In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Hahhh, yeah... I was up for a modern setting. It's worth remembering that Stoker's novel departed from the early Gothic tradition in using what for him was a modern setting complete with all the latest technology (wax cylinders, telegrams, Kodaks, etc). And of course my love for Dracula: AD 1972 knows no bounds ( and causes spoilers )

In the end, seen in toto, I think this is where this version of Dracula sits for me:
1. The whole Hammer opus (including The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula)
2. Stoker's original novel
3. The Northern Ballet version
4. The Mystery and Imagination version
5. This version

And you know, that's not bad going given how many versions there are. Not bad going at all.

I've been back working today, so couldn't do this earlier, but wanted to scribble down some initial thoughts on the first episode of the BBC's new Dracula while I can. This is the only time I'll be able to see it without the hindsight of the episodes which follow, after all. I'll put it all behind a cut, because I know it won't be available to viewers outside the UK for another couple of days.

( Gloriously spoilerific from start to finish )

Last October, Andrew Hickey wrote an excellent blog post to mark the 25th anniversary of the broadcast of Ghostwatch (1992), a BBC production with a rather special place in cult TV history. I have always wanted to watch it, and his post forcefully reminded me why, as well as revealing that it is now available on a DVD two-set along with The Stone Tape (1972), which I have also always wanted to watch. I therefore put them on my Christmas wish-list, and Santa (acting through the medium of my sister) kindly obliged. Arguably, neither is really a 'film' - they are both one-and-a-half hour long scripted BBC TV dramas, which I guess have been packaged together as they both involve people investigating paranormal phenomena. But now that I no longer have a back-log of some twenty actual films to write up, I can expand the limits of what belongs on this tag a little. And besides, I want to write about them anyway.


1. The Stone Tape (1972), dir. Peter Sasdy

I should have loved this. After all, it was made in the early seventies, directed by a man who regularly worked for Hammer (e.g. he directed Taste the Blood of Dracula), and concerns the supernatural with what turns out to be a significantly folk-horrorish vibe. If I'd watched it at the right time in my life, I probably would have loved it. The fact that I didn't I think stems partly from the very fact that it has been elevated to such cult-classic status over the year, and partly from the fact that I now live in a world that allows me to be alert to gender disparities - but many of the people who have raved about it either didn't, or do and don't care. This effect is very neatly captured in the 'Cultural significance' section of its Wikipedia page, where the final paragraph quotes six people in a row saying how wonderful it is... but all six of them are men.

The result was that I already knew the core story-line before I watched it - in essence, that what appear to be ghosts haunting a cellar turn out to be memories written into its stones, and extending far back before the construction of the cellar to the prehistoric stone-beds they were quarried from. Knowing this meant I didn't have the capacity to be wowed by that revelation. It was already a given for me. But I certainly did have the capacity to notice that there is only really one significant female character in the story - Jill Greeley, played by Jane Asher - and that her basic role in the story is to be sensitive to and scared by the ghosts. She is part of a team of scientists who have been sent to an old country house to conduct intensive research into potential new sound recording methods, and in fact her framing within that team is an artefact of the historical period during which men did the 'proper science' and women programmed the computers. She is literally introduced at one point as "Jill who programs our computer". But the men around her repeatedly dismiss her concerns, block her investigations and eventually drive her into a situation where she ends up dying, horribly, alone in the haunted cellar.

The script doesn't entirely celebrate this behaviour - we're clearly invited to think that at least some of the men are assholes, and we're also given enough material to see that Jill is actually very bright and generally correct in her insights, so that if the men had listened to her earlier things might have turned out a lot better. But still, the positioning of her as the 'sensitive one' alone is enough to make the story cringeworthy and alienating for a twenty-first century female viewer, and the notion of memories being recorded into stone is nothing like enough to compensate for that. I just can't see myself feeling tempted to watch it again.


[I watched another film in between these two which I will return to, but am skipping it for now for the sake of reviewing both parts of the DVD set as it is now packaged.]


3. Ghostwatch (1992), dir. Lesley Manning

Thankfully, I liked Ghostwatch a lot better. The Wikipedia page describes it as a 'reality–horror/mockumentary television film' and provides lots of useful production context, while Andrew's excellent review also explains the concept, gives some good examples of how it works, and points out the crucial importance (way beyond the entertainment value of a Halloween ghost spoof) of the fact that it set out to encourage people to critically evaluate what they see on TV.

I watched it with lady_lugosi1313, and we found ourselves fascinated by the way the premise had been worked through, as well as for the insights it gave into early '90s culture. It was noticeable that the family at the centre of the hauntings consists of a single mother and her two children, and that this appears to have been done specifically because it would be easy for the audience to believe that the occupants of such a 'broken home' might be more than usually sensitive to, or even a target for, supernatural horrors. So something a little bit like the hypersensitive Jill Greeley in The Stone Tape was still going on here - but to nothing like the same cringeworthy extent, and with much more to compensate for it. There was even a female academic being interviewed 'live' in the studio!

Though Andrew is right that the whole production is incredibly cleverly put together, it did give itself away at a very early stage when what was labelled as 'university footage' from a bedroom in the haunted house panned and zoomed towards the action as soon as something started happening. A fixed CCTV camera wouldn't do that, and a fixed CCTV camera is what you would use if you were trying to get an objective record of what was happening in the room without a) introducing human bias or b) requiring 24-hour human monitoring. So that broke our suspension of disbelief by revealing the hand of a director striving to deliver a dramatic experience. Other revealing flaws included talking to somebody 'live in New York' from the studio with absolutely no delay on the line, and the fact that all of the supposedly 'ordinary' people in it, including various children, people gathered in the street to watch the 'documentary' being filmed and callers phoning into the studio, spoke clearly, articulately and concisely rather than being shy, mumbling, or going on about trivial details for ages - as real people actually do when they find themselves on TV.

Other than that, though, there was very little to give it away as anything other than an absolutely genuine chunk of early '90s reality television, complete with all the presenters you would expect to see fronting it. I was just sorry that in practice, we were watching it a little over 25 years later, and thus couldn't fully see how it would have looked alongside the regular TV productions of the day. The lighting, camera techniques, and reporting techniques looked different from what we see on comparable news and reality programmes now, but I'm no longer quite able to say how well they matched those of 1992 - though my guess is 'very well indeed'.

As for the story, it is a fairly simple 'horrible thing happened here once and hasn't been laid to rest' ghost story, but that is absolutely right for what is purporting to be a documentary about a real haunting case. The story itself should be quite tropish and formulaic, precisely to underpin the sense of realism, while the clever stuff lies instead (as Andrew has shown) in the presentation and the way it makes you think about what you are seeing. We did think it got a bit silly at the end, as the 'ghost' escaped from the ordinary suburban house where it had first manifested and began making lights blow out and cameras roll across the floor in the studio from which Michael Parkinson had been charismatically interviewing guests throughout. I thought a much better line to follow here would have been to capitalise on the psychology of Mike Smith, stuck in the studio, seeing his wife Sarah Greene apparently in grave danger in the house. This opportunity isn't completely missed - we do see Smith getting a bit distracted from his designated task of monitoring the studio phone-lines towards the end of the show. But if the events he's seeing from the house are real, he should be absolutely flipping his lid, shouting at the studio team, demanding people at the filming location go in after his wife, and generally going utterly to pieces out of a combination of fear and impotence. That could have been a lot more psychologically compelling, and indeed convincing, than the OTT 'everything going crazy' we actually got at the end.

Still, though, a very impressive piece which I felt deserved its place in cult TV history. I only wish I'd felt the same about The Stone Tape.

OK, next up on Overdue Film Review Club we have this BBC adaptation of Dracula starring Louis Jourdan, which was originally broadcast all in one go at Christmas 1977, and which I watched last weekend with ms_siobhan. I have wanted to see it for a very long time, as it is widely acknowledged as the adaptation most faithful to the original novel, and I can now confirm that this is very definitely true. Not absolutely everything is by the book - for example, Mina and Lucy are made into sisters, while Quincey P. Morris steals Arthur Holmwood's surname, and the latter isn't otherwise represented in the story. But other than that it follows the structure, events and feel of the novel more closely than any other adaptation I have ever seen. Episodes which almost universally get discarded, like Mina and Lucy's encounter with the seaman Swales in Whitby, the scene where Dracula gets to speak out for himself and pour scorn on the vampire-hunters at his house in Piccadilly, or the shoot-out between the vampire-hunters and the gypsies at the end, are all present and correct, as Stoker would recognise them - and it was absolutely fantastic to see them.

Thanks largely to Doctor Who, I have seen enough television from the 1970s to say that by the standards of their time, the production values here are absolutely mint, too. People were still producing television quite noticeably inferior to this in the late 80s and indeed the early 90s. Some of the special effects look dated now - particularly colour-saturation and negative inversion of a type used regularly on Top of the Pops at the time (example). But even those are being used in a commendable attempt to convey the surreal, dreamlike effects of vampirism, which was actually still very effective in terms of creating the right atmosphere for the story. Other than that it has all stood up extremely well, and must have eaten up a pretty hefty chunk of the BBC budget for the year of its production. The costumes, locations, sets and props are seriously impressive, with Dracula's castle in particular looking both historically-plausible and properly unkempt and Gothic at the same time, and they had even acquired a real bat for some close-up scenes (though it unfortunately also had a rubbery, be-stringed stunt double). Whitby features prominently, as do various settings in London (including Highgate cemetery), while the internet tells me that Dracula's castle was played primarily by Alnwick Castle in Northumberland (supplemented by sets for the interiors) - and that would explain why it looked so good.

Of course, telling Stoker's story accurately, and pouring a lot of money into the effort, doesn't automatically result in a high-quality outcome. Jess Franco's Count Dracula (1970) also ticks both of those boxes, and has Christopher Lee in the title role to boot, but it is still ill-paced and tedious to watch. Thankfully, this production is a great deal better. It is long (150 minutes in total), but in general used the time very effectively to develop the characters and build up the story-line. There was a short phase in the run-up to the climactic encounter with the Count in the Carpathians where we did feel that a few scenes were being rushed through in order to get to the end on time, but perhaps even that is worth accepting for the quality of the material around it. For example, the scene in which Mina and Van Helsing cower amid the snowy Carpathians within a circle made of crumbled holy wafers while the vampire brides call and gesture all around them was really well done, and worth the rather rapid montage needed to get them into that position.

Certainly, ample space is given to character development, and the actors (almost all) make good use of the material. Louis Jourdan may not be Christopher Lee, but he does turn in a great performance as Dracula here - beautifully creepy from his very first appearance, exuding a powerful, self-confident sexuality in his interactions with his victims, and yet with a note of impatient world-weariness to his character that speaks of the many centuries he has lived through. I did miss Dracula's violent out-bursts, though, which seem to have been neither scripted nor acted into Jourdan's part. Even when he catches his vampire brides dining out on Jonathan Harker, he is merely a little firm about expressing his displeasure - and I definitely like Christopher Lee's utter explosion of rage in the equivalent scene (albeit with only one bride) in Hammer's Dracula much better. Frank Finlay as Van Helsing and Jack Shepherd as Renfield also deserve special mention for two utterly compelling performances, although on the other hand it does need saying that Quincey P. Morris' 'Texan' accent was face-palmingly bad, and his performance as a whole lacklustre alongside it. In fact, it seems to have been the first role of an unremarkable career for him, and it shows.

This was never going to dethrone Hammer's Dracula as the ultimate telling of the story for me, and if only because of when it was made it couldn't really hope to outshine Nosferatu (1922) or Bela Lugosi's iconic Dracula (1931) either. But it is definitely in their league, and far stronger than some film versions I could mention. I can certainly recommend it as a way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

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Via altariel, and with thanks to communicator for compiling the list, here follows a meme based on the BBC programmes and other services mentioned in Mitch Benn's new song, I'm Proud of the BBC. Bold = love (or have loved) it, Plain text = neutral, Strike through = never seen / listened to.

Obviously, there's some stuff on the list that I think is a bit rub, too - like Last of the Summer Wine or Songs of Praise. But that's not the point here. The point of the song, and thus also the meme, is how much stuff produced by the BBC most of us have seen or otherwise experienced (and thus have in common whether we liked it or not), and how much of it really is chuffing good, and thus worth being proud of. I'm happy to extend that pride to programmes and services which don't appeal to me personally, but which I can see are well made and well suited to their target audience.

( This list is a lot longer than I'd realised, just listening to the song )

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Bah, I wish the Beeb would stop changing the time of Doctor Who! I just missed the first ten minutes of this week's episode, because I thought it started at 7. I even (thought I had) checked, but mis-read the way the programmes were lined up on DigiGuide, so hadn't noticed that crucial 15 minutes...

Well, at least I can perform an emergency temporal shift to watch it again via On Demand, and I will. But, on the whole, I have to say that that two-parter was one of the lower points of the series so far. Good characters and setting, but the central theme just compromised what Daleks should be about too much for my taste. Not only bad for these two episodes, but I fear bad for their future appearances, too.

Still, next week looks thematically promising...

I'm not sure this is quite what the BBC intended, but last night I decided I should make the effort to watch a little of Big Brother in preparation for this weekend's Doctor Who episode.

Ye gods, but this year's housemates are a bunch of petty and characterless individuals, aren't they? Admittedly, I was watching the live feed on E4, so it wasn't edited to present the most interesting moments, but still. One lot were sitting around in some kind of conservatory, bitching about the washing up, while another lot were in the kitchen, telling each other to stop singing. Living on my own as I do, I can usually tolerate the most tedious dross for the sake of some background babble... but this got switched off within ten minutes.

I wonder if the BBC made their own set for the Doctor Who story, or paid Channel 4 for the use of theirs? Perhaps this will become obvious on Saturday. I'm betting the BBC would have preferred to hire, and I should think Channel 4 would have been happy to take both the money and the publicity, assuming that the show isn't too roundly trashed.