Recommended Reading.

Whilst we rarely go in for direct product endorsements on this weblog, it has nonetheless come to my attention that there are a number of film books forthcoming in the next few months that I am incredibly excited about, and it occurs to me that readers here might appreciate a heads-up about them too.

In particular, I am consumed with what can only be described as ‘rabid anticipation’ at the thought that the first volume(!) of Stephen Thrower’s long-awaited study of the cinema of Jess Franco – now entitled Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco and published by Strange Attractor Press - will, gods willing, be in my hands within the next few weeks. As I have remarked here before, Thrower is, to my mind, the most insightful, readable and informative writer currently working in the sphere of quote-unquote ‘cult cinema’, and hearing him hold forth on Franco in various DVD extras (and in person at a one-off event at Bloomsbury’s Horse Hospital a few years back) has always been an absolute joy.

To suddenly have four hundred-plus pages of such material to dig into is a discerning Francophile’s dream come true, and upon receipt of said book I fully intend to put all other leisure-time activity of indefinite hold as I retreat to the sofa, put on a suitably ominous record and get cracking. Disturb me at your peril.

Murderous Passions is available in a range of enticing special editions directly from Strange Attractor, whilst the regular hardback can be nabbed at a slightly more economical rate via Amazon in the UK.

Another dutifully pre-ordered volume I’m really looking forward to is the first printed venture from one of the best writers out there on the criminally under-investigated subject of global pop cinema, Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!’s Todd Stadtman. Speaking as a novice viewer fascinated by the excessive sights and sounds of Bollywood movies but feeling very much adrift without a knowledgeable guide to point me in the direction of the grittier, weirder stuff lurking beyond the big budget masala melodrama, I can only imagine that I am the exact target audience for Todd’s sure-to-be-earthshattering Funky Bollywood: The Wild World of 1970s Indian Action Cinema, coming imminently from FAB Press. At this point I should probably say things like “woo, yeah, bring it on!” and so forth, so, uh, yeah – there ya go. Pick up your copy from the link in the preceding sentence today.

Speaking of Mr. Stadtman, we next move on to the happy news that his old alma mater, Teleport City, have finally thrown caution to the wind and embarked on their own book, entitled At The Matinee of Madness.

Whilst it may sound like a pretty pompous and unlikely statement, it would be no exaggeration to say that the writing of both Todd and Keith Allison on Teleport City had a pretty big impact on my life after I began regularly reading the site around a decade ago, and their work definitely played a pivotal role in inspiring me to cultivate an interest in quote-unquote ‘cult cinema’ (gotta stop saying that) that extends beyond mere time-killing and ironic chuckles.

Promising a bumper compendium of new material and re-worked old stuff, the forthcoming book should at the very least provide me with a perfect opportunity to relive those glory days of sneakily spending quiet afternoons at work marveling at tales of Turkish super-villains, Japanese girl gangs and Doug McClure punching cavemen in the face, before hastily pulling up a spreadsheet window as soon as someone approached my desk. As is only right and proper, the book should also, on the basis of the head-spinning contents list published here, make for a veritable smorgasbord of everything that is wonderful about psychotronic cinema, primed and ready to infect other impressionable minds with the same obsessive enthusiasms that have gradually consumed your humble narrator, further swelling the ranks of those of us who consider Mario Bava’s ‘Danger! Diabolik’ to be peak achievement of Western civilization. Phew.

Going the self-published route, ‘At the Matinee of Madness’ will initially appear as an e-book, with a print edition hitting our doormats at some point thereafter. Those who have clocked the smug ‘printed word’ pledge on the sidebar of this blog won’t be surprised to hear I’m waiting out for the latter option, but either way – keep ‘em glued to Teleport City for updates.

And, finally, at completely the other end of this blog’s aesthetic spectrum, we move to a belated notification of a book that was actually published a few months back and, given its limited edition status, may already have sold out. Assuming copies are still available, fans of David Rudkin’s extraordinary TV film ‘Penda’s Fen’ (which I linked to and briefly wrote about here, many moons ago) should make haste to purchase The Edge is Where The Centre Is – David Rudkin & Penda’s Fen: A Conversation, a hand-printed small press volume published by New York-based Seen Studios, and surrounded by some characteristically artwork by Julian House, who hopefully needs no introduction here.

I’ll be honest with you and admit that I haven’t actually had a chance to begin reading my copy, but chances are any Rudkin/Penda cultists amongst my readership are already preparing to complete the necessary Paypal transaction, regardless of my thoughts on the book’s contents.

Initial copies (if there are any left) come complete with several photographs of Rudkin taken during the interviews that form much of the book (hey, why not?), and a print of House’s poster for a 16mm screening of Penda’s Fen that took place in London last year – a screening that I missed simply because I failed to notice it was happening, although the very existence of a 16mm print at least gives me hope that one day we might get to see this masterpiece released in a slightly more salubrious form than the blurry VHS dubs currently doing the rounds. Fingers tightly crossed on that one.

UPDATE: The first edition of ‘The Edge Is Where The Centre Is’ is actually now sold-out, but the page linked above promises an expanded second edition at some point in the future, so by all means drop them a line to express your interest (see Seen Studios link above).

Mysterious Britain at the BFI.

BFI Flipside’s “Mysterious Britain” evening last week got off to an odd start in not quite the manner the organisers had anticipated, when Bruce Springsteen apparently announced a surprise public appearance to promote a documentary about himself, and claimed NFT Screen # 1, where the Flipside screening was due to take place, for that purpose.

I would have loved to witness the meeting between The Boss’s people and the soft-spoken British cinema archivist types, but needless to say, we’re now devoid of leg room, crammed into the substantially smaller NFT # 2. I don’t know whether or not late-arriving ticket-holders had to be turned away and given a refund, but I’m glad I got in early.

After a brief apology/explanation from curators Vic Pratt and William Fowler, it’s on with the show, the general gist of which is a collection of brief TV extracts dredged up from the BFI vaults, illustrating the British media’s approach to investigation of ‘strange goings on’ throughout the mid 20th century.

Proceedings begin with a 1973 broadcast on behalf of The Aetherius Society, a supremely weird religious sect based around the “sixty miles of audio tape” recorded by one Dr. George King, who claimed to be channelling the pronouncements of a holy being from Mars, who urged earth’s major religions to combine into some kind of benevolent mind-meld, turning back the tide of evil and atomic destruction. The footage of a young altar boy earnestly charging a battery with ‘prayer power’, backed up by an ethnically diverse congregation of four, was pricelessly eerie, as was the thought of an era in which BBC ‘community outreach’ funding could filter down to letting dubious outfits like this lot spread their message of hope via late night BBC2.

Next up, a 1972 edition of “The Sky At Night” which sees Sir Patrick Moore mixing it up with the druids during their midsummer rituals at Stonehenge. Sir Patrick says he found the druids to be pleasant and genuine bunch, before politely informing them that their veneration of the stones is clearly a load of bunk in the face of new research which reveals the Henge’s true function as a “primitive astral calculator”. “Well, there’s always 1973”, he cheerfully announces as the druids shuffle off at the end of their ceremony, disappointed that the overcast sky denied them a glimpse of the dawn. Words to live by indeed.

Sticking with standing stones and knighthood, Sir John Betjeman turns up next, narrating a short subject on the earthworks and stone circle at Avebury for a 1950s Shell Motor Oil travelogue series. Betjeman’s observations on the subject, though interesting, are strictly by the book, but the film is beautifully photographed. Black & white footage of the mysterious monoliths standing alone in a field of daisies and long grass with the scattered brick cottages on either side, is incredibly evocative, expressing the very heart of ‘weird England’ as it quietly thrived in the days of our parents and grandparents, almost too perfectly for words.


Next we have a full edition of an absolute genius ITV series from the late ‘50s entitled Out of Step, in which Daniel Farson, a sort of bullish proto-Boris Johnson figure, tracks down people who hold unusual views, and proceeds to antagonise and mock them. This week: people who believe in flying saucers! Are they cranks, frauds, or simply misguided? Farson’s first stop is the roof garden of the Rt. Hon. Brindsley Le Poer Trench, whose crumbling UFO paperbacks and inherently hilarious name certainly played a role in my childhood. Lord Trench gets bonus points for beginning his answer to the question ‘why do you believe in flying saucers’ with “well, speaking as the editor of Flying Saucer Review…”, and for repeatedly stressing that his sighting reports come from “serious, highly trained observers”, as opposed to, I dunno, some random bozos who just like wandering around staring at the sky. We get straight to camera statements from various of these observers, my favourite of which was a man who looked like a Dan Clowes caricature come to life, whose evidence of strange lights in the sky is somewhat undermined by the fact that his sightings have all taken place “in the area between two aerodromes”. If the aliens were to set up a base-camp on earth, he reasons, it would probably be in Stafford.

Subsequently, Farson seeks an opposing view from the retired Astronomer Royal, who sits in his drawing room absent-mindedly pondering the weight of the supplies these space-fellows would need to bring them to our solar system, and interviews a dentist who claims he was taken for a ride to Mars and Venus by interplanetary visitors (“if I may say so sir, it certainly sounds like one of us is being taken for a ride..”), and who states that the women on Venus were very beautiful indeed.

Looking back after subsequent decades in which the whole UFO mythos has taken on an increasingly dark and troubling tone, this programme’s light-hearted approach to the subject was a wonderful reminder of how simple and wholesome the whole business seemed prior to the arrival of cattle mutilation, recovered memory syndrome, suicidal cultists and the ever-present intimations of child abuse. I don’t know whether any other episodes of “Out of Step” have survived, but if so I’d love to see them – this one was a hoot.


Sixteen years into a darker future, and a queasy orange glow of deteriorated video tape colour hangs over a short news item about a young Birmingham couple sitting meekly whilst an exorcist (Church of England, apparently !?) banishes a poltergeist from their chilly-looking council house. The ghost has been doing terrible things, like turning the cooker off and hiding the husband’s wallet under the bed. The vicar conducts the ceremony from a little xeroxed booklet entitled “Exorcism”. I don’t know who wrote it, but it all sounds a bit fishy to me. Whilst we may be tempted here to focus our ghoulish retromancy on the kitchen’s lurid bad-trip flock wallpaper or the husband’s Tony Iommi approach to personal grooming, the truly notable thing in this case I feel is the way the parents leave their toddler to play unaccompanied on the front lawn for an extended period of time as they dutifully accompany the priest in his somewhat questionable business.

Back to the comforts of the black & white era, and next we have a delightfully baleful short programme from 1964, in which a BBC reporter recruits a cheerfully imaginative local historian to help interpret the remnants of several apparent folk magic ceremonies conducted in ruined churches in East Anglia. The presenter gives us a right mouthful in his introduction, automatically linking these rather generic magical talismans with a survival of pre-Christian Celtic tradition, which he then defines as “..the worship of Pan, or Lucifer”. Hmm. Anyway, he gets the biggest laugh of the night when he announces “it may be shocking to us to learn of the survival of these dark traditions, over fifteen hundred years since Christianity was accepted as the sole religion of the British Isles. But then… this is Norfolk.”

Perhaps my favourite item of the evening was a contemporary news investigation of the infamous Highgate Vampire flap, a sequence of events sparked by a spate of grave desecrations which took place in Highgate Cemetery through 1970. As The Sun reported on 19 August 1970; “A man armed with a wooden stake and a cross went on a vampire hunt in a cemetery. But all he found was the police. And they arrested him. Alan Farrant, aged 24, told magistrates at Clerkenwell, London yesterday: ‘my intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake in its heart’”.


Farrant, a “former tobacconist of no fixed abode” according to this news item, was subsequently acquitted in court, and when we join him here he’s up to his old tricks again, clambering over the wall of the cemetery after-hours for his regular anti-Vampire patrol. Farrant insists he has seen Satanists at work in the cemetery at night, consorting with the figure of a glowing eight foot high vampire, and that it is up to him to try to stop them.

Meanwhile, the supremely Garth Marenghi-like Mr. Sean Manchester, self-styled president of the British Occult Society, considers Farrant a rank amateur, going about his own unauthorised nocturnal vigils with a more sombre demeanour and an altogether more expensive-looking crucifix and stake combo. The British Occult Society appears to consist largely of Manchester presiding over counterfeit Golden Dawn rituals in his darkened bedsit (WHITE MAGIC, he insists). When he illustrates the best methods of destroying a vampire for our reporter, he speaks with the authority of a man who has seen Peter Cushing’s performance in ‘Dracula’ more than once.

The view of the long-suffering Highgate Cemetery caretaker on the impending occult battle transpiring on his territory? “Well they’re a load of bloody nutcases, aren’t they” he sighs, sweeping up the broken glass of another nocturnal trespasser. It is notable I think that many of the incidents that inspired this vigilante action in the first place (a body dragged from it’s grave and beheaded, another staked with an iron spike, etc) seem perhaps to have been the result of some similarly misguided anti-vampire activity; if not the work of morbid schoolkids, then possibly of Farrant himself, or some other sorry soul who’d taken all those Hammer flicks a bit too much to heart..?

From the ridiculous back to the sublime, the screenings conclude with “The Living Grave”, a half-hour TV drama from 1980, scripted by Penda’s Fen writer David Rudkin, based around the premise that a young woman under hypnosis is channelling the spirit of Kitty Jay, tragic subject of a well known Dartmoor folk tale, whose grave is apparently marked with fresh flowers to this day. Mixing highly convincing hypnosis scenes, in which we witness a psychologist slowly guiding ‘Kitty’ back through the details of her life, with documentary-like footage of a some guys visiting the locations she is describing, “The Living Grave” is an extremely effective work, using its paranormal conceit to draw us completely into the short, sad life of a rural orphan girl in 18th century England.

Although far more straight-forward than “Penda’s Fen”, “The Living Grave” is no less poignant in its forceful demonstration of the way in which the past can live on in the present, not through the contrivances of spooks and hauntings, but through the continuation of stone and wood and landscape, like the oak beam in the barn where Kitty Jay’s tale ends, holding the memory of a disgraced 18th century teenager kicking away a bail of hay and hanging herself, as we see a 20th century farmer beneath it, messing around with some fertilizer sacks. It’s all happening at once, after all. Certainly the most chilling moment I experienced over the course of this 21st century Halloween, and a fitting end to another exquisite evening of retromancy from BFI’s Flipside strand.

Outside the auditorium, it looks like someone has knocked over some of those rope cordon thingys, and torn some posters off the wall. By the back entrance, some heavy looking security types are loading gitar flight-cases into a Transit van, saying stuff like “Ok, we’re all done” and “go, go!” Boy, it sure woulda been cool to see Bruce Springsteen.

Youtube Film Club: Penda’s Fen

Last week, I watched the 1973 BBC play-for-today “Penda's Fen”, written by David Rudkin and Directed by Alan Clarke.

Shrouded in VHS fuzz and with otherworldly atmospherics, it’s an extremely unusual coming of age tale set in the Malvern hills, dripping with atavistic English mysticism in the spirit of Blake, Arthur Machen and Sir Edward Elgar, the latter of whom is good enough to put in a memorable spectral appearance.

Personally, I found “Penda’s Fen” to be a strange, wise and beautiful work, and in particular found it’s expression of a connection with history and landscape that transcends small-minded conservative drudgery, and of an innate spiritual faith divorced from religious dogma, to be very poignant.

What you’ll find it to be is anyone’s guess, but regardless - essential viewing for any connoisseur of vintage British high weirdness.

For the full background, see John Coulthart’s blog-post here.

Part # 1 (taken from a videoed Channel 4 repeat circa 1989) is here: