Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

THE BLOG THAT DRIPPED BLOOD BY BILL HUSSEY

October 16th, 2008

I recently wrote a blog about those films that have, over the years, ‘pushed my horror button’, and it got me thinking: why not tell the good people that visit Horror Reanimated about my secret movie passion?

Don’t worry, I’m not about to delve into the darkest reaches of my twisted movie psyche. I am fully aware that the world is not yet prepared for my idea of a remake of Night of the Living Dead starring the cast of Sesame Street (‘They’re coming to get you, Big Bird!’). No, what I’m talking about is a bunch of horror movies that don’t quite make the grade as far as influencing my writing or plaguing my dreams. In short, they don’t push my horror button, baby. Instead, they dance around me wearing cheap, garish clothes and doing their best to pull scary faces. They are as camp as a Butlin’s holiday, with plots so laughable dear old William Castle would have turned his nose up at them. But, in the process of trying their very best to horrify, they show so much darn heart that you end up loving them anyway.

My passion for these poorly stitched monstrosities really began in the summer of 1999. I had been working in London throughout ’98 – long hours in a miserable little office in Whitehall. By Christmas I was starting to feel unwell. Early in the New Year, en route home on the tube, I collapsed. My opinion of Londoners was not improved by the fact that, although the carriage was crowded and I was neatly attired in suit and necktie, I hit the deck at London Bridge and wasn’t helped until we pulled into Clapham North. Cut a long story short, a nice doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases on Tottenham Court Road told me that I probably had malaria. I’d picked it up while traveling through Peru a year or so back and it had incubated in my system. Those Murderous Mozzies of Machu Picchu had come back to haunt me.

After the malaria my immune system was so worn down that I suffered from ME, or post-viral fatigue syndrome, for the next six months. Aside from my mum’s battle with cancer, this experience is just about the worst thing that has ever happened to me. My decline from a relatively healthy lad of twenty to an emaciated invalid was swift. Within weeks of diagnosis, I was so physically drained that shuffling from my bed to the bathroom became impossible. I couldn’t even be carried to the toilet because, if I was touched, every muscle screamed. Eventually I couldn’t even make it to the commode positioned at the end of the bed and was forced to wear a kind of adult nappy. The muscles in my arms and legs atrophied. I lost over two stone in weight, and I was pretty skinny in those days anyway. In later years, my mum admitted that she thought I would be bedridden for the rest of my life. Worse, due to the continued wasting, she didn’t think I would live that long. Her concerns were overly gloomy – I was never in that much danger – but she was terrified. After three months, I was skeletal: a tiny form barely able to move, always cold, always shivering, never hungry, and so confused I couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. Couldn’t even remember the names of friends and family. I hardly noticed this morbid deterioration – my mind just wasn’t playing ball – but when my mum described it to me in later months, it made a big impact. I could then recall bits of it, and I think the experience found echoes in the demise of Peter Malahyde in Through A Glass, Darkly.

I was, in the end, very lucky. ME is a terrible illness which can last a lifetime. I had a course of homeopathic medication prescribed by my doctor and, whether it was due to this or my system finally rallying after the malaria, I began to get better. It took a while though and, due to the over-sleeping induced by the ME, I now found myself awake at all hours of the night. Still not strong enough to concentrate on reading, I watched a horrible amount of late night TV. It was during this time that the BBC started showing a selection of old portmanteau horror movies…

Virtually all of these films came from the 60s and 70s and were produced by Hammer-a-like studio Amicus. The portmanteau horror films of Amicus all followed a similar pattern: there would be a framing story around which five or six tales were incorporated. For example, in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, directed by genre stalwart Freddie Francis, five men share a railway carriage from London to Bradley. They are joined by Peter Cushing’s Dr Schreck (that’s ‘terror’ in German, get it?), a man promising dark mystery and sporting a pair of unlikely eyebrows. Anyway, ol’ Doc Schreck proceeds to lay out a set of Tarot cards and, in reading the destinies of his fellow passengers, the stories are told. This was the first of a series of movies shown by the Beeb over the summer of ’99, and I was hooked from the get-go. The tales had a wonderful old world charm to them that I found absolutely spellbinding. Sure, even in 1964, stories about deadly trailing plants and voodoo curses were probably old hat, but there was real pleasure to be had in the hammy commitment of the actors (including Roy Castle and, bizarrely, DJ Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman!) and the leisurely pace of the storytelling.

The actors of Amicus were a weird bunch. In the same movie, you could get a clutch of real thesps like Denholm Elliott, Joss Ackland and Charlotte Rampling rubbing shoulders with such familiar genre faces as Cushing, Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt. Admittedly, a few of those, shall we say, better-regarded actors were past their prime and slumming it for the pay cheque. Having said that, there are some strong performances throughout. Those that spring to mind include a wonderfully ethereal Rampling in Lucy Comes To Stay, and a creepy turn from Herbert Lom in Mannequins of Horror, both from 1972′s Asylum. That film also boasts a brilliant, if barking, framing device: in order to become the titular asylum’s new head doctor (hee-hee) newcomer Robert Powell must guess which of the inmates is Dr B Starr, the former director of the asylum. The resulting interviews make up the portmanteau’s stories. Although there were a few standout performances throughout the Amicus period, one or two leave something to be desired. Case in point: a woefully miscast Jon Pertwee in The Cloak from The House That Dripped Blood. It’s true to say that Pertwee was not helped by a weak story but, by God, those fangs made him look about as scary as a headless Worzel Gummidge… Wait a minute, that was always scary!

It could be argued that these movies are too cosy to scare anyway. That age has withered and customs staled their potential to horrify. Not true, say I. After all, some of these films were scripted by none other than Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame. Sure, their taglines and posters were ludicrous – Terror Waits For You In Every Room In The House That Dripped Blood! - Death Lives In The Vault Of Horror!  - and my personal favourite – Come To The Asylum… To Get Killed! Erm, no thanks – but a few of the tales were genuinely disturbing. The aforementioned Lucy Comes To Stay is a hauntingly-told story of split personality. …And All Through The House is adapted from my beloved Vault of Horror comics and does a fine job of telling a gruesome and ironic tale of a murderous housewife (Joan Collins) getting her just deserts. In Method For Murder, Denholm Elliott is a writer plagued by visions of the psychopathic anti-hero of his latest novel. Wonderful stuff.

Night after night, I devoured these movies. I found them strangely comforting for, although they claimed to be horror stories, they came from a world both predictable and innocent. A world quite like that of childhood, in fact. At the age of twenty, having gone through a crippling illness, I took solace from anything that reminded me of more carefree days.

And so I’d like to thank Amicus. Despite their shoestring budgets, hammy acting, appalling dubbing and dire effects, they really work. Why? Maybe because they show the proper Blitz spirit. Do they grumble about the occasional bad script? Not a bit of it. Do they bemoan the fact that some of their actors are quite obviously phoning-in their performances? Do they heck. They get on with the job and they make do. That’s British horror for you, folks: sometimes unpolished, occasionally risible, but most of the time bloody brilliant!

Entry Filed under: The Function of Fear