the story is a cocktail of influences as disparate as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES. V for Vendetta’s ideological struggle still stands amongst the best of Moore; it works as a detective story, futuristic thriller and an action adventure, yet V’s brand of faceless and remorseless violence seems as dictatorial as the fascist ideal. V blows up buildings and is a cold-blooded murderer, torturer and manipulator. If ordinary people are caught within this struggle, the suggestion is that they have made their own cage. But beyond V’s rebellious aims he also reminds about identity and integrity. Change may be painful, but V channels and directs his anarchy to a specific goal – ultimately, the character becomes more than his menagerie of ideas, he becomes a force, pursuing his vendettas and preaching his values until his vision is vindicated. This is why Evey becomes V at the end of the story; while the first V was a destroyer, the next V will be a teacher and builder of the cause.

V’s actual appearance - a Guy Fawkes papier mache mask, cape and conical hat – was the idea of artist David Lloyd. Here V is the cover story from issue 5 of the comics fanzine Infinity, published in 1984.

The film version, written and produced by the Wachowski brothers and directed by their former assistant James McTeigue, adds nothing to the original and subtracts a great deal – most crucially, Moore’s paean to anarchism. Too much of the political fable falls back on posing and fireworks, unsurprisingly turning the comic’s grim and grey 1980s into a IMAX-friendly technological sheen. Evey (Natalie Portman) is no longer a factory waif on the point of prostitution, but an office girl (a new sub-plot involving Stephen Fry as a gay rebel is as pointless as it is irritating). Worthy of note, however, is Hugo Weaving as V, in what must have been the least sought-after leading male role of the season. Purring lengthy speeches with the insidious tones of a 1970s TV voiceover, his body language and head-tilts effectively convey seething emotions behind his immobile mask.

Fragile Geometry

DON’T LOOK NOW (1973)

John aimlessly clutches Christine in the harrowing opening to the film.

ARGUABLY the most commercial and, in many respects, completely satisfying films by the erratically brilliant Nicolas Roeg, this provocative work has lost little of its power to challenge, shock, and amaze. Roeg is one of Britain’s most adventurous directors, stretching the potential of cinema through a masterly montage of raw emotions, complex time-leaps and splintered narratives, and examining characters forced into a journey of self-exploration when cut adrift from their usual moral and physical milieu. Based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, DON’T LOOK NOW is a beautifully sensual and restrained horror film, yet it also suggests a world that is perilous, cruel and out of control. Superficially calm, it is an eerie labyrinth that gets under your skin and stays there, underpinned by a constant sense of foreboding that erupts into bloody violence only at the climax; it is a love story with only one love scene, and a study of grief during which nobody cries. This makes the work characteristic of the same peculiar Englishness which informs films as different as BRIEF ENCOUNTER and THE INNOCENTS.

Beginning with every parent’s nightmare – the tragic death of a child – DON’T LOOK NOW examines how grief can overpower emotion, but is cautiously optimistic in its portrayal of how love can transcend death. In the perfectly edited opening sequence, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) find their idyllic English country afternoon shattered by the accidental drowning of their young daughter, Christine (Sharon Williams). John experiences an unsettling psychic vision during the tragedy that proves to be a portent of things to come. During lunch at a restaurant in Venice, where John has been brought in to work on a precious holy fresco, the couple are approached by a blind English medium, Heather (Hilary Mason), who informs them that their daughter is expressing happiness and messages of reassurance from the afterlife. During this time the streets of Venice are haunted by a series of gruesome murders - the bodies found drifting in the canals – and John's further visions may be related to a strange figure in a red coat.

Sharon Williams gives a brief yet memorable
performance as doomed Christine Baxter.

The opening drowning takes place with almost unbearable force and awareness, a series of cuts that contain all the keys to the remainder of the film. Roeg's image system is all important, and this sequence introduces the key motifs of the picture; water, both as a source of life and death and as something which needs to be crossed if two people are to be connected; separation, literal or metaphorical, based on geography, belief or simply the way of seeing things; breaking glass, a potent symbol of an accident; scepticism and belief, how one's refusal to believe what's happening can be a fatal mistake; the difference between appearance and reality, as when John says "Nothing is what it seems"; and, perhaps most memorably, the colour red, whether as a harbinger of danger or a way of focusing on something significant.

Until DON’T LOOK NOW, Venice was always used in films to symbolise romance and passion. But here, Roeg unsettles the viewer right from the start, and the whole movie is suffused with shrouded fog and subliminal clues. The transition from Hertfordshire to the cold, autumnal Venice is achieved with a brilliant jump cut from Laura's scream to the whine of a drill, linking the past to the impending horror of the present. Indeed, Venice, similar to the Victorian London in Alan Moore’s From Hell, is turned into a character itself; gloomy, and other. It clouds John's consciousness, rendering him unable to see exactly what is happening as the maze of streets seems to have been designed specifically in order to make the unwary tourist lose their way. The Eternal City seemed to offer comfort and the hope of redemption from the awful feelings of loss but to John Baxter, it provides only terrifying glimpses of a fate which can be delayed but never avoided. Water is everywhere, acting as a reminder of his daughter, and an unavoidable obstacle to getting where he wants to go.

Possessing a star quality and physical presence rare in British cinema, Julie Christie has survived being the representative of a new generation into political activism and grand dame-hood.

DON’T LOOK NOW is a romantic ghost story, but on a deeper level it is also a meditation on perception and fate, where human destiny can be thwarted by a simple misreading of the signs hidden in everyday reality. The film explores what are too fleetingly only referred to as “coincidences,” yet are defining moments of life. The use of colour is especially notable, with all but red being muted and icy blues and greys becoming prominent as John’s search becomes more frustrating. When Baxter pursues the small red-garbed figure at the end of the film, Roeg offers an unforgettable echo back to Prospero’s pursuit of the Red Death in Roger Corman’s THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, a picture in which Roeg acted as cinematographer. Although the film is about death, it is also about love, making it more than just a clever Gothic puzzle. In Christie and Sutherland, we can believe in the ongoing passion of these two adults for each other. The famous love scene, with its non-linear cutting of the couple dressing for dinner, is not played for the usual cinematic effect of seduction or titillation. Rather, it is a natural scene notable for its candour, and for the fact that it seems to communicate love and not just sex. Without this scene, the story would seem less engaging and the interim between the Baxter’s last devoted moments together and their subsequent alienation would be left unexplored.

War in His World

The Artistic Legacy of H.G. Wells

Chris Moore’s stunning cover to Gollancz Press’ SF Masterworks 24, which collects Wells’ two most popular books – The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.

NOVELIST, analyst of society, amateur of science and populariser of ideas, H.G. Wells’ astonishing literary career exhibits the guiding passion of a single-minded personality. He believed, above all, in shaping the progress of mankind, and in the destruction that awaited us in the absence of such control. The simple fact is that his mind and vision became so completely possessed by the sense of a crisis in human affairs, that Wells lost patience and more than once decided to give up writing fiction altogether. It was plain, he argued, that social planning on a planetary scale was essential, and that we needed to form a single world community and order. In support of that belief came a flow of words, a torrent of ideas, a mounting spate of enthusiasms from year to year that formed the mental climate of his times, and that made the word Wellsian almost a household term of criticism. Today we can realise how much more than mere fantasies his Scientific Romances were, and how his imagination was excited by the new vistas opened up by scientific conquest.

All too often, Science Fiction writers are misread as prophets, and are judged by predictive success or failure rather than literary accomplishment – yet Wells excelled in all. His first influence on SF literature was 1893's The Man of the Year Million, which introduced that potent image of a hyper-evolved man with overdeveloped head, eyes and brain, an impact famously echoed in Dan Dare’s The Mekon. In a technological sense The World Set Free imagines the use of atomic power in war and peace, but the most remarkable Wells prediction was of tank warfare, long before the outbreak of World War I, in The Land Ironclads. The Ironclads tracked each target in a camera obscura and fire with what we’d now call a joystick. Here the author anticipated not only today’s remote-controlled slaughter but also computer games.

A Dell edition of The First Men in the Moon, a novel first published in 1901. This work introduces the gravity-shielding material Cavorite, Wells’ most powerful influence on the fringes of science. This incidental device - which allows a low-budget Moon expedition in fiction – led to the establishment of an actual Gravity Research Foundation.

Wells’ great achievement was to use the apparatus of science to take a long view of the human condition, and to show how small we appear through the grandeur of the Universe. The real hero of The Time Machine is not the traveller or his device, but the concept itself – hundreds of thousands of years in which humanity is warped and divided by evolutionary pressures into a class system of effete Eloi and sinister Morlocks, and then billions of years more before that unforgettable vision of Earth’s last crab-like inhabitants on a barren shore under a blood-red dying Sun. The docile Eloi are prototype flower-children, forerunners of the hippie counterculture then seventy year distant, while the whip-wielding, ape-like Morlocks feed off the Eloi in the most literal way. This then-subversive notion that humanity is not the pinnacle of evolution but perhaps just another passing phase was more delicately finessed a year later in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Here, the Doctor’s experiments to “uplift” animals to human form and intelligence in The House of Pain is underpinned by a disquieting sense that the gulf between animal and man cannot be very great. Worshipped with extreme fear by his Manimal subjects, Moreau is the ultimate example of the mad scientist as self-appointed God, a malignant deity given to acts of Old Testament-style wrath and retribution. His relationship to the Beast Folk is a deliberate parody of the Christian conception of God; Moreau is capricious to the Manimals as, in Wells’ view, God is cruel to Man. The Doctor’s attempts to supersede evolution may be abhorrent, but Wells’ intended Moreau to be the hero of the novel, who constructs a rational code of morality to meet the complex requirements of life.

Our chronic delusions of superiority are satirised in Griffin, the megalomaniac antihero of The Invisible Man. Despite its paranoia and grotesquerie, the novel ultimately provides comfort by showing, in miniature, the fate of a would-be fascist dictator when common people unite against him. Wells then gave the British a contrasting shock in The War of the Worlds, in which the fondly cherished Victorian mandate to colonise and civilise the world is inverted. On the surface, The War of the Worlds is an invasion story, but the worries of the late Victorians are expressed through its symbolism and themes, concerns of an end to Empire and a weakening of the national will. His imperialist Martians – “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” – set about Earth without regard for its natives, debunking the complacency that assumed the superiority of British firepower, and demonstrating an exhilarating penchant for property damage (a metaphor for Wells’ ruthlessness toward humanity). Another potent Wellsian influence can be detected in these invaders, who are physically feeble and powerful only when linked, cyborg-fashion, with their war machines, thus anticipating DOCTOR WHO's Daleks.

A portrait of H. G. Wells. The author questioned society’s chances for survival in a world in which technological advances outpaced intellectual development.

The content of all great Science Fiction is partially eclipsed by the “fun stuff.” The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are magical works, and are as thrilling as anything in Haggard or Kipling. Wells wrote to warn and transform, and his spirit (evoked in such recursive fictions as Michael Moorcock’s The War Lord of the Air and Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships) remain an inspiring presence. But given that Wells touched on just about every major SF theme – with the exception of the alternate reality story – during his prolific career, its arguable that subsequent Science Fiction has simply followed in his wake, updating, reworking and subverting basic genres with varying degrees of accomplishment.

Heroes and Monsters

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999- )
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

Peta Wilson is LXG’s Mina Harker. The Australian actress
and model can next be seen in SUPERMAN RETURNS,
in the dizzying role as "flight attendant."

WHAT is known today as Steampunk has its beginnings in the Victorian penny dreadfuls and the novels of Jules Verne; an increasingly literate public took advantage of the opportunities for adventure and high romance offered them by Verne, Wells, Haggard, Conan Doyle and Burroughs, as well as the macabre tales of Poe and Hawthorne. Steampunk, is in part, a nostalgic reclamation of Victorian and Edwardian Scientific Romances, Imperialist derring-do and Gothic horrors, reminiscing about a more elegant age that never really existed. Yet the spectre of the Victorian era has never left the discourse of the fantastic for very long; new creators always find themselves returning to this steam-driven crucible, an age of tremendous aesthetic decadence yet sublime heavy industry.

The mannerisms and references Alan Moore drops into his comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen makes it a veritable Steampunk bible. Previously, the Northampton writer has subverted and reinvented myths about superheroes (Watchmen) and Jack the Ripper (From Hell), and this time he’s taken it further by pulling literature into the graphic medium like never before. Illustrated by Kevin O’Neill, the series is a homage to the grand adventure stories of yesteryear, with a dark slant that only Moore could envision. By applying the conventions of the superhero team-up book to characters of Victorian literature – Mina Murray from Dracula, Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Invisible Man all acting under the auspices of the British Secret Service – the scenario recreates the reading experiences and entertainment we had as children. But we have the best of both worlds – a youthful sense of wonder and a mature reflection upon it.

The League are recognisable characters, not just visually but in terms of their literary and cultural reputations. Beyond that Western readers know them because they represent archetypal characters from Victorian literature, archetypes that are still present in popular culture.

The typical Moore twist is that each of the characters are presented as being somewhat past their prime, and well past their individually known stories. Quatermain, for instance, is rescued from an opium den and a life of dissolution, and Wilhemina Murray, formerly Mina Harker - erstwhile wife of the ill-fated Jonathan Harker - continually conceals her neck after incidents which left her ravaged by a foreign nobleman (i.e. Count Dracula), thus setting her outside of polite society. Therefore, this is not a gathering of squeaky clean heroic individuals, which makes them all the more interesting. With Quatermain an addict, Dr Jekyll threatening to change into Mr Hyde at any stressful moment, and The Invisible Man remaining completely amoral, things are never straightforward.

Moore and O’Neill evidently revel in this new pulp universe. The idea of a Victorian League is just a starting point, with the creative team tirelessly working in the era’s architectural fancies into their fantasy environment. The fact that all characters or names refereed in the strip would have their origin in either fictions written during or before the period in hand, or else in elements from later works that could be retro-engineered into a continuity, has made the series popular with normally non-comic book fans, including Sherlockians and the H. Rider Haggard Appreciation Society. O’Neill renders an intricate world of Empire at its zenith emerging from the filth and squalor of an authentic 19th Century London; his scratchy style is particularly effective with Hyde and Nemo, portraying a brutish appearance and imposing filed fangs for the former, and an appropriate burning gaze for the latter. His pencils are often cartoonish but always precise and full of motion and expression, lending each character, no matter how trivial, a unique sense of personality.

The first volume of stories centre around an amount of Cavorite being stolen by a nefarious crime lord, while the second series is set amongst H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion. Depicted here is the Question Mark Man, a trademark from the first series who tends to have been replaced by a Boadicea figure in the second. In both instances, the symbols resonate with a bygone era.

This freshness make Stephen Norrington’ 2003 film adaptation even more depressing, despite some astounding set design by Carol Spier. Typically known as LXG, this abomination, starring Sean Connery as Quatermain, starts exploding in your face almost immediately. The movie brings the characters together to battle a supervillain called the Fantom, but uses them like guest stars in some variety show. As we watch, often dumbstruck, Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) minces around trying to hide his portrait, and The Invisible Man (Guy Skinner) literally disappears for huge stretches and then reappears with the same annoying cockney accent and bad jokes. And in Venice, where the narrow canals can accommodate the Nautilus, the Fantom's men detonate explosions in the middle of a carnival, while our heroes - who now include Mississippi River ragamuffin Tom Sawyer (Shane West) for American interest - race around in a white limousine.