Force of Nature

IN THE EARTH (2021)

"It can get a bit funny in the woods sometimes;" from sacrificial sites to otherworldly portals, standing stones have a firm history in British film and television, hinting at the ancient and the macabre.

BEN Wheatley's IN THE EARTH is a slow-burning folk horror freak-out referred to as his "lockdown movie." Conceived and made during the Coronavirus pandemic, it is not just a companion piece to Wheatley's KILL LIST and A FIELD IN ENGLAND, it is a film which is umbilically linked to them. This mirrors the narrative, that in a virus-stricken world fertile soils are sought to increase crop production. A standing stone is discovered to be the epicentre of an underground network; attempting to communicate by sound and light, can humans actually talk to nature? And if so, what would the inherent features have to say to us? Scientist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) and forest scout Alma (Ellora Torchia) venture into the woods with equipment for Dr Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), Martin's former colleague and ex-lover who is researching Mycorrhiza, the symbiotic association between fungus and plant roots. However, this two-day trek is interrupted by Zach (Reece Shearsmith), a man living in the terrain who inducts them into his own world of ritual.

Using a template of John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN for what can be achieved with a microbudget and a fifteen day shoot, IN THE EARTH makes the most of its natural production and 2:39:1 frame, very much an "outdoor" picture to reintroduce normality after the shock of Covid. Visually beautiful but awkwardly flat, there are too many threads to form a nuanced experience: we have the BLAIR WITCH psychology of Parnag Fegg; SAW extreme violence; trippy ALTERED STATES sequences; science against myth; and dull back stories (Zach is also Wendle's ex-husband). Of the performers Shearsmith is unsurprisingly the highlight, providing the stand-out scene of literal toe-curling horror. Torchia is a believable guide, but Fry is lamely introverted, and Squires too wide-eyed from the get-go to be believed or trusted.

"Everything seems to just keep us here;" Reece Shearsmith is Zach, a fusion of Robert Plant and Jack Torrance.

Yet Wheatley is not leading to any rational conclusions, rather a heavy dose of weirdness expertly described by critic Peter Bradshaw as like "the last crashing cord of The Beatles' A Day in the Life." IN THE EARTH not just mimics woodland horror, it illustrates the pastoral gothic of British creatives from Algernon Blackwood to Nigel Kneale and 1970s Hauntology. Although there are overtures to THE STONE TAPE and even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, allusions to Blackwood are particularly apt. The writer and broadcaster wrote stories not to frighten but to create awe with alternative consciousnesses and creations, imaginative treatments of possibilities outside our normal human range. For example, in The Willows, part of his 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories, the environment is personified with threatening and powerful characteristics; and The Wendigo, first published in 1910's The Lost Valley and Other Stories, details spiritual possession during a hunting trip.

Ancient Rhythms

DOCTOR WHO - DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS (1970)
DOCTOR WHO - THE SEA DEVILS (1972)

Due to a graphics department miscommunication, DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS is the only TV story to have DOCTOR WHO in the title. 

WITH new producer Barry Letts working with script editor Terrance Dicks to provide a more mature approach to DOCTOR WHO, these two serials, written by Malcolm Hulke, provided related monsters to explore. In a reversal of the alien invasion scenario, long-dormant cousins Silurians and Sea Devils are ancient races of Earth, and The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) a middleman trying to reach peaceful agreements between them and humanity. Both adventures are pedestrian, and suffer from jarring experimental soundtracks, but offer appealing monsters and interesting questions about morals and military might (although the rubber costumes grate with the increased ambition, as does the Silurians' Allosaurus pet).

For DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS, millions of years ago on Earth, Silurians feared their civilisation was threatened by an asteroid. The creatures built subterranean shelters around the world but the astral body settled into orbit as the Moon, so they slept on until awakened by the activities of a research base. When a rebellious young Silurian seizes power a virus that will eradicate humans from their home is released, but The Doctor finds an antidote before the disease takes hold; plans of a secondary attack fail in an attempt to destroy the Van Allen Belt - a barrier shielding Earth from solar radiation, harmful to humans but beneficial to reptiles - as The Doctor overloads the base's reactor. Retreating to their caves, The Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) blows up the Silurian base; ultimately notions of co-existence between Silurians and humans are lost in bickering and scheming on both sides.

Lacking the bleak tone of DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS, THE SEA DEVILS is the archetypal Jon Pertwee adventure yarn.

The message of military condemnation is lost in THE SEA DEVILS, where UNIT is substituted by enthusiastic support from the Royal Navy (including a submarine, a hovercraft and a diving bell). Aided by the misguided Colonel Trenchard (Clive Morton), The Master (Roger Delgado) is stealing Naval equipment to build a machine to revive the amphibious Sea Devils from hibernation, while he is imprisoned on a high-security island. The first episode was transmitted at the end of a Miners' Strike, accounting for a sharp increase in viewers from episode two. Yet it was the end of episode three where one of the most iconic Time Lord moments occurred, as the Sea Devils rise from the water and advance up a beach. Like The Silurians, the titular menace is wonderfully conceived, their turtle-like head pieces worn as top hats by actors so that they towered even over Pertwee. But the real meat is the interplay between The Doctor and The Master ("he used to be a friend of mine once ... a very good friend.")

Carey Blyton's score for DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS has the Renaissance woodwind instrument Crumhorn for its creature cue. This results in a comical misrepresentation, mirroring Malcolm Clarke's controversial incidental soundscape for THE SEA DEVILS. Here Clarke used the Radiophonic Workshop's newly acquired EMS Synthi 100 to his own anarchic whim, bringing an artificiality to the action which treads a fine line between musical composition and sound effect. Letts insisted on substantial edits, while Clarke argued that his work was mood pieces that fitted both needs. At least this particular score was championed by the Manchester University Press publication Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on DOCTOR WHO, calling it "startling in its range of obtrusive electronic timbres and relative melodic paucity."

Suffolk Saucer Attack

THE RENDLESHAM UFO INCIDENT (2015)

Steve Bissette's trading card on the Rendlesham alien encounter, featured in Kitchen Sink's "Saucer People" set of 1992. Bissette's illustration focuses on one of the many traits of this infamous 1980 UFO incident: the observation by American and British personnel of creatures suspended in beams of light working on their spaceship.

SHORTLY after Christmas 1980, Suffolk became the location of an apparent UFO crash; dubbed "the British Roswell," mystery still remains what actually happened in Rendlesham Forest near RAF Woodbridge. At around 3.00am on the 26th of December, RAF Watton in Norfolk registered an "unknown" flying toward the coast. Disappearing in the vicinity of the forest, security police at the RAF base - then under the control of the USAF - saw lights fall from the sky. Patrolmen discovered a metallic object with "a pulsating red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath hovering or on legs." Case studies are blighted by witness contradictions and disparities, particularly the extent of people involved: one maintains that before a second sighting, a large number of personnel gathered to await the UFO's arrival at a prearranged spot. Consequently, facts have been shrouded by exaggeration and misperception; UFO researcher Jacques Vallee has even suggested that the story was a complete fabrication to monitor servicemen's reactions to a potential alien attack.

Since the Autumn of 1980, Eastern England had been a hotspot of UFO activity. Incidents included strange lights over Fylingdales radar station and the NSA communications base at Menwith Hill, and even a police officer was reported abducted from his patrol car in Yorkshire. On Christmas Day, the British Astronomical Association stated that sightings of moving lights were in fact meteors and inert space debris; even on the 26th December, the RAF Watton "unknown" coincides with the passage of a bright meteor. Yet by the following day, stories had spread between the twin NATO bases at Woodbridge and Bentwaters of aliens, ground traces from their craft, strange marks left on trees, and significant increases of radiation. USAF airmen claimed that they discovered triangular depressions in the clearing where the UFO landed, yet British police officers noted that "the impressions were of no depth and could have been made by an animal." Similarly, the marks on the trees were in fact made by forester's axes identifying trees due to be felled.

If you go down to the woods today ... THE RENDLESHAM UFO INCIDENT creates some wonderfully ethereal images.

Facts are still muddied thirty-five years on, but explanations for the incident follow two main paths. As Jenny Randles notes in her piece 'Rendlesham Evolving Theories' in Fortean Times #204 (December 2005), "there are hints that conditions could have made the [nearby Orfordness] lighthouse look more mysterious and difficult to recognise. The trigger for this confusion may have been a mirage caused by the lighthouse beam shining through a patch of low mist, splitting the light and smearing it. Some of the military witnesses were using night vision scopes to observe the glow, and these can cause optical distortion effects." Another plausible theory is that the lights were caused by a "fireball" created by the rocket-body of Soviet satellite Cosmos 749 re-entered Earth's atmosphere around the same time. Indeed, it was subsequently revealed that twelve satellites decayed during the week of this UFO flap.

Daniel Simpson - who made the squatter-horror SPIDERHOLE in 2010 - filmed THE RENDLESHAM UFO INCIDENT without a formal script as HANGAR 10. The picture is shot found footage style, following metal detector enthusiasts Gus (Robert Curtis) and Sally (Abbie Salt) in their quest for Saxon gold. Their expedition is lensed by Jake (Danny Shayler), who captures incredible UFO footage while the three drift increasingly lost into MoD land. Eventually stumbling upon a disused military complex and linking tunnels, mutations of a spiky viral-fungus are revealed, and alien life itself. Found footage pictures are thematically disadvantaged by generic characters and sluggish pace; THE RENDLESHAM UFO INCIDENT suffers from both these factors, but is saved by its sound design (metallic groanings and aircraft screeches) and SPFX (allegedly achieved by Simpson on his laptop) which are refreshingly non-obscured and genuinely eerie. The sheer vastness of the forest is photographed effectively with washed-out tones, but Ufologists expecting a film steeped in Rendlesham folklore will be disappointed. Its triptych of protagonists, disillusioning movement and foreboding are more direct lifts from the picture's real inspiration, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

"Blood of My Ancestors!"

Doctor Who Weekly - Black Legacy (1980)

When Black Legacy appeared in June 1980, Alan Moore's story predated his 2000 A.D. debut by a month, representing his first published comics work - amateur or professional -  solely as a writer. To illustrate the tale's "legacy," Russell T. Davies name checks the Deathsmiths of Goth in a Time War piece published in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual.

LIKE most TV characters that find themselves on the printed page, the Cybermen enjoy poetic license. John Canning's surreal Patrick Troughton strips for TV Comic had DOCTOR WHO's second greatest foe use skis (Eskimo Joe, #903-906, 1969) and earlier they were even destroyed by flower scent (Flower Power, #832-836, 1967). Steve Moore introduced the philosophical Kroton in Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman (Doctor Who Weekly #5-7, 1979), a man from Mondas who is sent to quell a human revolt, but wonders if an understanding of "abstract concepts of freedom and individuality" is the better path to take. Even Grant Morrison wrote a debatable account of Cyber origins in The World Shapers (Doctor Who Magazine #127-129, 1987). Using a muddled reference to the 1968 serial THE INVASION, Morrison explains that the rubbery inhabitants of "Planet 14" the Voord - seen in the 1964 THE KEYS OF MARINUS - have used an alien Worldshaper machine to evolve into Proto-Cybermen.

One of four back-up strip collaborations between writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd for Doctor Who Weekly, Black Legacy is introduced and tailed by the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) as if recounting the story. Published in issues #35-38, Cyberleader Maxel leads a mission to Goth ("a haunted planet shunned by all"), the former home world of legendary armourers the Deathsmiths. In search of a weapon that wiped out an entire civilisation overnight, the cyborgs explore the war museum, but are watched by the Apocalypse Device, a synthetic creature carrying every conceivable disease and virus. Having annihilated his creators, the being destroys the Cybermen by telepathic nightmares and a lethal rust-like virus. Finally, Maxel confronts the Apocalypse Device who wants to use the Cyberleader's craft to escape the planet and destroy the galaxy; when Maxel auto-destructs the ship, the creature's dastardly plan is seemingly thwarted ... until a Sontaran vehicle lands. The last line – "It will not wait forever, that is the problem with ultimate weapons" – is almost certainly Moore's attempt at implicating the nuclear arms race.

Altered Vista's created a VCD version of the story in 2006, which was applauded by Moore. As the writer states on the Altered Vista website, "This is clearly a work that is born out of nothing save for a simple love of the material. It has not opted to change elements of the story, give it a less bleak ending or introduce a love interest and cute pet dog for the chief Cyberman protagonist. You have simply adapted the story as faithfully as you were able, without feeling the need to 'improve' it".

Taking a cue from Kroton, Black Legacy portrays the Cybermen as un-characteristically human in their thinking, speech and posture, and illustrates Moore learning his craft with little interest in the source material (the strangely declamatory Cybermen spout "blood of my ancestors!" twice). These strips acted as ideal learning curves for the Northampton magus, creating worlds in concise timeframes (usually a tale of two pages crossing four issues); consequently, as well as building the story, each two instalments had to work if read in isolation, but also recap and end on a cliff-hanger. The flaws of the strip, however, are not limited to aspects of Who lore. It’s actually a near re-run of Steve Moore’s The Final Quest from Doctor Who Weekly #8, where a Sontaran is tricked into self-destruction by exposure to a lethal plague. The Apocalypse Device broadcasting telepathic nightmares, paralysing enemies with fear, are two factors Cybermen ought to be immune to.

Moore followed Black Legacy with the Autons story Business as Usual, and three linked tales set in Gallifrey's distant past: Star Death, 4-D War and Black Sun Rising. While DOCTOR WHO had been on television for seventeen years, the history of the Time Lords had barely been touched on. With a relatively blank canvas, Moore created a space opera hung around a time paradox – the Time Lords are under attack from the Order of the Black Sun, a mysterious organisation from the future who are retaliating for some offence the Time Lords are yet to commit. The series hadn't explored the nuances of time travel since the 1972 DAY OF THE DALEKS, so it was refreshing to see an illustrative work play with similar nonlinear ideas. In conclusion, Moore’s strips for Doctor Who Weekly come to a sum of 28 pages over little more than a single year, and even though he was working to a restrictive brief and writing for a very young audience, the reader can already see a distinct progression from simple templates to the type of cosmic-bending work he would later make his own.

Green and Unpleasant Land

PLAY FOR TODAY - ROBIN REDBREAST (1970)
THE SHOUT (1978)
THE MAD DEATH (1983)

Esteemed TV players Bernard Hepton and Anna Cropper's different world's collide in the rural horror ROBIN REDBREAST.

BROADCAST as part of the BBC's PLAY FOR TODAY strand, ROBIN REDBREAST is a folk horror rarity that acts as a precursor and influence to the more hard-hitting THE WICKER MAN and BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW. Written by John Bowen and directed by James MacTaggart, it is the story of Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), a London-based TV script editor who temporarily escapes to the country in order to recuperate after a break-up. But with mice scurrying in the walls, birds coming down the chimney and local eccentrics like housekeeper Mrs Vigo (Freda Bamford) and Mr Fisher (Bernard Hepton) dispensing weird customs, Anna becomes increasingly isolated and lost within her new environment. When she falls pregnant after a one-night stand with SS-obsessed gamekeeper Rob (Andrew Bradford) - who she first encounters practising karate in the woods wearing only his underpants - Anna is embroidered in a conspiracy to prevent her leaving the village.

The class struggle theme is amplified by Anna being such a liberated, modern woman and Rob a himbo who looks to the history of the Third Reich to generate monosymbolic conversation. They have nothing in common but sleep together in the onset of fear, instincts which adhere to the programme's yearning to turn back to more straightforward times. The countryside may be full of shunned micro societies, but can the urban development of "civilised" post-war Britain - and the intrusion of the outsider - really ever erode the colour of tradition and ritual from a brutal prehistory? Talky but engrossing, ROBIN REDBREAST's slow burning dictum - and the inclusion of snobbish London friends Madge (Amanda Walker) and Jake (Julian Holloway) - makes a case that our green and unpleasant land will always govern our prudish endeavours.

The soul of a housewife is manipulated by a magical stranger in THE SHOUT; reverting to an Aboriginal state, Rachel scuttles on all fours through her cluttered kitchen.

Though THE SHOUT is connected with Aboriginal Outback culture, and was the first British film of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, Englishness seeps through every frame. Shot in and around Braunton Burrows and Saunton Sands in North Devon - a stone's throw from this writer's home - the film shows a cricket match between the staff and inmates of an asylum. One of the patients, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates), is running the scoring hut, where he tells Robert (Tim Curry) a strange story ("every word of what I'm going to tell you is true. Although I'm telling it in a different way, it's always the same story … I vary it a little because I like to keep it alive.") Told in flashback, we see married couple Anthony (John Hurt) and Rachel (Susannah York); Anthony is a Church organist/composer, and Rachel a staid housewife. Crossley appears and announces that he has returned from eighteen years in the Australian outback, where he lived among the Aborigines and studied their magic. Even though the stranger tells the couple of him killing his own children, Crossley moves in with Anthony and Rachel permanently, establishing a spell over the household.

An ambitious but perplexing film, THE SHOUT opens with the featured couple asleep on a beach, both having the same dream of a witch doctor in a tailcoat. Crossley explains this was one of his teachers, and we learn more about the strangers powers: the ability to take another man's wife by simply keeping an item of her clothing - in this case a sandal buckle - and the secret of The Shout, a cry so despairing that it can kill. Crossley creates a disquieting, intimate awkwardness, made the more terrifying because his incantations are introduced naturally into country village life. The production's otherworldly quality is further enhanced by its use of an electronic and avant-garde score by Genesis linchpins Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. In fact the film's haunting central theme 'From the Undertow' was the opening track on Banks' solo debut album A Curious Feeling released a year later.

The THREADS of the Rabies world, the BBC Scotland drama THE MAD DEATH was made two years before its eventual transmission date.

In this age of bird flu and ebola, it is easy to forget that in the 80s Rabies was the virulent virus. The BBC had already featured the condition in a third season episode of SURVIVORS, but THE MAD DEATH tackles Rabies full-on. Based on the Nigel Slater book of the same name, writer Sean Hignett and director Robert Young examine the effects of a notional outbreak of "the mad death" on our shores. Opening with a titles sequence where a voice whispers 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' over a distorted image of a fox, the terror begins when an infected cat is smuggled by her owner from France into Scotland. When the feline is run over by a car, its body is eaten by a fox. The spread amongst the animal population goes undetected until the first human, womanising American businessman Tom Siegler (Ed Bishop), befriends the infected animal. After Siegler is confirmed with the disease in hospital, the government calls in leading Rabies specialist Michael Hilliard (Richard Heffer) and Doctor Anne Maitland (Barbara Kellerman). Maitland's jealous partner Johnny Dalry (Richard Morant) creates a tepid love triangle which fails to hold interest against a number of alarmingly brutal scenes.

By addressing humanity's fear of disease with a love of animals, THE MAD DEATH has a solid premise. While most commentators mention the shopping centre containment in episode two as the highlight, the demise of Tom in the first part is more dramatically satisfying. Benefitting from focuses on the declining health of the businessman for a continuous large portion of running time, we follow Siegler through the various stages of the disease, starting off with headaches, disorientation, and blurred vision; and in medical care, having hallucinations of being strangled, as hydrophobia takes hold. If the story seems pedestrian after the shopping centre sequence, it only serves as a foundation to the barnstorming final act, which depicts a still difficult to watch cull and creepy scenes within the home of Miss Stonecroft (Brenda Bruce) - the obligatory demented pet-obsessed loner - which includes the capture of Maitland and Stonecroft's attempt to feed her cat food and milk. Of the performances Bishop shines as the charismatic American, as confident and chatty as the English cast are reserved and stiff upper-lipped. 

Hammer Monster Mash

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
THE GORGON (1964)



"All Earth Stands Helpless!" Aware that the Quatermass name held no weight in the United States, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT was retitled SHOCK! then THE CREEPING UNKNOWN, and cut by United Artists. The movie was released with THE BLACK SLEEP, which featured Basil Rathbone as a mad scientist opening the brains of his victims to discover a means to cure his wife's tumour. It was alleged that this double-bill literally scared a nine-year-old boy to death, who died of a ruptured artery during a showing in Illinois.

HAMMER were always happy to capitalise on established hits; having drawn on radio (Dick Barton, PC49), the studio looked towards television with a truncated version of Nigel Kneale's THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT. While most British production houses regarded the X certificate as a kiss of death for the box office, Hammer hoped that the title change to XPERIMENT would be a marketing ploy to help the financially stricken company. Thankfully the film was a hit; without THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, it would be doubtful that Hammer would have survived to create the celebrated Gothic horrors that are so entrenched in our heritage.

The film begins with experimental rocket ship Quatermass 1 crash landing at Oakley Green. This opening - where the phallus-like craft plunges into the ground breaking the monotony of two coy lovers - is a fitting allegory for the arrival of Hammer horror. In this instant, the domesticity of the British feature film makes way for a new order of directness. Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) - the British rocket group scientist responsible for launching the ship without official sanction - discovers that two of the three crew members have disappeared. The sole survivor - Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) - is suffering from low blood pressure, pulse and heart rate. As Carroon's condition worsens, the astronaut plunges his fist into a cactus, starting a consumption by an alien organism which mimics the plant form. Quatermass tracks the creature to Westminster Abbey, and before its spores can spread, is electrocuted.

Richard Wordsworth's alien-infected Carroon in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT is an unwilling martyr to Professor Quatermass' abrasive scientific crusade. The actor would later bring similar sympathetic tendencies to the role of the feral beggar in THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF.

In keeping with a long-established pattern, a Hollywood star was contracted for the benefit of stateside distribution. Fading heavy Donlevy was selected much to Kneale's horror (Donlevy's alcoholism reducing the actor to read off cue cards) and in 1995 the writer was still vociferous of the actor's portrayal: "I may have picked Quatermass' surname out of a phone book but his first name was carefully chosen: Bernard, after Bernard Lovell, the creator of Jodrell Bank. Pioneer, ultimate questing man. Donlevy played him as a mechanic, a creature with a completely closed mind. He could make nothing of any imaginative lines, and simply barked and bawled his way through the plot. A bully whose emotional range ran from annoyance to fury." Donlevy's Quatermass is indeed pointed and bullish, refusing to waste time even when considering Carroon's increasingly catatonic suffering ("there's no room for personal feelings in science ... some of us have a mission").

As well as the wayward Donlevy, American Margia Dean plays Carroon's wife Judith. Suffering from indifferent post-synching, Dean was imposed upon director Val Guest because she was reportedly the girlfriend of American co-producer Robert Lippert. Thankfully the British cast feature strongly: David King-Wood as Dr Briscoe, Harold Lang as private eye Christie and Thora Hird as Rose the baglady are uniformly excellent, with Jack Warner's Inspector Lomax shadowing his trademark role in DIXON OF DOCK GREEN. Wordsworth's heart-rending performance, however, is the highlight; communicating an unbearable loneliness through mime, the success of the actor's illustration of a once intelligent man consumed by forces beyond his control was key to Hammer when contemplating their re-imagining in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Discovering body horror years before Cronenberg, Wordworth's poignancy matches Karloff's Frankenstein, particularly in the scene with a little girl (Jane Asher), which mirrors Karloff's lakeside encounter with Maria (Marilyn Harris). It is this sequence that we glimpse Carroon in human form for the last time, as if the innocence of the child evokes a last note of sympathy.

The girl who befriends Carroon in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT is played by Jane Asher, who seventeen years later would star in Nigel Kneale's THE STONE TAPE.

Many characters and sub-plots are inevitably missing when compressing the television serial to feature length - for example, the intriguing notion that the alien ether had made Carroon absorb the other two astronaut's minds - but such trimming makes THE QUATERMAS XPERIMENT a fast-paced thriller which is made even more immediate by Guest's gritty, semi-documentary style. Perhaps one constriction too many was the change made to the Westminster Abbey conclusion; instead of the explosive climax in the film, on television Quatermass appeals to the human consciousness within the alien, which wills itself to death. Totally lost upon the feature is the teleplay's framing of this climax within a fictionalised live BBC broadcast - which must have raised a few eyebrows of those tuning in late - but although THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT loses this particular faux realite, Guest's feature does incorporate one of the earliest examples of found footage in cinema history: a silent video feed shows the bombardment of Q1 by the cosmic rays which cause Carroon's transformation.

While the changes to the teleplay are in the interests of producing a box office success, the cuts made by United Artists for the Americanised THE CREEPING UNKNOWN release are, in fact, insulting. Nearly three minutes of footage is removed - mostly cheapening the London Zoo sequence - but the devil is in the detail: Donlevy and Dean receive above the title billing opposed to Donlevy and Warner in the British version, and the titles also downplay the importance of Kneale's play. Furthermore, American prints eliminate acknowledgments to the BBC, The Air Ministry, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co, The British Interplanetary Society, The Post London Authority and General Radiological Ltd, as well as replacing the closing "A Hammer Production, produced at Bray Studios" with a simple "The End."

Having exhausted the gallery of classic movie monsters, Hammer turned to mythology for inspiration, resulting in THE GORGON being one of the studio's most poetic and haunted achievements.

When THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN was unleashed, it set in motion an initial burst of robust Hammer Horrors that focused on dominating male characters. THE GORGON, however, made seven years later, started a trend towards predatory yet well-spoken female parts that fundamentally weakened narrative. Hammer's later move from Bray to Elstree was detrimental enough, but this gender shift resulted in a hit-and-miss series of films which portrayed murderous but sexualised lead woman: for every measured entry like FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN and HANDS OF THE RIPPER, there was THE WITCHES and LUST FOR A VAMPIRE.

The last Hammer film to combine the talents of stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and director Terence Fisher, THE GORGON is overwhelmingly fatalistic.  Set in 1910, the film focuses on the village of Vandorf, which has been suffering a series of mysterious deaths for five years. However, the local doctor Namaroff (Cushing) has been concealing that the victims were all turned to stone, and suspects that the derelict Castle Borski is housing Megaera, the last of the legendary Gorgons. When an artist's model and her unborn child are turned to stone, her boyfriend Bruno (Jeremy Longhurst) hangs himself, which results in the boy's grieving father Professor Heitz (Michael Goodliffe), his second son Paul (Richard Pasco) and Paul's mentor Professor Meister (Lee) investigating.

Barbara Shelley in THE GORGON. Ballet dancer Prudence Hyman played Shelley's monstrous alter ego with the infamous stiff snake-hair.

Ambiguities add to this dream-like storyline. Hammer may have looked to mythology for new monsters, but the Greek Megaera was not even a Gorgon, rather a deity who causes jealousy. It is unclear why The Gorgon only appears during the full moon, as is the question of why - after thousands of years - the spirit has possessed a human, Namaroff's assistant Carla (Barbara Shelley). Although her back story is never elaborated on, Carla was an amnesia victim who came to Vandorf for treatment, the doctor exhibiting both concern and deeper feelings for his patient. Shelley brings her usual grace and strength to the role, but the inversion of Cushing and Lee's usual screen persona's creates mixed results. Cushing plays the stern, humourless authority role that Lee would normally be presented with, Namaroff a tormented variation of Cushing's Frankenstein as he struggles with guilt and unrequited love. Lee, however, seems uneasily cast in an unflattering greying facade.

The doctor's observation "the most noble work of God, the human brain, is the most revolting to the human eye," underlines Fisher's grim approach. With only some humorous asides from Meister to relieve the gloom ("don't use long words, Inspector; they don't suit you"), the director's emphasis on the pain of romance has great depth, with the central love triangle being the most poignant to be found in Fisher's oeuvre. Despite THE GORGON being considered a second-tier release by Hammer historians, It is an intimate picture which uses its careful pace as a necessity of its mood. Indeed, there are scenes that rank with the best of Fisher: Heitz's call to the Castle Borski, for example, and the sequence where the doomed father attempts to pen a letter to Paul during his gradual petrification.

Family Values

MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY (1969)
MUM & DAD (2008)
THE CHILDREN (2008)

“In a happy family you must always have rules:” MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY.

HOME-BASED dysfunction and horror go together like Norman Bates and Mother. The PSYCHO template has divided into two distinct, transatlantic lines; while Britain produced Freddie Francis' MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY and Pete Walker's FRIGHTMARE, America's more influential variant came out of Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and Wes Craven's THE HILLS HAVE EYES. The family is problematic in horror because of repressed violence and sexuality; perhaps this is why US films are more powerful, as they concentrate on more baroque situations and also act in direct contradiction of the American Dream. Francis' film discussed here has a more underlying, sardonic approach typical of British fare.

MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY tells of a wealthy family who live in an isolated, Victorian mansion. Their lives are devoted to acting out a fantasy from which they never go out of character, and rarely speak in any way other than baby talk. They are free from the divisiveness of growing up and puberty; even though "children" Sonny (Howard Trevor) and Girly (Vanessa Howard) are in their twenties, they sleep in giant cribs and dress like sixth-formers. Sonny and Girly regularly seek out loners to bring back to their house to play "The Game"; when the "new friends" refuse, they are "sent to the angels." One day, they kill a male prostitute (Michael Bryant)'s girlfriend (Imogen Hassall) and convince him that he was responsible. And after bringing him back to their house, he seduces each of the women and turns the family against itself. It’s a playful allegory of the breakdown of the nuclear family of the 1950s as a result of the free love movement of the 1960s, and has echoes of PEEPING TOM as Sonny films his killings for Mumsy (Ursula Howells) and Nanny (Pat Heywood), and even predates THE SHINING's axe through the door and FATAL ATTRACTION's cooking pot scene. But it’s a tedious affair hindered by weak casting: Bryant, in particular, is totally out of depth to convince that he has any sexual prowess to control the females.

MUM & DAD is the sickest movie ever to bear the BBC Films logo.

Openly acknowledging its debts to MUMSY and FRIGHTMARE, Steven Sheil’s micro-budgeted MUM & DAD is the story of Heathrow Airport cleaner Lena (Olga Fedori), a Polish girl estranged from her family. She is befriended by chatty co-worker Birdie (Ainsley Howard) and her mute brother Elbie (Toby Alexander), and when Lena misses her last bus home, the Pole accompanies them to their nearby house - an undesirable suburban semi under the Heathrow flight pass - where she is drugged and chained. Birdie and Elbie's parents - known only as Mum (Dido Miles) and Dad (Perry Benson) - abduct surrogate children who are forced to co-operate in thieving from airport luggage, and subject them to gruelling ordeals as they are forced into the deranged family unit.

MUM & DAD is a brave attempt at British Torture Porn under the shroud of Fred and Rosemary West, and works both as a study of the English underclass and as symbolic of the way Britain exploits foreign labour. Benson's Dad is a beer-bellied, thick-spectacled, brutal letch, and the sight of his flabby, naked arse is only championed by what may well be cinema's most disgusting masturbation scene involving a slab of bloody, unidentifiable meat. Miles is equally unsettling as the outwardly warm maternal figure, and Howard's cheery performance adds another dimension to the depravity (though a secret, drooling child hidden on the top floor - perhaps Mum and Dad’s true offspring - is the most grimmest element).

HOLLYOAKS veteran Hannah Tointon plays a teenage daughter caught between bickering parents and murdering minors in THE CHILDREN.

Tom Shankland’s THE CHILDREN also offers an off-kilter look at family life. Set in an isolated, (slightly) snowbound locale over a New Year family get-together, the children soon become sick and turn into killers; the smugness of the upper middle-class parents is slowly peeled away by their children's alternate whining pleas for comfort and vicious attacks. While ostensibly well meaning and providing their kids with encouragement, the two sets of parents are too caught up in their own concerns to detect the problems with the increasingly broody infants, and even when realisation finally hits, they still allow prejudices and assumptions to blind them.

The subgenre of monstrous minors never appeared onscreen until after World War II; strictly speaking, they arrive in the 1950s, following the displacement of so many children whose potential where uncertain. THE CHILDREN draws from a rich legacy of problem child cinema - THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW to name only two - in exploring fears of innocence lost. Unlike these supernatural forebears, however, Shankland's film is seated in the present's fixation with illness and pandemics. The reason for the children’s behaviour is not explained - a virus is the most likely, and there is a playful reference to MMR jabs - and the dinner scene, where the tide turns, is an undoubted highlight. While the killings tend towards the OMEN-styled novelty variety (such as a lethal combination of toboggan and garden rake), they are nevertheless carried out with infectious, ghoulish glee.

Two Tribes

DOOMSDAY (2008)

South African stunt woman Lee-Anne Liebenberg is memorable as Viper.

FURTHER advancing director Neil Marshall's affinity towards examining humanity in times of extreme stress, DOOMSDAY is set in 2033, where Scotland had been quarantined since the outbreak of the Reaper Virus in 2008. All communication lines with the outside world were cut and people left to die; as a final measure, a wall was built following the same line as the Roman frontier, cutting Britain in half. When the virus re-emerges in London, The Department of Domestic Security instructs Chief Nelson (Bob Hoskins) to select a leader for a military team to be sent into Scotland to bring back either a survivor, or a vaccine from a Dr Kane (Malcolm McDowell)'s lab. Nelson appoints Sergeant Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) who, with her comrades, head towards a job completed or to their deaths.

DOOMSDAY plays like a greatest hits package embracing apocalyptic efforts THE OMEGA MAN, MAD MAX 2 and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. Marking a distinct increase in budget, Marshall still maintains his punky DIY aesthetic, but here functions more as a fanboy than a serious director; its his own private Grindhouse, a loving collage of genre throwbacks. In addition to its action heritage, when McDowell spouts soliloquies in a castle straight out of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, we are reminded of another Marshall favourite, John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR. Luckily, in the midst of anarchy, Kane has managed to outfit an entire medieval castle with painstaking attention to period detail.

Rhona Mitra is Sinclair. Saved from the chaotic clutches of the disease-stricken zone when she was a little girl, she has grown up without a mother and has nothing to lose.

What redeems DOOMSDAY from being mere indulgence is the proficiency with which Marshall propels from one set-piece to the next. You have to credit the filmmaker for the rampaging senselessness, where somehow he wedges in pus-spurting ghouls, club-wielding punks, motorcycle chases, knights in armour, and gladiator fights, while breezing past matters as trivial as the plenitude of gas in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. There are also a couple moments of gratuitous cruelty toward animals that are meant to provide either a sick joke or a satirical statement about the Fascist nature of the government.

Effectively using a throwback pop soundtrack (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam and the Ants), DOOMSDAY refreshingly relies on old-fashioned physical stunts rather than CGI, and consequently Marshall recaptures much of the rhythm and percussive power of the films he is referencing. Mitra handles her cold and distant role well and, although their scenes are brief, Hoskins and McDowell manage to register forcefully on screen, justifying their presence as something more than novelty casting. David O'Hara is excellent as the power behind the prime minister; his super-stiff body language is enough to tell you he's a bastard the first time you see him, and Craig Conway has a blast as the Mohawk-topped Sol, a hollow-eyed punk who keeps the mob happy with goofy production numbers and ritual human sacrifice.