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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