In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

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.

I'm watching huge numbers of films at the moment, mainly with Joel, and indeed going about all over the place doing lots of cool things as well. Which is awesome, but while I'm managing to record the various trips and adventures on FB at least, there is a big queue of films waiting to have anything at all written about them anywhere. This post is an attempt to address something of that backlog.


33. The Monster Squad (1987), dir. Fred Dekker

Watched with Joel in Whitby on my birthday, and not of course to be confused with The Monster Club (1981). While we should in theory have been able to cast it onto the massive TV on the wall of the apartment where we were staying, unfortunately the wifi was so bad that we actually couldn't, and ended up watching it huddled over his phone instead. Ain't technology marvellous, eh? It's about a bunch of kids who love classic monster movies, and have a club which meets in a clubhouse lined with posters from them. But little do they know, monsters are real, and Dracula is busy gathering together / resurrecting his own squad of monstrous chums to try to take over the world via the medium of a powerful amulet. They, of course, have to figure out how to stop Dracula and save the world, with the aid of a diary written by Van Helsing exactly a century earlier and a neighbour who lives in a scary, dilapidated old house, but turns out to be very kind and helpful towards them - and is also incidentally a Jewish former concentration camp inmate.

It's fun, silly, and a nice example of the self-referential humour which flourishes within the horror genre. I think in fact that the kids in the squad probably map fairly directly onto the monsters in theirs - e.g. one of them has a dog, which matches up with the Wolfman; Sean, the ring-leader, wears black and red just like Dracula; his little sister develops a special affinity with Frankenstein's monster which is clearly meant to recall the (doomed) friendship between the monster and the little girl by the lake in the original Universal movie, etc. But I was a bit too tired to really put the full details of that together as we were watching. Meanwhile, as Joel pointed out, it has one of the most bad-ass Draculas ever committed to celluloid, who fights practically every other character in the film, lobs live sticks of dynamite about the place, rips the door off his own hearse with his bare hands, etc etc. All good stuff.


34. Byzantium (2012), dir. Neil Jordan

I've watched and written about this before (LJ / DW), but on my first viewing I had no idea how good it was going to be, so have long wanted to revisit it with the full focus and attention it deserves. Luckily, Joel was amenable to the suggestion. ;-) And it does indeed very much reward a second viewing. There is a great deal in the early scenes which makes fuller sense in the light of what the film later reveals about the characters than it can on a first viewing, such as Clara singing what is clearly a nineteenth-century nursery song to Eleanor in the cab of the lorry as they flee their original location. And so many other clever echoes between the present-day and flash-back scenes, like Eleanor desperately sucking up Frank's blood from a discarded tissue after he has cut himself, followed later by Clara coughing up her own consumptive blood into a similar handkerchief. Having not felt like I did this film justice last time I wrote about it, because it was part of a multi-film catch-up post written long after the fact, I'm annoyingly in much the same position again now. But suffice it to say that I love it, and it remains very comfortably within my top five non-Dracula-based vampire films.


35. Penda's Fen (1974), dir. Alan Clarke

A folk horror classic which I've been wanting to watch for an extremely long time, and therefore put on the birthday present wish-list which I supplied to my family. It's basically about both homosexuality and paganism bubbling up from under attempted suppressions, impossible to eradicate no matter how hard conservative society might try - all of which is obviously immensely appealing. It's surreal, contemplative and very beautifully filmed, and will certainly reward repeated viewings. I also hadn't really taken on board before watching it just how deeply engaged it is with the landscape and history of my native Midlands, what with its setting amongst the Malvern hills (prominent and extremely recognisable in the photography), its interest in the music of Elgar, who was born in Worcester, and of course the appearance of the eponymous Penda, king of Mercia. As for Byzantium, it's one I'll probably want to rewatch now that I know all that, so that I can really appreciate how it all works together.


36. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), dir. Francis Ford Coppola

A re-watch, with a previous write-up here: LJ / DW. My basic opinion that it is tonally uneven, with flashes of what could have been a great film just serving to show up the flaws around them, remains unchanged. I particularly bridle at the stuff around Dracula's wife, which rolls two misogynistic tropes into one. First, her death provides Vlad's whole motivation for turning against the church and becoming a vampire, so is a prime example of fridging, and second the whole reincarnation trope inevitably erodes Mina's agency - although, to be fair, Mina does not just fall straight for Vlad, as usually happens with reincarnated lost lovers, but rejects and resists him at first, and has some general conflict about the whole thing.

But the reason we watched it was following a conversation about some of the Classical references in it, such as moving snakes in one of the brides' head-dresses very clearly referencing Medusa, and it was worth returning to with those eyes on. There's actually quite a lot of Classical statuary and artefacts dotted about the place, and generally used intelligently to add extra dimensions to the story - e.g. a bronze head and vase in a cabinet at the party where Lucy's suitors are introduced, signalling that the hosts are established aristocrats whose ancestors did the Grand Tour, a Marsyas in the cemetery / garden, signalling punishment and torment, and a Lar on Lucy's nightstand signalling domesticity. So, again, an insight into what some people involved in the film were trying to achieve, even if the efforts weren't consistently sustained.


37. Razor Blade Smile (1998), dir. Jake West

I hadn't (that I can remember) heard of this film before, but Joel suggested it because he thought I'd appreciate its '90s Goth vibe, which I did! It's basically about a vampire called Lilith who spends her time partly hanging out in Goth bars and partly operating as an assassin hunting down the members of a mysterious and evil sect. It's extremely low-budget, but it was evidently made with enthusiasm and is definitely a nostalgia-trip as far as '90s fashions and interior decor are concerned. Lilith wears a great deal of PVC, and indeed has something of the vibe of Tanya Cheex from Preaching to the Perverted (which came out the year before) about her, but she still has a terrible pine bed-frame, exactly like that found in every teenager's bedroom and rental property at the time. Oh, and there's a nice little twist ending, where it turns out the whole assassin / sect thing is just a game she plays with her long-term lover to while away the centuries. Excellent fun, but should definitely be watched with alcohol.

I don't think I've even mentioned this here yet due to being busy with other things, but I have agreed to give a lecture in Bradford on 26 May to mark World Dracula Day. As it's the 125th anniversary of the publication of Stoker's novel, I'm going to lean into the theme and talk about how Stoker himself uses temporal resonances in the novel, and then about how people have responded to it since its publication in 25-year snap-shots, and how they have made use of round-number anniversaries in their own right. It's something I should be on pretty solid ground with, between my knowledge of vampire film and literature and all the thinking I've done about anniversaries and how they work in the context of my work on Augustus.

Anyway, that's all by way of a preamble to explain why I spent an hour and a half of my life watching ( this shonky low-budget film on Saturday night )

Finally, as soon as I saw pages from an antiquarian vampire tome bearing what looked a lot like Latin writing being flicked through in front of the camera, I of course hit the print screen button. I expected to discover it was something like lorem ipsum, and functionally it kind of was - but weirder...


Obviously the first word, and probably the only word most people will catch when watching the film normally, is 'Nosferatu'. After that, someone seems to have stuck in a garbled version of 'mens( )sana in corpo(re sano)' ('a healthy mind in a healthy body'). But then came the real surprise - most of the rest of the text was lorem-ipsumified snippets from Augustus' Res Gestae. You can make out 'A. Hirti{b}o consulibus, con{w}sula{j}rem locum [...] sententiae' (RG 1), '{i}quos ex se{ }natus' (RG 4) and 'in libertatem vindicavi' (RG 1 again). There are other bits in between them, but I think that's enough to show that the Res Gestae is the basic source text here - especially the first and longest snippet with the very distinctive 'Hirti{b}o' in it. I'm still pretty sure it's basically the output of an automated lorem ipsum generator which happens to have the Res Gestae in its database, but nonetheless it was fun to come across it. I expected this film to be of interest as a reception of Dracula, but I didn't anticipate bonus Augustan receptions along the way.

lady_lugosi1313 and I booked our tickets for the Northern Ballet's Dracula some six months before the actual performance, because we had both enjoyed it so much when they last did it in 2014 (LJ / DW).

( Ballet as a medium for Dracula )

( Eroticism and Dracula as a liberator )

( Similarities and differences compared to last time )

( The ending )

Now that I have seen this version of Dracula for a second time, it's confirmed the provisional opinion I had of it beforehand - that it is the second best adaptation of Dracula I've ever seen, with only Hammer's cycle of Dracula films above it. As regular readers will realise, I have seen a lot of Dracula adaptations, and Hammer's will always remain the ultimate interpretations to me - so that's the highest praise I can possibly give. This time, the performance we saw was filmed and transmitted live to various cinemas around the country, and I am really hope that also means it might be made available on DVD at some point, as I would love so much to be able to watch it again. And, since the casts changed from performance to performance during its run, I will record here that ours was as follows:

Dracula: Javier Torres
Old Dracula: Riku Ito
Mina: Abigail Prudames
Lucy: Antoinette Brooks-Daw
Jonathan: Lorenzo Trossello
Renfield: Kevin Poeung
Dr Van Helsing: Ashley Dixon
Dr Seward: Joseph Taylor
Arthur: Matthew Koon
The Brides: Rachael Gillespie, Sarah Chun and Minju Kang

Well done and thank you so much to all of them!

I began reading this in early December, hoping that it would provide some seasonally-appropriate chills in the run-up to Christmas (as Dickens did for me last year), and finished it last night. My leisure reading is always glacially slow, but that's still at the slower end of the spectrum, and does reflect me struggling to really take to Gaskell's style. I can't even really put a convincing finger on why, either. One basic factor is that the stories aren't all that ghostly, so they didn't tick the box I was looking for. The title of the collection is accurate in placing 'Mystery' first - there are rather more highwaymen, robbers and false identities than ghosts. But while I like a good ghost, I'm not rabidly against the other types of stories presented here. Nor do I have any particular problem with their shared central themes of family feuds, lost and uncertain orphans and hard circumstances. And I entirely see that they are well crafted, with lots of attention to character, local dialect and historical detail. The only reasons I can really put forward for not being wowed by this collection are that sometimes the misery just gets too grinding and inescapable, and that at those points the only hopes and comforts alluded to revolve around Christian religious piety. (One story literally ends with a miserable, wronged person dying, followed by the final sentence "But the broken-hearted go Home, to be comforted of God", which is more or less exactly calculated to me want to barf.) However I do know that both the misery and the piety were just reality for many of the sorts of characters Gaskell writes about, and many of the people around her. Anyway, although there are nine stories in the book, no-one wants to read in any further detail than I've already outlined why I wasn't that into seven of them. So instead I will focus on recording why two of them were really great.

The Old Nurse's Story. This was the first story in the collection, and involved the old nurse of the title relating her teenage experience of being sent, with a little girl as her charge, to a huge house occupied by only a few servants and reclusive elderly people. As winter sets in, she begins to notice strange phenomena - the sound of the organ in the great hall playing, even though no-one is sitting at its keyboard and its pipe are lying in dusty disarray on the ground, and a little girl outside in the snow banging on the window to be let in but making nary a sound. We have there a nice pairing - sound without a source and a source without a sound - demonstrating in each case that something supernatural is going in. The nurse's little charge is, of course, particularly sensitive and susceptible to the ghostly girl knocking on the window, but she does just about manage to stop her from running out to die in the snow with her, while also learning of the old family injustice which lies behind the strange events and is being lived out over and over again until the wronged parties are avenged. Very spooky and effective, and just the sort of story I was looking for.

The Grey Woman. Much later in the collection, this too mainly consists of an ageing woman looking back on and narrating a story of her youth. This time, she is a German miller's daughter who is courted by and marries a rather effete French aristocrat, only to find when she goes to live in his château that he cuts off all contact with her family, keeps her shut up in a suite of rooms, and eventually turns out to be part of a band of robbers who murder a local landowner and bring his body back to the château to dispose of it. At this point, she and her pragmatic maid / companion Amante decide to escape from the château, and most of the rest of the story features them on the run while her former husband tries to hunt them down. So it's already basically a story of a woman escaping from a disastrous coercive relationship with the help of another woman, and has a lot of power and emotional heft to it just for that. But then, while they are on the run, Amante chops all her hair off and adopts men's clothing so that they can pass as a married couple to evade the murderous husband's pursuit and earn some money by working as itinerant tailors. In other words, it basically became a lesbian love story - an impression not at all dampened by the way they share beds and lodgings as they journey onwards, sentences like "I cannot tell you how much in these doubtings and wanderings I became attached to Amante", or the fact that the narrator is already pregnant when they escape they chateau, so that their little family is soon completed by the arrival of a baby. I really doubt Gaskell meant anything of the sort, and indeed the queer honeymoon does not go on forever - the husband's gang eventually catch and murder Amante, while the narrator goes on to marry a sensible local doctor who helped deliver the baby. But it was nice while it lasted.

Since the two books I read before this one had been awful and disappointing respectively, I turned to this one for a reasonably-guaranteed good read. That's the advantage of literary classics - people are likely to have kept reading and recommending them for a reason, so you're on safer ground than with something new and untried. This one was lent to me by lady_lugosi1313 probably up to a year ago now, when the film was on at the Cottage Road cinema and we were thinking of going to see it. In the end, we didn't, but I kept the book anyway and this was its time. I have seen the film in the past, but before I began regularly blogging films here I think.

Breakfast at Tiffany's itself is a novella of c. 100 pages. It's told in the first person from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who is a writer by profession, and has a fresh, light modern style which seems simple but is actually quite finely crafted when you stop to look at it. The broad set-up is similar to the film - Holly Golightly moves into the same brownstone apartment block as the narrator, lives an expensive and aspirational lifestyle funded by her rich lovers, turns out to be the child bride of a simple Texan farmer, gets arrested for inadvertently assisting a drug trafficker, and is then released on bail. But the ending is very different, in that the film gives Holly and the narrator-character (Paul for screen purposes) a romantic happy ending, whereas in the novella she gives him the slip and disappears from New York and his life forever. This is hugely more in keeping with everything we learn about her character over the course of the novella - she is a fly-by-night, living in the moment but always searching for something better, who is fundamentally incapable of settling down anywhere or with anyone. That doesn't mean her portrayal in the film, or its ending, isn't appropriate and satisfying in its own right, of course. It's just that the two have to be treated as quite different animals.

The novella paints a picture of New York living which must have seemed quite shocking at the time (and certainly led to a bit of difficulty getting it published). It's not just Holly's transactional relationships with men, but the fact that she smokes weed, speaks openly about her 'dyke' friends and at one point declares that a person ought to be able to marry men or women because "Love should be allowed. I'm all for it." Indeed, the same sort of subjects come up in two of the other three stories included in the book. The first, 'House of Flowers', is about a Haitian woman who starts the story as a sex worker in Port-au-Prince and ends up going into the mountains to marry a simple farmer (who treats her appallingly). She's a kind of reverse Holly Golightly, in fact. The second, 'A Diamond Guitar', is about an older prisoner who becomes such close friends with a younger man who arrives in the compound one day that "Except that they did not combine their bodies or think to do so, though such things were not unknown at the farm, they were as lovers." Capote himself was gay, but also clearly more broadly interested in challenging conventional morality and exploring the lives of people at the bottom of the social pyramid. The final story, 'A Christmas Memory', is more sentimental and wholesome, featuring the friendship between a young boy and a much older female relative who conspire to make Christmas cakes together despite their very limited means, but Wikipedia confirmed my instinct that it too reflected Capote's personal experiences, drawing on his rather financially and emotionally deprived childhood. I certainly read it at the right time of year, since I finished this book in early December, though I hadn't planned that.

This one I saw a week ago with the lovely glitzfrau at the Hyde Park Picture House, in all its newly-restored 4K glory. I love Forster, and his work always seems to inspire excellence in screen adaptations, but this one has always meant the most to me I think. I saw it first some time in my early teens - I'm not sure exactly when but I would guess aged about 14 - when it was broadcast on Channel 4, and remember sitting up for hours afterwards on top of a chest of drawers which sat in the bay-window of my bedroom, looking out through an open window over the dark, quiet street while summer rain dripped in the trees and climbing plants outside, and wallowing in the feel of it. By then I'd already had multiple powerful crushes on other girls or teachers at school, but I had never before seen anything at that time which presented queer attraction as openly as this, let alone suggested that it could be good and fulfilling or might turn out well. It seems the film has had a similar sort of impact on many people over the years.

I've watched it at least once since, but not for a long time now I think - a good fifteen years, I'd say. But it's always stayed with me, and coming back to it now I am not at all surprised. It's not just the subject-matter, but how incredibly well-crafted the film itself is in every possible respect. Almost every shot in it is absolutely iconic, not a line of the dialogue is wasted, and although the musical soundtrack is beautiful and well-deployed, it also gets so much out of silence - still, high-angle shots of Cambridge, lingering on characters' pained faces, etc. Above all, though, I was struck by how well-structured the whole thing is. It's inherently a film of two halves because of the way it tells the story of Maurice's two successive relationships - one ultimately unhappy, but also leading the way towards the other, where he finds his fulfilment. Actually, in that respect it reminded me very much of the 1963 Cleopatra, with its Julius Caesar half and its Antony half, though Forster laid down that structure for his book long before that film was dreamt of.

But anyway, what that allows, and what Merchant & Ivory really brought out of the book, is an incredible series of resonances, so that almost every scene throughout the film resonates with and calls forwards or backwards to a fellow in the other half. I mean things like Maurice having his boxing gloves with him from the start in Cambridge, to be followed up by his efforts in the East End boxing club later; Maurice climbing in through the window of Clive's room and then Scudder later doing the same to Maurice; Maurice writing to Clive that he gets no sleep and begging him to answer his letters while he's in Greece and Alec later writing exactly the same to Maurice from his boat-house; Maurice saying in the tutorial at the start, when Risley is arguing that words are the only things which matter, that no, it's deeds which matter, and then at the end coming to tell Durham what he has done and being full of joy at Alec's deed of not getting on the boat to Argentina.

A lot of this is there already in Forster, as I established during a hasty skim through the book after I got home, but not all of it. It's very clear that every line, every shot, every moment in the film was incredibly carefully thought through with the eyes of fine craftsmen so that it would convey the maximum amount of meaning - like the water dripping though the ceiling of Clive Durham's house to reflect the rotten sham of his marriage, or the final scene of him carefully and purposefully closing and bolting his windows to the memory of Maurice. Yet it never feels hokey or Oh So Symbolic - there is enough room for the characters to breathe and to be three-dimensional to prevent that.

One interesting choice is that the film is very deliberately and specifically set in the run-up to the First World War through repeated on-screen captions which date each stage in the development of the story so that it finishes some time in 1913. My skim through the novel suggests this did not originate there (though glitzfrau, who somehow read the whole thing that evening, may know better than me). The novel was originally written during 1913 to '14, but it doesn't include any explicit internal dating, and could take place any time in the late Victorian or early Edwardian periods. In fact it's tempting to read the scenes in King's as based on Forster's own undergraduate years - that is 1897 to 1901, when the Provost there was one M. R. James, then at the height of his own Platonic friendship with James McBryde.

Going back to the film, repeatedly reminding the viewer that war is approaching perhaps casts a pall over the happy ending, since it implies that whatever Maurice and Alec may have built will be shattered to pieces in the trenches within a year. (In the book, by contrast, they simply fade into a sort of unseen fantasy-Arcadia.) But I suppose it is an inevitable element of how we now look back to that period, and especially its upper classes. Merchant and Ivory put enough casual snobbery and misogyny into the mouths of both Maurice and Clive to mean it is a world which has to fall.

Meanwhile, the image of Maurice and Clive raptly imbibing Monty's ghost stories isn't the only enticing inter-text to be had from watching the film now. Merchant and Ivory clearly knew what they were about when they casually dropped Helena Bonham-Carter into the audience at the cricket match, for all the world as though Lucy Honeychurch had called by from A Room with a View. But they could not have anticipated that the scenes of Hugh Grant lurking at the back of the court-room while the verdict is read out at Risley's trial would now look quite so much like a young Jeremy Thorpe seeing a vision of his future - right down to the hat he is using to try to hide his face. They did know what they were doing when they cast him, though, as well as everyone else in the film. Very, very well done, Merchant and Ivory. Thank you profoundly for everything you put into this film.

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.

I spent this evening at the Seven Arts theatre space in Chapel Allerton, where lady_lugosi1313 had spotted that Spud Theatre were doing a production of Carmilla. We saw the same company do Dracula a few years ago (LJ / DW), and thought it was pretty decent for a local amateur production - certainly decent enough for us to be willing to try another of their shows. And we were right to do so, both coming out saying that we felt it had been better than the Dracula they'd done previously.


Carmilla is a first-person story, told by a 19-year-old girl named Laura, and the way this production approached that was to have her character facing the audience directly and telling her story to them, punctuated by other actors entering and merging into scenes with her when she begins describing what other people said and did - at which points she turns and interacts with them instead. This worked really well, and (as I've confirmed by a quick glance at my copy of the story since I got home) meant that they could use masses of the original text verbatim. Of course, it did mean that the young woman playing Laura in particular had a lot of lines of crisp, eloquent mid-19th century prose to learn, and indeed almost every member of the cast had at least some quite long speeches to get through without the benefit of the prompts and cues that come with rapid-fire back-and-forth dialogue. So there were inevitably one or two muddles or hesitations - but remarkably few of them considering how much they had to say and that (as far as I know) it was their first performance. Overall, I thought they all spoke beautifully, really doing justice to Le Fanu's prose. The actual performances were impressive, too. Possibly slightly over-egged in a few cases - but that might just be because I'm more used to watching film and TV, where people can be more subtle, multiplied by the fact that we were sitting in the second row, so quite close up to the action. There may also be a case for saying that Carmilla herself was a little too fluttery and bubbly, given that she is also described in the dialogue as 'languid', but then again in and of itself it worked - it was just the slight contradiction with the dialogue which made it seem slightly off-tone for me.

As for the story itself, I don't think I've read it since I was a teenager, and of course it's been creeping steadily up my mental 'to-read' list over the past few months given the other things I've been reading and thinking about. So it was very welcome to have the opportunity to revisit it through this production. And isn't it great? It's certainly thrilling to think that pure Victorian ideals of female friendship allowed Le Fanu to get away with writing something that strikes modern audiences as so rampantly lesbitious. At least, I feel the need to read up on exactly how that worked and how it would have been received by contemporary readers. My current reading of David Skal's biography of Bram Stoker has primed me enough on the Irish cholera epidemics of the 1830s and '40s to see the resonances those must have given to the casting of Carmilla's nocturnal activities as a 'plague'; while of course it's obvious and widely recognised how much Stoker's own vampire novel owes to Le Fanu's. I can also see now how much Robert Aickman's 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' (LJ / DW) is drawing on this: particularly in its use of a young female first-person narrator and its device of vampires targeting their victims at balls. His vampire-character is male rather than female, but as I noted in my review, his female narrator does also seem distinctly interested in the contessa's daughter after she (believes she) has begun her transformation into a vampire, so Aickman manages to have it both ways - an opposite-sex main attraction, but also a same-sex sub-plot.

I think I will still revisit the story proper before long, not least to test out whether or not it uses Classical references at all in the same manner as Stoker's Dracula. It won't harm the paper I'm planning on that topic if it doesn't, as John Polidori's 'The Vampyre' and Edgar Allan Poe both certainly do, and we know that both were read by and influenced Stoker. So I've got a strong enough case to say that his Classical allusions are part of the tradition he is positioning himself within already - but another one or two tucked away within Carmilla certainly wouldn't hurt. I can only say for now that there definitely weren't any in this evening's performance - but who knows what there might be in the parts of the text they didn't use.

So! Film festival, day two. Here is the overall schedule for the day:



And here's what I did:

( 21. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), dir. Gordon Hessler / interview with Caroline Munro / Ray Harryhausen's Lost Treasures )

( Interview with Katy Manning (aka Jo Grant from Doctor Who) )

( Met Caroline Munro and got her autograph )

( Doctor Who season 22 show-makers' interview )

Afterwards, I joined newandrewhickey, minnesattva and innerbrat for the first 45 minutes or so of The Rocketeer (1991), a sort of larger-than-life SF comedy about a US stunt pilot in the 1940s who finds a jet-pack, with Jennifer Connelly as his under-impressed girlfriend. I could see it was good and would have stayed to watch the whole thing if there weren't competing features on the schedule, but there were: two live commentaries from the Tenth Doctor era, marking the fact that his first full season screened ten years ago now. Ten is much more my thing than Six, so off I slipped...

( Live commentary on New Who 2.3 School Reunion )

( Live commentary on New Who 2.13 Doomsday )

All this time, Galaxy Quest had been playing in another room, which is a pity, because once the Doctor Who stuff was over and I went to join innerbrat, minnesattva and newandrewhickey in the screening, I realised what bloody good fun it was to watch at an actual con. But then again I have seen it multiple times before, and those live Doctor Who commentaries really were great, so I think I made the right choice.

After the film had finished, we went for food at a seriously good pizza / pasta place just down the road. It was nominally just a take-away / sit-in at fixed tables place, but the quality of the food was way better than you'd normally expect for a place like that, and along with the cute student room I was staying in and the well-appointed Co-op just below it, this was one of a number of things that really made me fall for the area where we were staying. Like, on one level, it was just edge-of-city-centre ring-roadish urban redevelopment, with a lot of medium-rise new-builds, but on another it did actually feel somehow quite modern and dynamic and nice to be in. In fact, hell, let's have a picture of it which fails to do justice to the intensity of the sunset on the Friday evening:



( 22. Blood of the Tribades (2016), dir. Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein )

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