Fans of HOST (Rob Savage, 2020) will know that the limitations lockdown places on film making can be a boon to inventive not to mention low budget horror. Ben Wheatley has gone for the equal and opposite approach here, a film made almost entirely out of doors and with only four central characters and unlike … Continue reading Land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in #6: In the Earth (2021)
Two of my more recent discoveries on Amazon Prime were a selection of the BBC anthology series Play for Today (1970-84), (sadly no A Photograph), and ABC’s gothic daytime melodrama Dark Shadows (1966-71). This unique and unlikely hit gave its creator Dan Curtis the chance to successfully pitch some classic horror adaptations to the U.S. … Continue reading Enter freely and of your own free will! #2: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1974)
Anyone who watched the recent series The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story (2019) will know how misogynistic assumptions can hamper an investigation and an obsession with the killer can reduce their victims to statistics and social judgement that puts part of the blame on to themselves. After all, society says, what were … Continue reading Foreign Countries #23: Mystery and Imagination: Sweeney Todd (1970)
The visitation drama has formed a lasting sub-genre in plays and it's not hard to see why, a stranger intruding in a home/family unit is both a simple and effective dramatic device. It is also straightforward and relatively cheap to stage. Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (1836) and An Inspector Calls (1945) by JB Priestley … Continue reading Foreign Countries #21: Play for Today: Brimstone and Treacle (1976/1987)
Royal Holloway's ongoing project 'The History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK’ is currently running ‘Drama She Wrote’, a season of neglected TV dramas by women writers from the ’50s to the ’70s, held at BFI Southbank. You can find more details over on their blog here. The screening on 11 September 2018 was … Continue reading The Value of Myth #6: ITV Playhouse: A Splinter of Ice (1972), Then and Now: Over (1973)
Every time my wife watches a mid-eighties Top of the Pops repeat on BBC Four these days I feel the need to point out the portion of Bernard Lodge’s slit scan effect created for the Doctor Who titles in 1973. And I do mean every time. Those titles that ran from 1973 to 1980, accompanied … Continue reading Foreign Countries #17: Shadows of Fear: The Death Watcher (1971)
The revelation a few years ago that the Black Death might have been caused by marmots and gerbils has done little to rehabilitate the reputation of rats in Western society. I imagine this is because few people have had to gingerly walk around a bunch of great gerbils feasting out of bins while taking a … Continue reading The Value of Myth #4: Doomwatch: Tomorrow, the Rat (1970), Beasts: During Barty’s Party (1976)
You can listen to our latest podcast here and now on iTunes (gosh). But before Howard I delved in to Kim Newman's favourite horror film we took a little time to discuss my thoughts on seeing Unburied, Hermetic Arts' hour long folk horror performance piece, playing at Waterloo East Theatre as part of VAULT Festival. … Continue reading M4 Death Trip #5: Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971)
This month (February 2018) the BFI are celebrating the work of pioneering director Waris Hussein. His CV reads as a parade of some of the most groundbreaking TV series in the UK including Suffragette serial Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978) and taboo-smashing Aids crisis drama Intimate Contact (1987). A success in … Continue reading Foreign Countries #16: The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972)
So Howard Ingham and I don our Parking Inspector brassards and channel our inner hoons as we investigate The Cars That Ate Paris. You can listen to the Podcast above or here but by way of introduction a quick word about rural Australia on film. Director Peter Weir is probably the first among equals for … Continue reading M4 Death Trip #4: The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)
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