MELANCHOLIA

“My Taste for… Everything Like Mummy is Decided.”

Paean of Nostalgia For mid-60s Horror

Mention horror films today and you can bet your life titles offered up will include Hostel, Saw, Wolf Creek, Cabin In the Woods, or Blair Witch Project, - even Hellraiser. A wide divide exists now between what was once celluloid horror and what is now perceived as horror film. What then distinguishes the taste for early Hammer and Roger Corman? I believe it might be a taste for melancholy. 



"From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were - I have not seen

As others saw - I could not bring

My passions from a common spring..."

Edgar Allan Poe (Alone)



One might suggest a mote of melancholia divides the gothic horror (Hammer etc) enthusiast from the fan of the so-called splatter or gorno movie (or “exploitation trash” if you‘re Mark Kamode). The moviegoer entranced by the subterranean depths of Castle Dracula or the antics of Vincent Price’s Roderick Usher, or Christopher Lee’s Count Drago, or Boris Karloff keeping dark secrets in The Terror, must align himself with a sensibility that originates with an earlier age, with the first ‘tourists’ who found new pleasures during the eighteenth century, in the contemplation of old ruins. For ruins were believed haunted and now implied the possibility of sinister development.

Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (pub.1817) would write,

“ While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.”

William Beckford’s heroine (in Vathek pub.1786) is made to declare, “I myself have a great desire to… visit the subterranean palace, which no doubt contains whatever can interest persons like us: there is nothing so pleasing as retiring to caverns; my taste for dead bodies, and everything like mummy is decided.”

Make no mistake, Forrest James Ackerman could without doubt, claim credit for many of us finding our way via the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland to Shelley, Keats, Poe, Beckford, ‘Monk’ Lewis, Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe. Thankfully I also had the dubious benefit of a local bookshop known affectionately by local residents as “Dirty Dick’s”.






St Alban Street, Weymouth, Dorset : In a busy little side street in Weymouth could be found 'Dirty Dick's bookshop'. Long gone, it is now a lighting shop. Today, across the street, can be found a rather agreeable fantasy bookshop called Imagine Books where earlier this year I purchased an old copy of Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker which I am pretty sure I originally purchased in Dirty Dick's! (well, maybe not the same actual copy!!!). In my day Imagine Books was a fascinating antiques shop aptly named Ye Old Curiosity Shop. You could see a mummy's hand in a glass case there (not for sale) amongst other curios worthy of a movie set.

 



Of Paper Rounds & Paperbacks

In Weymouth my Sunday newspaper round was generously paid. The shop was a small beachside store in Wyke Regis and I was the lone paperboy, responsible for delivering to houses spread over several square miles on a Sunday morning. In order to carry so many newspapers (whatever the weather), my father attached two ex-army canvas bags to the rear of my bicycle, one each side of the back wheel. It worked a treat.

And where else was I to spend my well earned income if not at the cinema (or the roller skating rink)? On ‘monster mags’ of course! And if I didn’t find the latest Famous Monsters (always a month or two later than the American cover-date) at the paper shop in Weymouth's St Edmund Street, then it was to ‘Dirty Dick's’ that I went in search of new treasures.

                     

A weekly visit to Dirty Dick's bookshop with it’s big windows displaying intriguing, and eye catching (if not downright lurid and politically incorrect) adult magazines, (no pc in those days!) mostly from the USA, was one of anticipation of the unexpected; the collector’s raison d'etre.
One could rely upon the proprietor’s ever changing stock of American magazines to throw up a not-seen-before Creepy, Eerie, or Monster World, or Shriek, or Monsters Unlimited... sometimes reduced to a shilling!



Yet more importantly the stock of newly published paperbacks offered the young reader the ideal introduction to the classics behind the Hollywood monsters.

In gradual succession I added to my bookshelf Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, (and Dracula’s Guest), Poe’s tales of terror, classic ghost stories, Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde), H P Lovecraft and Robert Bloch. I still have a few of these paperbacks on my shelves today, some 47 years later!

And what treasures they reveal; Three Gothic Novels (The Castle of Otranto/ Vathek/ Frankenstein; published by Penguin Books,1968) has a defining preface by Mario Praz, a revealing and page-turning introduction to the whole genre, his The Romantic Agony in a nut-shell. Here we find the steps to the subterranean passages of Castle Dracula or indeed Roissy (Histoire d’O) are worn with time and are hung with the cobwebs of themes eternal.

Here are found the inaccessible castles in the mist, the doomed Byronic ‘hero’, the fatal nobleman, the dangerous follower of dark practices, the seductive femme fatal, the persecuted damsel in distress, and the ghosts and spectres, the gorgons and hydras, that are transcripts, types… “the archetypes are in us and eternal” (Charles Lamb).



“The tale of terror… has found its best medium in the film.” - Mario Praz





Cameo: The 'fatal lover' of Mario Praz' The Romantic Agony: Christopher Lee, never more cooly menacing than as the sinister Dolmance in Jess Franco's Eugenie. Also above: the castles of Pit & the Pendulum, and Fall of the House of Usher, Hazel Court in Curse of Frankenstein and Jane Fonda in Spirits of the Dead (Histoires Extraordinaires 1968), Vincent Price and  Bela Lugosi.

Hammer Horror: Answer me this: How was it that Hammer with its constraining budgets, dusty clichés and often, second-rate actors, consistently achieved some of the most splendid moments of screen excess directly akin to Shelley’s evocation of the Medusa, “the tempestuous loveliness of terror”? Here a ghostly spectre rises from its grave in Hammer’s Twins of Evil (1971), floats across a grave yard and enters the study of a man engrossed in melancholic distraction, revealing itself finally to be a beautiful and desirable young seductress.

 






Forever Haunted: Vincent Price as Verden Fell in Roger Corman's Tomb of Ligeia (1964) "Hypnotism's effect on memory interests me more than it's curative powers... Through it one is able to call to mind things long forgotten... or to forget things best not called to mind..."

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OUTER SPACE!

 

COMICS, THE SPACE RACE,
MONSTER THRILLS & MORE!

The Jellymen Are Coming...
It is the hanging onto the things that give us pleasure that makes one a collector – and later too, the saving, rescuing, even conserving or restoring things – but no horror or fantasy film fan really ever needed, in reality, an example of a Forrest J Ackerman. We were already ‘collectors’ at an early age; comics, bubble gum cards, cigarette cards, matchbox tops, and general ephemera such as postage stamps, foreign coins, old keys... anything slightly curious or exotic!

If you were not influenced by your peer group at school then to be influenced by your parents was a distinct possibility. My father, having grown up in the East End of London with little to call his own, made sure my sister and I were well supplied with comics (and sweets!) on Fridays, 'pay-day'. So at the end of the week copies of Dandy or Beano appeared, - Beezer and Topper were his preference (and he was a big fan of Jane and Garth in the Daily Mirror), or War comics passed onto him by work mates. Later pocket-money was proffered and at the local shop down the road, the choice of comic, be it Victor or Valiant, Hornet or Hotspur, Lion or Tiger... was often influenced by the ‘free gift’ on offer that particular week!

Below: a regular free gift in UK comic weeklies
(photo: Lew Stringer from his BLIMEY! blog)

 

Trips to the open air market in Harlow's new town centre were an opportunity to purchase second hand copies of imported Action, Superman, Batman or World’s Finest. ‘DC Comics’ were much favoured, a little rarer in those days, and a taste of another world – America with its big cars, bubble gum and “Tootsie Rolls”, sky scrapers and Cape Canaveral, and within the DC pages, "100 Toy Soldiers" for just $1.25!

For my generation, born even before war-time rationing had ended, the race to put men into space was the true Wonder of the Age. Rockets and spacemen – how we looked forward to the future! And whilst we busied ourselves pasting newspaper clippings of the first satellite missions, into our scrapbooks, we were captivated and thrilled by the wonders of DC Comics and our home-grown Topper, Beezer and Eagle weeklies.
Between the launching of the Russian Sputnik in the autumn of 1957 and the launch of Telstar in the summer of 1962, we thrilled to the Jellymen (Feb 1960 - September 1960), The Black Sapper (1959) and his futuristic tunnelling machine called the Earthworm, Robot Archie (the most popular strip in Lion during the 1960s), Captain Condor – Space Pilot, and Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future!

The Jellymen, I should point out, were not creatures from space but creatures from the depths of the sea - and somehow all the more terrifying. A few short years later we were kept in suspense by The Iron Eaters, another centre pages adventure in the Beezer, in which Earth is threatened by huge iron-eating sponges from space. Blowing one up in spectacular fashion only resulted in a multitude of mini-sponges on the rampage! Both The Iron Eaters and The Jellymen were drawn by the uniquely talented Ken Hunter.

TV watching c.1960, Harlow, Essex




Scary: ITV's Pathfinders In Space

 

Television, even if it remained for many of us quite small and in black & white for some years to come, was another opportunity for suspense and monsters. Whilst our parents thrilled to Quatermass & the Pit (1958), the last of a trilogy that kept the whole nation in thrall during its initial outing, us youngsters had to wait until 1960 for our very own space thrills in Target Luna (featuring a trip around the moon!), and its sequel Pathfinders in Space (in which two space ships set off on the first trip to the Moon and encounter a third ship of unknown origin). I recall the cliff-hanger sequences of the crew exploring the Moon's surface scared the pants off us! Target Luna and the three sequels were enormously popular at the time. One episode was broadcast on Christmas Day 1960 and the production team claimed it had the second highest audience of the day after the Queen’s Speech. An academic study of children's attitudes to television viewing found the Target Luna audience to be, "discerning, intelligent and capable to handle new and innovative subject matter”.

Kids Stuff: Target Luna

A rather more ‘adult’ sci-fi thriller for which I was somehow allowed to stay up late, during the autumn nights of 1961, was the outstanding A for Andromeda, about messages from outer space and a computer creating an artificial girl in the form of newcomer Julie Christie. It was highbrow stuff and shot Christie to film stardom!


Girl from Outer Space: Julie Christie



String-puppets entertained us with the futuristic Supercar (1961), and Fireball XL5 (1962) and Dr Who made his first appearance on our TV screens, with monsters, galore in 1963. The whole family thrilled to that one; strange planets, giant moths and fearsome Daleks!

Bug Eyed Monsters! : Did we really hide behind the settee?
The very first Dr Who, fondly remembered: William Hartnell (1908 – 1975)



Puppet drama & Dr Who's Daleks become comic adventures in the popular TV 21



Yet it was scares of another kind which found us all sat around our TV set in 1966 and later in 1968; Mystery and Imagination (24 episodes). Who now remembers David Buck introducing each week, yet another remarkable and sometimes spine-tingling TV production of classic Poe (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’), Sheridan Le Fanu (‘Carmilla’), or Louis Stevenson (‘The Body Snatcher’), and later ‘Frankenstein’ (11/11/1968) and ‘Dracula’ (18/11/1968) staring Ian Holm and Denholm Elliott respectively? These two productions are outstanding. They are surely as close as any filmmaker has come in attempting fidelity to the original gothic novels.

Superb Gothic thrills:  Mystery & Imagination

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END NOTE: "Dan Dare (full name Colonel Daniel McGregor Dare) was chief pilot of the Interplanet Space Fleet. He was born in Manchester, England, in 1967 and educated at Rossall School. Although not a super-hero, he sometimes pulled off exceptional piloting and often proved extraordinarily lucky. He excelled at jiu jitsu, but he most often found non-violent solutions to predicaments. He was bound by a sense of honour, never lied, and would rather die than break his word. His lean-faced character was recognisable by the outer tips of his eyebrows, which were wavy. His uniform looked like a typical British Army type (Frank Hampson used his own World War II army uniform as a model), though a lighter green. In place of British rank insignia it had coloured stripes and circles on the shoulder boards. His cap badge was a vertical, antique rocketship in a circle with one five-pointed star on either side. Initially, Dare was to be portrayed as a chaplain."

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Famous Monsters:

Peter Cushing OBE

26 May 1913 - 11 August 1994

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