1a-c. A trio of short horror curiosities

I'm starting my films of 2015 as I mean to go on - that is with vintage horror, just like in 2014. steepholm's post yesterday about an Edwardian horror film reminded me that some time ago I had bookmarked an even earlier one, and the neatness of starting my year with what is widely considered to be the first horror film ever made appealed to me - especially since I knew I would be able to progress onwards to the Edwardian one afterwards. Thus my evening began.

1a. Le Manoir du Diable (1896), dir. Georges Méliès

The history of film begins, as we all know, in Leeds, with 1888's challenging and poignant Roundhay Garden Scene. Given that people had already been using all manner of special-effects technology (still cameras, lights, distorting lenses, paper cut-outs etc.) to create otherworldly vignettes for years, and that the Victorian fascination with the Gothic was at its greatest height yet, it is no surprise that within eight years, somebody had put the new technique to work in creating the world's first horror film. Nonetheless, we shouldn't let that inevitability distract us from how amazing it is that we can actually see this film, just over 118 years later. (I say 'just over', because it was originally released on Christmas Eve 1896, placing it in the fine and time-honoured tradition of Ghost Stories at Christmas.) To be clear about exactly how early we are talking, this film was released the year before Bram Stoker's Dracula was published. You may read more about it at Wikipedia, and indeed watch it for yourself right here.

It isn't exactly horror in the sense of 'intended to scare', of course, as the Wikipedia page rightly says, but then again neither are lots of films, books and plays which end up being placed in the 'horror' category. Like most category descriptors, the 'horror' genre falls down pretty quickly on close analysis, but we still stick with it anyway because it is simple and widely understood - so I'm not going to fret too much about all that. This certainly is the first film with fantastical, diabolical, supernatural, Gothic goings-on - and that's good enough for me. Indeed, it features a quasi-vampiric protagonist, who is presumably the diable of the title, but notably transforms from a bat into a human-like creature at the beginning of the story, and is defeated by a crucifix at the end (sorry if that's a spoiler for anyone ;-) ), which is very exciting.

Everything seems very simple to 21st-century eyes, of course, and yet at the same time it is surprising how much of what film can do has already been recognised and pressed into use only 8 years after its invention. We are basically looking at a theatrical vignette, filmed with a single static camera, but stepping beyond the constraints of live theatre by using the camera's ability to compress and edit time via cuts, so that people and objects can be made to appear and disappear. We also have special effects props hanging from wires (the bat), people appearing in puffs of smoke, and 2D mattes (the cauldron). As yet, though, there are no intertitles (which were invented in 1903, apparently), so the story has to be simple enough to follow without them. And of course Gothic melodrama lends itself well to that situation, since a basic battle of good vs. evil doesn't need to rely on deeply-felt personal emotions of the sort which need articulating via words or close-ups.

In short, a fascinating glimpse into both the early history of film and the evolution of Gothic horror - and since it's only three minutes long, you can be pretty certain that it will reward that small investment of your time.

1b. The Mistletoe Bough (1904), dir. Percy Stow

This is the film which steepholm posted about. It is a telling of a widely-known ghost story called The Mistletoe Bough, which you can read about here, and was most popularly known at the time when this film was made through a song by Thomas Haynes Bayley published in 1884, which the film seems to follow fairly closely. You can watch it for free on the BFI website, and it is only 5 minutes long - so again, well worth the investment.

We are only eight years beyond the previous film here, but the technological leaps forward are striking (as, of course, they also are between Roundhay Garden Scene and Le Manoir du Diable over the same time-period). Everything is still very theatrical, as cinema would continue to be well into the 1930s (and television the 1960s), right down to being able to see the shadow of the 'stage-front' on the back wall in the opening ball-room scene. But where Le Manoir du Diable had one location, this one has six (ball-room, house exterior, steps to the tower, tower interior, generic black background to seeking scene and house drive-way), and in one of them the camera-person even uses a panning shot to follow the bride as she comes out of the house and looks for a place to hide. Since this film is telling a known story, it is able to convey a slightly more complex narrative than Le Manoir du Diable, but technological innovation helps here too in the form of the newly-invented intertitle; one is employed to signal that thirty years have passed between the mysterious disappearance of the bride and the discovery of her terrible fate.

Even more strikingly, we have the appearance of a new special effect. While Le Manoir du Diable used cuts to signify appearances and disappearances, The Mistletoe Bough gives us the ghost (or a dream?) of the bride, slowly fading in the arms of her husband when he tries to embrace her. This really was interesting, because I have more than once heard it said that the scene of Count Orlok fading in the sun at the end of Nosferatu (1922) is the first use of such an effect in a horror film - which I now know is definitely not the case. I suppose it goes to show the folly of declaring anything the 'first' whatever in cinematic history, given how much of its early output is now lost or little-known. The actual mouldering corpse of the bride, as discovered thirty years later by her husband, is kept off-screen though - we only see his and another man's (the butler? a friend?) horrified reactions as they look into the chest. My guess is that this was done out of concern for what could and couldn't be shown on screen, rather than limited props / effects resources, since a skeleton in some rags isn't too hard to do. But either way it felt like a precursor of the later grand horror tradition of keeping shonky special-effects 'monsters' off-screen as much as possible.

As for the story itself, it is intended as genuinely tragic / horrific this time, and did indeed give me a horrified thrill as the bride met her fate, and again as her husband realised what had happened to her. The theatricality still gives it a strong melodramatic edge, though, which reduces the sense of realism, and the scenes of the wedding party utterly failing to find the bride in spite of there being only one very obvious place where she could possibly have ended up are more comical than I suspect they were meant to be. Meanwhile, the titular mistletoe bough itself doesn't actually seem to play any part in the plot - it is simply there to signify a winter / Christmas setting for the story, apparently matched by the real-world season when the film was made, to judge by the bare branches on the trees and what might be remnants of snow on the ground (or could just be unevenly-worn gravel on the drive). As such, then, this too fits neatly into the Ghost Stories at Christmas tradition, making this a good time of year to have discovered it.

1c. Cross-roads (1955), dir. John Fitchen

Finally, having arrived at the BFI website to see The Mistletoe Bough, I couldn't help but notice that one of the other features offered on the same page was this 20-minute ghost film starring Christopher Lee. This is exactly the sort of early / small-scale work from his filmography which it's generally very hard to get hold of, and I certainly hadn't seen it before. So I snapped up the opportunity to watch it, urged on by the information that it was one of his first forays into Gothic territory, and features what would soon become his signature screen trick of a portentous close-up into his narrowed, piercing eyes. You too may have the pleasure here, though I'm afraid this time you will have to pay one English pound for the privilege.

It's worth it, though - at least if you are a Lee fan, anyway. Because he is the ghost at the centre of the story, and because his purpose is to wreak horrible revenge on the man whom he considers responsible for his sister's death, there really is a great deal here which he would draw on again in his role as Dracula three years later - icy charm, supreme self-assurance, a menacing physical presence, a sudden switch from congenial politeness to cold anger, and of course those piercing eyes. Those are all in his performance, and could equally well occur in a story about an ordinary human being bent on revenge - but it does help, too, that the story imbues him with both supernatural powers (able to cut off a telephone line, prevent an unlocked door from opening and be unaffected by bullets) and limitations (he has only until the same hour as his untimely death to wreak his revenge). All very satisfactory indeed.

Cinematically, we're obviously in an utterly different world with this film from the two above, so I won't try to draw strained comparisons with them. But this one stands as an interesting insight into the nature of the film industry in its own time, all the same. I'm not quite sure what it was originally produced for, as neither my best Christopher Lee book nor the internet is providing any answer to that question, but I do know it came out of a low-budget operation called Bushey Studios, and my guess is that it was a B-feature short to be shown at cinemas before a main movie. The editing is abysmal, with multiple cuts between different camera-angles that don't follow fluently from what was happening before, most of the acting (including Christopher Lee's) is pretty mannered, and some of the dialogue is cringe-inducingly banal. I don't think audiences were willing to accept editing of this quality in particular for much longer, though it's not the only similar example from around this time I have seen (and I suspect the others may have had Christopher Lee in them as well). But the lighting is nice, and there's quite a pacey car-chase scene through central London at the end, too, which is not to be sniffed at.

All in all, a very enjoyable little adventurette through early horror film history, and certainly a great start to a new filmic year which I hope will continue in much the same vein.

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New Who Christmas 2014 special: Last Christmas

The central conceit of this year's Christmas special was that Doctor Who is just as real, and just as unreal, as Santa Claus. In and of itself, I loved this. It was very meta, perfectly true, and extremely productive for bouncing the two mythic traditions off against one another. As the Doctor himself put it, "D'you know what the big problem is in telling fantasy and reality apart? They're both ridiculous." Maybe it was a slightly repetitive line to take, after having done much the same thing with Robin Hood earlier this year, but that's less of a problem for a Christmas episode than it would be a regular one, given that Christmas episodes tend to pull in a higher proportion of casual viewers who may not have seen Robot of Sherwood anyway. And there were lots of cool moments to enjoy, like the snarky Elves, Santa rearing up on Rudolph like a heroic knight, Nick Frost generally being completely brilliant, and everything about Shona.

But a week, much musing, and some re-watching of key scenes later, and I'm still both puzzled and bothered by the question of whose dream(s) we are seeing at any given stage in the episode, and where the dreams end and 'reality' begins. I realise that worrying about this at all is at odds with that central conceit, according to which it doesn't matter, since everything you're seeing is a story anyway. But the difference between Doctor Who and the mythos of Santa Claus is that Doctor Who is an ongoing, unfolding story presented by an identifiable single source (the BBC TV series), which purports to offer internal consistency of plot and character development. So while Santa Claus can merrily get away with being and doing many different and contradictory things, depending on who is telling him, Doctor Who cannot - or at least not if it wants to keep hold of viewers who care about what has and hasn't actually 'happened' to the characters they are following.

As far as I understand it, the official line on this episode is that everything we see is a dream (often within one or more other dreams), except for the final scene when the Doctor arrives at the large house in which a twenty-something Clara is now sleeping, rescues her from the last dream-crab, and they leave together in the TARDIS. This, at least, is what Moffat himself has stated. The problem is that this scene comes at the end of a whole story in which the Doctor has repeatedly insisted on applying critical thinking to determine the difference between dreaming and reality. "Trust nothing, interrogate everything", he says. But the 'waking-up' scene which Moffat insists is 'real' comes directly after the Doctor has voiced the wish to older-dream-Clara that he had returned to her sooner, so it is a wish-fulfilment scenario for him (the second chance he doesn't normally get, as he says), while the tangerine on the windowsill is a heavy hint that this is meant to have been set up for him by Santa. So everything that has gone before this scene should have trained us to spot the big red flags here, and recognise this as another dream. And yet Moffat is insisting outside the text that it is real, without having given us anything within the text to support that.

This feels lazy to me, as well as like Moffat is trying to have it both ways. Within the story he's saying that the distinction between dreams and reality doesn't matter, yet from outside the story he is still leaning in over our shoulders anyway to tell us which bits are dreams and which 'real'. If that distinction matters to him after all, couldn't he have put the effort into making it clear from within the story itself? Like a lot of Moffat stories in recent years, what this all feels like is that he had a promising idea for what could have been a really great episode, but in practice it didn't go through enough rewriting drafts, so that we have something nearly-brilliant, but which kind of flakes out at the last hurdle. And what really bothers me about all this as a viewer is not so much not knowing which scenes are dreams and which 'real' per se, but the fact that a knock-on consequence of this is that we don't really know whose dreams we are seeing at any given time either, and thus whose subconscious we are being granted an insight into. These are the various different possibilities which could apply, as far as I can figure them out:

1. As per Moffat's Diktat, "Everything except the very last scene is a dream". This means that dream-crabs really exist, since we see the Doctor removing one from Clara's face, and I think we're meant to understand that both were attacked by them (the Doctor in a mysterious cave and Clara in her equally-mysterious house), and were somehow experiencing a shared dream from their different locations. Under this scenario, then, the Doctor and Clara have both effectively told each other that they were lying about Gallifrey and Danny respectively at the end of season 8, because they did this in a dream which both were experiencing. Both have also effectively admitted to each other that they really just want to keep on travelling together. But, as I've said above, there are pretty hefty in-story reasons to view Moffat's Diktat as bollocks and read the last scene as just as much of a dream as everything else. In which case, they possibly haven't shared these emotional breakthroughs after all.

2. Even if we accept Moffat's Diktat, the roles of Shona, Albert, Fiona and Ashley remain unclear. By "the very last scene", does he literally mean the last scene with the Doctor and Clara, or does he extend that to mean each of the other characters' last scenes as well? (Well, except for Albert, who doesn't get one 'cos 'e snuffed it.) I.e. is it a shared crab-induced dream with input from all of them, which began for each character in the various different real-life locations where we see them waking up towards the end of the story? Or not? Do the other characters even exist, or are they dream-inventions of the Doctor's and / or Clara's? After he rescues her from her dream-crab, the Doctor tells older Clara that "The dream crabs must have got to me first and then found you in my memory. The others were collateral damage." But this doesn't really clear things up. Does it mean they were in his memory too? Or hers? And are they present in the dream as the Doctor and / or Clara's subconscious memories, right down to dreaming happy endings for them where they awake back into reality, or are they there as real people who are dreaming too, and really do wake up back in their own realities? When Albert, who put his hand on Shona's knee during the briefing process, is sucked into a security monitor and never seen again, is that Shona's sub-conscious wish-fulfilment? Or Clara's? Or the Doctor's? Or what?

3. Another approach is to ignore Moffat's blethering, and rewind back to the end of the last episode of season 8, where we saw the Doctor nodding off at the console of his TARDIS, before being rudely awakened by a knocking at the TARDIS door and Santa coming in declaring that he couldn't leave things with Clara like that. Everything Last Christmas has shown us should signal this, too, was a dream, and one which we never see the Doctor waking up from throughout the entirety of the Christmas special. Under this scenario, we can actually forget about the dream-crabs, and read the whole of Last Christmas as a perfectly normal non-crab-induced dream of the Doctor's, and his alone, within which he has presumably invented (or subconsciously remembered) a character, Shona, whom he imagined in turn inventing both the crabs and Santa Claus out of a combination of her favourite movies. This is actually what I think is the most plausible reading of everything we've seen on screen - but it does matter quite a lot for ongoing character development purposes whether or not it's correct, because under this theory, the Doctor and Clara haven't admitted to each other that they've lied, or that they want to keep on travelling together. In fact, they still haven't even seen or had any other kind of contact with one another since parting in the café.

I don't really know why I'm worrying or puzzling over any of this, because I am 99.9% sure that at the beginning of the next season, Moffat will carry on regardless. We'll never really know whether any of what we saw 'happened', and thus what the Doctor and Clara have or haven't said or revealed to each other, and it will all just become yet another unresolved plot string to trouble us vaguely in the background even while we're being asked to follow another. But the fact is that the weight of those loose strings is bothering me, and making me more and more jaded about each new one that follows. I wish we could find some way to cut free of them all, so that I can get on with enjoying what are otherwise still a lot of awesome stories and great characters.

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