Strictly Come Dancing – The Halloween Special

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[It’s from last year but what the hell!]

So it is another week when the REF has kept me from more worthwhile pursuits like discussing Tales from the Crypt, or Dead of Night, or the final episode of Dexter, which kept me up half the night – not from fear but from a really heartfelt sense of melancholy. Of course, I won’t say why, and not just because of SPOILERS – when I get the chance, I want to take some time with this series, which has given me so much pleasure over its various seasons. I don’t know about you but, when its on form, I find it really moving…

Okay, moving swiftly on, before someone calls the psych-ward, I thought I would give a moments thought to the fact that it was Halloween this week, and rather than finding myself with Jamie Lee Curtis in the house, a serial killer on the loose outside and a double bill of Forbidden Planet and The Thing from Another World on the TV, there seemed to be very little Halloween related on the box – except for a Strictly Come Dancing Halloween Special.

For those of you who are not privy to the wonders of British Saturday Night Television, Strictly Come Dancing is the show that is called Dancing With the Stars in the US – although the BBC version is the original, which also discovered Len Goodman and Bruno Tonioli, who are judges on the British version, too.

The Special basically involved the same format as usual, but with Halloween-themed costumes, routines and songs, and judges’ paddles that were shaped like ghosts. Not particularly scary, but with a lot to tell us about horror television.

First, one gets an interesting glance into what is imagined to be the popular perception of the key horror monsters and sub-genres, although, second, we also got a very selective tradition that seemed to largely consist of a version of the Gothic that had been filtered through Tim Burton – even when we get a reference to science-fiction-horror, it was less The Thing from Another World or Creature from the Black Lagoon than a case of Mars Attacks!

Then, there is the question of what happens to horror when it becomes something that can be used to ‘theme’ regular programming, like a Christmas Special. Which of course makes me immediately wish that we had a Johnny Cash Horror or Halloween Special, along the lines of the great man’s Christmas Specials from the 1970s. I can see him singing ‘The Man Comes Around’ on it as clear as day – or night!

And of course that raises the question of horror tastes. Loads of people who claim not to like horror wouldn’t have a problem with this kind of show, while lots of horror fans would hate it. I might like both but largely as an exercise in schizophrenia (in the horror sense of the term – split personality – rather than the clinical sense).

But separating this kind of horror material out from ‘real’ horror seems to simple to me. What it shows us is the complex ways in which horror is part of a common cultural language, on television and in other media, which may produce a variety of different kinds of identification. People may claim to hate horror in one context and yet have no objection to the genre in other contexts or at particular times of year.

Hell, Christmas television is full of material that would be dismissed as wildly inappropriate at other times of the year, but which is given a certain license at yuletide – remember the episode of Beverley Hills 90210 where Steve ran into Santa Claus?!?!

Anyhow, I am now taking votes on the scariest thing in the Strictly Come Dancing Halloween Special – there is a lot to choose from!

The Clangers (1969-1974) – Whatever the Hell You Call It!

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Another weekend with no fun, so I thought I should pose you all a question. It’s pretty obvious that I am just stalling, but what do people out there think: Are The Clangers a suitable topic for a blog on fantastic film and television? They may not be horror (even I might struggle on that one) but they are from outer space. Does that make the series an example of science fiction? Whatever the hell you call it – it’s fantastic in my book!

And just because it kind of reminds me of The Clangers – there are various vague visual parallels but I would feel uncomfortable about claiming much more – here is the trailer for the very wonderful The First Men in the Moon (1964). This is so good that I will even forgive the presence of Lionel Jeffries, but then it is a Harryhausen movie.

A Day Late and a Penny Short

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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cult-Film-Stardom-Cultification-ebook/dp/B00AINH8DQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382297447&sr=8-1&keywords=kate+egan+cult+stardom

Yes, I have been up to my ears in REF business this week (if you don’t know what the REF is; trust me, you don’t want to know). Anyhow the upshot is that I haven’t had time to do an entry for this week so I will have to engage, instead, in another exercise in shameless self-promotion. And just for those of you who might worry about this sort of thing: no, its not a new article but one from a short while back that I thought people might enjoy, even if the book is a trifle expensive. Also, I would like to make a big point of stressing that this piece that was s a co-written by Shane Brown, who is a wonderful man!

‘“The Screen’s Number One and Number Two Bogeymen”: The Critical Reception of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and 1940s’, in Kate Egan and Sarah Thomas, eds., Cult Film Stardom, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012, pp. 243-258.

Peter Cushing, Hammer and Television

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So, right, we all know that Peter Cushing was a major star of the horror film, a pillar of the Hammer productions, and a perennial figure in British horror films beyond Hammer. But what has all this got to do with television? Well, Hammer wasn’t quite the transgressive producer of cinematic horror that it is now remembered as being. On the contrary, its association with television was vital to its early years.

Before the release of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), it has even specialized in film versions of BBC radio and television shows. From 1948, it had made three film versions of Dick Barton, Secret Agent and, by the 1950s, it would achieve considerable success by adapting Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment and its follow-up, Quatermass II, into films.

So what has any of this got to do with dear old Peter Cushing? In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Cushing may have made films in Hollywood with figures such as Laurel and Hardy, but he was also known as a serious actor, and even appeared in Olivier’s Gothic film version of Hamlet in 1948, the American posters for which proclaimed: ‘Shrouded mist, clad in rusty armor, a horrifying spectre stalks the great stone battlements of the ancient castle. Its one command is . . .  kill . . .  kill . . . KILL!’.

By the 1950s, however, Cushing was dividing his time between Hollywood historical films such The Black Knight (1954, with Alan Ladd) and Alexander the Great (1956, with Richard Burton) on the one hand, and prestigious BBC television dramas on the other: Cushing even played Darcy in a 1952 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

However, the drama that was probably most central to his casting in The Curse of Frankenstein was his starring role as Winston Smith in the Nigel Kneale adaptation of 1984 in 1954, a production that was highly controversial and explicitly referred to as an example of television horror at the time.

Indeed, Hammer followed up The Curse of Frankenstein with another Cushing vehicle (NOT The Horror of Dracula, 1958) but an adaptation of another Nigel Kneale television play, The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Nor was this the end of the relationship between Cushing and Hammer on the one hand, and television on the other. In the 1960s, Cushing would appear on television in a Sherlock Holmes series that developed the role that he had played for Hammer in 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles; and in 1965 and 1966 he would appear in film versions of BBC’s Dr. Who (in Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth – 2150 A.D., the latter being a particular favorite of mine).

Actually, the two Dr. Who films weren’t made by Hammer, but by one of its rivals, Amicus, but they still illustrate that Hammer and its rivals clearly sought to associate themselves with television, long before the supposed decline into ventures such as On the Buses in 1971.

Scooby Doo, Where are You, Now that We Need You?

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What can I say about the glory that is the original series of Scooby Doo? It is one of those shows that makes me want to sound like some BBC arts presenter, who gushes with superlatives about the rich, artistic quality, the genius that evokes Leonardo, Michelangelo. You know, that kind of stuff. I even want to suggest that our brave hero’s cry of ‘Scooby Dooby Dooooo’ reminds me of Yeats…

I know that Scooby is back with a vengeance, and it is a deep pleasure to see youngsters worshiping at his majestic feet but (and now I definitely sound like a BBC arts presenter decrying the decline of western culture) it’s just not as good as it once was. Yes, folks, I am getting old.

But what can Scooby and the Gang tell us about horror and television. Well, first, there is the association with children that we discussed a while back. The show started in the late 1960s, which was only about ten years after horror films were the first major package of films that were sold to television and developed a huge following among the kids.

Indeed, most of the humor in the series relies on a high level of familiarity with the history of the horror film. Each week, the gang would run into yet another classic monster or classic monster movie type, and the series depends upon a familiarity with these monsters, their mythologies and the narratives with which they were associated.

None the less, the show was actually strongly associated with a particular period of horror. Despite the psychedelic clothes and van design, the series is strongly rooted in the monster-hunter narratives of the 1940s, as exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s.

If the Sherlock Holmes films are now remembered as detective stories, they were known as ‘mysteries’ at the time; and the term ‘mystery’ was not a separate category from ‘horror’ but meant stories of the strange, weird and uncanny. Holmes was therefore usually hunting down supposedly supernatural monsters, and even when the mystery was not a monster on the loose, the ‘mystery’ was not just a puzzle to be solved but a seemingly impossible phenomena that seemed to defy logic – even when the work of Nazis or criminal gangs.

It is therefore worth remembering that the Scooby gang drive around in ‘The Mystery Machine’, and they are teenage detectives in search of clues. They were monster hunters in much the same way as Holmes in the 1940s or Carl Kolchak in the 1970s.

This also relates to a theme that is central to the 1940s but also to horror from the Gothic novel to the present: the tension between the rational and the irrational. In the Holmes narratives, the conflict revolves around the possibility of supernatural explanation versus the power of Holmes’ rational logic. Would he be able to counter the supernatural; to give it a rational explanation? Or would the forces of the supernatural and the irrational win out?

Of course, like the Scooby gang, Holmes always finds a rational explanation; as does the detective in The Beast With Five Fingers. But in other narratives, the supernatural wins out and ridicules the powers of rational thought. Think about The X-Files for a moment!

However, Scooby Doo, Where are You? may have seemed to follow a rational logic but, let us be honest, who really cared about the key figures of rational normality, Fred or Daphne? Walking blocks of wood! Instead, it was disruptive monsters on the one hand, and the mad antics of Scooby and Shaggy on the other, that provided excitement. And Scooby and Shaggy were driven by an obsessive preoccupation with food; not the desire to solve the mystery (they ran to food and away from the mysterious and uncanny).

They are driven by the body, not the mind; they continually lapse into irrational panic; and it was usually their slapstick clumsiness that captured the menace, not Fred and Daphne’s carefully laid traps. And then, of course, the two blocks of wood are finally upstaged by Velma, who explains everything; and she was in almost all ways far closer to Shaggy and Scooby than Fred or Daphne, being another teenager outsider: the bespectacled smart girl. God, one can only imagine the humiliation that Daphne must have heaped upon her in the locker room back at school!

At the present, teen horror series a huge on television following Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in which Buffy’s group called themselves the Scooby gang); and, consequently, while Buffy may have been highly important in industrial terms, Scooby Doo hangs over the whole output (from Buffy to Pretty Little Liars, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, and The Vampire Diaries) like some grand ur-text; or some renaissance master: Leonardo, Michelangelo …

Doomwatch – The Future Looks Bleak … Again

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One of the shows that had a real impact on me as a youth, and which is strangely under-appreciated today, was Doomwatch, in which a team of British investigators look into the disturbing side-effects of contemporary science. Created by Gerry Davis and Kit Pendler, who had previously worked on Doctor Who, the series concerned a government unit led by Professor Quist, a deeply moral figure who spends most of the series fighting the dark forces of the British establishment.

There is a film version and some later spin-offs but the key period (for me at least) was three series that ran in the early seventies, and featured weekly stories in which Quist and his team battle bureaucracy, big business and killer rats.

The first episode, “The Plastic Eaters”, featured a new microbe that gets out of hand (it is developed to eliminate waste) and develops an appetite for plastic. Planes start falling out of the skies and all manner of other mayhem ensues. It is a wonderfully apocalyptic scenario, but was followed each week by a succession of potentially world-destroying scientific mysteries for the team.

Which brings me to the killer rats. The episode that I remember the best was “Tomorrow, The Rat”, in which science creates a race of super-rats that threaten to overwhelm humanity. One of the reasons that it was so effective was that it was around the time of panics over the side-effects of warfarin on rats – in that context, the idea of the world being taken over by super-rats was particularly and James Herbert’s The Rats would come out only a few years later (1974).

Why this show isn’t available on DVD is a complete mystery to me. Okay, so there are missing episodes, but that is no excuse. What is the BBC thinking?

Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt and a Much Needed Break

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I am taking a few weeks off on holiday so the next issue won’t be posted until Sunday, 22 September. Sorry about that. In case you are really feeling deprived, you can check out a new article of mine.

‘With Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre on their side’: German stars, the psychological film and 1940s horror

in Studies in European Cinema

Volume 9 Issue 2-3

September 2012

This article is an examination of two ‘German’ stars and the ways in which they were understood in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, after their departure from Nazi Germany. From an analysis of reviews and articles through which these two stars, Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt, were presented to audiences in the United States, the article will not only demonstrate that they were predominantly understood as horror stars in the period but also that this was due to the ways in which the figures of the horror villain, gangster and spy were seen to be linked with one another at the time. If all three figures were usually presented as being motivated by psychological compulsions, particularly a despotic desire to dominate and control others, the violence that they inflicted upon their victims was presented as being predominantly psychological, not physical. These figures sought to psychologically dominate, control and even destroy others. It was for this reason that Siegfried Kracauer claimed that one of the central features of 1940s horror was its ‘theme of psychological destruction’.

Arrow (2012-Present) – It Shouldn’t Work but It Does!

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Arrow is a weird one. It is the creation of Greg Berlanti, a specialist in family melodramas such as Everwood and Brothers and Sisters, but it is a superhero story with some really dark, horrorish elements. It also seems to be part of a larger shift for Berlanti, who has  gone into superheroes big time with No Ordinary Family (with which I can see the connection back to his earlier work) but also the Green Lantern film and its follow up, and reports of a new series with DC’s The Flash.

In Arrow, Oliver Queen has been stuck on an island for the last five years, after his ship went down in those uncharted waters in which the super-rich like to hang out. But before his discovery of the island, when he and his father are fighting for existence in their life-raft, the old man has persuaded Oliver to right his wrongs back at home and has then committed suicide. Which all leaves Oliver rather traumatized. Oh, and did I mention that Dad was also a super-rich industrialist who seems to be mixed up in some super conspiracy and has left a list of the people involved in his evil plan… Well, actually, it turns out to be the evil plan of John Barrrowman, but more of that later.

Once back in the bosom of his family, Oliver quickly sets about punishing the evil doers using athletic and archery skills that he has picked up on the island. So what we basically have is a lot of family dynamics and vigilante violence, which makes for a very odd, but hugely enjoyable, series that tries, unconvincingly, for a post credit-crunch social conscience.

In addition, the backstory of Oliver’s hellish time on the island, which is called purgatory or something, is told in flashback, so that the series feel a bit like Lost in reverse – everyday life punctuated by flashbacks to a weird island where God-knows-what is going on.

And then there is the fourth unlikely ingredient – a cast that seems to have been collected from BBC’s early Saturday night schedule. The evil super-villain (and closet archer) is played by John Barrowman, who may have been Captain Jack on Torchwood but also appeared on seemingly endless Saturday night talent shows with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Graham Norton. Also, Oliver’s new Dad, or rather the man who is now married to his mother, is Colin Salmon, who was previously a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing (that’s the original BBC series that Dancing with the Stars was based on).

I know I should think the whole thing doesn’t hang together but I find it strangely compelling and not just because of Willa Holland, who plays Oliver’s teenage sister, Thea – she was also Mini Cooper in The OC a while ago – and she is clearly the most intelligent and perceptive character in the entire series. She has a sharpness and a spikiness that is hugely welcome in the show, and I simply can’t wait for the point at which she gets her own superhero identity. In fact, I am surprised that it is taking them so long, the whole series feels ripe for her to replace Oliver and carry the show on her own!

British Actors and Horror

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Love this trailer, particularly the bit where Lionel Atwill tells the heroine that he has always found ‘in his experience’ that the female of the species is more responsive to electrical impulses than the male – which of course prompts the question: experience of what?

Anyhow, the relevance of this is that I’m taking a break this week – too many deadlines coming at me all at once. But I thought I should share something, so here is news of a recent article of mine that people might want to check out … or not! Of course, Lionel is only a minor player in this piece, which largely concentrates on Claude Rains, Charles Laughton, Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price.

It’s About Time British Actors Kicked Against these Roles in “Horror” Films’: Horror stars, psychological films and the tyranny of the Old World in classical horror cinema

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volume 33, Issue 2, 2013

pages 214-233

This article is an examination of the ways in which Englishness was associated with horror long before the success of Hammer, the British studio that in the late 1950s and 1960s became synonymous with a particularly English version of Gothic cinema. During the 1930s and 1940s, many key horror stars were English or signified Englishness; and the article explores the ways in which this was due to a preoccupation with themes of psychological dominance and dependence during the period. In other words, the threat of psychological dominance and dependence that preoccupied horror films meant that the horror villain was often associated with the spectre of old-world despotism in relation to which the United States defined itself as a rejection. Furthermore, these psychological themes also demonstrate that, during this period, the horror film either included, or was intimately related to, the gangster film and spy thriller so that most horror stars played a range of horror villains, gangsters and spies. However, rather than focusing of figures such as Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Lionel Atwill or George Zucco (the British actors most commonly associated with the horror film during this period), the article will concentrate on a series of actors closely associated with horror in the period, but who are not necessarily remembered in this way today—Claude Rains, Charles Laughton, Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price—stars who demonstrate the ways in which psychological themes not only connected the horror villain, gangster and spy but were also related to the spectre of old-world despotism.