A Celebration Of Gothic Cinema At The Little Theatre Cinema In Bath
'THE CINEMA COMES TO LIFE WITH DARK - LIKE DRACULA.' - David Thompson
Welcome to the blog for FROM OUT OF THE SHADOWS a season of films celebrating the Gothic on film. Below you'll find more information on the films themselves, and why we think they're worth your attention. Click on the titles in the 'WHAT'S ON' section to see write-ups on each of the films that we're showing, while if you look back in the Archive Section, you'll find a little more about the Gothic in relation to the city where we're screening and the odd extra tidbit that we couldn't quite fit in anywhere else. Have a good look around. We hope you find it interesting. With any luck we'll see you there... it's going to be a lot of fun.
Showing posts with label Little Theatre Cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Little Theatre Cinema. Show all posts
Higher quality version of the short film made as part of a film-making workshop for 11-16 years olds, conducted during the FROM OUT OF THE SHADOWS season of Gothic Cinema at The Little Theatre, and screened before the BFI restored print of Terence Fisher's Classic DRACULA...
So impressed were we all with the finished piece, that it will also be screening infront of PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (well, it just seemed too perfect an opportuinity to miss), and most likely all the other films too.
To all who took part - CONGRATULATIONS! You made a cracker.
Amidst all the fantastic films we're showing as part of FROM OUT OF THE SHADOWS we held a film-making workshop for young people. Sticking with the theme, and since it wrapped up the day before Halloween, it was a horror film.
The result was screened this evening ahead of Terence Fisher's DRACULA. I think it's a truiumph and everyone involved should be very proud.
For some reason it''s too big to embed, so click HERE and take a look...
I think we should look to screening this infront of all the other films we're showing. Or at least PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES... that would seem to be a given really.
Well done to all involved. Hope you enjoyed making it. Hope you enjoyed watching it on the big screen. And I really hope you all enjoyed DRACULA. You're part of a very rich heritage...
Someone out there likes The Little Theatre... check this out:
Now compare the detail in the left of frame to the image up at the top right of this page.
Uh, huh. I think so too. Pretty damn cool, eh?
Is someone trying to tell us that The Little Theatre Cinema is the very definition of the classic small English cinema? We can live with that.
Okay, so this picture is from Wes Anderson's upcoming film of FANTASTIC MR. FOX, but I can't help looking at it and wishing it were a film with Bill Murray as a narcoleptic giant...
This makes me proud.
Whoever designed this street, we'd like to shake your hand.
THE INNOCENTS (screening 7.30pm on Friday December 11th) is the greatest ghost story ever put on film - click on the title in the WHAT'S ON sidebar to find out more...
But, at the time, 20th Century Fox, didn't know what the hell to do with it.
Traditionally, in the US, horror films were thought of as kids stuff. This is a movie filled with intelligence. A movie made for adults. Evidently somebody forgot to tell the marketing department, because THIS is the trailer that they made:
When I first saw this trailer, my jaw was on the floor.
It's a testament to the power of editing/post production that a trailer made up largely of footage from the film, can so woefully misrepresent it.
This is a subtle, beautiful, polished film. Delicate even. Precise. It is not the ham fisted mess that this trailer makes it out to be.
I'm not alone in thinking this. The great Joe Dante (GREMLINS, THE HOWLING, INNERSPACE, MATINEE) agrees with me. Over at TRAILERS FROM HELL he does a commentary over the above trailer that says just that. Click HERE to watch and hear.
I love Joe Dante's movies. This makes me love him all the more.
TRAILERS FORM HELL is a great site too - a must for any true fan of film.
As promised, a slightly more professional picture of the night it all began...
From left to right: Jennifer Jennings-Wright, Martin Jennings-Wright, Maria Hollis, Ollie Wright and Fran Key your ghoulish guides for the evening...
Thanks again to everyone for their efforts and to all of you who came along to watch the film. I'm sure you'll agree it was a graveyard smash! (Sorry, I've been dying to say that - no pun intended).
Can you really watch that trailer and NOT want to come!? Can you really watch this trailer and not think it's going to be a fun!?
As far as I can see it's a perfect Friday night at the cinema. Even better, it's the kind of film that plays best with an audience, and we've got KIM NEWMAN (film critic for EMPIRE, SIGHT&SOUND, VIDEO WATCHDOG, and author of the ANNO DRACULA books) here in person to get things off on the right foot...
I don't really think you can go wrong. If you enjoyed the FRANKENSTEIN screening at Walcot Mortuary Chapel, I think you're going to LOVE this. Click on the title in the WHAT'S ON list to read more.
Last night the electrodes were attatched, the kites sent up in to the centre of the storm, and lightning struck!
All the secrets of the heavens flowed throught the wires attached to the kites, and in to Walcot Mortuary Chapel, where they kickstarted the projector and brought our season of Gothic Horrors to life...
A finger twitched, it began to breathe - and then it sat bolt upright and headed off into the night upon a rampage!
And oh, what fun we had...
With smoke and lighting and flames we welcomed the damned who joined us. Though normally we would not drink 'wine', the red stuff was handed out.
There's a few photo's here to give an idea of the evening, but there'll be better ones to follow since there was a pro on hand...
But look at those colours! Look at that light! It was like entering a Mario Bava movie (I'm not sure anybody else got that, but I was tickled pink!)
Graveyard ghouls... or shades of Miss Jessel (see what I'm talking about at the screening of THE INNOCENTS in December)
These gentlemen kept telling people they were 'late' and asking them to come this way. Should we have worried?
The assembled hordes. A sell out show! Does my heart proud. Thank you all for bowing at the Gothic altar to worship the wonders of Boris Karloff and James Whale. Hopefully you'll join us for more in the season.
And Now The Screaming Starts! The film begins... Edward Van Sloan steps up on screen to give fair warning to the audience of the horrors that will follow, while we lock the doors and grin (not really - no health and safety infringements here, and many thanks to the council for their help with the venue). Blurry photo I know, you can hardly make anything out, but a pro was present at the proceedings, so better pictures should be coming soon.
Many thanks to everyone who helped make this what it was. Damn good fun with a damn good film, and a wonderful way to start.
Thanks to everyone for coming.To RADIO for their wonderful work in dressing the Chapel, and to ORCHARD STUDIO for the smoke and lighting - thanks for helping us create just the right mood, it looked fantastic...
DRACULA: AD 1972 DIR: Alan Gibson UK 1972 96mins (15)
Hammer tended to locate Christopher Lee’s Dracula in some vaguely defined nineteenth century mittel-Europe, which road signs or directions given to harried coach drivers would place as being near a Germanic sounding town called Karlstadt.
Truth to tell, the fearful peasantry tended to sound more West Country than Westphalia, and the heath-land and beech woods were hardly the Black Forest, but the notion was there.
The Count did make it to Victorian England in TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970), carried in desiccated form by Roy Kinnear’s unwitting salesman and unleashed by Ralph Bates’ fin de siècle seeker of decadent sensation. But he immediately retreated to the ancestral castle for the woeful SCARS OF DRACULA (1970), a low point in the studio’s output which makes such derided efforts as PREHISTORIC WOMEN (AKA SLAVE GIRLS (1967)) and THE VIKING QUEEN (1967) seem like minor masterpieces in comparison (they’re certainly a great deal more entertaining). The general weariness displayed by all involved, and the desperate resort to liberal lashings of tawdry gore must have occasioned a rethink; and the most obvious way to refresh the Count? Introduce him into a contemporary setting...
In the aftermath of the social upheavals of the 60s - the implications of which were working themselves out as the new decade progressed - a rural European setting in thrall to the feudal class divisions of a previous century, no longer had much resonance for a popular audience. Michael Reeves’ 1968 film WITCHFINDER GENERAL had set a new standard for the representation of a particularised English past of squalid rural brutality, which made Hammer’s fairy tale locales seem even further removed from the times. It was time for Dracula to come down from his castle. This was, after all, what he had done in Bram Stoker’s novel, making arrangements to move to London in order to take full advantage of the steam-driven technologies of the modern late-Victorian metropolis.
The title DRACULA AD 1972 foregrounds this move to the modern era, but the opening of the film eases us towards such jarring modernity with a fatal struggle to the death between the Count and his arch-nemesis Van Helsing atop a careening carriage a hundred years earlier. This nod towards an Anglicised version of the Western convention of the assault on a speeding stagecoach - an extended version of which was played out towards the climax of Tim Burton’s Hammer homage SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999) - is an indication of the generic elements which will be added to the usual gothic mix in this film and its follow up, THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973).
The writer of both, Don Houghton, had already displayed his propensity for such miscegenation with his two Jon Pertwee DOCTOR WHO scripts, INFERNO (1970) and THE MIND OF EVIL (1963), which used plot structures borrowed from the disaster movie and the Cold War thriller, and he was later to create a self-reflexive country house murder mystery within which to house the strange metaphysics of the SAPPHIRE AND STEEL (1979) universe. The Count’s meagre remains, which we have seen in previous films are more than enough to effect a resurrection, are buried beyond the pale of the graveyard where Van Helsing is interred. There is a definite sense that these adversaries need each other. They are the twin poles of a Manichean worldview, each defined by the other’s opposition. The resumption of this eternal struggle will almost be a relief to them as they find themselves adrift in the rapidly shifting social milieu of the 70s.
The shock of the new is rather neatly conveyed by a camera pan away from a close-up on Van Helsing’s tombstone, which reveals that it is now surrounded by the encroaching rubble of demolition in preparation for subsequent redevelopment in the 70s style. And that means concrete. From the bird song in the rural Victorian graveyard where we have just witnessed the dual interment, the camera pans upwards to witness a jet plane roar overhead. It is a century-bridging cut which directly echoes a similar effect in Powell and Pressburger’s A CANTERBURY TALE (1944), where the hawk sent into the air by one of Chaucer’s pilgrims is transformed into a spitfire as we are shifted into the modern Kentish countryside of the Second World War.
Director Alan Gibson gives us some sweeping wide-angle lens panoramas, a technique on which he seems quite keen, to give an impression of this disorienting new world. Concrete overpasses spanning busy roads, the dizzying heights of steel and glass office blocks, and traffic choked London streets. It is little wonder that Dracula, once reincarnated, opts to stay in his small oasis of Victorian gothic revival. Remember, this was the era in which British Rail wanted to demolish the Gothic railway temple of St Pancras, presumably to make way for something along the lines of the brutalist civic centre now facing it in an architectural version of a Sergio Leone standoff.
The seeming irony of the Count taking refuge in a church, albeit a deconsecrated one, perhaps taps into a deeper sense that such figures of darkness can only have a meaningful existence in a world in which faith is still central. Van Helsing similarly takes refuge amongst the Victorian furnishings of his book-lined study, a scholar’s retreat which his granddaughter Jessica likens to a mausoleum. So is this really an analysis of the soul’s desolation, the isolation of the individual in the shadow of God’s absence from the world, in the manner of Bergman’s WINTER LIGHT (1962)? Er, not really, no. But it does reflect the wilful demolition of the past and the values which it embodied which was being carried out at the time. Many have seen the confinement of Dracula within St Botolph’s church as a failure of nerve, but I find it entirely appropriate for the period. A crisis of faith, be it cultural or religious, is a threat to sacred monsters and sacred architecture alike.
The Count’s servant seems to have changed little over the century, save in his foppish fashions and modish hairstyle, but we must assume that he is a direct descendant in the same way that Peter Cushing’s strangely named Lorrimer Van Helsing is the grandson of the original vampire hunter. The book ‘The House of Horror’, an official version of the Hammer story, was to be issued the following year by Lorrimer Publishing, which explains such peculiar nomenclature. Is there a genetically inherited component to evil henchmanhood being hinted at here?
The name Johnny Alucard is a bit of a giveaway, and it doesn’t fill us with confidence in his mental acuity that Van Helsing needs to painstakingly doodle an acrostic in order to figure it out. It also reminds us of other ‘hipster’ characters such as John Cassavetes’ jazz playing Private Eye of the nightclub world, Johnny Stacatto. Indeed, the name would seem to be more suggestive of a beatnik milieu, and it seems at times as if Houghton is drawing more on memories of this era (or the films which embodied it) for his view of youth cool. This would explain the inexplicable enthusiasm which Marsha Hunt evinces for a ‘jazz spectacular’ at the Royal Albert Hall. The Mahavishnu Orchestra, maybe?
Johnny is at the centre of a ‘hip’ Chelsea set which is first seen ‘freaking out’ the squares in a posh Kensington pad. These unfortunates have their house invaded by the happening sounds of Stoneground, who churn out uninspired grooves of lumpen heaviosity in the background. It was to have been The Faces, but alas, the ‘Ground had a pre-existing contract with the distributors, Warner Bros., so the services of Rod and the boys were not called upon.
The opening party scene demonstrates the level of authenticity we can expect in the depiction of contemporary youth culture; it is more convincing than the hippy festival in CARRY ON CAMPING (1969), but only marginally so. The dialogue is the big letdown of the film. Its risibility obscures the fact that there are some interesting ideas at play elsewhere. It’s perfectly possible that the whole thing is intended to be satirical, in which case we are laughing along with the script rather than at it. The babbling inanities of the supremely irritating ‘comical’ member of the cool inner circle would certainly mark him out for imminent death in any horror film made ten years on, particularly given his penchant for practical jokes of the leaping out from behind a gravestone variety. Why he chooses to dress in a monk’s robe is anyone’s guess. Caroline Munro’s pogoing dance moves do exude an infectious enthusiasm, however.
Munro, whose first significant film role this was (playing the exquisite corpse of Vincent Price’ wife in THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971) wasn’t much of a stretch) went on to become something of a fantasy film favourite in the 70s, appearing in such timelessly entertaining fare as CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER (1974), AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1976), THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1974) and becoming a Bond villainess in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977), before disappearing along with the rest of the British film industry. Adam Ant paid tribute to her iconic status (as he had already done with Diana Dors) by casting her in his video for Goody Two Shoes.
Stephanie Beacham, as Van Helsing’s granddaughter Jessica, displays a splendid example of a feather cut hairstyle, bested in 70s film only by Jane Fonda in KLUTE (1971), and sports a variety of purple clothing on her way to 80s Dynastic soap queendom. She also starred in Hammer rivals Amicus’ period gothic AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973), in which she was menaced by an ambulatory disembodied hand.
Meanwhile, Marsha Hunt arrives fresh from inspiring The Rolling Stones hit Brown Sugar, having had a daughter with Mick Jagger in 1970. She went on to have a small part in the little-loved (I like it) concluding film of Lindsay Anderson’s Travis trilogy, BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (1982), by which time the afro is long gone.
If the execrable dialogue can be enjoyed in its own right, the same can probably not be said for Michael Vickers’ intrusive, heavy-handed score, with its endlessly repeated horn riff and flailing guitar mangling. For this they ditched the reliable services of long-running Hammer composer James Bernard?
Much more impressive is the electronic music used to accompany the black mass scene, appropriately enough a track called Black Mass from an LP by White Noise.
White Noise were a temporary studio union of young technical wizard David Vorhaus and Unit Delta Plus, better known as BBC Radiophonic workshop legends Delia Derbyshire, who also provided electronic sounds for the 1973 film THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, and Brian Hodgson. The music is a genuinely disturbing blend of distorted vocals, ‘musique concrete’ screams and electronically processed drum sounds, and it builds the ritual to a pitch of hysteria climaxing in Dracula’s resurrection. It demonstrates what a vital role a good soundtrack can be in helping to create an evocative atmosphere. Not even Johnny’s lame invitation to ‘dig the music, kids’ can entirely dispel its power.
Whilst no classic, DRACULA: AD1972 is really much better than its lowly reputation would give it credit for. Peter Cushing gives his usual sterling and committed performance, and displays a touching tenderness in his scenes with Beacham. The contemporary setting allows him to indulge in his chain-smoking habit, and he is able to bring an absolute conviction to such exchanges as: ‘let’s just hope you’re wrong about this whole business’…‘I wish I was, Inspector. I wish to God I was’. Christopher Lee lends his usual looming presence, and the duels with Van Helsing(s) which bracket the film have a real physicality.
There is an intriguing homoerotic undertow to the film, as Alucard pleads with his anagrammatic master to be bitten and exposes himself with a look of expectant ecstasy. Lee approaches with a grimace of distaste, and the camera shies away from the actual bite (the vampire’s kiss) but Alucard attains the ‘power’ he craves and proceeds to pass it on to Jessica’s boyfriend, whilst the women are simply led to Dracula to be drained and discarded. The film dwells on the banality of everyday, kitchen sink environs, such as the car wash in which Jessica and her boyfriend talk, and the night-time launderette outside of which Johnny trawls for victims. New gothic locations are also put forward, such as the Cavern, a subterranean club space in which the usual elements connoting neglected antiquity such as cobwebs and cracked stonework are now self-conscious props.
This being a late period entry in the Hammer Dracula cycle, the methods of despatching vampires are becoming correspondingly baroque, and there is a nice bit of business in which the elements of a morning wake-up routine, the shaving mirror and the shower, are used to deadly effect. But of course, a film which proudly displays the year of its making in the title will always offer the pleasures of period detail. Look, there’s the number 19 to Finsbury Park, a Routemaster yet! And there’s Battersea Power Station, still belching out smoke and yet to be a Pink Floyd cover! And there’s some vintage Chelsea and West Ham graffiti, although the fact that they are placed neatly one above the other with no sign of erasure, and are daubed in a similar hand suggests that the art department was at work in this case (I hope they had permission). Really, this is just a film to sit back and unashamedly enjoy.
Take Jessica Van Helsing’s advice: sit back, relax and indulge in ‘a quiet bit of mind blowing’.
THE INNOCENTS DIR: Jack Clayton UK/US 1961 100mins (12A)
THE INNOCENTS (1961) is probably the finest ghost story ever put on film.
Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING (1963) runs a very close second (Mario Bava’s KILL BABY... KILL! (1966) and Guillermo Del Toro’s THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (2001) are fighting it out for third).
Between the two of them you can pretty much see where Kubrick stole everything that works about THE SHINING (1980). That is, everything that’s actually spooky, unnerving or scary.
Kubrick however is too much the rationalist to fully embrace Horror as a genre. It’s the irrational that scares us most here. The unknown. The dark. Primitive fears perhaps, but ones that remain despite centuries of intellectual probing.
It’s the dark, the shadows that are so beautiful and so terrifying in THE INNOCENTS, filmed in glorious black and white by Freddie Francis. But even more terrifying are the moments when our fears step out of the shadows, to stand before us in the daylight, staring back at us unblinking. Such are two of the key moments in THE INNOCENTS, as a dead woman is seen standing at the far side of lake amid the reeds/rushes watching us. And in the school room, when Miss Giddens – our protagonist, played by Deborah Kerr – hears weeping from behind her and turns to see the same dead woman sitting at a desk, crying.
A moment later the dead woman is gone, perhaps was never there. Perhaps, was little more than a shade on poor Miss Giddens’ mind; a trick of the light; a momentary daydream... but as she approaches the desk to clear away the slate the children left behind, she finds it wet. The tiny splash mark of a single tear [has been left behind]...
It is one of the most beautiful scenes in horror, one of the most perfectly filmed. And let us make no bones about it, this IS a horror movie. It is trying to scare you. But it is not one of the baser examples of the genre. It is Horror at its most refined, its most adult. It is terror. It is goose bumps on your arms, it is the tightening of your scalp, it is the small but audible and entirely uncontrolled gasp of realisation that what you fear is real. It is the cinematic equivalent of the short stories of M.R. James. It is every bit as good as THE TURN OF THE SCREW, the Henry James novella on which it is based. It is one of the most refined, most intelligent, and most perfectly realised horror films ever made.
You’re in for a treat.
It was made in 1961 by director Jack Clayton – best known at the time for Social Realist picture ROOM AT THE TOP (1959) – from a script by John Mortimer and Truman Capote, though it was Capote who added the final layer of Gothic detailing, the multitude of watchful cherubs that sometimes crawl with insects; the flowers in the house that are always shedding petals, especially when touched by Miss Giddens.
They play up the ambiguity. Is this real? Or is it all in Miss Giddens’ mind? A haughty uptight governess of religious upbringing, probably a virgin, alone in a rambling house with only a house keeper and her two charges... and the memory, the taint of something wicked, something sexual in the figures who haunt the place, literally or metaphorically; it’s left almost entirely for you to decide.
The performances are pitch perfect all around. Deborah Kerr is absolutely at the top of her game, while the children are nuanced and understated, Clayton being sure to portray them not as demonic, but merely as children. Only the circumstances and inferences surrounding them begin to make us think they might be more than they seem...
And here again is the brilliance of Clayton’s approach. He resolutely refuses to take the easy route, to go for anything like cheap thrills. As a result, the inference is so much darker, and stranger. Have the children been abused? Are they in fact possessed? Are they simply shadows/reflections of the former governess – Miss Jessel - and wicked valet Peter Quint? Both of who are dead, but whose influence and character continues to pervade... tainting the isolated splendour of Bly House.
Do their ghosts still walk these halls, and perhaps inhabit the children’s flesh?
Or is Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) losing her mind? Is her repressed Victorian facade beginning to crack?
Is she, ultimately, the villain of this piece? Or the victim? Watch and see. There’s very little certainty. The ball is in your court.
Ever since I saw the end tacked onto the beginning of DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (Hammer’s second sequel, though the first to feature the return of Christopher Lee as the definitive screen Count). I think that I was nine years old when I first saw it – taped off the telly late one night by my dad.
Then, it was just about the most thrilling, exciting film I’d ever seen. Even at that early age I was predisposed to like it: I had a taste for the Gothic and the Macabre, but was too sensitive a child to enjoy contemporary set horror films. The gore and the closeness to the world I knew and lived in made it all too frightening. AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981) left me leaping into bed from six feet away in order that I didn’t let my feet get within range of anything that might be lurking in the shadows underneath.
But DRACULA (none of your American HORROR OF... thank you very much) was incredible. Much that affected me so deeply, I don’t think I recognised/understood until much later. Seeing it again as an adult I realise that so many of the things I respond to today can be traced back to my first viewing of Terence Fisher’s masterpiece: to the acting of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, to the cinematography of Jack Asher, the script by Jimmy Sangster, to the careful, precise and entirely committed direction of Terence Fisher.
The fact that it also gave me a fondness for women in Victorian attire is quite beside the point...
I didn’t see the Universal DRACULA (1931) until many years later, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi in the role that he made a caricature long before Sesame Street got hold of it. I’ve never liked that version. Almost nothing about it works for me. I don’t like Lugosi in the film. I think it’s probably the worst film Tod Browning ever made (based on the few that I have seen and which can still be seen). If you want to see what the man was capable of check out FREAKS (1932). A truly remarkable film guaranteed to give you goose bumps to this day.
Only Dwight Frye as Renfield makes any impact in the Lugosi film. He is the saving grace of it. The only thing that is creepy, disturbing, transcendent of the dull drawing room drama that he’s imprisoned in: the only aspect that comes close to the mood and power of Stoker’s still brilliant novel.
That film has its supporters. But they are wrong. Hammer’s DRACULA is better. It is also one of the best, and most influential British films ever made. But Hammer’s reputation has fallen so that it is thought of now in the mocking - if warmly so - terms of the kind of cheap campery that began to creep into its output in the seventies as it began to lose its decade long grip on the zeitgeist. THE EXORCIST (1973), THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASACRE (1974), HALLOWEEN (1978), these films made the period set stories of Hammer almost cosy, quaint, despite a few last gasp attempts at something stronger near the end (DEMONS OF THE MIND (1972) was particularly promising, as were parts of TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1976)).
Though THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) had really put them on the map - and made the world sit up and take note when it made a fortune - it was DRACULA that really defined Hammer Horror as a style unto itself.
Classy; rich (some might say over ripe); lurid; sensual; melodramatic; quivering with barely repressed sexual tension, and presented by all concerned with a sense of pride and professionalism. These were no simple cheap shockers pumped out to make quick cash. Though that was undoubtedly on Hammer’s mind as a company, its repertory cast and crew were solid professionals who believed in what they were doing and believed in doing their best. Non more so than Terence Fisher, who came to directing comparatively late in life, and who found in this particular brand of lurid Gothicism – he always said his films were ‘Fairy tales for adults’ a phrase that hits the nail right on the head – something that brought out the very best in him.
So, why is it so good?
Well, for a start, it solves ‘The Problem Of Dracula’ efficiently and dramatically. And while it may continue to take enormous liberties with its literary source, it nonetheless keeps in mind its point and tone. It is – as Stokers novel was in its day and remains still – thrilling, and scary, and in many ways erotic. Not that the censors of the day would let it get away with anything too overt. There is no naked flesh on display, and yet the sexual undertow, lifted straight out of the novel, is palpable. Because he can’t show too much – and quite frankly Terence Fisher was a man of too much taste to want or need to anyway – Fisher concentrates on the moments leading up to a sexual encounter and the moments after. The scenes in which Lucy and Mina both wait in anticipation of Count Dracula, knowing what they do is somehow wrong, are incredibly well wrought, Fishers teasing use of camera and editing in perfect sync with James Bernard’s tremulous score to bring us to the very height of erotic dread.
Any suggestion that one is reading too much into things with regards to the films overt sexuality, need only see the look on Mina’s face as she returns just after dawn from the night in which she has first encountered Dracula. If it is not the very definition of ‘the cat who got the cream’, I don’t know what is. Indeed having played her prior scenes as uptight, and buttoned down, the playful moue and hungry eyes of Mina in this scene is quite a revelation.
‘The Problem Of Dracula’ is that we know too much. The very name displaces so much cultural water that t is impossible to enter a film called DRACULA and not know already that the man is the villain. He is evil personified in Bram Stoker’s novel. And though he would in later days come to be portrayed more in the tragic/Byronic mode, Hammer sticks to the book. He is a figure of fear. Evil personified. Appetite incarnate.
But in adapting the book, it becomes difficult to then portray the scenes of Jonathan Harker’s innocent arrival and later imprisonment in Castle Dracula, the slow revelation of the Count’s monstrous nature, without the audience losing interest, refusing to suspend their disbelief.
How do Hammer solve the problem? They make Harker just as knowledgeable as we are. They make him a man coming to Castle Dracula as a kind of undercover agent. A man intent on killing the fiend. If we know the novel, we’re pulled up short, surprised by this sudden revelation. If we don’t, we’re at least not looking at Harker as a fool to be walking into such an ominous castle and not suspecting anything.
Actually, here Bernard Robinson’s set design pulls a quite brilliant coo. Castle Dracula (in part due to budgetary consideration I’m sure, but also due to Robinson’s brilliance at his job) is not the Production designer’s Gothic wet dream that so many Hollywood productions make it. It seems nonsensical that anyone would walk into a place that screams doom at them, without the slightest hint of nervousness.
Hammer’s film is different. It is quiet, no birds sing in the vicinity of the Castle, and there are no servants. The place seems deserted. But is more conceivably the home of a Count/nobleman fallen on hard times, than a place that proclaims itself the very seat of Satan on this earth. Is it sinister? Yes, especially as night falls. Is it unsettling? Certainly. It is also believable, while being strangely unreal. The details are unusual; not quite right. It is, as Fisher would have it, a kind of fairy tale... but a fairy tale of the very darkest kind.
This sense of a ‘dark fairytale’ is at its height in the cinematography. Cold greys, deep blacks, calm browns, the bright vibrant red of blood, but also sickly greens and highlights of lavender and blue.
The concision of the storytelling is a thing of beauty. Fisher tells his tale directly, moves his camera for a reason - emotional or narrative. His framing is impeccable, and his work with cinematographer Jack Asher assured.
Just look at the scene in which Jonathan Harker awakes from an encounter with Dracula and one of his brides. He awakes in his room bathed in warm orange light. The fire is barely flickering, almost out, like the candles, wisps of blue-grey smoke rise from both. Everything within the frame is pertinent. By the light coming through the window, we already know that the day is almost over. Harker has been unconscious for quite some time; whatever happened to him was serious. At the same time, it pre-empts later scenes, lays groundwork for suspense: we know that night is coming, and by now we know that means the Count is coming. Danger is coming. At the same time, a sense of doom is building. We don’t believe that Harker is safe in any way. We’re not sure he will survive. The dying candle, the last flickering flame in the grate, the setting of the sun, all reflect Harker’s (and by extension at this point our) position, the waning light (and thus the gathering dark), the flickering flame of his life, the dying embers of our hope.
When you’re watching pay particular attention to details – the placement of skulls near Dracula’s tomb – as carefully placed in the frame as anything in a painting by Caravaggio; the shadows that ensnare and imprison poor Harker at the crucial moment.
Details like these are apparent in every scene, and damn near every frame... it is an astonishingly well made film. A film that should be up there near the top of any list of Greatest British Films. Britain lead the way with this kind of stylish, adult treatment of a genre thought of in Hollywood as ‘Kids Stuff’.
The French were quick to see Terence Fisher’s talent for what it was and lauded him. We should do the same.
We have a rich history of fantastic literature that was once disreputable, but of which we are now, quite rightly proud. Has it not been long enough that we can accept these – at the time - hugely popular films in to the ranks of Classics? Treat them with the respect that they deserve? As much respect as is afforded to their literary forebears?
This film... indeed these films, when at their best, are glorious. We should be proud.
Bath is a city of rationally planned Georgian architecture, its perfectly proportioned neo-classical facades reflecting a belief in the power of reason and the balanced harmony of the universe. It is the city of Jane Austen, of her witty and bright tales of social etiquette in which everyone eventually finds happiness within the pre-ordained social order.
But above these geometrically aligned terraces rises an incongruous edifice, encircled by a Victorian graveyard. This is Lansdown Tower, the retreat in later years of an alternative presiding spirit of the city, William Beckford.
Beckford was a dissolute aristocrat, who had resolutely squandered his considerable family fortune and been obliged to spend a good deal of time living abroad following an ‘indiscretion’ at Powderham Castle. He had already erected one oversized tower at the centre of his gothic residence at Fonthill Abbey, which had collapsed like Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER. Undeterred, he had rebuilt it in even grander style, and this one stayed up until several years after impecuniousness had forced him to move, when it finally succumbed to the inherent instability of the architecture of dreams.
He amassed a huge library, partly through bargain-hunting trips to revolutionary Paris, where desperate aristocrats were parting with their possessions at knock-down prices. This collection contained many volumes on magic and the occult. Such interests are manifested in VATHEK, the novel upon which his literary reputation rests, which was published against his will in 1786.
It is a piece of fevered orientalism backed with genuine scholarship which details the excessive transgressions of the titular Caliph, who indulges his every desire on his path towards eternal damnation. Many of the defining elements of gothic are on display. The aristocratic figure whose acts put him beyond the moral boundaries of society; the pursuit of occult knowledge and sensual pleasure as ends in themselves, towards the fulfilment of which any means become acceptable; the dwelling upon the physicality of horror and the grotesque; the encounter with the supernatural, usually in a malicious form, and the imposing architecture of the gothic edifice, here represented by the Caliph’s palace and tower, and by the labyrinthine vaults of the hell to which he is finally condemned.
The novel is Beckford’s contribution to the founding literary canon of gothic, and testament to a life which was lived in a similar spirit. His tomb lies in the graveyard that was largely constructed so that he could be buried in the shadow of his tower. It bears an amended quote from VATHEK, which allows him the possibility of a salvation denied to his characters. The original words evoked the immediate impact of the irrevocable decree of hell which fell upon the Caliph and his companions: ‘Their hearts immediately took fire, and they, at once, lost the most precious gift of heaven: HOPE.’
Gothic as a literary form flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The term refers to the architectural style of the medieval period and to the romantic attraction of the ruins from that era. It emphasises the degree to which these stories revolve around the return of, or sometimes to, a past considered more barbaric and bloodthirsty.
The use of a term from architectural history as a mark of an artistic movement also demonstrates the central importance of buildings to the form. The ruined, or at best poorly maintained castle or abbey was the essential setting for the early gothic novel, making its appearance in such works as Horace Walpole’s THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO and Ann Radcliffe’s THE MYSTERY OF UDOLPHO. Such edifices, with their labyrinthine corridors and hidden chambers, are still essential to the descendants of the gothic novel in their purest form. The nature of the gothic edifice may change, however. As time progresses, we inherit a new set of pasts, an expanded array of histories upon which to draw.
The buildings of the Victorian gothic revival provide a rich new set of locales, and there are plenty of imaginative possibilities to be explored in the monumentalism of much modern architecture. The 70s children’s tv series KING OF THE CASTLE took place in a tower block of the mind and the late Hammer offering THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA makes a gothic tower out of a steel and glass office block. The lowering masses and block-like solidity of 70s concrete brutalist monuments is surely ripe for use as a locus of gothic menace, too. The bewildering, disorienting spaces of the Barbican would provide the perfect backdrop for a mix of J.G. Ballard and Algernon Blackwood.
Perhaps the ultimate gothic edifice, and one drawn entirely from the imagination, is Gormenghast, as described, with the palpable physicality arising from the artist’s visual sense, in Mervyn Peake’s novels.
Here, the edifice effectively describes the entire world. The retreat into the enclosed, labyrinthine spaces of the edifice signify a retreat into an inner landscape, the stones and mortar of its confining walls effectively the bones of the skull. The preponderance of subterranean spaces, dank recesses and hidden basements, represent the lower depths of the mental mansion. It’s no surprise that Freud touched on matters gothic in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’.
Gothic is a fiction of darkness, both literal and figurative. Its major action tends to take place at night, or in interior spaces where little light penetrates. It is in many ways the inverse shadow of the culture of the Enlightenment, an instinctive irruption of the irrational into its world of balance and considered empiricism. The mysterious darkness of the gothic world occludes the daytime world of the knowable and measurable.
Whilst the Romanticism of the nineteenth century shares some of the wild imagination of gothic, it too is essentially in opposition to its spirit. If the Romantics sought out the Sublime in the awesome spectacle of nature’s grandeur, the gothic imagination retreated to its subterranean depths. Romantic poets might gaze upon the majesty of the Alps and reflect upon the immensity of creation. The writer of gothic fiction would have us descend into the dank caves below, where Frankenstein’s creature would be brooding on revenge.
Gothic thrives on fear and horror, recoil and revulsion. It is inward-looking and introspective, shrinking from its encounters with the unknown, which threatens to force entry nevertheless. Romanticism actively seeks the experience of terror and awe which comes from an encounter with the sublime, and which leads to an expansion of the imaginative perception of the universe. Both approaches lend themselves to the possibility of insanity if taken to excess, but they are different orders of madness. One arises from sensory overload, an inability to draw back from overwhelming immensity, the other from a disconnection from the world, or an apprehension of some essential disorder manifest within it.
The vogue for gothic literature, as much disparaged then as it was to be in its later forms, lasted from about 1765, when THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO appeared, to 1818, when FRANKENSTEIN and Jane Austen’s satire of the form, NORTHANGER ABBEY, were published.
FRANKENSTEIN has been identified by Brian Aldiss as the birthplace of modern science fiction, which he declares to be ‘in the gothic mode’. The gothic continued to be influential as a flavour throughout the 19th century, in the novels of the Brontes and in the dark urban labyrinth of Dickens’ London. But its most significant rebirth was in the revival of tales of the uncanny and supernatural in the Victorian and Edwardian era. Again, a rationalised era of technological progress produces its own spectres lurking beyond the circle of the gaslight.
Of the canon of gothic tales and monsters which would be transmogrified from literary to cinematic form, only Frankenstein’s creature could really be said to have been born from the original movement. And that from an end work rather than one written at its height. The rest were the products of the Victorian and Edwardian imagination; Bram Stoker’s DRACULA and Sheridan le Fanu’s CARMILLA; Robert Louis Stevenson’s JEKYLL AND HYDE, infused with the later top-hatted, caped and caned spirit of Jack the Ripper; Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLE’S the most famous and overt of Holmes’ several encounters with the gothic; the figure of the revenant mummy, inspired by the fin de siecle craze for Egyptian archaeological revelations; the vengeful ghosts of MR James, who emerge to punish those who uncover that which should have remained buried; and the latecomer, Guy Endore’s 30s novel THE WEREWOLF OF PARIS.
A great many gothic films and novels continue to return to the atmospheric, fogbound setting of this steam driven, gaslit era, and particularly to its emblematic city, London. But it is in the dark shadowy cavern of the cinema that the gothic has found its ideal home, and to which it has come to roost (hanging upside down, enfolded in black wings, of course). It is here that a pale-faced figure stands at the head of a monumental stone staircase and invites us, in a thick Romanian accent, to ‘listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!’
And it is here that an oak door opens, and a broad shouldered figure with heavy workmen’s boots and a block-like head shambles into the room and slowly turns round to face us. This is where we begin…
Text by Jez Winship
Neil Adds: We really need to show Mario Bava's classic KILL BABY...KILL! if we have another Gothic season. Quite apart from the fact that it is brilliant, just look at this. The Spiral Staircase in Beckford's Tower:
And THIS shot from Mario Bava's film...
I wonder if there's any way that we could show the film INSIDE Beckford's Tower?
