The Nature of the Catastrophe: A British Apocalypse Cover Art Gallery.

Watching Hammer’s version of ‘Quatermass & The Pit’ recently, I was struck by a brief exchange between Andrew Keir’s Professor Quatermass and James Donald’s Dr. Roney as they brain-storm the likely origins and the excavated Martian remains.

“The will to survive is an odd phenomenon”, says Quatermass. “If we found out our own world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do about it?”

“Nothing, probably”, replies Roney, “just go on squabbling like usual”.

As the 1967 movie swiftly moves on to other matters, 2016 viewers are left with a momentary chill (and yet more evidence of scriptwriter Nigel Kneale’s uncanny talent for holding a beam on the future, even when he wasn’t trying to).

Spending Christmas and New Years in Wales a few months ago, the temperature was anything up to 8 – 10 degrees higher than normal for the time of year, as rain poured down relentlessly for almost the entire duration of our stay. Watching the evening news, seeing various areas of the UK devastated by floods for the second year in a row, I couldn’t help reflecting that we probably have one of the more placid and non-disaster-prone climates of any nation on Earth, and wondering how many ‘freak’ meteorological upsets were simultaneously going unreported in other parts of the globe.

The second story each evening meanwhile brought grim footage of the proxy forces of assorted Western and Eastern powers scrabbling for control of empty, blood-stained piles of rubble in whatever remains of Syria, the juxtaposition making as clear a realisation of Kneale’s casual, fifty year old predication as could be wished for.

A few months later, watching the public’s largely disengaged response to the sight of the French authorities torching and tear-gassing the makeshift city constructed by refugees from war just across the channel, I was reminded not only of Christopher Priest’s bleak 1972 novel ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ (a book that trumps the “this might happen” scenarios of Priest’s fellow doom-mongering SF writers by depicting a series of events so grimly inevitable it’s a miracle it hasn’t taken place already), but of the obligatory shrugging-off-the-warning-signs / “it’ll never happen here” segment that tends open most stories in the good ol’ British End of the World tradition.

(This is most bluntly and grotesquely realised by the scene early in Cornel Wilde’s film adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’ [‘No Blade of Grass’, 1970], which sees attendees at a buffet lunch stuffing their plates with food as the TV in the corner of the room carries news of the Chinese government’s desperate decision to begin dropping atom bombs on their largest cities in a last ditch effort to curb the effects of mass starvation.)

Of course, you shouldn’t necessarily pay too much attention to my doom-mongering. I’m particularly prone to such alarmist trains of thought, having been unhealthily fixated by this peculiarly British strain of '60s & '70s apocalyptic sci-fi ever since I was in primary school. John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ series were amongst the last “children’s” books I read, and, following my Dad’s sound recommendations from there, John Wyndham’s classics were amongst the first “grown up” tales I subsequently made a start on.

After that, I spent the rest of my formative years consuming any story I could find that concerning “the end of the world” and, whether by means of wind, floods, drought, plague, famine, alien invasion, over-population, under-population, nuclear fallout, air pollution or god knows what else, my nation’s authors and paperback publishers were with me every step of the way.

With this in mind then, I’ll leave you to peruse the collection of scans below and decide for yourself the extent to which these storied literary gents of the mid-twentieth century might have been on to something.

Meanwhile, I could claim I was busy this weekend scoping out that easily defendable farmhouse with it’s own water supply and potato field, wondering who I should invite to share the landrover with me as we flee the city before the roadblocks go up. But, for better or for worse, such survivalist fantasies must remain just that in my case. As a Type 1 diabetic, I know I’d be dead within six weeks if the NHS stopped dishing out regular prescriptions of injectible human insulin. So, um..

Happy Easter everyone!

(Please note that a few of these scans have previously appeared on this blog in the past, but it’s always nice to see them again I hope. Also, the ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ scan above is not mine – I seem to have lost my copy, so I found this one online.)

(Penguin, 1963 / cover illustration by John Griffiths)

CATASTROPHE: famine.

(Corgi, 1961 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: heat / alien terraforming.

(Penguin, 1963 / cover illustration by Denis Piper)

CATASTROPHE: Kraken.

(Signet, 1965 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: infertility.

(Arrow, 1971 / cover designer unknown)

CATASTROPHE: overpopulation.

(Penguin, 1974 / Cover illustration by David Pelham)

CATASTROPHE: wind.

(Orbit/Quartet, 1977 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: pollution.

(Penguin, 1977 / Cover art by Harry Willock)

CATASTROPHE: blindness / Triffids.

(Arrow, 1979 / “Cover photograph of John Mills as Professor Quatermass by courtesy of Thames Television.”)

CATASTROPHE: general societal breakdown / alien matter harvesting.

Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 1.

Posted as part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

For no reason at all beside the fact that I enjoy making pointless lists, and that thinking about Hammer horror films makes me feel warm and cozy as I plod through the dreary complexities of the working week, I’ve recently found myself casually pondering what my favourite entries in the studio’s filmography are, and why. Just a bit of harmless, everyday nerd-think, but I thought it might translate into some nice, easy-going blog posts to keep things ticking over until I feel like I’ve got the energy to handle some more heavy duty movie review-age.

Not that cutting things down to a workable top fifteen was easy, mind you. I mean, I can reel off my top three at the drop of a hat (long-term readers with good memories may recall what they are), but beyond that, things get a bit murky. With the untouchable top level out of the way, my second tier of Hammer favourites consists of a large number of movies (most of the Frankensteins and Mummys, a few of the better Draculas, the Carmilla/Karnstein films and so on) that are just plain good - so consistent and enjoyable that it’s difficult to really pick any one over the others. They all do exactly what horror movies are supposed to do whilst still including enough quirks, nuances and unforgettable moments to make each one unique, and for that I am very grateful.

Perhaps inevitably therefore, the list below swings somewhat in the direction of the studios more eccentric and low-key productions - they being the ones that tend to stick most strongly in my memory. But that’s not to say that I couldn’t happily watch their more ‘routine’ offerings all day for the rest of my life and have a perfectly nice time in the process.

I’d imagine that most of this blog’s readers probably have more than a passing familiarity with the Hammer catalogue, but if there are any newcomers in the audience, I hope my list might lead you to some good entry points into the world of these films. And for the old hands out there, well, dumb lists like this are always a good way to spark discussion, and I always like talkin’ Hammer, so by all means feel free to let rip in the comments box.

Oh, and before we begin, probably also worth mentioning that this list is by no means supposed to be read as a complete or final judgement on the Hammer canon. Given prolific nature of the studio’s output, there are still plenty of their films that I’ve never even seen, so who knows, perhaps there are some whole other top twenty lurking out there that I’ve not yet even become acquainted with… and what a nice feeling that is.

So without further ado…

15. The Gorgon (1964)

 I wrote about this one pretty extensively here, and for me it remains one of Hammer’s most romantic, impenetrable and philosophically unglued outings, as the limitations imposed by a rather poorly thought out supernatural conceit are countered by one of the studio’s grandest fairytale gothic production designs, a chillingly ambiguous Cushing performance, and some soul-aching ruminations on the nature of entropy and confinement. Not exactly a good choice for a laugh and a few beers, but compelling viewing all the same.

14. The Vampire Lovers (1970)

 Amid all the misfires, oddities and strange diversions that comprise Hammer’s catalogue of vampire films, ‘The Vampire Lovers’ is one of the more straight-forward entries, and also, I think, one of the best. Delivering pretty much exactly what you’d expect in terms of lavish Victoriana, nocturnal cemetery hi-jinks, furtive hints of lesbianism and craggy-faced puritanical ass-kicking, Roy Ward Barker’s initial take on the Carmilla mythos essentially defines the agenda for the ‘70s Euro-vampire movie, setting a bar that the continent’s other purveyors of such material could proceed to soar above or mambo under as they saw fit. Although it never really achieves anything exceptional (beyond a gentle bit of first-time-in-a-British-horror same sex petting), ‘..Lovers’ is solid as a brick shithouse - as generic and satisfying as horror movies get.

13. Demons of the Mind (1972)

As noted above, most of my favourite Hammer films serve to evoke a warm, nostalgic atmosphere that I find very reassuring. This nasty little number though is a different kettle of fish entirely. With disorientating, bombastic direction from Peter Sykes and a script from the reliably out-to-lunch Christopher Wicking, ‘Demons of the Mind’ is a decidedly un-Hammer-like production that seems to be aiming instead to smash a hole in the side of your head, draining out the bits of your mind that think about the weather and what’s for dinner, and replacing them with endless close-ups of Robert Hardy’s sweaty moustachioed face, screaming in tormented delirium. Coming on like ‘The Black Torment’ on steroids, or a dark old house murder mystery spiked with some lethal extract of psychotropic mould, this psychologically assaultive, dark-family-secrets country estate slasher farrago simply defies description. Much like Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13’ a decade previously, you’ll know you’re onto a bit of a rum do when Patrick Mcgee turns up halfway through and actually seems like one of the more relaxed and well-balanced individuals on-screen.

12. The Lost Continent (1968)

Probably the biggest WTF in the Hammer filmography, this ill-starred Dennis Wheatley adaptation is a colossally misguided, schizophrenically inconsistent, directionless, crippled-at-birth vanity project disasterpiece that I’m afraid to say I absolutely love. The subject of so much behind the scenes aggro that it nearly tore Hammer apart, with James Carreras eventually stepping in to forcibly shut down his son Michael’s floundering production, the film that eventually emerged is so astonishingly strange, I’m surprised it hasn’t been cited more often as a bone fide ‘what-the-hell-were-they-thinking’ cult classic. I could say a lot more about this one, and hopefully at some point I will, but for the moment let us simply shake our heads in disbelief as a narrative framework seemingly requisitioned from a cynical ‘70s airport disaster novel stumbles headfirst into an anything-goes world of ridiculous stop motion sea monsters, fanatical Spanish Inquisitors, random tentacle attacks, descendants of marooned 16th century mariners bouncing around on giant, balloon-aided hovercraft shoes and, notably, no bloody lost continent. Incredible.

11. The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Another film that was been somewhat overlooked due to a perceived failure to directly deliver on the title, characteristically solid Val Guest joint ‘The Abominable Snowman’ has long been dismissed by monster fans as talky, stagy, uneventful. Once one can accept the fact that few bigfoot-related hi-jinks are forthcoming however, I think it can be appreciated as a very fine piece of work indeed – not a horror movie as such, nor a daring-do action-adventure flick, but as an atmospheric and intelligent study of men coming face to face with the unknown, finding their assumptions about the world mutating and collapsing, as physical peril and the quest for basic survival becomes ever more urgent. Whilst ‘..Snowman’s scientifically-inclined, remote location monster movie set-up was already pretty boilerplate stuff by the late ‘50s (there are clear nods here to both ‘The Creature From The Black Lagoon’ (’54) and Howard Hawks’ ‘The Thing from Another World’ (‘51)), Nigel Kneale’s script nonetheless takes a deeper and more challenging approach to the material than his predecessors, resulting in something wholly unique.

As with much of his best SF writing, Kneale here concentrates on mixing up the scientific with the sublimely mysterious, challenging both rationalists and mystics to come to terms with a more nuanced reality that fits nobody’s blue-prints. A careful balance of location and set-bound shooting (Hammer actually flew a crew out to the Pyrenees for this one, believe it or not) and a commanding central performance from Cushing really sells us on the reality of the on-screen drama as it unfolds, with Guest wisely taking a Val Lewton-like fear-of-the-unseen approach to proceedings, emphasizing Kneale’s conception of the yeti as not just a physical presence but a wholly alien, telepathic intelligence, and giving the film an aura that is both chilling and actually kinda beautiful, even as the bolts tighten on a subdued but persistently effective bit of survival horror.

To be continued…

The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, 1972)

Featuring eerie, abstract visual effects, a cast rendered distantly familiar by bit parts in Dr Who, music and sound effects by the Radiophonic Workshop, and even a plotline directly concerned with the deterioration of analogue recording media and the search for a digital replacement, it was somewhat inevitable that Nigel Kneale’s 1972 teleplay “The Stone Tape” should emerge as a key text of Britain’s current ‘hauntology’ / analogue era nostalgia movement. (Ok, so I suppose I can’t actually prove its position as such, but c’mon, if the Ghost Box contingent haven’t regularly thrilled to a bootleg VHS of this one on a Sunday evening, I’ll eat my hat.)

Kneale should of course need no introduction as one of the most inventive and uncompromising writers to ever work in television, the man behind “The Year of the Sex Olympics” (1968), and the creator of Professor Bernard Quatermass, whose appearances in Kneale-penned BBC TV serials during the ‘50s, and in particular the hugely influential “Quatermass and the Pit” (1958), far outshone his adventures in Hammer’s series of film adaptations (in my opinion at least).

Like “Quatermass and the Pit”, “The Stone Tape” posits a group of characters who find themselves setting out to investigate a rumour-shrouded haunted site through the ruthless application of scientific method. In this case, it’s a team of researchers working for a consumer electronics firm who have been relocated to the until-recently-derelict Taskerlands house, only to find that the cavernous basement room they’ve earmarked for a computer storage facility is already occupied by a screaming spectre. And, also like “Quatermass..”, the story’s masterstroke lays in the way that, rather than diminishing and defanging the supernatural by dragging it into the light of reason, the results of the team’s investigations simply serve to draw us deeper inside the mystery, exposing new ideas that eventually prove weirder and more threatening than an old fashioned ghost story could ever be.

Conveniently, the researchers, led by loud and hard-headed Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), have been charged with trying to develop a new digital recording medium to help the British electronics industry compete with the Japanese (“give me Wagner’s Ring Cycle encoded onto a ball baring with instant playback”, Peter demands of his colleagues, to hoots of derision and disbelief that seem wonderfully quaint from a 2009 perspective). So when they find themselves confronted with a room that regularly manifests disembodied screams and a hanging phantom lady, the solution is as obvious as it is ingenious: the walls of the room itself are storing information from the past, and projecting it directly into the minds of visitors at irregular intervals… thus potentially making the room the breakthrough the team is looking for!

Initially “The Stone Tape” lays on the haunted house mythology pretty thick, often with direct reference to Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” (a film whose effective, no nonsense style is very much reflected here in both the writing and direction). So we have half-remembered tales of unsuccessful exorcisms, and of a local boy who went insane after being locked in the room overnight, a stairway leading to nowhere and a Victorian servant girl who hanged herself from the top of it. Director Peter Sasdy certainly had a pedigree in the world of horror, having helmed “Taste The Blood of Dracula” and “Hands of the Ripper” for Hammer in the preceding years, but what’s immediately notable here is that the jump-scares and gothic imagery one might expect of a ghost story are almost completely excised in favour of a more subtly malign atmosphere that reflects our characters’ scientific background and, in the case of Peter and psychic sensitive computer programmer Jill (Jane Asher), their respective moral failings and nervous disposition too. As such, The Stone Tape” is realized with a cold and queasy realist inversion of the gothic aesthetic that would find it’s natural home a decade later in David Cronenberg’s early films.

Kneale’s writing is at its absolute best here too, and in fact “The Stone Tape” is as successful as a human drama as it is as an excursion into high concept weirdness. Peter’s character – a mendacious, bullying egotist with a proto-Thatcherite drive to success that sees him grasp the possibilities of his haunting theory with an Ahab-like determination, then drop it like a hot potato as soon as his professionalism is called into question – is oddly fascinating, especially as every aspect of his situation, including his opportunistic affair with the fragile and confused Jill, is sketched out in detail for us. As a sub-plot develops involving Peter’s battle for funding with a rival research team led by an oaf trying to perfect an experimental washing machine (perhaps here Kneale is making a crafty reference to the BBC’s tendency to sideline more forward-thinking projects in favour of low-brow schedule-fillers?), one begins to realize that “The Stone Tape” would be a pretty involving tale with plenty to say about British culture, even without the supernatural elements.

For all its modernism though, “The Stone Tape” still manages to hold true to the gothic formula, essentially boiling things down to a frightened and hyper-sensitive young woman alone amid the ghostly ruins, as the repressive and claustrophobic nature of her situation and the venal and manipulative nature of her companions if given physical form via the supernatural – as per usual. Jane Asher (who you may recall tackled similar territory in Corman’s “Masque of the Red Death”) is superb in the role of Jill – a stricken gothic heroine breaking out from under the skin of an educated and level-headed modern woman.


Also adding a huge amount to “The Stone Tape”s singularly creepy totality are the audio and visual effects, with the spooky-at-the-best-of-times BBC Radiophonic Workshop turning in one of their all-time best unhinged sound designs, full of baleful, echo-laden incidental passages and distorted EVP ghost-chatter that could have been pulled straight off an Eric Zann or Mount Vernon Arts Lab release. The visuals, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, are the perfect match – despite the obvious budgetary constraints, the designers certainly didn’t hesitate to throw in as much beautiful, fluorescent ectoplasmic splurge as they could muster, with split second glimpses of unspeakable, half-formed things, disorientating UV lighting and surreal super-impositions all serving to create a truly startling conclusion.

Prior to the play’s final ten minutes though, it should be noted that the supernatural elements are masterfully underplayed, with the trad ghost story tropes setting us up for shocks and surprises that never really come, and that are all the more unsettling for their absence. In true cosmic horror fashion, even the story’s final, mind-bending conclusions are merely hinted at rather than fully spelled out, left to sink in slowly over preceding hours/days as the full scale of the play’s central concept becomes clear.

When, after a frenzied night spent trying to ‘control’ appearances of the apparition using frequency generators and UV lights, the phenomena seems to disappear completely, the team conclude that they must have accidentally ‘wiped the tape’, and, slightly embarrassed, move back to their original work. It is only Jill who realises that the others are still stuck in an analogue mindset. Rather than a ‘tape’, the stones of the room function as a three dimensional matrix, and as the most recent layers are removed, older voices – characterized by the room’s past victims as “the others” – will begin to emerge, more deteriorated and more malign the further back you go; and how far back CAN you go? – to the laying of foundations in Saxon times, or to the formation of the stones themselves, before the dawn of the earth…?

The answers are left hanging, just like the Victorian servant girl who previously tapped into the voices from the stone, as Kneale demonstrates powerfully the idea that when you try to throw science at a mystery, the mystery is just as liable to magnify and overtake you as it is to recede. Just ask the guys working on the Large Hadron Collider, and file “The Stone Tape” as essential viewing for anyone with an interest in intelligent approaches to science fiction, paranormal phenomena or cosmic horror, or anyone who simply wants to drink in the analogue ghosts of some authentic, high-grade British weirdness.