Weird Tales / October Horrors 2019 # 9: The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham (Penguin, 1971 / originally published 1908)

“Oliver Haddo ceased to play. Neither of them stirred. At last Margaret sought by an effort to regain her self-control.
‘I shall begin to think that you really are a magician,’ she said, lightly.
‘I could show you strange things if you cared to see them,’ he answered, again raising his eyes to hers.
‘I don’t think you will ever get me to believe in occult philosophy,’ she laughed.
‘Yet it reigned in Persia with the magi, it endowed India with wonderful traditions, to civilised Greece to the sound of Orpheus’s lyre.’
He stood before Margaret, towering over her in his huge bulk; and there was a singular fascination in his gaze. It seemed that he spoke only to conceal from her that he was putting forth now all the power that was in him.
His voice grew very low, and it was so seductive that Margaret’s brain reeled. The sound of it was overpowering like too sweet a fragrance.
‘I tell you that for this art nothing is impossible. It commands the elements, and knows the language of the stars, and directs the planets in their courses. The moon at its bidding falls blood red from the sky. The dead rise up and form into ominous words the night wind that moans through their skulls. Heaven and Hell are in its province; and all forms, lovely and hideous; and love and hate. With Circe’s wand it can change men into beasts of the field, and to them it can give a monstrous humanity. Life and death are in the right hand and in the left of him who knows its secrets. It confers wealth by the transmutation of metals and immortality by its quintessence.’
Margaret could not hear what he said. A gradual lethargy seized her under his baleful glance, and she had not even the strength to wish to free herself. She seemed bound to him already by hidden chains.
‘If you have powers, show them,’ she whispered, hardly conscious that she spoke.”
- pp. 90-91

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) is not usually a name that springs to mind when one thinks of the great horror writers early 20th century. Indeed, the best-selling author of ‘Of Human Bondage’ and ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ goes entirely unmentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s wide-ranging survey Supernatural Horror in Literature (although, far further down the line, I gather Stephen King has expressed a fondness for his work).

Given Maugham’s reputation for florid Victoriana and good, old-fashioned story-telling, I approached his 1908 novel ‘The Magician’ - a tale inspired by the (broadly negative) impression Maugham formed of Aleister Crowley whilst both men were living in Paris in around 1902 - expecting something reasonably down to earth.

I picked the book up recently partly just out of sheer curiosity, and partly to soak up some fin de siècle Parisian atmosphere. I suppose I was anticipating some kind of slightly bohemian society melodrama with a few sinister overtones, framing a thinly veiled, industrial strength character assassination of a legendary blaggard – and whilst the book certainly delivers on this score, as it went on, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself reading a full-blooded supernatural horror story that wouldn’t have been out of place in Bram Stoker’s canon, further enlivened by some wildly excessive, hallucinogenic excursions into realms of depraved occult phantasmagoria. So, yeah - that’s certainly a recommendation that fans of this era’s literary fantastique can take to the bank.

Central to the story of course is Maugham’s Crowley analogue, Oliver Haddo - an exaggerated and titanic caricature of The Great Beast who bestrides ‘The Magician’ with a force of will that makes it feel as if the prose itself is cowering in his presence.

Clearly unconcerned about the prospect of upsetting his character’s real life model, Maugham’s descriptions of Haddo dwell obsessively upon his physical girth; we are constantly reminded that he grotesquely, unnaturally fat, as well as sweaty, pale and morbidly unhealthy in all manner of other respects. (Curiously, this characterisation feels slightly prophetic, given that, by my calculations, Crowley was a mere 27 years old and in fairly gaunt physical shape, having recently returned from one of his debilitating mountain-climbing exploits, when Maugham met him in Paris.)

Haddo’s conversation meanwhile echoes his physical appearance, in that is obscenely verbose and self-regarding. After making his entrance to the British ex-pats dining club where are heroine Margaret, her fiancé Arthur and their party are enjoying their supper, Haddo immediately sets about bullying and haranguing the assembled artists and dilettantes until, stung by his barbs or disquieted by the bad atmosphere he has introduced, they all make their excuses and call it a night, leaving Haddo to regale our protagonists with tales of his unparalleled bravery and skill in the field of big game hunting (a clear analogue for Crowley’s mountaineering), alongside darker hints of his sinister occult beliefs.

Although Haddo is a grotesque and cartoonish figure, Maugham does an excellent job here of capturing the aspect of Crowley’s character which has allowed him to remain such a fascinating figure within our culture – and, in the context of this novel, a frightening one too. Namely, the fact that whilst he may have been a liar, egomaniac, wastrel, blowhard, confidence trickster, sexual predator, drug addict, bully, spendthrift, really crappy poet and wanton abuser of men, women, children and animals alike, at the same time, he could never be entirely written off as a fake.

That’s not to say that Crowley possessed the kind of supernatural powers which are attributed here to Oliver Haddo, but for all his myriad failings as a human being, his work in the field of ceremonial magic, and the philosophy which accompanied it, have proved sufficiently revelatory to have entirely redefined the discourse surrounding his chosen subject area across the span of an entire century, whilst his dedication to his craft, and his associated feats of endurance, stamina, memory and persuasion, remain remarkable.

These latter qualities are carried over wholesale to the fictional Haddo, the legitimacy of whose powers is first indicated by his forceful gaze, which, in an identical manner to that which can be observed in the most famous photographs of Crowley, has the uncanny quality of seeming to look through, rather than at, the object of his gaze.

As we will gradually learn, Haddo’s learning and intellect also appear to be vast (he can quote entire tracts of books on a wide variety of subjects from memory), he plays the piano like a veritable demon, and, according to a letter helpfully provided by a former university colleague whom our hero contacts to learn more about this troublesome rascal, his achievements in the fields of hunting and sports are genuine and widely acknowledged.

During the book’s first real horror set-piece, we find Haddo – who has accompanied his new ‘friends’ to the fairground, largely against their wishes – intimidating an Egyptian snake-charmer with a tirade of terrible and forbidden incantations in his own language, before coaxing the deadly cobra into biting him on the arm, apparently suffering no ill effect from the fatal venom, and promptly snapping the creature’s neck.

Clearly Haddo – like the notoriously spiteful and litigious Crowley – is not a man you’d care to get on the wrong side of, in spite of his boorish public persona. But, of course, that is exactly what happens here, as the upstanding Arthur (it’s difficult not to picture him as being played by the aptly named David Manners from Browning’s ‘Dracula’ and Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’) subjects Haddo to “a sound thrashing” after the ill-mannered brute kicks his fiancée’s pet dog in a fit of pique.

Thereafter, the gargantuan magus instigates his elaborate scheme of vengeance, bending the impressionable Margaret to his indomitable will and eventually coaxing her into marriage, after which ‘The Magician’ falls into a similar formula to Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, as Arthur, Margaret’s best friend Susie and Dr Porhoët - a genial French surgeon with a special interest in Alchemy who acts as the novel’s Van Helsing character – become a close-knit unit, united by their determination to free their mutual friend from Haddo’s malign influence.

One area in which Maugham’s creation departs significantly from the real life Crowley is that of the precise nature of his magic(k)al work. The author seems to have been either unfamiliar with, or uninterested in, the ‘Western esoteric’ tradition of ceremonial magic from which Crowley’s practice originated, with the enactment of rituals and spiritual communion with supernatural intelligences mentioned only fleetingly in the text (and then only in the vague context of unspeakable, implicitly orgiastic, bacchanal rites and so forth).

Instead, Oliver Haddo is portrayed as a kind of modern day alchemist, working toward his abominable goals through chemical experiments which, for the modern reader, seem to veer closer to the realm of mad science than black magic, digging deep into that fascinating, pre-20th century hinterland of weirdness in which cutting edge chemistry seems to exist side-by-side with the blackest of ancient diabolism.

To his credit, Maugham seems to have conducted an absolute ton of research in this area, and ‘The Magician’ verily overflows with esoteric lore, as the works of figures such as Paracelsus, Éliphas Lévi and Hermes Trismegistus are discussed at length, whilst Dr Porhoët bangs off lists of (genuine) priceless Latin grimoires which could have given Lovecraft himself palpitations.

Combined with the novel’s parallel interest in exploring the more romantic and macabre aspects of both classical and comparatively recent visual art, which repeatedly had me pausing my reading to google up images of the works the characters are discussing (both Margaret and Susie are in Paris as aspiring painters, so there’s a lot of art chat), and the overall effect is pretty intoxicating.

For my money, the most remarkable part of ‘The Magician’ is the chapter setting out Haddo’s seduction / establishment of mental control over Margaret. Written from her point of view, the sequence of events begins when Haddo gains admission to her lodgings under the pretext of being struck by some kind of medical emergency. Once ensconced, he begins to slowly lure her (and by extension, we the readers) into his trap, initial acting with great humbleness and civility, before he turns his eye to the prints of paintings pinned upon his victim’s wall and begins holding forth about them with great eloquence, before ranging freely through the canon of sensuous and decadent art, as if trying to batter his listener into submission through sheer over-powering rhetoric.

He then makes his way to the piano, were he unleashes torrents of spell-binding, demoniac music, the like of which poor old Margaret has never heard in her life. And finally, once she is thoroughly cowed by his over-bearing presence, he makes his way to the kitchen and, producing a vail of strange, blue powder, treats her to a demonstration of its startling power;

“Immediately a bright flame sprang up, and Margaret gave a cry of alarm. Oliver looked at her quickly and motioned her to remain still. She saw that the water was on fire. It was burning as brilliantly, as hotly, as if it were common gas; and it burned with the same dry, hoarse roar. Suddenly it was extinguished. She looked forward and saw that the bowl was empty.
The water had been consumed, as though it were straw, and not a drop remained. She passed her hand absently across her forehead.
‘But water cannot burn,’ she muttered to herself.
It seemed that Haddo knew what she thought, for he smiled strangely.
‘Do you know that nothing more destructive can be invented than this blue powder, and I have enough to burn up all the water in Paris? Who dreamt that water might burn like chaff?’
[…]
‘He took a long breath, and his eyes glittered with a devilish ardour. His voice was hoarse with overwhelming emotion.
‘Sometimes I am haunted by the wild desire to have witnessed the great and final scene when the irrevocable flames poured down the river, hurrying along the streams of the earth, searching out the moisture in all growing things, tearing it even from the eternal rocks; when the flames poured down like the rushing of the wind, and all that lived fled before them until the came to the sea; and the sea itself was consumed with vehement fire.’”

Haddo then urges Margaret, who by this point is thoroughly under his control, to breathe deeply of the fumes produced by the blue powder…. and after that, we’re off to the races, basically;

Another point of differentiation between Haddo and Crowley is that Maugham’s character is the vastly wealthy skein of an ancient, aristocratic family (rather than merely pretending to be), and, following Margaret’s elopement with the blighter, we are treated to some delightfully coy ‘intimations’ of their misbegotten life together, as they mix with the highest of high-rollers in Monaco.

It’s amusing here to contemplate an era when a lady’s chronic moral degradation is shudderingly revealed in the fact that she tells a dirty joke during dinner and dares to tip her hat to “a woman known to be of low virtue”, but on the other hand, the implications of after-hours debauchery in the pleasure palaces of the Riviera in this section of the book also carry a pungent whiff of brimstone, suggestive of a debased, morally bankrupt European aristocracy drifting rudderless into the jaws of the First World War.

The final act of ‘The Magician’ however is where things get really wild, cementing the novel’s horror credentials. As our heroes converge upon Haddo’s blighted family seat in Staffordshire (in the tradition of Poe and, later, Lovecraft, vegetation fails to grow upon the blasted landscape surrounding his night-haunted abode), we’re treated in quick succession to a series of set pieces that could have come straight from a 1930s issue of ‘Weird Tales’, leaving us in no doubt as to the novel’s supernatural worldview.

A necromantic séance on a moonless night, a life-or-death battle with Haddo’s spectrally projected avatar, and, finally, the terrible, sanity-shaking sights which await our protagonists when they eventually batter their way into the furnace-like interior of the locked attic laboratory atop the magus’s decrepit stately home – dark secrets which, needless to say, will remain unrevealed here.

Considered with over a century’s hindsight, ‘The Magician’ feels like one of those fascinating works which seems to gather and reflect influence in all kind of unexpected directions. As well of potentially drawing from Stoker alongside the legends surrounding the real life Crowley, Maugham also seems to have drawn here from the success of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel ‘Trilby’ (which introduced the world to the character of Svengali), whilst the book’s take on contemporary alchemy may also have found an echo in the unheimlich imaginings of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ influential but deeply questionable ‘Alarune’, published a few years later in 1911.

Thereafter, the influence of Maugham’s book can arguably be felt to some extent in all of the mesmeric Satanic demagogues who would soon be romping all over the shadier reaches of popular culture, perhaps even playing into the creation of some of the greatest works of early American horror cinema, with both Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig in the aforementioned ‘The Black Cat’ (1934) and the twisted homunculi sealed in bell jars by Ernest Thesiger’s Dr Pretorius in Whale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935) embodying elements which could potentially have been pulled from the lurking shadow of Oliver Haddo. (1)

Meanwhile, ‘The Magician’ also seems noteworthy as one of the only fictional works I can recall in which an author has had the cast-iron balls necessary to present a thinly veiled portrait of a still-living individual, portraying them as a diabolical, murderous villain.

In view of Aleister Crowley’s tendency to let rip against his ‘enemies’ with curses, magickal battles and wildly extravagant lawsuits, I think he must have either had a soft spot for Maugham, or else secretly enjoyed the attention which ‘The Magician’ brought his way, because his public response to the book’s publication seems to have been relatively benign.

Writing under the name “Oliver Haddo”, Crowley produced a satirical review of ‘The Magician’, which was published by ‘Vanity Fair’. With typical point-missing insouciance, Crowley seems to have focused here upon accusing Maugham of plagiarism, alleging that he ‘stole’ parts of his novel from such works as Franz Hartmann’s ‘The Life of Paracelsus’ and ‘Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie’ by Eliphas Levi - a pretty fatuous suggestion, given that it is plainly obvious Maugham did indeed consult the books Crowley cites, using them as historical sources for his broadly original fictional story. (2)

Wisely, Maugham refused to respond to Crowley’s accusations, later claiming that he had not even bothered to read the ‘Vanity Fair’ review, adding that, “I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose”.

In the same ‘fragment of autobiography’, which has prefaced most latter-day editions of ‘The Magician’, Maughan also claims that, many years later, in the flush of his literary success, he received an unsolicited telegram which read as follows;

“Please send twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving. Aleister Crowley.”

Once again, he declined to respond.

---

Having generally been marketed as a “general fiction” title in paperback, covers for ‘The Magician’ have tended to be pretty dull, but I love the none-more-decadent detailing on the first edition hardback pictured above. That aside, the designs below are proabably the best of the bunch.

--

(1)Funnily enough, Thesinger actually knew Maugham socially, as a result of their work in London theatre; he appeared in the cast of Maugham’s play ‘The Circle’ in 1921.

(2) Crowley also accused Maugham of ripping off H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’, but I really can’t see much similarity between the two novels at all, to be honest.

October Horrors 2019 # 8: Santo Attacks The Witches (José Díaz Morales, 1964)

 (Or, ‘Atacan Las Brujas’, if you prefer.)

It’s about time for our annual October visit to the weird & wonderful world of vintage Mexican horror cinema, and boy, this relatively early Santo flick certainly throws us in at the deep end.

Voiceover narration from a woman we see tied to a sacrificial slab immediately informs us that she has been KIDNAPPED by the forces of evil!

Thunder crashes and theremins shriek (as they will continue to do throughout this film), as a variety of grisly taxidermied animals fill the screen, but our heroine (for such I suppose she must be) has two rays of hope in her darkest hour – firstly, her fiancée Arturo (hi Arturo), and secondly, El Enmascarado De Plata himself, the one and only El Santo!

We cut directly to Santo, who is busy infiltrating the Witches’ hacienda (yes, we’re in Mexico here, so the witches have a hacienda – get used to it), reaching an upper balcony where he instigates an epic (and, it must be said, extremely underlit) brawl with three anonymous, black-clad guards.

The Witches, it transpires, are led by Mayra, an ancient sorceress executed 300 years ago, who has recently returned from the grave as a result of the coven’s activities, co-ordinated by her second in command, the arch-seductress Medusa. They plan to use a curvy ceremonial knife to sacrifice both our narrator AND Santo to ‘The Lord of Shadows and Abysses’, as represented by a man wearing a fantastically gnarly ‘Devil Ride’s Out’ style Big Satan Head (although in truth, whenever he appears, I can’t help staring at his creased, baggy shorts, which stand out brightly against his otherwise all-black outfit – a catastrophic costuming decision and no mistake).

Whilst all this was going on, I found myself wondering whether this movie was actually the second half of an on-going serial, or whether my sub-titled bootleg of the film had mysteriously begun playback halfway through or something, such was the jarring effect of this immediate descent into credits-free, context-free action. But no – turns out this is actually all a dream sequence, albeit one that basically establishes the imagery and sequence of events which the remaining ‘waking’ part of the film will spend its time endlessly reiterating.

And so, we join Ofelia (María Eugenia San Martín) as she awakens from one of her regular, witches-vs-Santo related nightmares, perhaps inspired by the crumbling old mansion in which – so she has been told – her late parents will requires her to live for one full year, in order to claim her inheritance.

She has been informed of this by her icy sister Elisa (Santo regular Lorena Velázquez), who has recently appeared out of nowhere following a long period of estrangement to inform her that she is an orphan. Needless to say, Big Sis is the same woman who turned up as Mayra, the Queen of the Witches, in Ofelia’s dream, and, given the amount of time and expense which was clearly invested in the dream sequence, we already know that it was basically all true (and presumably cobbled together from footage we’ll be seeing again later), so – UH-OH.

Understandably frustrated by his inability to persuade Ofelia to marry him until all this eerie business is sorted out meanwhile, Arturo (Ramón Bugarini, whose other credits include ‘The Hellish Spiders’, ‘The Curse of Nostradamus’, ‘Bring Me The Vampire’, ‘The Incredible Face of Dr B’, ‘Sex Monster’ and ‘Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy’ – Mexican cinema, I swear) has the good sense to consult his good buddy El Santo – a meeting which takes place in the latter’s surprisingly drab-looking office/apartment, located on the upper floors of a Mexico City tower block - and The Man in the Silver Mask agrees, something here is clearly amiss.

Always up for a bit of breaking and entering based on flimsy, dream-based pretexts, Santo jumps into his nifty little convertible (as ever, I love the way he spreads his cape over the backseat as he drives) and roars over to La Casa de las Brujas to see what’s up.

Before long, Ofelia’s dream comes true, as our hero finds himself laboriously duking it out with those three beefy, black muscle-shirted coven enforcers, and, probably on about the third occasion on which two of them hold his arms behind his back whilst the third one pummels his exposed belly, I began to realise just what a bad idea this film’s decision to mix a ‘Satanic witches’ plot-line with the demands of an action-packed lucha libre movie actually was.

The problem here you see, is that the villains in this movie are women, and, whereas they achieve their evil ends through sorcery and deception, genre convention demands that our hero must fight back with, well, if not his fists precisely, then the physical impact of his muscular torso, at the very least.

With the best will in the world, the social mores of the 1960s ensured that we were never going to see The Champion of the People inflicting headlocks and body slams on a bunch of defenceless dames, so… basically, we’d better get used to the idea of seeing him grapple with these three anonymous dudes in what essentially look like filmed training sessions, because it’s going to be happening a lot.

It could at least have been fun to see him dusting it up with The Lord of Darkness (let’s see how those horns play out in the ring!), but sadly, this was not to be – which brings us neatly to this production’s other major drawback; namely the scriptwriters’ utter failure to come up with any ideas whatsoever to expand upon the basic premise.

Basically, we just keep seeing Santo arriving at the witches’ place, fighting with the anonymous blokes, getting captured and chained down on the sacrificial slab whilst the witches do their thing, then breaking free and escaping. Then Ofelia and/or Arturo get captured and chained down on the slabs, so Santo goes back to rescue them, and one or both of them escape, then they go back to Santo’s place to recuperate, then head back to the witches’ place again, and fight the dudes, and get captured…. it just goes on and on. The sheer repetition is mind-numbing, especially given that the film made a point of beginning with a long sequence in which we were already shown all of this stuff.

(I did however enjoy the moment when, after Arturo is captured at one point, Santo and Ofelia return to Santo’s office, where he reaches for his rotary telephone, and declares that he will call Arturo’s parents to inform them of the situation. Sadly, the scene cuts at this point, but I would have loved to have heard that call – “Hi, it’s El Santo here, yes that’s right, the famous luchador and folk hero. I’m just calling to let you know that your son has been kidnapped by a coven of evil witches, but don’t worry, I’m on the case..”, etc.)

On the plus side, as is usually the case with Mexican horror, the general sense of spook-show excess here is great, with the opening dream sequence alone mixing eerie close ups of toothy, moth-eaten stuffed animals with flashing strobes, super-impositions and so on, whilst later on we get lots of great, shadowy lighting, some wildly expressionistic compositions, flappy bat silhouettes, dust-choked sets, voluminous Satanic ranting and an atmosphere thick as congealed treacle.

Another unexpected highlight is the film’s obligatory wrestling sequence, which, unusually, is slotted in more or less at random at the one hour mark. The filmmaking here is far more accomplished and exciting than any of the actual in-story fights in ‘Atacan Las Brujas’, and it’s difficult not to get caught up in proceedings, as Santo takes on a furious, maskless bad-guy wrestler known as Lobo Negro, who pushes our hero to point of defeat again and again (he even punches the referee at one point), until Santo finally ploughs back into the contest at the last minute and flattens the blaggard, to the wild delight of the crowd. Phew!

I mean, I’m no connoisseur of wrestling, Mexican or otherwise, but even I can tell that this was one great bout. It certainly did a good job of waking me up from the stupor brought on by the endless cycle of capturing and escaping and so forth, anyway.

[Since watching the film, I’ve discovered that this wrestling footage was actually stolen in its entirety from an earlier Santo movie, ‘Santo Contra El Rey Del Crimen’ (1961), so the makers of ‘Aracan Las Brujas’ can take no credit – oh well.]

Back to the fight against the witches meanwhile, and the film’s final twenty minutes does at least up its game a bit with the appearance of that old stand-by, the Pit of Spikes (not as cool as the one in El Mundo De Los Vampiros admittedly, but still), and a defiantly Catholic conclusion oddly reminiscent of the 1960 gothic horror classic ‘City of the Dead’, in which Santo takes care of business with a *big fuckin’ wooden cross*, which roasts all evil in its path with purifying fire. Take that, sinners!

Whilst it has its charms, ‘Aracan Los Brujas’ is definitely not top tier Santo, and would indeed make an extremely poor introduction to Lucha cinema, or to the richly rewarding field Mexican horror movies as a whole. Frankly, the whole thing feels as if it has been slapped together from a few days’ worth of shooting with very little care or attention, leaving it feeling almost surrealistically repetitive and incoherent.

Whilst watching, I had assumed that these deficiencies were perhaps a result of Santo’s regular crew simply succumbing to exhaustion, having (by my count) knocked out around twelve vehicles for the big man in the space of six years. Subsequently however, Todd Stadtman’s estimable Lucha Diaries site has helped clue me in on the fact that ‘Aracan Los Brujas’ was actually one of a quartet of films produced during a brief period in 1964-65 which saw Santo desert his usual collaborators, instead signing a contract with one Luis Enrique Vergara, a notorious low budget operator who placed him a number of projects which were, well, somewhat below the level of our hero’s usual fare, shall we say.

Given that four films of the quality showcased in ‘Aracan Los Brujas’ could conceivably have been knocked out in a couple of weeks tops, I’m assuming that The Man in the Silver Mask saw the light and placed his film career back in safer hands pretty damn quick, but in retrospect I suppose, his dalliance with the bottom of the metaphorical barrel at least allows us a sneak preview of what was to follow in the early ‘70s, when the lucha genre as a whole fell down a rabbit-hole of lunatic, cheap-jack craziness, never to return.

Nippon Horrors / October Horrors 2019 # 7: Unbalanced Horror Theatre: A Mummy’s Love (Seijun Suzuki, 1973)

Sometimes, it’s difficult to know where to even start with these things.

So, let’s try this.

The narrative that has developed around the late Seijun Suzuki has tended to suggest that he more or less disappeared into the wilderness following his dramatic dismissal from Nikkatsu studios in 1967, only re-emerging when he helmed his critically acclaimed ‘Taisho trilogy’ in the early 1980s. In reality however, reports of Seijun’s invisibility during the 1970s have been greatly exaggerated. As his fans in Japan will be well aware, the idiosyncratic director actually kept busy and remained to some extent in the public eye throughout these ‘lost years’.

Indeed, viewed in the light of Nikkatsu’s decision to dedicate their resources entirely to the production of low budget ‘roman porno’ features from late 1970 onwards, and the subsequent collapse of the contract-based Japanese studio system as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘70s, it could easily be argued that Suzuki’s early dismissal basically just gave him a head-start in adjusting to the situation that most directors of his generation found themselves facing a few years later – interspersing more low-key, independently-financed films (if they were lucky) with voluminous quantities of TV work and commercials.

Which brings us neatly to ‘Kyôfu Gekijô Umbalance’ [‘Unbalanced Horror Theatre’], a weekly anthology series produced by the legendary Tsuburaya-Pro (home of ‘Ultraman’, etc), thirteen episodes of which were broadcast on Monday nights on the Fuji TV network, beginning in January 1973.

In terms of its creative ambition and production values, this series seems to have represented something akin to a Japanese take on the BBC’s celebrated ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’, and it also seems to have acted as a bit of a ‘life line’ to other struggling Nikkatsu directors, with Suzuki’s erstwhile colleagues Yasuharu Hasebe and Toshiya Fujita also contributing episodes.

Suzuki’s entry in the series however was the first to be broadcast, and is thus far the only one I’ve been able to track down with English subtitles. And, purely on this basis, I’m inclined to think that ‘Unbalanced Horror Theatre’ was pretty aptly named. To not put too fine a point on it, ‘Miira No Koi’ [roughly, ‘A Mummy’s Love’], first broadcast to the nation on 8th January 1973, is absolutely mental.

Frankly, even the series’ opening credits, in which twisting patterns of psychedelic flames are back-projected onto the looming silhouette of a roaming cat, to the accompaniment of shrieking, discordant strings and electronics, were enough to get me jumping out my seat, but once the story proper gets underway, all bets are off.

Suzuki’s reputation as a devil-may-care surrealist is immediately in evidence here, as he begins by cutting in a disorientating fashion between seemingly unrelated shots - close-ups of red warning lights at a railway crossing, and visions of a scraggly-haired skeleton in meditational pose floating toward the viewer – whilst voiceover narration, in a gentle female voice, also competes for our attention.

The woman who is speaking to us, it turns out, is a widowed employee of a publishing house who is travelling to visit an elderly and infirm professor, who has been working on a new translation of a work known as Harusame Monogatari (‘Tales of the Spring Rain’) – a genuine collection of folkloric tales, compiled by the famous writer and scholar Ueda Akinari in the years immediately preceding his death in 1809. The narrator describes this book as a “maddening and terrifying work”, and, on the basis of the story from it we’re treated to here, I’m inclined to take her word for it.

Pausing at the railway crossing, the woman encounters a small family car, driven by a chauffeur in full top-hatted finery, who gets out and doffs his hat to her. Inside the car are a Buddhist monk and a woman in formal, Edo period garb (complete with bakeneko type eye makeup). Our narrator is alarmed by the appearance of the monk, whom she declares conveys an “uncanny impression”, “like a doll”.

Before we realise what’s happening, we cut to a series of expressionistic studio tableau shots, reminiscent of some of the primary coloured effects Suzuki used a decade earlier in his masterpiece Gate of Flesh. We see the woman who has sitting in the car performing some kind of ritual before a bare tree branch, as the narrator’s voice fills us in on the nature of the ‘Nyujo’ Buddhist sect, whose adherents apparently attempted to attain enlightenment by confining themselves in wooden boxes and being buried alive.

Another sudden jump cut takes us back into the top-knotted, Shogunate past, where a studious young man named Shoji lives in a remote village with his mother. Shoji finds himself bothered by the sounds of a bell ringing somewhere in the vicinity of their house during the night, and, determining that these sounds emanate from the bottom of a disused well, he announces that they must belong to a “bodhisattva petitioning to return from the Pure Land”.

So, the young student starts digging, attracting a crowd of local on-lookers in the process. Eventually, the villagers succeed in unearthing a desiccated, mummified ancient sage, who was apparently buried in the lotus position.

Suzuki marks this discovery by suddenly cutting to a shot of an explosion taking place in some kind of thatched building, and a freeze-frame of the young student leaping in the air in front of it, after which the villagers begin hysterically laughing and bickering, kicking the polystyrene mummy prop around as if it were a football and cursing the unearthed monk for his apparent uselessness. Vaseline or something similar appears to have been smeared all over the lens for these shots, giving everything a woozy, unclear feeling, as if viewed through cataracts. (I’d also bet money that none of this was in the script.)

As the student and his mother set about resuscitating and caring for the revived ancient, whom the villagers have nicknamed ‘Nyoju no Josuke’ [very roughly, “guy in a trance”], it turns out that the predictions of his uselessness were entirely justified.

One of the monk’s first actions upon regaining consciousness is to attempt to molest a local woman (he is discovered in the rafters of a barn, making bird noises after she flees in terror), and, much to the villagers’ chagrin, he subsequently turns out to be a mute, drooling simpleton who displays no evidence of his apparent enlightenment.

Indeed, in stark contrast to the asceticism one would expect of such a high level sage, his sole interests in life seem to be stuffing his face, leering at women and giggling like a creep. This sends the young student who unearthed him into an existential rage, as he angrily questions the very basis of his nation’s Buddhist beliefs.

Before long, Josuke - who, hilariously, is played by none other than cult writer/director Atsushi Yamatoya, who worked with Suzuki on the script for ‘Branded To Kill’ and helmed a series of notable avant garde pink films, including 1967’s ‘Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands’ - has become a kind of despised village idiot figure, bumbling around in a dirty nappy and performing simple chores for the villagers.

Josuke’s antics, it should be noted, are accompanied by an incredibly strange music cue, which appears to blend digeridoo-like devotional chanting of Buddhist sutras with a light jazz/funk drum beat, effectively complementing the story’s crudely heretical themes, and cementing the surreal / comic mood. [IMDB credits this episode’s music to famed analogue synth maestro Isao Tomita, but I’m guessing he probably just provided the series theme tune, leaving the authorship of this weird music a mystery.]

When Josuke is discovered hiding in a haystack by a fornicating couple upon whom he is spying, they proceed to taunt him, with the woman suggesting he’d have more luck with the ladies if he were reborn as a kabuki actor – prompting our drooling bodhisattva to take on an even more grotesque appearance, plastering his face with theatrical make up, and wearing a handkerchief on his bonce in imitation of a kabuki head-dress.

Thus far, the portrayal of Josuke seems to have been inspired to some extent by the classic Karloff ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ archetype. Abandoned by his creator (or, uh, resurrector I suppose in this case) and shunned for his ugliness and inability to communicate, he gazes at his reflection in the river and so forth, inviting our sympathy. But, Karloff’s creature was never characterised as a goon-ish, slovenly sex fiend, and Frankensteinian mythos certainly offers us no analogue for what happens next, as Josuke’s new look unexpectedly succeeds in attracting the attentions of an impoverished young widow, to whom he is promptly married, or so the narrator (who has now become an elderly, croaking male voice, incidentally) informs us.

The narrator further relates that “Josuke had held within him an appetite for women for hundreds of years”, as a result of which, the couple make love continuously for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth day, they take a quick breather, and the woman collapses in pain, screaming that she is about to give birth. The frantic ringing of Josuke’s bell attracts the attention of the villagers, who, upon arrival, find clouds of bright pink smoke billowing from the widow’s house.

When the men, led by Shoji, break into the house, they find the woman dead, and, well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but… she appears to have given birth to dozens of tiny, gold-skinned Buddha people, who are crawling around all over her corpse like little human worms, ringing their miniature bells.

Understandably maddened by this terrible sight, the young student pretty much loses his mind, and begins crushing and stomping the little people, who collapse into dust at his touch. “What is a Buddha? What is resurrection? What have we been praying to all this time? Kill them all!” he cries as he tramples the tiny golden monks, encouraging the other villagers to join him in the destruction, kicking up clouds of Buddha-dust which soon cover them all.

Josuke meanwhile flees the scene with an angry mob in hot pursuit, commandeering a hay cart whose under-cranked progress drives him straight over the edge of a nearby cliff-face to his doom.

At some point subsequent to these awful events, Shoji takes a bride, but as soon as the young student and his partner attempts to consummate their marriage, they are interrupted by the tolling bell of the feral Nyoju no Josuke, who lurks cackling outside in the shadows.

Wondering the land in a daze, looking increasingly filthy and unhinged, the young man begins obsessively digging up the ground in the various locations where this story has taken place, in search of the ringing bell which plagues him. “From that point on, Shoji never touched a woman again,” the narrator tells us. THE END.

Still reeling, we cut back to the 20th century, where the woman whom we were following at the start of all this has arrived at the home of the professor who was working on the Harusame Monogatari, and has been transcribing his recitation of the tale outlined above.

The professor seems to pretty much at death’s door, far gone with some kind of consumptive illness, and his rooms are cramped, messy and seedy. Despite his illness however, the prof’s manner is intense and unnerving. He rambles on weirdly about the story of the resurrected monk as if it were verified truth, insisting that such things have actually occurred, and he further upsets his visitor – a former student of his - by unexpectedly producing a photograph of her late husband, who died as a young officer in the Pacific War.

Amid his ravings, the professor tells the widow he believes her husband is still alive, “like Nyoju no Josuke,” and that he has seen him walking around the era. He then becomes lecherous and grabby, attempting to assault the widow, who promptly leaves the house, suitably unnerved by her experience.

These scenes are sweaty and claustrophobic, with Suzuki slowly tracing his camera back and forth across the characters’ prone bodies, cutting between extreme close-ups of their eyes, as if it were some twisted Jess Franco sex scene, emphasizing the feeble desperation of the professor and the crushing loneliness of the widow, culminating in an intensely uncomfortable moment in which the professor’s sinister nurse attends to his needs with an incontinence bottle, whilst the sound of an air raid siren is heard on the soundtrack.

On her journey home through the stormy night, a shortcut takes the widow to the ruins of the air-raid shelter where her husband died. Some of the photography here is hauntingly beautiful, employing rich primary colours, deep blacks and chaotic compositions which again momentarily remind me of ‘Gate of Flesh’ – notably I think, another work which sought to exorcise the trauma of war through a kind of melancholic, sexualised desperation.

In order to leave the reader with at least some surprises should they seek out this TV show, I will break off my synopsis at this point and leave the story’s conclusion a mystery, but needless to say – it’s unpleasant, horribly ambiguous yet perversely beautiful -- and a final smug, Rod Serling-like farewell from series host (and future mayor of Tokyo) Yukio Aoshima does little to ease our frazzled senses or let us tie the threads of our conflicted emotions after all this startling business concludes.

Though I’ve drawn some comparison to Suzuki’s earlier work above, viewers familiar with Japanese genre cinema will inevitably emerge from ‘Miira No Koi’ with the name of ero-guro specialist Teruo Ishii on their lips. Indeed, this episode’s unsettling mixture of goon-ish comedy, twisted sexuality and malign visionary surrealism feels very much of a piece with the extraordinary series of “torture” films Ishii produced for Toei in the late 1960s, whilst the tiny, gold-skinned Buddhas seem to have been drawn straight from the same well of imagery as Ishii’s controversial Horrors of Malformed Men. Even Yamatoya’s performance as Nyoju no Josuke seems, when he initially appears, to echo the style of Iishi’s most distinctive collaborator, the pioneering Butoh choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata.

Going further, you could even make the case that there are moments here which recall the mad, performative psycho-analytical freak-out feel of Alexandro Jodorowsky, but really, such comparisons count for little. Ultimately, the clammy, unsettling feeling ‘Miira No Koi’ leaves us with is unique, even within Suzuki’s work.

In its own crazy way, this story seems determined to push the envelope in directions viewers tuning in for a more traditional ghost story would never have anticipated, interrogating themes that Japanese audiences in particular are liable to find deeply disturbing to this day. Not only do Suzuki (and writers Fumiko Enji and Yôzô Tanaka) treat the Buddhist traditions of resurrection and reincarnation which underpin much of their nation’s shared culture with nigh-on blasphemous scorn, they go one step further in suggesting that these received metaphysical notions have been chronically warped and devalued by the abusive lusts of a patriarchal social order, whilst simultaneously evoking harrowing memories of the personal loss and grief embodied in the mass death of the Second World War (still, lest we forget, well within the living memory of many viewers in 1973).

Digging into some deep, sticky psychic wounds, the goat-ish humour of this initially frivolous and absurd tale gradually gives way to some far more disturbing; safe to say, it must have left an impression difficult to shake off in minds of its initial viewers.

October Horrors 2019 # 6: The Black Cat (Harold Hoffman, 1966)

 It says something about the wild liberties cinema has taken with Edgar Allan Poe’s work over the years that Harold Hoffman’s 1966 independent production of ‘The Black Cat’ is actually one of the more faithful adaptations of Poe I can remember seeing, despite featuring a brawl at a rock n’ roll bar, an application of insulin shock treatment, a guest appearance by the Scotty McKay Quintet, a car chase and a man trying to feed champagne to his pet toucan.

Though the film-making here is pacey and technically proficient, one-shot director Hoffman made this one in Dallas, Texas in 1965, with funding partially provided by New York-based Hemisphere Pictures (yes, the Blood Island / Filipino co-production guys), and a sense of ineffable regional oddness shines through loud and clear in the finished product.

Aside from the 1960s setting, Hoffman’s main deviation from the text of Poe’s most disturbing and personal story is the fact that our protagonist Lou (Robert Frost – not the poet, obviously) is no longer a struggling writer, but in fact a very wealthy one. Lou (no surname provided) resides comfortably in a grand mansion he has inherited from his late parents, and the rationale for his descent into alcoholic delirium is given a more contemporary, Freudian update, as he is haunted by his hatred for his over-bearing father, whilst simultaneously revering the memory of his sainted mother.

When we meet Lou, he has been married for one year to the pretty but rather vacant Diana (Robyn Baker), apparently winning her heart with his romantic sensibility, child-like kindness and grasp of poetic-type lingo, so that’s nice for them both. Slightly less encouraging however is the fact that Lou increasingly likes to stay up all night, getting blind drunk and hanging out with his menagerie of caged animals, whom he speaks to in a crazy, cackling voice whilst attempting to force feed them alcohol.

One gets the feeling that Robert Frost may have made more than a few return visits to his local picture palace to catch Anthony Perkins in ‘Psycho’ a few years earlier, and he does great work here, delivering an endearingly twitchy, hellzapoppin’ uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin type performance. Sadly, Baker is, shall we say, an actress of more limited range, and the film ultimately suffers from her failure to garner much sympathy from viewers once her husband goes off the deep end.

As per Poe, Lou’s delicate mental balance seems to be upset by the introduction of the titular black cat, Pluto, into his household, as the cat soon comes to replace Diana in his affections. Also as per Poe, Lou begins heading further afield to get hammered – in this case, to a swinging joint where the aforementioned Scotty McKay and his boys (best known for their memorably raucous recording of Train Kept A-Rollin’, issued in 1968 with ‘Theme from The Black Cat’ on the flip) are busy laying down polite, white bread versions of ‘Bo Diddley’ and ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’.

These scenes are a lot of fun, complete with go-go dancers, a small crowd of modishly attired extras ravin’ it up, and the inebriated Frost looking cool as a cucumber as he cuts some rug, lit cigarette hanging precariously between his lips. (‘60s garage aficionados will also no doubt appreciate the chance to get a good look at the band doing their thing too.)

It’s kind of wonderful to suddenly realise we’re watching an Edgar Allan Poe movie with a rock n’ roll soundtrack (there are some groovy instro cuts too, and McKay and the band return later to sing ‘Sinner Man’, complete with piratical eye patches for some reason), and things get even more enjoyable when Lou’s raging drunkenness gets out of hand and the whole scene degenerates into a full on bar-room brawl, flying stools, smashing mirrors and everything. Good times!

In fact, whilst the success of the Corman/AIP Poe films earlier ‘60s must surely have inspired this project, at least in terms of convincing people it was a financially viable prospect (you can almost hear the filmmakers exclaiming “hey, they haven’t done ‘The Black Cat’ yet – let’s go!”, having apparently missed the middle segment of 1962’s ‘Tales of Terror’), it’s interesting to note the extent to which Hoffman refuses to draw upon their example here, eschewing gothic cliché and instead keeping things resolutely contemporary in terms of both setting and style.

As a result, ‘The Black Cat’ ends up feeling more akin to one of Corman’s snappier, black & white ‘50s productions, or one of those oddball hipster flicks that Something Weird Video used to specialise in digging up (indeed, I first watched ‘The Black Cat’ many years ago on a SWV double feature with the demented beatnik serial killer movie ‘The Fat Black Pussycat’ (1963), which I must get around to reviewing at some point).

After all this rockin’ fun, things adhere fairly closely to the Poe blueprint, and, though the film thankfully steers clear of full-on animal cruelty, prospective viewers should be aware that animals were at least made to feel a bit uncomfortable during its production, with a cup of liquid thrown over a caged monkey and a cat on a make-shift leash getting dragged up a flight of stairs, as well as providing a convincingly gruesome (staged) depiction of the pussycat gore the subject matter demands. The close up of a severed eyeball amid a mass of matted blood and fur in Lou’s clawed hand in particular is a great horror moment, though animal lovers of a sensitive disposition may beg to differ.

Once Lou has managed to burn his goddamn house down whilst in the process of electrocuting poor old Pluto, our lad is understandably confined to a sanatorium, where a scene depicting the application of the aforementioned insulin therapy (a grim and discredited procedure, needless to say) is truly rather horrifying, with his screams going way behind the comfort zone.

After a routine “yes doc, modern psychiatry has left me completely cured, yep, I ‘m a changed man alright, no doubt about that whatsoever” type sequence, Lou is back on the street – or, more specifically, in the more modest suburban home he now shares with Diana – and naturally he’s soon back to his old tricks. Another fun scene finds him freaking out in a low-life drinking den, where he unleashes a stream of crazy-man invective in the direction of a prospective hooker who has latched onto him. Amazingly, she continues to court him as a potential customer, even after he has slurringly accused her of being “a witch”, “the devil’s wife”, “an agent sent by my father” and “a cat in human form”. She must have really needed the business.

If the film drags a bit after this point, that’s largely just due to the fact that it plainly follows the story – and of course, we all know the story. Could the resulting feeling of ho-hum over-familiarity perhaps offer us an insight into why most other Poe adaptations tended to go so wildly off-piste with their story-telling (particularly in the USA, where, I gather, students are even required study this stuff in High School)?

The one remaining highlight – and it’s a doozy – comes when Lou (as per the story, once again) suddenly brains his long-suffering wife with a wood axe – whammo! This is a startlingly full-on, ahead of its time gore effect which punk rock fans of a certain age will immediately recognise as the source of the still used on the cover of The Angry Samoans’ Inside My Brain album.

To put my ‘serious critic’ hat on for a moment, ‘The Black Cat’s main weakness as a Poe adaptation is its superficiality. Whilst Hoffman dramatises the story in an admirably straightforward fashion, in the process of updating the explanation for the protagonist’s condition to reflect a paradigm of mid-20th century pop-psychiatry, he entirely jettisons Poe’s doom-laden musings on the underlying evil of the human condition, and loses most of the bleakly disturbing atmosphere which accompanied it in the process.

Meanwhile, we’re never really given a chance to engage with or share in Lou’s internal torments, despite Frost’s highly enjoyable performance, meaning that the movie’s eventual message never really delves much deeper than: hey girls, keep away from rich guys with parent issues who go a bit wacky when they drink – they ain’t no good, so do the right thing and you’ll keep your cranium intact.

Whilst these deficiencies prevent it from really being hailed as a lost classic of the horror genre however, Hoffman’s film is still a fun, divertingly weird watch, complete with a handful of startlingly memorable moments, a few laughs and some cool tunes, and its near total obscurity strikes me as slightly unfair. I certainly found it to be well worth the investment of 70-something minutes, and those with an interest in Poe adaptations and / or off-beat American regional horror in general are strongly encouraged to track it down.

October Horrors 2019 # 5: Killer’s Moon (Alan Birkinshaw, 1978)

“It’s one of those nights, Pete. Blood on the moon, one mangled dog, one missing axe and a lost girl who’s just found a body – on the wrong end of the axe! How’s that for the great English outdoors?”

The late 1970s were a dark time indeed for British horror; as opportunities for theatrical exhibition dried up and the prospect of getting projects financed became ever more nightmarish, only the genial Norman J. Warren was really flying the flag for the genre by the time punk hit, and even he was generally making do on budgets more appropriate to a biscuit advert than a feature film.

Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a project as marginal and bizarre as Alan Birkinshaw’s ‘Killer’s Moon’ fell through the cracks in 1978, and is rarely acknowledged even today in histories of British horror. I’ll freely admit that, although I’ve long been aware of the film, it had not occurred to me until recently that I might actually want to watch it. Aside from anything else, the “escaped mental patients rape and murder school girls” plotline scarcely sounds very edifying, and reviews which tend to write the film off as revolting and amateurish are not exactly encouraging.

As horror fans will be well aware though, holding out this way is a mug’s game. Sooner or later, you’re going to see a bedraggled movie like ‘Killer’s Moon’ looking up at you with dewy eyes from some pile of bargain basement blu-rays, and think, what the hell, let’s give it a try. After all, my British horror palette is so jaded at this point that even such impossibly sleazy ventures as James Kenelm Clarke’s ‘Exposé’ / ‘The House On Straw Hill’ (1976) can sit happily on my comfort-viewing list; how much worse can this one possibly be?

Well, long story short, I’m glad I took the plunge, because I absolutely loved ‘Killer’s Moon’. I’m not sure what it says about me that I managed to find a film about a gang of maniacal, animal-mutilating rapists so thoroughly charming, but…. there’s just something about ‘70s British horror, isn’t there? That sense of haunting, otherworldly mundanity and whimsical oddness that just seems to rise atavistically from the landscape itself, completely defusing my critical faculties…. and ‘Killer’s Moon’ has it in spades.

The film certainly gets off to an appropriately foreboding start, as a bus carrying a group of teenage choristers and their two teachers, apparently taking a fairly extensive diversion on their way to Edinburgh, breaks down in a remote and inhospitable corner of the Lake District. Subsequently setting out on foot, they eventually find themselves seeking shelter in a gloomy manor house-turned-hotel, closed for the winter and occupied solely by an accomodating caretaker. (I loved the way that, when the teacher rings the doorbell, the caretaker opens the door immediately, as if she were waiting on the other side in anticipation of random visitors.)

Although nothing untoward has really happened up to this point, the threat of impending violence is palpable during these opening scenes. Arthur Lavis’s grainy photography imbues the damp woodland with the same kind of dark, overcast malevolence found in Jose Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’ and ‘Symptoms’, whilst the film’s surprisingly accomplished score, by John Shakespeare & Derek Warne, creeps and burbles along nicely, mixing devilish clarinet and piano figures with glockenspiel, free improv percussion and disconcerting electronic pulsations, echoing such folk-horror touchstones as John Scott’s music for ‘Satan’s Slave’, or Marc Wilkinson’s work on ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’.

This sinister ambience jars very pleasantly with the naïve, Children’s Film Foundation-style performances delivered by most of the cast – “just say line loud enough for soundman to pick it up, luv” seems to have been the extent of the direction offered to the young performers here. It’s all quite lovely, but, at the same time, the pervading tone of bleak uneasiness means we can easily believe that some harrowing, ‘Last House..’ style awfulness could be coming down the pipe in due course.

Our first hint of the film’s slightly more, shall we say, ‘whimsical’, agenda arrives when we cut away to what purports to be a ministerial office in Whitehall (not sure about the wallpaper), where a government minister is being debriefed by a psychiatrist and a representative of the police force, who basically give us the sum total of this film’s narrative exposition in one easily digestible dose.

A quartet of psychopathic criminals, we learn, have escaped from a cottage hospital in the wilds of Cumbria. As if that weren’t bad enough, all four of them were taking part in an experimental treatment programme involving “lysergic acid in conjunction with dream therapy”. The net result of which is that, not only are the escapees presumably blitzed out of their minds on acid, they are literally “..walking around believing they’re in a dream”.

“My god”, exclaims the minister, neatly foreshadowing the action to come, “in my dreams I murder freely, pillage, loot and rape!”
“You do?” replies the policeman in surprise, before his superior swiftly changes the subject.

Despite the blackly comedic tone of this interlude, the mood back in the woods remains foreboding, as we trudge through an agonisingly extended build up during which the escaped maniacs remain largely unseen.

Instead, we spend time with Pete and Mike, a pair of jack-the-lad young campers who have pitched their tent somewhere in the vicinity of the ill-fated hotel. As if to prove that he can get his leg over even in the middle of a rain-sodden, uninhabited wilderness, Mike, when we first meet him, has just finished shagging Julia, the maid from the hotel, who has apparently popped out to meet him during her lunch hour. (Julia, incidentally, is played by Jane Hayden – sister of Linda, no less!)

Meanwhile, we also have the pleasure of meeting the area’s taciturn gamekeeper, an old geezer who keeps muttering about sensing that “something’s not right out there tonight”, and so on. (Perhaps he can hear the music on the soundtrack?)

Fears of very bad things to come are only increased by our first few encounters with the deeds of the elusive maniacs. Firstly, the campers are taken aback when a dog which appears to have had one of its legs hacked off hobbles into their tent (don’t worry folks, the genuine three-legged dog who was smeared with fake blood for this role looks perfectly content), after which they discover that their wood axe is missing. (1)

Needless to say, this is very much the point at which any responsible citizens would call a halt to their camping holiday and find a way to contact both the police and an emergency vet ASA f-ing P, but, as we will be continuously be reminded over the course of the next hour or so, common sense holds little sway in the inverted dream world of ‘Killer’s Moon’. So, Pete and Mike merely bandage up the poor old doggie, who dutifully limps off into the night, and proceed with their sojourn in the great outdoors as if nothing were amiss.

Our first proper sighting of the escapees meanwhile comes when one of their number – a lumbering brute in white hospital scrubs – infiltrates the cottage the groundskeeper shares with his wife, who, as you’d imagine, is not long for this world. The invader’s first order of business however is to menace the elderly couple’s cat, and, though the effects shot is obviously fake (thank god), a close up of the cat’s front paw supposedly getting sliced off is still outrageous – a shocking moment, and a clear indication that we’re dealing here with filmmakers who are unafraid to “go there” when it comes to gleefully tackling a few censor-baiting taboos.

Shortly thereafter, the campers encounter one of the schoolgirls, who is fleeing alone through the woods, having discovered the body of the murdered bus driver whilst on an errand to the phone box at the bottom of the road. Thereafter, the unhappy trio are also joined around the campfire by Julie, who is in a bit of a state. Whilst on her way back to the hotel, she matter of factly states, she was attacked and raped by three men in white overalls.

Gosh, that’s a bit of a rum do, approximates the sympathetic response of the boys to this grim news, but heaven knows, it’s not as if they can just head to the nearest town to seek help. I mean, it’s five miles away for heaven’s sake, what are they supposed to do, walk for a couple of hours?

In fact, the continued failure of the characters in ‘Killer’s Moon’ to make contact with the outside world become increasingly funny as the film goes on. On multiple occasions, various groups set out to make it to that nearby town or village, where they might “wake up the shopkeeper” or “look for a phone”, but none of them ever actually succeed in this relatively straight-forward task, repeatedly turning back, having decided that they’ve forgotten something, or can’t abandon their friends, or simply being chased back into the woods by the lurking maniacs.

If my tone seems rather flippant in view of the grim subject matter under discussion here, well, such is the strange frame of mind this film lulls us into. As soon as we actually get to spend some time with the dreaded maniacs, we find ourselves breathing a sigh of relief as we realise that nothing that bad is going to happen here.

‘Killer’s Moon’ has often been compared to ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (the bowler hat prominently worn by one of the fiends alongside his boots and overalls can’t help but be read as a deliberate reference), but to be honest there is very little resemblance between the menace and physical dynamism embodied by Alex’s gang in the Kubrick film and the lackadaisical berserkers on parade here.

To put it bluntly – this lot are fairly goofy. Two hefty, middle-aged chaps and two younger, somewhat foppish skinny ones, all four of them gurn up a storm, hamming it up as if they were stomping around in a local panto or something.

Although the film’s central rape scene, and a couple of subsequent low level molestations and stranglings, are inevitably pretty unsavoury, things remain reasonably restrained here compared to the kind of mean-spirited exploitation films that were coming out of Italy or the USA in the late ‘70s, and, basically, it’s difficult to take these awful acts seriously when the perpetrators are capering about the place, lip-smackingly referring to each other as “Mr Trubshaw” and “Mr Muldoon”.

Likewise, the whole business about the escapees believing they’re taking part in a shared lucid dream is just so utterly bizarre it’s difficult to know what to make of it, but it’s more or less played for laughs from the outset, as they intersperse their raping and pillaging with banter about who may or may not be a nurse or a hospital psychiatrist in real life, and hammer the kitchen table wondering why they can’t magic up some steak and chips. “Don't worry, she’s just a figment” Mr Jones cheerfully reassures his comrades as they look down at one murder victim, “I think I had her identified with the radiographer”.

In moments like this, it’s difficult to judge whether the makers of ‘Killer’s Moon’ were revelling in pitch-black humour, or whether the film’s assorted hilarity is entirely unintentional – an accidental result of the affectless, non-professional performances and giddily absurd situations.

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping example of this ambiguity comes when the most level-headed of the girls (who will later do in one of the killers with a sickle) comforts one of her violated friends by blankly telling her; “Look, you were only raped. As long as you don’t tell anybody about it, you’ll be alright. […] And if we ever get out of this alive, well, maybe we’ll both live to be wives and mothers.”

When you’ve picked yourself off the floor and wiped your eyes after this line is delivered, you’ll no doubt begin to wonder whether it is a bit of razor-sharp satire aimed at the sexist attitudes traditionally embodied by horror films, or alternatively something a male scriptwriter in 1978 might actually have considered a legitimate response to the situation.

And at this point, we should probably turn our attention to the fact that writer-director Alan Birkinshaw is the younger brother of the celebrated author and essayist Fay Weldon, and that, remarkably, it has been widely reported that he called in his big sister to entirely rewrite the dialogue for his ‘Killer’s Moon’ script prior to shooting.

This revelation certainly helps explain a few of the film’s tonal peculiarities, as well as pretty much confirming the satirical interpretation of the infamous lines quoted above, and helping ‘Killer’s Moon’ to top even Rita Mae Brown’s script for ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ when it comes to unexpected collisions between literary feminism and misogynistic horror movies.

Weldon, for her part, seems to have suffered from a pretty bad case of sour grapes when it comes to her (uncredited) contribution to the film, telling an interviewer at some point that; “In the original script, the girls were ciphers. I gave them characters, which had the unfortunate effect of turning the film into a cult movie. I should have left it as it was. Picture dialogue: A. Picture movie: D. A terrible mix.” (2)

Sad to say, this verdict strikes me as both unduly self-regarding and entirely unfair - not only because, as discussed above, some of the film’s visuals are actually quite accomplished, but also because, despite Ms Weldon’s best efforts, the schoolgirl characters remain chronically underwritten and largely undistinguishable from one another.

Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to assume that there are a number of moments in ‘Killer’s Moon’ in which the mordant wit of the woman who once tried to popularise the slogan “vodka gets you drunker quicker” whilst working in the advertising industry [source] can be seen shining through – not least the Monty Python-esque exchange which occurs whilst one of the campers is being pursued by a gun-toting maniac.

“Go to hell you bastard, you’re mad!”, our hero yells. “What sort of a reply is that from a National Health psychiatrist?” responds Mr Trubshaw, still convinced he’s in a dream at the hospital, “I knew I should have gone private.”

An extremely strange film by any yardstick, ‘Killer’s Moon’ ultimately fits into no known lineage of British horror, despite the atmospheric similarities outlined above. To my happy surprise in fact, it reminded me not so much of any rape-atrocity film, slasher or ‘Clockwork Orange’ knock-off, but rather of the kind of films Jean Rollin was making at around the same time on the other side of the channel.

An unexpected comparison, I’ll grant you, but just think about it for a minute; we’ve got artfully framed shots of girls in night-gowns taking long walks through atmospheric woodlands and uninhabited buildings, off-beat, naïve performances and surreal, dream-like situations, all underpinned by the looming threat of hideous (yet reassuringly unrealistic) sexualised violence. I think I know where I’ve sampled this complex bouquet before. Swap around the national stereotypes and rejig the tone of the humour a little, and ‘Killer’s Moon’ could easily have slotted into Rollin’s filmography, somewhere between ‘Les Raisins de la Mort’ (1976) and La Nuit des Traquées (1980).

And, like each of Rollin’s films, ‘Killer’s Moon’ is an unforgettable, idiosyncratic experience too. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, we’re looking here at a freakish mutant of some kind, never even considered for mass production; too weird to live, too unique to die. It’s up there on the shelf next to ‘Exposé’ the next time I need something easy-going to cheer myself up.

---

(1) According to an anonymous contributor to ‘Killer’s Moon’s IMDB trvia page: “Hannah, the three-legged dog used in this movie, was cast from a local dog agency. Moreover, Hannah had lost her leg after saving her master in a robbery at the pub that she lived in.”

(2) Unfortunately I can’t find a source for this quote, but again, it is reproduced in full on the film’s IMDB page.