WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TRANSYLVANIA TWIST? [420]

“Dracula, Frankenstein – and Friends!” was a 1977 season in which BBC Two broadcast the classic series of horror films made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 40s. Starting with Bela Lugosi in “Dracula” and Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein”, they ran in double bills on Saturday nights, handy for people who invested in the first home video recorders. These films had appeared on various ITV regions in the previous decade, but this season appears to be their first showing on the BBC, following appearances of the later Hammer horror films like “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” with Christopher Lee.

Interestingly, “Dracula, Frankenstein – and Friends!” was broadcast from the seemingly unseasonable month of July, through to September, ahead of the BBC's own "Count Dracula", one of the most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel. This time is bookended by the premiere of George Lucas’s “Star Wars” in the United States (on 25th May) and in the UK (on 27^th December). Much like Nirvana reshaped the rock music mainstream with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, “Star Wars” seemed to wash away the “monster madness” that cemented the imagery of Universal’s characters in general popular entertainment for children as much as for adults. From then, science fiction fantasy would be dominant in popular culture, except at Halloween, and whenever an individual work, like “Hotel Transylvania”, can break through.

I am fortunate to live surrounded by Gothic imagery: skulls, candlesticks, heads from marble statues, ivy and (fake) deer’s heads. Our land line phone is shaped as a chrome skull. A previous video of mine confirms we have bats circling our back garden. Of course, the gothic literary and arts tradition on which both Universal and Hammer drew for its film series – in both cases a niche and specialty for each studio, before the idea of film franchises took hold – is centuries old, but it is a tradition not limited to a certain time of the year.

Decades of familiarity of Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula and the flat-headed Frankenstein’s monster made the Universal monsters, and legally distinguishable variations of thereof, into family fare such as the coincidentally concurrent “The Addams Family” and “The Munsters” of 1964-66, and of Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” of 1960, of which the later album is best described as non-essential, even if you will hear the “Transylvania Twist”. Add into this the preponderance of monster imagery in food aimed at children, such as Smith's Crisps’ original Horror Bags, followed by Monster Munch, Wall’s Dracula ice lolly, and Count Chocula breakfast cereal, and it was clear how embedded in the culture this imagery truly was.

Of course, it is still pervasive, but only in the run-up to Halloween, which in the United States appears to be from July, in the run-up to when Halloween begins the period known as “the Holidays”. The UK is catching up, Guy Fawkes Night having become meaningless over the decades, and however much Halloween is an appropriation of Celtic, British and Christian tradition imposed as American mass culture, I approved of its imposition. The more we see of it, the more its imagery becomes part of the mainstream again.

IT WAS A GRAVEYARD SMASH [254]

"Nosferatu," a German horror film directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau in 1921, may now only receive a "PG" rating from the British Board of Film Classification, but I still problems watching it. Count Orlok's unnatural features and movement, the shadows, and the sense of foreboding may now only be advised as "mild threat" by the BBFC, but their cumulative effects beat the jump scares of a flash of red, a spray of blood, or a hunk of flesh.

Meanwhile, auteur theory, centralising a film’s director as the prime creative force in its making, is just as pervasive in film culture as horror movie tropes, making artists out of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and even its proponents, like Jean-Luc Godard. The critic Pauline Kael saw through it, preferring to look at each film individually, through the collective effort of everyone that made it: “The auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence, that period when masculinity looked so great and important.”

I only mention auteur theory because I can only assume this is why F.W. Murnau’s skull is still missing from his grave. It remains unknown who broke into it in July 2015, but wax found at the site suggest candles were used in some sort of ritual. I assume the grave has now been sealed by the cemetery, as this was being considered due to previous break-ins – Murnau’s brothers, buried in the same plot, were untouched. The prevalence of auteur theory in how people discuss film still does not mean that Murnau, still revered for “Der Leitze Mann” and “Sunrise,” is entirely responsible for “Nosferatu” as we know it - it’s a bit like saying Wes Craven made “A Nightmare on Elm Street” because he was a psychopath.

"Nosferatu" was deliberately designed to be an occult, supernatural film by its producer and distributor, not the director. Prana Film planned many similar films, had an occult mail order catalogue as a side business. Its co-founder, Albin Grau, a German version of Aleister Crowley, was also the production designer, filling props and backgrounds with occult symbols. Prana Film went into bankruptcy after the release of "Nosferatu," infamously an unauthorised adaptation of “Dracula,” in order to avoid the copyright infringement lawsuits from Bram Stoker's estate.

Before “Nosferatu,” Murnau had already directed one film about a fractured personality, that was also an unauthorised adaptation of a British novel - "Der Janus-Kopf" (1920), starring Conrad Veidt and Bela Lugosi, was based on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. This film is now lost, but we know the it formed part of the wave of German Expressionist films trying to examine the forces that German society found in itself following the First World War, leading to films like Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, Paul Wegener & Carl Boese’s “The Golem: How He Came Into The World” and Fritz Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler” and “Metropolis.”

However, no-one used the power of German Expressionist cinema to disrupt the graves of those directors, or that of Albin Grau.  

YOU’RE THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE [232]

Something feels a bit “adult Famous Five” about “The Devil Rides Out,” its main characters being a group that have been friends for years. Dennis Wheatley’s original 1934 novel is the second in a series of eleven to feature the group, led Duc de Richleau, played here by Christopher Lee. Not all of them deal with supernatural themes, although the last, “Gateway to Hell,” definitely did - it was released in 1970, two years after Hammer Film Productions released their version of “The Devil Rides Out.” Furthermore, Dennis Wheatley’s writing led him to become an authority on Satanism, despite having complete disdain for it, becoming a member of the Ghost Club, founded in London in 1862 to investigate and research the paranormal.

“The Devil Rides Out” begins with one friend acting strangely, having fallen in with a cult and its charismatic leader. The others must use black magic to fight the cult leader, who will face divine retribution for summoning the angel of death. It is a rollicking good adventure, almost a cautionary tale – film censorship issues over the occult were an obstruction to the film’s production for some time – and is told in a very adult and straightforward manner, with themes of brainwashing and possible child murder, by one of the demons summoned, coming into the mix. No wonder the characters literally thank God when all is over.

Christopher Lee is having the time of his life in one of his favourite roles, possibly because he was playing the hero, and not the monster, although I am not clear on why he knows so much magic himself. This time, evil is entirely human, through Charles Gray as Mocata, leading a ritual on Salisbury Plain, then infiltrating a family home – “I shall not be back... but something will.”

Hammer films have a very particular look, and for one set in the 1920s, its gothic trademark is all over the production, adding in a goat-headed devil and a giant tarantula. Aside from Christopher Lee, many actors in this film will be seen later: Paul Eddington, later seen in TV sitcoms “The Good Life” and “Yes, Minister,” plays the sceptic Richard Eaton, on whom the Duc de Richleau stakes their friendship in requesting Richard to stay within a chalk circle to bring a demon forward; Charles Gray, pre-Blofeld here, will also be found in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Shock Treatment”; and Patrick Mower, playing Simon Aron, the friend that gets pulled into the cult, has appeared in the soap opera “Emmerdale” since 2000.

“The Devil Rides Out” has a reputation as one of the great Hammer horror films, and is a cult favourite, but the definitive book of the company, “The Hammer Vault,” said it flopped upon release? How could it? It had the stars, the horror, and certainly the writing – the script is by Richard Matheson, of “I Am Legend,” “Duel,” and a number of short stories and “Twilight Zone” episodes. However, what was a co-production with an American company, Seven Arts (owners of Warner Bros. at the time) did not translate to success in the US: Paramount had its own occult hit film in the same year, “Rosemary’s Baby.” Christopher Lee’s big film in 1968 turned out to be, well, “Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.”

WE’RE OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD [171]

How is this for a career path: starting as a journalist in Southampton, John Boorman ran the newsroom of Southern Television, launching the evening news magazine “Day by Day,” a forerunner of the local news programmes seen across the UK. From there, he moved to Bristol, to make documentaries for the BBC. He was asked to make use of those documentary techniques to reproduce “A Hard Day’s Night,” except starring the Dave Clark Five. The resulting film, “Catch Us If You Can,” opened up an opportunity to direct a film in Hollywood, “Point Blank”, starring Lee Marvin. After the next film, “Leo the Lion,” was made back in the UK, Boorman’s next American film was “Deliverance.” In twelve years, Boorman made it to the Deep South, from the South of England.

So, by 1974, John Boorman could really make any film he wanted. Because “Star Wars” was still three years away, there was no appetite for something on the scale of “Lord of the Rings,” which was his original plan. However, science fiction films involving big ideas, like “Silent Running,” “Soylent Green,” “The Omega Man,” and “Phase IV,” were in vogue. Meanwhile, Sean Connery was still in demand, but not on the same scale as when he was James Bond – Connery accepted the role of Zed in “Zardoz” after it was originally offered to Burt Reynolds and Richard Harris.

This set of circumstances made for a very odd, but prescient film. It is also a film that gives itself away with an opening narrative, not unlike the sort Universal Pictures did at the start of their “Dracula” and “Frankenstein.” We are told we are watching a satire, based in the future, involving an immortal person masquerading as a God. We are told the film is “full of mystery and intrigue,” which is just as well, as a full hour is spent building the world of a futuristic, yet medieval caste system, of which Zed is an anomaly – a lower order that stumbled upon the truth.

“Zardoz” is a deeply layered fable that concerns the holders of knowledge and power, who have become immortal themselves in order to keep the old world going, but have become corrupt in itself, fencing themselves off, with a literal force field, from those left to work the land. In a situation like this, the “Eternals” are shown to have inevitably become corrupt, save for one that, like a trickster god, experiments to create a group of people that keep those outside at bay, but one would be led to discover the ultimate point of their existence, which is to destroy the higher order – this sis where Zed comes in, led by his maker to discover that Zardoz is a trick, inspired by a certain novel by L. Frank Baum.

Because it is ostensibly a mystery story, writing anything about “Zardoz” involves some kind of spoiler alert – I neglected to enter one for fear of writing nothing at all. Any story involving an immortal person reintroducing the idea of death is worth a look, not least for the bizarre costumes here, including Sean Connery’s loincloth. Few science fiction films are more eccentric than “Zardoz,” but really should be.