I’m pretty confident I wasn’t the only person whose reactions to the recent, widely-publicised, bullshit from Abercrombie & Fitch veered between a weary shrug and a desire to see the tapeworm in question flayed alive and rolled in fucking wasabi. For the benefit of those lucky enough to have thus far avoided this particular storm-in-a-bidet, A&F CEO Mike Jeffries has gone on record as stating that he ‘doesn’t want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people.’ Furthermore, our style guru ‘doesn’t want his core customers to see people who aren’t as hot as them wearing his clothing.’

‘In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,’ Mike explained. ‘Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong, and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.’ Fair enough there, Mr Jeffries, fair enough. I admire your candour and believe firmly in free speech, but…

Now where do we begin? Let’s try and avoid the cheap shots – such as the irony of being lectured on the subject of attractiveness by someone resembling a cross between a cheap, knock-off Stretch Armstrong and a badly battle-scarred butt-plug – and begin with a few fundamentals. Cool and popular are not the same thing Mike. Fact is, the demographic you’ve got in your sights there, with A&F’s range of crap couture, is popular-courtesy-of-money-courtesy-of-mom-and-dad. Might be cool. Seldom is. Because cool usually comes with rebellion, individualism, style – going beyond the norm – and Abercrombie and Fitch embody the norm folk of taste are desperate to transcend. At the risk of sounding patronising here, Mike, I don’t think you’ve really got your head round the basics.

Taking a quick virtual tour around the world of Abercrombie and Fitch courtesy of the Internet, the one thing I’m not getting is cool. Or attractive. Or hot. Or exciting. Or, above all, exclusionary. Fact is, Mike, I could order any garment from your corporate label at the click of a mouse, which I don’t think’s exactly exclusionary. Of course I wouldn’t make that click, because your designs are uniformly dorky, boring, ugly, and about as sexy as, well, you are. Checking out ‘this season’s hottest looks’ from A&F, to my untutored eye I’d probably nail the unifying aesthetic as thrift-store-preppie, or maybe trendy-trainee-accountant. There’s a worrying ubiquity of flip-flops here. Here’s some free advice Mike. Try and remember who it was told you flip-flops were cool, and fire them. They were taking the piss mate.

If one adjective leaps to mind while staring at your dreary designs, it is vanilla. However, I’m reluctant to use the term here personally. Not because the pejorative implications – lacklustre, ordinary, humdrum – don’t apply to Abercrombie & Fitch. Quite the contrary! But, because I just can’t get behind the routine slander of the noble vanilla pod which has become so regrettably commonplace nowadays. It’s a reference borrowed from the fetish scene to dismiss those who don’t indulge in unusual sexual practices, and I wouldn’t endorse it. I certainly don’t look down on fervent fetishists as sad deviants, but equally I don’t buy the mythology that extols them as elite sexplorers. A better culinary analogy might be between sushi and steak. While one offers exoticism and variety – a particular boon to jaded palates – but it’s difficult to beat the other for sheer satisfaction so long as it’s done right.

More importantly, perhaps, the use of vanilla as a synonym for dreary and commonplace seems to me a terrible gastronomic injustice. It’s the second most expensive spice, after saffron, extracted from an orchid found only in sultry tropical climes. And you’re telling me that’s less exotic than a fucking strawberry! On a more personal and practical level, one of my favourite beers is Bad Kitty, from Brass Castle, a brewery near to my hometown. It’s a porter, as dark, rich and thick as Kanye West – though considerably less tasteless and dull. What really makes the Bad Kitty is an infusion of vanilla that compliments the chocolaty flavours for a poky brew that’s anything but boring (they also donate 10p from every bottle to a charity that takes in abandoned animals rejected by other shelters).

All of which is rather veering substantially off the point. We were trying to help that nice Mr Jeffries who seems to have become horribly confused while pimping his tacky clothes. So, where’s he gone wrong?… Maybe brands just can’t be cool by definition. Cool’s an ineffable concept, but it has something to do with a mystical alchemy between a person’s appearance, their character, and their tastes. It’s not something you can buy, and most certainly not something you can sell, however ‘exclusionary’ you pretend to be. That’s perhaps what’s most nauseating about Mike’s self-important twaddle – the pathetic attempt to commodify one of the few aspects of life thus far not available for purchase in our increasingly vulgar culture.

Buying a top-of-the-range Harley-Davidson won’t make a rich executive into an outlaw biker, whatever Harley-Davidson’s marketing people might have you believe. Similarly, buying a pair of Abercrombie & Fitch pants won’t make you ‘cool and popular’ or an ‘attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends.’ You’ll just be another sucker in another stupid pair of pants. Perhaps the facile world which Mike Jeffries inhabits doesn’t matter, but the increasing packaging of rebellion and cool does stick in the craw, however ineptly it is attempted. One of modern hip-hop’s most depressing contributions to modern culture is its – largely successful – attempt to wed street cred with crass capitalist excess and the ethos of the swaggering bully.

Perhaps that’s why the moronic statements from Mike Jeffries that triggered this rambling essay inspired such visceral reactions from some of us. Because, beneath the marketing bullshit is the unmistakable language of the bully. The kind of dysfunctional personality that can only measure their own happiness against the misery of others: who cannot appreciate the pleasure or beauty in anything beyond denying it to someone else. It’s often said that bullies are cowards. I’m not so sure. But the audience they require, the weaklings who stand behind them and cheer them on, most certainly are. And Abercrombie & Fitch make clothes for them, uniforms for drones who want to feel better than other people but don’t dare stand out. And that might be popular, but it ain’t cool.

Among the loot I brought back after sacking Rome recently was the latest movie by local filmmaker Dario Argento. I mentioned the movie in a recent essay on this very site in less-than-glowing terms, so thought the least I could do was actually watch the film before joining the herd in dismissing it as a disaster, sight unseen. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the work of Mr Argento, he’s long enjoyed a reputation as perhaps Italy’s most stylish and audacious horror director, most famously for his delirious 1977 masterpiece ‘Suspiria’. In recent years, however, that reputation has plummeted courtesy of a succession of highly disappointing flicks, leaving many dedicated fans now hoping Dario won’t make another film, just as fervently as they once wished he would.

His most recent effort is ‘Dracula 3D’, which premiered at Cannes over a year ago, where, it was widely and comprehensively panned by the critics. (The review in ‘Variety’, which dismissed it as ‘a near-two-hour joke that ought to have been funnier’, was pretty typical.) Under this salvo of bad notices the film appeared to retreat off the radar, confirming suspicions for many that this wasn’t the film to rescue Argento’s reputation. But I couldn’t help but be curious, and when I saw a copy on DVD in Profondo Rosso, Dario’s shop in Rome, I snapped it up. Could it really be as bad as rumour had suggested? After all – to adopt my seldom-worn optimist’s hat – many of the director’s early classics were condemned by conventional critics upon initial release, awaiting discovery by more discerning eyes among genre devotees…

First off, it’s worth noting that my copy wasn’t in 3D, so I can’t comment on that aspect of the production. So let’s refer to it as ‘Dario’s Dracula’ – or ‘DD’ – from hereon in rather than ‘Dracula 3D’. Secondly, there will be minor spoilers in the following paragraphs, for which I apologise. But, frankly, if you’re approaching this film hoping for a complex, clever plot full of cunning twists, there’ll be tears before bedtime. There again, plotting and characterisation have never been Argento’s strong suit even in his best pictures, and ‘DD”s certainly no exception. Many elements appear plucked from other vampire flicks and cast haphazardly into the script on a whim, with little narrative tension to speak of. To be fair, ‘DD’ is clearly the product of folk familiar with horror cinema (though there’s little evidence of familiarity with the original novel) and genre veterans can play a game of ‘spot the reference’ in order to enliven proceedings.

So, for example, Jonathan Harker (somewhat anachronistically sporting a black ponytail) is a librarian, employed by the Count to sort out his book collection. Chalk one up for the 1957 Hammer version. The hackneyed plot device of having Harker’s wife Mina as the reincarnation of the Count’s lost love is plundered from the Francis Ford Coppola blockbuster version of 1992 (or, just maybe, the 1974 Jack Palance TV movie). I like to think that an early scene featuring some stuffed animals is in tribute to Jess Franco’s characteristically crackpot, low budget ‘Count Dracula’ (1970), which features a stuffed animal attack as one of its least special effects. I suspect Dario was aiming for something that captured the lush Gothic atmosphere of the Hammer and Coppola hits. He’s ended up with something rather closer to Franco’s steaming, chaotic stew of gore and sleaze in period garb.

There is the requisite dose of flesh and blood we’ve come to expect from classic Euro-horror – the first gratuitous sex scene hits just after five minutes in – and most of the actresses disrobe at some point in the proceedings. (Including Dario’s daughter, Asia, who seems to get naked in most of her father’s films these days – which is either refreshingly liberated or slightly weird – don’t ask me which.) Similarly there’s plenty of bloodshed, though too much of it’s achieved using clumsy CGI, of which more anon. Suffice to say, many of the killings might make you wince, but not often for the right reasons. Another issue here, is that there’s probably a little too much sex and violence for this to reach a mainstream audience, yet far too little to impress the kind of horror fan who’ll forgive a myriad of cinematic shortcomings as long as you throw enough voluptuous flesh and viscera at the screen. While in Italian horror’s 1980s heyday, films by Argento and friends were being banned for being excessively brutal and perverse, ‘DD’ looks tame, even quaint and comical, next to the barbed cutting-edge of the modern post-torture porn competition.

As I’ve already suggested, the CGI doesn’t help. I’m not among the radical puritans who condemn its use under all circumstances. Used with skill in the right situations, CGI represents a potent tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal. Yet the CGI in ‘DD’ mostly just looks cheap and dated – some of it wouldn’t be out of place in a bargain bin computer game – though there are occasions where it works. Similarly there are a number of wolf attacks in the film. Shooting day for night is a money-saving technique most of us are familiar with from low budget horror, and largely inclined to forgive. For the wolf attacks in ‘DD’, however, Argento is either trying to be quirky by staging the scenes in blazing sunlight, or he’s not bothered to even pretend its night-time for reasons of cost, time or energy. Who knows?…

One of the more original – and frequently commented upon – aspects of ‘DD’ is Argento’s unorthodox use of more unfamiliar animals in his freewheeling take on the vampire myth. According to the original novel, Dracula ‘can command all the meaner things, the rat, and the owl, and the bat, the moth, and the fox, and the wolf, he can grow and become small…’ While most adaptations confine themselves to allowing the Count to become a bat or wolf, Dario goes one further, making his Dracula transform into several unexpected critters, most infamously, a preying mantis! If I’m honest, I liked these offbeat elements of inventiveness, and would’ve welcomed more. I don’t think ‘DD’ was ever going to work as a straight Gothic that could stand up against the big budget Hollywood competition, so a retreat further into sinister surrealism might well have worked in its favour.

Performances are probably best described as competent, particularly given the dodgy dialogue they often have to chew over. ‘DD’s Renfield is a lumbering thug who reminded me a bit too much of Father Jack from the priestly sit-com ‘Father Ted’. Rutger Hauer half-heartedly channels the Anthony Hopkins Van Helsing from the Coppola ‘Dracula’, while Thomas Kretschmann as his nemesis the Count delivers a dignified, if unspectacular performance. To be fair, he’s following in the footsteps of actors who occupied the character so effectively as to struggle to escape the role, such as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, who were always going to be tough acts to follow. While the script obviously demands an undead antihero, crackling with demonic, erotic menace, Kretschmann’s Count has the gravitas but not the charisma to pull it off. There’s more of the vindictive bureaucrat than the cursed aristocrat about this Dracula – he feels more likely to audit the shit out of your accounts than steal your immortal soul.

Completing the ensemble is a soundtrack courtesy of Argento veteran Claudio Simonetti. It’s a curiously old-fashioned affair, most reminiscent of spooky TV shows of the 1960s – say ‘The Twilight Zone’ or even ‘Dark Shadows’ – complete with theremin. It contributes a cartoonish tone to proceedings – ‘Scooby Doo’ with tits maybe – while the accompanying video single ‘Kiss Me Dracula’ wouldn’t look out of place in ‘Eurovision’. Little in ‘DD will please Argento purists or mainstream horror fans, and I’ve spent most of this piece pouring scorn upon the film. But I can’t escape the fact that I had a blast watching it. There are moments that suggest the dark genius behind Dario’s best work, and even at its direst, ‘DD’ is infinitely more fun than the teen-obsessed dreck and found-footage bilge that passes for horror in most multiplexes these days. Misconceived, frequently daft, often slapdash, for sure, but I grinned throughout the whole silly exercise. Maybe it’s time to stop praying for another ‘Suspiria’, and to just crack open another beer and enjoy the show…

It is St George’s Day, a day where we indulge in typical English pastimes. Such as bickering. Traditionally, someone begins by contrasting how St Patrick’s Day is celebrated, while that of our own patron saint is neglected. Usually someone will now observe that George wasn’t an Englishman at all, but a Turk/Georgian/Syrian/Geordie. This is customarily followed by rather vague and feeble accusations of racism. Right-wingers must now accuse those failing to celebrate of being traitorous, bed-wetting Trots, while their liberal counterparts must hiss darkly about the English flag becoming the sole preserve of goose-stepping, Imperialist hooligans. None of which I have a problem with – like all good Englishmen I love a pointless argument, and will punch the first person to suggest otherwise – but I fear it rather misses the point.

Moving back to my childhood momentarily, when I was a kid, I liked to go to the London Dungeon every year. These days it’s a popular franchise, with branches across Europe. A haunted-house-style attraction, it’s full of animatronic gimmicks and out-of-work actors in white face-paint, jumping out at punters, or insulting or flirting with them in that curious accent you only ever hear in dodgy historical re-enactments. But in the early years, when I went, it was more like a grisly waxworks, focused on tableaux of authentic nasty episodes from our past. Frankly I preferred that, but I digress… The reason for this digression is that they had a couple of exhibits considered too gruelling for the casual visitor, shielded behind curtains with a warning emblazoned on them. Of course, this was quite irresistible. In one such taboo tableau was St George, being laboriously sawed in half.

Unsurprisingly, this made an impact on me, and ever since that’s the story of St George I remember, rather puzzled why others only talk of matters draconic. Many early Christians would have shared my sentiments. For whatever else you might feel about George, his dragon-slaying activities were incidental to the point of irrelevance in terms of his canonisation. For, what gets you sanctified in the Catholic church is dieing for the cause in the most dramatic, pointless, and preferably painful, fashion possible while continuing to irritate your persecutors with pious platitudes. In that department, George outstrips pretty much all of the competition. His death was a practical encyclopedia of the torturer’s art, that lasted not minutes, days, or even weeks, but seven fucking years! By comparison, JC’s time on the cross at Golgotha was a pleasant afternoon in the great outdoors.

So, in the spirit of celebrating our national day, I’ve hunted down the best account I could find of George’s interminable end. It has all the characteristics of authentic Early Christian lore: Pythonesque levels of silliness, childishly petty and spiteful sniping at rival religions, plus worryingly enthusiastic levels of sadomasochistic excess. I suspect we don’t hear so much of this aspect of the St George story because some scholars find it distastefully gruesome while others are aware that its gloriously, nasty tone of hysterical absurdity rather tend to expose the true colour of Christianity’s roots. But this is the real reason why St George is still remembered as a saint, not any hot action with scaly mythical characters. This version is borrowed from the Medieval Institute of Kalamazoo, Michigan

George, a military leader under Dacian, “king of the Persians,” inaugurates his seven years of torture by boldly coming forward to confess his belief in Christ, as Dacian is preparing to persecute Christians in the area. At Dacian’s order, George is stretched out on the rack and ripped to shreds with flesh hooks, harnessed to machines that draw him apart, and then beaten, after which salt is poured into his wounds, which are rubbed with a haircloth. He is then pressed into a box pierced with nails, impaled on sharp stakes, plunged into boiling water, and has his head crushed by a hammer. All to no avail. God comforts George in prison and informs him that he will die three deaths before entering Paradise. Dacian, confounded, summons the magician Athanasius who shows his mettle by splitting an ox in half and having each half return to life whole. Undaunted, George gulps down two portions of the magician’s poison, at which point the magician confesses Christ and is summarily executed by the Persian ruler and George is returned to prison. The next day he is lacerated on a wheel of swords, cut into ten pieces, and thrown into a well that is sealed with a stone. God appears with the archangel Michael to resurrect the saint, at which point the officer in charge, Anatholius, is converted with nearly 1,100 soldiers and one woman, all of whom are immediately executed. Dacian then redoubles his efforts: George is tied to an iron bed, molten lead is poured into his mouth and eyes after which sixty nails are driven into his skull, he is hung upside down over a fire with a stone tied around his neck, and he is shut into the revolving belly of a metal ox which is filled with swords and nails. Yet again at the end of the day the saint goes back to prison. To die his second death, George is sawed in two, boiled to bits, and just before he is buried, God, good to his word, resuscitates him after five days.

Despite fastening a glowing iron helmet to the prisoner’s head, tearing and burning his body some more, and executing George a third time, Dacian fails to move the saint to sacrifice to Apollo and tries verbal persuasion instead. When George appears to consent, the delighted king invites him to the palace for the night during which the saint surreptitiously converts Dacian’s wife Alexandra, who is later executed as a result. George in the meantime goes to the temple of Apollo, whose statue promptly leaves the temple and confesses his fraudulence. The saint stamps his foot, and the ground swallows up the false god. Exasperated, Dacian pronounces George’s death sentence yet again. Before his execution, though, George prays and intercedes for those who remember his name and feast day. Having survived seven years of torture and three deaths, he is finally decapitated and gratefully ascends to Heaven.

So, what are we to make of this crazy episode of divine capers in the Middle East? For one thing, I don’t think the main impression I get here of George is one of bravery. More stupidity and stubbornness, blended with an irritating dose of low mendacity. Which are characteristics to be found among many Englishmen to be sure – one can see why the Houses of Parliament might approve, for example – but these aren’t traits inclined to make me swell with patriotic pride. The major plus point in this story is the ridiculous overdose of blood, gore and murder on display, leavened with elements of the supernatural. It is, in other words, an early horror story, and I most certainly approve of that. So perhaps we should revere St George as representative of England’s proud tradition as the home of horror, the patron saint of splatter. Certainly, if Hammer were thinking of getting into the ‘torture porn’ game, they could do a lot worse than making ‘St George: the Movie’ in fully, bloody 3D. It’d make ‘Hostel’ look like ‘Mary Poppins’.

This immediately felt like yet another of my rants that demanded a flurry of apologies, exemptions and provisos to preface it. I do use the term ‘fan’ in a positive sense on a regular basis, often interchangeably with terms like ‘aficionado’ or ‘devotee’. So, for example, if I say an event is run ‘by fans, for fans’, I’m expressing approval, in contrast to more cynical festivals and such where financial profit’s the motivating factor. (It’s an indication of the perceived marketing value of being seen as a fan-focused event that so many film and music events portray themselves as such, when they’re quite clearly purely commercial endeavours.) There is, of course, much to be said for folk who are enthusiastic about and dedicated to the art or entertainment they enjoy, but I think there’s a little more to fandom than that.

I think alarm bells first started going off when I first came across fans of my favourite film genre – horror – being described as ‘nerds’ or ‘geeks’. Not, significantly, by a hostile outsider, but a fan, describing themselves and fellow fans as ‘horror geeks’. Now, as these terms were principally coined as anti-intellectual slurs by boneheaded sports fans and cowardly conformists, I certainly don’t want to come out and say there’s anything wrong with being a nerd, or indeed a geek. Equally, however, I’m not convinced it’s something to aspire to. The advent of ‘geek chic’, with dickheads wearing horn-rimmed glasses with non-prescription lenses – or even no fucking lenses at all – in order to follow fashion, is surely enough on its own to make avoiding geekdom like the plague a sensible decision. Yet I’d like to think I’m driven by a little more than rabid inverse snobbery.

Geeks have been traditionally associated with science fiction and comic books. More specifically, they’ve been associated with focusing obsessively on specific franchises – archetypally Star Trek – to the fixated degree where they’ve not just bought the T-shirt, but learnt the imaginary language. I remain sceptical that everyone who declared their religion as ‘Jedi’ on the census was joking. This is ‘fan’ as an abbreviation of ‘fanatic’ – as in monomaniacal devotion – and I suspect it’s not something we should be encouraging. Certainly, regardless of whether it’s become chic or not, I’d rather not see this happen in horror, which is generally commendably broadminded. Attend a good horror movie festival, and you’ll see everything from harrowingly gritty realist drama to zany comic fantasies, appreciated by audiences open to anything dark or offbeat that stirs the imagination or gets the blood pumping effectively. Of course, I’m probably biased as a lifelong horror fan.

There’s that word again. It is of course probably impossible to successfully separate and eliminate a word so successfully ingrained in our collective consciousness as a ‘good thing’. But perhaps you’ll humour me for the next few hundred words while I at least give it my quixotic best. Much of my problem with fans is their fanatical, undiscriminating nature. (The fact that ‘discrimination’ – the ability to differentiate one thing from another based upon quality – has become an almost exclusively negative term reflects something depressing about the modern world, but something beyond the remit of this little rant…) You might suggest that folk being fans – becoming uncritically obsessed with something or someone – is not only none of my business, but does no harm. You’ll doubtless be unsurprised to learn that I beg to differ…

The first thing is that a world which favours fans is one which habitually promotes shit. The faceless suits that pull the strings behind the scenes love fans, because nothing pleases them more than gullible, compulsive consumers. The sort of idiot who’ll buy four new ‘official’ football strips a year, every year, at vastly inflated prices without a qualm. If the suits can create similar scenarios in the realms of music and film, you can bet they’ll do it in a heartbeat. This is why certain undemanding rubbish receives enormous amounts of promotional resources – why we get fuckawful awards like the Grammies and the Brits – while other more interesting material is left to fend for itself in this hostile environment. It isn’t to do with promoting commercial material – if it’s truly that commercial, why bother? – but hyping shit that’s cheap and easy to churn out. I have some ideas on distinguishing such McMusic from the real deal – my binary theory of musical appreciation – but I’ll leave that for another time…

For now, suffice to say, becoming a fan invites becoming part of this process, a passive observer – or even an active cog – in the creative abattoir currently consuming the entertainment biz. But, you might argue – to move our focus back to movies – the film franchise you obsess over is far more sophisticated and original than the kind of populist pap I’ve been describing. It might well be, or at least was. The Hollywood machine does of course throw up something innovative or clever, be it by accident or design. It may very well be that the first film in your franchise qualified, but by the time it’s become fan fodder the tendency for it to become bland and predictable is building exponentially. More importantly, perhaps, the chances are when the first film came out, it did so unheralded by critics and unloved by fans. It was those adventurous cinemagoers willing to take a chance on a promising unknown quantity, not fans obsessed with a pop culture monolith, that kept your treasured fan favourite alive in the first place. If you want to stay faithful to the spirit of your favourite flick, spend money on speculative film tickets, not yet more branded merchandise. Debate the merits of oddball indie releases, not the minutiae of the continuity in tired sequels.

At least as a fan, you’re showing support for your favourite artists, and that has to be a good thing, right? Maybe, maybe not…. I most certainly appreciate it when somebody tells me that they like my work. But there again, believe it or not, that doesn’t happen so often. Even when it does, it can be kind of awkward. What do you say? If you agree you sound like an arrogant dick. Disagree and you come across as a grumpy old sod. Being English, of course, I have the third option of apologising, which I often use, before flailing around for some self-deprecating anecdote that illustrates that, while I may look like an international playboy and dashing man of letters, at heart I am still basically mortal. However, back in what passes for the real world, as a consequence of my work, I have had recourse to rub shoulders with sundry folk who really are famous. One major impression I’ve come away with is that, while admitting it would finish their careers, many of them are decidedly ambivalent about fans in private. Allow me to elaborate…

While it certainly suits some celebrities to be, well, publicly celebrated, others struggle to conceal their discomfit or even disgust. In my experience, the dividing line is ego versus talent. Those with plentiful self-belief but little actual ability bask in fan adoration, while those who are authentically gifted shrink from it. I’ve been sat next to someone as successions of fans have approached our table, proffering drinks, flirting, while struggling to know what to say. What if you, as a breathless fan, say the wrong thing to your lifelong idol? From the other end, while you have to be polite and tolerant, even grateful, the overwhelming feeling is awkwardness – the first-date-style awkwardness of struggling not to give the wrong impression to someone you don’t really know by saying something wrong. Of course, for some celebrities this is an ideal opportunity – a one-night-stand scenario (often in a quite literal sense) – where it doesn’t matter what they say because the other person doesn’t matter and you’ll never see them again. But these are seldom the kind of stars who have much to say worth hearing – either in person or with their work – and casting yourself at their feet is likely just feeding an already clinically obese ego. So, on balance, you should of course show appreciation for the work of someone you admire, but act like a fan and only the arseholes will appreciate that.

But, of course, there are less high profile legends that attract their own legions of fans – the backroom boys that garner more intellectual adulation without necessarily drawing mobs wanting to stick their tongues down their throats. Surely this kind of less carnal, cerebral celebrity worship can’t do any harm? I’d argue that even here undue adulation can be unhelpfully dazzling, even paralysing, doing untold damage to a talented artist’s career. Perhaps I can illustrate by referring to the realms of film fandom, specifically the horror genre, an area I know pretty well. Let’s take a couple of genre giants that towered over horror cinema during my formative years. To be honest, I never understood the widespread worship of Dario Argento. Some of his cinema – most notably Suspiria – was inspirational. But so much of his best work was undone by silly plots, dire dialogue and dodgy acting – why did nobody mention this to Dario? Whatever happened to George Romero? Turned one of America’s most visionary and daring directors into a sorry Hollywood hack, turning out dross that looks like clumsy film school pastiches of classic Romero?

I’d say the fans happened. So fans are responsible for kitschy dreck like Dracula 3D or the maladroit disaster that was Diary of the Dead? I’d say pretty much, yes. Being surrounded by dedicated cineastes hailing your genius to the heavens must have an impact on your sense of perspective if nothing else. While Argento should have been focusing on improving those aspects of his craft that let his work down, he was being distracted by too many voices lionising elements of his movies Dario didn’t even realise were in there. When George finally returned to the cinema of the living dead, he’d read so many pretentious articles dissecting his classics as works of profound social criticism, he forgot that they began as just cool ideas for scary flicks. For different reasons, two brilliant filmmakers lost their mojo, though in both cases I’d say it was the undiscriminating adulation of fans that played a leading role, making Argento over-complacent and Romero over-self-conscious.

By way of control, I’d offer Don Coscarelli, a horror director who emerged from the same period. Coscarelli was best known for his Phantasm franchise, beginning in 1979, and currently at number IV in the series as of 1998. Phantasm certainly has its fans – three sequels prove that – but it’s never enjoyed the fanatical following of Argento’s ‘Mother’ films, or Romero’s ‘Dead’ series, which have delivered such crushing disappointments to fans over the past decade. Similarly, Coscarelli’s seldom enjoyed the auteur tag routinely applied to Argento and Romero. In the case of cult Italian directors like Argento, narrative incoherence is typically interpreted as deliberate artistry designed to achieve a surreal, nightmarish effect rather than evidence of directorial shortcomings. Similar bizarre plot insanity in the Phantasm films often wasn’t cut so much slack. Yet, while Dario’s been depressing fans with Giallo and George discouraging devotees with Survival of the Dead, Don’s been blowing audiences away with truly original, breathtakingly good films like Bubba-Ho-Tep and John Dies at the End. Evidence that the absence of an overweening fan base can leave you to concentrate on the business of making cool movies mayhaps?…

As I write this, I am increasingly aware that the familiar face of hypocrisy looms over proceedings, not least in the shape of a signed Vincent Price picture that presides over my study. Similar evidence that I myself am not immune to the fan syndrome can be found all over the house, from the Universal Monsters busts that guard my DVD collection, to the Hammer horror coffee mugs in the kitchen. Much of my fan ephemera relates to older, classic genre outings – though I still buy it to this day – suggestive perhaps that fan worship is perhaps somewhat age-related. Somebody once said something along the lines that nobody ever sees their favourite film after the age of twenty, and I think there’s some truth in that. There’s something about encountering films with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of an adolescent that’s impossible to recapture as we grow older, and as our powers of discrimination wax, our passion wanes.

Perhaps that’s the essence of the issue. I get irritated when certain words are habitually used as pejorative terms – such as ‘middle class’ or ‘adolescent’ – as this is lazy thinking, prejudice that focuses on the negative stereotypes while ignoring the positives. I also have little time for those Jeremiads who insist they don’t make any good films/music/whatever anymore. You just can’t be bothered to look anymore. So, if fan status implies the passion and open-mindedness of youth, it’s a positive thing. It’s just when we cling onto it long after puberty was a distant memory that it has a habit of going stale or even turning toxic. You can’t hold onto the magical feelings you experienced when you first encountered your favourite work of art, and trying to do so will just ruin your appreciation of future works. So, as we mature from Monster Kids, let’s not aspire to be horror geeks, but become genre aficionados and enthusiasts. Now, I’m off to enjoy a bowl of Count Chocula…

It’s just hit the headlines that Manchester police are adding members of ‘alternative’ subcultures such as Goths, emos and metallers (I’ve never liked the term incidentally – do metal fans ‘metal’?) to a list of those at risk of hate crimes. This has caused a great deal of comment, not least from members of aforesaid subcultures who believe such moves lend them protection from hostility and prejudice or even justify them in some ineffible fashion. I’m afraid I can’t agree. I was uncomfortable when the campaign for this special status for subcultures was begun several years ago, and felt the need to write an opinion piece on it in the hope that people might think again about what I saw as a campaign for a bad law, being made with the noblest of intention, but without enough forethought.

My opinions on this haven’t changed much, so I thought I’d republish this little piece on the problems of expanding hate crime legislation largely un-revised. The only thing I’ve changed is the title, because it occurs to me that I’m not arguing for more tolerance for difference. If you stand out from the crowd for reasons of dress, for example, it is only human nature that you will attract attention, and that some of that attention will be unsympathetic. That’s just life. We don’t have a right to be admired and shouldn’t have a right to immunity from disdain or even ridicule. We should, however, have an absolute right to freedom from physical assault or intimidation. So, I’m advocating greater intolerance of society’s hooligan elements, both on the streets and in culture. What we have is a police force increasingly engaged in box-ticking, in hunting down people who make jokes on Facebook while football thugs run riot on a weekly basis. Initiatives, like this pointless move to categorise alternative subcultures as oppressed minorities, will only make this sort of situation worse. So, ladies and gentlemen, I submit a plea for intolerance…

It’s seldom good news when the mainstream media turns its attention to Goth. Everybody from the alternative scene is familiar with the intermittent, ignorant jibes from the press. Right-wing rags print stories warning worrying parents about the telltale signs to watch out for to prevent their offspring becoming Goths, while left-leaning broadsheets mock the Goth scene for its lack of ‘social relevancy’ and failure to exhibit the working class or ethnic roots that excite white, middle class commentators. And woe betide the Goth scene if a high profile crime is committed, where the perpetrator happens to dress in black. Open season is swiftly declared on the subculture, with bigoted editors printing pictures of tenuously-associated bands, while hacks comb their albums for out-of-context lyrics that ‘prove’ that everybody who’s ever worn a black leather jacket is Evil.

Recent media coverage of Goth has been even more troubling, though for altogether different reasons. The horrific murder of Sophie Lancaster, in a Lancashire park on August 11th, 2007, and subsequent trial, gripped the British media’s attention. In part, because of the truly appallingly brutal nature of the attack on a defenceless young girl, but also because the only motive for the wholly unprovoked assault appears to have been the alternative style of Sophie, and her boyfriend Robert Maltby who she was trying to protect when she was murdered. Her mother made the brave decision to make public pictures of Sophie in a coma in the days before she lost her fight for life. Even the most stony-hearted cynic couldn’t fail to be moved by the sight of this lovely, vulnerable young girl, her precious life brutally extinguished by vermin.

The press reacted with sadness and sympathy, particularly in light of the humbling dignity of Sophie’s mother, who expressed a hope that her death might not be in vain, hopefully serving as a horrific reminder of the consequences of intolerance. The media also reacted with anger, reflecting more closely the attitude of Sophie’s boyfriend Robert, who understandably couldn’t find words for how he felt about those who had robbed him of his soul mate in such an unspeakably vile and cowardly fashion. When pictures of the two killers were published last week, there was a certain depressing predictability about the identity of the moronic duo. Both, of course, were chavs, members of the sportswear-clad packs that plague Britain’s streets in the 21st century. Some commentators saw the attack as a symptom of the conflict between chavs and Goths among UK youngsters. Few cared to mention that this ‘conflict’ is almost always one way, that one of the many contrasts between Goth and chav culture is the essential pacifism of the former and the gratuitous, feral aggression of the latter.

There has been a call to extend hate crime legislation to extend to ‘protect subcultural people’ among sections of the Goth community, with an on-line petition to that effect being presented to parliament. But is this appropriate? Why is a crime worse if motivated by ‘hate’? One of the most disturbing aspects of the Sophie Lancaster case was the almost total lack of motive, hatred included. Besides which, we’d end up in the absurd position of lawyers trying to prove in court who was, or was not, legally a Goth. Such laws only feed discrimination and underline difference, while criminalising free speech, without deterring offenders who clearly have no concern for legal consequence. A murder is a murder, and while there is a case for increasing penalties for motiveless crimes like the Sophie Lancaster tragedy, it shouldn’t matter whether the victim or the perpetrator was a Goth, a Mongolian, or a Mormon. That’s what justice is about surely? A charity has been set up in Sophie’s name, the acronym translating as Stamp Out Prejudice Hatred and Intolerance Everywhere. While the sentiment is admirable, the practicality of such an ambitious campaign is surely questionable. Not least because, sad to say, sometimes negative emotions are justified – who could possibly begrudge Robert Maltby his hatred towards his attackers, or condemn the prejudice of anyone who opts not to walk past gangs of chavs alone?

If there is anything positive to be taken from this truly tragic crime, it is that it has obliged the British media to take a look at some of its own ill-informed prejudices. It was impossible to look at Sophie Lancaster without seeing beyond the piercings and dyed hair to see a loving, beautiful young lady, who died trying to protect the man she loved. Or to look at her attackers without wondering why we are feeding and sheltering such creatures when there are still shortages of donor organs in this country. We should be wary of blaming any art for the actions of individuals, but perhaps some of the media could look a little harder at the ‘urban’ music beloved of the baseball cap brigade, and cut a little more slack for the music and culture created by the black leather jacket contingent. Goths like to look different, and difference attracts suspicion. It’s simply human nature. But we would do well to remember that the world has always suffered more at the hands of those, like chavs, who are violently obsessed with everybody looking the same, than those, who like Sophie, just liked to look different.

This Sunday (March 31st) I shall be delivering a brief sermon to introduce a screening of the classic shocker Rosemary’s Baby at the City Screen cinema in York, England. Come along, because an Antichrist isn’t just for Christmas, they’re for Easter too!…

Just for a change of pace – and because I can put whatever nonsense I like on my own blog – we’ll be enjoying a brief interlude in 11th Century Spain, via the 1970s. Specifically, I’d like to offer a capsule review of sorts of the book I’m currently reading. Increasingly, like a lot of old farts, I find myself revisiting the entertainments of my youth. I used to read a lot of horror comics as a teenager, and have been rereading them courtesy of various collections (or graphic novels if you want to get literary about it) that have been proliferating over the past decade or so. I’m guessing that the primary market for these is nostalgia, because, truth be told most of them don’t really stand up to the modern competition.

In general, the art meets muster (I actually dislike a lot of modern comic art with its over-use of computer technology and the ghastly influence of manga), but the scripts are woefully leaden and the plotting comically ham-fisted. A case in point is El Cid, which I never read at the time, but thought looked fun the other day. For reasons best known to themselves, the editors at Eerie (a horror comic published by Warren) decided what they needed was a rip-off of the Charlton Heston historical epic El Cid, already 14 years old when they commenced the strip in 1975. What they got was a sort of Happy Shopper Conan the Barbarian, half-heartedly relocated to medieval Spain.

In common with most of the comics I’ve been revisiting from the era, El Cid is compelling, fun, and frankly, a bit shit. There is something inimitable about 70s comic scripts that makes you grin as it makes you flinch. An attempt to seem sophisticated and worldly that is wholly unconvincing, as if somebody’s ODed on pubescent hormones and then gone crazy with a bad thesaurus, spraying a feverish diarrhea of hot adjectives all over the page. While El Cid spares us the usual attempts to appear hip and with-it via embarrassing references to drugs or hippies courtesy of its historical setting, it more than makes up for it with the fervid flood of sex and violence, all written with the unmistakable tone of someone with no practical experience of either.

It’s probably easiest to demonstrate with examples. Here our hero gets into a tussle with a village full of evil dwarves. I can’t remember why he does – it seldom matters much – but the results are plain to see. El Cid 5 – Dwarves 0. You see our protagonist is rock hard and there’s seldom much actual tension in the story as there’s rarely much prospect of El Cid getting killed. Just, as it says here, panel after panel of brutal butchery.
Of course it’s not all blood in El Cid’s world. There’s also babes. Here, our hero is being tempted to murder a young man he happens to be passing and do something equally terrible to the chap’s girlfriend. The hooded fellows doing the tempting are actually ancient demons, who El Cid thwarts by the less than dramatic method of declining their polite suggestion.

Sometimes, however, El Cid does taste the musk of people’s moisting charms, though this seldom pans out. In this case it’s a Moorish slave girl who – like all the women in El Cid – falls madly in love with out hero almost instantaneously. This may have something to do with the fact that (with the exception of crones, who don’t count) all of the women in the strip look almost identical. They also all, almost inevitably, die violently before the end of the episode. This allows El Cid to morn the loss of the love of his life (even though he only met her three panels earlier) and ‘taste love anew’ in the following episode.

Part of the dubious charm of these old strips is their naïve misogyny and inept sadism – too silly to find offensive – stories full of the kind of crazy surrealism that people who’ve never taken drugs imagine might come to you on LSD. I dread to think of how many youngsters had the shit kicked out of them trying out moves cribbed from comicbooks, or indeed romances sabotaged by teenagers emulating seduction techniques suggested in the pages of El Cid. Still, never did me any harm… Incidentally, for the benefit of the uninitiated, the title is a reference to a character in a rather more recent comic. I daresay Sid would’ve fitted right in in 11th Century Castile.

Recently, the nice people at Lionsgate asked me in my capacity as a devotee of all things devilish to contribute to the launch of the new Silent Hill sequel. I was happy to oblige with a few interviews on the subject of Hollywood’s depictions of Hell, plus an essay on the topic. Several fine film sites published the essay, though in its truncated form, focusing on more recent film – based on the sound philosophy that attention spans on the Internet can be somewhat short, and the rather more dubious assumption that nobody’s interested in anything that happened before they were born.

(Any potential clients might care to note that, whenever appropriate, I put essays together in a ‘modular’ form, making it easy for paragraphs to be extracted without damaging the sense or flow of the piece, allowing for maximum adaptability. Plug done.)

Incidentally, Silent Hill: Revelation is great fun. While it’s unlikely to excite fervent disciples of French New Wave cinema, or indeed Fellini aficionados, it looks great – sharing that same eerily epic aesthetic as the original – moves at a cracking pace, retains its commendable fidelity to the spirit of the original games, and most importantly, has some truly marvelous monsters (such as our rather splendid friend at the head of this post). Top beer and popcorn horror with all the requisite jump scares and creepy twists. Meanwhile, I thought some of you might enjoy this first section of the essay which hasn’t yet seen the light of day, covering depictions of the Underworld in early cinema. Hope you like it…

HOLLYWOOD GOES TO HELL

By Gavin Baddeley

Starting in 1896, the Parisian illusionist and special effects pioneer Georges Méliès made well over 500 films – many of them only a few minutes long – mostly to showcase the camera trickery he was developing with the new medium. The Frenchman saw cinema as a tool to amaze and enchant audiences, filming the fantastic, frequently taking on the role of the Devil himself in front of the camera. Inevitably, many of his films haven’t survived, but two from 1903 are still with us in the form of Faust aux enfers (usually translated as The Damnation of Faust) and Cakewalk Infernal, making these perhaps cinema’s earliest surviving forays into the Underworld.

The story of Doctor Faust, the supposedly real German sorcerer who sold his soul to a devil named Mephistopheles, has inspired numerous works of art, music and literature, including several short films by Méliès. In The Damnation of Faust, we follow the doomed Doctor to Hell, which is full of sulphurous flames, monsters, devils and – somewhat incongruously – ballet dancers. Cakewalk Infernal introduces us to yet more damned dancers. This time devotees of the cakewalk, a goofy dance invented by slaves on American plantations to mock their swaggering masters, which subsequently became an international sensation. As this suggests, though Méliès is often cited as a horror movie pioneer, and there are macabre elements in his films, the tone is more often whimsical and fantastic rather than horrific or morbid.

Another cinematic pioneer who took a light-hearted look at Hell was Walt Disney, suggesting our great grandparents were less uptight than we might suppose. In the 1929 animated short Hell’s Bells, one of Disney’s ‘Silly Symphonies’, spindly demons cavort through Hades, a cavernous realm inhabited by bats and serpents. The tone is surprisingly dark, not least when Satan gleefully feeds his imps to his three-headed dog Cerberus. Six years later, the studio released Pluto’s Judgement Day, in which Mickey Mouse’s dog Pluto (also the name of the Roman god of the Underworld incidentally) chases a kitten, and then dreams he’s lured into Hell. This Hades, however, is a Hellish court staffed by demonic cats who try, and then find the cartoon dog guilty of his sins. While both shorts are obviously played for laughs, it’s difficult to imagine Disney animating such hot topics in the studio’s later years.

Of course, some early filmmakers did take the prospect of everlasting damnation more seriously. The first ever feature film from Italy, home of Catholicism, was an adaptation of the epic 14th Century Italian poem Inferno by Dante Alighieri. (It’s worth noting here that of the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy – detailing journeys to Hell, Purgatory and Heaven – it’s the first that enjoys by far the most interest, reflecting the aspects of the traditional Afterlife that fascinate us most.) The 1911 film effectively brings to life the engravings of the Victorian artist Gustave Doré, the best-known illustrations of Dante’s classic depiction of a journey into Hell. While modern viewers might be most shocked to note that the film follows Dante’s original poem and puts Mohammed in Hell, a century back it was the nudity that upset some viewers.

Despite – or more likely because of – this L’Inferno proved an international success, and, in an early example of a time-honoured Hollywood tradition, the film was duly ripped off in the US. The pirate in question was the infamous director and producer Dwain Esper, the man responsible for such zero budget dreck as Reefer Madness and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband. Esper randomly spliced scenes from L’Inferno into his dodgy 1936 oddity Hell-A-Vision. Nudity had become officially taboo in Hollywood after the imposition of the Hays Code of censorship rules in 1934, giving Esper’s threadbare outlaw production the added allure of the forbidden. Oddly enough, this wasn’t the only example an American director using Dante’s Inferno as an excuse to include some titillation in their depictions of Hell.

The 1924 film Dante’s Inferno concerns a slum landlord who’s so wicked that a demon arrives to drag him down to a Netherworld inspired by the 14th Century poem. It’s the climax of the film, built on huge sets and, as it precedes the 1934 code, a surprising number of those writhing in the flames or being whipped, are doing so without a stitch on. The 1935 remake features Spencer Tracy as an immoral fairground owner whose shady character earns him a trip through the fiery depths of Hades. As this Dante’s Inferno debuted post-Hays Code, while there’s plenty of chains and sweating flesh, voluminous wigs come in handy to cover the modesty of the damned. From a purely moral standpoint, the trouble is that these Netherworlds seem more exciting than terrifying somehow – certainly the scenes they appear in are highlights in a pair of otherwise rather dull films.

Despite easy assumptions about the piety of yesteryear, by the 1940s, Hades was – if anything – being treated with even greater irreverence in Hollywood. In the whimsical 1943 fantasy Heaven Can Wait, a spoiled socialite tries desperately to prove he lived a sinful life in order to get into Hell, which seems to resemble an exclusive gentleman’s country club. The same year saw the release of a big screen adaptation of the witty, all-black Broadway jazz musical Cabin in the Sky, in which the Underworld is a swinging juke joint, and the forces of Heaven and Hell decked out in dapper, old-fashioned military uniforms. In Angel On My Shoulder (1946), Old Nick mischievously swaps the souls of a virtuous judge with a loutish hoodlum – with Hades depicted as resembling an American penitentiary, complete with trustees and a warden.

It’s almost as if, in an age which witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the idea of a fiery pit staffed by guys in red suits wielding pitchforks had become redundant to the point of camp. That’s certainly the way it comes across in The Devil with Hitler, a 1942 propaganda piece where Hell is like a corporation, with its demonic board threatening to sack Satan for failing to be as wicked as the Fuhrer. The traditional terrors of Hellfire seem to have cut even less ice in Hollywood in the Fifties, as the Cold War unleashed fears of nuclear apocalypse and communist subversion. A typical quasi-scientific – even atomic – treatment of the Afterlife is the star-studded 1957 flop The Story of Mankind in which the ‘High Tribunal of the Great Court of Outer Space’ is convened because humanity has developed a ‘Super H-Bomb’ capable of wiping out the entire human race. For the prosecution, arguing that man should be allowed to destroy himself is Old Scratch – played by horror legend Vincent Price – while Ronald Colman (in his final role) argues for our preservation as the Spirit of Man.

The most interesting interpretations of Hell in the Sixties came from beyond Hollywood. The Devil’s Messenger (1961) was cobbled together from a Swedish TV series entitled 13 Demon Street, and features a wraparound story in which Satan (played by Lon ‘Wolfman’ Chaney Junior) tries to recruit souls to join him in Hell. With echoes of The Story of Mankind, the Devil’s ultimate plan involves destroying humanity with a nuclear bomb. In Ingmar Bergman’s characteristically melancholy Swedish 1960 comedy The Devil’s Eye, Don Juan – history’s greatest lover – is tormented in a highly theatrical Hell, by having to constantly repeat his greatest seductions without ever consummating any of them. Jigoku (1960, nominally remade in 1979 and 1999) from Japan offered a Buddhist interpretation of Hell, which is a stopping-off point in the cycle of reincarnation to which we condemn ourselves. Unusually, at a time when Japanese horror cinema was usually painterly, poetic and haunting, Jigoku tried to shock with its cheap and deliberately nasty depictions of the suffering of the damned.

If you found this little essay diverting, you might like to read the second part, which brings us up to date with matters infernal and cinematic. The following fine film websites have all been kind enough to publish it: Midnight Review, the Incredibly Strange Movie blog, Movie Ramblings, Horror Talk, Pissed Off Geek, and Total: Spec.

I seem to have spent much of my writing career wrestling with popular myths and fashionable falsehoods. For want of a better term, let’s call these ‘revelatoids’. So, what’s a revelatoid? Allow to me to offer as an example an old favourite, which I’ve been encountering anew with depressing frequency during recent research. It concerns witches, specifically, the idea that historical witchcraft, as manifest in European history of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern eras, had nothing to do with the Devil. You’ll find this confidently stated in magazine articles, in books, and on radio and TV documentaries. Indeed, repeated often enough with sufficient conviction that folk could now be forgiven for believing it to be true. Unless, of course, you’re familiar with the original sources…

Bar a flimsy fistful of interesting exceptions, every significant document from what we might call ‘the Golden Age of European Witchcraft’ – say 1300-1700 – makes prominent mention of Satan in some unholy shape or form. Now you could argue that most such documentary evidence is compromised by bias – overwhelmingly the work of fervently Christian authors, frequently quoting from confessions extracted under extreme duress. But, quite frankly, that’s pretty much all we’ve got that’s worth the paper its printed on. The other ‘evidence’ you’ll find on offer almost invariably turns out to be wayward wishful thinking, concocted in more recent times to some modern agenda, a.k.a. ‘shit some bozo made up’.

Open season on re-inventing witchcraft began in the 1920s when an eminent Egyptologist named Margaret Murray, while on hiatus from unwrapping mummies, stumbled upon a theory that connected witchcraft with a pre-Christian fertility cult. Witches actually revered Mother Nature, but were persecuted as Satanists and forced underground by fanatical Christian clergyman, who in their ignorance mistook the witches’ horned hunting god for that other notorious horny character from Hell. It was a fascinating idea with but one fatal flaw. It was almost certainly total bullshit. Respect for Margaret’s good name as an Egyptologist ensured her theory enjoyed a brief respite of academic respectability, before its tender underbelly of implausibility was exposed, and the scholastic hounds of history tore Murray’s pet theory limb from limb.

Understandably, under such pressure, the pet theory slipped the leash and became increasingly wild, embracing such madcap notions as a secret royal conspiracy of human sacrifice and a race of literal little people, dubbed ‘fairies’ by us dull ordinary folk. By this point the only serious attention Margaret’s pet theory was enjoying in academic circles was hostile – used as target practice by mean-spirited historians looking for an easy hypothesis to shoot down for fun or profit. The retired Egyptologist’s knight-in-shining-armour came in the eccentric shape of an ex-civil servant named Gerald Gardner, a well-travelled amateur anthropologist with an interest in historical weaponry and exotic religions.

By recruiting a few occult enthusiasts of his acquaintance, and combining some of his own peccadilloes – notably nudism and a little light S&M – with Murray’s theories, Gerald came up with a practical programme, a creed he dubbed ‘Wicca’. While sceptics might observe that his coven seemed more like a Home Counties swingers club than a pre-Christian sect, for Gardner and friends, the aura of witchcraft served both to justify their al fresco frolics and add a deliciously unholy frisson of wickedness to proceedings. Crucially, however, Murray’s theories allowed these newly minted ‘witches’ a get-out-clause whereby if challenged, they could piously observe that witchcraft had nothing to do with the Devil, hence anyone criticising them was taking the side of the sadistic bigots of the Church who persecuted, tortured and murdered so many innocents in centuries past.

Distinctly dodgy claims to roots stretching back millennia notwithstanding, Wicca was born in the years following World War Two. It was given a welcome shot-in-the-arm in 1951 with the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1735, which Gardner claimed finally allowed him to be open about his beliefs. Gerald was being disingenuous at best. The Act of 1735 wasn’t about persecuting witches as dangerous heretics, but aimed at stopping con artists from defrauding the gullible with claims of magical powers. The law that replaced it, the Fraudulent Mediums Act, was much the same, altered only slightly to allow Spiritualist churches exemption from prosecution for fraud. Both acts treat witches as fraudsters rather than sorcerers, and would’ve made no practical difference to Gerald’s gaggle of occult-inclined naturists, unless they were fleecing people. But it made for good press, an ideal opportunity to exploit the wave of ill-informed media interest stirred up by the repeal of the Act.

By the time Gardner died in 1964 a fertile new field of potential converts were emerging among the flower children of the nascent hippie movement. The naturism and risqué rituals dovetailed neatly with the hippie ‘free love’ ethos, while evidence that many traditional witches’ potions contained psychoactive ingredients encouraged mystically minded acidheads to see kindred spirits in the covens. Another self-styled high priest – or indeed King of the Witches no less – soon leapt nimbly into Gerald’s still-warm sandals, in the shape of one Alex Sanders, a fellow Brit who proved adept at exploiting the widespread growing interest in all things occult burgeoning in the Sixties. While the witch-finders of yesteryear rode out equipped with thumbscrews and pricking needles, their 20th Century counterparts were armed with telephoto lenses, notebooks and a lascivious leer.

For, much as Sanders liked to maintain that there was no erotic element to his naked ceremonies, few really bought the line. Least of all the tabloid and colour supplement editors who printed acres of newsprint covering the supposed witchcraft revival, illustrated by copious photographs of attractive young witches, frolicking au naturel for the edification of the reading public. Alex’s nubile wife Maxine later observed that she doubtless had the most photographed bum in England. Repeating the suspect story that these were the inheritors of an ancient pre-Christian religion seemed a small price to pay – and useful justification – for getting away with printing such nakedly prurient pictures in ‘family’ newspapers. The other increasingly familiar mantra of Wiccan dogma was the ‘fact’ that witchcraft had nothing to do with the Devil, and that anything bad associated with the occult was all the fault of elusive – and frankly largely imaginary – Satanists.

Curiously, the Sixties also saw the term ‘witch-hunt’ enter widespread popular usage as a metaphorical term for any draconian persecution of innocent scapegoats. The McCarthyite ‘Red Scare’ of 1950-56 was increasingly described as a witch-hunt in retrospect (thanks, in part to Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible which used the Salem Witch trials on 1692-3 as a metaphor for McCarthyism). Serious historical scholarship on witchcraft was starting to examine the phenomenon as a manifestation of the horrors of murderous scapegoating, which had reached an appalling apex in the 20th Century with the Nazi Holocaust. Were the witch-hunts Early Modern Europe’s equivalent? Wiccans liked to think so, as it reinforced their self-image as a long-oppressed minority, persecuted for centuries and now deserving of sympathy and special treatment. At least it would if their creed bore any real resemblance to historical witchcraft. More pertinently perhaps, if the building historical consensus was correct, and the witches executed in days gone by were simply victims of delusional persecution, was there ever truly any witchcraft tradition to adhere to anyway?…

Such questions went largely unanswered – and indeed unasked – within Wiccan ranks however, as our latter-day witches began to warm to the role of oppressed martyrs. A new phrase began to be bandied about in the Seventies – ‘the Burning Times’ – referring to the movement’s supposed times of trial in days gone by. Accompanying these buzzwords came fresh claims and jargon. Nine million women had died during the Burning Times, a tragedy that qualified as ‘Gendercide’, the murderous suppression of the feminine power manifest in witchcraft by the patriarchy. Inevitably, perhaps, little of this would pass muster with serious scholars. The number of victims quoted is absurd – reliable estimates suggest well under 1% of the figure so often quoted – of whom most where hanged not burnt, and while the majority were female (maybe 75%) many of those who died were men. But we can’t let historical research get in the way of spiritual truth now can we?…

The idea of witchcraft as a feminist force actually first emerged in parallel to Wicca, when a New York group emerged in 1968 calling themselves W.I.T.C.H.. It stood for ‘Women’s International Terrorism Conspiracy from Hell’ and consisted of radical feminists who struck out at what they perceived as misogynist targets with acts of satirical revolutionary street theatre while dressed as Halloween witches, a process that they described as ‘hexing’ or ‘zaps’. The victims of hexing included Wall Street, male-dominated revolutionary movements and bridal fairs, before W.I.T.C.H. fizzled out in 1970. Meanwhile Wicca was also embracing a revolution, as many began rejecting the leadership of ‘Kings’ like Gardner and Sanders – who seemed increasingly inappropriate icons for such a traditionally feminine practise as witchcraft. Similarly, the Horned God was frequently given his marching orders in favour of placing a Mother Goddess centre stage, with some covens even adopting a ‘ladies only’ policy, a version sometimes styled as Dianic Wicca.
The Great Rite – ritual sex, frequently employed by male coven leaders to initiate pretty recruits – became yesterday’s news, replaced at first by a symbolic version (thrusting a knife into a cup) before largely being abandoned altogether. Other risqué practises, once integral to Wicca, such as flagellation and nudity, faded into symbolic versions before often being abandoned altogether. Witchcraft – at least in this version – was losing its frisson of wickedness, its alluring aura of sin washed away and replaced by green awareness and liberal gender politics. Ironically, one is tempted to observe, the very engine of its invention in the mid-1900s – the exercise of the libido in an exotic, interesting milieu – was removed, leaving behind only the tenuous ideological window-dressing that once justified it. The supernatural swingers had stopped swinging.

At this stage in proceedings, those persistent readers with the endurance to reach this far in this rambling essay might feel entitled to wonder if we’re any closer to a point. Will we ever find out what a ‘revelatoid’ might be? What, indeed, has it to do with a notably spiteful dissection of the less edifying aspects of the history of Wicca? For, to be fair, many 21st Century Wiccans probably wouldn’t disagree with many of the observations made here, even if they might take issue with the mean-spirited tone in which they were made. Among the better-informed adherents there’s a willingness to concede that historical scholarship is against them, to accept that their form of witchcraft is a largely modern invention. But – what the Hell – Wicca works for them, so why change it? To be honest, even I’d struggle to argue with that. So why waste all these words washing Wicca’s dirty laundry?

Well, it’s because I’m sick of hearing the revelatoid that witchcraft has nothing to do with the Devil, which Wicca’s ultimately responsible for propagating, even if it’s spread by numerous sundry numbskulls these days. I’m now long overdue explaining my term, so here goes. A revelatoid is a particular species of factoid. For those unfamiliar with this word, it refers to a frequently repeated falsehood. A classic example is the notion that most people only use 10% of their brain, something that is only true of the kind of people who repeat this silly statistic. A revelatoid is a surprising revelation repeated specifically to try and establish its author as an expert in a specific field, and like a factoid is actually firmly rooted in 24-carat-bullshit but repeated often enough to enjoy some specious legitimacy. So, faux occult experts frequently try and establish their credentials with the shock disclosure that witchcraft historically has nothing to do with the Devil.

As I suggested at the start of this rambling address, my career seems to have centred on confronting revelatoids. So, for example, after my first book on Satanism (when I first began to be irritated by the dubious legacy of Wiccan wisdom) I penned a cultural dissection of the singer Marilyn Manson. Ask most people to categorise Manson’s music, and I suspect many might still identify his work as Gothic rock. Suggest that to most self-respecting Goths, however, and they’ll react with a mixture of dismay and disdain. Because, as every authentic Goth knows, Marilyn Manson is the very definition of not being a Goth. Indeed, expressing contempt for the vocalist is the secret password that establishes the speaker as clued-in on the subculture, unlike the poor fools taken in by the ignorant mass media. The only thing is, this is horseshit. Gender-bending, wildly coloured hair, platform boots and an obsession with Tim Burton, David Bowie and Bauhaus: So Marilyn Manson’s a fucking reggae singer?…

There’s a very similar scenario regarding Cradle of Filth, who were the subject of another of my books a few years back. The imaginary initiation into the make-believe secret black metal circle involves fervently disavowing Cradle before sagely intoning that they’re not proper black metal, and that only a prize fool would mistake them for such. Yet, as much as black metal is a specific style of music, the British band were playing it and touring with fellow black metal bands when many of the pompous tools making such statements were just an unhealthy glimmer in Jimmy Savile’s eye. Cradle themselves have wisely shrugged and abandoned such battles long ago as a waste of time, but I can’t help feeling mildly irritated on their behalf. If only because I’ve been listening to black metal for even longer, and don’t take kindly to being lectured by the hoards of bandwagon-jumping bell-ends.

This meandering missive is already too long by half, and as I plan to elaborate on my charges of bell-endery in black metal (and possibly also the depressing sport of Gothic one-upmanship) at a later date, I should probably wrap up and shut up. I’m under no delusion that ‘revelatoid’ will catch on and endure as a term, in fact I sincerely hope it doesn’t. In part because it sounds too much like a shitty Dr Who monster, and partially because if I’m entirely honest, I rather like myths, and what I’ve been describing has largely involved the evolution of modern mythologies. But I don’t like it when myths limit their subject or slowly drain it of mystery or danger, which is what has happened with revelatoids like the Wiccan Devil denial. Plus, the really wonderful thing about history is that it’s almost invariably far more interesting and shocking than the shit bozos make up…

Late last year I was interviewed by the lovely Haley Alice Roberts on a subject dear to my heart – namely the state of play in the modern horror scene. For anyone curious to hear me bitch and kvetch at length on everything from the dreaded ‘found footage’ to the tedium of ‘torture porn’, Hayley was kind enough to give me permission to post a copy of her interview here. Let the rambling commence…