... the beginnings of horror. Part Two
Denis
Gifford’s was a name I encountered many times during my teens, a
man whose enthusiasms for comics, horror and science-fiction films
mirrored my own. He was the author of numerous books that I quickly
came to regard as definitive texts, including Happy Days: A
Century of Comics and a publication that found its way into my
hands early in 1974, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies.
This book became my guide to the genre, its limits and scope coming
in time to define the extent of my own interest in horror films. At
the time of its publication in 1973, Gifford’s guide, essentially
an illustrated companion to the whole horror genre, covered pretty
well every significant title ever committed to celluloid in the name
of scaring the moviegoing public of Britain and America. It had
little or nothing to say on examples from other countries, and this
omission goes a long way to explain why, to this day, I have never
taken an interest in European horror films.
In
actual fact, the years of my serious interest in horror films were
essentially the decade of the 1970s. By its end, my attention was
beginning to waver, and I took no interest in the increasingly
violent and erotic offerings that were arriving in cinemas with
depressing regularity. Frankly, I drew the line at Dracula AD
1972. I still do.
Denis
Gifford’s book included dozens of stills, posters and lobby cards,
some depicting films I have yet to see forty-four years later, others
serving as an indication that it probably wasn’t worth bothering
with them. As is always the case when selecting a single image to
stand for a whole movie, many of the pictures were misleading, or
misleadingly labelled. A particular favourite was the small black and
white still from Fiend Without a Face (1958), which purported to show
a woman having her brain ‘sucked out by materialised thought.’ In
fact, she was being attacked by a flying brain and spinal column with
antennae: possibly the most ludicrous monster ever conceived for a
horror picture (the genre not being noted for its adherence to
plausibility, it must be said). That small still, however, was enough
to convince me to add Fiend Without a Face to my ever-growing
list of horror movies that I must somehow endeavour to watch
(invariably, although not always, on television). In fact, it would
take over forty years before I finally got to see the movie (on a
film print in a privately-owned screening facility) and I recognised
it at once for a prime, oven-ready turkey. A bum steer if ever there
was one: thanks, Denis...
Good,
bad or bloody terrible, the films covered in Denis Gifford’s
weighty tome supplied me with a bucket list of horror pictures to be
investigated as and when they turned up on television. It also set a
limit on the extent of my interest in the genre, and to this day,
there are few horror films post-dating that book that I’d willingly
sit down to watch. Once it was relatively easy to find such old
movies on television, although these days one struggles to find
anything pre-dating the last turn of the century... back in the 70s
and 80s, it was a different matter entirely, and horror films lay
thick on the ground, classics, obscurities, the whole gamut,
stretching back to the 1930s.
ITV’s
late-night Friday horrors of the 70s formed part of the subject of
my last blog post, and the slot, starting life under the bland
umbrella title of ‘The Late Film’, soon became enshrined under
the far more evocative appellation, ‘Appointment With Fear’.
These were the days of the in-vision continuity announcer, one of
whom, Peter Tomlinson, became inextricably associated with those
late-night terrors. He appeared one week accompanied by a knitted
panda, which a thoughtful viewer had sent in as company to sit with
him through the scary pictures. One thing led to another, and before
too long, Tomlinson would turn up on screen surrounded by a veritable
menagerie of cuddly toys (didn’t he do well?) I had the pleasure of
lunching with Mr. Tomlinson last year, and can report that he still
holds fond memories of ‘Panda’ and those late-night broadcasts...
Frankly,
this was the only way to watch horror movies. Forget the cinema or
today’s shiny new blu-ray remasters: nothing quite recaptures the
experience of watching a splicy, scratchy old film being shown late
at night, sometimes with the threat of a thunderstorm rumbling away
in the near distance. The defining example of this experience
occurred on Spring Bank Holiday Monday May 28th, 1973, and
while the film in question wasn’t exactly to my taste (the 1943,
musical version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring Claude
Rains), the ensuing night more than made up for the movie’s lack of
terrors. By the time the movie ended at a quarter past midnight,
there were some curious, distant bumping sounds coming from somewhere
outside. It sounded, implausibly enough, like someone moving
furniture out of a van a few yards down the street. It was not, as
suggested by our mum, a ‘dog running up the side of the house’,
which was possibly the scariest of the infinitely possible
alternative explanations. In fact, it was the distant, continuous
roar of a gigantic thunderstorm, of Hollywood biblical epic
proportions, which, when it finally arrived, would rage far into the
small hours, utterly obliterating the memory of Claude Rains and his
facial scars.
Thunderstorms
are, of course, a staple of the gothic/horror genre, and there are
many classic examples in the history of horror films, none more so
than the storm that forms the centrepiece of Bride of Frankenstein
(no matter that it was all achieved by studio artifice). Even if
there wasn’t a storm in a particular picture, the creaky old prints
being pressed into service by ITV and BBC during the the 1970s often
had such rumbly soundtracks that it was hard to tell whether or not
some distant thunderstorm might be lurking just over the horizon,
either in the movie or, more worryingly, in real life. The effect was
most noticeable during quieter passages, and once again it fell to
our mum to provide an explanation for this phenomenon: it was, she
told us, just the film ‘rolling on’. Highly technical, I know,
but this shorthand explanation was seized on by my brother and myself
whenever we encountered a particularly rumbly soundtrack on one of
these late night horrors (curiously, the phenomenon never seemed to
afflict other movies shown on TV).
Appointment
With Fear and its associated seasons (such as ‘The Monster Movie’)
dominated Friday late night television for a good many years, and
through the good offices of ATV, I got to see a lot of horror movies
from the 1930s through to the 1970s, amongst them Taste the Blood
of Dracula, Tarantula!, The Blood Beast Terror, The
Fly (and its disappointing sequels), The Hound of the
Baskervilles, It Came From Beneath the Sea, The Mummy’s
Shroud, Twenty Million Miles to Earth, The Sorcerers,
and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
But
inevitably, enough is as good as a feast, and after a few years I was
pretty well done with horror movies, to the extent that, when the BBC
instigated a late-night horror double bill in the 1980s, I rarely
made the effort to tune in, unless the Radio Times guide
assured me of catching something special (such as Night of the
Demon, broadcast on 2nd January 1991). It’s also telling to
look back and realise how many of those films I’ve never seen
again.
Of
the films released after the Gifford book came out, pretty well the
only horror movie I’d single out as a go-to title for me would be
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which with its famous
quotation from The Three Little Pigs, brings us neatly back to
where we began...
One
of the last of the ITV horror seasons that I made a special effort to
watch went out in early 1979 under the umbrella title ‘Christopher
Lee, Prince of Terror’, and in the last part of this series, I’ll
look back at the most significant film of that season...
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