Dennis’s Library (#40): The Curse of the Wise Woman by Lord Dunsany (Sphere, 1976)

 By this point, it seems that the Dennis Wheatley Library Of The Occult had abandoned their distinctive circular, zodiac sign cover designs; which is a blessing in this particular case, because the full cover painting (for which I cannot find a credit online) is absolutely superb.

This book has been in my possession for many years, but I confess, I’ve never got around to reading it. Though Lord Dunsany remains noteworthy to weird fiction fans as a primary influence on the early work of H.P. Lovecraft, His Lordship's brand of oneiric high fantasy has never really been my cup of tea, and though this rare departure into real world-set supernatural fiction might conceivably be worth a punt, Wheatley’s description of it as appealing primarily to “..those who love shooting, hunting and magnificent descriptions of the beauties of nature” hasn't exactly stoked my enthusiasm for giving it a try, even though the Irish political angle sounds quite interesting.

Top marks for use of the word ‘profanation’. One of my favourites.

As this is the highest number I currently own within Dennis Wheatley’s Library Of The Occult, here is a run-down of what was included within it up to this point. A pretty varied selection to say the least.

Dennis’s Library (#33): The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (Sphere, 1975)

After searching for this book for much of my adult life (because if one of the greatest cosmic horror authors who ever lived had a yarn about Ghost Pirates, I want to read it), I actually found this copy in Japan a few years back, bizarrely enough.

I had intended to use it as the basis for one of my (long-neglected) series of Weird Tales posts, but after I actually started reading it, I soon put that idea aside.

It’s not that the book is disappointing as such, but… well let’s just say that it was clearly written as much for enthusiasts of nautical fiction as for fans of ghost stories. As such, the story’s supernatural elements are introduced extremely slowly and with great subtlety, whilst the relentless application of highly detailed seafaring jargon meanwhile leads to the book becoming quite difficult to follow for readers who grew up subsequent to the Great Age of Sail.

Much of the action concerns sailors running around different parts of the ship preparing for different weather conditions, and as such, a diagram to help us landlubbers identify the various decks, masts, sails and rigging referenced in the text would have proved extremely helpful. Characterisation meanwhile is fairly minimal, making it difficult to engage with what seems like a fairly boilerplate narrative of a band of able seamen caught between the regime of a sadistic and unreasonable First Mate and that of a distant and allegedly drunken Captain.

As is usually the case with Hodgson however, the novel’s supernatural revelation, when it does finally arrive, is actually a bit of a mind-blower. Rather than being harried by a more traditional ghost ship, it turns out that the vessel upon which the books characters are sailing has actually become trapped between dimensions, and thus is kind of ‘overlapping’ with the space occupied by an alternate universe vessel whose malignant, spectral occupants are gradually picking off our human crewmen one by one.

Pretty freaking far out, especially when you consider that Erwin Schrödinger first introduced the theory of parallel universes into popular thought in 1952, over forty years after ‘The Ghost Pirates’ was first published.

Here’s what Dennis had to say on the matter:

Dennis’s Library (#5): Carnacki The Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson (Sphere, 1974)

To get us in the mood for the start of this year’s October Horrors season next week, I thought it would be a nice idea to highlight a few suitably eerie occult/horror-ish paperbacks from my shelves – which led me directly to pulling down the few volumes I own from The – ahem – Dennis Wheatley Library Of The Occult.

Now, say what you like about Wheatley (and I’ve said plenty in the past), but this line of paperback reprints, which he masterminded on behalf of Sphere books during the mid-70s, must have been an absolute god-send for fans of weird fiction at the time – and indeed it remains so for anyone seeking affordable second hand copies of the wide variety of obscure works the line helped bring back into circulation.

That said, I’m going to assume that most of my readers here will have at least a passing familiarity with William Hope Hodgson and his ‘Carnacki’ stories. Like most of Hodgson’s supernatural fiction, the adventures of his 'Electric Pentangle'-brandishing occult detective feel both wildly ahead of their time and frustratingly uneven – the latter largely a result of the author’s insistence upon reducing at least some of his hero’s cases to light-weight hoaxes and comic misunderstandings.

Though none of these stories really display the same extreme idiosyncrasies that defined Hodgson’s far-future myth cycle ‘The Night Lands’ or his masterpiece ‘The House On The Borderland’, the best of them are nonetheless superb, with ‘The Hog’ in particular standing as one of the most intense examples sustained cosmic horror ever printed.

If you’ve not read them before, I’d humbly suggest this book (long out of copyright and available in wide various of inexpensive editions) would make a great addition to your Halloween reading list – particularly if you can find it between these splendidly evocative covers, with unaccredited artwork paying blatant homage to Mario Bava’s ‘Kill Baby Kill!’ (1966), a film whose influence seems to have spread remarkably widely in view of how poorly received and sporadically distributed it was upon its initial release.

 [UPDATE, 24/10/18: It would be remiss of me not to link to this 2012 post from John Coulthart's blog, which I stumbled upon today. Coulthart traces the use of the image from ‘Kill Baby Kill!’ back to a still which appeared in Denis Gifford's unfeasibly influential ‘A Pictorial History of Horror Movies’ (1973), from whence it was subsequently repurposed by any number of illustrators and designers.]

Well, that’s what I think about it anyway. Let’s see what Dennis had to say on the matter.

This Week’s Wheatley: Dennis’s Mates.

 “The Reverend Montague Summers was a most interesting man. He was not only a great authority on witchcraft, werewolves and the rest, but also wrote a number of excellent books on Restoration theatre. He always dressed a clergyman, and, with the silvery locks that curled down on either side of his pale, aristocratic face, he was the very picture of a restoration bishop. But quite a number of people maintained that he had either been defrocked or had never taken holy orders at all.

I remember his telling me one evening of an exorcism he had performed in Ireland. The wife of a cottager was apparently possessed by a devil. When Summers arrived she was foaming at the mouth and had to be held down. With bell and book he performed the ceremony. A small black cloud issued from the woman’s mouth. She became quiet, the black cloud disappeared into a cold leg of mutton that had been put on the table ready for supper. A few minutes later, it was seen to be swarming with maggots.

Summers asked my wife and me to spend the weekend at his house in Arlesford. We motored down on the Friday afternoon. When we were taken round the garden, my wife spotted the most gigantic toad she had ever seen, and in the bedroom we were given there were a dozen enormous spiders.

On the Saturday morning my host took me into a room that was empty except for a pile of books. Picking up a small leather-bound volume, he said, ‘Look, this is just the thing for you. It is worth far more, but I’ll let you have it for fifty pounds.’ I did not want it and, anyhow, could not have afforded it. Much embarrassed, I said so. Never have I seen a man’s expression change so swiftly. From benevolent calm it suddenly became filled with demoniac fury. He threw down the book and flounced out of the room. An hour later I had sent myself a telegram. By Saturday evening my wife and I were home again in London. That was the last I saw of the ‘Reverend’ Montague Summers.”

“Rollo Ahmed was a very different character. He was an Egyptian by birth, and from his father’s family had acquired his initial knowledge of the ‘secret art’. However, his mother was a native of the West Indies and, while Rollo was still in his ‘teens, his parents decided to leave Egypt. For many years he lived with them in devil-ridden islands and the little-explored forests of Yucatan, Guiana and Brazil. In these places he acquired first hand knowledge not only of the primitive magic of the forest Indians, but also of Voodoo and the use of obeahs. Later he explored Europe and Asia for further knowledge of the mysteries and for a while lived in Burma, where he became a practitioner of Raja Yoga.

He was a small, slim man, neither bombastic nor subservient, with a most cheerful personality and a ready laugh, and he spoke English perfectly. Several times he dined with us in Queen’s Gate. On one occasion on a freezing night in mid-winter he arrived without a hat or overcoat, dressed in a thin summer suit. He had walked all the way from Clapham Common; yet his hands were glowing with warmth. This he declared was due to his practicing yoga, and he offered to teach my wife and me yoga breathing. We had a few lessons, but were too heavily engaged with other matters to follow it up.”

[…]

“From him I learned a great deal. Later I was told that he had slipped up in a ceremony and failed to master a demon, who had caused all his teeth to fall out. Soon after the opening of the war, I lost sight of him, as I had other things to think about.”

“I was introduced to Aleister Crowley by a friend of mine who was a very well-known journalist and later, as a Member of Parliament, became one of the leaders of the Socialist Party. I will therefore refer to him as Z. Crowley dined with my wife and me several times. He was a fascinating conversationalist and had an intellect of the first order.”

[…]

“Having had Crowley to dinner several times, I told my friend Z. that, although I found him intensely interesting, I was convinced he could not harm a rabbit.
‘Ah!’ Replied Z. ‘Not now, perhaps. But he was very different before that affair in Paris.’ The affair in Paris was as follows.
Crowley wanted to raise Pan. One of his disciples owned a small hotel on the Left Bank. Crowley, with his twelve disciples, took it over for the weekend and the servants were given a holiday. On Saturday night a big room at the top of the house was emptied of all its furniture, swept and garnished. Crowley and his principle disciple, MacAleister (son of Aleister), were to perform the ceremony there, while the other seven remained downstairs. He told them that, whatever noises they might hear, in no circumstances were they to enter the room before morning.
Down in the little restaurant a cold collation had been prepared. The eleven had supper and waited uneasily. They all had a great deal to drink, but got only stale-tight. By midnight the place had become intensely cold. They heard shouting and banging in the room upstairs, but obeyed orders not to go up. The door was locked and they could get no reply to their anxious calls, so they broke it down.
Crowley had raised Pan all right. MacAleister was dead and Crowley, stripped of his magician’s robes, a naked gibbering idiot crouching in a corner.
Before he was fit to go about again, he spent four months in a lunatic asylum. Z., who told me all this, had been one of the disciples, and an eye-witness to this party.”

----

All text from the chapter ‘Modern Occultists’ in Dennis Wheatley’s ‘The Devil And All his Works’, pp. 256 – 261.

Photographs via the internet.

---

This Week’s Wheatley: The Devil And All His Works (Book Club Associates, 1977 / first published 1971)

My history with Dennis Wheatley’s coffee-table opus ‘The Devil And All His Works’ goes back a long way. During my childhood, a copy used to sit on the ‘expensive hardbacks’ shelf behind the counter at a second hand bookshop I’d occasionally visit with my parents, and naturally I coveted it. Even then, the book’s appeal to me was based more on humour than an earnest desire to learn about the occult – I remember thinking how funny it would look on the shelf, and what a perfect volume it would be to be caught idly flicking through when the vicar called ‘round unexpectedly. But still, I knew I must have it.

My parents however disagreed, and decreed that I had better things to spend my pocket money on than big books about the devil. Fast forward to the present day, and when I saw a copy being sold for pennies recently in a charity book fair, I couldn’t help picking it up, just to celebrate the fact that I’m all grown up now and can buy whatever books I damn well please, ha ha ha. Of course, I won’t be laughing so hard when another one of my living room shelves collapses under the sheer weight of stupid books I’ll never read, but for the moment, let’s all enjoy a furtive tour through ‘The Devil And All His Works’.

Upon first glance, Dennis’s characteristically trenchant take on the influence of "The Devil" upon world history and culture is as grim as you’d fear, with “..All His Works” apparently incorporating phenomena as varied as hypnotism, pyramids, Aubrey Beardsley, “Mohammedanism”, yoga and Victorian fairy photography. But to give Wheatley his due, the book is actually fairly readable once you get stuck in, veering randomly from one subject to another in the best head-spinning ‘70s occult paperback tradition, and adopting an amiable and anecdotal “rambling old gent in a rural pub” kind of tone that’s actually quite enjoyable.

You could say Wheatley’s decision to summarise the entire history of human spiritual belief within the pages of a book entitled ‘The Devil And All His Works’, placing potted summaries of the world’s major religions in between loads of guff about table-tapping and the Salem witch trials, is questionable at best, horribly irresponsible at worst, but if you’re prepared to put such concerns aside and just go with the flow, he does at least manage to approach *most* subjects with a certain amount of surface level knowledge and respect.

 

P.66 - ‘Revelation of the black art to a neophyte by the fiend Asomvel’

Of course, the downside of listening to rambling old blokes in pubs is that it’s usually only a matter of time before they start busting out the racism and barmy OAP conspiracy theories, and such is the case here too, I'm afraid.

Even taking into account his age and era, the delight Wheatley appears to take in using the terms “Negroes” and “Asiatics” every few pages begins to grate after a while, and despite his general tone of curious acceptance of those foreigners and their funny ways, there are occasional lapses into outright offensiveness, the most deplorable and unpleasant of which is perhaps the chapter in which Wheatley gives us his views on ‘voodoo’, apparently whilst channelling Andre Morell in ‘The Plague of the Zombies’:

“This is one of the vilest, cruellest and most debased forms of worship ever devised by man. Its origins lay in darkest Africa, and the Negro has carried its foul practices with him to every part of the world which he inhabits; and now even, I am told on good authority, to several cities in England.”
[…]
“The Caribbean islands, Brazil and the Southern United States are all riddled with voodoo, but its heartland is the black Republic of Haiti. In 1908 Celestina, the daughter of the President, and a powerful mambo, was married to a goat. When it died it was buried with the rites of the Christian Church.”
[…]
“A Voodoo altar looks like a cheap jumble sale. One that I saw in Brazil had heaped on it pictures of the Virgin Mary and several saints, bottles of Coca-Cola, little pots of wilted flowers, shredded palm fronds, a dagger, a fly-whisk and flasks of rum. But so primitive still are some of these people that Voodoo ceremonies are held to appease spirits that they believe to live at the sources of rivers”
- pp. 261-262

Such views may be more or less what you’d expect of a staunchly conservative servant of the crown born in 1897, I suppose, but that still doesn’t make his sub-horror movie demonisation of pan-African belief systems any more palatable, especially given the Daily Mail-like note of panic about these “cruel and bestial practices” finding a home in “several cities in England”.

P.220 – ‘A witches’ altar high on the Yorkshire moors’

Subsequent to this, ‘The Devil And All His Works’ also finds time to give us a mammoth dose of Wheatley’s strident ‘good vs. evil’ cosmology and imperialist rhetoric, with some melodramatic tabloid scare-mongering thrown in for good measure.

Concluding his section on ‘The Black Art Today’, the author turns his attention to the emergence of the ‘permissive society’, and as you’d imagine, the results aren’t pretty. Likening young people’s apparent enthusiasm for “..the spilling of semen in lust without affection” to “..ringing a bell for The Devil”, he leaves us with some rather startling assertions on where “the practice of such perversions” may lead us;

“Assuming that I am right, and that such genuine black magicians as there are concern themselves very little with romps, but a great deal with bringing about disruption through causing conditions that lead to widespread labour unrest and (wherever possible) wars, this does not mean that covens run by frauds are harmless. Far from it. One does not have to know the secret rituals to attract the powers of darkness.”
[…]
“All these thousands of young people who have become initiates of covens are liable to become pawns of the Power of Darkness in its eternal war with the Power of Light. If this continues on an ever-increasing scale, the inevitable result will be a return to the brutal lawlessness, insecurity and poverty of the Dark Ages.”
- p. 272

In his concluding chapter, Wheatley hits us with The Way It Is:

“The lesson the great empires left us was that rulers should rule, and for the past two decades the governments of the Western World have failed to do so. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly are a part of our inheritance; but not the right to destroy property, gun down the police and attack peaceful citizens, nor the right to form covens that call upon occult forces and send their members out to rob, rape and murder.”
[…]
“In every city in Europe and the United States malcontents create riots in which they smash the windows of embassies, ruin sports grounds, set fire to buildings and create outrages which no proper government would tolerate. Is it possible that riots, wildcat strikes, anti-apartheid demonstrations and the appalling increase in crime have any connection with magic and Satanism?”
- p.276

No. Not really. But please, do go on…

“To stamp out Satanism entirely is, I believe, impossible. But the Roman Emperors kept it in check by forbidding sorcery, and in Britain, until 1951, the practicing of witchcraft was a crime. No civilised person would dream of initiating witch hunts such as those that took place in the seventeenth century. But I am most strongly of the opinion that to fight this evil, which is now a principal breeding ground for dope-addicts, anarchists and lawlessness, new legislation should be introduced.
Psychic investigation should be encouraged, but only under license; and persons participating in occult ceremonies other than those approved by a responsible body should be liable to prosecution.”
[…]
“What is the solution? Some argue for corporal punishment. Others believe in various methods of re-education. In recent times, in Britain, a vociferous minority of do-gooders have turned prisons into clubs where inmates enjoy excellent food, games, libraries, television and concerts. Surely, to be effective, prisons should not be merely houses of detention but correction. This might soon lead to their no longer being overcrowded.”

And so it goes on; you get the picture, I’m sure. Trying to end things on a more positive note, Wheatley spends his last few pages holding forth about reincarnation and the wheel of karma, the internal calm that comes from dedication to the powers of goodness, and other such hippy-friendly notions, but it all rings a bit hollow after the red-faced frothing that has preceded it.

So, in conclusion, I think my parents were probably quite wise to not let me buy this book. I mean, I’m sure I would have coped just fine with the etchings of the Spanish Inquisition and pictures of Maxine Sanders running around in the nude and so on, but the author’s editorial content on the other hand is the kind of thing that could have given a growing lad some right funny ideas.

This Week’s Wheatley: To The Devil – A Daughter (Arrow Books, 1960 / first published 1953)

To put it plainly, I’m not really a fan of Dennis Wheatley (1897 - 1977). Although “the prince of thriller writers” (as he is heralded on the inside cover of this paperback) wrote extensively on a number of subjects that greatly appeal to me – Satanic cults, adventure on the high seas, exploration of lost/ancient civilisations, and so on – the authorial voice and general tone of his prose makes it impossible for me to ever get very far with one of his books.

I don’t know enough about Wheatley’s personal life and proclivities to start throwing ‘-ist’ words at him, but… how best to put this? Trying to read a Wheatley book is a bit like being trapped in the back room of a private members club in Calcutta in the 1920s, being interminably lectured by a drunken British cavalry colonel. Not so much ‘old world’ as actively ploughing backwards into the past, it’s easy to imagine Wheatley snorting with derision at the work of his ‘modernist’ literary contemporaries, naturally assuming that his rip-roaring tales of melodramatic daring-do are infinitely superior works, just because, well, it’s bloody obvious, isn’t it? They've got STORIES, and such.

Even more distressingly, Wheatley seems to have combined his cheery advocacy of Victorian colonial imperialism with an adherence to a strict Manichean belief system that saw him banging on – apparently in earnest - about the eternal battle between good and evil at every possible opportunity… which can’t possibly be a healthy combination, I’m thinking.

Nonetheless though, given my interests in old horror films, pulp fiction and so on, a certain amount of Wheatley contamination is inevitable. As I’ve mentioned several times before on this blog, I absolutely love Hammer’s adaptation of ‘The Devil Rides Out’ (to some extent precisely because the pompous attitudes that render the novel unbearable become wonderfully entertaining when transferred to an 80 minute genre movie), and for one reason or another Dennis’s name crops up more frequently on my shelves than that of many an author who I actually like.

Case in point is this edition of ‘To the Devil a Daughter’, the cover of which provides such a knock-out bit of straight-down-the-line horror-pulp artistry, I just couldn’t say no. (Cover artist is uncredited as per usual, but signature in the bottom left corner reads ‘Sax’?)

Staring at this cover, and reading the equally evocative list of chapter headings, really makes me wish that Hammer had stuck to a similarly old school approach when they came to film this one, rather than belatedly turning in some kind of muddled, post-Omen ‘70s thriller type effort complete with creepy jailbait nudity and the worst “oh shit, we forgot to film an ending” ending in cinema history. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

(In fairness, it’s been a long time since I saw Hammer’s ‘To The Devil a Daughter’, and I know it has its supporters… maybe it’s about time I gave it another shot..?)

For no particular reason, several more Wheatley-related posts to come over the next few weeks!

Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 3.

Posted as an extremely belated addition to what was the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

5. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973)

All of the Cushing/Fisher Frankenstein movies are great, but for some reason it’s this final entry that sticks most strongly in my memory. Although they ploughed on with a few more ill-starred ventures in subsequent years, for me ‘..Monster From Hell’ really marks the bitter end of Hammer horror, and, clearly doing its best to stretch out a shoe-string budget as unrelenting gloom descended over the whole British film industry, it is a conclusion to the Frankenstein saga as sickening, pitch black and claustrophobic as one could hope for.

Many of Hammer’s later films made a point of including gruesome asylum sequences, but nothing they offered up was quite as relentlessly grim as the institution that houses the goings-on here, with almost the entire movie confined to a cramped, brick-walled dungeon that is the polar opposite of the Matte-painted fantasias beloved of Fisher’s ‘50s and ’60s films. The twinkle-eyed humour and theatrical winks of earlier productions are also stone dead by this point, as a character like John Stratton’s incompetent asylum director, who might have been a chortlesome comic relief figure in earlier instalments, is rendered simply as a weak-minded, lecherous fool. No laughs here, just cowed, brutalised inmates, bully-boys with rubber hoses and nothing no escape to outside except the cemetery. The “monster from hell” itself is – deliberately, I think – a fucking travesty of a thing, a pathetic, drooling disaster that looks like a shaved gorilla drunkenly superglued with random off-cuts from the Pinewood make up department; it’s almost painful to look at.

We all know who the real monster from hell is though, and towering above everything, Cushing. Of all of his increasingly nuanced portrayals of the Baron, I think this final outing is arguably the best. By this stage of course, his character had just about reached rock bottom, the combined weight of his previous outrages having reduced him to a truly abysmal set of circumstances. But when he first appears, Frankenstein, ever steadfast, refuses to acknowledge this at all. On the contrary, he seems like a force of order and stability, a champion of progress within the otherwise stygian and entropic world of the asylum… making the gradual realisation of how insane he is a truly ghastly thing to behold.

We know it’s coming of course, we’ve seen it all before, but even here Cushing can still make it seem fresh. The key moment for me I think is when, after it becomes clear his piss-poor gorilla-monster is nothing to shout about, he immediately starts making preparations for ‘mating’ the misbegotten thing with mute servant girl Madeline Smith, casually discussing what a triumph the off-spring of their union might be as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, leaving us to join with juvenile lead Shane Briant in our slack-jawed disbelief at such a cracked, barbaric, just plain CRAZED leap of logic, emanating from a man who still just about maintains the exterior of an efficient, gifted scientist. It’s rare to watch a Frankenstein film in which we actually, personally, feel the urge to smash the Baron’s instruments and burn the place to the ground, but that’s the level of queasiness that’s induced here.

And yet, still some sympathy remains. More than just the end of Hammer Horror, ‘..Monster from Hell’ is a grisly full stop at the end of the whole golden age of international gothic horror cinema that ‘Curse of Frankenstein’ kicked off some fifteen years earlier, concluding the cycle on a note of anguished, gore-strewn bleakness, as Cushing’s drawn, cadaverous face stares straight to camera, calmly addressing the crowd of senseless, unwashed lunatics who have just bloodily torn apart the innards of his final, hopeless monster; “Go back to your rooms. There is nothing more for you to see. It’s all over now… all over.”

4. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

Although I have a soft spot for the general oddness of Conan Doyle’s characters and tales, I’m not really a big Sherlock Holmes fan to be honest. The central business of investigative logic and puzzle-solving has never interested me much… just give me mystery and monsters and inexplicable hullaballoo in my Victorian pulp. Thankfully, Terrence Fisher and his collaborators seem to have broadly agreed with my sentiment, and there is precious little investigative padding to be found in Hammer’s only proper Holmes movie – a film I would point to before any of the Frankensteins or Draculas as a perfect distillation of everything that made Hammer’s late ‘50s / early ‘60s output so special.

I wrote about it a little bit here, but to reheat a few key points; like ‘Captain Clegg’, Bernard Robinson’s gorgeous gothic production design and Jack Asher’s photography render this a horror movie in all but name – I honestly think it’s one of the most beautiful films Hammer ever made. Just about every element of the colour, lighting and mise en scene pleases me greatly on some deep, sub-conscious level. And even more so than ‘Captain Clegg’, the cast is a phenomenal assemblage of oddball British talent. Cushing and Morell are so definitive as Holmes and Watson, I get unbearably disappointed whenever I see the characters played by other actors, and in addition we’ve got the combined ham-age of Francis DeWolff, John LeMesurier and Miles Malleson to contend with, plus Christopher Lee in what I think is one of his most tolerable and sympathetic performances as the nervous and incompetent Sir Henry Baskerville, a great villainous turn from the somewhat-less-renowned Ewen Solon, and Marla Landi as a memorably deranged femme fatale. Despite being assembled from elements that could very easily have produced a film as static, dated and dreary as anything to come out of Britain in the ‘50s, Fisher as usual keeps things moving at a steady pace, with no shortage of exciting goings on thrown in at regular intervals (sacrificial knife murder! spider attack!), and, well… like many of the films on this list, it’s just BLOODY GOOD essentially, and on some days there’s no higher accolade than that.

3. The Devil Rides Out (1968)

Brief thoughts on this one can be found in my old 25 Favourite Horror Films run-down, and probably don’t need repeating in a similar format here. But if you’ll allow me to begin on a bit of a tangent: did any of you lot catch all the controversy surrounding the blu-ray re-release of ‘Devil Rides Out’ last year? I had it pre-ordered and was really looking forward to catching up with it again (I’ve currently still only got it on an old VHS), until I caught wind of the new edition’s compulsory ‘improvements’ (see here for details), at which point cancelation was the only option.

My refusal to accept these changes has less to do with a kneejerk hatred of digital tinkering with old films (although I’ll admit, there’s probably an element of that), and more to do with the fact that they’ve gone and 'fixed' some of the things that I actually liked best about the original film. I know that writers and fans often tend to gripe about the poor quality of the effects in ‘The Devil Rides Out’, and that apparently the filmmakers weren’t entirely satisfied with them either, but I would like to go on record as saying that, personally, I think those scenes are great. I like the fact that the supernatural apparitions in this film simply appear, plain as day, with no thunder or lightning or palaver. The way that bug-eyed genies and giant spiders just turn up like they popped round to borrow a cup of sugar makes things all the more frightening, and surprising, and just plain weird. So many of the more ‘sophisticated’ Satanic cult movies that followed tried to present their demons in a more allegorical or hallucinatory terms, but there’s no need to worry about the devil’s subtle machinations here – look, there he is, over there! The Goat of Mendes himself! Quick, run the bastard over!

In some ways, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ seems like a film that should have been made in 1938 rather than 1968; it seems absurd to think that a treatment of the material this pompous and straight-faced turned up in cinemas mere months before the far more modernist, self-aware approach taken by ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, but (and you probably saw this one coming) the sheer, bloody-minded imperial old-fashionedness is precisely what makes me love it so much. Throughout the history of cinema, black magic / Satanism movies have tended to be a rather peculiar business- even going back to ‘The Black Cat’ (1934 version) and ‘The Seventh Victim’, they’ve been couched as grotesque dreams or ambiguous psychological mysteries or as unearthly fantasias of some kind. But there’s no room for any of that bloody nonsense here. All you need to take on Hammer’s Devil is the love of God and an elephant gun. And a firm handshake, an aristocratic title and a state of the art motor car would probably help too. And look out for those foreigners – they’re sure to be up to no good, with their bad manners and shifty pagan ways. Who knows what really goes on in those dark, sultry nights in the depths of…. what? Well I don’t care if he is from Birmingham, where did he go to school for god’s sake? Keep an eye on him, that’s all I’m saying. Praise the lord, and pass the brandy.

Though it may have arrived a few decades late, it was ‘The Devil Rides Out’ that really set the standard for the kind of ‘normal’ Satanist movie that subsequent entries in this persistently strange sub-genre would proceed to mimic and spoof and deny and generally trample all over, and rightly so of course – the whole thing is antiquated and offensive and ridiculous. But for establishing the instantly dated rules and proceeding to stick to them with stiff upper-lipped determination as everyone else looks on and laughs, and for still managing to produce a powerful, entertaining and captivating film in the process, I will love Terrance Fisher & co. forever.

2. The Damned (1961)

Jospeh Losey’s ‘The Damned’ (‘These are The Damned’ to US readers) was one of the first films I ever wrote about for this site, and whilst I honestly wouldn’t recommend you go back and read that review (say what you like re: recent content here, but I’ve certainly got a lot better at writing about movies over the years), the film itself remains a mindblower.

Though it’s probably not a film many people would recognise as a Hammer production after the opening credits have rolled, said credits reveal that ‘The Damned’ was indeed part of the studio’s core output rather than one of their “farmed out” ventures, with such familiar figures as Anthony Hinds, Michael Carreras, Bernard Robinson and Arthur Grant all taking a bow on this decidedly uncharacteristic and controversial feature… and who can forget James Bernard’s singular (I hope) attempt to get down with the kids and play some rock n’ roll (“black leather, black leather, crash crash crash..”)?

Presumably ‘The Damned’ was initially cooked up to cash-in on the previous year’s successful ‘Village of the Damned’, but in Losey’s hands the material takes on a far more challenging, conflicted and multi-faceted aspect than the rather one-dimensional allegory of Wolf Rilla’s Wyndham adaptation, or indeed any of the era’s numerous other British sci-fi films. Never less than immoderately ambitious, and on fine straining-at-the-leash form here, the director mixes up a whole mess of decidedly unusual parallel story arcs – Oliver Reed’s pre-Clockwork Orange psychopathy and quasi-incestuous domination of his sister, Alexander Knox’s anguished humanism and self-destructive pursuit of cold war oblivion, Viveca Lindfors’ rootless beatnik sculptress – ploughing them all into a central aesthetic conflict between the quaint, parochial atmosphere of contemporary British cinema and the brutal reality of military-industrial Ballardian bleakness lurking just around the corner, beyond the barbed wire fence on the clifftops; Losey (as usual) offers no apologies to anyone as he instigates what must surely be the most unrelenting torrent of politicised, quasi-avant garde b-movie destruction ever wrought upon the quiet streets of Weymouth.

A ridiculous, unsettling and completely unique car crash of pulp sci-fi absurdity, misunderstood teenage nihilism, eerie seaside atmospherics and tormented mid-century paranoia, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who enjoys the kind of stuff I write about on this blog but hasn’t seen ‘The Damned’ should rectify that situation immediately. Since I wrote my original review, a cheap, dandy looking Region 2 DVD has become available, so now you have no excuse – see it, see it, see it, as critics who get quoted on the side of buses are apt to say.

1. The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

The tone of this list has focused heavily on the nostalgic reveries and general comfort factor of watching Hammer films, and as such it seems fitting that it took me about 0.3 seconds to decide that my favourite one is ‘Plague of the Zombies’.

Few would contend that it’s the studio’s BEST film (although it’s pretty damn solid), and it’s certainly not as weird or challenging or accomplished as my top tier of favourite non-Hammer British horrors, but nonetheless, it’s the one that provides the warmest memories for me – the one that I can watch again and again without ever getting sick of it. It’s like a member of the family. I wish I could marry it, or take it on long walks, or… well, probably best end this paragraph right there. You get what I mean.

I ranked it at a surprisingly low #13 in my Favourite Horror Films list a few years back, and, as per ‘The Devil Rides Out’, you can read some of my primary thoughts about it there.

I don’t think ‘Plague..’ was the first Hammer film I saw during my formative years of late night TV viewing (if memory served, I might have sleepily suffered my way through ‘Satanic Rites of Dracula’ and ‘Lust For a Vampire’ before getting to this one), but it was the first one that I REALLY LIKED; the first one that really struck a chord with me, that made me laugh and made me feel shivery and enchanted and made me want to watch a lot more films like it and find out about who made them, and where, and why. As such it played a pretty pivotal role in bringing me to where I am now, writing this blog and so forth. Most of the late night horror films I watched in those days, I enjoyed simply because they were funny and crazy, but (whilst it still had a lot of knowing humour about it) ‘Plague..’ was the first one I remember seeing (beyond some of the obvious classics) that I felt I could watch seriously, as a good story well told, and could enjoy for its rich atmosphere, and for the craftsmanship and obvious enthusiasm that went into its production design and performances. It’s the first one that really drew me into the British (and by extension, European) Horror World, so to speak, rather than just leaving me a smirking spectator.

I liked it so much in fact that I recall I sampled most of the dialogue and music from it, pushing a microphone against the mono TV speaker, ostensibly to use it in some sort of botched music project, but actually just so that I could walk around playing it in my headphones, reliving the experience of the film, meaning that to this day I can recite half of Andre Morell’s dialogue from memory, and do most of the voodoo chanting too. Quite what inspired such obsessive behaviour, who knows. I’m sure I could bore you senseless talking about how superb I think Morell’s performance is in this film, about how my respect for John Gilling as a writer and director grows each time I (re)watch one of his films, about how utterly jaw-dropping and endlessly evocative the graveyard dream sequence with Jacqueline Pierce’s decapitation is, and how it pretty much encapsulates everything that I love about horror movies in the space of about three minutes…. but I’ve done all that before, and probably will again, so let’s just leave it at that, and say that after viewing it approximately once a year for about a decade, I still can’t wait until the next time I get a chance to sit down and watch ‘Plague of the Zombies’ again. It really makes me happy.

#16 The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968)

It’s funny how I’ve always found Dennis Wheatley’s best-selling witchcraft potboilers to be an insufferable load of insufferable, sanctimonious guff, and yet somehow I love Hammer’s take on “The Devil Rides Out” - an adaptation that if anything renders its source material even more smug and puritanical.

In some ways, I’ve always thought there is almost something almost sweet about Hammer’s Manichean puritanism - something quite comforting and noble about the steadfast, upstanding heroes of their vampire movies, forever protecting their buxom womenfolk from the depravations of immoral monsters. Wheatley’s dire warnings against the forces of darkness by contrast just seem sleazy and hypocritical, like a public school master berating his charges for their ‘dirty thoughts’. Thankfully though, it is the former aspect that predominates in Terrence Fisher’s film, a thoroughly enjoyable affair that sets out to define itself as ‘the quintessential, old-fashioned witchcraft movie’ with such Victorian vigour that witchcraft movies made ten years before it end up looking modern by comparison.

One of my favourite scenes in all cinema has to be the one here in which The Duc de Richleau and his allies watch from a distance as evil sorcerer Mocata’s coven carry out their black mass on a starless Walpurgis midnight. Partly because their polite, fully-clothed ‘orgy’ is such a gas, but mostly for the moment when our heroes look on in disbelief as a giant, horned figure – “..the Goat of Mendes… the devil himself!” – rises at the climax of their ritual. I mean, that’s motherfucking SATAN, standing right right there guys! No messing around! And how do our heroes respond but by hitting the accelerator and driving their motor-car RIGHT AT HIM. Physical manifestation of the lord of all evil, pah - run the bastard over, that’ll sort him out! I can only assume it is the sheer, true-hearted bravery of our protagonists, rather than the hurled crucifix, that gets the job done, making The Horned One cut his losses and quit the scene in a puff of smoke.

It is this wonderful, bloodyminded literalism that I love above all about “The Devil Rides Out”. Faced with the prospect of trying to represent magical conflict and the evocation of demons in a movie, Fisher and co bypass all the go-to techniques usually brought in to make such subject matter palatable – excessive atmosphere, implication and subtlety, ‘monsters of the id’ style psychological peril, psychedelic freakout etc. – and instead misstep the audience by doing the last thing anyone would expect: giving it to us straight. There is something incredibly unsettling about the way the horrors of Mocata’s bestiary simply *appear* at his command, centre-screen in full light - a shock that mirrors the way one might actually feel if suddenly confronted with a boggle-eyed imp or a giant, spectral tarantula. The sequence that see The Duc and his allies under attack from the forces of darkness within their chalk circle is one of the most effective ever seen in a supernatural horror film – a masterclass in building tension and dread from almost nothing whatsoever. Whatever you do, DO NOT STEP OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE, or you will be lost. Rarely has the idea of cringing before the forces of goodness and light and promising not to be naughty seemed so tempting.

If Christopher Lee as The Duc initially comes across as a rather self-satisfied and bullying character, what with his dictatorial pronouncements, his haughty attitude to servants and his tendency to beat his friends about the head and kidnap them if he disapproves of their social life, he more than rises to the occasion when the supernatural shit starts to hit the fan – the very personification of stern, benevolent authority, with more gravitas than the cliffs of Dover. I’m not Lee’s biggest fan, but he’s great here - enough so to make me wish he’d had the chance to play good guys more often.

Although given a more low-key role than villains are usually allotted in a Hammer picture, Charles Grey too is excellent as Mocata – a casting decision that in its own way is as unusual as making Lee the good guy. Not in any way the kind cool, aspirational face of villainy more common to witchcraft movies, Grey cuts a chubby, smirking, manipulative figure – closer perhaps to the face of an actual ‘60s/’70s occult huckster. And, whilst we’re on the subject, I’ll also throw in a good word for Nike Arrighi – a striking actress who manages to turn the nothing-role of Tanith into a really engaging presence here, her demure looks and mannered performance placing her in a whole different universe from Hammer’s usual buxom beauties, and making her character all the more intriguing as a result.

For all that I enjoy it though, it must be admitted that there is a deep current of anachronistic imperialism, even flat-out racism, running through “The Devil Rides Out” that many modern viewers might find distasteful, beyond just the sight of our comfortable, independently wealthy heroes and villains cruising between country houses in their fleets of unfeasibly speedy and reliable motor-cars. I’m not usually one to try to project social consciousness onto a film that never asked to be judged on such terms, but the presence of a few black extras who are seem milling around whenever Mocata’s coven meets is a strange and completely unnecessary inclusion (perhaps trying to imply some spurious connection between Western witchcraft and African ‘hoodoo’, or merely warning us that people who consort with other races are not to be trusted), and it is hard not to read at least some sub-text into the film’s first supernatural manifestation, which sees The Duc and Rex Van Ryn reduced to stunned terror by the spectre of a semi-naked black man impudently grinning at them (“for God’s sake, don’t look into its eyes”).

But as noted, these few weird missteps aside, I find the old fashioned tone of “The Devil rides Out” perversely comforting. The staunch moralism always present in Fisher’s films is given perhaps its ultimate expression here, and, together with screenwriter Richard Matheson’s characteristically thoughtful approach to ‘us & them’ story dynamics, I feel that “The Devil Rides Out” succeeds in giving a more elegant expression to Wheatley’s dusty bluster, conveying a more genuinely humane take on the battle between good and evil. This is beautifully illustrated when Sarah Lawson’s Marie boldly steps forward to reclaim her daughter from Mocata’s altar, calling out the creepy Satanists not in the name of God, but of that which they truly lack and fear, that which ultimately separates our upstanding heroes from them - love without desire.