Now Playing: Johann Sebastian Bach--"Buss und Reu" from the St. Matthew Passion
I've been published this month! Some may know that I frequent British Horror Films, a website devoted to what one might imagine, which combines hilarious film and television reviews (the review for 1974's Craze--with Jack Palance as a gay antiques dealer--is perhaps the funniest I've ever read) with a terrific web community, which comment on the width and breadth of the site's given purview and then just about anything else. Why am I so interested in British horror films? It almost certainly resulted in the beginning from my (ongoing) devotion to Doctor Who (countless lead actors and guest stars of the latter had appearances in these flicks), but I came to realize that there was a certain something to those classic numbers like some of the Hammer Dracula flicks (featuring the dynamic duo of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) and lesser known gems like Quatermass and the Pit (1968) that American horror films from John Carpenter and that wretch Wes Craven lacked (Larry Cohen and George Romero are still awesome, though). One cherished childhood memory, "Commander USA's Groovie Movies," which showed Saturday afternoons on the then-fledgling USA cable network ("Commander USA," a paunchy, middle-aged dude with a resemblance to Charles Bronson in a baggy superhero outfit, lived below a shopping mall and carried on Senor Wences routines with his left hand--"Lefty"), ran many of these movies (I still remember bits and pieces of Vampire Circus--which I still haven't actually seen, dammit--and sadly all of Land of the Minotaur). I was a huge fan of The Wicker Man (1973--one of my undisputed top ten favorite films of any sort; finally seeing the previews for the Nicolas Cage/Neil LaBute remake will not change that one iota) as early as high school, and through discussions on the board have managed to track down other gems such as Death Line (1973), Vampyres (1974--chilling despite the godawful ending), and, of course, the magnificent Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974).* There's no dearth of print recommendations, either; had it not been for the board I may never have discovered the joys of the master of literary horror, M.R. James (Lovecraft may use bigger and fishier words, and Poe has more English-class cred, but I suspect James tops them both). The members are tremendously friendly (there have been differences, of course, but given the actual horror stories I've heard about other message boards, it seems a model of etiquette and literacy), opinionated, and well-versed in matters cultural and political, so it's rarely a dull moment when I check the posts.
BHF's head honcho, Christopher Wood, won a contest a couple of years back put out by the BBC in which participants were asked to supply an ending to a beginning written by horror writer Shaun Hutson (described very amusingly in the anthology's introduction). Talk about his win on the forums and the literary aspirations of some of the board's members led to the establishment of a new subforum devoted to creative horror and/or speculative horror-tinged fiction writing. Chris was so impressed with the results that he decided to put nearly twenty of the stories into an anthology, published by a small print-on-demand firm that specializes in this sort of thing, the profits to go towards the running of the website. Two of mine, "Brierley Day" and "Hotel Naiade," were chosen, and my copy finally arrived in the mail yesterday. It's lovely; Paul Mudie's illustrations on both shiny covers purposefully evoke the old Pan paperbacks to which the anthology was partly intended as homage. The illustrations in general are first-rate. Lawrence Bailey's dark visions alternate with Paula Fay's macabre children's-book pictures, giving a visual heft to the thing that many regular paperbacks just don't have. I'd read all the stories before, but was pleased to remember how good they were on rereading them. They range from M.R. James-style Victorian ghost stories (Daniel McGachey's "They Dwell In Dark Places") to seventies rural nostalgia (Billy Turner's "Fresh Souls," complete with Ford Cortina!) to an annoying, punchable hero like many in British horror films themselves (Chris' own "Edward"), to the nasty, occasionally fatal travails of the present-day homeless (James Stanger's "Beggar's Banquet"). All are good (although one of mine could really have used a hard scrubbing) and some are excellent, the standout for me being Neil Christopher's "Surface Tension," a maritime horror combining the tang of the sea, infernal imagery, haunted islands, a thrillingly imaginative (and comprehensible) use of physics, and a doomy, apocalyptic dread throughout. Thanks to Chris and everyone who came together to make this thing; it's terrific!
*Available at Liberty Street Video in Ann Arbor: Death Line, with its U.S. title of Raw Meat, on DVD, and Vampyres on crappy yet now quaint VHS (old, too--there are upcoming video previews from the late 1980s, of the kind I used to see on SelectEvent, what I think was the "Betamax of Pay-Per-View"), both in the horror section.
Posted by Charles J. Microphone
at 4:57 PM EDT
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