In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

So help me, it's a list of every single film I watched in 2023. I've put notes where I could remember anything particular about the film or the viewing circumstances, but haven't tried to do that consistently. This is more about record-keeping than reviewing now.

1. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher - deliberately chosen as our first film of the New Year so we'd be starting it out right!

2. Fright Night 2 (1988), dir. Tommy Lee Wallace

3. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968), dir. Freddie Francis

4. Hellboy II (2008), dir. Guillermo del Toro

5. The Vampire Bat (1933), dir. Frank R. Strayer

6. Vampire in Venice / Nosferatu a Venezia (1988), dir. Augusto Caminito - would be an amazing film about decay and ageing, if it didn't also have Klaus Kinski being actively peedy in it.

7. Caligula (1979), dir. Tinto Brass, Giancarlo Lui and Bob Guccione - the fullest, unexpurgated version, seen at Wharf Chambers as a Pervert Pictures screening, complete with a contextualising introduction. It's the logical extreme of the decadent Rome trope.

8. The Company of Wolves (1984), dir. Neil Jordan

9. Dracula Bloodline (2013), dir. Jon Keeyes

10. The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), dir. Michael Carreras

( There's another 94 under here )

It's another catch-up post in an attempt to clear the unwritten book review slates. Just brief notes on what I can now remember of each. Some were read on Kindle or borrowed from a friend, so aren't in the picture.


1. Lady Caroline Lamb (1816), Glenarvon (read on Kindle) - a three-volume novel which famously satirises Byron and many of his circle. I don't think you need to 'get' that to enjoy the story, but it has other flaws. In particular, it's a cautionary example of why the rule 'show, don't tell' exists, as it spends why must be at least the first ten chapters describing its main characters in great detail yet without them really interacting or doing anything, and by the end of that you've forgotten what they're all supposed to be like anyway and have largely had enough. Not helped by the amount of time the heroine then spends hanging around at the bottom of the garden agonising about running away with Lord Glenarvon, only to lose her nerve and abandon the idea.

2. Marin Sorescu (1978) A treia ţeapă / Vlad Dracula The Impaler, trans. Dennis Deletant (1987) - a play by a Romanian author about Vlad Dracula whose original Romanian title means 'The Third Stake'. It's very well researched, and indeed makes good use of the contradictions inherent in the sources, often leaving the reader / audience to decide which of two views expressed by different characters is 'true' and referring within the script to the pamphlets used to blacken Dracula's reputation. It's also quite modernist and surreal, ending for example with a fatally-wounded Vlad passing judgement on himself and going to impale himself. Would be amazing to see it performed.

3. M.R. James (1922), The Five Jars (read on Kindle) - a charming fantasy story for children, in which the narrator finds a box full of magical jars while out on a walk, and is able to see and hear more and more aspects of a sort of fairyland with each one he drinks. Memorable scenes include him being able to hear the thoughts of his cat, which are exactly the same as the sorts of thoughts we all imagine cats having today, and being shown moving images by one of the fairies / elves on a glass device very similar to a modern tablet.

4. Terry Pratchett (2004), Going Postal - a Discworld book I hadn't read before, whose plot is I'm sure well known to everyone. An enjoyable light read.

5. Forrest Reid (1947), Denis Bracknel (read on Kindle) - read after sovay spoke highly of it, and rightly so. The Denis of the title is a strange, withdrawn and probably queer teenage boy whose concerned family hire a tutor for him and who finds an ultimately solace in an ancient pagan altar in the woods. Reid does landscape, weather and seasons exceptionally well throughout.

6. Bram Stoker (1911), The Lair of The White Worm (read on Kindle) - decided to give another non-Dracula Stoker novel a try, after reading The Mystery of the Sea a couple of years earlier. This one's reputation precedes it, but I read it anyway because I knew it had some references to Roman paganism as part of the history of the snake-cult at the centre of the story. It started out OK, but it really does end up pretty incoherent and directionless. It also, just like The Mystery of the Sea, contains some absolute Grade A racism around a black character called Oolanga, who is and quite clearly made black to help code him as evil and bestial. This time it was even worse than in The Mystery of the Sea, because he featured more frequently in the narrative, and the two experiences between them have really made me wary of reading anything else by Bram Stoker other than Dracula again.

7. S.T. Gibson (2021), Dowry of Blood - a fantastic little novel which I came across via recommendations on Twitter, and has since become a major hit for its author. It's about a series of lovers drawn into the polyamorous harem of an ancient and dominant vampire who is certainly a Romanian noble and may or may not be Dracula, told from the perspective of the first one. She and her fellows (one female, one male) are swept away by the intensity of his passion at first, but of course over the centuries his domineering control over them reveals itself as abusive, and the three of them have to work together to find a way of freeing themselves from his power. Dark, sexy and compelling, basically everything you want from a vampire novel.

8. J.S. Barnes (2020), Dracula's Child - this, meanwhile, was the Dracula spin-off novel getting all the big attention while Dowry of Blood remained barely known, and it was pretty disappointing by contrast. It's basically about Jonathan and Mina's son Quincey, who turns out to have something evil in him thanks to Dracula's blood passed on via his mother, and is defeated at the end by the Power of Love. There's a lot more along the way, but I found it drawn-out and forgettable compared to Dowry of Blood. It tries to engage closely with its source material BY using an epistolary format, including many of the same characters and referring back to the events of Dracula. But it doesn't always get it right, for example saying that Van Helsing's wife and children had died, rather than the wife being confined to an asylum.

9. Robert Lloyd Parry (2020), Ghosts of the Chit Chat - a collection of short stories and other pieces by members of Cambridge's Chit Chat Club, of which the most famous was M.R. James. Lloyd Parry has done a brilliant job of just finding out who they all were and how the club functioned via archival work, let alone identifying writing of various kinds produced by them. Obviously in some cases the scrapings were thin, but I was mainly just impressed by how much he had found, and found out, and pleased to be able to understand this major crucible for James' creative writing better.

10. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and Xavier Aldana Reyes, eds. (2020), Visions of the Vampire: Two Centuries of Immortal Tales (borrowed from S) - a collection of short vampire stories, many of which I had read before (and therefore skipped). Some great stuff, though. I particularly welcomed the opportunity to read 'The Room in the Tower' properly, enjoyed the absolutely classic Anne Riceyness of 'The Master of Rampling Gate', and loved 'Let the Old Dreams Die', a coda to the novel Let The Right One In which reveals through the story of a ticket collector and a detective involved in the events of the original story that Eli and Oskar are in Spain, and that he too is now a vampire.

Hey there, LJ / DW. I did All The Things for a few weeks there, and I am really not sure how I will ever get you caught up on it all. But let's have a go at writing about just one Thing - going to see Spartacus on a frankly ENORMOUS screen at the National Media Museum's Widescreen Weekend with HickeyWriter.

It looked SO GOOD. It was the 2015 restoration, which not only included all the deleted footage put back in 1991 (oysters, snails and all), but had clearly been carefully visually cleaned up as well. It was incredibly crisp, bursting with colour and detail, and sometimes almost looked like it was in 3D when there was something prominent in the foreground and the camera was moving round to track something in the middle distance. It really showed off the epic scale of the closing battle scenes as well. I had a go at counting the numbers of Roman soldiers by row and by column as they performed their opening manoeuvres before Spartacus' forces, and realised to my astonishment that I was looking at easily 20,000 people on that side alone. The spectacle of them all filing into lines and presenting shields in perfect synchronicity was genuinely awe-inspiring, and really helped me to understand the psychological impact such displays must have had on opposing forces in antiquity. On the other hand, the big-screen experience perhaps revealed more than a small one might that the editing and continuity left some room for improvement. People having conversations with each other were often visibly in completely different positions when the camera cut between shots seen from the front and behind, while the final few scenes revealed the remarkable colour-changing properties of Varinia's baby's hair.

I am not going to say much about the plot or its political resonances, all of which is well-documented, but it did really strike me how we are carefully shown enslaved women and children in the gladiatorial school, not to mention a very diverse range in Spartacus' roaming troupe, including elderly people and a dwarf. We're left in no doubt of the wide-ranging impact of slavery, or the inclusiveness of Spartacus' revolution, and this shows up in its logistics as well as its demographics. It's made very clear that weaving is as important to the revolutionary cause as fighting, with a role even for Antoninus the musicus. He seems to personify the (slightly apocryphal) quotation from Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

The art (wall-painting, statues, etc) and architecture are often a little anachronistic, but that's par for the course in screen depictions of antiquity. In fact, I found the inclusion of statuary from right up to the late antique period in the opening credits actually worked in a positive sense, in that it could be taken as signalling that the moral issues at the heart of the story remained in place throughout the Roman period - though that reading was then undermined by an opening narration suggesting that the coming of Christianity had helped to overthrow the tyranny of slavery, which it very much did not! In any case, the sets all looked broadly Roman at least, and some aspects of them were carefully researched and thoughtfully conceived. I had to suppress a squee at the sight of an hourglass-shaped millstone in the kitchen at Batiatus' gladiatorial school. Oh, and talking of Batiatus, Peter Ustinov really is just truly amazing in a film chock-full of great actors playing great characters. I understand he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in it, and it could not have been more deserved.

Although I've seen the film before, I've learnt a lot more about both late Republican politics and modern politics since then, so that political exchanges which had rather passed me by on previous watches struck closer to home this time. In some ways, this was irritating, because it opened up new dimensions of anachronism for me. For example, in the period when the action supposedly takes place, there was no such thing as a First General of the Republic (which is what Crassus is introduced as), a garrison of Rome (six cohorts of which Glabrus takes against Spartacus) or a governor of Aquitania (to whom Gracchus sends Batiatus and Varinia at the end of the film), which had not been conquered yet. Nor was there any prominent politician called Sempronius Gracchus. Rather, Laughton's character seems to be a sort of splice between Crassus' main opponent Pompey (whom he can't literally be because Pompey was away in Spain for most of the crisis) and Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, the late-second-century BC populists. On the other hand, I was able to be forgiving about all this because I could also see how the politics of the Roman Republic was being used as an analogy for American politics, with Crassus as a Republican leader and Gracchus as his main opponent - perhaps an idealised Kennedy?

Although we didn't know this before we arrived, it happened that this film was the first screening of the Widescreem Weekend's 25th anniversary edition, so we got free drinks beforehand, free ice-creams in the intermission, and free cup-cakes to take home afterwards. Given how good the film itself was, I didn't need those perks to make for an excellent evening, but they certainly didn't hurt.

This is a collection of short stories whose author is known in this parish as sovay. I hope she won't mind if I proceed to just call her S for the rest of this review, a) to save myself having to keep typing out the code for sovay, and b) to signal that I'm writing about her in a different way here anyway, which bridges both sovay, the DW friend, and Sonya Taaffe, the author.

We've been DW friends for a few years now (probably about four-ish?), and I have been following S's writing career all that time. It is obviously a big passion and a serious commitment for her - she regularly posts to say that she has had an individual short story or poem published, attends readings and cons to present / talk about her work (in pre-COVID times anyway), and of course reported the publication of this book a couple of years ago. I've been a little slow to get round to acquiring and reading it, but not because I had any doubt that it would be good. I'd already read a couple of the individual stories in it anyway which S had shared, and been extremely impressed. I'm just slow, is all.

I've never met S in real life, as she lives in Boston, but she tells her DW readers a lot about herself, and has clearly put a lot of the same self into her stories too. So I had very much the same experience reading this book as I did when reading my friend Andrew Hickey's novel Head of State (LJ / DW) of recognising the person I know through DW in the stories. S's passion for the sea, knowledge of Classical myth and literature, Jewish heritage, and queer identity are all here, combined with a fine-detail observation of urban landscapes and a sense of colour and the best words for conveying it vividly which really struck me in the first of her stories that I read.

I'm not going to write about every single story, because there are twenty-two in the book altogether, but ( here are some notes on my favourites ones and what I liked about them )

In short, a very impressive and enjoyable collection which I highly recommend. S has a real gift for taking established literature, myth and history, combining it with close observation and transforming it into something completely new and unexpected. Here's to her further success as a writer.

This novel was written by two sisters, of whom the elder, Emily Gerard, was a Polish cavalry officer's wife and spent time living in the Transylvanian Romanian towns of Sibiu and Brașov where he was stationed. It's well known in Dracula circles that she used that time to research an article and book on Transylvania which were used in turn by Bram Stoker in the course of his research for Dracula:

• 1885: 'Transylvanian Superstitions' in The Nineteenth Century 8: p. 128-144.
• 1888: The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania, New York: Harper.

But her experiences also clearly informed this novel, which itself also relates closely to Dracula. The connection is flagged up explicitly in the one and only newspaper interview which Bram ever gave about his best-selling novel, conducted by one Jane Stoddard, which begins like this:

One of the most interesting and exciting of recent novels is Mr. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” It deals with the ancient mediaeval vampire legend, and in no English work of fiction has this legend been so brilliantly treated. The scene is laid partly in Transylvania and partly in England. The first fifty-four pages, which give the journal of Jonathan Harker after leaving Vienna until he makes up his mind to escape from Castle Dracula, are in their weird power altogether unrivalled in recent fiction. The only book which to my knowledge at all compares with them is “The Waters of Hercules,” by E.D. Gerard, which also treats of a wild and little known portion of Eastern Europe. Without revealing the plot of the story, I may say that Jonathan Harker, whose diary first introduces the vampire Count, is a young solicitor sent by his employer to Castle Dracula to arrange for the purchase of a house and estate in England.

It's important to notice here that Stoddard isn't saying that Bram's novel wholly resembles the Gerards' - only that theirs is the only other novel she can think of which, like the first 54 pages of his, is set in Eastern Europe. But, recognising the surname from the publications on Transylvania, that was enough to make me look out the novel, and see just what Stoddard meant about its resemblance to the opening chapters of Dracula. None of the libraries I have easy access to had a print copy, and it seems long ago to have gone out of print so that there wasn't a cheap second-hand paperback or Kindle copy available either, but it is on the Internet Archive, and after a bit of experimentation I discovered that downloading the pdf version to my tablet resulted in a readable text which I could take to bed with me. So away I went.

It's a Victorian novel written by women for women, so it isn't a great surprise that the main subject-matter of the book is the question of who our main character, Gretchen, will marry. There are multiple contenders in the field - the sensible, middle-aged, middle-income lawyer Dr. Komers, the wealthy, aristocratic and childishly selfish Baron Tolnay, and (very much lagging behind the field and utterly repulsive to Gretchen) the obsessive Dr. Kokovics. A lot of time is spent establishing their (and multiple other) characters, at first in Gretchen's German home-town and then in the valley of the Waters of Hercules, to which the action shifts from the 7th of the novel's 53 chapters. Gretchen herself is bright, perceptive, and (as we are repeatedly told) sensible, but she begins the novel rather obsessed with the idea of marrying into wealth. Needless to say, she will learn over the course of it that there are other things more important, and that the lawyer has hidden depths which weren't initially apparent on his sensible-to-the-point-of-dullness surface. The style was pleasantly easy to read. The Gerards like to play with our expectations, setting up a scene from one point of view and then switching to another which reveals something different. They are good at establishing settings and moods, and occasionally quite happy to devote a whole chapter to what might seem like a mere comic distraction (such as the various fishing methods espoused by different visitors to the Hercules Valley), but which of course reveals a great deal about character in the process.

The titular and main setting for the story is a very real valley and spa town in what is now part of western Romania, but belonged to Hungary at the time when the novel is set. It contains healing baths and a statue of Hercules, who is supposed to have stopped in the valley to bathe and rest. But much of the action and drama of the novel is in fact driven by another (as far as I can tell) fictional location in the mountains somewhere above the valley: Gaura Dracului, a yawning and apparently bottomless chasm with many a legend attached to it, which wanderers through the forest come upon almost before they have realised it is there, and sometimes stumble and fall into as a result. Obviously, the name of this geological feature is yet another of the likely pointers which nudged Bram Stoker towards settling on the name 'Dracula' for his aristocratic vampire, and indeed it may also lie somewhere behind references to 'deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither' of which Van Helsing speaks in Dracula's Transylvania. In this novel, the name of the chasm has nothing to do with the Dracula family, and simply means ‘The Devil’s Hole’ - actually a very common name for deep caves and pools all over the world (see here for just a few largely English-language versions). But that is quite enough to underpin a number of Gothic horror tropes which run throughout the novel alongside its main romance story.

As the action shifts into the Hercules Valley, the Gerards work hard to establish the right kind of atmosphere of lingering paganism and local superstition for the legends of Gaura Dracului to work on their characters and within their plot - just, of course, as Stoker does on Jonathan Harker's journey into Transylvania. Indeed, Gretchen and her family's journey to the valley adheres to the same basic Gothic model of the journey into a strange and dangerous land as Harker's. Once they get to the valley, we hear a lot about how paganism has survived there, overseen by the statue of Hercules whom the locals treat as though he were still a literal god, and we are treated to some ripe stereotypes of the superstitious Romanian peasant that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has read Dracula. Indeed, when Gretchen asks some local goatherds where she can find Gaura Dracului, they react with terror and cross themselves. Gradually, we learn that the god of the valley has sworn that the hole must have human blood once a century, which to me rang bells of Polidori's The Vampyre, in which Lord Ruthven must have it once a year. Indeed, a prologue set in the time of Trajan establishes that this has been happening since the Roman period. That was particularly interesting to me in light of the paper I gave on Dracula and Classical antiquity at the Brașov conference, because it means the Gerards were here doing one of the very same things I had argued Stoker was doing in Dracula - rooting his menace in the ancient, pagan past as a way of emphasising how long and deeply-established it is, and of capitalising on the blurry line between pagan gods and demons in the western Christian tradition. Meanwhile, we also hear that Gaura Dracului contains secret hidden hoards of Turkish, Russian and many other coins, just like the dusty corners of Dracula's castle, and all sorts of Gothic vocabulary is used to describe it. It is an open grave, haunted and full of ghosts; it has fanged jaws like a monster; Gretchen feels when lost in the forest around it as though the bats and moths flitting about her are phantoms; and a climactic fire-storm which rages through that same forest in the final chapters of the book contains descriptions of trees writhing in agony and an army of fire-demons rampaging through them.

So, yes, it definitely has more than a touch of the Gothic to it, and does resemble Dracula in more than the purely geographical matter of being set in Eastern Europe. I don't think we have any proof that Stoker read it, while since we do have proof that he read the article and book on Transylvania by Emily Gerard which I've mentioned above, it's quite possible that a lot of what appear to be connections between this novel and Dracula were actually ideas he took from those. But, having read it, I could definitely believe that he had done so too. I think one of my little projects for the next year might be to read up a bit more on the Gerards, including reading Emily's work on Transylvania and learning a bit more about their biography, so that I can understand their influence on Dracula more fully. It might well make a decent paper for another Dracula conference at some stage.

Meanwhile, there were other themes in the novel I found interesting in their own right, regardless of any connection to Dracula. One, inevitably, was its assumptions about and attitudes to gender. It's no surprise that Gretchen's main concern is marriage, or that this is couched primarily in terms of how she can best marry her way to a comfortable lifestyle, but I found it interesting that one of the plans she hatches over the course of the novel is to find the treasures supposedly hidden in Gaura Dracului, on the grounds that if she finds her own fortune she can marry whoever she likes. This is hardly a feminist parable, of course, since she still clearly doesn't have the option to lead a genuinely self-sufficient working life, but the very idea is still one of the ways in which Gretchen is cast as a radical, modern thinker, and she feels she needs to hide it like a guilty secret from her more traditionally-feminine Italian friend, Belita. I was also struck by two separate scenes in which Gretchen is cornered very horribly by entitled suitors, and which read very much like the sort of horror stories women have to relate all too often on Facebook and Twitter about their experiences with creepy men today. In one, she is trapped in a gorge with a sheer drop at the end of it by Dr. Kokovics as dusk is falling, and her terror as he approaches, coupled with his dismissal of her terror, together made it very clear (without ever spelling it out) that her basic fear was of being sexually assaulted. In the other, Baron Tolnay gets her alone in dark forest, demands her love on the basis that he has proved his to her by committing a terrible crime, and tells her that him doing so was all her fault for leading him on - which she internalises and believes. Between the two they very much demonstrated how much the novel acted in the Victorian period as a forum for women to share such experiences under the cloak of fiction.

Also striking was the carefully-ranked hierarchy of national stereotypes into which all of the characters are slotted, and which belong very much to the fundamentally racist thinking of the day. Strong east-west and north-south fault-lines are in evidence, so that the Romanians are swarthy, Oriental, lazy, stupid, natural liars and superstitious, the Hungarians are more competent but ultimately not to be trusted, and the Germans (our point-of-view characters) are blond, noble, intelligent and morally sound. Gretchen's Italian friend is warm and effusive but thinks of little other than fashion and status; the novel's one English character, Mr. Howard, is reserved and hidebound by social etiquette, but does warm up and come round to Gretchen and her family over the course of the story; and a reference to hook-nosed Jews pops up in the context of a discussion about debts. All of this, too, can be found in Stoker's Dracula, of course, though there's no need to believe he got it from here. It is the widely-accepted thinking of the day, occurring unsurprisingly in both novels. That's Victorian literature for you. If you can read round it, though, and like the sound of pagan superstitions, yawning chasms and a German girl's marriage prospects, I would on the whole very much recommend this one.

This book is obviously exceptionally relevant to my interests! The main body works its way through each of the sixteen vampire films made by Hammer from the 1950s to '70s, covering the production process for each one followed by commentary on the story itself, its themes and its cultural resonances. It also sets the Hammer films themselves into the wider context of the evolving vampire genre through opening and closing chapters on screen vampires before and after their heyday, as well as references to related contemporary productions in the main chapters.

The source material is a combination of other published work (contemporary reviews and publicity, more recent books on Hammer, its stars and its productions) and interviews conducted directly by Hallenbeck himself over the years - often for his articles in the occasional horror magazine Little Shoppe of Horrors. Because I spend most of my time reading academic books, I struggled a bit initially with the fact that the publications Hallenbeck had used weren't properly referenced (e.g. via footnotes), but their authors and titles are provided in the text and / or in a bibliography at the back of the book, so I eventually realised that they were all traceable - it's just that actually doing so would require a bit more digging than it might have done. In fact, this book is as well-researched as could reasonably be expected given that it isn't aspiring to academic levels of rigour and support.

I didn't feel I'd got a great deal out of either the opening or the closing chapters, basically because of what they were taking on - giving a bird's-eye overview of a large number of films in a short number of pages. It was never going to be possible to say anything very original about them in that context, so most of it I already knew or could have read on the relevant Wikipedia pages if I didn't. But the main chapters have a lot of interest and detail to offer, even for someone like me coming to them with a very good knowledge of these films already, while Hallenbeck's commentaries on the stories are good at drawing out the themes and dynamics at work within them.

Some points I found particularly interesting follow below:

In re the references to vampirism as a survival of an ancient pagan cult in Brides of Dracula, Hallenbeck says that producer Anthony Hinds 'professed himself to be enamoured' with pagan religion (p. 64). This rings true from the content of several of the films he was involved in, which certainly reflect a prurient thrill around paganism, but it's one of the statements in the book which isn't properly referenced - it might come from an interview in Little Shoppe of Horrors #10/11 which is listed in the bibliography, but that isn't fully clear, and Google isn't bringing up anything much to support it. That's annoying, because I'd like to know more about it.

Hallenbeck cites interviews with both Andree Melly (Gina in Brides, p. 63) and Barbara Shelley (Helen in Prince of Darkness, p. 94) saying that they were explicitly encouraged by Terence Fisher to play up the lesbian connotations of their lines after they have been transformed into vampires (respectively, "Put you arms around me, please - I want to kiss you Marianne" and "You don't need... Charles"). As he points out, Hammer later moved on to entirely explicit lesbian vampirism with The Vampire Lovers (1970), but it's interesting to know that it was consciously and deliberately being slipped past the censors in subtextual form as early as Brides (1960).

Shelley further states (same page) that to prepare for her role as a vampire, and particularly to lend herself the required air of 'evil and decadence', she drew on the days when she 'used to study the old Greek dramas and studied the use of that sort of feeling of the Furies'. Very interesting indeed to see her instinctively turning to classical archetypes there, in a markedly similar way to Bram Stoker, John Polidori and more.

Hallenbeck isn't a big fan of Dracula AD 1972 himself, but he gives it a fair write-up, and I was fascinated to note that this included multiple references to good reviews which came out on its original release. This isn't to say there were also some pretty luke-warm ones, but Variety liked its slick script and fast pace, and Films and Filming thought it had a fresh cast playing against a background of quality (both p. 163). That's interesting, because less fair-minded contemporary commentators tend to foster the impression that it was widely received as an ill-conceived mis-step even on first release (as opposed to dating quickly, which is a different matter), but that obviously isn't entirely true. It was also clear by this point in Hallenbeck's book how much Hammer's real problems in this period stemmed from struggling to get proper promotion and distribution for their films - i.e. if audiences were slipping away, it's partly because they simply didn't know about or couldn't access new releases, rather than necessarily because they hated them (though I realise that if audiences had remained really keen, the distributors would have been sure to cater to them).

He's not a great fan of Vampire Circus (1972) either, the difference there being that this time I agree with him (LJ / DW)! Indeed, he introduces it thus: 'The vampire as child-molester. If that sounds like a distasteful idea, it was only one of the many in Hammer's Vampire Circus...' That's without even mentioning the supposed monster attacking people in the woods which is actually quite clearly a sock-puppet. Hallenbeck's behind-the-scenes details do cast quite a bit of light on why I didn't much enjoy it, though - e.g. I noted in my review that this was director Robert Young's first film, and he was clearly a bit out of his depth, and Hallenbeck fleshes this out by explaining the time-pressures and poor communication from the producer and head office which exacerbated the problem.

Beyond those points, I obviously generally enjoyed revisiting and expanding my knowledge of the Dracula films, and also came away feeling I must (in most cases re-)watch their other non-Dracula films (apart from Vampire Circus and Captain Kronos, both of which I've seen already within the last few years). As luck would have it, the one I want to see most, Kiss of the Vampire, was on the Horror Channel yesterday, so I now have that safely recorded and ready to enjoy in the full light of Hallenbeck's commentary. It's definitely one I'll keep taking down from the shelf as I revisit these films over the years.

Starburst magazine ran a film festival in late August 2016, which I went to with friends and wrote up on my 'starburstff' tag (LJ / DW). It was badly advertised and organised, but actually the films, the guests and the friends I went with were all great, so we had a brilliant time - something I particularly needed back then, as it was still less than two months after my Mum had died. They attempted to put another one on about a year later, but I guess got even lower take-up than the previous year, so that it ended up being cancelled. This time, though, they hit upon the cunning ruse of giving away the tickets for free, which of course meant people snapped them up and it went ahead this time. (Clearly their business model does not really depend on box-office takings.) Andrew, Extinction65mya, lady_lugosi1313, planet_andy and I went along and enjoyed a mixture of brand new and vintage films and the delights of the local food outlets, while periodically boggling out of the windows at the snow swirling upwards between the towers which make up most of Manchester's Media City area, and wondering nervously how we were going to get home. Thankfully, all trams and trains were running smoothly today in spite of the weather, which is more than I can say for Friday when I travelled over. So I'm now safe and warm on the sofa, and able to write up what I saw:


6. The Gatehouse (2016), dir. Martin Gooch

This is basically the story of a ten-year-old girl called Eternity who likes digging in the woods. Eternity is the kind of girl who, when she digs up what looks like an eighteenth-century lady's pistol buried in a tin box, steals a book on guns from the library by stuffing it under her coat (but does give the girl on the desk a cheese sandwich on the way out), finds out what she needs to restore it to working order, talks her Dad into taking her to the hardware store and tells the man working there that it's none of his business when he queries what on earth she wants all this stuff for anyway. And not only is she the central character, but the motifs and logic of the story are those of an imaginative, strong-minded ten-year-old girl too, involving magical stones, a horned god roving the woods turning people into trees, a secret chamber under her house, people who appear to have been shot dead turning out to be fine after all (possibly the blood that looked like jam really was jam?), and her playing a central role in helping the horned god to sort everything out. In fact, it’s a lot like the sort of story my six-year-old niece Eloise tells me when we play with her story-cubes. And while a film matching that description could be dreadful, this one really wasn’t, because all of the characters were so believably written and played (very much including Scarlett Rayner as Eternity, in what I see was her first film role), the horned god was shot just on the right side of obliquely enough to keep him mysterious and stop him looking too much like a guy in a suit, and actually the whole thing was very impressively framed and edited and shot, making very good use of some nice British countryside.

The trailer is a bit misleading, because both Eternity and her Dad are troubled by post-traumatic bad dreams following the death of her mother (in a highly-implausible boating accident which also comes across like the kind of story dreamt up by a ten-year-old), and a lot of the soft shocks which the trailer chooses to foreground are actually those dreams rather than the ‘real’ (insofar as it tries to be anything of the sort) main story. Meanwhile, it entirely misses delights like local teenagers Poppy and Daisy’s drunken walk home from the pub, Poppy's folk-Gothic Lithuanian-accented tarot-reading friend, or Eternity’s Dad teaching her to call up (imaginary) Roman legionaries to help see off the school bullies. Actually the Romans were bumping about quite a lot in this story, not only as Eternity’s personal bodyguard but also as the people who supposedly first built a structure on the site of the gatehouse which she and her Dad now live in. For a moment at the end, Eternity called up her imaginary legionaries to protect her against the horned god, and it looked like we might actually get a stand-off between the might of ancient Rome and the spirits of the British woodlands, which I would have been very interested in. It was not to be, but a great film nevertheless, and in my view the best of the new productions I saw during the festival.


7. Black Site (2018), dir. Tom Paton

The festival schedule had a different film by the same director lined up in this slot, but as the editing on this one had just been completed this week, he decided to treat us to a test screening of the new piece instead. I was a little bit sad about this, as the scheduled film (Redwood) was about vampires in the woods, but then again this one was very solid and it's always exciting to see something absolutely brand new which hasn't reached the general public yet - so I didn't mind too much in the end.

Black Site draws on Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, but the format of the film is 'trapped in an enclosed space with something bad', as per (for example) The Thing or (as Extinction65mya pointed out) Die Hard. The enclosed space in question is the Artemis complex, an underground military facility used to deport Elder Gods who have returned in weakened form to our universe (I think - I'm not sure I fully followed that bit). Once they have been tracked down by field agents and ‘bound’ into human bodies, they are brought to the Artemis complex for deportation back to hell - a complex process which requires a deportation agent to recite a text which he has memorised. Most of the time, though, it’s a quiet place run on a skeleton staff, which only comes into action when a deportation candidate is brought in. As as result, it's not as secure or well-maintained as it should be, so between that and the complexity of the deportation process, there is plenty of scope for things to go wrong.

Our main character is Ren Reid, who saw her parents killed by the Elder God Erebus as a child, and is now working at the Artemis complex, desperately trying to qualify as a field agent and get out of there, but constantly failing her psych test because of ongoing trauma from her childhood experience. Then one day Erebus himself is brought in for deportation, along with the deportation agent (a rather clueless public-school type) and closely pursued by a group of cultists who want Erebus back so that they can carry on drinking the blood of the succession of human vessels they had been trapping him in before the field agents bust in and took him from them. Chaos ensures, and most of the film then consists of Ren fighting her way through the cultists while protecting the clueless deportation agent, so that she can get him to Erebus at the centre of the complex and complete the deportation.

It was a well-paced, well-crafted story making excellent use of a well-chosen location. I particularly enjoyed the confrontation with Erebus at the end, which proved not to be fighty at all (as he was held safely captive behind an Electronic Light Field - ELF, geddit?), but instead focused on dialogue in which he told the humans just how insignificant they appeared from his out-of-time perspective, and eventually revealed that he had set the whole thing up from the beginning because he wanted to be deported anyway in order to be reunited with his love, Nyx, deported 20 years earlier. (So it was only the cultists getting in the way of the Artemis complex's normal procedures after all.) I am a real sucker for supernatural beings whose power is such that they are simultaneously dangerous to humans and yet also possessed of insight and perspective we can only dream of (it's a lot of what I also like about vampires), so this ticked my boxes in a big way - and all the more so for tagging it onto real-world ancient Greek mythology.

It was also good on female representation. Besides Ren, it also features two other well-defined female characters who are far from constrained by gender roles - her savvy, hard-headed boss and the samurai-trained leader of the cultists. A conversation between Ren and the boss about her career prospects secures a Bechel pass, while we all enjoyed a trope-aware scene at the end in which the deportation agent tried to suggest to Ren that as the 'hero' of the hour, he should get the girl, and she snorted and told him it was never going to happen. It didn't do so well on race, though. It gave Ren a black friend / mentor, but of the four main good human characters (along with Ren, her boss and the deportation agent), he was the only one not to survive the film, and the way this played out was definitely tropey - heroically trying to protect others and then entirely focused on motivating Ren to carry on as he dies. We were also under-whelmed by the American accents which the actually mainly British cast had been asked to adopt. On the whole, though, jolly good and a worthy follow-up to The Gatehouse.


8. The House of Screaming Death (2017), dir. Alex Bourne, Troy Dennison, Rebecca Harris-Smith, David Hastings and Kaushy Patel

This, by contrast, was just terrible! It was meant to be an homage to the great British horror films of the 1950s-'70s, and had adopted in particular the Amicus speciality of the portmanteau format. The framing narrative consisted of Ian McNeice, sitting down to tell an audience whom at first we couldn't see some stories from the bloody history of 'Bray Manor'. You'd think you couldn't go too far wrong with something that had Ian McNeice in it, and the trailer had conveyed a generally promising impression. It's also worth saying that the films of Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and the like were all low-budget and contain much which is rough around the edges. What they do offer, though, is decent acting, characters, stories, period settings, direction and dialogue - which this did not.

Would you, for example, enter the pub in a village where you are staying, and, on the back of having been (rather improbably) told earlier by the local priest that several local people had disappeared about a year ago, announce at the top of your voice to the entire assembled company, without any preludes or introductions, that you wished to express your sympathies for their recent losses? No? Well, a character in this film did. He also turned up in the village without a hat, stood at the bar in shirt-sleeves with no cuff-links, said 'OK' and ran past visibly-modern radiators, even though it was all supposed to be set in 1888. Meanwhile, another story featured a character explaining how she had once murdered someone using a stake from a fence in the process of construction while we saw a flash-back of the action, except that in the flash-back she was very clearly wielding a garden fork, not a fence-stake. Plus all of them relied heavily on scenes of people standing still and delivering exposition to one another, while we had got a good twenty minutes into the film before a single woman spoke.

At the very end the framing story offered the chance to excuse the utterly inept period detailing at least, since it turned out that all of the main characters from the stories were gathered together in one time and place as the audience listening to Ian McNeice's narration, after which he proceeded to murder them all. So maybe they had never 'really' inhabited the various time-periods when their stories were supposed to be set at all, and were actually just the modern victims of a modern serial-killer. But that is to cut the film a lot of generosity for something which it gave no convincing sign of having thought through in advance, and I personally didn't have any such generosity left to give after everything we'd sat through for the previous two hours. Not actually the worst film I've ever seen, but very, very disappointing.


9. Tremors (1990), dir. Ron Underwood

Our final two films were oldies, so I won't bother with plot précis. I've only seen Tremors the once before, on TV when baby-sitting around the age of 15 or so. I wasn't expecting much from it, but I remember getting sucked into its silly fun at the time, and can very much see why now. For what is essentially a wild west film (but with worms instead of armed bandits), it's not bad for diversity either. Finn Carter as the geologist, Rhonda, has a purpose and agency of her own, isn’t overtly sexualised, contributes plenty of good ideas throughout and indeed is seen by the two main male cowboy characters as an authoritative source of information. Sure, Kevin Bacon's character does ‘win’ her at the end (in exactly the trope parodied in Black Site), but there's a knowingness about it even here in the way he doesn't do it in self-assured alpha-male fashion, but is clearly pretty nervous and has to be chivvied along by his friend. In the racial diversity stakes, we have a Chinese store owner who dies, but a Mexican character survives, and like everyone else in the cast gets to make his own contribution to the rescue effort by having the idea to set a tractor running to distract the worms, and the bravery and physical skills to do it. All in all, it's one of those films which actually just ends up reminding you how little progress we've generally made on diversity in film almost thirty years later (for all that the past few years have served up some stand-out exceptions). Probably my favourite moment of this viewing was sitting next to Extinction65mya, who is a palaeontologist, when Rhonda observed that there are no fossils of anything like the worms threatening the town, and that therefore they must 'pre-date the fossil record'. She head-desked. I also kept thinking Kevin Bacon would end up riding one of the worms, but I guess I was getting that mixed up with Dune. His cliff-face grand finale defeat was great anyway.


10. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), dir. Ed Wood

Another very special genre classic, which I last saw a little more recently that Tremors, but only by about three or four years. As Extinction65mya observed, you've had one hell of a film-watching day when (thanks to The House of Screaming Death), this is definitively not the worst film you've seen. But of course the reason everyone loves it is the surreal charm of its particular form of ineptness, underpinned by a sort of cheerful exuberance which somehow carries you along for the ride. We howled with laughter throughout, in a fond and appreciative way. My only real disappointment is how little Vampira really gets to do in it, and I'm now keen to watch some of the other films which Maila Nurmi played in her Vampira persona, so that I can enjoy more of her obvious excellence.


With that, we called it a day, and lady_lugosi1313, planet_andy headed off for a terrifying white-out drive along the M62, while Andrew, Extinction65mya and I merely walked across the square for dinner at Prezzo. Here's hoping we're all back in Manchester before long for more from the Starburst crew - but ideally without the snow!

I reckon if I just crack on with it and don't allow myself to get too carried away with any individual one, I can get my 2017 book reviews finished today. Let's see how that goes...


6. Nick Clegg (2016), Politics: Between the Extremes

I am Quite Ashamed that Nick Clegg has written and published a whole other book during the time it's taken me to get round to reviewing this one. I read it largely in the bath or by the pool-side in Cyprus, and for a book on politics it worked remarkably well in those settings. Clegg's written prose is impressively clear and fluent, while his content is very perceptive and intelligent on the current state of UK politics, articulating the significance of what's happened in recent years very clearly and often appearing extremely prescient on some of the things which have happened since it was published. It's exceptionally frustrating that he has undermined so much of what he might have had to offer in this book and in politics generally as a result of how he approached coalition government. No matter how thoughtful, valuable or well-meaning much of what he has to say is, he has now so completely trashed his capacity to reach a majority of people in this country that there is a significant extent to which he may as well not bother. But I do admire the thickness of skin which allows him to continue nonetheless, and in fairness he certainly isn't hoarding the lessons of his rather unique path through British politics to himself. He quite openly acknowledges that the coalition wasn’t exactly a roaring success for the Liberal Democrats, and sets out at least some of the reasons for that with considerable humility and perspicacity. Who can say whether he could have handled it better given the chance again, but I think his comments on the negotiation process and the day-to-day business of working with the Tories will be exceptionally useful to any smaller party attempting to form and work within a coalition with a larger party in the future. Indeed, I wondered wryly last June whether the DUP leadership had read it, given how efficiently they appear to have wrung everything they could out of the Tories in return for a mere confidence and supply deal. Few will agree with every political position he expresses - there were certainly a couple of passages which made me want to give him a shake and point out his blind-spots (though unfortunately I can't remember what on now, as I didn't take notes at the time). But it’s hard not to come away with the overall impression of an intelligent and compassionate man who is much more genuinely committed to improving the life-chances of everyone in the UK and beyond than he is often given credit for.


7. Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally (1989), Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times

Read on my Kindle in Australia. Florescu and McNally are famous in Dracula circles above all for their 1972 book In Search of Dracula, in which they argued that Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula by a deep and profound knowledge of the historical Vlad III Dracula (rather than setting out to write a vampire story and dressing his creation in an impressionistic mish-mash of elements which certainly include Vlad's name and a few pickings from his life-history but don't privilege them). This isn't that book, but it's important context for how I approached this one, and relates directly to the next book I read as well. Basically, although I haven't read the 1972 book, it's famous now above all for over-interpreting Bram's prose to assume things without sound justification - e.g. assuming that wooden stakes are a key weapon against vampires because Bram knew Vlad had used them to impale his enemies, rather than because he had encountered this standard method of despatch during his research into general vampire lore. But it was also clear to me from what I'd read about the 1972 book that half the problem was that it was the work of two (somewhat over-enthusiastic) historians approaching a piece of literature without really understanding how an author like Bram works. On that basis, I was prepared to give Florescu and McNally a try as historians of the real historical Dracula, which is what they are being in this book. As such, for me it was a complement to reading Treptow's book on the historical Dracula a couple of years ago (LJ / DW).

Indeed, as history, it was pretty good, and certainly better than I'd feared from the things people say about the authors' 1972 book. In particular, they present lots of direct quotations from the primary source material, which is what I’m really after with regards to the historical Dracula (and why I liked Treptow's book so much). They also took a more systematic narrative approach that Treptow, who groups his material more thematically, which helped to fill out some details and clarify causes and effects for me where I hadn't fully understood them before. But there are some errors to catch - e.g. they think Whitby has a ruined Cathedral rather than an Abbey. And, more seriously, their interpretation of some of the primary material needed more thought. They are fully aware that the German and Russian pamphlets about Dracula’s atrocities were written with strong political agendas which have obviously strongly distorted their content, and indeed they discuss those agendas and the role of the pamphlets in furthering them at the appropriate point in the book. BUT they also still take the contents of the pamphlets very nearly at face value in other parts of the book when it suits them to do so. In other words, they commit the classic undergraduate dissertation student's error of explaining the 'problems' with the primary sources in their introduction, and then ticking that task off their to-do list, dusting their hands and going on to use those sources completely uncritically in the rest of the work. Luckily I have the training and experience to realise that that is happening and read around it, but it's irritating to see professional historians doing this, and perpetuating myths as a result.


8. Elizabeth Miller (2006), Dracula: Sense and Nonsense (2nd edn)

Also read on my Kindle in Australia. The basic premise of the book is that people talk a lot of unsupported nonsense about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so Miller goes through the most persistent and egregious myths systematically, quoting examples and explaining the problems with them. She explains the approach herself on this publishers' page about the book. I completely see the need for this. People do churn out ill-researched books on Dracula because anything with his name in the title sells, and I’ve been irritated myself often enough by the constant repetition of well-worn canards. Florescu and McNally's 1972 book claiming that Count Dracula the vampire was inspired by a detailed knowledge of Vlad III Dracula (mentioned above) is obviously a prime example, but there are plenty more. In general, Miller unpicks them very fairly, drawing on what is clearly an exceptional knowledge of the book, Bram's writing process and the scholarship around it, and guided by unerring critical facilities and a very sophisticated understanding of how both history and literature work. That said, I think the format of this book often encourages her to go a bit too far to the opposite extreme in the cause of killing off popular myths.

In the case of the relationship between the historical Dracula and the vampire Count, the detail of Miller's deconstruction of Florescu and McNally's claims is very good and entirely justified. As she shows, Bram's research notes make it very clear that he developed the character before he found the name, and probably only knew a few basic details about Vlad III Dracula's actual career. BUT the antagonistic 'what nonsense!' tone in which she presents her case has I think inspired a lot of people to take the whole issue on too much of a black-and-white basis. It's not exactly Miller's fault that lots of blokey horror fans on Facebook groups now rush to inform everybody that Bram's Dracula has 'nothing to do with' the historical Vlad every time the subject comes up, because in fact she herself is far more nuanced than this and entirely acknowledges that Bram did use snippets of Vlad to round out his creation without intending Dracula wholly to 'be' Vlad. But I think she has fed a climate in which the baby is entirely thrown out with the bathwater by people unable to appreciate these sorts of nuances. The same goes for other examples as well. E.g. she calls the idea that Bram drew on his relationship with Henry Irving to help develop his characterisation of Dracula 'fabrication', but to me 'over-simplification' would be fairer. Obviously authors draw on the real personal relationships they have experienced when crafting their characters, at least subconsciously, and there has to be a middle ground between ‘Stoker's Dracula is a thinly-veiled caricature of Irving’ and ‘Stoker's Dracula has nothing to do with Irving’ which allows for Irving to have been just one of the character's many real-world ancestors.

I spotted one actual error, which is that Miller insists Dracula's famous cape comes only from film adaptations and is not mentioned in the novel. But unless we want to argue that a cape is meaningfully different from a cloak, these words from Jonathan Harker's journal (12 May, chapter 3) contradict her: "I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings." In complete fairness to Miller, though, it's quite clear that she would acknowledge the issue straight away, as she does in fact once or twice hold her hands up to her own previously-published erroneous assumptions within this book. She also provides a very helpful annotated bibliography of major publications on Stoker and Dracula, some of which I will certainly be reading. I came away feeling great admiration for both Miller's scholarship and her open style of debate, but wishing she had presented what she knows about Stoker and his novel straightforwardly, rather than in the format of killing canards. Thankfully, elsewhere she has, so I've since acquired a copy of her book Bram Stoker's Dracula: A Documentary Journey into Vampire Country and the Dracula Phenomenon and look forward to reading it.


9. Bram Stoker (1897), Dracula

So it was fairly inevitable in the light of the other reading I'd done this year - especially Makt Myrkranna (LJ / DW) and Miller's book - that I would feel the urge to Go Back To The Text; and this feeling was only intensified by the approach of our DracSoc trip to Whitby in September (LJ / DW). I read Dracula first when I was nine, and reviewed it here on my last read in 2004: LJ / DW. I find some aspects of that review a bit cringeworthy now, feeling that it largely presents a lot of very obvious and widely-recognised points as though they were original observations. But then again, I had certainly had much less exposure to other people's writing and discussion about Dracula then than I have now, my friends at the time seemed to like it, and it's a very early example of me reviewing anything at all online. I didn't start doing it regularly and systematically until 2007, and the fact that one of the occasions before then when I was inspired to do it was after reading Dracula says quite a lot about how much the novel has always meant to me.

I enjoyed the re-read, and it certainly enhanced my trip to Whitby to have those sections fresh in my mind. I was struck throughout by Bram's facility for descriptive prose, and particularly liked the newspaper account of the storm as it brews in the prelude to the arrival of the Demeter. I also appreciated his ability to capture plausibly the voices of women. I commented on the strength of Mina's character in my last review, but here I mean rather things like the tone of her and Lucy's letters to one another, Lucy's internal thoughts as her mysterious illness increases and Mina's sensible, clear-headed pragmatism throughout. I don't mean to claim that Bram is a great feminist or his women perfect literary creations - in particular, Mina's description of herself as unclean and dramatic requests to be put out of her misery should she become a vampire come across very much as the stereotypical melodramatic and self-sacrificing Victorian female heroine. But I just mean it's better than you might expect for a late-Victorian male writer, and Bram deserves the credit for that. I was also surprised by how quickly Dracula leaves London once the vampire-hunters start seriously invading his lairs, which slightly undermines his characterisation as the ultimate demonic enemy. Within a day of snarling out his famous line at the house in Piccadilly that "My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side", he is on a ship out of there, so that the line falls a bit flat really in retrospect. Meanwhile, with my Hammer lenses on, I enjoyed the moments when their various crystallisations of the novel suddenly flared up on the page, and indeed spotted one I hadn't really taken on board before: that even as late as The Satanic Rites of Dracula, when you would think the novel had entirely been left behind, the way Jane (Valerie Van Ost) experiences Dracula's approach in the form of a mist billowing under her door while she lies helpless on the bed, unable to escape, is actually very directly based on how he gets into Mina's room in Seward's asylum in the novel.

But the main thing that happened on this read, and which I had certainly never noticed before, is that I found myself seeing a nexus of Classical references woven into the book, and indeed enough of them for it to be worth writing a paper on the topic. This is very exciting, because having enjoyed the World Dracula Congress which I attended in Dublin in 2016 (LJ / DW) and knowing that another is coming up in Brașov this October, I had been increasingly thinking that it would be really nice to attend the next one as a presenter rather than just a listener. Well, now I've found my topic and indeed have got far enough with developing the idea to have submitted an abstract to the conference committee (which I'm currently waiting to hear on). I won't say too much about it here, as it's a separate matter from an ordinary book review, and besides I don't want to give too many details of my argument away before the actual conference. But a simple and typical example of the sort of stuff I've been collecting is represented by this little speech from Van Helsing:

Let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day. He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar.

There, Bram is situating Dracula within a frame of reference which explicitly extends to antiquity, although of course only alongside a whole symphony of other cultural resonances. My point is essentially going to be that we wouldn't want to isolate the Classical references from the rest of the mix, but since they are there they are worth exploring and understanding properly - and while people have spent a lot of time examining Stoker's use of Eastern European history and folklore, personal knowledge of Whitby and London etc., no-one has really pulled together the Classical references and shown what they contribute to the novel as a whole and the characterisation of Dracula in particular. I've got about 25 in all, scattered fairly evenly through the novel - some straightforward and explicit like the one I've included here, others more allusive, and others still quite fundamental and structural. Anyway, I am enjoying pursuing and thinking about them all HUGELY, and assuming that my paper is accepted will probably be banging on about this topic quite a lot more over the next few months as I steer my leisure reading in its service. You have been warned!


10. Charles Dickens (2009) Complete Ghost Stories (Wordsworth Classics edition; editor unnamed).

Finally, this was my Christmas reading. I had read M.R. James' full oeuvre the Christmas before (LJ / DW), so wanted something in the same vein but not actually James, and Dickens seemed the obvious choice. I read parts of it on a train to Göttingen, looking out over wooded valleys and light driving snow, and finished it on New Year's Eve in the somewhat chilly garret of my sister's Georgian house, listening to fireworks going off all around me - all of which (except perhaps the fireworks) seemed extremely appropriate. You can see the full table of contents via Amazon's look inside function, but I will confess that I skipped 'A Christmas Carol', on the grounds of having read it at least twice already. Several of the earlier stories in particular are actually extracted from ongoing serials such as The Pickwick Papers, rather than having been written as stand-alone stories as such.

Generally I enjoyed the collection hugely, and one of its pleasures was the organisation of most of the content into chronological order, starting in 1837 with The Queer Chair and finishing in 1866 with The Signalman (a lot of the remainder of the book after this actually consists of tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary on the standard tropes of ghost stories, rather than straightforward stories per se). In broad terms, the earlier stories show a greater interest in exploring the capacities of language, repeatedly delighting the reader with descriptions which are just perfect for and evocative of whatever is at hand, yet always original and surprising. They lean towards the moralistic, though, in a way that can sometimes strike a modern reader as rather sickly and cloying. The later stories, by contrast, are perhaps simpler in their language, but more complex in their morality - edges are greyer now, and there is less of a sense that Dickens wants to convey a Lesson. In other words, there's plenty of pleasure and value to be had throughout, though of different kinds.

My least favourite story was 'The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain', which read like an attempt to recreate the success of 'A Christmas Carol' five years later, with a similar central motif of a self-centred elderly man learning to be a better person after supernatural intervention. But this one certainly did suffer from cloying morality without ever offering anything of the seasonal good cheer also inherent in 'A Christmas Carol'. My most favourite, after giving each entry a fair hearing, was still 'The Signalman', for its masterful portrait of the human psyche under the strain of isolation and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. There's a good reason why that one was selected for the BBC's annual ghost story adaptations in the '70s. The most surprising moment, though, came in the middle of 'The Ghosts of the Mail', in which the narrator's somewhat inebriated uncle, walking late at night through the street of Edinburgh, comes across some abandoned mail-coaches, and experiences visions of the eighteenth-century cads, adventurers and damsels who once travelled in them. The story unfolds of a distressed young lady who is clearly being abducted by her male fellow travellers, and whom the uncle (now fully absorbed into his own hallucination) resolves to rescue. Once the coach stops and everything erupts into actual sword-play, though, this happens:

At this very moment, the gentleman in sky-blue turning round, and seeing the young lady with her face uncovered, vented an exclamation of rage and jealousy, and, turning his weapon against her beautiful bosom, pointed a thrust at her heart, which caused my uncle to utter a cry of apprehension that made the building ring. The lady stepped lightly aside, and snatching the young man's sword from his hand, before he had recovered his balance, drove him to the wall, and running it through him, and the panelling, up to the very hilt, pinned him there, hard and fast. It was a splendid example.

One of Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's literary ancestors there!


OK, I did it. That is 2017's books all written up. That doesn't mean I'm quite at the top of my pile - I still have six 2017 films to do, besides another three already for 2018 and one book. But getting completely up to date is looking more achievable right now that it has for a long time. That is a good feeling.

My final film watched of 2015, I recorded this one off the Horror Channel a while ago, and watched it on New Year's Eve. It's a Hammer horror classic, right from their glorious hey-day, in which the Germanic village of Vandorf is troubled by the spirit of a millennia-old Gorgon who comes out when the moon is full and turns people to stone. It is also one of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing's twenty-odd screen collaborations. I have seen it before, but a looong time ago - probably a good 20 years, I reckon.

It is almost really brilliant. Much of the usual reliable production team is here - James Bernard doing the music, Bernard Robinson the sets, Michael Reed the photography, Rosemary Burrows the costumes and Terence Fisher the direction. Quite apart from Lee and Cushing, the cast is great too. Richard Pasco, Michael Goodliffe and Patrick Troughton are all worth the entrance fee alone, but Barbara Shelley particularly shines in a role which really shows her range: kind, gentle and loving, strong-willed yet afraid and internally conflicted, while always remaining entirely convincing as a single, coherent character. I already loved her from Dracula Prince of Darkness (in which she is similarly wide-ranging), Rasputin the Mad Monk and Quatermass and the Pit, but she really excelled herself in this one, and I'm now thinking I should make a point of seeking out some of her other appearances.

What lets it down, though, is a story-line which doesn't fully work through its potential. There's a good idea on the table. ( But discussing it involves spoilers, and it is best to see this film unspoilt if you can )

I am also going to come right out and say that I don't think Christopher Lee is particularly good in this film either. His character is actually the good guy, who arrives half-way through the story, applies an open-minded rationalism to what is going on, figures out what the villagers are hiding and eventually dispatches the Gorgon. And this is something he is definitely perfectly capable of doing well, as his performance as the Duc de Richleau in The Devil Rides Out shows. But for some reason he evidently decided to give his character in this film a sort of brusque gruffness which just didn't work for me. This isn't to say he's abysmal. He has some good confrontation scenes with Peter Cushing, where there is a lot going on emotionally on both sides of the equation. But of the two, Cushing's depiction of a man who, while rather unlikable overall, elicits our sympathy through the obvious mental anguish caused by his attempts to cover up ( spoiler's ) crimes, is distinctly more compelling and interesting to watch.

Finally, what can we make of the use of a Greek mythological creature in this film? It's only to be expected, really. Hammer in this period were clearly working their way through every monster they could think of in their search for suitable new material, and they were bound to turn to Greek mythology at some point. It also happens to make the middle entry in a nice trio with The Mummy (1959) and The Viking Queen (1967): Egypt ✓, Greece ✓, Rome ✓ - and I think there is clear hierarchy of priorities at work in the order they went about them, basically working from the culture with the most potential for macabre fantasy stories to the one with the least. The particular choice of a Gorgon I would guess probably springs from a fairly simple pragmatic equation - ( another spoilery bit here ), and her only non-humanoid attribute is the snakes, making the special effects relatively manageable too. (This film pre-dates Clash of the Titans (1981), so its Gorgon does not have a snaky tail - Ray Harryhausen invented that.) The effects are still pretty poor, and this is a major flaw in the film - but imagine how much more trouble they would have had trying to do the sphinx, harpies, Echidna or similar.

Meanwhile, Bernard Robinson took up the Greek cue in his set design, making a nice replica centrepiece of the Belvedere Torso for the entrance-hall of the castle where the Gorgon likes to lurk, which was used to good effect in turn by Michael Reed's photography:


On one level, this was a reasonably obvious creative touch for a film about people being turned to stone by a monster from Greek mythology. And the particular choice of the Belvedere Torso is not difficult to explain. It's an extremely famous piece of Greek sculpture (technically a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, but that is true of most surviving 'Greek' art), of the type which you would come across pretty quickly if you picked up any book on the topic. But then again, there would have been lots of other options in the same book too, and homing in on one which expresses anguish and tragedy so eloquently through its twisted pose and fragmentary state deserves credit; as does the fact that its missing limbs and head both resonate rather nicely with what happens to some of the Gorgon's victims, and eventually also the Gorgon herself, over the course of the film. Possibly the Laocoön, with its snaky theme, would have been an even better choice - but then again I see why a replica of that statue would be considerably more time-consuming and expensive to make. Also, it left the stage clear for 28 Days Later to use the Laocoön statue in a very similar way many decades later - maybe even inspired by Bernard Robinson's set designs, who knows?

Overall, worth watching for Barbara Shelley, the Lee-Cushing pairing and the general Hammery goodness, but not in the first rank.

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Last weekend, the lovely ms_siobhan and I set off on a Hammer horror-related adventure, the first leg of which took us to Luton. More or less every person to whom I mentioned the Luton part of this endeavour curled up their lips in disdain, from which I gathered that Luton's public image is more or less equivalent to Birmingham's. But, just like Birmingham, Luton is actually well worth visiting for the under-rated treasures it offers to the intrepid visitor. In our case, the main attraction was the Stockwood Discovery Centre - once the grounds of a stately home; now home to a multiplicity of attractions, including gardens, adventure playgrounds, a local history museum and the the Mossman Carriage Collection.

What was so exciting about the Mossman Carriage Collection? Well, it contains more or less every horse-drawn vehicle ever to appear in a Hammer horror film, not to mention at least 50 other films made between 1937 (Doctor Syn) and 1985 (Out of Africa) besides. Basically, if you have ever watched a British-made film or TV production from that period which featured a carriage, the odds are it came from this collection. The man behind it was George Mossman, a Luton businessman born in 1908, who realised just at the time when horse-drawn transport was passing out of regular use that it would be a) fun and b) a good idea to buy up and restore some of the many carriages which were by then languishing away in barns and coach-houses across the country. Lending them out to film companies was of course one way of helping to make back the cost of buying and restoring them, and on Mossman's death the collection passed to the Luton Museum Service in 1991.

Before we went, I spent the best part of every evening for a week screen-capping every single carriage to feature in a Hammer Dracula film, and combing through the pictures on the Mossman Carriage Collection website to try to identify them. I'm glad to say that on arrival, my identifications proved 100% correct, so below each cut which follows you will find historical information about the carriage in question as taken from the website, pictures of it as it appears today, and screen-caps showing it in use within the Dracula films. Any pictures with me in them were of course taken by my trusty travel companion and acclaimed professional photographer, ms_siobhan. Oh, and it's important to note that the paint colours on the carriages today don't always match up with how they look in the films, but as the website notes explain for the Private ‘Favorite’ Omnibus (first entry, immediately below), Mossman himself was quite happy to repaint them as required for film commissions. In most cases, I was able to confirm what previous colours each of the carriages had been painted by simply looking closely at the inevitable scratches in the finish to see the previous layers.

( Private ‘Favorite’ Omnibus, about 1880 )

( Hearse, about 1860 )

( Town Coach, about 1860 )

( Victoria, about 1890 )

( Brougham, about 1860 )

( Round Backed Gig )

So far, so lovely, then. But after this, things got a bit frustrating. Because on arrival, we discovered that a wedding reception was going on inside the largest room of the collection, housing on my estimation at least half of the carriages. And we were not allowed to go in. That's pretty damned annoying when you have travelled all the way from Leeds to get there, I can tell you - especially when there is nothing on their website to warn potential visitors that this might happen. I'm pretty sure that there were at least three more carriages in that room which were used in the Dracula films, but I could only see one of them well enough to get a photograph of. Thankfully, it was the carriage I was second-most excited about seeing after the hearse, but I would really have liked to see it a lot better than I did - to say nothing of the other two which I think were in there.

( Travelling Chariot, about 1790 )

There are a number of other carriages in the Hammer Dracula films which I never could identify on the Mossman Collection website, and after having visited as much as I could of the collection and looked through their excellent souvenir brochure as well, I have concluded that this is probably because they never came from it in the first place. From about 1970 onwards, Hammer must have been hiring from somewhere else - or possibly even making their own replicas, which would of course have had the advantage of being able to be bashed about a bit in the course of filming if needed. Certainly, I can't identify the Hargood family coach in Taste, the coach which Paul falls into from the window of Sarah's party in Scars, or the coach from the famous opening chase-through-Hyde-Park sequence at the beginning of Dracula AD 1972.

Meanwhile, the Mossman Collection Carriages of course had a wide and varied film career which went well beyond the world of Hammer. On the whole, I didn't worry about this - indeed, I didn't even worry about Hammer films other than the Dracula cycle. There's only so much film-geekery one brain can manage, after all. But I was excited to stumble across a replica chariot which its information panel informed us had been custom-made by George Mossman for use in Ben Hur (1959):

( Replica Roman Chariot )

The fact that I was able to stand in it was in keeping with the collection's general policy, which was that genuine antique carriages had 'do not touch' labels on them, whereas visitors were allowed to sit or stand (as appropriate) in the replicas. This seems reasonable, but on the other hand I'm not sure they have thought hard enough about the heritage value of even some of the replicas, especially where they have appeared in really famous films like Ben Hur. Certainly, they don't draw very much attention to it. Only one small section of the museum mentions it, and this was the only information panel I saw which linked up a specific vehicle with a specific film. Meanwhile, as you can see in the photos, the decorative detail on the chariot is badly degraded. At first we assumed that this was just because it had been made in the first place of materials which had naturally perished over the years, but this is a picture of the same chariot from the collection's souvenir brochure:


And this is it again in a video which was playing in one of the rooms of the museum:


Judging by the hair and clothes of the people in the video, it must have been made within the last ten years at most. And meanwhile, when we looked closely at the chariot we realised that all the damage to its decoration is concentrated on the side of it which faces outwards from the arched entrance-way where it stands, and hence towards the elements. So in other words, at some point in the last ten years it has been placed facing into an open courtyard, and the result is that an iconic prop used in one of the biggest block-busters of the 20th century, which was fine ten years ago, has degraded into the state seen in the above pictures.

This makes me feel really sad, not only because it is a neglectful waste, but also because it is surely very short-sighted on the part of the museum management. Film tourism is a real thing, as our own visit proved, and the value of a prop from a film like Ben Hur is only going to grow as time goes by. Imagine being able to say at the time of its centenary in 2059 that you have a chariot used in that film! You know, a film which is famous for its chariot races... Except that a prop which is rotting away in the rain is going to be a lot less of a draw than one which has been kept in good condition.

In fact, I think the Mossman Collection could do with getting some film specialists to collaborate with them asap to draw up a proper and comprehensive list of all the films its vehicles have been used in, complete with screen-caps of the kind I've done here for the Dracula films, which could be displayed on their website and within the museum. They could reach whole new audiences by publicising that information properly - but right now, it is acknowledged only fleetingly and incompletely. It is up to geeks like me to create their own guide to the carriages used in the films they are interested in if that's what they want to see - and while I will do it and enjoyed the results enormously, even I would have been glad of a guide which covered just the other Hammer films at least.

A bit of a sad note there at the end, then, and the wedding reception thing was annoying too. But on the whole I would very much recommend a visit to the Mossman Collection, especially if you are a British film geek. You just might need to be prepared to do your own research in advance...

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