Frightmares: A History of British Horror Cinema

215 Pages·2016·2.979 MB·English

by  Ian Cooper

Frightmares
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A History of British Horror Cinema ig
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Ian Cooper
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The horror film reveals as much, if not more, about the British psyche as the more respectable A
heritage film or the critically revered social realist drama. Yet, like a mad relative locked in the H
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attic, British horror cinema has for too long been ignored and maligned. Even when it has been t
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celebrated, neglect is not far behind and what studies there have been concentrate largely on the r
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output of Hammer, the best-known producers of British horror. But this is only part of the story. It’s o
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a tradition that encompasses the last days of British music hall theatre, celebrated auteurs such as B
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Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski and opportunistic, unashamed hacks. i
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Frightmares is an in-depth analysis of the home-grown horror film, each chapter anchored by close h
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studies of key titles, consisting of textual analysis, production history, marketing and reception.
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Although broadly chronological, attention is also paid to the thematic links, emphasising both the rr
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wide range of the genre and highlighting some of its less-explored avenues. Chapters focus on the r
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origins of British horror and its foreign influences, Hammer (of course), the influence of American
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International Pictures and other American and European filmmakers in 1960s Britain, the ‘savage e
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Seventies’ and the new wave of twenty-first century British horror. The result is an authoritative,
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AuteurPub er
Front cover photograph: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) © American International Pictures,
courtesy Stephen Jones (www.monstersfromhell.co.uk) 9 780993 071737
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Frightmares
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Frightmares
A History of British Horror Cinema
by
Ian Cooper
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank John Atkinson at Auteur for saying yes to this project (appropriately
enough on a Halloween). His suggestions, advice and patience are very much appreciated.
Without him, this book wouldn’t have happened. I also want to thank Garry Johnson and
Gav Whitaker, aka Gav Crimson, who provided me with some useful material. I’m grateful
to everybody who helped me out with ideas and thoughts, either in (ahem) real life or
through social media. I do owe a particular debt to the following: Brecht Andersch, Dan
Berlinka, Scott Bradley, Robert Chandler, Hugh Kenneth David, Jackie Downs, J. Marie
Gregoire, Jeanie Laub, Neil Mitchell, Joseph Marr and the late Dan Tunstall.
First published in 2016 by
Auteur
24 Hartwell Crescent, Leighton Buzzard LU7 1NP
www.auteur.co.uk

Copyright © Auteur Publishing 2015
Designed and set by Nikki Hamlett at Cassels Design
Printed and bound in the UK
Cover: The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) © American International Pictures, courtesy Stephen Jones
(www.monstersfromhell.co.uk)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including
photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or
incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: paperback 978-0-9930717-3-7
ISBN: ebook 978-0-9930717-4-4
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Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: ‘It’s Alive!’ The Birth of Home-Grown Horror ....................................................................23
Chapter 2: Hammer – Studio as Auteur ........................................................................................................51
Chapter 3: The American Invasion – Camp and Cruelty. ......................................................................97
Chapter 4: Soft Sex, Hard Gore and the ‘Savage Seventies’ .............................................................115
Chapter 5: ‘Bloody Foreigners’ – New Perspectives .............................................................................151
Chapter 6: Rising from the Grave ...................................................................................................................169
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................................195
Footnotes ......................................................................................................................................................................197
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................................................199
Index ................................................................................................................................................................................205
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Stills information
All reasonable efforts have been made to identify the copyright holders of the films
illustrated in the text and the publisher believes the following copyright information to be
correct at the time of going to press. We will be delighted to correct any errors brought
to our attention in future printings and editions.
The Ghoul © Gaumont British; Dead of Night © Ealing Studios/Canal+; The Mummy, The
Vampire Lovers, Vampire Circus, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Dracula AD 1972,
The Satanic Rites of Dracula © Hammer Films; Horrors of the Black Museum © Anglo-
Amalgamated; Night of the Demon, 10 Rillington Place © Columbia Pictures; The Masque of
the Red Death, The Abominable Dr Phibes © AIP; Theatre of Blood © Harbour Productions;
Horror Hospital © Noteworthy Films; The Offence © Tantallon/UA; Frenzy © Universal
Pictures; Frightmare © Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd.; Repulsion © Compton Films;
Vampyres © Lurco Films; Dog Soldiers © Kismet Entertainment; Kill List © Warp X/Rook
Films. Thanks to Stephen Jones (monstersfromhell.co.uk) for his assistance in researching
and supplying a number of these stills.
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Introduction
London is a city which has never been slow to exploit its violent and lurid history. There
are no longer severed heads mounted on London Bridge or public executions at Tyburn
but the capital city retains its dark glamour. One can visit the Chamber of Horrors at
Madame Tussaud’s wax museum off Baker Street and encounter infamous killers such
as Dr. Crippen (played on screen by Donald Pleasence) and John Christie (Richard
Attenborough). There are also facsimilies of letters purportedly from Jack the Ripper
on display, written (of course) in red ink. In the London Dungeon, as well as interactive
exhibits illustrating torture and bubonic plague, the Jack the Ripper experience offers
an animated restaging of one of Saucy Jack’s crimes. Until the attraction was extensively
overhauled, there were graphic autopsy photos of mutilated women on display. Want
more Jack? You can also take a Ripper Tour along the back alleys of Whitechapel, passing
close to The Blind Beggar pub on Whitechapel Road where the gangster Ronnie Kray
shot George Cornell through the eye. (Rumour has it the bullet passed through the
unfortunate Cornell’s head and hit the jukebox, which started playing ‘The Sun Ain’t
Gonna Shine Anymore’ by The Walker Brothers.) Whitechapel Road is also the location
of the London Hospital where John Merrick, The Elephant Man who inspired the
gothic David Lynch film, lived for the last four years of his life and it was also where an
enterprising waxwork show depicting the Ripper murders was set up in 1888, unable
even to wait until the murder cycle had finished before capitalising on it. In Bram Stoker’s
novel Dracula (1897), one of the Count’s London addresses is in Whitechapel. The Ripper
walking tours – they’ve proved so popular there are a number of competing firms
providing them – traditionally end in The Ten Bells pub, which contains various items of
Ripperabilia, including a handsome, wall-mounted Victim Board. Indeed, from 1976 until
1988 the pub was actually called The Jack the Ripper, until protests by feminist groups led
to it reverting to The Ten Bells.
Across town in Kensington, one can go to see Hitchcock’s old house, marked with a
blue plaque. From there it’s just a short walk to The Goat tavern, where John George
Haigh, the acid bath killer, met a wealthy fairground owner who he would go on to
batter to death before drinking a cup of his blood. Until a few years ago, Haigh was
name-checked on a plaque inside the pub. Upon his arrest, he was keen to exploit his
new-found notoriety and became an enthusiastic participant in the ghoulish fascination
his crimes aroused.He played the role of the urbane English murderer, always appearing
impeccably dressed and referring to his arrest as ‘this little pickle’. It’s surely a measure of
how skillfully Haigh played the archetypal English cad that when he was immortalised on
film it wasn’t by the sinister likes of Pleasence or Attenborough but by the comic actor
Martin Clunes (in the TV movie A is for Acid [2002]). Haigh’s legal defence was paid for by
the News of the World, in return for the exclusive rights to his story. Sentenced to death
for six murders, he bequeathed his best suit to Madame Tussaud’s. His likeness can still be
seen there, alongside that of Dennis Nilsen, who killed 15 young men between 1978 and
1
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FRIGHTMARES
1983.1 Nilsen picked up one of his victims in Piccadilly Circus, a one-time hangout for rent
boys and close to another of Count Dracula’s houses. It’s in Piccadilly where the Count
achieves his desire:
...to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the
whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death and all that makes it
what it is. (Stoker 1897: 31)
Nilsen picked up most of his victims in the Golden Lion pub on Dean Street in Soho, 5
minutes walk from Piccadilly Circus. Soho, of course, has long been associated with the
film industry and its seedy sibling, the porn business. The Golden Lion was the local of
US grindhouse auteur Andy Milligan during his London sojourn in the early 1970s, when
he came up with the likes of The Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) and The Rats Are Coming,
The Werewolves Are Here (1972). Further up Dean Street, the actor Charles Laughton
used to live in a flat – in what had been the house of Karl Marx – along with his wife,
Elsa Lanchester, who played the twin roles of Mary Shelley and the shock-haired, hissing
monster’s mate in Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
On Wardour Street, the imposing art deco building standing at 113–117 is Hammer
House, formerly the head office for the best-known makers of British horror, and if you
walk towards Oxford Street, you’ll end up in Soho Square, the location of the offices of
the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). Jon Finch makes a telephone call from
the square in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972). Murder, sex and film are all brought together
in Michael Powell’s once-loathed, now-celebrated film Peeping Tom. It’s on the fringes of
Soho that we first meet the sympathetic cameraman/killer Mark Lewis as he picks up
a victim in Newman Passage, filming her as he does so. Powell shot some of the film
in the suburb of Cricklewood, once the location of a film studio and just around the
corner from the flat in Melrose Avenue where Nilsen killed a dozen of his victims before
dismembering them and boiling, burning or burying them under the floorboards in his
living room…
Bound for the Lost Continent
Until very recently, British horror cinema has been ignored and maligned, hidden away
like the eponymous feral brother in the The Beast in the Cellar (1970). Even when it was
celebrated, neglect was not far behind: David Pirie’s seminal study A Heritage of Horror
(1973) was out of print for decades. What studies there were, even those which were
avowedly encyclopaedic, have concentrated largely on the output of Hammer, the best-
known producers of British horror. But recent years have seen a number of books of this
once-despised tradition (see Boot 1996; Rigby 2000; Chibnall and Petley 2002) as well as
a long overdue update of the Pirie book. The extremely influential central thesis of the
latter is still relevant:
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INTRODUCTION
It certainly seems to be arguable on commercial, historical and artistic grounds that
the horror genre, as it has been developed in this country by Hammer and its rivals,
remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim its own, and
which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America. (2007 [1973]:
xv)
Julian Petley’s 1986 essay, ‘The Lost Continent’ (which takes its title and central metaphor
from one of Hammer’s wackier effforts) reinforces Pirie’s argument, describing a
neglected tradition of fantastic, horrific and sensational cinema which formed:
An other, repressed side of British cinema, a dark disdained thread weaving the length
and breadth of that cinema, crossing authorial and generic boundaries, sometimes
almost entirely invisible, sometimes erupting explosively, always received critically with
fear and disapproval. (1986: 98)
This refusal to acknowledge this ‘other, repressed side’ is compounded by the dominance
of certain forms of cinema which represent the ‘real’, the everyday, the naturalistic. For
Petley, this:
Vaunting and valorising of certain British films on account of their ‘realism’ entails, as
its corollary… the dismissal and denigration of those films deemed un- or non-realist.
(ibid.)
This tendency to reject the kind of cinema which dwells in this Lost Continent, when
combined with a very British kind of island mentality, has also led to the horrific and
the sensational being not just sidelined but actively suppressed. It’s not for nothing that
Mark Kermode has written of the ‘hundred-year terror’ that the British Board of Film
Classification (nee Censors) has visited upon the horror genre (Kermode 2002: 22).
Given this deep-seated and abiding suspicion of the popular and the fantastic, it comes
as no surprise that both Pirie and Petley seek to locate Hammer et al in an illustrious
literary tradition. For the former, the fact that so many British horror films ‘are derived…
from literary sources’(2007: xv) is highly significant:
The literary basis of the films is so striking that I make no apology for the literary
orientation of this book; the film medium is not an extension of literature (or of
anything else) but in this instance literary comparison becomes not only illuminating
but essential. (ibid.)
Petley, meanwhile, when observing the lengthy period it took for the genre to establish
itself in the medium of film draws on that same literary tradition, noting how:
For the country which produced Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Bram Stoker, Anne Radcliffe,
Charles Maturin, Matthew Lewis, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope
Hodgson and William Beckford, Britain was peculiarly slow in developing the horror
film and the whole area of fantasy cinema. (1986: 113)
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