In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

A General Election has been called, and I am the chair of a Liberal Democrat constituency party in a very, very winnable target seat. So I am unlikely to get much time for LJ / DW until after it has finished. BUT I've recently been to three very cool performances of different kinds, so I am damn well going to make the effort to record them before they entirely disappear from my memory.

This first one was another staged reading of an unproduced Hammer script held at De Montfort University's Cinema And Television History (CATH) Research Centre, similar to the ones I have been to before of The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula (LJ / DW) and Zeppelin v. Pterodactyls (LJ / DW. This time, though, rather than being part of the Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham, it was produced by kierantfoster, who has just completed a PhD on the unmade scripts, and got some postdoctoral funding to put it on. He told me he would be doing this at the Vampire Festival I went to in July (LJ / DW), so I kept a careful eye out in the months that followed, leapt on the tickets when they came out and enthusiastically recommended it to all my horror-loving friends. Kieran even commissioned a special poster by Graham Humphreys just for the event:


JohnJJohnston was kind enough to offer me crash space at his flat in south London for the night, so we met up beforehand for a bite to eat, strolling through Soho past Hammer House (where the studio's offices once were) on the way:


Then it was on to the cinema where more or less everyone who was involved with Hammer and is still with us was there - Caroline Munro of course, because she had a part in the reading, but also Judy Matheson, who had contribute a voice-over, and Madeleine Smith and Renee Glynne (script supervisor), I assume just because they wanted the fun of being at a Hammer performance, not to mention all the people who do Hammer art, and books, and run Facebook groups.

The set-up for the reading itself was similar to the other ones I've been to - a cast of actors, most with one major part and a couple of minor ones, reading the script with appropriate body-language and accents, with occasional music and animations projected onto the screen behind them to help the story along. Here is Jonathan Rigby doing a bit of opening narration, before settling down into his major role for the evening of the ageing, alcoholic stage magician Pendragon:


Having read up a bit on the history of the script and its various woes before the performance, I found that the most pressing question I had for kierantfoster in the bar before things began was, "Is it actually a good story?", to which he replied "Er, it is now." From this I gathered that judicious editorial work had been done - but I still have to say that the plot-line was pretty bonkers and hard to make much coherent sense of. Besides which a fortnight has already passed since I saw it, so my memory of it may not be particularly sharp.

Still, these are the outlines as far as I can remember. The story is set in mid-70s (when the script was originally written), and the major locations are Bermuda and London. Bermuda beach, we gradually learn, is where Vampirella first fell to Earth, in the form of a bat, after an alien race called Akrons destroyed her home planet, Drakulon, where the rivers run with blood. There, she met alcoholic stage magician Pendragon, who helped her adjust to life on Earth and took her to London where her alien powers lent his act a new lease of life. But she cannot fully remember who she is or where she came from, and is only able to access her past in scant fragments via hypnosis with the help of her boyfriend, Allan. Meanwhile, planes and ships are disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle. They are scooped up, scanned, and then either returned or destroyed. And in London, a scientific organisation called Space Operatives for Defence and Security (SODS), of which Allan is a part, are trying to work out the cause of multiple cases of apparent mass murder and mutilation across the globe.

Early in the story, Pendragon and Vampirella perform their show at a London casino, but we also notice that a strange blue-eye man is tracking Vampirella. He turns out to be one of the Akrons who destroyed her planet, who is also operating the alien base which has been plucking vehicles out of the Bermuda triangle. Vampirella inevitably ends up captured and transported to the base, where she sees horrible visions of brains in jars, but initially she is returned to SODS, where the team are struggling to get their supercomputer to help them work out the cause of the mystery deaths. Their efforts, though, are undermined when their chief (played by Caroline Munro, though in a role originally intended for a man) turns out to be an alien infiltrator, whereupon Vampirella kills her. Vampirella is transported to the alien base again, where she this time confronts the blue-eye man and learns about her past and his role in destroying her planet. He suggests that they should team up and become all-powerful together, but instead she reveals the identity of the base to SODS, who destroy it. Vampirella escapes back down to Bermuda beach, where Pendragon is sitting, and they leave together.

Vampirella as a character originated in a series of comic books, and the story sort of makes sense on that level - casinos, aliens, teams of scientists, kidnappings, supercomputers etc. Indeed, it may have worked best not as a live-action film, as Hammer were planning, but as an animation, where the very staccato story with sudden jumps from one scene to another without much obvious logic behind them might have seemed less surprising. I think it also suffered pretty badly from just having too many characters in it, so that none of them was very well-developed. Still, the core pairing of a washed-up but charmingly paternalistic Pendragon (a role originally intended for Peter Cushing) and a resourceful but out-of-place Vampirella was sound.

For me, the most effective scene by far consisted of a party hosted in their echoing old ballroom by two elderly sisters, Gloria and Constance, who have sent their man-servant out to invite their society acquaintances of the past without realising that they are all long dead. Instead, Pendragon and Vampirella show up, for plot reasons which I can't now remember, followed shortly thereafter by a motorbike gang who get right into the spirit of the party. The sisters are mainly just delighted that anyone has come, while Vampirella uses her alien powers to conjure up visions of the guests they had originally invited, who dance with them for a while, but then gradually fade away. I got the impression from the script that this was intended as visible fading, in which they would become more and more transparent before disappearing, but in my head it was done via edits - each time the camera cut to a new angle on the room, there were just fewer and fewer dancers until only the living ones were left.

Vampirella is a very different kind of vampire from Hammer's more usual gothic variety, both in that she is actually an alien and in that she behaves largely like an ordinary human being, only killing when people deserve it (e.g. the alien who has infiltrated SODS). But I was pleased to find that the story was designed to dovetail with the Dracula 'universe' nonetheless. This was partly done through two characters called Adam (the father) and Conrad (the son) Van Helsing, who come after Vampirella as though she were a typical Hammer vampire, but fail when garlic proves to have no effect on her. I like to think they are maybe the brother and nephew of Lorrimer from Dracula AD 1972. Also, at the end of the film, as Vampirella and Pendragon walk off Bermuda beach, a horse-drawn hearse pull up and its driver informs them that his Master invites them to perform at his castle, whereupon a hand wearing a ring embossed with a D extends from the coffin inside. ♥

The linking narration from the original script was shared out between the various members of the cast when they weren't busy with other roles, and was similar to other Hammer scripts I've seen or read in the quantity and quality of descriptive detail. Indeed, it included some quite nicely worked out linking devices, like a from-space view of Earth switching to life on the planet by cutting from an image of the globe to a spinning bicycle wheel. I missed Jonathan Rigby's narratorial voice as we'd enjoyed it in The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula a little bit, but he was great as Pendragon (pronounced as PENdra-gon rather than the more usual pen-DRAgon), channelling Peter Cushing quite uncannily in the role. This wasn't just about his vocal delivery, but something about his stance and the angle of his head which almost made the shape of his face seem to change and acquire a Cushing-esque gaunt profile and long nose.

Georgina Dugdale, whom I didn't even realise until afterwards is Caroline Munro's daughter, played Vampirella, interestingly choosing to do her as sweet and demure (but deadly when she needed to be), rather than the default sexy superhero that the character's comic art suggests. Caroline Munro herself unfortunately stood out a bit as less in command of her role than the others, and she obviously felt it hadn't been her best performance. I chatted to her briefly in the bar afterwards, as I was wearing a T-shirt with a big picture of her in Dracula AD 1972 on it, and a Hammer super-fan who knows her quite well insisted on taking me over so she could see it, and when I asked her if she'd enjoyed it she said straight away that she wished they'd had more rehearsal time. But she has such a lovely warm personality, and was so gushingly proud of her daughter (with good reason!) that no-one could possibly mind.

I came away feeling that it had probably never been a terribly good story, and there were probably good reasons why it was never made, but that it had been a brilliantly fun evening watching it come to life with an audience of appreciative people, and having the chance to reach that conclusion for ourselves. There is plenty more yet to be discovered in the Hammer script archive, and I for one will be there next time it's tapped into.

I saw this one with lady_lugosi1313. We noticed that it was on its last week of screening in Leeds despite only having been released a couple of weeks earlier, and that the cinema wasn't exactly packed out, so I'm guessing it perhaps hasn't done as well as hoped. And that's a pity because I thought it was great on all levels - cast, story, jokes, songs and historical detail.

The setting is the Boudiccan rebellion, and the main storyline follows a Roman boy, Attilius (or Atti for short) who is forced into the army by Nero as a punishment, and a 'Celtic' (I would have preferred 'British', but I get why they did this) girl, Orla, who is desperate to be a warrior but whose Dad won't let her as she is too young. Their utterly wholesome narrative involves her taking him prisoner, them falling (very chastely) in love, and both of them eventually coming to realise that war is actually a bad thing as it tends to end up with people being hurt.

The research was really solid, and what I particularly liked about it was that the script not only reflected a strong knowledge of the relevant source material, but that it also drew direct attention to the nature of those sources and their problems. So we saw a classically-megalomaniacal version of Nero being told that no-one really knew what had happened to Boudicca, and dictating his own preferred version to his tame court historian - who, for bonus meta-referential points was Horrible Histories' real-life historical consultant, greg_jenner. Then, as if that weren't enough, a Roman rat popped up over the closing credits to tell us all about the conflicting historical accounts of the events depicted. The value of that for children just getting to grips with history is immense, and I was so pleased they had taken the time to do it.

I was also pretty impressed by the way they had handled the topics of Roman imperialism and cultural change, both inevitably raised by the historical period and setting. We were shown very clearly that most of the 'Celtic' characters weren't in the least bit interested in Roman 'civilisation', while those who were (as represented by them e.g. incorporating Roman columns into their round-houses) didn't consider having their political autonomy arbitrarily taken away a reasonable price to pay for it. As a children's film, it had to come to a happy ending after Boudicca's rebellion, so we didn't see that being brutally repressed (in fact, most of the final battle was conveyed as a dance-off), and instead the Romans and the 'Celts' reached a cheerful accommodation with one another. But even this was very much about characters who had developed mutual respect for one another's cultures over the course of the film, rather than the Celts coming to appreciate 'what the Romans have done for us'. In short, if a generation of future Classics / Anc Hist students are out there watching this, I should get fewer in my classes assuming that Roman imperialism was a beneficent civilising mission.

There were too many great jokes and inter-texts to list in detail, but obviously it was beyond wonderful to see Derek Jacobi reprise his role as Claudius for a few short minutes, before being bumped off by the machinations of an almost equally wonderful Kim Cattrall as Agrippina. I thought there was a touch of David Morrissey's Aulus Plautius in Britannia lurking behind Rupert Graves' Suetonius Paulinus, too, as well as in the design of the Roman camps and the way Atti was treated after being recaptured from Orla (though this was obviously a very sanitised, child-friendly version of what happens in Britannia). As for jokes, watching in Yorkshire I think my favourite had to be seeing the Brigantes (our local tribe) portrayed with strong Yorkshire accents. Overall a great watch and a most worthy addition to the canon of screen portrayals of Roman Britain.

I've already written up the International Vampire Film and Arts Festival which I attended in July in its own right (LJ / DW), but deliberately saved reviewing the films I had seen there until I'd written up a large back-log of earlier viewings first. Now, their time has come.

( 13. Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974), dir. Brian Clemens )

( 14. Interview With The Vampire (1994), dir. Neil Jordan )

( 15. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher )

I first saw this during my trip to Australia in 2017 on a friend's telly-box (LJ / DW), but as I had never seen it in the cinema I was very happy to go along and watch it again at the Hyde Park Picturehouse with lady_lugosi1313 recently. It is, after all, very good.

Some things which particularly struck me this time, and / or I didn't mention last time, included the very effective use of silence and stillness throughout the movie. It creates a compelling sense of focus and isolation around Oskar and Eli when they meet in the play-area of their apartment building, underscoring how separate from everything around them their friendship is. And once that's established, it contrasts nicely with the sounds we do hear - yelling from Oskar's bullies, the buzz of conversation in the bar where the adults hang out, the roar in Oskar's ears as he is being held underwater in the pool.

Perhaps because I was seeing it on a big screen this time, or perhaps just because I already knew the story so could pick up smaller details, I also noticed that sometimes when Eli is in vampire-attack mode, CGI is used to make them appear both older and more savage. I really liked that - both the subtlety of it, so that you may or may not consciously notice it, and the properly frightening, supernatural edge it gives to the character (who could otherwise risk becoming too humanised). And although I had certainly remembered how touching the portrayal of Eli and Oskar's relationship is, I had forgotten that from time to time the film is also darkly humorous - as when we learn that Eli has appeared to save Oskar's life and make short work of his tormentors by seeing severed limbs and heads falling into the swimming pool from Oskar's underwater perspective.

In my head, this film now belongs on a list of five exceptionally-good (for different reasons) vampire movies which we've been lucky enough to have in the last now-slightly-more-than-ten years. In chronological order, those are:

• Let the Right One In (2008)
• Byzantium (2012)
• Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
• What We Do In The Shadows (2014)

I will be only too happy to consider further additions to the list if anyone wants to recommend any, or indeed release them!

This one I learnt of at the Polidori conference I went to in April (the one I never wrote up but did upload some pictures from). It was mentioned in a paper about Byronic vampire narratives of the 1960s, and although the speaker said quite explicitly that it wasn't a very good film, they also said that it featured a character going off to Greece and becoming involved in occultism, Peter Cushing, a scathing speech about reactionary Oxbridge academia, and a random psychedelic orgy scene which had clearly been tagged onto the rest of the movie in a desperate attempt to attract audiences. Though I like a good horror film as much as anyone, I also have a lot of time for brilliantly inept horror films, especially ones made in the 1960s and '70s, so this sounded fantastic to me. Luckily, lady_lugosi1313 agreed and had a copy, so we watched it.

It was indeed gloriously terrible. Not even the combined forces of Peter Cushing, Patrick Macnee and Edward Woodward could save it. The plot was confusing, most of the acting was dreadful, there were all sorts of continuity errors (like a lady going out of her apartment without any jacket on, but miraculously having acquired one as she stepped out into the street), and the dialogue was clearly written by someone who knew the sexual revolution had occurred but hadn't had any direct personal involvement and furthermore absolutely insisted on 'no homo'. lady_lugosi1313 actually wrote down some of the choicest examples of this at the time, which included:

• "I'm not a homosexual, you know."
• "Now let's skip the rather special case of the homosexual vampire."
• "You have your voyeurs, transvestites, narcissists, bestialists..."
• "Vampirism is a sado-masochistic sexual perversion affecting frigid women and impotent men."
• "Are you trying to tell me that a girl sucking blood from a man's neck can induce an orgasm?"
• "Some men can only make love in a coffin."

Somewhat oddly, it also made pretty good use of location footage in Oxford and (I was surprised to realise half-way though) both Kyrenia and Salamis in Cyprus, which I visited with rosamicula two years ago. A nice collection of shots of both from the film is visible here, but I'm afraid I did the same with the Cyprus trip as the Polidori conference - uploaded pictures here, but never wrote a post to put them into. I guess I may as well at least drop a couple of the ones which match up best with the film in here:




All in all, we had a mightily enjoyable evening watching this, eased along by the good offices of a couple of vampire cocktails apiece. Our only disappointment was that the shoe-horned psychedelic orgy scene turned out to have been excised from the cut of the film we watched - but luckily it was included as an extra on the DVD. Marvellous.

Life is genuinely a bit quieter for me at the moment than it has been for a while, and (touch wood) should stay that way until the end of August, so I'm taking the opportunity to try to get back on top of things a bit. I've been tidying and cleaning my house so far today, and now turn my attention to my unblogged film list - not that I am really likely to make great inroads into it today, given that I am probably going out to see another film this evening. ladylugosi1313 will appreciate just how far I am going back to review this one, although luckily I did take some notes on it at the time, so I have at least something of a starting point.

Anyway, this is a classic and very famous Powell and Pressburger film which centres around the lives and loves of a ballet company engaged in putting on an adaptation of 'The Red Shoes' by Hans Christian Anderson. The story tells of a young girl who yearns for a pair of beautiful red shoes, but when she acquires them through the manipulative machinations of the evil shoemaker, she finds that they compel her to dance on and on until she dies. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the film, we are treated to an amazing sequence, probably some 15-20 minutes long, which is just the company performing the ballet. The relevant cast members were all actual professional dancers, so it is essentially a filmed version of an actual ballet performance, but enhanced also by the potential of what film allows them to do. This ranges from the relatively simple and obvious business of close-ups and camera tracking, which a static audience in a real theatre can't benefit from, to special effects such as the girl seeing a vision of herself already dancing in the shoes when she peers in to the shop window to wonder over them, and then her dancing through fantastical landscapes using an early version of what's now green-screen when she is first experiencing the joy of having acquired them.

Around this, the story of the ballet company echoes the narrative of feeling compelled to dance with tragic consequences in a real-world setting. The lead role in the ballet is played by Vicky Page, who is just emerging into the ballet world as a new rising star, and feels a strong vocational compulsion within herself to make her way in the profession and be the best dancer she can be. This is externally personified by Boris Lermontov, the ballet company's director, who takes her as his protégé and demands of her to devote her entire life to dancing. But meanwhile she also falls in love with the company's composer, Julian Custer, and runs off to marry him - only to discover and admit to a jealous Boris some months later that his career as a composer has taken over, and she has barely danced since their marriage. It is tragic and terrible and very emotively played, but it does essentially boil down to a very gendered story about how a woman can't have both love and career success. Even worse, because Vicky's own internal conflict about this is externally personified into the two men, it is largely framed as a conflict between them within which she has no real agency. Vicky's response is thus to run in tears from the theatre, horribly compelled by the red shoes she is wearing, and jump from a terrace into the path of an oncoming train. That is, two men fight over a woman until she breaks.

It was a visually very beautiful film, beyond the ballet scenes I've already mentioned. The colour was over-saturated, but with a taupe tint - probably largely because that was what they could achieve using still quite early colour technology, but it looked amazing anyway, with the red shoes themselves incredibly rich. Some of the cinematography also reminded me of Fellini's films - especially shots of people looking smallish and isolated in large, splendid rooms which accentuated their fragility. Some of the dialogue struck me the same way, too. Fellini's characters often make very simple, even banal, statements which acquire a lot of their meaning from context, and these characters quite often did the same. Fellini was in his late 20s and just getting started in the film industry at this time, so maybe he saw it and picked up some ideas?

Anyway, very beautiful and effective overall, as long as you can look around the inherently rather misogynistic central conceit.

Obviously I’ve seen this before, but I wanted to revisit it because I am going on this Dracula Society trip organised around its locations, studios and director in May / June (excite!), and lady_lugosi1313 was very happy to join me in the enterprise. We found a nicely-restored version online, which was beautifully crisp and also contained several scenes neither of us could remember seeing before – e.g. the escape and pursuit of a prisoner from the asylum called Knock. It looks like quite a lot has been rediscovered and reinserted into the film since I last saw it, as the version we watched was about 1h30 long, whereas I’m pretty sure I only remember it being just over an hour previously. And it has gained a great deal in the process, with more time to establish the story at the beginning and all of the characters and the relationships between them coming across as better developed and more convincing.

We also attempted to match it up with lady_lugosi1313’s blood-red vinyl copy of the soundtrack which Hammer composer James Bernard wrote for the film in the 1990s, but since that was about 50 minutes long and the film more like 90, it was never going to be a perfect match! Periodically we either paused the record or went back a bit, but most of the time they were well out of sync. It didn’t really matter, though, as both were just so amazing and while the music was clearly designed in the first place to match the tone of particular scenes, it was all broadly Gothic and atmospheric, so it was never really at odds with the action.

The special effects deployed in the grand finale, when Count Orlok fades into nothing in the morning sunlight, are famous – not least because this scene first introduced the notion that sunlight is fatal to vampires. Orlok rising up in his coffin on the Demeter, presumably done by putting him on a board which could be pushed up using some kind of hidden mechanism, is almost as well-known. But over the years that had meant I’d come to assume they were the only two special effects shots in the film, and actually on rewatching I was struck by how much more widely they are used. Others I noticed included Orlok opening a door without needing to touch it in his castle, similarly unrolling a tarpaulin without needing to touch it on the ship, suddenly appearing sitting on his coffin in the ship and passing through the door of the warehouse in Wisborg without needing to open it at all. Speeded up film was also used at several points to show the supernatural speed of his movements, and negative image when his carriage is thundering through the woods. This is all just one particularly good example of why film showed itself so early as a medium well-suited to fantastic stories. Even the simplest special effects can do such a lot to convey supernatural activity, and Murnau was right there on front line of the technology.

Though Nosferatu was famously pulled after Florence Stoker sued its producers for copyright infringement, and was supposed to have been entirely destroyed, it had already been distributed overseas before this happened, and as a consequence never really ‘disappeared’ in the way you might expect in those circumstances. Rather, bootleg copies continued to circulate in both the UK and the US (I would link to pages explaining this, but between how fiddly that is on my tablet and how shonky the train wifi is, I’ve given up – just Google Nosferatu bootleg if you want to read about it). With that in mind, I’m now pretty sure after having rewatched it that at least somebody involved in the production of Hammer’s Dracula (1958) had seen it. The destruction-by-sunlight ending is almost enough to guarantee that (and indeed the wider impact of that scene also shows how the film continued to influence storytellers despite Florence’s efforts), but in addition to that there are also scenes of Hutter (the Jonathan Harker character) looking at the bite marks on his neck in a mirror which match up well with Hammer, as does Orlok conceiving a desire for his wife (Ellen, the Mina character) after seeing a framed picture of her amongst Hutter's possessions in the castle. Dracula being able to open doors without needing to touch them crops up later in Hammer’s Scars (1970), as well. Love me an inter-text.

Anyway, I’m now very excited indeed for my holiday and will be sure to take many pictures when I am there!

‘Kay, so I’m on a train to London, and I’m going to try to use the time to catch up with some film reviews. We’re going back to January for this one, which I saw with glitzfrau at the Hyde Park Picture House. Anyway, I probably don’t need to say a great deal about it, given that everyone in the world has seen this one, and indeed that it has won multiple awards including an Oscar since.

Anyway, it’s great. It is a story all about women maximising the power available to them in a male-dominated world complete with explicit lesbianism, and everything about the production at every level is superbly well-executed. Olivia Colman deserved her Oscar for how well she acted having had a stroke alone. The moment we saw her, before anyone said or did anything, I recognise straight away what was supposed to have happened. The lighting was also brilliant – one of the most natural-looking depictions of candle-lit interiors I have ever seen, which are very hard to do on film. And Rachel Weisz looked so amazing in her breeches during the shooting scenes, that was worth the entrance price on its own.

As a historian, though, I think the thing I’ll appreciate it for most long-term was its overt creative anachronism, as seen in e.g. many of the clothes, the awesomely-funny dance-off, the music (Baroque Greatest Hits but with a modern twist), etc. No production is ever going to be 100% historically accurate – only actual history was ever that – and attempting to do so can ham-string a good story that would otherwise resonate strongly with its modern audience. So lampshading it by making it clear that for all the truthiness, this isn’t actually the ‘truth’ seems like a good solution. Maybe there’s a general drift in that direction in the creative industries at the moment? It’s certainly what the TV series Britannia has been doing for example. Anyway, I like it and I hope the immense success of this film will encourage more in the same vein.