strange_complex | Entries tagged with paganism

I don't think I'm going to manage to complete another book before the end of 2023 now, so it seems like time to post this list of what I read this year, with brief notes on each. I don't have pictures of all of them, because I've already returned one borrowed book to its owner and read another on Kindle, but these are the ones I do have:

( List and notes under here )

Still trying valiantly to catch up, here...

1. Marcus Sedgwick (2006), My Swordhand is Singing - a YA novel set in seventeenth-century Transylvania and drawing deeply on local vampire and other folklore. The protagonist, a teenage boy named Peter, has to deal with his alcoholic, troubled father, the cold and poverty of life as a woodcutter in a Transylvanian forest, his feelings for two different girls and of course corpses rising from their graves. My main abiding impressions are of snowy forests, a night in a hut besieged by a vampire, and the family horse, Sultan, who is as much of a character as any of the humans in the book.

2. Tim Lucas (2005), The Book of Renfield: a gospel of Dracula - an attempt at giving Renfield a fully fleshed-out backstory explaining his life and character beyond what Stoker includes in Dracula. In essence, he's been being visited by a divine/demonic being whom he knows as Milady, and we later learn also manifests as Dracula, since his childhood. It engages very closely with Stoker's novel, using an epistolary format and incorporating chunks of the original text (printed in bold type to identify them). But I must say it isn't the backstory I'd have written for Renfield, and in particular I wouldn't have made Dracula so straightforwardly godlike. Some subtlety was lost, there.

3. William Trimble, ed. and Anna Berglund, trans. (2022), Powers of Darkness: the wild translation of Dracula from turn-of-the-century Sweden (read on Kindle) - this is the full, original, free adaptation of Dracula which the Icelandic version found a few years ago turned out to be only about the first third of. It's as much a completely different story as the loosest screen adaptations of Stoker's novel, in that although it does still cover its major outlines, it goes to some completely different places, and ends with Draculitz's (i.e. Dracula's) destruction in London rather than after a chase back to Transylvania. I can't begin to go into detail about it here, and indeed wrote a comparative review of this and the other English translation by Rickard Berghorn released a couple of months afterwards for the Dracula Society zine, Voices from the Vaults anyway, so my thoughts are on record elsewhere. But it was certainly an intriguing read, if not exactly brilliant literature. It's basically hastily thrown-together pulp fiction, padded out with passages borrowed from multiple sources (not just Stoker) and markedly interested in theories of evolutionary degeneration and the supremacy of a superior race. Not unusual stuff for the turn of the century. It will be interesting to see if anyone ever manages to solve the mystery of who wrote it, but a mistake to assume (as several people working on the question have) that the author would be the same person as the author of any of the texts which were plagiarised in the process.

4. Jeanne Kalogridis (1994) Covenant with the Vampire - not recommended. The essential set-up is that the main character and his wife return from nineteenth-century England to his ancestral home in Transylvania, where they are frustratingly slow to realise that the great-uncle and patriarch is a vampire (specifically, of course, Dracula). Later on, it transpires that the family covenant requires the latest male heir, now the main character, to help the vampire cover up his killings in return for him and his own family being protected. In fairness, once this comes out, the very dull process of slow realisation is replaced by a great deal of gory and transgressive detail, including dismemberments, incest and necrophilia. Let's just say that I really did not want to read the word 'thrusting' in that latter context.

5. Jim Shepard (1998) Nosferatu in Love - I picked this out of a box of books being given away by a colleague moving to another university, and it's absolutely the best book I read this year. It might as well be called 'Murnau in Love', as it's the story of his loves and losses over his lifetime - particularly Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele. The main narrative covers Murnau's youth in Berlin, the production of Nosferatu, Der Letzte Mann and Tabu, before a coda returning to 1915 and then his death in 1931. It's lightly unconventional in style without being overly mannered, in that it starts off in the third person, then switches to first-person diary entries from Murnau while shooting Nosferatu, and then moves between the two in the section on Tabu. Its characterisation is great and it's highly readable, but it's also extremely insightful about how silent film works and what it can do, on a level I'd usually expect to encounter in an academic book on film rather than a novel. E.g. in Murnau's diary entries: "We're no longer astonished by the technically unheard-of. We're surprised on those days the newspaper does not trumpet new breakthroughs. So we look for the fantastic within ourselves. We notice the child or the dog who walks to the mirror, caught by the miracle of the doubled face. We wonder: If this second self, the Other, were to come out of the mirror's frame?...." and "For the vampire's arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience." It of course also captures the context of Germany in the 1910s and '20s, including the First World War, post-war inflation, and growing antisemitism (e.g. Murnau and his classmates at Reinhardt's theatre school defend a Jewish student against an instructor's prejudices), and tries to show how some of this shaped Murnau as a film-maker. In flying school at the beginning of the war, Murnau begins to think about the implications for film of a moving perspective, like a plane flying through and across the landscape, and later develops camera tracks to try to replicate it for Der Letzte Mann. But the main impacts for him are of course the losses he experiences: "The war was drinking the blood of millions. Allmenröder was gone. Hans was gone. The war had taken his partner in sadness and, before that, his lover." Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys Murnau's films.

6. Robert Aickman, ed. (1966), The Third Fontana Book of Ghost Stories - bought serendipitously at an instance of the Leeds Alternative Market (a biannual goth market) because it was edited by Aickman and contains a story by him. I read it in the run-up to Christmas, because I like to make a point of reading compilations of ghost stories around that time of year, and discovered in the final few pages that the last story (Aickman's, 'The Visiting Star') actually culminates on Christmas Eve - though I think I ended up reading it on Boxing Day or something like that instead. Just the ticket.

7. Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac (2012), The Theology of Dracula: reading the book of Stoker as sacred text - argh, this book was so frustrating! I bought it because I could see from Google that it had quite a lot to say about the references to Classical deities in Dracula (Demeter, Morpheus etc), and I wanted to read it for my Classical references in Dracula paper. It gives more attention to that material than any other publication on Dracula that I've seen, and contains some good insights. It also deals with various earlier vampire stories, especially the various theatrical and operatic adaptations of Polidori's 'The Vampyre', and makes good points about their pagan and mystical elements too. But unfortunately the author totally undermines the value of those points by writing throughout as though his reading of the text is a profound revealed truth. Basically, almost every sentence is like this, and it very quickly becomes unbearable: "Feet planted on the Earth, silhouetted against a darkening night sky that glitters with its brilliant inhabitants, crushed serpent, Little Dragon, at her feet, Mina presents an Isaian or Marian figure and returns the narrative to its beginning and the rosary." I would have abandoned it half-way through, except that I had to read so much of it for my paper that it then became a sunk-cost issue, and I persisted out of sheer bloody-mindedness so that I could say I'd finished it.

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.

This is a terrible-brilliant book about Vlad as Dracula, and the first of a trilogy. It's one of many written following the publication of Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally (1972), In Search of Dracula, which took their (rather over-egged) argument that Stoker's Dracula was based on a profound and detailed knowledge of the life of the historical Vlad Dracula, and spun glorious fiction out of it. Florescu and McNally misunderstood how Stoker (and indeed fiction generally) worked and their case has now been comprehensively deconstructed, but the opposite extreme of arguing that Stoker's Dracula has nothing whatsoever to do with the historial Voievod is also just as wrong, and in any case I don't really care and still love the connection. It is my personal head-canon. So books which adhere to it are my happy place.

This one presents itself in grand Gothic tradition, just like Dracula, as an authentic 'found' document - specifically the memoir of Mircea, son of Vlad Dracula, written in 1480, discovered by Abraham Van Helsing in a Russian monastery in 1898, translated and annotated by him, and then 'found' again by Peter Tremayne in an Islington street market. The story starts in Rome, where Mircea, twenty-two years old, has recently been orphaned following the death of his mother, Dracula's second wife, who had fled there for safety in 1462 when Dracula discovered she was having an affair. He is well-to-do but gets himself into trouble after seducing the wife of a local prince, and decides that the time is right to take up an invitation from his older half-brothers, Vlad and Mihail, to return to Wallachia and claim his share of their birthright now that Dracula is dead. Naturally, when he gets there, he finds them living in a remote and spooky castle, appearing only at night and plotting to turn him into a vampire so he can help them restore the house of Dracula to its rightful mastery over the world. Meanwhile, Dracula himself is not as dead as people have been led to believe...

'Peter Tremayne' is apparently a pseudonym for Peter Berresford Ellis, who is also a Celtic historian and now best-known for the Sister Fildelma murder mystery series. I actually think it's fair enough for a non-specialist historian not to have debunked Florescu and McNally's theories about Dracula for himself, especially since the main grounds for questioning their claims came from the study of Stoker's notes in the 1980s. Meanwhile, his historical grounding is clear throughout, and he has certainly absorbed what was known about the historical Vlad in the the late '70s pretty thoroughly and gives room in the novel to different perspectives on him. Mircea begins the story believing that his father was a popular ruler who had been just to punish the Saxons for trying to overthrow him, but as he meets Saxons on his journey through Wallachia who don't know he is Vlad's son, he discovers that to them he was a bloodthirsty tyrant. Later, in Tirgoviste, he meets an abbot in whose view Vlad was driven by an excessive puritanical austerity which led him to punish the immoral, but also wonders whether the horrific stories about him can really be true, or invented by his enemies to discredit him. Others note that VLad may have been harsh and ruthless, but at least he drove the Turks out, while Mircea himself knows of plenty of other contemporary rulers who impale at least as much of Dracula - including John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (aka the Butcher of England).

That said, some bits of Tremayne's background research felt like they had been crow-barred in for the sake of it. On the way to Wallachia, Mircea travels through Dubrovnik, but no action takes place there. Rather, it is mentioned, we are treated to a paragraph about its history, economy and demography which reads for all the world as though it had been copied out of an encyclopedia, and then we just go straight into "When I left Dubrovnik, I noticed almost immediately a drop in temperature." So... why bother with a copy-and-paste description of what was actually nothing more than a staging-post on his journey? Meanwhile, there are plenty more nods to Stoker's novel beyond the simple presentation of the story as a first-person documentary account. E.g. Mircea sees blue flames flickering in the darkness as he approaches Castle Dracula, which his coach driver stops and bends over to do something. Later, he learns that one of the ways Dracula may have become a vampire is by dabbling in sorcery and conjuring the devil, while in the final moments of the novel Dracula tells Mircea he has not won because he will spread his revenge over centuries and has only just begun.

( The castle )

( Brother John )

( Dracula and his origins )

After all this, the actual ending felt slightly disappointing. Mircea fights off most of the vampires with a sword blessed by the Pope, through which he feels some kind of magic power surging as he lifts it against them. That felt like a bit too much of an easy solution, I think - as when a Doctor Who story is essentially solved by waving the sonic screwdriver. During the sword-fight, a candelabra is knocked over into a tapestry, setting the castle ablaze, and Dracula himself is lost somewhere in the flames - which of course creates plenty of opportunities for him to escape and go on to further adventures. As Van Helsing spells out in a final note appended to the manuscript, that includes those recorded by Stoker.

If there's another book out there which combines Stoker's Dracula, the historical Dracula and Hammerish notions of vampirism as rooted in ancient paganism, I'd sure as hell love to read it. Until then, this one will enjoy a special place in my heart, despite its occasional ineptitudes and rather weak ending. I remain unclear as to why it is titled 'Dracula Unborn', as I couldn't see that that title matched up with any of its characters.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/680533.html

These were my Christmas Eve and Christmas Day viewings, thematically linked by the fact that they are both about human beings eking out a living in marginal conditions on the edges of the habitable world, and beset by Things out there in the darkness.

( 20. Rare Exports (2010), dir. Jalmari Helander )

( 21. 30 Days of Night (2007), dir. David Slade )

So, OK I guess, but I've definitely seen better, and of these two films I enjoyed Rare Exports a lot more.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/680314.html

I haven't been watching very many films recently, as I have simply been too busy, but at least that means it isn't too big an undertaking to catch up on the reviews.

17. The Mummy (1932), dir. Karl Freund

I've seen this one before (LJ / DW), and indeed

lady_lugosi1313 and I followed it up by working our way through the whole of the Universal Mummy series - an enterprise which I would highly recommend. Its great and all the things I mentioned in my first review still very much impress on a second viewing - the well-informed and indeed cutting-edge for the time treatment of archaeological issues, the agency of the main female character, the striking use of deliberately vintage-looking film footage to show the past in a vision and the amazing ending in which Imhotep is destroyed via the power of a pagan goddess. But maybe I didn't say enough about Boris Karloff's performance last time, except to comment on his pleasingly malevolent delivery of the dialogue. That goes together with some excellent eye acting - shifty glances and menacing stares which are ably enhanced by good lighting and close framing - as well as a stiff gait and some chunky lifts which helped him to look taller than everyone else in the film despite only actually being 5'11". Like all the best monsters, Imhotep also has a complexity which Karloff brings out well, especially when speaking dialogue about how he loves Helen Grosvenor for her soul, not her body. Synchro-watching this time with

lady_lugosi1313, we agreed that if we had to choose one or the other of them, he would be a better option than sappy tedious Frank, the human love interest played by the same guy as Jonathan Harker in Dracula, who does precisely nothing helpful or interesting throughout the entire film.

18. Dracula is not Dead (2017), dir. Luizo Vega

This was screened as part of this year's IVFAF, which I went to IRL last year (LJ / DW). I didn't get to engage with it very much this year, because the first of its two days clashed with the academic conference I spoke at recently, and after all that intensive academic Zooming the last thing I wanted was more of the same on the second day. However, by the evening I did feel more or less up to staring at vampire-related stuff streamed to my telly, and as this was the only full-length film I could find in that timeslot which sounded interesting (on the basis of this trailer and this article), I went for it. It is basically a series of vignettes loosely tied together into a story by our hostess, Vampira (Mariana Genesio Pena), who explains what is going on between the various vampy characters we see. The primary aesthetic is a cross between a fetish fashion shoot and an industrial music video, though it's generally experimental and plays around with various techniques - e.g. some sections are filmed in the style of silent film. The 'plot' (such as it is) is that Dracula, who dominates the Paris fetish club scene along with his lover Lilith, is dying for want of virgin blood in this modern world, but I have to say I find that whole premise rather tiresome. I also wasn't wild about the sequence in which Dracula hears of the existence of one last remaining virgin, Lucy, whom we see bathing erotically in a lake, and who is then 'saved' from Dracula's bite by Van Helsing pursuing her through the bushes and basically raping her. On a charitable reading it might have been meant to make us reconsider the idealisation of virginity and our notions of heroism, but I am not convinced the director's thinking was anything like that sophisticated. Still, Vampira the hostess, who happens to be trans, was absolutely great. Her sassy, worldly, gossipy persona will be what stays with me from this film the most.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/678461.html

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.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/675059.html

I have been wanting to explore more of Bram Stoker's fiction in order to get a sense of the wider context for Dracula, and chose this book to start with because it is set in Cruden Bay, where I went with the Dracula Society in Bram's footsteps in summer 2018 (LJ / DW). While we were there, local Stoker researcher Mike Shepherd showed us the places where he had stayed or which had inspired his fiction, with The Mystery of the Sea featuring fairly heavily because of its local setting. I read Mike's book, When Brave Men Shudder: the Scottish origins of Dracula about six months later (LJ / DW), which revealed that for Mike, The Mystery of the Sea was important not only for its engagement with the Cruden Bay region, but also for its insights into Stoker's spiritual outlook. So that intensified my desire to read it, and here we are.

( Similarities to and differences from Dracula )

( Authorial self-insertion )

( Bram's spirituality )

( Gender roles )

( Blatant racism )

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/658818.html

I read this because it was published while Stoker was writing Dracula, and both use pagan gods to stand for the abject, evil and Satanic - though Machen's novella focuses almost wholly on that idea, whereas in Stoker's Dracula it's only part of a tapestry of related concepts. The Great God Pan is part of efflorescence of fin-de-siècle stories and artworks about Pan, mainly inspired by an anecdote about his death in Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum 17 and thoughtfully examined in this 1992 book chapter, which I wanted to get to grips with as part of Dracula's context and a possible influence.

Having read it, though, I don't think the influence is particularly strong or direct. Both certainly reflect similar anxieties about what lurks beneath the façade of contemporary civilisation, within us, in the past and / or in the untamed places of nature - but those themes are more or less what all horror stories are about. And both present their stories as a collection of accounts from different viewpoints which only gradually come together - but again, many late 19th century novels did that. What makes them quite different is that Dracula is manifest and present within his eponymous novel, whereas Pan does not manifest directly to any of the point-of-view characters in Machen's. Indeed, he isn't wholly an embodied being at all. Rather, Pan, Satan and Nodens are all treated as attempts to express by metaphor an evil too horrific and inhuman for human minds otherwise to understand; as much something psychological, or the pure concept of evil itself, as anything embodied. As one character puts it, "Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale."

That was all slightly disappointing to me, as I was hoping for something both a bit more embodied and a bit more ambiguous - a Pan simultaneously alluring and terrifying, who might sound sweet music through wooded glades and yet also leap savagely with snorting nose and bloodied fingernails upon the unwary transgressor. Machen's Pan doesn't really span that divide, existing rather on the wholly-terrifying side of the equation. I shall have to browse through the book chapter I've linked above for something more along the lines I was looking for - unless anyone reading can recommend a different fin-de-siècle story or novel which comes closer to ticking those boxes? Do I want G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday or Saki's 'The Music on the Hill' (which sounds good anyway), or what?

Anyway, although it wasn't quite the novel I was expecting or perhaps really wanted, I still got good value out of reading this one. The way it draws on Classical motifs, and especially the landscape and gods of Roman Britain, to construct its image of evil reminded me of the realisation I had made while watching the BBC TV version of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit that it is in part a response to the discovery of the London Mithraeum (LJ / DW). I guess this novel, and other material like it, also forms part of the literary backdrop which made Kneale's story possible.

It does some interesting things with story structure. The chapters from different points of view I've already mentioned, but the final chapter is literally called 'The Fragments', and includes texts with deliberate lacunae in them to bring the story to a dim, half-understood conclusion which the reader is left to patch together. This is essential to the way Machen has dealt with Pan throughout, the whole point being that no human mind can witness him / it without going insane. And it plays around nicely with the relationship between city and country. Pan is unleashed in the remote Welsh / Romano-British countryside, but his worst effects are felt in the heart of London. So Machen uses rural metaphors to describe the encroachment of the rural (primitive) into the city (civilised). One dimly-lit London street looks "as dark and gloomy as a forest in winter", while in another "the wind blew as blithely as upon the meadows and the scented gorse".

The critical reception section of the Wikipedia page is right to draw attention to its outright misogyny, though (third para). The force which Pan represents is brought into the world in the person of a woman, Helen Vaughan, whose main modus operandi is to lure men to her and then drive them to kill themselves. Even worse, she is born in the first place by the actions of a doctor who performs a brain operation on her mother, Mary, and who justifies his actions to a demurring friend on the grounds that "I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit." Mary, by the way, is only seventeen, and in addition to seeming to think he has the right to perform experimental brain surgery on her, the doctor has also evidently brought her up to call him 'dear' and solicit kisses from him in what read to me as a very power-abusing relationship. The operation destroys Mary's mind, while her body survives only long enough to give birth to the child, Helen, (always the true purpose of women in misogynistic novels) and while the doctor does come to regret his actions by the end of the story, it's not at all clear that he would have done if it hadn't been for the consequences which followed. Both Helen and Mary also exist only from the two-dimensional perspective of the male characters - Helen never speaks, but just goes round being evil and ruining men; Mary speaks a few lines before the doctor's operation, but only to submit meekly to his will. Still, Wikipedia also tells me that there is a feminist response to the novel called Helen's Story by Rosanne Rabinowitz which tells the whole story from Helen's point of view - and that could be truly awesome.

If you'd like to read The Great God Pan yourself, the whole thing is on Project Gutenberg, and I can confirm that their free Kindle-formatted version works very nicely.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/645999.html

Just over a year ago, in June 2018, I went on holiday with DracSoc to Cruden Bay (formerly known as Port Erroll), a little fishing village on the east coast of Scotland where Bram Stoker spent several summer holidays and probably wrote most of Dracula. As part of the trip, we met up with local resident Mike Shepherd, who had been researching Bram's visits to Cruden Bay, and guided us around the place pointing out Stoker-related landmarks and explaining what he did there. At the time, he had basically finished this book and was in the process of looking for a publisher for it, so he walked around clutching sheafs of print-outs from it, and periodically reading relevant passages - mainly quotations from Stoker's work. Here's a picture of Mike talking to some slightly chilly DracSoc members about Bram walking up and down Cruden Bay beach and the inspiration he drew from the sight and sound of the sea, with just such a sheaf in hand:

The book was published later that year, went straight on my Christmas list, and now I have read and very much enjoyed it. Most of the information about Bram's visits there I knew already from what Mike told us during our trip (and which I wrote up after the holiday: LJ / DW), but it was nice to see a few extra historical pictures in the published book, and I also learnt a bit more than I'd fully grasped before about Cruden Bay's development during the years that Stoker was visiting. Basically, he was a bit of a pioneer, discovering the village by chance during a walking holiday when it was still very remote and isolated. But soon after his first stay there in 1894, major local developments began with the aim of turning it into the 'Brighton of Aberdeenshire' - and the name change from Port Erroll to Cruden Bay was part of this, as it was judged to sound less related to trade and hard work, and more charming and idyllic. Work began in 1895 on a local railway station which was completed in 1897, while a hotel and golf course opened in 1899. So as Stoker continued to visit annually, the village changed entirely from a quiet retreat to a popular resort full of contemporary notables. This was obviously great for the local economy, but changed things rather for Bram, and probably explains why on his last visit there in 1910 he stayed in a cottage at Whinnyfold, at the other end of the bay, which would have been markedly cheaper as well as quieter - particularly important for him by that time on grounds of ill health.

Alongside Mike's careful research into these sorts of historical details is a second thread to the book, which he hinted at during our visit but kept closer to his chest. This is all about how the natural landscape and local customs of Cruden Bay may have appealed to and inspired Bram, given his well-documented passion for the similarly nature-venerating and pantheistic poetry of Walt Whitman. There's certainly a basis for this. Whitman poems like 'On The Beach At Night Alone' and 'With Antecedents' do speak of the oneness of all things in nature, and the acceptance and syncretism of all faiths as reflections of a single spiritual truth. And Mike quotes plenty of examples and passages from Stoker's work which reflect similar thinking - e.g. Esse, the main character in his novel The Shoulder of Shasta, who is explicitly described as a pantheist, or the mystical / magical old woman Gormala in The Mystery of the Sea (which is set in Cruden Bay and which I need to read urgently!), whose beliefs are described as deriving from 'some of the old pagan mythology'. I found this helpful and interesting, and it certainly gave me more of a sense of what had impressed Bram so much about Whitman's poetry than Skal's biography (LJ / DW), from which you would be forgiven for concluding that it was wholly about repressed homosexuality. But I also think Mike might be indulging slightly in projection and wishful over-thinking when he makes statements like these:

"Bram discovered an entire world-view in Walt Whitman's poems and connected with them. This was an outlook that led from his childhood connection with nature and progressed to an acceptance of pantheism. This encompassed and subsumed the Protestant faith of his boyhood." (p. 179)

"I walk along the same beach every day trying to imagine what Bram Stoker was thinking when he walked there some 120 years ago. My suspicion is yes: Bram believed in a mystical universe, that land is the realm of the material world and the sea is the living embodiment of the spiritual world. It's essentially the age-old belief of the Port Erroll fishermen; that a nameless spirit resides in the sea." (p. 203)

"Here's what I think. Bram Stoker's spiritual outlook appears to be more or less that of Walt Whitman: it encompassed all religions past and present and rejected none. If a religious belief was real to the person that held it, then their gods and spirits were real to Bram Stoker. That the fishermen of Port Erroll could simultaneously hold Christian and pagan beliefs would be seen as natural by Bram." (p. 206)

I totally get where Mike is coming from on all of this, and I appreciate the way he has signalled this thinking as his own opinion, rather than verifiable fact. But the idea that Bram Stoker consciously identified as a pantheist in a way that 'encompassed and subsumed' his Protestantism, or believed that all gods and spirits were equally real, doesn't ring true to me from what else I've read about him (quite a lot by this stage!). He was certainly fascinated by other religious traditions and enjoyed probing at their implications in his creative writing. There's a very good article about the religious implications of Dracula (which requires a JSTOR subscription or library to access in full but has a reasonable abstract here), which reveals some fascinating unresolved and probably unconscious tensions and implicit dark undercurrents in the way Stoker portrays various Christian traditions and their relationship with (what were seen as) superstitions. That is, it's clearly all a locus of unease which he keeps circling back to, and I think it's perfectly accurate to say he was fascinated by and sympathetic to ideas like pantheism. But still, at face value he always remains resolutely Christian and indeed somewhat pious in his proclaimed outlook.

I didn't mind too much, though, because in the process of exploring the potential relationship between Stoker's beliefs and local pagan traditions Mike devoted two whole chapters to them - taking 'pagan' to mean pretty much anything relating to the veneration of nature, unnamed spirits, superstitions and anything not sanctioned by the church. Stoker himself does get rather left behind during those two chapters, which both more or less begin and end with brief comments along the lines of "this is the sort of stuff Stoker might have heard about or been inspired by when he visited Cruden Bay", but I was perfectly happy to read about them in their own right because I love that stuff. There were a few things which rang Wicker Man-ish bells for me, like a reference to Shoney, god of the sea (to whom Lord Summerisle offers barrels of ale). And I was particularly tickled, for surname-related reasons, to learn about the custom of the Goodman's Croft or Fold - a small area of agricultural land deliberately left untilled for the 'Goodman', a generic word for landowner here meant in the sense of a spirit living on the land. I've always understood it before just to mean (along with Goodwife) a wholly generic term similar to 'Gentleman', but I like the idea of it meaning a spirit of the land a lot more.

Overall a very interesting book which needed writing, which Mike as a Cruden Bay resident was the perfect person to undertake, and which will especially appeal to those who (like me) enjoy a bit of Scottish folk tradition as well as the work of Bram Stoker

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/644266.html

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.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/627322.html

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.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/611849.html

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!

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/604625.html

As mentioned at the end of my last Hammer Dracula review, I have set myself the intellectual challenge of seeing if I can conjure up an internally-consistent continuity framework for the entire series, even though no such thing was ever used or imagined by the people who originally made the films. For the lulz, I'm interpreting the challenge in the most extensive possible terms, and am thus going to (at least attempt) to include not only Brides of Dracula (a perfectly good film which presents no particular continuity challenges anyway) but also The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (a terrible film which utterly contradicts almost everything Hammer had done before) within my remit. May the gods have mercy upon my soul...

Brides is the first avowed sequel to Hammer's original 1958 Dracula, but in spite of its title Dracula himself is not in it. His place is taken instead by ( David Peel as the Baron Meinster )

Up against the Baron is Peter Cushing as ( an impeccable Van Helsing )

There is a great supporting cast of ( classic British character actors )

Some nice misdirection sets us up to expect that the Baroness Meinster is the vampire at the beginning of the film, ( She's not, but she is probably the best character in the film anyway )

( Vampirism as a sort of pagan cult )

( Lesbian and poly readings )

( Sets, props and other production elements )

Next time: kung-fu vampire-hunting adventures in turn-of-the-century China - so help me.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

It's taken me a fair old while to finish this book: in fact, I interrupted it for The Merlin Conspiracy for a while, as it seemed a bit much back in late February, and I was in need of something lighter. Bulwer-Lytton's prose style is so famously overblown that there is an annual bad fiction contest named in his honour; and as for the florid Victorian poetry which he inserted at every available opportunity - well, reader, I skipped it.

This is not to say he's actually a bad writer. Once you attune to his rhythms and get into the highly mannered spirit of his prose, it can be marvellous fun. Check out this fantastic description of the Witch of Vesuvius, for example:

"With stony eyes turned upon them — with a look that met and fascinated theirs — they beheld in that fearful countenance the very image of a corpse! — the same, the glazed and lustreless regard, the blue and shrunken lips, the drawn and hollow jaw — the dead, lank hair, of a pale grey — the livid, green, ghastly skin, which seemed all surely tinged and tainted by the grave!" (Book 3 chapter 9)

Now that's a proper witch, all right. But an endless succession of passages like that can get a bit tedious, especially when the subject turns to long-winded musing or moralising.

Nonetheless, it was worth persevering - not least, of course, because I have now finished it just in time to see whether or not it's conveyed a legacy to the forth-coming Who episode, The Fires of Pompeii. Judging from the trailers so far available, it looks like the influence isn't going to be that direct. But then again, this novel is really the ur-text as far as fictional representations of Pompeii go, and I can certainly see traces of it in the Who audio adventure, The Fires of Vulcan now I've finished it. More on that, later...

( Historical realism )

( Ancient religion )

( Romantic idealism )

( Bulwer-Lytton and the visual arts )

Finally, because I can, and because I want to know what's come from where when reading or watching further fictional representations of Pompeii, I finish with a table summarising key story elements in the three main examples I've encountered so far:

( A very big table )

Just a few more hours now till I can see how The Fires of Pompeii fits in with all that!

Yesterday evening, I ventured along with

nalsa,

big_daz,

myfirstkitchen and two other folk (who are probably on LJ but I don't know their usernames) into the remarkably friendly and agenda-free territory of the University Chaplaincy, for the sake of an audience with Doctor Who writer, Paul Cornell. We got there a bit early, so had time to settle down with free cups of coffee amongst the bean-bags, and chat to Paul (whom

myfirstkitchen already knew) while we waited for the talk proper to begin.

( And an excellent session it was, too )

Finally, while I'm writing, I also want to rave about ( my fantastic new shoes! )