Objects Regained.

Further to my post last month regarding the disappearance of the Found Objects weblog, I’m happy to report that the blog now has a new home here, and that many old posts (including some of my own) have been dragged from the depths of the interweb and reinstated, whilst new additions have thus far been popping up on a regular basis.

Huge thanks are due to Pete aka Bollops (sometime proprietor of Boring Old Books) for bringing this resurrection about, and I am hoping I can play a part in making sure the new site remains a going concern.

Interested parties are encouraged to read, follow, spread the word, contribute [but not arbitrarily delete, please] at their leisure.

Four Rampos.

We return here to our old pal Edogawa Rampo, with four random entries from a long series of paperbacks collecting his stories, issued by Kadakawa Books during the 1970s. The superb cover illustrations are provided by paper-cut artist Masayuki Miyata (1926–1997), a framed example of whose work we previously saw displayed at Rampo’s house [see link above].

Each of these volumes contains several tales, but the names / title stories, in the order they are displayed above, are:

1. Kumo-Otoko (The Spider Man) (1974)
2. Panorama-to Kidan (The Strange Tale of Panorama Island) (1974)
3. Kage-Otoko (Man of Shadows) (1973)
4. Sankaku-kan no Kyohu (Fear of the Triangular House?) (1974)

The fifth image is a generic series illustration, repeated on the back cover of all four volumes. In common with many Japanese paperbacks, the artwork is printed on detachable, hardback-style dust jackets -- which is pretty cool.

Though I have been banging on about him occasionally on the blog for quite a while, it is only in the past year or so that I have actually made the effort to begin tracking down and reading Rampo’s stories in English translation, and, even more-so than I might have expected, they are absolutely extraordinary.

Though capsule biographies of Rampo often tend to paint him as a devotee of Western-style mystery and detective stories, the way in which he spikes the conventions of coldly logical, whodunit detection with the irrational perversity of human desire feels uniquely transgressive, unlocking fearful vistas of ambiguity and apprehension that place him within an aesthetic world that is entirely his own; a world that I feel is brilliantly captured by Miyata’s artwork.

I picked these books up for peanuts in Nakano Broadway, and now just wish that I could read them.

The Adventures of John Carpenter in the 21st Century: The Ward (2010)

Ok, so – let’s try to get this one over and done with as quickly as possible.

2010’s ‘The Ward’ is, at the time of writing, John Carpenter’s most recent film as director. I haven’t had a chance to do any research or read any interviews pertaining to Carpenter’s reasons for taking on the project, but I can only speculate that he must have agreed to do it as the result of some sort of personal favour or family obligation.

Was one of the producers his son-in-law or daughter-in-law or something? Or was it all a country club handshake deal with an old friend, or somesuch? I don’t know.

Such speculation may seem facetious, but I honestly just can’t think of any other reason – creative, artistic, even economic - for The Great John Carpenter return from semi-retirement to lend his talents to this thoroughly mediocre indie horror movie. (The only other possibilities would seem to involve blackmail or mob intimidation, but best not go too far down that line of thought.)

Unfortunately, pondering such back stage machinations is actually a more enjoyable prospect than trying to talk about ‘The Ward’, which is…. well, to be fair to it, I should probably admit that I’m perhaps not best placed to pass judgement on a film like this.

I watch very few contemporary horror films, and when I do make the effort, I tend to stick pretty strictly to those that have attracted positive critical attention or good word of mouth from people whose opinions I value. When it comes to what you might call the “next rung down” - the middling, largely unremarked efforts - whether mainstream studio releases that pop up for a few weeks around Halloween, or cheaper, straight-to-streaming imitations thereof – well, let’s just say that I don’t have enough experience to really assess how ‘The Ward’ stacks up against them. Is it a respectable effort in this vein, or an absolute stinker? Is it even quite good, as far as these things go? I really don’t know.

What I can say with slightly more authority is that, in and off itself, I thought it was pretty awful. A painfully derivative, blandly conceived effort that in the course of vaguely trying to be ‘clever’ and ‘serious’ (and failing on both counts) seems to have had everything that used to make lower budget horror movies fun systematically sucked out of it.

In particular, ‘The Ward’ serves to demonstrate the way in which themes that used to be (correctly) roped off as pretty heavy stuff within the genre – childhood trauma, false memories, mental illness, confinement, torture etc – have now become tokenistic horror signifiers, to be lazily thrown around and mixed up to no particularly clear purpose (or even just for the sake of good ol’ exploitation and sleaze, which is notably absent here).

Unlike the werewolves and Satanic cults of old furthermore, this kind of stuff is really just no fun without a decent storyline or committed performances to go with it, which leads to make me wonder why ‘The Ward’ and countless films of a similar ilk continue to even get made…. but, enough of my proto-geriatric ramblings.

In purely technical terms, it goes without saying that ‘The Ward’ is pretty well made. Compositions and camera movements are as slick as you’d expect from a director of Carpenter’s calibre, and the movie’s scary/ghosty bits are reasonably efficient, doing more or less what they are supposed to do.

Essentially though, getting John Carpenter behind the camera on this thing feels like putting a Rolls Royce engine inside a lawnmower, with literally no other aspect of the production rising to a level that would normally justify his participation or interest.

Going in, I was hoping some interest might emerge from the fact that much of the movie takes place within an all-female psychiatric ward, potentially allowing Carpenter to work up a sort of gender-reversed take on ‘The Thing’, perhaps? Well - no dice. I’m afraid anyone coming to ‘The Ward’ in search of a new twist on the director’s conflicted approach to gender will be sorely disappointed. A crass (or merely unimaginative) casting process results in the titular ward resembling a retreat for troubled super-models, and the script gives none of the actresses anything to work with, should any of them have had a yen to make something of their characters.

To give an indication of just how sloppy ‘The Ward’ gets as a character drama, the bulk of the action is supposed to be set in the 1960s, but upon first viewing I completely forgot about this until a retro, ‘Ghostbusters’-style ambulance rolled in for one of the closing scenes, such is the contemporary (or merely bland) nature of the cast’s dialogue, behaviour and appearance.

As you might gather from this, production design shoots for ‘austere’ but instead merely hits ‘boring’, with the drained colour photography and depressing aesthetic of white walls, iron radiators, peeling paint, empty rooms and the like predominating.

Built on confusing morass of flashbacks, flashforwards and god knows what, the story is superficial, poorly developed and pretty unconvincing, highlighting once again the extent to which the post-‘Sixth Sense’ obsession with trick endings and clunky, heavily signposted misdirection has so often made watching modern horror movies a drag.

And… what else can you say really? I think I’d best call it day on this one. Basically, I just really, really hope that John Carpenter manages to come back and direct something else at some point in the future, even if it’s just a cartoon or a short or something, because it would be a tragedy to see such a wonderful filmmaker go to his grave with this shrug of a movie as the final item on his CV.

The Adventures of John Carpenter in the 21st Century: Cigarette Burns (2005)

After effectively clearing his desk and waving goodbye to the Hollywood rat-race following the critical and commercial failure of ‘Ghosts of Mars’ in 2001, John Carpenter’s next directorial assignment was a one hour TV movie, produced as part of the first series of the ‘Masters of Horror’ project in 2005. Subsequent to its original broadcast, ‘Cigarette Burns’ has lived on as one of the most talked about and well regarded entries in that series… although the extent to which its success can be attributed to Carpenter’s participation is debatable, as we shall go on to discuss.

Before we get to that though, Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan’s script for ‘Cigarette Burns’ is very much a “high concept” number, and a pretty great one at that, so a quick synopsis is probably in order.

Basically, the story here is nothing less than a cult movie in-joke blown up into a full-blooded piece of cosmic horror, built around what is basically a celluloid equivalent of Lovecraft’s ‘Necronomicon’ (or, more prosaically, a movie-world version of the 1999 Polanski thriller ‘The Ninth Gate’).

Our protagonist is Kirby (Norman Reedus), the proprietor of a struggling Alamo Drafthouse-style repertory cinema, who also holds a formidable reputation for tracking down elements for lost and ultra-obscure films. It is in the latter capacity that Kirby visits the home of a decadent, ultra-wealthy collector named Bellinger (played for maximum creep effect by Udo Kier), who offers him enough money to immediately write off his debts and save his cinema, if he can track down a print of one particular film.

All well and good then, but we can almost feel Kirby’s guts perform a somersault when Kier dramatically announces that the film he wishes to locate is… ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’.

The near mythic final work of a controversial (and deceased) European director named Hans Backovic, ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ was publically screened only once, at the Sitges festival in 1969. Legend has it that people died, and blood ran in the aisles. Survivors refused to discuss what had happened in the screening room, and were never quite the same. The director’s sole print of the film was reported to have been seized by the Spanish authorities and destroyed. Or was it…?

Bellinger has of course been obsessively collecting ephemera related to ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (a framed poster hangs next to his priceless three-sheets for ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Nosferatu’), and the stakes are raised further when he offers to show Kirby the jewel of his collection – a living souvenir from the production that subsists in darkness, chained in his basement.

Now, if you’re anything like me, by this point the rest of this review will pretty much be moot. You will need to seek out and watch ‘Cigarette Burns’ immediately.

Ever since Lovecraft first placed the idea in my head as a teenager, I’ve loved the notion of a cultural artefact so terrible (in the literal sense of the word) that it destroys those who come into contact with it, and have always found myself totally captivated by stories along those lines.

That the ephemera surrounding weird, esoteric movies also greatly appeals to me should be no-brainer given the nature of this weblog, and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, McWeeny and Swan’s script tackles this material as well as could be wished for, mixing up just the right quantities of mystery and ambiguity, attention to detail and engrossing detective work to create a slow, creeping sense of dread and fascination around ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’, building up our anticipation of the moment when Kirby finally finds himself touching the canisters containing the reels of the film to fever pitch.

Given that this review strand focuses on John Carpenter though, we should probably divert our attention back toward his contributions, and, the first thing that will be obvious to the director’s fans is that ‘Cigarette Burns’ does not feel very much like a John Carpenter film. I’m not sure at what stage of the pre-production Carpenter became involved, but suffice to say that, beyond the actual, technical business of directing, the other distinctive touches that feed into what we think of as “a John Carpenter movie” – usually incorporating everything from the writing, to the casting, to the score – are notable by their absence.

My gut feeling is that Carpenter must have approached this one as a straight “shoot the script as written” job, and, given the strength of the material provided him by the writers and the wealth of interesting plot detail to be covered, that was probably a good call.

Nonetheless, I hate to say it, but…. I can’t help but feel that the intermittent weaknesses that compromise this otherwise excellent film could potentially be interpreted as the result of Carpenter bungling certain aspects of the script that simply presented him with situations and ideas that he was simply unable to get a proper angle on.

It’s not as if Carpenter hadn’t taken a few creditable shots at cosmic horror in the past (see ‘Prince of Darkness’ (1987) and ‘In The Mouth Of Madness’ (1994) in particular), but, whilst I like both of those films, I’ve always felt that his sensibility as a director does not really lend itself to grasping the totality of the Lovecraft/Kneale-derived stories he so obviously admires.

Caprenter’s take on things is just too, I dunno… pulpy, for want of a better word. His best films are down to earth, action-orientated, practical. At times, he has been able to conjure great power and atmospheric gravitas from Weird Tales-esque subject matter, but when more careful notes of subtlety are required, or when things start to get more cerebral, multi-layered or mind-bending, he has a tendency to (sometimes literally) lose the plot.

Thus, whilst the treatment of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ during the first half of ‘Cigarette Burns’ achieves an absolutely sublime level of eeriness, things become progressively more inconsistent as our protagonist gets closer to comprehending the true nature of the film-within-a-film.

Personally speaking, I found the story’s ‘angels & demons’ angle to be both tediously over-familiar and pretty poorly handled, and the film’s conclusion is also marred by the inclusion of an excruciatingly silly, sub-Fulci gore set-piece that seems to have been thrown in purely as a rather patronising attempt to keep the horror fans ‘on-side’ – but whether you wish to place the blame these minor fumbles on script, director, the producers of the series or some combination thereof is largely a moot point.

A more significant misstep comes I think when Carpenter actually begins to let us see pieces of footage from the dreaded, blasphemous reels of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’, and – in the tradition of every film you’ve ever seen in which a character is built up as an artistic genius whilst the poor production designer is handed the thankless task of coming up with some evidence to justify this assertion – it is inevitably a bit of a let-down.

As if echoing the real life experience of soaring expectation followed by crushing let-down that frequently befalls those of us who make a habit of tracking down weird and obscure movies, the scene earlier in ‘Cigarette Burns’ in which we get to see some production stills from ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ is almost heart-stoppingly exciting - all the more so given how closely it mirrors the feeling I’m sure we’re all familiar with, when one sees a hazily suggestive black & white still from some extraordinary, esoteric movie reproduced in a reference book and thinks, “my god, what is this movie?! I must see it!”.

It is in these moments – whilst interrogating the networks of fascination, repulsion and obsession that underlay our shared desire to seek out non-mainstream films – that ‘Cigarette Burns’ is at its strongest, finding new ways to fuse the real life interests and activities of its perceived viewers with intimations of doom-laden supernatural horror.

The moment it becomes clear however that ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ basically just resembles some pretentious, Catholic-baiting Euro-arthouse S&M/torture flick – the kind of thing a particularly po-faced student might come up with after watching a few Borowczyk or Robbe-Grillet films - the spell is broken.

Another significant drawback arises from the fact that, whereas in his own films Carpenter has pretty much always framed his characters within a semi-fantastical, action-adventure environment, ‘Cigarette Burns’ by contrast requires him to present his protagonist’s back-story (which involves drug addiction, the death of a partner and a hefty burden of subsequent guilt and responsibility) in strictly realistic, harrowing terms.

As a result, the scenes in question are played so heavy-handedly they’re almost laughable, raising sniggers from moments in our characters’ lives that should be devastating, and botching the whole (potentially very interesting) aspect of the story wherein the power of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ lies in its ability to become toxically entwined with the personal failings and guilty consciences of the individuals who become involved with it. Such an idea is, admittedly, pretty difficult to fully elucidate on screen, and I hope readers will understand that it is not necessarily a criticism of Carpenter when I say I suspect that, working under the time and budgetary constraints of a one hour TV movie, he couldn’t really make it fly.

But, I don’t want to accentuate the negative too much here. Although flawed to a certain extent, ‘Cigarette Burns’ is nonetheless a captivating and thought-provoking effort that – in direct contrast to the reassuringly familiar terrain of ‘Ghost of Mars’ – sees Carpenter casting the net of his ambitions way beyond the limits of the comfort zone he had carefully established for himself in preceding decades, producing a bold and unique horror film that, whatever your eventual take on it is, certainly stands as a ‘must see’ for anyone with an interest in cosmic horror, the culture surrounding ‘cult films’, and the potential intersection between the two.

Were it not a TV show, this would be one of those movies for which you would be well advised to book a table in advance for the post-screening discussion, which is liable to get just as involving as the movie itself. I highly recommend tracking it down, despite having just spent the best part of a thousand words griping about all things it got wrong.

The Adventures of John Carpenter in the 21st Century: Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Strangely enough, I’d pretty sure I actually attended the UK premiere of John Carpenter’s last Proper Movie to date way back in… 2001, I’m assuming? If I recall correctly, this event took place in the inauspicious environs of Leicester’s local arts cinema, and, as a student in the city at the time, I’d snagged a season ticket to their annual Fantastic Film Fest (oft referenced here in the past), and so went along.

The reception, it must be said, seemed muted. In fact I don’t recall the atmosphere being much different to that of yr average Tuesday night movie screening. Until I re-watched it this year, I didn’t remember very much at all about the film itself, but, being at the time a rather snobbish fan of cerebral, “big idea” sci-fi and avant garde freakiness, I don’t think I liked it very much.

More fool me then, and more fool the rest of the world, who apparently joined me in consigning ‘Ghost of Mars’ to unremembered oblivion amid the millennial whirl of the early ‘00s, prompting (or at least accelerating) Carpenter’s decision to pack it in and make a tactical withdrawal from the world of mainstream filmmaking.

Returning to the film in 2017, with of fifteen years of water under the bridge, I’m sure I won’t be the only Carpenter fan to take a chance on the recent blu-ray reissue and discover that, whilst it’s certainly no lost classic, ‘Ghost of Mars’ is, in a profound sense, actually pretty good.

I mean, clearly no one is going to try to make the case for ‘Ghosts..’ as one of Carpenter’s best films, and in terms of production value it’s probably one of his least ambitious projects, but in a sense it is the very modesty of the film’s ambitions that serve to make it such an enjoyable prospect today.

Taken on its own terms as a late-VHS-era b-movie in fact, I would contend that ‘Ghost of Mars’ is rock solid, with Carpenter’s distinctive guiding hand discernable in just about every aspect of the production, from the initial concept to the final edit. So - if the idea of John Carpenter directing a rock solid late-VHS-era b-movie pleases you, hesitate no longer over that “add to basket” button, because I’m confident you’ll have a good time here.

I don’t imagine that Carpenter planned ‘Ghosts..’ as his “last hurrah”, but in retrospect the movie’s tendency to fall back on story elements retooled from ‘Assault of Precinct 13’, ‘The Fog’ and ‘The Thing’ certainly gives it a self-referential “last lap of the track” vibe that – whilst much criticised in contemporary reviews - now allows us to indulge in some pleasurable nostalgia for an era in which movies such as these actually got made.

For those of us of a certain age and inclination in fact, ‘Ghosts of Mars’s potential as rainy day comfort viewing is immense. Not only is it probably the closest Carpenter ever came to the kind of modest, Hawksian western he always claimed he really wanted to make, but, speaking as a child of ‘90s video rentals, I also found myself loving ‘Ghosts..’s production design, which resembles a kind of perfect amalgam of every mid-budget/straight to video sci-fi actioner that that decade produced.

It’s full of unfeasibly bulked up post-‘Aliens’ assault rifles, tense walks down clanking corridors, faux-tough guy posturing, infra-red “monster-vision”, cyber-punky made up drugs and set within one of those weird, brightly lit ‘Total Recall’-esque dystopian off-planet colonies that actually looks quite nice and orderly -- and, somehow, all this squares quite nicely with the kind of no nonsense script that could easily have been “Raid on Dry Gulch” or some-such in a former life.

Natasha Henstridge from the ‘Species’ movies turns in a surprisingly strong performance as our resident space-sheriff, proving beyond doubt that she had the necessary acting chops to carry this kind of movie (if only anyone had been paying attention), and, if Ice Cube sadly doesn’t make much of an impression as our Snake Plissken/Napoleon Wilson surrogate (“Desolation Williams”!), there’s no shortage of other interesting contenders to fill the vacuum, from Jason Stratham doing his latter-day cockney action man thing to Robert Carradine drivin’ the big train, Joanna Cassidy from ‘Bladerunner’ fleeing across the Martian desert in a shakily CGI-assisted hot air balloon (shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs, perhaps..?), and, how can you say no to Pam Grier as the butch dyke space police commander? (With difficulty is the answer you’re looking for.)

Given its status as an unpretentious action-adventure movie furthermore, I think some of the ideas in ‘Ghost of Mars’ aren’t half bad. Considering the kind of comic machismo, barely concealed homo-erotic sub-texts and quaintly adolescent fear of women that had long dominated Carpenter’s films by the time he made this one, the decision to make the Mars colony a matriarchy is certainly an interesting one, and, though the implications of this are never really explored in much depth, there is nonetheless an enjoyable frisson to be found in watching an action movie in which most positions of power and normative authority belong to female characters, with the men conversely portrayed as ‘plucky underdogs’ and suchlike. (I also enjoyed the way that the film’s outlaw characters sneeringly accuse each other of “workin’ for The Woman”.)

The possessed Martian miners who comprise the film’s monster-threat are pretty good too, representing a distinctive and genuinely alarming spin on what could easily have been a rather ho-hum “Indians-via-zombies” type effort. With their bodies now inhabited by the spirits (or “ghosts”, y’see) of barbaric ancient Martian warriors, the human colonists begin filing their teeth, practicing grotesque self-mutilation and forging improvised new weapons for themselves, until they resemble some goth-damaged take on a Warhammer 40,000 army, waving their war banners and hefting improbably massive multi-bladed hand weapons as they bear down upon our heroes’ encampment. Though the mall-goth type make up they favour is.. kind of strange (well, it was 2001 I suppose), this is all pretty awesome, to be honest.

Although the film’s climactic siege situation had generally been read as a rehash of ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ (Henstridge & Cube’s similarly ‘Rio Bravo’-inspired sheriff/prisoner relationship certainly suggests as much), these more visible and flamboyant antagonists really make it more of a space-age/’Road Warrior’-filtered take on a good ol’ Rourke’s Drift scenario, and Carpenter clearly had a ton of fun with this notion, even throwing in a blatant homage to ‘Zulu’ at one point as he has his survivors adopt a first rank / second rank firing strategy to take down the Martians pouring through their over-run defenses.

All in all, it is difficult for me to find anything to dislike in a film that panders to my rose-tinted ideal of John Carpenter making a sci-fi action film in 2001 quite as warmly and generously as ‘Ghosts of Mars’. Even the soundtrack, built around woefully dated layers of down-tuned nu-metal guitar, worked quite well for me this time around, with the characteristic rhythmic drive of Carpenter’s compositions adding a welcome sense of urgency and forward momentum that such candy-coated sludge often lacked in the hands of the bands who popularised this questionable sound around the turn of the century.

I don’t want to build expectations for ‘Ghosts of Mars’ up too high in the midst of all this praise however. As stated, the film is certainly no gold-plated classic, but – and this is the key point – it doesn’t intend to be. If only more 21st century productions were content to set out with such modest, genre-constrained ambitions; perhaps more would succeed in fulfilling them half as well as Carpenter does here, and perhaps as a result us long-suffering viewers might have more fun of a weekend movie night. (Just sayin’.)

The Adventures of John Carpenter in the 21st Century: Intro.

 On Halloween night last year, my wife and I went to see John Carpenter and his band performing live at a large London concert venue. In spite of the obvious drawbacks that come with being inside a large London concert venue, we had a pretty great time.

Mr Carpenter stood at the front of the stage behind his midi keyboard, somehow looking more youthful than he did in interview footage filmed about ten years ago, and said helpful things like “MY NAME IS JOHN CARPENTER”, and “I MAKE HORROR MOVIES”, to much applause.

Sadly there was no Coupe De Villes material (boo), no Benson, Arizona, and I’m not sure ‘Assault of Precinct 13’ really benefited from a full band arrangement with rock guitars, but no matter - basically it was great. Actually, truth be told, I probably would have deemed it ‘great’ even if J.C. had just pulled up a comfy chair and taken it easy for a couple of hours, such was the pleasure I felt merely being in the presence of such a beloved cultural figure (and especially given that he seemed to be having a grand old time with the whole “being a rock star” business).

By complete coincidence, the following six months have found us watching or re-watching every significant directorial assignment that Carpenter has completed since the turn of the millennium, so, what more of an excuse do I need to write a bit for you about these oft-overlooked late era additions to his formidable legacy?

Three posts will be forthcoming over the next couple of weeks, conveniently scheduled to cover a stretch of time I’m spending out of the country and away from the computer. Have fun while I’m gone...

The Beach of Falesá by Dylan Thomas (Panther, 1966)

In honour of the fact that today is apparently International Dylan Thomas Day, I thought I’d take the opportunity to pull another recent acquisition from my ever-growing paperback mountain for your enjoyment.

Though admittedly somewhat beyond the pulp fiction remit of this blog, Dylan Thomas remains one of my favourite writers. Growing up in West Wales, I was more or less force-fed his words from a young age, but since rediscovering his work in adulthood, both his prose and poems have become very dear to me.

Nonetheless, until I stumbled upon this volume on a day-trip to Brighton last month, I was entirely unaware that this most revered of twentieth century wordsmiths had ever penned “..a sinister, spine-chilling tale of superstition, black magic and evil” set upon an “exotic and inviting” South Seas island. An instant purchase, needless to say.

In order to maintain an open mind when I get around to reading it, I have deliberately carried out no research whatsoever into the history or perceived literary value of this work, other than to note that it is a re-working of a story of the same name by Robert Louis Stevenson. Likewise, the fact that this book’s copyright originally belonged to The Hearst Corporation (1959) before moving to ‘Viking Films Inc’ in 1963 is instructive, as is the fact that it barely stretches to 120 pages, despite the use of extra-large text and frequent and over-large paragraph/chapter breaks. Should be an interesting read.

I can’t say that Panther’s cover design strikes me as very appealing however. Contrary to the note I’ve scanned above, the woman pictured on the cover is most assuredly NOT a detail from Gauguin’s ‘Aha Oe Feii?’ aka ‘Are You Jealous?’ (1892), and I can only assume that this note was mistakenly retained from an earlier edition of the book. As to where this woman’s head and shoulders actually did come from, god only knows. I suspect they probably just clipped her out of a magazine or something.

So, not exactly a classic in design terms, but in literary terms…? Well, I hope to get around to it soon, so we’ll see.

Lost 0bjects.

For the past five years or so, I have been a reader of, and contributor to, the collective blog Found 0bjects, until recently located at http://found0bjects.blogspot.com/.

Unfortunately however, it has disappeared this week – presumably deleted or (here’s hoping) removed from view by an unknown person with admin rights.

Discussions between contributors have thus far drawn a blank re: establishing what happened, but, given that the blog was still regularly visited and intermittently updated, and that it contained a huge backlog of interesting content, it seems a shame for it to have been arbitrarily terminated.

If any readers here have any further info (or mere speculation) on the condition or whereabouts of Found 0bjects therefore, please let me know via the usual channels. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, and if it turns out someone is holding it hostage – let us know, we can talk.

Thanks for your time.

Soul Pulp: Keller # 1: The Smack Man by Nelson De Mille (Manor Books, 1975)

Bloody hell. As if to demonstrate the scarcity of these ‘blaxploitation pulps’ in my collection, not to mention the frighteningly rabid conservatism prevalent in these ‘70s ‘men’s adventure’ series books, we’re already down to this one for our second (and thus far, final) Soul Pulp post.

Born in 1943, Nelson De Mille began writing series detective books from the mid ‘70s onward and is still writing thrillers at a prolific rate to this day.

Trying to determine exactly how many ‘Keller’ novels he turned out is however complicated by the fact that some if not all of these books seem to have first been published as outings for the author’s on-going character Joe Ryker, and were sometimes credited to his Jack Cannon pseudonym, except when they weren't. For reasons unknown, these Ryker books were then retooled as Keller books, with “Joe Keller” taking over as the protagonist.

From the late ‘80s onward, it seems that De Mille revised and republished all of these books as Ryker novels, and removed all mention of “Keller” from his bibliography, with most online sources following suit. Currently, some ‘Ryker’ books being sold on Amazon even have ‘Keller’ cover art attached to them, so… who knows. I have no idea what was going on with all that, to be honest.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, ‘The Smack Man’ usually seems to be listed as the fourth Ryker book, despite appearing here as the first Keller one.

As to the book itself…. well it seems to be yr standard trudging police procedural business, enlivened largely by frequent and bold use of expletives, detailed drug use and other such tough guy shit, with some rampant misogyny, bone-crunching violence and ugly racial stereotyping thrown in for good measure. As such, there's probably some good, cynical fun to be had here, if you're nasty enough to dig it.

For a pure dose of 1975, just check out this central card ad page and the text that surrounds it. Nice.

Soul Pulp: Superspade # 2: Black is Beautiful by B.B. Johnson (Paperback Library, 1970)

As our previous post here touched upon the sparks that flew when the aesthetic of the early ‘70s ‘black action film’ hit the literary world, I thought I might as well pull a few choice volumes off the shelf and instigate a (sadly very short) mini-series looking at what I suppose we’re contractually obliged to term “blaxploitation pulp fiction”.

First up then, we’ve got one of my favourite recent finds, and to begin with a quick note on the cover art - I wash my hands of even trying to find an art credit for this one, but I quite like the effect the artist has created by leaving most of the secondary figures as pencil sketches, just filling in (presumably) the main protagonist and antagonist.

This gives it a kind of dynamism that sets it apart from yr average example of this early ‘70s ‘action collage’ style, although whether we should treat this as the result of deliberate artistic intent or merely “we need this at the printers by Friday goddamnit, put the fucking brush down and gimme what you got so far”, I will leave to your discretion.

Moving on the the book itself, it is notable I think that it appeared in the same year that the movie version of ‘Cotton Comes To Harlem’ set about gently lampooning the Black Power movement.

The Black Panther Party, needless to say, had been big news in the U.S.A. in 1969, with the organisation’s membership reaching an all time high and Panther-related violence making waves in Chicago, New York and L.A. Bobby Seale meanwhile was under arrest charged with ordering the murder of a suspected police informant, and December saw Fred Hampton gunned down in an exchange of fire with cops in Chicago.

Clearly the editors at Paperback Library wasted no time in exploiting the publicity surrounding these events to the max, and the enigmatic B.B. Johnson knocked out no less than five ‘Superspade’ novels for them in 1970, with one further book following in ’71.

Like Ossie Davis’s aforementioned movie, ‘Black is Beautiful’ obviously takes a pretty cynical view of Black Power, skirting the fringes of libel (“Ridge Hatchett”? - c’mon) as it “exposes” the allegedly self-serving con men behind the revolutionary rhetoric.

At least Davis (and Chester Himes before him) had the advantage of actually being black when they expressed such opinions however; though Paperback Library may have dug up the coolest author photo in recorded history for “B.B. Johnson”, I will eat my neckerchief if the individual behind these books was actually a gentleman of colour.

Skim reading a few chapters of ‘Black is Beautiful’ in fact, the authorial voice seems more suggestive of a middle-aged, white divorcee typewriter jockey mopping his brow with a gingham handkerchief in a back office somewhere, scouring the local black community paper to try to get the right lingo down whilst cursing his editors for not just letting him do another Bond rip-off. (The book eventually runs with the idea that the Panthers – sorry, ‘Jaguars’ – are a front for Castro’s Cuba incidentally, which puts my hypothetical author back on the more familiar ground of good ol' anti-commie paranoia.)

But, who am I to make such assumptions? Prove me wrong if you dare, and if it turns out ‘Superspade’ actually WAS a side-gig for Melvin Van Peebles or Isaac Hayes or somebody, I’ll be on neckerchief sandwiches all week.

Either way, I fear this book is no classic, but its value as a cultural artefact is mighty indeed.

200% Cotton.

(Penguin, 1974 / Cover by Paul May / John Claridge)

(Dell, date unknown [presumably 1970] / artwork taken from the movie poster by Robert McGinnis.)

Normally, I’d try to avoid putting two copies of the same book side by side on my shelves, but when I scoped the exquisite American Dell copy of Chester Himes’ ‘Cotton Came To Harlem’ - featuring artwork taken from the superb poster for the 1970 movie, courtesy of Robert McGinnis, as well as a rather nice font - I knew I had to make an exception and stack it up next to my Penguin copy.

I like the Penguin cover too, but the Dell really is a thing of beauty. I only wish my crappy scanner could do justice to the detail of McGinnis's illustration. And no, I’m not sure what “the wild new ‘inside’ movie” is supposed to mean either, but hey – that’s 1970 for you.

If you’re unfamiliar with Himes and his work, I’ll save you most of the hyperbole and simply state that I consider him one of the best American crime writers, period, and that this 1964 belter is a great place to start.

Need more info before committing? I’ll let the back office boys at Penguin and Dell step in to do their damnedest;

The inspiration for this post by the way comes from the fact that I recently got around to watching the aforementioned movie adaptation of ‘Cotton Comes To Harlem’, directed by Ossie Davis. It’s not a bad effort by any means, but whilst it keeps the events and characters of the novel pretty much intact, it falls well wide of the mark when it comes to actually capturing the tone of Himes’ writing.

True, the broadly comic elements and madcap chase antics prioritised by Davis’s film are certainly present in the novel, but the difference is, Himes managed to put them across whilst remaining hard-boiled as fuck, with a burning rage against those who seek to take advantage of the black, urban poor boiling under every page. The movie, essentially, does not.

Significantly downplaying the wanton bloodshed and sweaty, sexualised energy of Himes’ book, as well as the grittier elements of his social realism, the movie plays safe, largely limiting its social criticism to a rather mild lampooning of the contemporary Black Power movement. Meanwhile, the white establishment largely gets off scot-free, with Digger and Ed’s clueless superiors eventually rewarding them for their zany, crook-catching ways much has you’d expect at the conclusion of any light-weight buddy cop movie.

Such compromises though are perhaps inevitable when we consider that ‘Cotton..’ was a major studio venture released several years before ‘Shaft’ and ‘Superfly’ helped make the black action film a viable proposition at the U.S. box office. If Davis was required to take a somewhat whimsical approach to ghetto life and black criminality in order to get his project to the screen though, he and his collaborators nonetheless pulled out all the stops to deliver a eminently entertaining picture, full of solid performances, wild action scenes and evocative location shooting, all of which make it well worth checking out, even if it fails to hit the lofty heights of its source material.

What I liked about the film most of all though is that it reminded me of reading the book – and when the book in question is this good, that alone is enough to earn the movie a pass.

Cinema Trips: Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2017)

In spite of all the plaudits director Ben Wheatley has received since his disturbing kitchen sink/crime/horror mash-up ‘Kill List’ first put his name on people’s lips in 2011, I must admit that I felt quite sorry for him following the release of ‘High Rise’ last year.

That film was his most ambitious and high profile project to date by quite some distance, and, suffice to say, many in the world of what I suppose I’ll have to take to grit my teeth and call “alternative culture” were on tenterhooks at the thought of a director like Wheatley helming a relatively big budget take on one of J.G. Ballard’s most uncompromising novels. But, as the reviews began to trickle in, enthusiasm (on my part at least) swiftly began to wane.

Having your big break-out movie savaged by mainstream critics who have missed the point or were predisposed to hate it is one thing - but imagine how Wheatley must have felt, clicking on links as they popped up in his feed and reading a succession of thoughtful, well-informed writers and bloggers presaging their articles by declaring their earnest admiration both for Ballard’s book and for Wheatley’s earlier films… then going on to regretfully express their opinion that he actually seemed to have made a bit of a hash of it.

I mean, that’s got to hurt pretty hard – especially when working in a segment of the film industry that still relies largely upon critical adulation and word of mouth to push punters through the gates.

After such a setback, one might have reasonably expected Wheatley to retreat into the shadows and spend some time licking his wounds, like previous contenders Richard Stanley or Neil Marshall before him. But, thankfully, our boy also seems keen to cultivate a reputation as one of the most determinedly prolific filmmakers around, and, though he doesn’t quite crank ‘em out as relentlessly as, say, Takashi Miike (which is probably for the best), he’s nonetheless back in cinemas, less than a year after ‘High Rise’ crashed and burned, with ‘Free Fire’.

And, by god, it’s a knock-out. The cinematic equivalent of straight jaw punch, seemingly designed to to instantly obliterate memories of his previous project’s over-reach and indulgence from the minds of potential future backers – which thankfully makes it a pretty great time for us as viewers, too.

If there is one overriding concern that can be seen to have emerged from Wheatley’s work to date, it is a fascination with the ugly results what occur when quote-unquote “tough guys” (violent or ego-driven men of one kind or another) are pushed into situations way behind their control, often in confined and treacherous environments; a kind of anti-Hawksian dynamic that sees the “men on the scene” heroism of the traditional genre movie uncomfortably shattered into a million pieces.

This thread can easily be traced through ‘Kill List’, ‘A Field in England’ (2013) and ‘High Rise’, and we can perhaps speculate that what most appealed to the director when conceiving ‘Free Fire’ was the chance to spend an entire movie taking this notion to joyously ridiculous new extremes – with “joyous” perhaps being the operative word.

The first thing to get out of the way here then is to make clear that, where previous Wheatley films have tended to be somewhat dour, unsettling experiences, their humour arising from toxic social awkwardness and their tone black in the extreme, ‘Free Fire’ by contrast represents perhaps the first time the director has dropped his patina of "seriousness" and delivered more of a MOVIE than a FILM, abandoning his exploration of aberrant psychology and grim social realism to instead reward his viewers with a guilt-free thrill ride of laughs, shocks and lovingly reiterated genre clichés – a fun flick in other words, if admittedly one predicated almost entirely upon mindless violence and the wanton infliction of pain… but, we’ll get to that.

Very much a ‘high concept’ joint as far as action/crime movies go, the set-up for ‘Free Fire’, in case you’ve not read about it elsewhere, goes as follows:

In the seemingly arbitrary setting of Boston, 1978, a pair of Irish Republican fighters, along with their American street punk accomplices, arrive at an abandoned dockside factory to meet with an eccentric white South African arms dealer, his ex-Black Panther partner and their own additional muscle. The ‘fixer’ who brokered the deal is also present, as is the pretty girl who initially put the various parties in touch (because hey, it’s a movie).

The meeting is tense to say the least. The assorted bad-asses do not get along too well, and trash talk and dick-swinging are just barely kept in check. Certain elements of the deal are not exactly what the Irish agreed upon, but nonetheless, ten crates of assault rifles are about to change hands, and the ex-Panther guy is counting the money.

We’re maybe twenty minutes or so into the movie by this point, when it becomes clear that one of the arms dealer’s driver/loader back up guys has a serious personal beef with one of the Irish’s local hired punks. Attempts to resolve this do not go well, and, before long, the shooting starts.

About seventy minutes later, the shooting ends.

Filling the interim is a single, real time, one-location action scene that I for one thought was a pretty extraordinary piece of filmmaking, but please don’t just take my word for it – if you think this whole business sounds like your idea of a good time, pick up a ticket to your nearest screening, and I’m confident you won’t be disappointed.

I’ve already read some reviews criticising ‘Free Fire’ as a characterless technical exercise, but to be honest I think such an accusation is way off target. True, we don’t get a lot of back story to fill us in on the participants’ lives outside of this single night of carnage, but neither do we need any. This is a minimal, self-contained action movie, and thus what Wheatley and his writing partner Amy Jump wisely give us is minimal, self-contained action movie characterisation, of the best possible kind.

We may not get any explanatory monologues or heart-string tugging childhood flashbacks (thank god), but, in the grand tradition of directors like Hawks and Siegel, we learn a huge amount about these characters simply through their body language and the way they relate to each other, as we find ourselves sizing them up as if we were a stranger blundering into the room, trying to figure who to stand behind and who to keep well away from.

Naturally, it is the actors who must carry the weight of putting these characterisations across, and the cast – comprising a great number of vaguely familiar people who have no doubt done sterling work in modern movies I never bothered to watch – do it absolutely beautifully. Just great ensemble stuff all round.

Surprisingly for a movie so entirely concerned with action, ‘Free Fire’ is in fact an extremely talky film (even if 30% of words spoken are probably either ‘fuck’ or ‘aargh’), somehow managing to allow its characters to speak and interact throughout, even as they are in the process of trying to inflict dreadful violence upon each other, making the film feel at times like some strange variant on the perennial ‘Old Dark House’ formula wherein everyone is continuously letting rip with high calibre weaponry.

I don’t know if I made it clear in my earlier synopsis that ‘Free Fire’ is as much a comedy as it is an action movie, but, well, it is, and it’s an extremely good comedy at that, with these exaggerated, barely believable tough guys bouncing off each other like champs, as Wheatley & Jump’s somewhat glib, wise-cracking dialogue prompts more genuine laughs and post-screening quote-offs than any film I’ve seen in recent memory.

(As the most broadly comic participant in the shooting match, Sharlto Copley as Vernon – the South African – proves particularly good value, coming on like a cross between Maurizio Merli in an Italian poliziotteschi and Will Ferrell in ‘Anchorman’, as the other characters’ wordlessly contemptuous “is this guy for real?!” responses to his clumsy antics provide a constant source of amusement.)

As the shooting begins, viewers will naturally find themselves weighing up the chances of the different characters, mentally placing their bets on who they expect to go down first, who they expect to be the last (wo?)man standing, and so on. But Wheatley’s masterstroke in ‘Free Fire’ I think comes from his rejection of the predictable, slasher style “picked off one by one” approach that could have seen the movie degenerate into a coldly mechanical multi-player death-match.

Instead, every one of the eight or nine major characters manages to stay alive until the gun fight’s final act, keeping all of them ‘in play’ even as they accumulate increasingly debilitating combinations of flesh wounds and limb damage, meaning we are eventually treated to the sight of the bullet-riddled combatants hobbling and dragging themselves across the increasingly battle-damaged sets, lapsing into occasional bouts of unconsciousness before an overload of pain and adrenalin propels them forward, increasingly unhinged, toward the resolution of their own sorry personal vendettas. This gradual collapse into entropy adds a sense of Godot-esque absurdity to proceedings that, needless to say, Wheatley absolutely relishes as things take on an air of desperate, baroque madness – a zero sum game as blackly pathetic as anything in his previous films.

Alongside all this, it almost goes without saying that ‘Free Fire’ is an astonishing achievement from a technical standpoint – a total master class in good action direction, fight choreography and editing, as Wheatley succeeds in cutting between the activities of up to ten independently motivated characters occupying different positions within the same cluttered set, keeping things coherent, suspenseful, gripping and visceral at all times, never bludgeoning us into insensibility the way many contemporary action directors tend to, and only allowing moments of chaos to temporarily break through when they represent the confused POV of characters for whom events are simply moving too fast to take in.

Given that the bulk of the film represents a single, real time sequence shot over the course of what I’d imagine must have been many weeks, simply maintaining continuity through different shots must have been a Herculean task, requiring the filmmakers to keep track not only of the locations and sight-lines of all the characters in relation to each other, but also of the spread of props, cover, weapons, ammunition and so forth across the set, not to mention the ever-multiplying injuries and damage to clothes, etc etc. I mean, seventy solid minutes of fight scene must have been a tough gig for all concerned, but I think the efforts of the rarely heralded continuity staff deserve a particular round of applause on this one.

I realise that official ‘making of..’ featurettes for contemporary films are generally dull as ditch water, but I would genuine love to find out about how they went about making the technical side of ‘Free Fire’ work as well as it does, and look forward to watching any such material available when I purchase the film on blu-ray – as I inevitably will, on the very day it is released more than likely.

In fact, it is difficult for me to fully express the extent to which I enjoyed ‘Free Fire’. I genuinely think it is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years.

If I found any fault with the film, it arose mainly from the occasionally shaky application of the period setting; some of the dialogue and reactions assigned to Brie Larson's character in particular seem decidedly contemporary, and the Tarantino-esque 'needle drop' soundtrack also gets a bit heavy handed in places (it's hard not to cringe for instance when some Ayler-esque free jazz bursts in to accompany a sequence in which the film's only black character goes on the rampage).

As a marriage between the pure visual kineticism of a good action movie and the thespian chops of a good, multi-hander stage play though, ‘Free Fire’ works brilliantly, and if auteurists or future thesis-writers – ever sniffy about the idea of films actually being fun - may not wish it to be considered as a contender for Wheatley’s best film with regard to the realisation of his own personal vision and so forth, I nonetheless foresee it remaining my own favourite amongst his movies, by quite some distance and for quite some time to come.

Some Notes on ‘Vampyr’ (1931) as an Ur-Text for the European horror film.

NOTE TO REGULAR READERS:
I’m afraid to report that I have recently become rather fixated on Carl Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’ – so much so in fact that I have spent an inordinate amount of time banging out the interminable essay on it below, when I should really have been working on something a bit more concise to entertain you with here. 

Nonetheless, I hope you will take the time to persevere with my temporary diversion into somewhat Film Studies-y territory, and hope you will be able to get something out of it. It should be noted that this piece is particularly skewed towards readers who are already somewhat familiar with European horror, and also that it will make a hell of a lot more sense to readers who have actually seen ‘Vampyr’. (It is currently available, in just about as good a quality as it can be seen anywhere, on Youtube here.)

I.

When Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film ‘Vampyr’ – the first project completed by the Danish director since his celebrated ‘La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc’ five years earlier - premiered in Berlin in May 1932, there was, it is fair to say, a certain amount of consternation. In the words of Jean & Dale Drum in their book ‘My Only Great Passion: The Life & Films of Carl Th. Dreyer’ (Scarecrow Press, 2000);

“The audience evidently hissed and booed in equal measure with hurrahs, and it is reported that photographer Karl Hoffman and actor Willy Fritsch stood up and shouted at a group of noisy whistlers, ‘Pay the Piper!’ No one was able to explain this odd behaviour. In Vienna, it was reported that the premiere was something of a scandal, with riotous behaviour by the public, which demonstrated noisily against the film and stormily demanded their money back. The police had to step in and restore quiet with their nightsticks.” (1)

Reading this account, Euro-Horror devotees will likely recall the tales that swirl around the Paris premiere of Jean Rollin’s ‘Le Viol du Vampire’, which took place some thirty-six years later against the volatile backdrop of May 1968 – a premiere that, if we’re to believe published descriptions, sounds broadly similar to that of ‘Vampyr’, minus perhaps the “hurrahs”.

Indeed, beyond their status as rare examples of vampire films shot in France, there are a surprising number of similarities between the two films, particularly with regard to the hostile manner in which they were initially received by their respective publics.

Both films were extremely eccentric independent productions ill-advisedly pushed by their distributors as local responses to more commercially-minded series of horror pictures that had recently captured the public’s imagination (the early Universal horrors in the case of Dreyer’s film, the successes of Hammer and their imitators in Rollin’s). Both films furthermore compounded matters by deliberately harking back to older aesthetic forms deemed unfashionable by viewers at the time of their release (silent cinema in ‘Vampyr’, matinee mystery serials in ‘Le Viol..’).

More pertinently however, ‘Vampyr’ and ‘Le Viol du Vampire’ both achieved the rare distinction of managing to provoke violent outrage in their viewers, not by presenting any scandalous or offensive content, but simply by frustrating the audience’s demand for a linear narrative, and by refusing them the comforts of conventional cinematic syntax.

The difference however is that, whereas Rollin’s film has become more palatable over the years (I would argue in fact that it now makes for uproariously enjoyable viewing, whether taken as a time capsule of the rebellious, improvisatory energy of May ’68, as a roadmap for its director’s future obsessions, or simply as a wild & woolly Euro-horror freak-out), ‘Vampyr’ by contrast remains singularly unapproachable, liable to leave first time viewers as mystified as those original Berlin patrons were eighty-five years ago. (It is not for nothing that Alfred Hitchcock apparently deemed it “the only motion picture worth watching… twice”.)

II.

Irrespective of the great esteem in which ‘Vampyr’ and its director are now held, it is nonetheless one of the most confounding, elliptical, genuinely inexplicable works in the entire European canon – a prototypical weird movie whose failure to adhere to any set of expected cinematic norms has led critic Tony Rayns to tentatively identify it as a 1930s precursor to the work of David Lynch. (2)

Even this comparison though gives too much credence to ‘Vampyr’s potential for acceptance into quote-unquote “normality”. Whilst even Lynch’s worst enemies must credit him as a technically gifted filmmaker, ‘Vampyr’s ragged, often seemingly accidental, parade of loose ends, continuity disruptions, blurred perspectives and fluffed effects by contrast seems as if it could have been specifically designed to alienate even Dreyer’s most ardent supporters.

Indeed, when reading that the aftermath of ‘Vampyr’s inevitable commercial failure led Dreyer to a nervous breakdown that curtailed his directorial career for over a decade, those who recently watched the film for the first time may be inclined to suppose that he began suffering from this breakdown whilst still in the editing room. Recalling the syphilitic fever-dream of Bram Stoker’s ‘The Lair of the White Worm’, ‘Vampyr’ plays at times like the work of an man who is actually in the process of going insane, his authorial choices seeming to defy all reason.

It is all the more remarkable then, when reading around the film and viewing it more closely, so discover that Dreyer’s methodology in assembling ‘Vampyr’ was in fact extremely exacting and deliberate, the consistent - if agitated - ‘rhythm’ of his editing discernable through every last non-sequitur insert and impossible POV shot.

Whilst the film’s technique initially feels pretty ragged (a conclusion encouraged by the extremely rough quality of the surviving prints), closer attention reveals that many of Dreyer’s camera movements and transitions between shots are actually very elegant and imaginative – clearly the work of a cinematic artist in full control of the relatively limited technology at his disposal. (3)

Whereas naïve or unintentional examples of ‘weird cinema’ will almost inevitably contain passages of lucidity against which the weirdness may be contrasted, Dreyer’s determination to “problematise” (as Rayns puts it in his commentary) just about every shot in his movie, either through irrational editing or disorientating mise en scene, seems to have been entirely methodical, rather than the result of the kind of technical shortcomings or poor visual story-telling that are often blamed for creating such effects.

Whilst the most obvious interpretation of ‘Vampyr’ (the easiest way to live with it, you might say) is thus to read it as a cinematic rendering of a bad dream, Dreyer’s technique is actually full of details that render this conclusion just as problematic as any other. The abrasive, somewhat ‘mechanised’ editing style, the highly naturalistic and tactile settings, the numerous scenes that range beyond the scope of the ‘dreamer’s perspective, the vast quantities of explanatory text and (singularly unhelpful) background information provided to the viewer – none of these things seem quite in keeping with an exercise in what we would now recognise as “dream logic”.

The film’s haunted, almost paranormal-seeming imagery certainly has the potential to become a *literal* bad dream for those studying it (whatever your take on ‘Vampyr’, you can expect its litany of staring, corpse-like faces, backwards gravediggers, peg-legged creepers and floating cartwheels to invade your sleep for days after viewing), but its construction paradoxically feels far more grounded and cerebral than something intended as a ‘dream’, prompting that particular brain-itch that occurs when following a conventional story that we’ve simply lost track of.

Some initially inexplicable “dream-like” details (such the flashing silhouette of a bird seen on the door to the doctor’s office when the peg-legged soldier is electrocuted(?) by the vengeful ghost near the film’s conclusion) are revealed on closer analysis to be at least somewhat coherent (a caged bird was fleetingly seen in the same room earlier in the film). Other moments though (such as the protagonist’s stilted exchange with the doctor about the absence of children and dogs) remain utterly opaque – either a deliberate attempt to create dream-like incoherence, or the editing decisions of a mad man, referencing earlier details he has already sliced from the print…. and at almost a century’s remove, who can say for sure? (4)

In short, ‘Vampyr’ is a film that fails to fully adhere to any pattern you might try to place upon it, lending it a persistent ambiguity that renders it endlessly fascinating – a gateway to genuine delirium that is rare in any kind of cinema, and must have been nigh on unprecedented in 1932.

III.

Irrespective of the fact that the majority of viewers are likely to have been absolutely perplexed by ‘Vampyr’ when it first appeared, Dreyer seems to have been proud of his work on the film, and – like all truly weird filmmakers through the ages – firmly believed that his extraordinary attempt to cash-in on the contemporary popularity of ‘mystery’ movies had real commercial potential. And, although his apparent failure to understand the all-too-obvious reasons for his film’s initial failure seem to have caused him a significant amount of grief, the director’s oft-stated intention to make ‘Vampyr’ “a film unlike any other” can at least be judged to have been an overwhelming success.

Whilst ‘Vampyr’ is still indisputably a unique proposition however, I would argue that its influence can be strongly felt in many, many subsequent films; in fact, I think we can make the case that Dreyer’s film represents the genesis of a particular style of filmmaking that didn’t reach full flower until over twenty five year after its swift disappearance from cinemas in 1932.

The osmosis-like diffusion of the film’s influence was helped no doubt by the dedicated cult that seems to have sprung up surprisingly quickly to keep ‘Vampyr’s legacy alive as battered variant prints traversed the globe in the decades following its release, and there are certainly enough direct tributes to ‘Vampyr’ in European horror films of the 1960s and ‘70s to make it abundantly clear that the people directing such pictures were aware of the film.

(Examples that immediately spring to mind include the tribute to Dreyer’s ‘glass-topped coffin’ sequence in Renato Polselli’s The Vampire & The Ballerina (1962), the River Styx imagery and tolling bell that opens Giorgio Ferroni’s ‘The Mill of the Stone Women’ (1960) and the surreal drift through the skull & candle decorated room in Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampires (1971) – not to mention the descent into the alchemist’s workshop in Dario Argento’s ‘Inferno’ (1980), a film whose rambling, episodic structure and obsession with the exploration of hidden/mysterious spaces makes it feel at times almost like a blockbuster remake of ‘Vampyr’.)

Beyond these more overt tributes though, I believe that the overall influence of Dreyer’s strange little movie upon the development of European horror cinema was far wider and more pervasive, to the extent that it can retrospectively be identified as a core component of the genre’s DNA. Whether through its drifting currents of irrational eeriness, its attempts to deliberately disorient its viewers or its paradoxical combination of modernist technical precision and foggy, mystical obfuscation, ‘Vampyr’ *feels* “Euro-cult” through and through, readily identifying itself as one of the key urtexts of the multi-faceted entity we have come to think of as Euro-Horror.

IV.

In order to keep things to a manageable length, I will try to break down the key aspects of European horror’s debt to ‘Vampyr’ one by one, as follows;


1. Unglued Narrative.

The downplaying of narrative coherence in favour of pure, cinematic effect – effectively approaching a film as a series of visionary ‘set-pieces’ with narrative tissue reluctantly stretched around them – is something that became a defining characteristic of European (and particularly Italian) horror during its golden age.

Of course you could argue that this “pure cinema” approach can be traced back to the influence of Hitchcock, but then, given that Hitchcock publically expressed his admiration for ‘Vampyr’, this stuff all goes loops back on itself I suppose.

Either way, euro-horror directors from Argento and Fulci on down therough the canon certainly took it upon themselves to pursue the “sensation over story” agenda to an extent that would have been unthinkable in the Anglo-American commercial cinema within which Hitchcock was operating, and it is this comprehensive disdain for narrative structure that we can see being practiced obsessively – some might say definitively - by Dreyer in ‘Vampyr’.

During the 1960s, it could be argued that euro-horror filmmakers hadn’t quite grasped the power of this principle – or at least, the creative freedoms that would allow them to fully embrace it were not yet in operation – and as such, many of the ‘60s gothics I’ve reviewed here involve sprawling wastelands of dull, expositional padding between a handful of hair-raising “cool bits”.

By the dawn of the ‘70s however, directors seem to have caught up with what Dreyer was laying down four decades earlier. In an era that saw the emergence of a wilder, post-counter culture aesthetic sensibility combining with the rapid retreat of censorship, narrative padding withered and died, giving way to pictures that rejoiced in a near non-stop onslaught of heavy, fantastical atmospherics and stylised ‘shock’ imagery, often of a heavily sadistic or erotic character and largely unfettered by the demands of conventional storytelling. In other words, a weaponised, exploitation-happy reworking of precisely the techniques employed by Dreyer in ‘Vampyr’.

Which brings us neatly on to…


2. Delirium.

It was at this stage in development of “Euro-Horror” that we see the sublimation of narrative reaching a point where filmmakers began to deliberately seek to evoke a sense of disorientation or outright sensory delirium in their viewers. Kaleidoscopic, psychedelic, call it what you will, but the giddy feeling of dislocation and chaos achieved by directors such as Renato Polselli and Luigi Batzilla was once again pre-empted (and some would say more or less perfected) forty years earlier by ‘Vampyr’ – a film that takes the core expressionist aim of unsettling its viewers and pursues it far more aggressively (and, to modern eyes at least, more effectively) than the comfortably static tableaus of ‘..Caligari’ and ‘Nosferatu’ managed to.

At one point in ‘Vampyr’s (already extremely frayed) narrative for instance – just prior to the celebrated ‘glass-topped coffin’ sequence – Dreyer actually contrives to split his protagonist (the film’s financier, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who, as has frequently been noted, bears an uncanny resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft) into no less than three separate entities, apparently existing on three separate plains of being.

As de Gunzburg’s physical body slumbers on a park bench, having apparently fallen asleep following a blood transfusion (don’t ask), Dreyer echoes the independently mobile shadows showcased earlier in his film by sending de Gunzburg’s transparent ‘spirit’ off a-wondering. This ‘spirit’ de Gunsburg thus arrives at the lair of the film’s sinister doctor, where we find a third iteration of de Gunzburg stretched out for burial in a saw-dust filled coffin.

Our natural inclination here might be to read ‘spirit de Gunzburg’ as an elaborate transition device bridging the character’s ‘waking’ and ‘dream’ states as he experiences a nightmare of his own funeral, but, as discussed above, Dreyer is scrupulous in his determination to deny us this neat rationalisation, purposefully blurring the boundaries between wakefulness/reality and dream/fantasy to the point where such a distinction is no longer remotely useful to us in trying to interpret the subsequent action.

For instance - as he investigates the doctor's lair, spirit-de Gunsburg not only interacts with the objects and other characters around him, he also obtains information regarding the location of his kidnapped sweetheart that his waking self will later employ in rescuing her. Are we to take it therefore that, rather than simply experiencing a dream, our protagonist is actually partaking in some manner of astral travel (a bizarre idea that surely few other filmmakers would dare drop it on us, sans explanation)?

Shortly thereafter, such concerns become irrelevant as our primary POV shifts once more to the third iteration of de Gunsburg, immobilised in the coffin. And, assuming we accept the suggestion that spirit-de Gunsburg was eavesdropping on events in the “real” world, this de Gunsburg # 3 represents, well… what exactly…?

Do you feel that deliciously familiar sense of utter disorientation setting in, Euro-Horror fans..? None of the clearly signposted blurry screen effects or filtered ‘dream-vision’ that were called in to retain order in, say, Corman’s Poe films are in evidence here; instead we’re dropped clear off the map into unknown realms, a question mark hanging over all that follows.

By the time we see de Gunsburg # 1 awaken on his bench as a quartet of pallbearers tramp by behind him bearing what may or may not be his own coffin, any grasp we may previously have imagined we had over the different plains of being operating in this film has been entirely trashed.

Such rampant metaphysical uncertainty, combined with the growing sense of dislocation of we shift between de Gunsburg’s one, two and three was, we must suppose, entirely the point of the not inconsiderable trouble Dreyer went to in constructing these sequences.

By affecting such a bewildering series of transitions, Dreyer already seems to want to drag us beyond the cliché of a horror movie “bad dream” sequence, instead forcing the audience to actively participate in trying to make sense of what they are seeing, purposefully disordering their senses so as to render the coffin set-piece which follows – its provenance within the worlds of the story now thoroughly unclear – all the more powerful as a result.

Though they were inevitably far less careful or exacting in their craft, it is precisely this methodology – along with the same aggressive and deliberate rejection of rational cause & effect – that free-wheeling exploitation directors like Polselli and Batzilla employed again and again in their unfathomable eroto-psychedelic stews of the 1970s, and that was also intermittently pursued during the same era by such bigger names in the field as Mario Bava (in ‘Lisa & The Devil’ (1972)), Riccardo Freda (in ‘Tragic Ceremony’ (1972)) and Jess Franco (in Venus In Furs (1969) and ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ (1972)), to name but a few.


3. ‘Real-Unreal’ Location Shooting.

Though the naturalistic use of locations to generate sinister effects in horror films can be traced back at least as far as ‘Nosferatu’ in 1920, that film saw Murnau using location-shooting primarily to create strikingly Romantic [capital ‘R’ here, folks – Ed.], quasi-mystical tableaux – static backdrops against which human figures, when they appear at all, recall lone travellers intruding into the corners of 19th century landscape paintings to provide a sense of scale.

Needless to say, this conception of location shooting is very different from that seen in ‘Vampyr’. Pre-empting the production ethos of innumerable European genre films to come, Dreyer’s film was shot entirely on location primarily for budgetary reasons, to avoid the expense of studio hire and set construction.

Taking full creative advantage of this situation, Dreyer has his misshapen characters racing perpetually around a labyrinthine, ill-defined landscape of disused factory corridors, open fields, cheaply wallpapered hotel rooms and cramped chateau parlours, the director’s eccentric framing choices and the production’s weirdly camp ‘set dressing’ imbuing these found spaces with their own bizarre character, even as they remain identifiable as part of a real, lived in world.

Whereas the grand, painterly character of ‘Nosferatu’s exterior photography was evoked surprisingly rarely by mid-century euro-horror productions, the shabbier, less clear-cut, more genuinely unheimlich manipulation of the real world seen in ‘Vampyr’ has I think achieved a far more pervasive influence over the genre.

Most notably, Dreyer’s approach seems – whether by accident or design (though I suspect the former) – to have been co-opted pretty much wholesale by Jess Franco as he went about cementing his signature style from the dawn of the ‘70s onward. Using little save for his own in-camera technique and directorial suss, Franco repeatedly managed to transform the endless series of Iberian hotel rooms and concrete apartment complexes necessitated by his non-existent budgets into brooding, otherworldly spaces that at times strongly recall those created by Dreyer in ‘Vampyr’.

(In particular, the scene early in ‘Vampyr’ in which de Gunsburg intensely scrutinises the unsettling framed picture on the wall of his room at the inn - a picture that we then see in extreme close-up as the camera glides, fascinated, across its surface - will strike Franco fans as a move straight out of Uncle Jess’s playbook.)

Further echoes of this kind of methodology can of course be found in every Euro-Horror film that ever sent its cast rampaging around the nooks and crannies of an ill-kept villa or chateau, whilst Dreyer’s seemingly obsessive interest in doors, windows, keys and locks (the sheer amount of screen time in ‘Vampyr’ that is dedicated to shots of figures looming behind slowly opening doors is extraordinary) is mirrored in the visual syntax of countless Italian gialli and gothic horrors.

Likewise, Dreyer’s extensive and apparently improvised use of smeared windowpanes, glass latticework and other such devices to obscure and distort the action (an overly literal nod to the supposed origins of ‘Vampyr’s story in Sheridan LeFanu’s ‘In a Glass Darkly’, perhaps?) is a device that was taken to extremes by later horror directors.

Irrespective of 'Vampyr's sanctified status within the arthouse canon in fact, the film's budget conscious manipulations of reality – the implicit eeriness of the way in which Dreyer’s camera transforms mundane details into something entirely outré - have an unmistakable “b movie” feel to them, especially when viewed in the light of over eight decades of subsequent horror films.

V.

Just as instructive as the similarities between ‘Vampyr’ and later Euro-Horror traditions though are the differences - those aspects of Dreyer’s film that subsequent generations of filmmakers chose *not* to pursue.

Whilst European horror of the ‘60s and ‘70s frequently aligned its aggressive rejection of rationality with the atavistic invocation of a ‘weird’, pre-rational past returning to undermine the 20th century present - as represented by the cobwebbed chateaus, undead ancestors, witches curses and hallucinogenic historical flashbacks of revved up pulp gothic horror - ‘Vampyr’ labours under no such retromantic baggage.

According to interviews with Dreyer, ‘Vampyr’ was conceived with reference to the excitement surrounding various strains of modern art holding sway at the time in Paris, and indeed, one of the things that continues to make ‘Vampyr’ such a unique viewing experience despite the vast reach of its subsequent influence is the way in which it strives to cross-breed the inevitable atavism of a vampire story with a forward-looking, almost balefully futurist aesthetic approach that feels entirely at odds with later horror directors’ determination to pull us back into a woolly, soft-focus fantasy of the feudal past.

We have already mentioned Dreyer’s jaggedly mechanical editing patterns, full of inexplicable inter-cuts and jarring shifts in POV, faintly suggestive of the ‘ordered chaos’ of Cubism – and this is reflected in much of the film’s most potently peculiar imagery, which again and again seems to place not only people, but entire mechanical/industrial processes, under the sway of vampires and ghosts. From the apparently levitating cart-wheels that herald the vampire’s exhortations to silence, to the capering shades of the phantom factory workers(?) she commands, to the grinding cogs of the flour mill and the mechanised fate of the doctor – this literal “dark, satanic mill” (if you will) represents dense nexus of imagery that has rarely, if ever, been invoked since by a traditional gothic horror film.

Even the extraordinary details of the vampire’s staking scene follow suit, as – in an idea apparently taken from genuine folkloric sources – the malevolent being is literally pinned to the earth, like a butterfly on a collector’s board, by a gigantic iron nail hammered straight through her body into the ground.

A notably industrial, rather than rustic, implement (somewhat like an extended railroad spike perhaps?), this unconventional stake and the violent, clanging blows delivered to it by our protagonist have a mechanical/modernist quality to them that, again, has never subsequently been repeated in similar sequences in later films – an omission that I find quite surprising, given how quaintly ineffectual it makes the little wooden stakes more routinely handed out by movie Van Helsings seem in comparison.

In contrast to the shadow-clogged, supernatural realm of the film’s factory moreover, the chateau where ‘Vampyr’s human characters reside feels dead inside – static, mournful and devoid of the energy harnessed by the representatives of the undead who intrude upon it from outside. Within this schema, the doctor’s ghostly, banjo-playing, peg-legged accomplice is suggestive of an ill-fated soldier or factory worker, exacting his vengeance upon the anaemic remnants of the local aristocracy, whilst the doctor himself - his apparent penchant for alchemy or necromancy (or something) not withstanding – brings sleep and death upon the antiquated residents of the chateau through the scientific, 20th century means of blood transfusions and chemical poisons.

That the doctor’s ‘modern’ methodology turns against him to bring about his pointedly industrial demise may count as one of cinema’s weirder instances of “live by the sword..” style poetic justice, but, as ever, Dreyer’s precise intent here is difficult to fathom.

As the doctor’s death is (rather awkwardly) inter-cut with de Gunsburg and his dream-lady’s escape back across the Stygian waters to an impossibly romantic sun-dappled grove of trees, is the director encouraging us to celebrate the return to a kind of pre-industrial idyll, following an anxious dream of grinding, fatalistic machinery..? Is nature/wakefulness/love/life triumphing over a fantasy of mechanisation, loneliness and death? In fact, as with so many inter-war horror films, could we even be looking here at yet another buried reflection on the horrors of the Great War..?

Well, needless to say, the director’s inspired final image – of the vast cogs of the mill grinding to a silent halt – comprehensively derails such easy trains of thought.

Are we to read this closing image as the end of the dream we’ve just been sitting through (potentially including the happy ending the dreamer and his beau are now experiencing)? Or merely as proof that the evil spirits that have previously animated the abandoned mill/factory have, in time-honoured fashion, dissipated alongside their vampire masters? Have these grinding wheels ceased to turn in finality (and if so, is this a ‘death’ we should be celebrating, given the cold environs of the chateau), or, are they simply pausing to allow the dreamer his flight back to reality (whatever that may be), before they (like a very textbook example of early 20th C. anxiety) begin turning and crushing once more, the moment he closes his eyes?

Like any true moment of cinematic poetry, such tortured explanations remain both insufficient and unnecessary. In terms of ‘feeling’ – and that, like subsequent European horror, is the level upon which I believe ‘Vampyr’ is primarily operating - the shot itself silently/wordlessly gives us all we need to know.

Meanwhile, if I began this appropriately rambling, inconclusive piece unsure of whether or not I even liked ‘Vampyr’ as a film, and unsure whether or not I could really buy it as the great work that Dreyer’s champions would have us believe it is… well, it looks as if I’ve found my answer, to that question if to no other.

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(1)This quote is taken from an extract from the Drums’ book reproduced in the booklet accompanying the 2008 Eureka/Masters of Cinema DVD release of ‘Vampyr’, which is also the source for all of the quotes from Dreyer, Hitchcock etc used in this piece.

(2) See Rayns’ commentary track to the Eureka release of ‘Vampyr’, in which he likens the film’s effect upon contemporary audiences to viewers of ‘Twin Peaks’ 50+ years later.

(3) In this respect, I would particularly draw your attention to the eerily smooth “roaming” camerawork showcased in some of ‘Vampyr’s interior scenes, which moves far beyond the standard logic of character POV/reaction shots, occasionally even seeming to crudely pre-empt Kubrick’s definitively sinister use of steadicam technology in ‘The Shining’.

(4) Another possibility when attempting to explain the children/dogs discussion is that it simply represents a protest on Dreyer’s part against the necessity of making a sound film. That ‘Vampyr’ adheres strongly to the aesthetic of a silent film is undeniable, so could the decision to have the first significant dialogue scene in his film consist of characters mumbling absolute nonsense to each other be read as a statement on Dreyer’s part re: the superflousness of such scenes to cinema as an art form? Either way, it certainly can’t have helped the mood of an audience who paid to see a sound film.