Jericho Part II: Conspiracy, Cult Television and Genre

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As season one comes to an end, and Jericho and New Bern finally engage in battle, the conflict is disrupted by the arrival of external military ‘order’. But this army are not the cavalry. As season two starts, it becomes clear that this army is not the United States military but an army that represents a new nation, with a new flag, and a new version of history. Initially, the re-establishment of order looks like a good thing, but Jake and Robert soon start to see problems with this new nation state and start to amass evidence that it is not the re-establishment of the US, but rather represents the very forces that destroyed the US in the first place, forces in which independent defense contractors are central.

Tragically, season three never happened. Season two was only made after immense fan pressure and the makers had to fit the entire season into a seven episodes, which was all the channel would fund, a situation that makes everything a bit rushed. But its better than nothing. Also, the cult status of the show has meant that the narrative has continued in other media, with novels and comics developing the story.

Clearly, then, the show has developed a major cult following (in 2007, TV Guide placed it in 11th place in its list of the Top Cult Shows Ever!) , and this is for many different reasons. Obviously the fantastic cast is a factor, and the wonderful characters that they play. Also the show is done with a sense of authenticity (I am not talking about the realities of nuclear attack here) with a grim vision of a small community struggling in a hostile post-apocalyptic environment. It has also got real emotional resonance, without the treacly qualities of shows such as Falling Skies. Family is important here and the stories are emotional, but the families in this show also have their painful, difficult and complex problems, problems that a bit of ‘quality time’ or a ‘group hug’ won’t solve.

Genre is also interesting here. As has already been indicated, the show treads a careful line generically. It does not deny its generic roots, as is the case with so much ‘quality television these days. The Wire was fond of saying that failure would have resulted in the series becoming a cop show, when that was evidently what it was; even my beloved Deadwood kept claiming that it wasn’t Gunsmoke, in an attempt to disavow its status as a Western. But Jericho also resists the inverse tendency of being too clever and knowing about its generic roots.

Instead, it tells the story with seriousness and commitment. If it has been seen to have traces of the western, and if it also draws heavily on Biblical narratives, the justification for discussing it here in a blog on fantastic television is that it is also clearly associated with science fiction and horror though its post-apocalyptic setting. For example, it concerns a community trying to survive when the technological supports of its society wither or fail, a concern that it shares with films such as Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and novels such as Earth Abides. The same can also be seen in cases such as The Day of the Triffids (the novel and television versions, if not the Howard Keel film version), or even Stephen King’s The Stand, both of which explicitly explore attempts to forge new social patterns in a post-apocalyptic world.

It is in this sense, then, that for all its association with the Western, Biblical Epic and even the Political Thriller, Jericho can also be seen as a contribution to science fiction and/or horror television. But whatever genre you may want to associate it with, this is a fine show that I would recommend in the strongest terms.

Jericho: An Apocalypse of Biblical Proportions

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Jericho is one of those great shows that was cancelled at the end of its first season, for reasons unimaginable to those who has seen it. It concerns a small town in rural Kansas which is plunged into crisis when a series of nuclear explosions take out 23 major US cities and communication with the outside world go silent. Not only does this situation create uncertainly about what has happened but also it also places the community in a desperate struggle for survival.

The main character is Jake Green (played by Skeet Ulrich), who is the wayward son of one of the town’s key families, and has just returned home after several years away in unspecified military operations that seem to include action in the Gulf War. His return to town just in time for the crisis may be a coincidence that proves a bit hard to swallow, but it is the only problem of this kind in the show.

I have never really seen the point of Ulrich before, and have always considered him not only to be a bit too twitchy but generally rather boring. However, here, he really justifies his star status, and even makes you wonder why no one has ever found out how to use him effectively, either before or since. He completely transcends his teen-rebel role and emerges as a character of real substance.

But he is by no means the only impressive member of the cast. This is a show with a large number of characters almost all of whom are played by actors of real quality. Lennie James is fantastic as Robert Hawkins, the other newcomer in town, and a man who knows more than he is saying about the attacks that have obliterated the United States. He is a fascinating character who grows and grows as the series develops, and he quickly becomes Jake’s sidekick, although sidekick makes him sound secondary. It is probably best to call him Jake’s ally.

Gerald McRaney is great as dad, and the wonderful Pamela Reed is mom, plus there is also Sprague Grayden as another of Jake’s allies; D. B. Sweeney as a surprisingly menacing threat to the town; and the outstanding Esai Morales (in series two) as an honorable commanding officer, although an explanation of his role would give too much away at this stage.

As should be already clear, this series is an explicitly post-911 drama but the nuclear destruction is not the result of an ‘Islamic’ attack that demands a defensive/offensive response. On the contrary, Jericho may have been the city whose walls famously fell before the Israelites’ trumpets, but the show explicitly deals with the issue of aggression and defense – of borders, territories and ‘security systems’. Right from the start, Hawkins’ presence suggests that the attacks are internal rather than external and, by season two, Jake and Robert start to investigate the interests at stake in this attack. But I get ahead of myself.

Even in season one, as people begins to realize that the United States no longer exists and that the community is now on its own, the town finds itself prey to various different groups, the most menacing of which is a gang of mercenaries who have turned into bandits and are exploiting the chaos. These mercenaries also raise one of the key concerns of many left or liberal post-911 films and television series (and even less liberal shows such as 24), the rise of the new private or corporate ‘security services’. In the show, these mercenaries, led by D. B. Sweeney, were originally employed by the Government to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the aftermath of the attacks but, once the US state had effectively collapsed, they turn into the kind of parasitic bandits that are best exemplified by Eli Wallach’s outlaws in The Magnificent Seven.

Of course, this kind of narrative has lead many to claim that the show is much like a contemporary Western, with the destruction of the US transforming the environment into something akin to the Wild West. However, as the title Jericho suggests, the model for the series (or at least for season one) is less the Western than the Biblical epic. As season one progresses, the references to the ancient world proliferate, and the town’s community begins to look like a Biblical tribe as they battle to survive in a landscape that puts them in conflict with other tribes.

Consequently, the introduction of a nearby town, New Bern, sets the scene for a narrative that resembles the Biblical story of Lot’s encounter with Sodom and Gomorrah (without the sodomy), in which a struggle over resources leads into a tense trade agreement, which finally descends into open conflict.

Next Week: Jericho Part II: Conspiracy, Cult Television and Genre

Falling Skies – Paedophiles from Outer Space

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Falling Skies is a SF-horror-family melodrama that is produced by Spielberg, which is supposed to be a positive recommendation but ends up being its greatest problem. The series concerns a world invaded by aliens in which a brave band of resistance fighters mount a spirited opposition to the enemy.

The hero is played by Noah Wyle, nice guy Carter from ER, who plays an ex-history professor, Tom Mason, who is second in command to Will Patton’s hard-bitten veteran, Captain Weaver. It is nice to see a positive representation of an arts and humanities academic these days, and the history professor bit is no accident: Mason’s main function seems to be to provide endless comparisons between the resistance to the aliens and the American Revolution, while also being the nice liberal family man. The result is often nauseatingly patriotic, particularly in a post-911 context.

However, the aliens are not really not British colonialists, nor ‘Islamic terrorists’, but rather paedophiles from outer space. It is not just that Wyle is a nice family man, who seems to spend as much time worrying about his kids as fighting the extra-terrestrial menace, but that the aliens are after our children. They slaughter the human adults but seem to have a  thing about the children. Instead of trying to wipe the child out, the aliens keep the kids alive in groups and spend huge amounts of time devising schemes to whisk the moppets away from their parents.

And once they have the little cherubs (these are Spielberg children), they penetrate them from behind – no, really! They have these things that most characters refer to as harnesses, which are attached to the children’s backs and control them. But they don’t look much like harnesses. Instead, they have tentacles that penetrate the flesh and fuse with the spinal cord.

Once penetrated by the harness, the kids are under the control of the aliens and even develop a bond with their abuser. At one level, this is identified as a kind of addiction, so that, if the harness is removed, the children go into shock and die, at least until a procedure is found to cure this problem. But even then some children still long to be back with the aliens and the feeling of ‘being loved’ that the aliens gave them, but that their parents seem to be incapable of providing. On the other hand, some children, such as Noah Wyle’s son, develop an extreme anger at their abusers, clearly suffering for a case of deep-seated guilt and self-disgust that manifests itself in a case of ‘protesting too much’.

Of course, most of this isn’t new. The parasite on the back is clearly a borrowing from stories that go back to Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, an alien invasion narrative that preceded Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Heinlein’s novel even has includes the victim’s sense of dependence upon its parasite; their suicidal responses to its removal; and even the traumatic guilt and self-disgust of some survivors.

But Heinlein’s aliens ride on the upper back, just below the neck and between the shoulder-blades, while the alien parasites in Falling Skies cover the entire length of the spine right down to … well, I will leave it to your imaginations. And Heinlein’s alien’s are slug-like creatures, while these aliens (while seeming to be biological-technological hybrids) look awfully like the insect creatures from Cronenberg’s film of the William Burroughs novel, The Naked Lunch, both of which have clear homosexual subtexts…

None the less, for all its neurotic concerns with children, and with paedophiles – let us just take a moment to remember that most victims of child abuse are victimized by close family members who profess to love and protect them and that ‘stranger danger’ is phenomenally rare – the series does have a lot going for it. Visually, it has a really gritty and realistic look that is quite at odd with the sugar-sweet sentiments elsewhere, and its also got a terrific cast. Noah Wyle is always a pleasure to watch, even if he is not terrifically well cast here, but Captain Weaver is played by Will Patton, who is a character actor that brings an air of gravitas to the proceedings, and (most of the time) even succeeds in undercutting the more annoying elements of the series. By season two, he does get to spend more time worrying about his own kids, but we also have a great appearance from one of my favorite television character actors, the truly wonderful, Terry O’Quinn. You know, John Locke, from Lost! God, I could write a whole entry on Terry O’Quinn, but as usual, he appears in a role that uses his rather odd ability to play characters that seems to be a nice, normal everymen but also suggest the menacing possibility of something dark and/or tyrannical underneath…. I will say no more. For now.

Season two also starts to complicate the aliens. It turns out that not all aliens are the same … surprisingly.

But the bad aliens still want our children …

I read somewhere that Falling Skies has been described as a cross between Jericho and V but I have to say that for all its gritty, end-of-the-world feel, this series is no Jericho. If you haven’t seen this tragically canceled series, do so immediately. And that is an order. It may not be strictly fantastic television – it carefully avoids any overt sf or horror trappings – but it is also a post-apocalypse epic, so I think I might do an entry on it. And there are no creepy aliens hanging around the playground in this one!

Next Week: Jericho: An Apocalypse of Biblical Proportions

The Walking Dead – the Clue is in the Title!

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I have just finished watching the end of season three of The Walking Dead and I remain a little mystified. Its alright – quite diverting really – but it has had enormous viewing figures in the US given that it is shown on a premium channel, a situation which I simply can’t fathom. It’s not bad. As I say, it’s quite diverting, but it’s also strangely static. Certainly, there is action but it often lacks any sense of narrative drive.

In the first season, Rick wakes up in hospital to find the world has been over-run by zombies and he sets out to find his family. But this potential quest does not organize the show, so he finds them pretty sharpish. His family are with a group of survivors that are camped outside a major city and, for some reason, a lot season one seems to be spent going back and forth between the camp and the city. Stasis. The group then hit the road (although its not clear why) and find a high security lab, where the horrible truth is explained to them. And then, they head out the road again … and again, without much sense of a quest.

In season two, they hang around on a farm for a while.

In season three, they find a prison, move in and then have some disagreements with the neighbors over in Woodbury.

To be fair, I am still watching it, which is more than can be said for True Blood, but any discussion of the latter show will have to wait for another time.

Lots of people claim to love how dark and morally ambiguous The Walking Dead is. Who should we really fear – the zombies or other humans? But that is hardly shatteringly original – it is actually central to Night of the Living Dead. Also, the show is actually not that bleak. The lead characters are hugely sentimental, particularly about babies and young children (even if Rick’s son may be turning into a merciless killer – oh, yes, please!) Not that I mind sentiment, but the characters seem to spend a lot more time worrying about interpersonal relationships – has my wife run off with another man; whose child is she carrying; is the father of the child a psychotic killer? – than they do about the zombie apocalypse knocking at the door.

If you really want to see bleak, see Frank Darabont’s fantastic movie, The Mist, which the series resembles in many ways. (Darabont was the creator of The Walking Dead but was booted off the show sometime during season two.) However, The Mist is far darker and far more frightening and far more tightly constructed.

What I am trying to say, and struggling with, is that The Walking Dead is much more like a soap opera than a story about a zombie apocalypse – again, I have nothing against soap operas (and not in the sense that some of my best friends are soap operas) but the zombie terror often feels to be simply a minor inconvenience within the narrative, or a backdrop against which other issues dominate, or an occasional interruption to the proceedings.

Even the violent carnage, when it does arrive, feels very odd. It is properly violent, with blood and brain splatter aplenty, but somehow none of it feels very horrifying or shocking. Certainly, there are great moments: in one episode Andrea is tied up in a room, where a close friend is slowly dying and will therefore soon become a zombie and try to eat her, and this sequence is simultaneously horrifying and heart-rending. But most of the time, as Rick and others shoot, stab and slice their way through armies of zombies, or are turned into hamburger by hordes of the shambling undead, the gore seems to lack resonance.

None the less, it is great to see Gale Anne Hurd back to what she does best. I worship this woman, but she hasn’t done anything worthy of her in ages. This is the woman who co-wrote The Terminator, produced Aliens and not only produced The Abyss but was the inspiration for its fabulous heroine. James Cameron has, in my less than humble opinion, never done anything as good as when he was married to her. She was the one that kept his ambitions in check and gave his films a real sense of authenticity and (dare I say it) economy. Even The Abyss, a massively over-ambitious project, with an ending that tries hard but fails to work, looks like a model of restraint when compared to Cameron’s later work. Don’t get me wrong – I love Terminator 2: Judgement Day – but it is already loosing the raw, exploitation origins of his greatest work, or rather the work that he made in partnership with Gale Anne Hurd.

It is also fun to see Andrew Lincoln in the role of Rick. Really? The actor who played Egg in This Life as a tough American policeman? Really? Wasn’t Egg the wettest of a group of rather wet twenty-somethings. Even more strangely, he’s actually alright in the new role.

However, my favorite moment in the show is  towards the end of the third season, where Andrea decides to leave Woodbury and travel to the Prison, a journey that seems to take quite a time when people travel it by car. However, not only does the distance seem to shrink when Andrea does it on foot but she finally works out how to cope with the zombies, a discovery that no one before or since has thought of. She runs. Or rather she gently jogs, and the walking dead (as I said, the clue is in the title) can’t catch her. It is only when she stops to hide from some humans that are hunting for her that she is attacked by zombies. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to learn from her experience, or pass the news on to anyone else, so I guess that, by season four, most of the cast won’t have the benefit of this brilliant technique for staying alive.

Ah well, there are more pressing problems, like finding formula for the baby and making sure that you spend quality time with the kid, so that he doesn’t go around shooting the innocent and defenseless.

Next Week: Falling Skies: Paedophiles from Outer Space

Journey to the Unknown (1968) – Part Four: When it Works

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Of course, despite its problems, Journey to the Unknown can be real fun, and there are certainly episodes that are genuinely effective. The Madison Equation isn’t a work of genius, but it is an interesting detective/horror story. It concerns a brilliant female scientist whose husband, motivated by resentment at her success, plots to kill her. More importantly, he decides to use her brilliant creation, a super-computer, to perform the perfect crime.

However, the whole thing backfires when he, rather than his wife, becomes is the victim of the death that he had planned for her, and a detective is assigned to investigate his murder. As the detective gets to work, however, he finds that the pool of suspects rapidly decrease and eventually – SPOILER ALERT – the solution proves both fantastic, horrific: the murderer is the computer!

By using the computer to plan the murder, the husband has alerted the machine to his intentions, but the machine has acquire more than an independent intelligence – it has acquired emotions and has fallen in love with its creator.

It may not be the most stylistically inventive of the series, or the most scary (although the end does pack a nice punch), but it’s a really well executed story. In some episodes, brilliant short stories like Miss Belle or Girl of My Dreams are pretty much ruined by being over-extended beyond their neat little scenarios – the original stories for both episodes were much like jokes, in which the tale largely works to set up a brilliant twist in the tail, or moment of poetic justice, but by over-extending these set ups, both episodes blow the final denouement, which ends up feeling too slight (or obvious) given the long build up. The Madison Equation, on the other hand, balances its elements and the build up is proportional to the resolution.

The case of Poor Butterfly is someone different. Its not the best story in the world, and its not actually frightening. However, it is a ghost story with a wonderfully melancholic tone, which it maintains with mesmerizing skill. At first, its hard to see where the whole thing is going, but give it time: the episode has a fragility and a sense of atmosphere that is quite engaging; and it provides a glimpse of the ways in which the series could have really made its mark. Several other episodes have a similar quality (Someone in the Crowd, Eve) but tend to distract the viewer with silly stories. Poor Butterfly isn’t the best story in the world but it doesn’t have Dennis Waterman falling in love with a mannikin, which is certainly creepy but for the wrong reason – well, at least for British viewers who are familiar with Dennis Waterman.

Atmosphere is also vital to the two best episodes in the series, Paper Dolls and Matakitas is Coming. The first is a creepy story about a group of identical young boys with the power of mind-control. It’s very similar to Village of the Damned in some ways, but it has a unique sense of atmosphere and suspense. It is also a story that that allows the series to define its own identity, being quite distinct from the kind of horror-thriller associated with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but also from the explicitness with which Hammer was associated.

The same is also true of Matakitas is Coming, which (in addition) has the benefit of a tight, claustrophobic setting in which Vera Miles finds herself to be trapped overnight in a deserted library with a supernatural killer on the loose. It should also be noted that the build-up of tension is magnificent, largely due to the expert handling of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a classic figure of British television who would also become famous for his Beatles documentary, Let it Be. I won’t say too much about the story for fear of ruining things, but its strongly recommended.

And with that, I think its time to move on from Journey to the Unknown.

Next week: The Walking Dead

Journey to the Unknown (1968) – Part Three: Horror Writers, Television and Alternative Definitions of Genre

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2VwwStE-ck

The presence of Harrison also demonstrates something else. The stories are not, like most Hammer films, references back to the classic Gothics stories of literature or to the Universal horror pictures. There is no Frankenstein, Dracula, Werewolf or Mummy here. Instead, the stories are based on writers such as Cornell Woolrich, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and Donald Westlake. Robert Bloch also appears as a screenwriter, even if he is adapting other people’s rather than contributing stories of his own. In this way, the series relates to a version of horror that is often forgotten and includes both the nightmarish thrillers of Woolrich and the stories of Matheson and Beaumont, a version of horror that had been central to television horror until at the least the late 1960s and is probably exemplified by Joan Harrison’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Although often remembered today as a writer of crime thrillers, Woolrich was very much talked about as a horror writer in the 1940s, and he had written several scripts for silent horror films during his time in Hollywood. He is also remembered for his nightmarish tales of psychological breakdown. In fact, many of his protagonists are psychological victims who have lost their memory and find themselves in terrifying worlds that they cannot comprehend.

This is also the central premise of his story for Journey to the Unknown, except that in this case, the protagonist (Stephanie Powers) is not the victim of a knock on the head but a suicide, whose dead body is brought back to life by a scientist. However, although alive, the poor girl has lost her memory, and her previous life is a mystery to her. In many senses, then, it looks like a familiar Woolrich story except that its protagonist is one of the living dead.

Similarly, Matheson, Beaumont and Bloch had all written horror, science fiction and noirish thrillers, which they did not see these as separate categories. Elements that we might associate with one term or another were often blended within their stories, and they even described their stories in ways that we might find surprising today. In his autobiography, for example, Robert Bloch describes his time as part of the Lovecraft circle of writers, when he was writing in the style of Lovecraft; but he does not refer to this writing as horror (with which these kinds of stories are commonly associated today) but as science fiction. Given these stories are concerned with alien monsters that are trying to invade the world, one can see how he could have understood the type of fiction associated with Weird Tales as SF rather than horror.

Westlake is also interesting in this context. Although probably best known for his comic caper thrillers, often featuring the wonderful Dortmunder (God, I love these novels – if you haven’t read a Dortmunder novel, you are really missing something), he has also written a variety of other stuff. In the mid-1980s, he wrote the screenplay for a fantastic slasher film, The Stepfather, which is an absolute classic. He also wrote the famous Parker novels, under the pseudonym of Richard Stark. These are tough, vicious thrillers that were most brilliantly adapted for the screen with Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin and directed by John Boorman. I also recently read Memory, a posthumously published thriller that he wrote back in the 1960s, which is a really wonderful Woolrich-style horror-thriller that is absolutely brilliant. And heartrending.

Anyhow, Journey to the Unknown demonstrates the continuing survival of a 1940s version of horror, just around the time when the first studies of the horror film were coming out and were largely marginalizing or excluding this tradition from what would become the canonical definitions of horror throughout most of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

To be continued: next week – Journey to the Unknown – Part Four: When it Works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNBlx5AbM94

Journey to the Unknown (1968) – Part Two: Joan Harrison in the Hammer House of Horror

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5oAcl7y7V4

It’s not just the American stars in cheap boarding houses that are odd. Journey to the Unknown was one of Hammer’s attempts to break into television and it was produced by Anthony Hinds, but it also featured Joan Harrison as an executive producer. I am not sure how much involvement she really had, or whether she simply owned rights to some of the stories, but a collaboration between Hammer and Harrison is worthy of comment.

Harrison’s film and television career started when she was employed as a secretary to Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s but, by the 1940s, she had graduated to screenwriter and had credits in various key Hitchcock films of the late 1930s and 1940s, notably Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur. By the mid 1940s, however, she had taken another step forward, and established herself as one of only three women producers in Hollywood, and one who was a specialist in the new horror-thrillers.

By 1944, she had not only written an interesting film, Dark Waters, in which Merle Oberon is menaced in the Southern Bayous, but was the producer of the highly influential, Phantom Lady, one of the films seen as establishing the noir style, and was a fantastic horror-thriller adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel. She then followed this up with another horror-thriller, Uncle Harry. The latter film was also as being highly significant at the time and gave the wonderful George Sanders a really terrific role. She then moved on to a series of other noirish thrillers, Nocturne, They Won’t Believe Me, and Ride the Pink Horse although it was in television that she became a really major player when she became the producer (with Norman Lloyd) of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a show in which she, and not Hitchcock, was the real creative force.

She would also be associated with Suspicion, which I have already written about, but it was Alfred Hitchcock Presents that was the hugely influential success and it ran from 1957-1962 before being converted into The Alfred Hitchcock Hour from 1962-1965.

Anyhow, Journey to the Unknown is an odd hybrid. It features the type of stories that were featured in Alfred Hitchcock Presents on the one hand, and the more seedy, sensationalism in which Hammer specialized on the other; and this was clear in the general aesthetic. The show was in color but, after the famous fun-fare credits, the color seemed an odd choice in the drab British locations – despite the color, things look VERY gray.

The shows also seemed to wrestle with the restrictions of television. Alfred Hitchcock Presents was very much about a sardonic tone and grim twists, but was also careful not to be graphic in its horror. Everything was about suggestion and atmosphere. But Journey to the Unknown wants to be graphic – it just can’t be! In short, the series seems to lack the sense of quality with which Harrison was associated, but also lacked the sensationalism for which Hammer was known.

For Harrison, its a sad end to an illustrious career.

To be continued: next week – Journey to the Unknown (1968) – Part Three: Horror Writers, Television and Alternative Definitions of Genre

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXaT_nHl98w

Journey to the Unknown (1968) – Too Bloody Right

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-oIPE2uL-o

Journey to the Unknown isn’t exactly bad. There is lots to enjoy, particularly if you are nostalgic for late 1960s and early 1970s kitsch – although that is also its problem. I just found the whole look and feel of the show so distracting. Its odd to see major Hollywood stars (and some less major Hollywood ‘stars’) coping with the run-down seediness of 1960s British life. For example, its quite disconcerting to see Stephanie Powers (the girl from The Girl from Uncle and one half Hart to Hart) grappling with a 1960s British gas meter. No wonder that she wants to commit suicide!

Weirder yet is Patty Duke (only a year after Valley of the Dolls) being sent to stay in a cheap seaside guest house at the end of the season – the landlady tells her that Patty that her employers must really value her, given that they have sent her there to recover from something unspecified, but I had a completely different response – obviously there is something very wrong with the landlady (that goes without saying) but is this all a sinister plot by Patty Duke’s employers to drive the poor girl crazy?

Even when things are supposed to be up-market, as in The New People, where Robert Reed and his wife move into an upmarket suburban neighborhood, the 1970s interiors are just too in your face. They don’t have the feel of a naturalistic setting that stays in the background but conjure up a fantastically weird land that time forgot!

However, its the odd mixture of elements that makes Journey into the Unknown both fascinating and awful. As should have become clear, this was a British television series but featured lots of American ‘stars’ that often seem to have been dropped into the British context with little or no convincing explanation – and even when there is an explanation, the juxtaposition still just looks ODD!

Also some stars are real stars, if somewhat faded as in the case of Joseph Cotton, Vera Miles, Barbara Bel Geddes; some are established or up-and-coming, such as Patty Duke, Julie Harris, Carol Lynley and Stephanie Powers; some are those loveable television personalities such as Robert Reed (who never makes me feel anything except happy, whatever tosh they put him in); but there are also hordes of less stellar figures like David Hedison, Michael Callan, Robert Lansing, George Maharis and Michael Tolan. Oh, and one episode features Brandon De Wilde, who was once the little boy in Shane!

Having said that, one story also features Roddy McDowall as a hip, young thing who uses words like ‘groovy’, which is about as near to heaven as one can wish for. McDowall is one of those actors who can make gold out of anything. Even the material that he is given here.

The stars are also interesting in other ways. Cotton is obviously there to evoke memories of his 1940s horror collaborations with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchock and others (Journey into Fear, Shadow of a Doubt, Gaslight, Love Letters, The Third Man, etc). Vera Miles was in Psycho, while Barbara Bel Geddes might be best remembered for her role as Miss Ellie in Dallas, but she was also in various thrillers, particularly Hitchcock’s Vertigo. If Patty Duke doesn’t have the same associations, Julie Harris had given an absolute stand out performance as Eleanor in The Haunting only five years earlier; Carol Lynley had be the terrified victim in Bunny Lake is Missing in 1965 (she would also appear a few years later in … you guessed it, The Night Stalker); and a young Stephanie Powers had appeared in Experiment in Terror (1962), which I have mentioned elsewhere.

However, the story is quite different with the younger men. Only Roddy McDowall seems to have had much of a background in horror, but what a background! He had a great little part in Fritz Lang’s horror-thriller, Man Hunt in 1941; he was Malcolm in Orson Welles’s mad, crazy Gothic take on MacBeth; he was in two episodes of Suspicon, neither of which I have been able to get hold of; he was in iconic episodes of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery; and of course he WAS the star of the Planet of the Apes films, and not only appeared in every one of the five films, but became the star of the series after the first two – he even went on to star in the television series, too.

In general, then, the series is an odd mixture of elements and references so that, when they called it Journey to the Unknown, they weren’t joking – you just never know what you are going to get!

To be continued: next week – Journey to the Unknown – Part Two: Joan Harrison in the Hammer House of Horror

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uglacaRF2ZQ

Beasts (1976) – Nigel Kneale’s Strange Creatures

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZnp_atwpRY

I am currently watching Journey into the Unknown, which has only reminded me how wonderful Beasts was. The latter was a one-time-only series of six horror plays, all of which were written by Nigel Kneale, the creator of the Quatermass stories and the Old Testament God of television horror. That fact alone should be recommendation enough but the series was an absolutely corker.

Of the six plays, my least favorite is Special Offer, probably because I am not a big fan of Pauline Quirke, whose weird supermarket employee is the central character. Odd things are happening in a supermarket, and an unseen creature seems to create havoc there, all of which proves fun but not nearly as disturbing as the events in other stories of the series.

Baby is also okay but pales by comparison. It involves a couple who find an odd object built into the fabric of the cottage that they are renovating, an urn containing the dried corpse of a strange unnatural creature. The mixture of pregnancy, witchcraft and domestic breakdown are well developed and genuinely unsettling but, to my mind, it is still not the best of the series.

In the The Dummy, however, the series really excels and it concerns an actor who is so bound up with a horror monster that he has made his name playing, the Dummy of the title, that he becomes possessed by the monstrous creation and suffers a horrifying breakdown. Here, as in the other stronger stories, the focus is on psychological processes and there is a slow but inexorable build-up of tension as we watch the psychological crack up.

However, my three favorite stories in the series are During Barty’s Party, What Big Eyes and Buddyboy. The first is probably the most familiar story but it features a central trick which is quite brilliant. Essentially, the world is taken over by killer rats … in one night! Great. This could have been an absolutely terrific and trashy horror tale, but instead Kneale tells the whole thing through techniques that make the story far more terrifying. First, the entire story is told within one household and with only two characters, as a husband and wife gradually realize the nature and scale of the horror. Secondly, we see nothing and the entire evidence for the horror remains purely aural. In other words, the couple start to suspect something is wrong when they hear odd noises under the floor, noises that become progressively louder and more frequent. Also, their link to the outside world is a radio playing in the background, the show being Barty’s Party, the kind of banal, cheerful nonsense that was typical of BBC radio at the time. The horror is therefore even more shocking for slowly chipping away at not only the couple’s nerves but the radio show’s facade of gaiety.

What Big Eyes is really difficult to describe and also largely revolves around a small number of characters as Michael Kitchen confronts an old man who experimenting with wolves (the wonderful Patrick Magee). Magee’s character believes a weird theory of evolution, which involves lycanthropy, and he is trying to turn himself into a wolf. He also has a devoted daughter who accepts her father’s faith in his own genius, even if he is shunned by others as a madman. Essentially, then, what we have is a fantastic retelling of the old mad scientist story, but with a terrifying psychological realism in which the arrogant over-reacher dominates and demeans his daughter, who willingly takes the humiliation because she believes in his superiority. I must say, having been raised in a Stalinist household, I found this a really moving story but I won’t spoil the end for you, which you will either find absolutely heart-rending or a massive let-down. I found it the former – the let-down is the tragedy … for everyone!

Finally, there is Buddyboy, and this one is going to prove even trickier to describe. Okay so let me get this out of the way right at the start: this episode is about the revengeful ghost of a dolphin. There, I have said it. It is out in the open. So we can push on. Despite what seem like one of the most unlikely, ridiculous, and inescapably campy premises in human history, this is one of the most chilling, moving, weird and wonderful horror plays ever. There, I have said that too, and while anyone who knows me also knows that I am prone to wildly exaggerated claims, I think that few people who watch this will actually disagree with me.

It concerns a sleezy sex-industry entrepreneur (Martin Shaw) who is looking for new properties and decides to take over an old disused aquarium. A vicious parasite who gains a sadistic pleasure from exploiting others, Shaw’s character quickly recognizes that the owner of the old aquarium is terrified of something and he can hardly stop himself from using this knowledge to get one over on the man.

The whole episode is drenched in atmosphere and the slow revelations of people’s viciousness and cruelty are tense and horrific. If the end almost comes as a disappointment, it is due to the extraordinary build-up. For me, this is the standout episode due to its really creepy, eerie tale of suffering and pain.

As you have probably guessed, then, the series is distinguished by two key features. First, the stories all revolve around ‘creatures’ (the unseen force in Special Offer; the strange mummified monster in the wall in Baby; the horror monster that is The Dummy; the rats in During Barty’s Party; the wolves of What Big Eyes; and the dead Dolphin of Buddyboy. However, in all these stories, these ‘creatures’ operate in relation to human beings, and it is these human characters who may be the real ‘Beasts’ that Kneale is concerned with.

Second, the series is also distinguished by a rather odd relationship to horror as a genre. On one level, the stories aim for a resonance that associates it with ‘serious’ drama and yet, at the same time, the series does not exhibit a contempt for, or embarrassment with, horror as a genre. Instead, it seems to embraces generic materials but gives them weird and unexpected treatments, treatments that make no distinction between popular generic entertainment and serious drama. Kneale was clearly trying to break out of certain confines but it is refreshing to find that it is not genre itself that he saw as limiting. In other words, Kneale seems to have been trying to genuinely experiment with the genre, to create something that was both fresh and familiar, serious and entertaining.

But I supposed that I had better get back to Journey into the Unknown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPXOfLnjbHo