In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of delivering the second Goth City World Dracula Day lecture at the Midland Hotel in Bradford, and thus helping to cement it as an annual institution. I went to the first one last year (LJ / DW), and had already booked a ticket for this year when I got a message from the organiser asking if I would deliver it this time. I hadn't quite expected that, but I am generally up for any opportunity to talk about Dracula-related things in a public forum, so I agreed.

Various ideas for the topic sprang to mind, but after a chat through the options with lady_lugosi1313 in her garden I decided to run with one which really leaned into the theme of anniversaries. The main one was the 125th anniversary of Dracula's publication, but as it happens this year is also the centenary of Nosferatu, 50 years since the release of Dracula AD 1972 and 25 years since the launch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I managed to fill the rather awkward 75-year anniversary gap with a 1947 revival of the Dracula stage play, and thus a journey through time working in 25-year slices was born.

The audience was small, but they seemed to enjoy themselves, and it was certainly fun getting gothed up celebrating Dracula's 125th anniversary. I can say I played my part in a worldwide event which included Dacre Stoker doing a tour of the UK and a world-record-breaking gathering of people dressed up as vampires in Whitby. Here are ( a few pictures of the event )
As if that weren't enough, thanks to the wonders of modern technology I also managed to be part of another World Dracula Day initiative on the same day. This was the first of a series of videos to mark the anniversary made by Erin Chapman, whom I met at the World Dracula Congress in Dublin in 2016 (LJ / DW), for the YouTube channel Morbid Planet. She had contacted a bunch of Dracula scholars and commentators, for some reason including me(!) around February, asking us to record little pieces to camera answering three questions she had set us. So we all sent our footage in, and she has now compiled it into three videos, the first of which was released this Thursday and the other two of which will follow. If you'd like to know what I, Dacre Stoker, Christopher Frayling and a bunch of others would ask Bram Stoker if we could sit down for a coffee with him, the answers are here:

Watch on YouTube

I did something I've been meaning to do for weeks today. I got Casting the Runes (1979) for Christmas. It's an ITV adaptation of the M.R. James story of the same name, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, but unlike most of its BBC equivalents it is brought up to date and set in the present day. Dunning is a broadcast journalist, rather than a researcher, who incurs Karswell's wrath by portraying him as a crank in a documentary on occultism, and she is also female. As I understand it, this was done largely to save money on period costumes, sets and locations, and indeed the same principle is clear even in the selection of present-day settings. It was filmed out of ITV Yorkshire's studios, which are literally used as Dunning's work-place, and because they are in Leeds, that is also where she and the other characters live and work.

Before lockdown, I watched it with lady_lugosi1313, who turned out to be a wonder at accurately recognising the locations I hadn't been able to pin down myself. There are some scenes set in and around a farm near a canal which we didn't recognise immediately, but I managed to locate those soon afterwards too, with a little help from someone on Twitter who pointed me to a collection of pictures of canals in this part of the world. So we'd reached the point where the only locations we hadn't managed to identify were the airport interiors used at the end - and I'm sure there will be plane geeks out there somewhere who can help us with those. Unfortunately, a planned day out to the farm and canal locations never materialised, because coronavirus hit just as we were starting to make concrete plans to do it. But I've been waiting for a good opportunity to use some of the locations within Leeds as goals for walks, thus cleverly combining exercise with an actual trip out to somewhere I genuinely wanted to go. Today, I finally did the first of those - to the ITV Yorkshire studios themselves.

It's actually completely the wrong time of year to attempt like-for-like photos on this production, because it is set in snowy winter weather. The best I could do is wait for an overcast day, but even then the sun began to come out soon after I arrived at the right location and obviously all the trees were in full leaf. I also quickly realised that I couldn't match the original camera angles precisely. My camera just has a different field of vision from the film cameras (I think?) that were used for these exterior shots, while in some cases they were clearly also raised up on tripods / rigs which I didn't have. But still, the purpose was leisure and exercise, not a precise reproduction. ( I took along four screencaps, and this is how I got on. )

By the time I'd finished, the sun had come fully out, but that made for the perfect conditions to sit at the bottom of a grassy bank near the houses, drinking a bottle of water I'd brought. After a while, some children who clearly lived in the houses came along to roll down the bank, laughing and smiling at me each time they got to the bottom. Given that I spend most of my time now sitting in my house with only myself for company, that sort of thing counts for quite a lot these days. I had also clocked up 8000 steps on my phone by the time I got home, as well as clearly stretching some muscles which haven't had much use recently and making bits of my feet slightly sore because I'm not really used to wearing shoes.

Two other locations from Casting the Runes are within walking distance of my house, maybe three if I push it a bit. So now I've done this one as a proof of concept, I might follow up with some of the others over the next few weeks. Frustratingly, under normal circumstances I would have free access to one of the most distinctive interiors as well - the Brotherton Library, which plays the same role in this adaptation as the British Library's old Round Reading Room in the original story. But that one will have to wait until after lockdown.

Soon after lockdown began, lady_lugosi1313 and I worked out a basic way of doing a virtual film-watch together. We use FB messenger for it, starting off with a video-chat to say hi, catch up and get ready for the film, then switching to text-based chat while the film itself is on, and finishing up by returning to video to discuss what we thought of it and have a bit more social time. This was the first film we watched that way, taking advantage of the fact that Talking Pictures were showing it anyway, so someone else would do the business of pressing 'play' for us.

It's one of my absolute favourite Hammer films, but although I watched and wrote about the TV version a few years ago when the BBC made it available on iPlayer (LJ / DW) I don't think I've ever reviewed the film version here.

It uses a script developed for film treatment by Nigel Kneale, author of the original TV version, so fairly unsurprisingly it follows the same plot pretty closely. The most obvious differences are the removal of a subplot about a journalist covering the discovery, and the fact that the Martian capsule is found during work on the London Underground rather than during construction work in Knightsbridge. That latter change means that the relationship to the discovery of the London Mithraeum which so struck me when I watched the TV version disappears, but I don't really mind as the London Underground setting is excellent and so iconic of 1960s Britain. I think the character of Barbara is a little more prominent in the film version too, which is also very welcome as she is played by Barbara Shelley whom I love beyond measure.

The production values are very high on the scale of what Hammer could do, and indeed it's one of those Hammer films like The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula or The Mummy where a form of magic seems to have happened, and everyone involved was at their absolute best. In keeping with the TV version, it has a very intelligent script, dealing with profound social issues including racism and groupthink, and setting up well-defined and plausible conflicts between different forms of authority (military, academic, political, ecclesiastical). It does also perpetuate some of the same tropes around women and working-class people being more sensitive to primitive alien influences as as in the TV version, though I should note in fairness that we see our ultimate academic authority-figure, Quatermass, falling into the grip of it too.

It also has absolutely amazing sets, which were purpose-built for the film by Bernard Robinson on the back lot at Elstree, where Hammer were working at the time. You could very easily believe they were real London streets, but they aren't, as this image from Peveril Publishing's book Hammer's Grand Designs (which I highly recommend) shows:


There are so many good scenes in it that it's hard to pick a favourite. There are plenty which build the tension up nicely as successive discoveries are made in and around the Martian capsule, including very good use made of horrible disorienting sound effects which drive characters mad, and then some good climatic moments such as when winds rush through the underground station, possessed crowds rampage in the streets and of course Roney heroically swings a crane into the huge Martian apparition at the end.

But I think one particularly effective scene comes about a third of the way in, when Quatermass, Barbara and a policeman investigate a deserted house immediately above the underground station. The policeman is visibly uncomfortable with the childhood memories he recounts there, knowing that he is supposed to be rationalistic, but also clearly experiencing visceral and traumatic flashbacks to what he experienced. It gets right to the heart of the conflict between the rational and the emotive mind which horror likes to probe at. And probably the best scene of all, mainly because the film has really earned it by this point, is the shot which the closing credits roll over, of Barbara Shelley and Andrew Keir outside the underground station just staring around them, traumatised at everything they have witnessed.

A fine example of what Hammer could do, and one I'll always happily re-watch.

What a pity Doctor Who wasn't broadcast in the autumn this year, as this episode would really have suited a slot around Halloween. Still, the evenings are dark and the weather dismal all the same, and it delivered an excellent dose of Gothic horror, as well as one of the more historically accurate portrayals of the Diodati weekend I have come across. Common canards like having the Shelleys a) married and b) staying in the villa with Byron and Polidori were both not merely avoided but actively deconstructed. And I liked the clever device of delivering orientational exposition in the form of gossip during a dance. Very impressive!

I mainly just want to squee over this episode really, so here is a squee list:

• The shout-out to Ada Lovelace from earlier in the series.
• Polidori challenging Ryan to a duel.
• The nightmarish circular geography of the house, and even better this all turning out to emanate from Shelley's fevered mind.
• Byron hiding behind Claire from Polidori in his scary possessed state (and Claire later calling him out for this - though sadly for her the spell never really was broken).
• Fletcher the valet's eye-rolling.
• One of the fireplaces in the villa having a copy of the Apollo Belvedere over it. (Only really because I, too, have a copy of the Apollo Belvedere over my own fireplace - but it was nicely appropriate set dressing for a house full of Romantic poets.)
• Mary managing to cut through to the remaining humanity of the half-Cyberman just for a while, but not permanently. (It would have been very hokey if that had been a permanent solution - we had enough of threats being overcome by love in the Moffat era.)
• The ghostly maid and child remaining entirely unexplained.

Dramatic tellings of this weekend are all bound to look and feel much like one another, but Gothic (1986: LJ / DW) is a particularly obvious comparator, because it likewise sets out to tell the story as a Gothic horror, rather than merely about the production of Gothic horror. I wouldn't say this story was deeply rooted in Gothic, not least because Gothic has a lot of very sexual, violent and disturbed content which wouldn't be suitable for a family show like Doctor Who. But the prominence in this episode of Byron's bone collection and the way it all culminated in a basement do seem more likely than not to have come from there. There's also the matter of 'Mary's Story' from the Eighth Doctor Big Finish collection The Company of Friends, which I listened to some years ago. I can't say I remember it in much detail now, but judging from that plot summary it's a pretty different story from this one, concerned mainly with different aspects of the Doctor himself rather than any Cyberman.

Meanwhile, this story isn't merely a standalone, but the set-up for the epic two-part struggle with the Cybermen which has been trailed as the season's finale from its beginning. I can't say I have particularly high hopes about that, having seen one too many of New Who's epic final battles over the years. But I did appreciate the Doctor's impossible moral dilemma of being asked to choose between saving not only Shelley but the future contingent upon him and saving all the people involved in that battle - and especially the companions' discomfort when she pointed out the consequences for them. I hope the final two episodes can sustain those shades of grey.

Yep, another good one. It felt like a productive exploration of what the show can do with a four-person TARDIS team - certainly much more successful in that respect than last week, where the three companions were not-very-subtly side-lined for much of the episode. A multi-thread story conveying a global scale of threat and letting each of the individual characters do something challenging is a much better use of them. Nice to see the climate crisis message being sustained from Orphan 55 too.

The little things: Yaz quietly turning the device Graham was using around through 180 degrees so that he could read it correctly; Graham's man-to-man chat with Jake, helping him to confront profound truths about his relationship with Adam without ever making him feel like he was being pushed into emotional territory he'd obviously designated as off-limits.

The oversights: I felt that the emotional impact of Jamila's death on Gabriela had been all but forgotten by the end of the episode, but that's nothing to poor old Aramu apparently dying on the beach under an onslaught of birds, entirely unnoticed at any point by any of the other characters. I know Doctor Who couldn't function if we lingered over the death of every guest character, but come on! They could at least have expressed some regret over Aramu at the end.

It would obviously also have been nice to have any idea of what's going on with the Ruth-Doctor, or even any sense that the events of last episode had happened - but again, I get how functional filler-episodes work.

Just a few quick thoughts on this week's Who:

1. This series is really interested in inventions and the history of technology, isn't it? After Barton, Ada Lovelace, the hall of Victorian inventors and the MI6 tech in Spyfall and Sylas the brilliant engineer kid in Orphan 55, now we have Tesla vs. Edison. I mean, technology is always central to Doctor Who, but in this series it is being treated not just as a given but something whose very route into existence we should be fascinated by. It'll be interesting to see where that goes.

2. Despite their shared interest in the history of technology, though, this episode and Spyfall depart radically from one another in their treatment of the historical guest stars of the week. I was already unhappy at seeing Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan having their memories of what they had seen with the Doctor wiped; I'm absolutely bloody furious now that the same logic hasn't been applied to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who if anything saw rather more than they did. Is there not some kind of, I don't know, overall story editor whose job it is to ensure consistency in these matters???

3. Yaz looks absolutely amazing in Victoriana.

That is all.

That resolved out pretty well. I'm kind of glad the Alien Menace wasn't Cybermen after all. It's nice to have something new. I liked Yaz reprimanding Ryan for getting carried away and telling Barton's men the plan, and then it not just being a joke line but an actual step in the plot which helped him to find them again quickly. I liked that they acknowledged that a Master who looked like Sacha Dhawan would find it difficult to 'pass' as a Nazi general, and offered some kind of explanation for it, because that had been bothering me until they did. I liked the nods to City of Death (top of the Eiffel Tower) and Logopolis (reference to Jodrell Bank). And I'm up for a season driven by deep secrets in Gallifrey's past. I'm an absolute sucker for anything Gallifreyan.

I could have done without Ada and Noor Inayat Khan having their memories wiped at the end, though. That is a big squick for me in all fantastical fiction, and I know I've complained about it reviews of both Doctor Who (e.g. what happened to Donna) and other stories (e.g. Fantastic Beasts) before. It feels like such a huge personal violation to take someone's memories away, and it made it even worse that Ada was actively protesting against it. It doesn't even seem consistently applied, either. The Doctor has left hundreds of historical figures with their memories intact before, and I don't see that the fairly brief and confusing things they had seen would be that much of a historical problem anyway - especially since no-one was ever likely to believe them when they talked about it.

Anyway, basically OK, and I hope we'll be seeing more of Sacha's Master as the series goes on.

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 )

Oh dear, yeah. I didn't have hugely high hopes, but I'm afraid that really did feel like Doctor Who by numbers to me. Basic plot-line - a Dalek is unleashed, causes a bit of havoc before being tracked down by the Doctor, and is then defeated via a combination of Technobabble and the Power of Love. We've definitely seen that story before, and the arc involving Ryan's Dad was particularly poorly integrated into it. It really made me miss RTD, who made those sorts of emotive personal plot-lines into the beating hearts of his stories, rather than feeling like an awkwardly bolted-on extra.

It's a pity, because I have a soft spot for Doctor Who stories involving archaeology (which as a real-life form of time travel offers a lot of potential for parallels with what the Doctor does), and the three Custodians seemed exciting initially. I could really have gone for a story in which their descendants had to come together and work with the Doctor (in the place of the lost third) to save the world. But we didn't get that, and even within what we did get I felt the design department did a pretty poor job of putting together the materials about the legend. Would it have been too much to ask for some authentic-looking ninth-century documents, rather than a picture-book which looked like it had been bought in The Works?

Oh well. Plenty of time to forget all about it before the next series...