Of Werewolves and Wedlock

With my new book successfully launched at last month’s Frightfest, the reviews are starting to come in. I’m highlighting this one from the Sinister Minister, Reverend Peter Laws, because I think it’s the first review I’ve ever had on YouTube. It is also, incidentally, very kind. I may be seperated from Reverend Laws on many points of philosophy, but we have very similar taste in monster movies. Which just goes to show the unifying powers of horror cinema!

On which note, wish me luck, as I’m getting married this weekend, in a medieval hospital, under the full moon!…

Modern Horror’s All Folked Up

A viewing of the recent Netflix horror film APOSTLE last night inspired a few thoughts on recent trends in the genre.

Basically it’s the bloke that made THE RAID having a crack at THE WICKER MAN.

(Or, if you prefer, Welsh director Gareth Evans – who gained a cult following for his uber-violent Indonesian action flicks – turns his talent to an atmospheric period horror film set rather closer to home.)

[MINOR SPOILERS HEREAFTER]

First off, it’s pretty good, though at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, like so many recent movies, it’s too long. Hey, you quit making overly bloated films, I’ll quit whining about it.

This self-indulgent editing does give you rather too long to ponder some of the weaknesses in the plotting and generally threatens to leech some of the urgency and suspense from proceedings.

But it doesn’t destroy them, and – bam! – when things get messy and nasty in the final couple of acts, they hit like a freight train. If you’d forgotten that this was directed by the chap behind THE RAID, you soon remember here. The violence and Grand Guignol brutality is so flamboyant that it almost won’t gel with the film’s preceding sinister slow-burn scene-setting. But I’ve bought this ticket and I’m definitely on board for this rough ride.

You might charge that making WICKER MAN comparisons these days is lazy criticism. I’d respond that making WICKER MAN pastiches these days is lazy filmmaking. I confess to heaving a little inner sigh when yet another film sets out to try and jump onto the increasingly rickety folk horror band wagon.

It’s not that I don’t like folk horror. Quite the reverse. Replacing traditional Gothic themes with folkloric tropes is an excellent opportunity to introduce freshness into a horror movie. And it’s not like I object when the horror films I love mine the well-worn Gothic tradition. It’s just…

Well, for one, I am allergic to buzzwords. And for a long time ‘folk horror’ was a buzzword in search of substance. It meant virtually nothing (three tangentially related vintage Brit horror movies) and everything (a fandom has grown up, dedicated to labelling everything, from bus timetables to Donald Trump’s hair, as ‘folk horror’).
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From somewhere in-between emerge these WICKER MAN rip-offs, some pretty good, some not so good. All welcome in their own way. I mean, rather these than lazy zombie snoozeathons, home invasion toss, or torture tedium.

I’m just not convinced that this has something profound to say about our relationship with our lost rural roots in the 21st century. THE WICKER MAN is horror’s salted caramel. It was an interesting flavour when you first heard about it, but now everyone is doing it, it’s not so special, and there’ll be a new taste sensation along presently.

But as it goes, THE APOSTLE is one of the more toothsome examples.

Documenting She Beasts, Sorcerers and Witchfinders

As autumn finally beckons, finally burying another sweltering summer, I have a number of projects, appearances and suchlike to announce. But let’s begin with a brief plug for an upcoming feature documentary, THE MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION OF MICHAEL REEVES. For those unfamiliar with his work, Michael Reeves was the greatest director we never had. Those in the know were touting him as the next Alfred Hitchcock, a prodigy whose instinctive grasp of violence and the macabre was second to none. But tragically he died of a barbiturate overdose in 1969 at just 25. The young director left behind just three features – THE SHE BEAST, THE SORCERERS, and WITCHINDER GENERAL. But all three are now recognised as indicative of vast potential, the latter in particular a cinematic landmark that still looms large over the horror genre today.

I was privileged to be asked to take part in a new documentary by Diabolique Films, peeling back the skin on the private world of this brilliant, troubled filmmaker. THE MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION OF MICHAEL REEVES premieres at FrightFest in August and Abertoir in November, offering a rare opportunity to preview this fascinating new feature on the big screen. (I hope to be in attendance at both events this year too – but don’t let that put you off.) For further info on this upcoming release, check out the Diabolique Films page here.

Going Howling Mad

I’ve neglected this site for rather too long, though in my defence, I’ve not been idle. One of the endeavours occupying my time has been this…

The culmination in many ways of a lifelong lycanthropy obsession, it consists of reviews of some 200 werewolf films, supplemented by essays on the history of lycanthropy, musings on the place the Wolfman holds in classic monster iconography, and a survey of the other creatures we can turn into should the mood take us…

The exclusive release is planned for Frightfest this August, where I’ll be signing copies alongside DOG SOLDIERS director Neil Marshall. So even if you don’t fancy my illegible scrawl in your book, that has to be a must for any serious werewolf devotee. What’s more, Neil’s penned a rather wonderful foreword, where he explores his own relationship with the Wolfman.

I have a lot of exciting, crazy things coming up in the next few months, so stay tuned for more information. In the meantime, for more details on the book and the signing, click here.

How We Resurrected the Bride of Frankenstein in a Medieval Hospital

On a personal level, 2018 was a very challenging year. But there were good times, and one highlight was definitely our public screening of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN for Halloween. And all great experiments deserve a post mortem, so if you will indulge me, here follows an autopsy of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN…

I’d been talking about collaborating on something with the events coordinators at York Explore for some time, when last year all of the pieces fell into place. York Explore’s popular Big City Read initiative for 2018 was focused on THE RADLEYS, Matt Haig’s vampire novel, so Gothic was very much in the air. I agreed to give a talk on The Unnatural History of the English Vampire at Explore, but we also thought it would be a shame not to do something a little more ambitious to add to the programme of events.

It was the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley’s original novel FRANKENSTEIN, so it made sense to do something to celebrate that. And thus Explore Gothic was born. Explore manage most of what remains of St Leonard’s, a ruined medieval hospital in the heart of York, and had resolved to more fully explore the potential of this unique space. It’s the perfect Gothic backdrop for a Frankenstein event, but what? Then leading pop-up screening specialists CinemArts joined the team, and it became obvious that our challenge should be to transform St Leonard’s into a medieval cinema showing a Frankenstein film over Halloween.

But which one?

As the team’s Gothic expert I was appointed curator, and I knew it had to be the 1935 classic THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. The first landmark FRANKENSTEIN film was released four years previously, directed by James Whale and starring fellow Englishman Boris Karloff as the iconic Monster. It established most of our popular ideas about the story, from the Monster’s shambling gait, flat head, and bolts through the neck (actually electrodes), to his resurrection via lightning strike in a cavernous electrical laboratory, as his ecstatic Creator screams “It’s alive!”. (In the novel, Mary Shelley is deliberately vague about both the Creature’s appearance and the method of its reanimation, which are rather less spectacular on the written page.)

Yet BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is an example of that rare creature – a sequel better than the original – a creepy, camp classic widely regarded among connoisseurs as not only a landmark in vintage horror cinema, but one of the greatest films ever made. The film brings together most of the talent – like Karloff and Whale – that helped make its predecessor, with two important additions to the cast. Ernest Thesiger plays the skeletal, gin-swigging mad doctor Septimus Pretorius, who steals every scene he’s in with his creepily camp performance, and is in many respects the true monster of the film. In the title role is Elsa Lanchester, who also plays the author Mary Shelley in the film’s prologue – another factor that made BRIDE the ideal feature for our bicentennial celebration.

But it is as the Bride of Karloff’s Monster that Elsa is best remembered, adding some welcome sexual equality to proceedings by becoming arguably the only female among horror’s classic line-up of iconic monsters. Her distinctive hair-do – imitated for countless Halloween costumes – was inspired by a bust of the famously beautiful Ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. For her performance, Elsa borrowed from the unfriendly swans in Regent’s Park, who would hiss at her when she was taking an afternoon walk. While tame to modern eyes, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN shocked contemporary audiences worldwide. Censors objected to overtones of blasphemy and necrophilia, with some nations – Hungary, Trinidad, Sweden and Palestine – banning the film outright!

We were hoping to delight rather than outrage our audience with our film selection for the evening. From the start our powerfully atmospheric, chillingly apt venue was clearly one of our biggest assets. Showing THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN in an authentic ruined medieval hospital – how could you get more Halloween than that? At its medieval height, St Leonard’s was perhaps the biggest hospital in England, containing well over 200 beds, and stretching as far as the current location of York’s Theatre Royal, where fragments of the original structure can still be found. It was founded in the Anglo-Saxon era, rebuilt by the Normans, rebuilt once again after a fire in 1137, before falling into ruin in the 1500s during the Reformation. Our screening took place in the remains of the chapel, one of the facility’s most important chambers, as medieval hospitals were closer to monasteries than modern medical facilities, places where the focus was on confession, convalescence, and prayer, rather than treatment.

Our challenge was to transform this magnificent, but derelict space, into somewhere that could offer our audience a comfortable and pleasant cinema experience, without compromising any of its Gothic ambience. Our unique, eerie venue was in many respects the star of our show. So the Explore team worked tirelessly, creating chambers from thin air, carefully placing countless candles to get the lighting just right, and of course installing a pop-up bar. CinemArts used their trained eye to establish the optimal location for the screen and projector. New partners became involved at this final stage. Local purveyor of macabre curios and vintage oddities Pandora’s Box contributed a display of antique surgical equipment plus a real human skeleton to watch over the bar. The synth music project Dead Eagle Club were on hand to provide live atmospheric sounds. Finally, I curated a display of film posters, depicting the history of Frankenstein on film.

As anyone who’s held such an event can tell you, the audience is key to its success. Not just that they attend, but that they do so with the right attitude to create an environment conducive to a memorable, enjoyable night. We knew we had no worries with numbers – we sold our last seat weeks ahead of showtime. Happily, we also got a wonderful crowd, who got exactly what we had worked so hard to achieve, and soaked up the atmosphere. I was scheduled to introduce the film, and it seemed a shame not to camp it up and go full Frankenstein, so I took to the stage in my flayed-skin greatcoat, poet’s shirt, and some Regency riding boots I’d hired to complete the ensemble from the Theatre Royal’s costume department, then delivered my introduction as if I were a mad scientist lecturing to a 19th Century medical society about a particularly shocking case.


Despite this eccentric intro, everybody seemed to love the film, and I’d especially like to thank those who made a point of coming up to us afterwards to express their admiration. Also those attendees who came from out of town to attend our Halloween soiree – your efforts were truly appreciated. And for those who wanted to know if we will be hosting any similar events – I can now confidently say, watch this space! Meanwhile I’d like to thank everyone at York Explore – especially Dave, Andy and Rachael – and John from CinemArts, Libby from the Dead Eagle Club, Heather from Pandora’s Box, and our volunteers, all of whom were a pleasure to work with and key to the event’s success. Plus last, but far from least, the Arts Council, whose additional funding helped us take everything to the next Gothic level.
Until next Time!…


Location photography: Gareth Buddo © York Explore
Explore Gothic is part of Explore Labs which is a three year project, core funded by Arts Council England.

Happy Halloween!

I like to give some warning on here if I have any public appearances upcoming, but have been somewhat remiss this year. So I thought I’d use the opportunity of giving out seasonal greetings to outline some of my activities this Halloween and announce a forthcoming talk. In conjunction with York Explore, last Saturday we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the publication of FRANKENSTEIN with an immersive screening of the 1935 classic BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. In the ruins of a medieval hospital no less! And as my next trick I delivered a talk on The Unnatural History of the English Vampire. Both events, I am proud to say, were sold out well ahead of time. Obviously, even if there were tickets, it would be impossible to attend either event without a time machine. But for those curious about the FRANKENSTEIN event, I wrote a supplementary article, that you can read here.

Meanwhile, it is still possible to attend my next talk, which will at the Abertoir film festival in Wales on Wednesday the 14th of November at 2pm. As some of you may be aware, Abertoir is an annual pilgrimage for me, and this year I’ll be asking Do Serial Killers Really Exist? If this odd query intrigues you – or you just like wonderful genre cinema – then check out the festival website here

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Magic, Morality, and the Macabre – An Interview with Andy Nyman, Creator of GHOST STORIES


By the end of the 1950s, Britain had become the home of horror, with world-beating Gothic melodramas from Hammer Films, supplemented come the 60s with movies from rival studios like Amicus and Tigon. As the 70s progressed, however, British genre cinema fell victim to its own success, oversaturating the market with product, while systemic problems in the film industry began to bite. Brit horror took a further hammer blow in the 80s, when a tabloid-led moral panic triggered the draconian ‘Video Nasties’ legislation, effectively criminalising the distribution and possession of many genre films on the vital new home video format.

UK horror cinema then languished in the doldrums for decades, with few truly British horror films being made, and even fewer worth watching. Happily, the genre has subsequently enjoyed a creative and commercial renaissance in the UK in the 21st Century. For me the landmark movie was Neil Marshall’s minor masterpiece of 2002, DOG SOLDIERS. I went to the opening fully prepared to be disappointed by another homegrown failure, only to be delighted by a film that was witty, well-paced and actually pretty scary in parts.

If future film scholars write a history of this 21st century British horror renaissance, there will undoubtedly be numerous index entries for the multi-talented Andy Nyman. While he hasn’t yet collaborated with Neil Marshall, Andy’s appeared in two horror films for the underrated director and screenwriter Christopher Smith (the 2006 gory satire of office politics SEVERANCE and the 2010 medieval folk horror nasty BLACK DEATH). He’s also enjoyed plum roles in some of the best small screen Brit horror mini-series, including Charlie Brooker’s zombie-BIG BROTHER mash-up DEAD SET, and Mark Gattis’s haunted manor anthology CROOKED HOUSE (both 2008).

But Mr Nyman is a true renaissance man, having performed in numerous other theatre, film and TV productions, including providing voices for the popular MINIONS animated movie (2015) and appearing in the hit PEAKY BLINDERS TV series (2013). He’s also an accomplished magician, and has collaborated with the celebrated psychological illusionist Derren Brown, co-writing many of Brown’s award-winning magic specials, starting with the 2000-03 TV series MIND CONTROL. Nyman was originally expected to front the show, but deferred in order to concentrate on other projects.

Projects like creating the 2010 stage play GHOST STORIES, co-written and co-directed with Jeremy Dyson, best known as the silent partner on the cult BBC black comedy series LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN (another key component in British horror’s 21st Century revival). Their theatrical chiller proved a big hit, breaking box office records, and running for over 1,000 performances, including shows in Moscow and Toronto. Nyman and Dyson decided to adapt their play to the big screen, with Andy now also taking the lead role of Professor Phillip Goodman, the arch-sceptic whose determination to debunk the supernatural leads him into nightmare realms his academic background had not prepared him for.

There are obvious autobiographical connections between Andy and the professor – they share a Jewish background and both have been involved in debunking psychic fraud. When I had an opportunity to talk to Andy recently, I wanted to unpick a few of the ideas behind the densely-layered film, which is a lot more thoughtful than many of the Hollywood haunted house films that have been popular in recent years. Some critics have compared Nyman’s GHOST STORIES (2017) to the gleefully ghoulish Amicus anthology films of the 1970s, and there’s something to that (in one of many in-jokes, a tin of cat food in the film is named after the Tigon studio). Yet in many respects, GHOST STORIES is more akin to the psychological dread of DEAD OF NIGHT, the 1945 anthology film that is arguably the first true classic of British horror cinema. So I began by trying to establish how Andy had become associated with the genre…

GB: To go back to the start of your screen career, I didn’t realise you were in the original 1989 TV version of THE WOMAN IN BLACK…
AN: It was my first TV role. It’s been amazing happenstance really that I’ve ended up in a few of these things. It wasn’t like I wanted to be a horror actor – it just happened. I’ve done so much varied and interesting work, and it just so happened that that was there, and then DEAD SET happened and then SEVERANCE. I’ve always played extreme roles – I enjoy playing extreme characters whether it’s Patrick in DEAD SET or Churchill in PEAKY BLINDERS. There’s something about playing larger than life people that I enjoy.

I was trying to thinking of a unifying factor in some of the roles you played, in horror at least. I came up with the word ‘hapless’. Just like Sean Bean supposedly always dies in everything he’s in, your characters seem to get the shitty end of the stick a lot…
AN: That’s a fun observation, but that’s actually not really the case. It’s only been a few of my roles. There’s Gordon in SEVERANCE. In DEATH AT A FUNERAL the character that I play literally gets the shitty end of things. But then you look at Patrick in DEAD SET and it’s the polar opposite of that. I mean, yes he ends up getting ripped apart, but he’s a fighter, not a weak man. I think extremity’s the thing that’s always appealed to me. If I’ve just played a character who’s hapless, the next part I play won’t be, because I like always doing different things.


GB: I think what I was trying to get at is that your characters always seem to end up being punished. Obviously in DEAD SET your character is a villain – he’s a bad man – everyone’s rooting for the zombies to tear him apart. But the scene where he craps in a bin takes it further somehow. I don’t know why, but it is a particularly memorable scene.
AN: Yes, that’s right it is. I don’t know really. I just like taking roles that interest me and they often involve extreme scenes like that, which was just a joy as an actor. I’ve never been an actor who has played roles that are charming – where he wanders into the room and everyone swoons – though there’ll be characters that need charm to achieve an end.


GB: Getting onto GHOST STORIES, the punishment your character goes through seems wholly disproportionate to what he’s done.
AN: That’s a really interesting point. And I’ll tell you about that because we’ve wrestled with that a lot, me and Jeremy. When we were writing the film, an early version of it went to a producer, and we ended up parting company with them. One of the things these producers really felt, was that it was too brutal, that they wanted conclusion that was slightly neater and slightly more comfortable, because it does feel so disproportionate. So we went down that route and we rewrote it, and after about three versions of that we realised this is not our thing anymore. So we went back and looked at the play, and what’s interesting about having the play is that you already have a product with a version that has worked and worked very successfully, so you can analyse the thing. What is it that worked about that, that isn’t working about this? We realised one of the things that’s very key is that the punishment is disproportionate. It’s biblical. It’s blood and thunder, that says if you sin – even if that is a sin of omission – you will be punished. You can’t bleat about that. You can’t complain that it’s too harsh. You wronged. And there is a consequence to that. It is harsh for sure, and it’s bleak, and not terribly nice. But what’s interesting within that, is at times it seems that we live in a world where actions often don’t have consequences. You look at how politicians behave and think how is this happening? Or why am I paying more tax than Google? Where is the right and wrong here? Where is the simple humanity and morality? And so there’s something very interesting to us about the unapologetic biblical nature of your demons. You’ll pay you pay for your crimes, pay for your sins.

GB: The film’s called GHOST STORIES. But you could argue that there are few if any traditional ghosts in it. It’s almost begging the question what is a ghost? If you look at the work of the most famous ghost story writer of all time, M.R. James, surprisingly few of his tales feature classic ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts in any shape or form? And what do you mean by ghosts in this film?
AN: I don’t believe in ghosts. What do we mean by ghosts? Well, Martin Freeman’s character Mike Priddle identifies it when he says that every action we’ve ever done, ever word we’ve ever uttered, has a consequence – a little ghost of itself, a trace. He says to my character Goodman “That’s true isn’t it?” And that is true. Every single conversation you have, every single thing you do or say, has a consequence that can be both positive and negative. The way you treat people, the way you conduct your life, the emails you send, the tweets you make – every single thing that you do has a ripple effect, and can’t really begin to imagine where that ends. So what’s scary is… Both Jeremy and I aren’t religious, but we’re both quite spiritual and think that there’s certainly a lot of power in religious teachings and in religion itself. One of those things that is a scary consequence is that it’s really easy to live in a secular society where you’re not answering to a higher power. This is Goodman’s thing. You’re not answering to anyone, it’s great – let yourself off the fucking hook mate! Do whatever you want – there’s only the here and now. But that’s not true. It’s not true if you’ve got kids. It’s not true if you’re in a relationship. Every time you roll your eyes when you partner says something. Every time you huff and puff. It has an impact. It has an impact on you, on their health, on my health, on everything, let alone how they then conduct themselves in their life and how that goes on. Well there’s a big difference between that and following a teaching, believing in a higher power – which I don’t – believing in that. And the danger with where we are – Jeremy and I believe – is that you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You end up saying “There is no God – it’s all bullshit – it’s not true. I believe in Dawkins – Dawkins is right. Religion’s all just a convenient set of nonsensical rules.” And what you end up doing is just throwing away all of that wisdom and power and truth and construct that makes living life – which is hard, and throws up challenges you can never imagine – harder.

GB: That leads onto one of the things I was wanting to talk about briefly – about how I was surprised that GHOST STORIES felt almost anti-rationalist. The film opens up with this fraudulent psychic – and this scene links to a lot of your other work with Derren Brown – but from thereon in your character is sort of crucified by his own scepticism.
AN: The film is anti-rationalist. It is. And we could sort of skirt around that, but it is. Equally I am a rationalist. But that’s what’s interesting about working in the way we do, is it does throw up challenges that make me think about the way I think or believe or not believe, which I also wrestle with. I was never religious. But I like being Jewish. I like the trappings of it and I like the philosophies of it, and I grew up going to the synagogue, being bar mitzvahed and all that stuff. As I got older, I started working with Derren Brown, and then my dad died, and I thought fuck all that shit. I started looking at it all, started pulling it apart, and decided it’s all nonsense. Sure enough though, the older I get the more I wrestle with it a bit more. Because it isn’t nonsense. The notion of God may be nonsense. Our notion of God as an omniscient higher power may be nonsense. But you know there is a God. Look at the NHS. That is the most brilliant embodiment of God on earth, where everybody in our country pays into something, gives of themselves to help whoever. You go to a space where people are not paid well, where miracles happen. Literally miracles happen.

GB: I seem to recall a politician described the NHS as the closest the UK gets to a true religion…
AN: Which is why where we are right now is so painful. It’s profound where we are at the moment politically. It isn’t just about whether we want immigrants or not. It’s profoundly disturbing to think that selfishness and greed can beat selflessness. It’s just staggering and it feels irreligious – it feels sacrilegious – to neglect this incredible thing that’s still so relatively young, but is amazing. Something that has literally worked miracles in my immediate family. I’m talking about me my wife my two kids. Let alone what it’s done for your life or for our parents’ lives. It has worked miracles for everyone. So that to me is an example of an interesting crossover. You can just say that that’s not God. But the question then is what is God? If you don’t believe in that, in the notion of giving of yourself, and kindness, and treating others well, and all of those things that are easy to just throw away. To think that’s not true – it’s rubbish. But it isn’t rubbish. It isn’t. It’s massive, massive, massive stuff.

GB: I think there’s a danger here of spinning off into a deep theological debate about here. This is a three hour conversation and I know our time is limited. So I’d like to finish on an aspect of horror history that still fascinates many genre fans – the Video Nasties panic of the 1980s. It’s interesting how many of the films they banned weren’t much good, but because kids were watching these fuzzy, third generation copies on video, they took on this almost totemic status…
AN: What goes hand in hand with that is you’re also having an almost mythological experience because you’re watching these things where the graininess tells you that it has been watched a thousand times. It’s a shared experience strangely. Also it’s playing the brilliant part of adding another layer of intrigue and mystery onto the experience. What am I looking at through this fog and fuzz? Trying to get to the bottom of it. It was so exciting that stuff. It’s so important to have that kind of thing.

For more on Andy’s many endeavours, check out his website here.

With special thanks to the lovely Natalie Boyd, for arranging this interview.

The Sun Has Got His Baseball Cap On…


Sweltering here in another heatwave, there’s no denying that s
he summer isn’t my favourite time of year. All of those relentless rays are fine if all you have to do is sit in a pub garden by the river and while away the day in good company. But if you have things to do, shit to think about, places to go, it can wear thin fast.

You can tell when the thermometer has hit critical when the chavs start taking their tops off, to reveal the kind of physique only achievable by a programme of stealing bikes on a diet of cheap speed and Smirnoff Ice. They don’t have torsos so much as thoraxes covered in sickly off-white chitin.

And heat seems to have the same effect on them as kicking over a lukewarm can of lemonade has on wasps at a picnic. Usually, you could go weeks without enjoying a live Jeremy Kyle performance. Once the summer kicks in, angry morons in baseball caps seem to be everywhere, shrieking threats into mobile phones, gibbering at each other across busy streets, falling over tables in pub yards.

It is now officially impossible to find anywhere peaceful and secluded to relax in the sun which will not be invaded by noisy shitheads within thirty minutes. Contrary to the myth spread in the Bible, our distant ancestors weren’t driven from the Garden of Eden by the temptations of a serpent or archangels with flaming swords, but the arrival of a posse of cunts in trackie-bottoms with a pallet of Kestrel Super and a deafening sound system loaded with shitty hip hop…

Publishing Untamed

apocalypse-culture I was sad to learn of the recent death of the publisher Adam Parfrey. He is perhaps best known for editing APOCALYPSE CULTURE, the highly controversial compilation of essays, interviews and articles that documented the extremes of human behaviour as the millennium approached. Originally published in 1987 by Amok, the distribution company he co-founded that year, it was subsequently reissued as the flagship for his infamous publishing house Feral House.

APOCALYPSE CULTURE was an iconic volume. If you saw it on somebody’s bookshelf you likely had at least something in common.

My personal interactions with Mr Parfrey varied between the refreshingly cordial and the absurdly cantankerous. But he was someone who’d earned the right to more than a little cantankerousness.

ParfreySeattle Because, like most people aware of Adam, I really knew him via his work as a publisher, and in these realms he was a legitimate original who made a profound, if subtle impact on the modern world.

Feral House belonged to the twilight of popular publishing, before the internet ripped up the rulebook. Finding subversive literature then meant a trip to the likes of Compendium Books in Camden, or ordering from a crazy American catalogue like the Amok Dispatch, published by Parfrey’s former colleagues.

compendium Compendium was unusual. While there was no shortage of ‘alternative’ bookshops in the UK, it was almost invariably the same ‘alternative’. I remember asking the hippie behind the counter in Atlantis Books in Bloomsbury if they had anything on Satanism, while researching my first book. “I don’t believe in Satanism” she spat with a withering glare. I endeavoured to acquaint her with the irony of not believing in something that certainly existed while running a shop named after a mythical island. To little avail.

Amok dispatch Compendium had a whole section dedicated to Satanism, much of it from Feral House. While Amok’s Dispatch was technically merely a book catalogue, in practice it was much more. In place of the regular categories, were headings like Sleaze, Mayhem and Orgone. Like Compendium it was a gateway into a forbidden world beyond good and evil, before the internet made extremism almost banal.

If I learnt one important thing from Adam Parfrey and his work, it was the value of ignoring boundaries. Of refusing to be funneled into the orthodox underground – the ‘approved alternative’ which is every bit as prescriptive and regimented as the mainstream it pretends to subvert. Go your own way.

And he did. Parfrey was a contrarian by nature. Someone who managed to turn their instinctive drive to be awkward, to ask uncomfortable questions, into something constructive. I only hope that some day people can say the same thing about me.

[I interviewed Adam Parfrey for HEADPRESS MAGAZINE some years back, and an expurgated, virtual version of the piece can be found here.]

Frankenstein and the Factoids From Hell…

Beware mobs of angry pedants brandishing burning torches!

frankcrux

Some people like correcting people. I like correcting people who correct people. Which probably makes me even worse.

This year’s the 200th anniversary of the publication of FRANKENSTEIN and I hope to be involved in at least one project commemorating this. So I’ve been digging into all things Frankenstein. Where I’ve been reminded how fond ‘experts’ are of correcting anyone who refers to the Monster as Frankenstein.

Want to know a secret?

bride-of-frankenstein-movie-poster-1935They’re wrong. While Mary Shelley never really names the creature, when people talk about the story today, they’re almost invariably thinking about the cinematic FRANKENSTEIN, not Shelley’s literary one. Specifically the Universal version brought to life by director James Whale, actor Boris Karloff, and makeup artist Jack Pierce in the 1930s, which diverges wildly from the novel, while establishing pretty much every FRANKENSTEIN cliche we’re all familiar with, from the Monster’s bolts to the huge, buzzing electrical machinery required to bring him to life.

And by BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1935 – regarded by many as not just the classic Frankenstein film, but the best of the Universal Gothics – Frankenstein is clearly used to designate both the creature and his creator. In the movie’s prologue, Lord Byron is discussing the story with Percy Shelley and Mary, and refers to the Monster as Frankenstein – Mary does not correct him – and in every subsequent Universal classic FRANKENSTEIN film, the name refers to both creator and creature.

prologue

While we’re on the subject of necromantic nit-picking and nomenclature…

Having discussed the correct name for the creature, what might be the proper term of address for the creator? Baron or Doctor Frankenstein? Taking the same principle – that our common understanding of the characters owes almost everything to cinema – we can answer this quite categorically. While his status as the archetypal mad scientist makes the title of doctor seem apt, in almost every version of the story the young Frankenstein either abandons his academic studies in disgust at the ignorance of his professors, or is expelled for conducting unholy experiments. Either way, Frankenstein never graduates, so as a university drop-out is not entitled to employ the title ‘doctor’. His entitlement to the title ‘baron’ is rather tentatively established in the Universal Frankenstein films. But when Britain’s Hammer films adapted the story in 1957 with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, his artistocratic title becomes canon, and is employed in all of the studio’s subsequent Frankenstein pictures.
cushing frank
(I am of course aware of Muphry’s Law, whereby any attempt to correct anyone else invariably contains errors itself – and thus the circle of pedantry continues…)

Anyhow, as I intimated earlier, I have plans to launch some FRANKENSTEIN projects of my own in the forthcoming year. So, if mad science and unholy resurrections are your thing, watch this space…