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Jim Mountfield: less angelic, more demonic

 

© Cloaked Press

 

The independent publisher Cloaked Press has just brought out the latest instalment in its series of annual horror-story anthologies, Nightmare Fuel.  The 2026 anthology is called Angels & Demons and, as its title indicates, its contents are about supernatural entities either of the angelic or demonic varieties.  I’m pleased to say I have a story included in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons.  It’s entitled Asmodeus 86 and it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

 

My story is about a demon, not an angel – the ‘Asmodeus’ of the title is, according to his Wikipedia entry, ‘a king of demons in the legends of Solomon and the constructing of Solomon’s temple’ and ‘associated with lust’.  He’s mentioned in various holy texts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as being referenced in the notorious 1486 treatise on witchcraft the Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer of Witches in English) and supposedly involved in the famous possession of a convent of Ursuline nuns in Loudon in France in 1634.

 

Oddly, though, I first became aware of the name Asmodeus through something entirely different.  In Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the novel’s anonymous narrator and hero gives the name to a feral cat who befriends him while he’s literally holed up in the English countryside, hiding from the bad guys.  ‘Asmodeus’ is an appropriate moniker for the cat since he’s rather supernatural in appearance, being wholly black.  Also, the kinship the narrator feels with the cat whilst under extreme pressure – he spends ages concealed in a dark, filthy cubbyhole under a huge hedgerow in Dorset – becomes intense and spooky: “…there is, I believe, some slight thought transference between us…  back and forth between us go thoughts of fear and disconnected dreams of action.  I should call these dreams madness, did I not know they came from him and that his mind is, by our human standards, mad.”

 

So Asmodeus-the-demon is the exotic subject of my story in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons.  But Asmodeus 86’s setting is a mundane one.  It takes place in a state secondary school in the south of Scotland in the 1980s, just like the one I attended back then, Peebles High School.  The story concerns a group of school-pupils who resort to using black magic to achieve their ends and one hapless kid who unwittingly gets caught up in their shenanigans.  If you map the ages of the characters onto my high-school experiences, the events in the story would have happened in 1982, my final year, when I did my final exams there.

 

However, at that time in 1982, the news in Scotland, and the United Kingdom generally, was dominated by the war between Britain and Argentina over possession of the Falkland Islands.  So I shifted the setting forward to 1986, when the story’s characters would have less ‘background noise’ coming from the TV, newspapers and conversations around them.  (Not that big events weren’t happening in 1986.  The story namechecks a certain Mr. Gorbachev, a certain disaster at Chernobyl and… psychobilly music.)

 

Lastly, I titled the story Asmodeus 86 as a tribute to Artemis 81, the baffling, barmy and fascinating three-hour occult / mystery / fantasy / sci-fi TV play broadcast by the BBC in December 1981, written by David Rudkin, directed by Alastair Reid, and starring such thespians as Hywel Bennet, Dan O’Herlihy, Anthony Steel, Roland Curran, Ingrid Pitt, a very young Daniel Day-Lewis and, er, Sting as a gay angel.  Yes, I can safely say the days when the BBC would be so bold as to spend money on an audacious and willfully headache-inducing project like Artemis 81 are long past.

 

Containing 13 stories dedicated to the ‘divine and the damned, the celestial and the unholy’, the 285-page Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons can be purchased on kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

From wikipedia.org / © BBC

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Rab Foster lights the way

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the nom de plume by which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new story published in issue 177 of Swords & Sorcery Magazine.  Entitled The Illuminators, it features a recurring character of mine, the swordswoman Cranna the Crimson, who’s basically a big gobby redhead who takes no shit from anybody, least of all from male chauvinists.  In The Illuminators, Cranna is hired to escort a group of pilgrims across a city, at night, to a graveyard.  Ostensibly, the pilgrims’ purpose is to say prayers in memory of some fellow-believers who are buried in the graveyard – but inevitably, this being a sword-and-sorcery story, their real purpose proves to be a darker one.

 

The Illuminators owes a lot to a wonderful essay called On Thud and Blunder (1978) by the late science fiction and fantasy author Poul Anderson, which you can read here.  First, Anderson addresses the tendency of writers of sword-and-sorcery and heroic-fantasy fiction, up until the late 1970s at least, to base the imaginary settings of their stories on pre-industrial European societies that’d existed in history: ‘often as a mishmash of Roman Empire, Dark Ages, and high Middle Ages’, though ‘with a bit of Pharaonic Egypt, Asian nomadism, and so forth on the fringes.’

 

He then castigates many of those writers for not creating a setting ‘which, however thaumaturgical, makes sense,’ and describes how the realities of pre-industrial European life – political structures, labour, religion, literacy, travel by land and sea, disease, warfare, weaponry, horses, hand-to-hand combat – were very different from what’s usually depicted in fantasy writing.  To take just one example: “Nobody in his right mind would grab a sword two-handed, raise it over his head, and chop straight down, exposing his belly all that while.”

 

Something that struck me especially was Anderson’s observation about pre-industrial cities after dark: “People who have experienced blackouts will tell you that a nighted city without the modern invention of lights is black.  With walls shutting off most of the sky — especially along narrow medieval streets — it is far gloomier that any open field.  You’d grope your way, unless you had a torch or lantern (and then you’d better have an armed guard).”  That gave me the idea of having Cranna work for a business, in a medieval-style city, that provides escorts for travelers in the city’s streets after dark.  The escorts carry torches and are armed, thus providing both illumination and security.

 

I also took on board Anderson’s comments about the cleanliness, or lack of it, of pre-industrial streets.  “Furthermore, those lanes were open sewers; in many places, stepping stones went down the middle because of that.  Despite sanitary measures, metropolitan streets as late as about 1900 were often uncrossable simply because of horse droppings.  Graveyards stank too: one reason why incense was used in church services.”

 

In fact, the city that appears in The Illuminators is inspired by one I’m very familiar with, Edinburgh.  The Scottish capital earned itself the nickname of ‘Auld Reekie’, first of all because of the smoke it produced and then, as the meaning of ‘reek’ changed from ‘smoky’ to ‘stinky’, because of its malodorousness.  My imaginary city even has a lake below its slopes, which one character describes as a ‘cesspit’ because of all the sewage and filth that’s oozed down those slopes into it.  That corresponds to the Nor Loch, the body of badly-polluted water that used to exist at the bottom of the northern slopes of Edinburgh’s Auld Toon – the site of the Nor Loch is now occupied by Waverley Station and Princes Street Gardens.

 

For the month of November, you can read The Illuminators here, while the main page of Swords & Sorcery Magazine can be accessed here.

 

From wikipedia.org

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2026

 

 

For the past month, in keeping with it being the season of Halloween, I’ve been putting spooky and horror-related entries on this blog.  Well, today is October 31st, 2026 – Halloween itself.  As is my custom, I will celebrate the occasion with a post where I talk about ten pieces of creepy or scary artwork that have caught my eye since Halloween last year.  Incidentally, the photographs above are of the façade, at the moment, of a house in the Singaporean street where I live.  The folk there seem to really love Halloween.

 

First, to get you in the mood, here’s a vintage American Halloween card featuring some impish-looking demons and some pumpkin lanterns that disconcertingly possess real eyes and mouths.  According to the Public Domain Review, “Halloween and picture postcards have a shared history, and both captured the anglophone imagination at the turn of the twentieth century.  As the October 31st festival began to emerge in its modern guise thanks, in part, to an influx of immigrants from the British Isles in the United States, picture postcards entered their so-called ‘golden era’, ca. 1905–1915.  Rarely seen or used in the US before 1893, an estimated 900 million postcards had been mailed two decades later.”

 

From publicdomainpictures.net

 

If you find the smiles on those pumpkins unsettling, brace yourself for the smile in the picture that’s coming next.  It’s a detail from a leaf of the Hungarian-Anjou Legendary, an illustrated 14th-century, Latin-language manuscript about the lives of 58 saints.  This leaf, which now resides at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, provides information on St Bartholomew, including information on his grisly fate.  Reportedly, the Armenian prince Astyages flayed him alive.  Because of this, Christian art often depicts Saint Bartholomew as carrying around his own, removed skin – see his appearance in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536-41) or the very anatomical statue of him by Marco d’Agrate.

 

But the Hungarian-Anjou Legendary detail is the most gruesome depiction of him I’ve seen.  As I’ve said, it’s the grin on the unfortunate saint’s face that makes it truly disturbing (though it doesn’t help that his freshly sliced-off face is hanging down at the side).  I suppose if you’d just had your face flayed off, you wouldn’t have much choice about grinning either.  By the way, it seems something of a sick joke that Bartholomew ended up as the patron saint of, among other people, tanners.

 

From the Morgan Library and Museum

 

Also religious-themed is the following work from Italian artist (and accomplished freestyle wrestler) Paolo Girardi, who has a lengthy entry in the Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives website because of the artwork he’s done for many heavy metal bands – most prolifically for the Colombian thrash-and-black-metal band Inquisition and the awesomely-named Italian black-and-death-metal one Blasphemophagher.  This particularly striking example of Girardi’s talents is one I’ve seen on Pinterest, Reddit and TikTok but I can’t find its name.  As far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to be artwork for an album cover.  What to make of it?  I interpret it as representing a madman’s dream of the apocalypse, with his head opening spectacularly above his (noticeably Christ-like) face to reveal a bubbling hellscape where there rampages the seven-headed beast from the Book of Revelation.

 

From imgur.com / © Paolo Girardi

 

Girardi’s dragon-like seven-headed beast puts me in mind of King Ghidorah, the dragon-like three-headed kaiju – giant monsters in Japanese cinema that specialise in demolishing cities – who’s regarded as the deadliest foe to have faced Godzilla, the greatest of all kaiju.  Godzilla is having yet another moment, thanks to the recent release of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero (in which, I understand, King Ghidorah also features).  During the course of countless movies since the 1950s, there’s been times when Godzilla has come dangerously close to being cuddly and domesticated – he’s acquired a voice (in 1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan) and become a dad (in 1967’s Son of Godzilla) and his battles with other kaiju have frequently sunk to the comical level of a Big-Daddy-versus-Giant-Haystacks pro-wrestling bout.  It’s sometimes been easy to forget he was originally meant to be massively dangerous and frightening.

 

But massively dangerous and frightening is how Godzilla looks in the next picture I’ve chosen.  It comes from a four-issue, comic-book mini-series appropriately called The Horror of Godzilla, which debuted in July this year.  It’s drawn by the excellent Australian artist Tristan Jones, whose previous work has involved other well-known cultural properties such as Alien, Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Perhaps most intriguingly, he’s illustrated a comic-book prequel to the 1997 Sam Neill space-horror movie Event Horizon.

 

© IDW Publishing / Tristan Jones

 

I’ve just said that Tristan Jones has worked in the universe of the Alien movies.  That brings me to my next pick, which belongs to the first Alien-related artwork I ever saw.  It’s a picture from the 64-page graphic-novel adaptation of the 1979 original Alien film directed by Ridley Scott, Alien: The Illustrated Story, which was drawn by Walt Simonson, written by Archie Goodwin and published in 1979 too.  I never owned it, but I remember spending half-an-hour in a branch of the (now-defunct) Scottish bookshop John Menzies, perusing a copy of it – and grimacing at the book’s violent frames, which had a volcanic level of bloodiness, far more than what was actually shown in the film.  This frame exemplifies Simonson in all his sanguinary enthusiasm.  And yes, it depicts the film’s most notorious scene, wherein the baby alien decides to vacate John Hurt’s chest.

 

© Heavy Metal Communications / Titan Books / Walt SImonson

 

The Catalonian artist Manuel Perez Clemente, who painted under the name of Sanjulian and who sadly passed away in the middle of this month, did some film-related work too, for example, a cover of the venerable and pioneering horror-movie magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-83).  However, Sanjulian is probably best-known for his work on the horror comic-strip magazines put out by Warren Publishing (who also published Famous Monsters) – Creepy (1964-83), Eerie (1968-83) and Vampirella (1969-present).  I don’t know where the following item originates – I came across it on the website for DMR Books, in a tribute to Sanjulian they posted following his death.  It’s a cemetery-set monster-mash that showcases the gloriously pulpy style of much of his art.  Incidentally, the skull-faced miscreant lurking at the picture’s bottom looks a lot like Dr Anton Phibes, the character played by Vincent Price in the movies The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) and Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972).

 

From DMR Books

 

Speaking of Vincent Price, the great horror-movie star appeared in several films in the early-to-mid-1960s that were based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and directed by Roger Corman.  These included the 1963 movie The Raven, which had a made-up story about dueling magicians (from the pen of Richard Matheson) with the title of Poe’s most famous poem cheekily tagged onto it.  At least during the film Price got to recite the poem in his impeccably mellifluous voice.

 

Anyway, here’s one of 24 illustrations that the celebrated 19th-century French artist Gustav Dore drew for the poem The Raven shortly before his death in 1883.  It’s inspired by the lines “…I stood there wondering, fearing / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before…”  Dore’s imagining of the dreams no mortal dared to dream before involves the Angel of Death sitting atop the globe amid the mess of his robes and scythe.  Strictly speaking, the raven hasn’t yet appeared in the poem’s narrative, but you can spy him flying furtively past.

 

From poestories.com

 

Also in 1963, Roger Corman found time to make X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, about a scientist (Ray Milland) who develops eye-drops that can expand the range of human vision, treats his own eyes with them and finds himself able to see deeper and deeper into the fabric of reality.  First, he can see through people’s clothes, which is a bit sleazy.  Then he can see through skin and flesh and identify internal injuries, which is medically useful.  However, by the movie’s end, he’s able to see into the centre of the universe, where he observes ‘an eye that sees us all’, which is definitely freaky.  (The hallucinogenic script was by Ray Russell.)

 

The following picture by the late Austrian artist Rudolph Sieber-Lonati reminds me of that ‘eye that sees us all’.  It’s an outstanding piece of visual cosmic horror – cosmic horror being a school of macabre writing that emphasizes the puniness and insignificance of human beings whilst suggesting there are vast and terrifying forces in the universe that could destroy us all in a split-second if the notion took them.

 

From facebook.com/CuthuluCo

 

From cosmic horror to folk horror, which Wikipedia describes as “a subgenre of horror film and horror fiction that uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding.  Typical elements include a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition, folk religion, paganism, sacrifice and the dark aspects of nature.”

 

This is a handsome illustration called Witches’ Sabbath, which I discovered on Etsy.  There’s always something darkly jolly about paintings and drawings of witches heading to the sabbath – they have a look of anticipation on their faces that tells you they’re planning to really party and have a good time.  Maddeningly, I can’t find any details on where this piece came from.  The accompanying blurb on Etsy claims it “was originally commissioned by the band Widow from Italy. It shows the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone flying, performing a ritual and reminding the viewer of their own mortality.”  I know there’s an Italian band called Void Widow, but I don’t think this is connected with them.

 

From etsy.com 

 

For my tenth picture, I’ve selected the cover illustration for a Japanese edition of a collection of stories by the English writer Algernon Blackwood, which all feature Blackwood’s psychic investigator John Silence.  The artist responsible is the remarkable surrealist and fantasy illustrator Tadami Yamada; and the scene depicted is from the story Ancient Sorceries, wherein a hapless English traveller finds himself trapped in a remote French town whose inhabitants turn out to be… not werewolves, but were-cats.  As far as I can remember, the story doesn’t take place at Halloween, but the sight of Yamada’s grey-blue cats levitating through the moonlit air gives it a pleasing Halloween-y vibe.

 

From kokusho.co.jp / © Kokusho Kankōkai / Tadami Yamada

 

Oh yes…  Here’s an extra, eleventh picture in recognition of the fact that this Halloween marks exactly one century since the death of the illusionist and escapologist Harry Houdini.  He died on October 31st, 1926, from peritonitis – possibly caused by appendicitis, possibly caused by blows to the abdomen he’d received nine days earlier.  I love the posters advertising the shows of the great magicians of the early 20th century, like Howard Thurston and Harry Kellar, which were adorned with ghosts, demons and skeletons, hinting that the magicians’ powers weren’t necessarily stage illusions and might be linked to the supernatural and occult.

 

This poster for a Houdini show at the Lyceum Theatre in Paterson, New Jersy, however, restricts the supernatural stuff to a few spectral spirits billowing out of some wanly-coloured flames.  Houdini was a total sceptic about spiritualism and the paranormal – as the poster’s wording says, “Do spirits return?  Houdini says no – and proves it” – so maybe the lack of flamboyance is deliberate.

 

From wildabouthoudini.com

 

Anyway, I wish you all a better Halloween than Harry Houdini had a century ago.  Happy Halloween!

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Another Edith gets eerie: Edith Wharton’s ghost stories

 

© Penguin

 

When it comes to the literary oeuvre of Edith Wharton, all I’m familiar with is her 1911 novella Ethan Frome, which I read many years ago.  I enjoyed it and resolved to read more of her works but, somehow, never got around to it.

 

At least, I did see Martin Scorsese’s 1993 movie adaptation of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence (1920).  I enjoyed this too, though many other people seemed not to.  People familiar with the novel (including my wife) disliked it because of liberties it allegedly took with the characterisations.  Fans of Scorsese’s usual movies didn’t like it because, presumably, it didn’t feature any montages of Joe Pesci cooking and eating pasta, Joe Pesci being loving to his elderly mom, Joe Pesci psychopathically beating and murdering the shit out of people, etc., all set to the music of the Rolling Stones.

 

I have, over the years, heard people talk enthusiastically about some ghost stories Edith Wharton penned during her career.  Her writing ghost stories didn’t surprise me – plenty of literary greats, including Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry James, happily wrote ghostly, scary and macabre fiction until the genre fell out of critical favour and gained an unsavoury reputation in the snobby 20th century.  Anyway, not only did I generally resolve to read more of Wharton’s work, but I particularly resolved to read her ghost stories.

 

Recently, I read a collection called Pomegranate Seed, published in 2025 by Penguin, which gathers together seven of her supernatural stories.  The collection takes its title from the opening story, which is about a young woman, Charlotte, who marries a widower, Kenneth, and becomes increasingly concerned that he’s is having an affair.  This is on account of Kenneth receiving letters written by a female hand, which mysteriously arrive without stamps or return addresses and which leave him in a visible state of agitation.  It transpires that the letters are ghostly dispatches from his first wife, Elsie, who, even in death, is unwilling to relinquish her hold over him.  The trope of a new wife struggling against the spirit of an old, dead wife for possession of her husband has been used several times, most impressively, in my opinion, in Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938).  But Pomegranate Seed is an agreeable enough piece.

 

Incidentally, the title Pomegranate Seed comes from the Greek myth of the goddess Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, who was tricked into remaining in the Underworld for part of the year when its king, Hades, got her to taste pomegranate seeds – ‘the food of the Underworld’.  Persephone’s yearly sojourn in that melancholy realm coincides with the season of winter in the land of the living.  A picture of an overripe, seed-oozing pomegranate fills the cover of this 2025 Penguin collection – and makes the book look as if it’s an anthology of body-horror stories.

 

A troubled marriage and a female ghost also figure in The Lady’s Maid’s Bell, and there’s a similar premise whereby the central character, again a woman, is a newcomer in a household with sinister secrets.  Here, though, the character is a maid, recovering from typhoid fever, who’s employed in a mansion house on the Hudson River.  What causes the trouble in the troubled marriage isn’t a ghost this time, but an all-too-alive abusive husband.  Meanwhile, it’s suggested that the apparition – “a thin woman with a white face, and a dark gown and apron” – is trying to protect the beleaguered wife.

 

More flippant is Mr Jones, wherein an aristocrat called Lady Jane Lynke inherits an estate called the Bells – “the beautiful old place that had belonged to the Lynkes of Thudney for something like six hundred years” – and then finds her every request about improving the estate defied and thwarted by a very elderly and thrawn caretaker called Mr Jones.  The odd thing is that she only ever hears about Mr Jones from the staff, and never actually meets him, which leads to a slightly predictable denouement.

 

In Afterward, the main characters also acquire an old house – they purchase it rather than inherit it, being a couple who’ve recently ‘come into money’.  The house is said to be haunted, though with the puzzling proviso that nobody who encounters the ghost realises it’s a ghost until afterwards: “Not til long long afterward.”  A ghost appears and, accordingly, neither of the couple grasps what it is until later.  Grimly, when they do realise this, they also find out that the ghost is linked to the underhand way they acquired their fortune in the first place.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

Kerfol creates a different kind of atmosphere in its opening pages, a straight-up weird one.  The narrator visits a historical pile in Brittany with a view to buying it. He finds no humans on the premises but is followed around by half-a-dozen strangely inscrutable dogs.  This first section of Kerfol put me in mind of the stories of Robert Aickman, which were unfailingly odd and unsettling but rarely offered much explanation about what was going on.  However, Wharton then proceeds to do the very un-Aickman-like thing of explaining what those eerie dogs were and why there were there.

 

Less explanation is given in her story All Souls’ and it’s all the more effective because of that.  A widow called Sara Clayburn, living on an estate in the wilds of Connecticut, has an accident one winter’s day and severely sprains her ankle.  This happens shortly after she encounters a strange woman whilst out on her daily walk – when she asks her, “You’re going to the house?”, she gets an ambiguous answer: “Only to see one of the girls.”  And then the woman walks away.

 

Sara becomes bedridden and has a long, harrowing and possibly imaginary experience where, for a day and a half, it seems that her servants have vanished and she’s entirely alone in the house.  The story is a nicely paranoid one where, while you read it, you wonder where Wharton is going with it all.  Has Sara slipped into some sort of parallel reality?  Are the servants involved in a sinister plot against her?  And is there significance – occult significance, perhaps – in the mysterious woman she met before her accident?  All Souls’ is made more uncomfortable by the knowledge that this was the last piece of fiction Wharton ever wrote.  She died four months after completing it in 1937.

 

But the best thing in this collection, I feel, is Bewitched, which uses the bleak and unforgiving landscapes of wintertime New England to propagate an atmosphere of genuine dread.  Prudence Rutledge, a stern, dour matriarch at a remote farm, summons three neighbours to her farmhouse and informs them that her husband Saul is having regular trysts with another woman, Aura Brand, by the edge of a nearby pond.  But this is more than a case of marital infidelity – Aura has been dead for over a year and Saul is increasingly drained and distracted when he returns from these trysts, as if something is feeding on him.  The three men resolve to take action.  One them is obliged to because he is Sylvester Brand, the late Aura’s father.

 

Published in 1926, Bewitched made me think of a spooky tale written a year later, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space.  Okay, in some ways, the two stories couldn’t be more different – in Bewitched, the horror is psychological and possibly supernatural, while in Lovecraft’s one it’s cosmic in origin and is terrifying unearthly.  Also, Bewitched is all about the characters, whereas characterisation is something Lovecraft has little interest in.  But both are about agricultural folk who are trying to eke a living in countryside that frequently is – or it becomes – hostile to their efforts, and who come up against frightening forces that their lives until now have given them no understanding of and no preparation for.

 

I especially like how the possible ghost-vampire being in Bewitched doesn’t follow the norms of conventional fictional and cinematic vampires.  Wharton wrote it at a time when these norms hadn’t been cemented yet in popular culture.  In that way, Bewitched is reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s celebrated 1932 movie Vampyr, another work that does its own thing with the vampire legend.

 

If this collection has a fault, it’s that Bewitched comes second in the order of stories, with the result that some of the ones that follow it feel slightly anti-climactic in comparison.  However, the book concludes with All Souls’, so at least it finishes strongly.

 

From wikipedia.org / The American Academy of Arts and Letters

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A splatter of life and death

 

© Plan B Entertainment / Mubi

 

Two days ago, on October 26th, my wife and I received an early Halloween treat.  The 37th Singapore International Film Festival showed Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), the new meta-horror movie from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, at the Gallery Theatre in Singapore’s National Museum.  We got tickets for the event before it sold out.

 

This is Schoenbrun’s third movie, following We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), which I haven’t seen, and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which I did see recently while it had a tenure on Singaporean Netflix.  It took me two attempts to get into I Saw the TV Glow, but when I adjusted to its wavelength it really impressed me.  It’s a haunting and melancholic film about a pair of alienated high school kids (Justice Smith and Jack Haven) and their relationship with a kids’ horror TV show that, ultimately, causes reality to blur into fantasy.  When adulthood arrives and reality fails to blur anymore for one of them (Smith), the consequences are tragic.  The film has phantasmagorical qualities that sometimes make it feel like a David Lynch movie – if, crucially, David Lynch had grown up in the 1990s rather than the l1950s and 1960s.  And its ending is genuinely sad.

 

I certainly didn’t feel sad after watching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which I found a joyous and life-affirming, and very funny, experience.  Crudely, it could be summarised as 1950’s Sunset Boulevard transplanted into the universe of the Friday the 13th movies (1980-2009).  A very Friday the 13th-like horror franchise called Camp Miasma, wherein countless horny teenagers were bloodily slain by a killer called Little Death (I Saw the TV Glow’s Jack Haven with a box-shaped vent on their head and wielding a humungous spear), made pots of money in the 1980s.  Now a studio wants to reboot the franchise but, alas, the movies are today regarded as problematic.  The character of Little Death, dismissed at the time as a ‘freak’, is in modern parlance a transgender person.

 

To handle the project, and to cover their arses, the studio executives commission a young, queer director called Kris Wiliams (Hannah Einbinder), previously responsible for an arthouse film that was a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) told ‘from the perspective of the shower curtain’.  They presume she’ll make it woke enough for modern sensibilities.

 

The earnest, nerdish but very likeable Kris has the idea of casting in her new version of Camp Miasma the actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who’d played the ‘final girl’ in the original movie of the series.  Billy has become a recluse and bizarrely lives in the huddle of old summer-camp buildings where that movie was filmed four decades earlier.  So, Kris goes to visit her and reality, as in I Saw the TV Glow, begins to blur…

 

Schoenbrun is obviously a big fan of the 1980s slasher movies that inspired the film.  In the opening-credits sequence, there’s a montage of Camp Miasma merchandising and artefacts, including video cassettes of the first movie and its (increasingly shite) sequels.  As with Friday the 13th, the sequels include a third instalment filmed in 3D, one called The Final Chapter and a subsequent one called A New Beginning, one where Little Death goes into outer space (Miasma 3000), and one where he tangles with a monster from a rival franchise (Little Death vs Sleepy Man).

 

© Crystal Lake Entertainment / New Line Cinema

 

Details elsewhere in the film also indicate how knowledgeable Schoenbrun is about the slasher school of cinema.  Billy mentions the unpleasantness of auditioning for the 1981’s The Burning (which was produced by a young Harvey Weinstein).  Kris refers to a gutter-press rumour that once circulated about Jamie Lee Curtis, star of the Halloween (1978-2022) franchise.  And Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela is alluded to – she appeared in the second and third entries in the Sleepaway Camp series in 1988 and 1989.

 

All this makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma intriguing because Schoenbrun is transfeminine and non-binary and uses the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’.  And notoriously, those old slasher movies that Schoenbrun is a fan of frequently used gender non-conformity and transgender identity as cheap ways to explain their killers being murderously loopy.  See the first Sleepaway Camp movie in 1983, or Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) – which, despite its dodgy gender politics, is in my opinion the best slasher movie of the 1980s – or of course, the granddaddy of them all, Psycho.

 

I started watching the film wondering what it would do with those weary and mean-spirited old tropes.  As it turned out, Schoenbrun not only dismantles them but reassembles them and makes something wonderfully fresh out of them.  In the process, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma reclaims the slasher sub-genre for an audience that in the past was too often demonised by it.

 

One particular joy of the film is its performances.  Hannah Einbinder makes an engaging central character, clearly a stand-in for Schoenbrun, and sells the idea of somebody fascinated by the slasher sub-genre while simultaneously troubled by its misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.  But the film belongs to Gillian Anderson, whose portrayal of Billy Presley is majestic.  I’ve read that as a teenager Schoenbrun was a big fan of The X-files (1993-2002, 2016-18), where Anderson found fame playing FBI agent Dana Scully.  So, getting her to perform in their movie must feel like a dream come true.

 

Incidentally, another unwelcome trope in cinema is that of a sad, mad and possibly dangerous female movie star living as a recluse, past her prime and losing her looks.  It’s sexist – though if nothing else, it highlights the sexism of the industry around it.  Gloria Swanson, who played the washed-out actress Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, was only 50 when the film was made; whereas nobody questioned the right of her co-star William Holden to still be a leading man in 1969’s The Wild Bunch when he was in his fifties.  But there’s none of that pathetic-ness about Anderson’s character.  Yes, she’s a bit odd at times;  but she’s also bold, funny, charismatic, sensual and empathetic.  Generally, she’s a joy every time she’s on screen.

 

Elsewhere in the cast, my wife was delighted to spot Kevin McDonald playing a clerk at a hotel near Billy’s summer-camp abode – McDonald is a member of the Canadian comedy team The Kids in the Hall, whose 1988-95 TV sketch show she’s a big fan of.  Another welcome face is that of Patrick Fischler, playing a scary gas-station attendant.  Fischler made a small but devastating appearance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) as the nightmare-haunted man who decides to check out what’s really behind the diner he keeps dreaming about and triggers the most frightening moment in the film – actually, for my money, it’s the most frightening moment in Lynch’s career.

 

© Sante Fe Productions / New World Pictures

 

I’ll admit, though, to having a few misgivings when I sat down to watch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma because I’m definitely not a fan of 1980s slasher movies.  I’d already become a horror fan by the end of the 1970s and, for me, the 1970s were the golden age of the genre.  During that decade, you got such classics as The Devils (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Exorcist (1973), Deliverance (1974), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Carrie (1976), Jaws (1976), Suspiria (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Alien (1979).  So I was less than enthused when the 1980s arrived and all-of-a-sudden most horror filmmakers seemed interested only in making films wherein dummkopf teenagers get slaughtered by figures in Halloween masks and hockey masks.

 

For me, the biggest crime of 1980s slashers like He Knows You’re Alone (1980) or Prom Night (1980) or Happy Birthday to Me (1981) or The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was their stultifying lack of imagination.  Any display of imagination in the slasher sub-genre seemed to begin and end in the film that kickstarted it, John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) – itself a 1970s movie.

 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma contains a number of scenes taken from the ‘original’ Camp Miasma movies of the 1980s.  Some are stylised re-imaginings of them that are operatic in their gusto and feature extraordinary geysers of blood.  But other scenes are meant to be ‘authentic’ ones, which Schoenbrun stages with a convincing, desperate, no-budget 1980s tackiness.  I did end up thinking that if I’d been a few years younger at the time, and less in thrall to 1970s horror movies, and the 1980s slashers had seemed like ‘forbidden fruit’ to me – films I was officially too young to watch and I only occasionally saw, furtively, through my fingers, on scratchy VCR recordings – I might have developed an affection for them too.  And today I’d enjoy them at least in a so-bad-they’re-good way.  (The reality is that I find them so bad they’re annoying.)

 

Incidentally, I was delighted that Schoenbrun included in their film a reference to 1983’s Videodrome, a horror movie far better than its slasher contemporaries, made by a genuinely visionary filmmaker, David Cronenberg.  As an actor, Cronenberg was game enough to appear in Jason X (2000), the entry in the Friday the 13th franchise where, yes, Jason Voorhees goes into outer space.

 

Lastly, it was a pleasure to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at the Singapore International Festival, surrounded by an enthusiastic and appreciative audience.  Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy the film and gave it a much-deserved round of applause at the end.

 

© Compass International Pictures / Aquarius Releasing

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Black magic and black ops

 

© Cork University Press

 

A few posts ago, I mentioned the Satanic panic that seized Northern Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.  As Halloween is nearly upon us, I thought I would republish the following, which is a slightly revised version of something I wrote a decade ago, after I’d read Richard Jenkins’s book on the topic, Black Magic and Bogeymen (2014).

 

When I was eight years old, I lived in a tiny village near the border between Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh in Northern Ireland.  Thinking back, I suspect that when my neighbours saw me they’d whisper, “Look… There’s the most gullible child in the village.”

 

They probably thought I was gullible because I readily believed any old guff people told me, especially relating to things that, scientifically speaking, didn’t exist – i.e., manifestations of the supernatural.

 

I was a sucker for ghost stories.  For instance, an uncle once told me about the Cooneen Ghost – a tale involving a local family who supposedly were tormented by poltergeist-type knockings on the doors and windows of their house.  When they tried to escape the entity by emigrating to North America, it travelled with them.  The phantom knockings continued in their cabin on board the ship and then at their house in the New World.  After hearing that, I lived in dread of hearing similar knockings on the doors and windows of my house.

 

I also believed that fairies were real because a girl in my primary-school class had assured me that once her mother had been in the family’s stick-house (Northern Irish for ‘wood-shed’) when she’d heard crying sounds coming from a block of wood.  Presumably these were made by a fairy whose home was in the tree that’d been chopped down for the timber.

 

I even believed in banshees for a while because an older boy spun me a yarn about how, one night long ago, his father had heard a hideous screeching noise out in the darkness; and very soon afterwards, someone well-known to his father died unexpectedly.

 

So you can imagine my alarm one day when a couple of my primary-school classmates started talking about devil worshippers being active not only in Northern Ireland, but in the town of Enniskillen a few miles along the road from us.  They talked about a family in Enniskillen who, according to rumour, drew all the curtains in their house as soon as it got dark and then spent the night performing black-magic rituals.  They described the carcasses of freshly-sacrificed goats that’d been discovered beside the River Erne in Enniskillen with their hearts removed.  Most alarmingly, they claimed a child, about our age, had been abducted by devil worshippers and later been found dead and cut into pieces.  I swallowed every word of this and took it as gospel truth.

 

Talking of the gospel, I’ll say in my defence that I belonged to a fairly religious community of Northern Irish Protestants.  We were a paradox.  On one hand, we prided ourselves on being rational and not superstitious, seemingly unlike the Roman Catholics, with their talk about saints, visions and weeping statues; but on the other hand we believed everything that was said to have happened in the Bible because it was the Word of God.  And since the Bible said the devil existed – he did exist.  Our local clergyman confirmed this.  I remember him telling us sternly during a Sunday sermon that if you believed in the existence of God, you had to believe in the existence of the devil too.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

So if the devil was real, surely it followed that evil people who worshipped him by slaughtering humans and animals were also real?

 

During the decades since, I often wondered how my primary-school classmates got hold of those grisly stories about devil worship in early-1970s Northern Ireland.  Well, I finally found the answer when I read Black Magic and Bogeymen, a 2014 book by Richard Jenkins, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield and a one-time undergraduate at Queen’s University in Belfast.  This investigates a “wave of rumours about black magic, Satanism, animal sacrifice and child abduction” that “swept across the north of Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.”

 

According to Jenkins, “(b)etween 5th August and mid-December 1973, sixty-five items about witchcraft and black magic appeared in the mainstream press north and south of the Irish border: news reports, features, editorials, letters to the editor, church reports, and what appeared to be religious announcements…  Most of the reporting concerned the east of the province: Belfast and counties Antrim, Armagh and Down…  The reports peaked between mid-October and the third week in November, clustering around Hallowe’en.”

 

At their height, these reports seemed to reflect genuine panic in parts of Northern Ireland – adults concerned that their children might be kidnapped and sacrificed, and children generally scared witless.  (I was one of them.)  As Jenkins observes, children were also among the worst culprits for spreading the rumours.  They “seem to have actively elaborated or invented stories about bad people doing bad things” and were “likely to have contributed to the meagre ‘tangible evidence’ of supposed witchcraft and black magic practices.”

 

Jenkins explores the many factors likely to have fostered these stories of devil worship, black magic and ‘witchcraft’.  (My apologies to any Wiccans or other practitioners of white or pagan magic reading this, but to 1970s Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics, witchcraft was devil worship and vice-versa: end of.)  He describes the heightened interest in the occult in Western culture at the time, signified by such things as the sensational black-magic novels of Dennis Wheatley and high-profile movies like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973).  He devotes a chapter too to “the supernatural lore that was part of the enchanted world-views that could be encountered in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s” and no doubt made some people believe the rumours more readily – supernatural lore that includes not just the ghosts, fairies and banshees that so worried my eight-year-old self, but also traditions of faith and folk healing and a great enthusiasm for celebrating Hallowe’en.

 

Obviously, something that casts a huge shadow over Jenkins’ subject matter is the Northern Irish Troubles.  In their fourth year when the rumours began, the Troubles had already claimed an appalling toll – 467 people killed in 1972 alone.  Jenkins discusses how “social conflicts may be symbolised and re-worked in supernatural imagery and stories, not least in threats such as witchcraft and fears of spiritual jeopardy”.  The Troubles figured in the rumours in more tangible ways too, for example, through tales of teenagers getting embroiled in the occult after “trying to contact the souls of those killed in the Troubles, using Ouija boards or other methods.”

 

Jenkins attributes considerable blame for the scare to the province’s local newspapers, which generally reported the stories with ‘very modest facts’ that were ‘inflated and misrepresented’, ‘framed with unconnected material’ and ‘ornamented by apparently authoritative, if somewhat imprecise, anonymous information.’  Admittedly, those newspapers were under massive pressure.  A few years earlier their main stories had been about ‘livestock sales’ and ‘the Women’s Institute’ but now they were regularly covering ‘intimidation, murder and mayhem.’  Thus, standards weren’t high among their beleaguered journalists.

 

© Carrickfergus Advertiser

 

Fascinatingly, another possible culprit identified is the British Army, which depending on your political viewpoint was then in the province as protectors or oppressors, as peacekeepers or occupiers.  Jenkins provides evidence suggesting the army was happy to stir the pot of black-magic rumours.   It conducted ‘black propaganda’ operations promoting the belief that, yes, diabolical things were going on and religious and / or superstitious Northern Irish parents should keep their offspring off the streets at night.  On those streets, they were actually unlikely to tangle with devil worshippers; but they could tangle with paramilitaries or the security forces.

 

Jenkins prints an interview conducted in 1993 with the legendary Intelligence officer and ‘psychological warfare’ expert Colin Wallace, who claims he and his men went around Northern Irish properties mocking them up with magic circles, esoteric symbols, blood, bones, candles and inverted crosses to make it look like unspeakable rituals had taken place in them.

 

Tragically, one element in the stories was real – the child who, my classmates had told me, had been ‘cut to pieces’.   Jenkins devotes a chapter to the murder of ten-year-old Brian McDermott.  Brian was reported missing from his home in east Belfast at the start of September 1973 and his remains, ‘burned, mutilated and partially dismembered’, were discovered in the River Lagan a week later.  Although the police dismissed the idea that the murder was the result of some occult ritual, Jenkins notes how “a ‘black magic’ interpretation of the murder of Brian McDermott became an established tale of the Northern Irish Troubles.”  Officially the crime remains unsolved.  According to the journalist Martin Dillon, British Army Intelligence suspected the killer as being John McKeague (himself killed in 1982), one of the conflict’s most notorious and feared loyalist terrorists.  However, the fact that McKeague was in prison at the time of the murder casts doubt on his culpability.

 

Richard Jenkins conducts his investigations with academic thoroughness, analysing certain stories and rumours from different perspectives as he goes through the various actors in the drama – the Troubles, religion, superstitious belief, the media, the army, etc.  His approach is exhaustive and may seem exhausting to the casual reader.  However, I found Black Magic and Bogeymen fascinating – well, I was there at the time – and it’s surely the last word on the subject.

 

Returning to my own experience, I recall being asked in December 1973 if I wanted to go to the Christmas pantomime being held at Enniskillen High School and telling my parents flatly that no, I didn’t, because Enniskillen was full of witches and devil worshippers.  My Dad went ballistic at me for believing such ‘a pack of nonsense’ and then demanded to know who’d told me those stories.  I gave him the names of my guilty classmates.  “More fool you,” he raged, “for listening to them slabbering eejits!”  And that was that.  I stopped worrying and agreed to go to the pantomime.  Somehow, that angry burst of rationality from my Dad cured me of my fears.

 

Surprisingly, decades later, I remember my Dad – who originally hailed from Country Cavan in the Irish Republic – having a whiskey with an old Irish friend.  The pair of them started talking about their childhood in the Irish countryside and how, once the sun went down, their family members would tell ghost stories.

 

“I’m not kidding,” marvelled my Dad.  “After dark, you’d be too terrified to step outside the house.”

 

“I think,” said his friend, “that was why they told us them stories.”

 

Which proves I wasn’t the first member of the family to be troubled by tales of ghosts, fairies, banshees, black magic and bogeymen.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions / 20th Century Fox

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Edith gets eerie: E. Nesbit’s ghost stories

 

© Greyladies

 

Until recently my single point of reference for the English writer E. (Edith) Nesbit, who lived from 1858 to 1924, was her children’s book The Railway Children (1906).  I have memories of my primary school teacher, Mrs Atkinson, reading this book to us in instalments when I was eight or nine years old; and, later, I saw the 1970 film version of it, directed by Lionel Jeffries, on TV.

 

The bit of The Railway Children that’s always remained in my head comes from the film.  The three kids, played by Jenny Agutter, Sally Thomsett and Gary Warren, witness a landslide that buries a section of railway track and they have to warn an approaching train to slow and stop before it crashes cataclysmically into the rubble.  This necessitates Agutter and Thomsett stripping off their red bloomers and waving them like flags in the air.

 

I should say I was at an age where I was more interested in the landslide – I recall being spooked by Gary Warren exclaiming, “Look at that tree over there… Lord, it’s moving!” – than in the sight of Jenny Agutter, who’d later appear in Walkabout (1971), Equus (1977) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), and Sally Thomsett, who’d later appear in Straw Dogs (1971) and the popular TV sitcom Man about the House (1973-76), waving their brightly-coloured undergarments at a locomotive.

 

So, E. Nesbit was known to me as a children’s writer and as the author of one children’s book in particular.  But she also wrote adult literature, poetry and non-fiction, as well as being a founding member of that venerable British democratic-socialist organisation the Fabian Society, whose other early members included George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst.  Despite writing items such as Women and Socialism: from the Middle-Class Point of View and Women and Socialism: A Working Woman’s Point of View (both 1885), she was not a fan of women’s suffrage – according to her Wikipedia entry, “mainly, she claimed, because women could swing Tory, thus harming the Socialist cause.”

 

Meanwhile, her personal life was unpleasantly complicated and sometimes tragic.  Her first husband, Hubert Bland, was a philandering cad who sired three children with two other women while he was ostensibly married to Nesbit – Bernard Shaw observed that Bland had “simultaneously three wives, all of whom bore him children.”  Nesbit lost her father at the age of three, her only sibling when she was around 12, and a son when she was in her early forties.

 

I wasn’t familiar with her backstory when, a short time ago, I picked up a paperback collection of seven of her ghost stories.  If I’d known more about her, I might have been less surprised at what I read.  Nesbit’s tales of the supernatural aren’t the comfy, cosy ones you associate with her time and place, i.e., Victorian and Edwardian England, where there’s a popular image of well-heeled gentlemen and ladies assembling around a log-fire at Christmas-time, with glasses of port and sherry, for the purpose of mildly spooking each other by telling a ghostly ‘yarn’.  No, Nesbit’s stories have unexpected bite.

 

The opening  one in the collection, From the Dead, begins with some painful marital complications not wholly dissimilar to those Nesbit faced with Hubert Bland.  A maliciously forged letter causes the narrator to abandon his fiancé and marry someone else.  When he learns the letter was forged, he casts out his wife in disgust.  A change of heart sends him in search of her but, months later, when he finally locates her, he’s informed that she’s just died in childbirth.  There ensues a scene that put me in mind of the apparition near the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839).  The newborn child survives but the final line remarks sombrely: “It is four years old now, and it has never spoken and never smiled.”

 

John Charrington’s Wedding is more straightforward and traditional but it ends too on a downbeat note: “I saw her face.  Shall I ever forget it.  White, white, and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as I have never seen since, except in dreams.”

 

Then comes Man-Size in Marble, perhaps the most famous of Nesbit’s ghost stories.  It has a young couple moving into a cottage in the English countryside where they discover, nearby, an ancient Norman church containing the funerary statues of two cruel-looking knights.  The husband also hears a legend about how every Halloween – or Hallowe’en as it was back then – those statues come to life and stalk around the neighbourhood.  He declines to tell his wife of the legend for the patronising reason that she “was always nervous, as highly strung natures are, and I felt that these tales… might have made our home less dear to my wife.”  Incidentally, he has a habit of calling her ‘Pussy’ and ‘Puss cat’, which reminded me of Henrik Ibsen’s famous indictment of the patriarchy, his 1879 play A Doll’s House.  In that, the beleaguered heroine Nora has to tolerate a husband who insists on calling her ‘skylark’ and ‘songbird’.

 

Partly due to the husband keeping his wife in the dark about the sinister legend of the statues,  Man-Size in Marble has a grim denouement too.

 

© Adorable Media / BBC Film

 

In 2024, Man-Size in Marble was adapted for television by Mark Gatiss, who retitled it Woman of Stone.  This was broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Eve as an instalment in the channel’s revived A Ghost Story for Christmas franchise (1971-78 and 2005-present).  Now I like Gatiss generally, and I like a lot of his work, but I’m not a fan of his adaptations of classic ghost stories penned by the likes of M.R. James.  I think they’re too glossy and overcooked and, somehow, they miss the authenticity that made the originals effective.  Anyway, I haven’t watched his version of Man-Size in Marble.  E. Nesbit features in it as a character, supposedly…  Played by Celia Imrie, no less.

 

Next is The Ebony Frame, whose narrator retrieves an aged painting from a storeroom not because of its canvas, which is blackened beyond recognition, but because he wants to reuse its frame, the ebony one of the title.  He discovers that the blackened panel at the front never had a picture at all, because the frame actually contains two pictures, turned inwards, secured face-to-face.  One of them, he’s shocked to learn, is of “Myself – in a cavalier dress, ‘love-locks and all’!”  The other is of “a woman of the type of beauty beloved of Burne-Jones and Rossetti.”  The sealed-together portraits point to a forbidden love affair in the distant past, while the narrator’s likeness to the cavalier suggests he’s the man’s descendent or even reincarnation.  Predictably, he’s soon having frighteningly realistic dreams where the saucy Burne-Jones / Rossetti lady comes to him, keen to rekindle their romance.

 

Yes, The Ebony Frame is yet another haunted-painting story – it was first published in 1893, three years after Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray.  But I found the idea of the two concealed pictures ingenious.

 

At ten pages, The Mystery of the Semi-Detached is the shortest thing in the collection.  It differs from the other stories in that it’s a dark tale of premonition.

 

Also different is the penultimate entry, The Pavilion.  From the conversations of the main characters, two young men and two young women, we learn how the title structure is connected to “some story about a wizard or an alchemist or something, and it was burned down, and then they rebuilt it in its present style.”  It’s also engulfed by the stems and leaves of what’s said to be a Virginia creeper, though one person observes that it looks ‘more like a South American plant’.  And because “there have always been so many rabbits and weasels and things found dead near it”, the pavilion is reputed to be haunted.  A dare is made and the young men spend the night in the place.  Needless to say, the creeper proves to be more mobile than anyone had thought.  The Pavilion contains some unexpected character dynamics, which elevate it above the level of most killer-plants-at-large horror stories.

 

Lastly is The Shadow, perhaps the clammiest and most dread-inducing tale in the collection.  This begins with the afore-mentioned scenario of Victorians making themselves comfortable at Christmas-time to tell ghost stories – but then takes the reader to places where there are ghosts but the vibe is definitely not comfortable.  Following a festive dance, three young woman gather in a room and entertain themselves with spooky tales.  Eventually, they invite the housekeeper to join them and coax her into telling one, and get more than they bargained for.

 

The Shadow features an entity that’s a harbinger – or a bringer – of death and, as the title suggests, its appearance is dark and incorporeal: “Between us and the coffin, first grey, then black, it crouched an instant, then sank and liquefied – and was gathered together and drawn till it ran into the nearest shadow.  And the nearest shadow was the shadow of Mabel’s coffin.”  Ultimately, the housekeeper’s young audience discover that the thing in her story has entered their world as well.

 

To sum up, these tales present a bleak view of the supernatural.  They depict it as a hostile realm, with the humans who blunder into it having mostly unhappy or tragic fates.  Also, in a couple of cases, the foolish actions of men help bring about fatal consequences for the female characters.  The stories are excellently written.  Like all good children’s writers, E. Nesbit perfected her craft writing for a readership who don’t have the patience to tolerate florid, overwrought and pretentious prose like many adults do.  As a result, her style is admirably clear and direct.

 

 From wikipedia.org

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Steve Cashel is over the hill

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

My story The Drove Road has recently been published in Volume 2, Issue 1 of Still Here magazine.  Appropriately for its appearance a few weeks before Halloween, this edition of Still Here is both themed and subtitled Haunting Humanity and, accordingly, The Drove Road is a ghost story.  However, its supernatural elements are very mild, perhaps existing only in somebody’s imagination.  So, rather than attribute the story to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I attach to the scary fiction I write, I’ve attributed it instead to Steve Cashel, the moniker I usually put on non-scary stories that are set in Scotland.

 

And The Drove Road has a particularly Scottish setting.  It’s inspired by the hike from Peebles, my hometown in the Scottish Borders, up to the top of 750-metre hill of Dunrig.  It’s a route that follows the old Gypsy Glen Drove Road and takes you past slightly lower summits such as Kailzie Hill, Kirkhope Law, Birkscairn Hill and Stake Law.

 

Two other things also inspired The Drove Road.  One is Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine (1984) – specifically a scene that occurs during a remembrance the main character, Jock McLeish, has of his youth, when he joined an amateur theatre group who were putting on a play at the Edinburgh Fringe.  One day McLeish and his aspiring-thespian friends fill in time between performances by ascending Edinburgh’s most famous natural landmark, the ancient, extinct volcano Arthur’s Seat.

 

The other influence is something entirely different.  It’s the Japanese YouTube anthology Fake Documentary Q (2021-present), whose episodes tell stories of the paranormal and unexplained via a ‘found footage’ (sometimes just ‘found audio’) format that employs various types of digital and analogue media.  My story’s plot is inspired by one episode in particular, which is about some friends making a pilgrimage.  But The Drove Yard also mimics the anthology generally in its use of assorted media — photographs, flyers, letters, emails, audio files, WhatsApp chats, etc. – to fill in the reader about what’s been happening.

 

Volume 2, Issue 1 of Still Here: Haunting Humanity can be downloaded for free here.  As ever, it’s a bargain.  This issue boasts no fewer than 19 short stories, 16 poems, two essays and seven pieces of art.

 

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More things that terrified the young me

 

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

 

Here’s the second half of my account of things that scared me, to the point of scarring me, when I was wee.

 

Space: 1999 – Dragon’s Domain (1975)

Even as a kid, I knew the TV show Space: 1999 was silly.  I already had enough awareness of science to realise the ridiculousness of its premise – a titanic explosion on the moon in the then-future year of 1999 sends it, and 300 human beings crewing a base there called Moonbase Alpha, careering out of earth’s orbit and into deep space.  Particularly ridiculous was how every second episode the moon hurtled into a new solar system and came close enough to an earth-type planet for the Moonbase Alpha folk to explore it.  Space: 1999 depicted the universe as a giant pinball machine with the moon bouncing between earth-type planets like the silver ball bouncing between the machine’s flippers and bumpers.

 

And yet…  A Space: 1999 episode called Dragon’s Domain petrified me.  It has the runaway moon approaching a sinister graveyard of abandoned spaceships in which a horrifying, one-eyed, tentacled monstrosity lurks.  Okay, seen today, the monster in Dragon’s Domain doesn’t impress, being a mass of wavy tentacles obviously animated by wires.  But the barrage of things that accompany it still inspire fear – it initially materialises as a swirling pattern of lights, it makes hideous shrieking noises and its victims are battered by gusts of wind.  Most horribly, moments after those victims are dragged into its maw, they’re spat out again as desiccated corpses, apparently drained of all their moisture.

 

There’s something about the episode’s ineluctability that got me too.  It focuses on a Moonbase Alpha member (Gianni Garko) who’s encountered the monster before.  While he was captaining a mission into deep space, it ate his crew and only he managed to escape.  Now stuck on the moon after its unexpected departure from earth’s orbit, fate has cruelly decreed that he’ll meet the thing again.

 

The pictures in The Horrific World of Monsters (1974)

I might have been terrified by monsters like that Space: 1999 one, but I was also fascinated by them and in the mid-1970s I bought a hardcover, kids-orientated book called The Horrific World of Monsters by Dulan Barber.  This provided an A-Z of monsters from myth, folklore, cryptozoology, movies, TV and comics.

 

© Marshall Cavendish

 

Lavishly illustrated, a couple of the book’s page-sized movie-stills troubled me, lodged themselves in my psyche and occasionally caused me nightmares.  These depicted the mummy, played by Lon Chaney Jr in 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost, throttling a victim; a fanged, hairy Michael Landon pouncing on a victim in I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); and, in unflinching close-up, the title character of The Return of the Fly (1959), the second film in the series about a scientist experimenting with a teleportation device who gets his molecules mixed up with those of a fly and acquires a massive, insectile head.  Just as well it wasn’t a close-up of Jeff Goldblum from late in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly.  That sight would have left me gibbering.

 

Eventually, I sold the book to a schoolmate called Geoff Simmons, who was a gifted artist and who used some of its illustrations as inspiration for pictures – I remember him showing me one he’d drawn based on the mummy.  Geoff is now a graphic designer (and also a community historian) in London.  I’d like to think The Horrific World of Monsters played a small part in shaping his future career.

 

Bodega Bay gets attacked in The Birds (1963)

By the mid-1970s, someone had informed me that the Americans and Russians both had ‘bombs that could blow up the world’, so I had a new thing to worry about – the end of humanity.  Accordingly, apocalyptic movies frightened the bejesus out of me.  For example, Steve Sekely’s Day of the Triffids (1963), a cheap adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, scared me with its depiction of a world where nearly everyone has gone blind.  Even at 10 years old, unfortunately, I could tell how shoddy its special effects were, especially the ones involving the triffids.

 

But the apocalyptic movie that traumatised me was 1963’s The Birds, directed by the impeccable Alfred Hitchcock and based on a 1952 short story by the equally impeccable Daphne du Maurier.  Most traumatic for me was the part where Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor find themselves in a diner in the middle of the little coastal town of Bodega Bay, trying to convince the locals – who react with varying degrees of scepticism – that the area’s feathered population is behaving very strangely.  After seven minutes of conversation that mingles humour with growing unease, and is brilliantly performed by character actors like Doreen Lang (as an increasingly frightened mother), Charles McGraw (as a gruff fisherman), Ethel Griffies (as an elderly, know-all ornithologist) and Karl Swenson (as a Bible-quoting Irish drunkard), all hell breaks loose.

 

Multitudinous seagulls swoop down and cars and petrol pumps explode (thanks to fuel spewing from a dropped hose), more cars crash, horses run wild and many townspeople get clawed and pecked.  Hedren spends a nightmarish minute trapped inside a telephone booth with birds, plus one unlucky human victim, smashing into its sides.  Taylor rescues her and gets her into the diner again, but…  The atmosphere there is suddenly less welcoming.

 

From wikipedia.com / © Universal Pictures

 

Hitchcock’s orchestration of this blew me away.  The telephone-booth bit was possibly the first time I’d been exposed to what film-fans would describe as ‘pure cinema’.  But Taylor and Hedren’s return to the diner provides the chilling coup de grâce.  The people inside are cowering in terror, including Griffies’s no-longer-cocky ornithologist, and already a superstitious irrationality is taking hold of them.  This crystalises when a now-crazed Lang accuses Hedren of, basically, being a witch: “Who are you?”  What are you?  Where did you come from?  I think you’re the cause of all this.  I think you’re evil.  Evil!”  No doubt a young Stephen King was taking notes at this point.  Similar things happen in his 1980 novella The Mist, with many of its characters reacting to another apocalyptic event by succumbing to medieval-style hysteria.

 

Doctor Who – The Seeds of Doom, episode 4 (1976)

I could write a whole article based only on moments from the BBC’s long running science-fiction / fantasy / horror series Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25) that scared me: the shop dummies coming to life in the serial Spearhead from Space (1970); the killer plastic chair in Terror of the Autons (1971); the murderous Morris dancers in The Daemons (1971); a scaly hand appearing over a boat’s gunwale in The Sea Devils (1972); an infected crewman removing his hand from his pocket and revealing it transformed into a slab of glistening green slime (okay, it’s really green-painted bubble-wrap, but hardly anyone at the time knew what bubble-wrap was) in The Ark in Space (1975)…  But scariest of all was the 1976 serial The Seeds of Doom, about alien seed-pods that infect humans and transform them into malevolent, carnivorous plant-monsters.  Episode 4 of The Seeds of Doom, to be precise.

 

One alien pod becomes the possession of an insane millionaire plant-lover called Harrison Chase – played by character actor Tony Beckley, who’d been in The Italian Job (1969) and Get Carter (1971) – and at the start of episode 4 it germinates, infecting one of Chase’s minions, a hapless botanist called Arnold Keeler (Mark Jones).  Ignoring Keeler’s pleas to be taken to a hospital, Chase has him chained to a bed, purring in delight, “The rate of increase is astonishing…  Protein absorption from the animal, of course…  We shall have to give you some food soon…  You’re changing into a plant, Keeler…  a marvellous new species of plant!”

 

© BBC

 

With Keeler turning green, then fibrous, then tentacular, and Chase trying to speed up the metamorphosis by feeding him pieces of raw meat, what I was witnessing here was the icky sub-genre of horror known as ‘body horror’.  But it was the performances of Beckley and Jones, one disturbingly malevolent, the other distressingly pathetic, that truly conveyed the horribleness of the situation.

 

Legend Horror Classics, issue 4 (1976)

The same impulse that made me buy The Horrific World of Monsters inspired me to purchase issue 4 of a British film magazine called Legend Horror Classics, edited by Gent Shaw, who’d also edited the scary-movie magazine World of Horror in 1974-75.  Issue 4 of Legend Horror Classics was devoted to zombies, which until then I’d understood to be dead people brought back to life by voodoo and put to work on Caribbean sugar plantations.  By the 1970s, however, thanks to the influence of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombie stories and films had become less voodoo-reliant and a lot grislier and more visceral.  This issue contained several gruesome photos that, like those in the Monsters book, gave me nightmares.

 

However…  Since then, I’ve discovered, indignantly, that the yuckiest pictures in the issue weren’t actually from zombie movies!  There was one of the mouldering, prehistoric ape-creature inhabited by an evil alien intelligence in the Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing horror film Horror Express (1972); and one of a rotting corpse (not reanimated as a zombie) from another 1972 movie featuring Christopher Lee, Deathline.  If you’re reading this, Gent Shaw, I’m accusing you of breaking the Trade Descriptions Act.

 

© Legend Publishing

 

The Nationwide report about the Hexham Heads (1976)

The Hexham heads were two little stone heads, possibly Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971.  Reputedly, the heads triggered paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them.  And that paranormal activity manifested itself spectacularly in the form of a werewolf that was glimpsed stalking through their homes after dark.

 

Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – normally a family-friendly TV current-affairs programme, which aired on the BBC every weekday evening after six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976.  The makers of the report had the not-so-family-friendly idea of spicing it up with ghastly screams, images of severed human heads and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed lurching towards the camera in 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf.  This approach traumatised every kid who happened to be watching, me included.

 

One eyewitness reported seeing the Hexham Heads werewolf after arriving home late at night – allegedly she spotted it prowling about her dark house before she switched on the lights.  Soon afterwards, my family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland.  My parents frequently received invitations to Sunday lunch and dinner at the homes of Northern Irish folk they knew directly, or knew as friends of friends, who were now living in Scotland.  After much food, whisky and blethering, we wouldn’t get home until late on Sunday evening.  While my parents unlocked the front door and we entered a black, silent house, I’d think of the Nationwide report and wonder, “What if there’s a werewolf waiting in there?”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Archaeology Data Service / Dr Anne Ross

 

Footage of that legendary 1976 TV report on the Hexham Heads was long believed lost but it’s now been discovered and restored – see here and here.

 

Jon Voight’s dream at the end of Deliverance (1972)

By the time I was 12, I believed I was a mature, hardened type who’d seen everything and couldn’t be frightened anymore.  But then on TV one evening I watched John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), about four Atlanta business men whose canoeing holiday in remote north Georgia turns into an ordeal, and was freaked out by it.

 

Oddly, it wasn’t the notorious sequence where some hillbillies rape Ned Beatty’s character and insist that he squeals ‘like a pig’ that upset me most.  Maybe I wasn’t old enough to fully understand what was happening.  No, it was the bit near the end where Jon Voigt’s character has a nightmare about the river they canoed on – which has since been dammed and turned into a lake – and sees a pale, bloated hand rising out of its water.  The image of that emerging hand haunted me for weeks afterwards.  I obviously wasn’t as tough as I thought I was.

 

© Elmer Enterprises / Warner Bros.

 

Thinking about it, I suppose I must have been a complete scaredy-cat whose childhood was one long procession of moments of terror.  So now, half-a-century later, why do I write short horror stories under the penname of Jim Mountfield?  I’ve had nearly 70 such stories published.

 

Perhaps it’s a case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em.”

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Things that terrified the young me

 

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros Entertainment

 

We’ve entered October, the month that ends with the spooky and supernatural-tinged festival of Halloween.  I usually mark this time of year by posting some entries related to the macabre – well, I am a published writer of horror stories.  So, here is a piece listing the various things, in real life, in print, on TV or in the cinema, that terrified me as a kid and, possibly, affected my development and made me the person I am today.

 

The Tom and Jerry cartoon Heavenly Puss (1949)

When I was five or six years old, popular children’s cartoons that suddenly and without warning turned creepy were like booby traps for my delicate psyche.  For example, I remember watching an episode of The Inspector, which was part of The Pink Panther Show (1969-78), where the Inspector’s sleepy sidekick Sergeant Deux-Deux accidently drinks a mad scientist’s potion and turns into a hulking Mr Hyde-like monster.  This horrified me.

 

But my all-time cartoon nightmare came when I watched a Tom and Jerry short called Heavenly Puss, in which Tom is terrorised by a horned, red-pelted, green-eyed devil-dog – basically a satanic version of Spike the Bulldog – who keeps appearing and threatening to boil him alive in a cauldron.  I was living in Northern Ireland at the time, and was already having my head filled with warnings about the devil by the multiple religious personages who populated the place.  Seeing a similar, infernal figure intrude on something as innocuous as Tom and Jerry was deeply upsetting.

 

Incidentally, the 1942 Tom and Jerry short Fraidy Cat freaked me out too, though not quite as much as Heavenly Puss did.

 

Mij gets it in Ring of Bright Water (1969)

With this one I was less terrified than traumatised.  Many people my age go on about how they were reduced to quivering wrecks when they watched the animated, leporine bloodbath Watership Down (1978).  But a far worse experience for me was the movie Ring of Bright Water, based on the 1960 book of the same name by Gavin Maxwell, in which Bill Travers plays a hapless Londoner who rescues a rambunctious otter called Mij from a pet shop and ends up moving with him to the more otter-friendly environment of Scotland’s remote west coast.  Not only Mij thrives there – Travers does too, especially when he makes the acquaintance of the fanciable local doctor (Virginia McKenna).

 

© Palomar Pictures International / Rank Film Distributors

 

I saw Ring of Bright Water on TV in the early 1970s.  For most of its running time, it’s an amiable comedy in which Travers and Mij get up to amusing high-jinks.  Nothing prepares you for the ending.  McKenna is taking Mij for a walk when he gets his head flattened in a random act of violence by a shovel-wielding ditch-digger who regards otters as vermin.  It’s made even worse by the fact that Travers is in London at the time.  In the next scene he returns, cheerfully believing all is well, and McKenna has to interrupt his garrulous blather with the bald statement, “Mij is dead.”

 

It’s a sobering reminder of the fact that, no matter how much we sentimentalise animals, they frequently live or die – more often die – by the whims of humans beings.  But sneaking that reminder into what’d been, for the most part, a fun, good-natured family film seemed a bit rotten.

 

Playing the ditch-digger was the Glaswegian actor Archie Duncan, who passed away in 1976.  I wonder if that’s inscribed on his headstone: ‘HE KILLED MIJ.’

 

The Northern Irish satanic panic in 1973

According to the 2014 book Black Magic and Bogeymen by Richard Jenkins, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, a “wave of rumours about black magic, Satanism, animal sacrifice and child abduction… swept across the north of Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.”  Jenkins notes that “(b)etween 5th August and mid-December 1973, sixty-five items about witchcraft and black magic appeared in the mainstream press north and south of the Irish border: news reports, features, editorials, letters to the editor, church reports, and what appeared to be religious announcements…  The reports peaked between mid-October and the third week in November, clustering around Hallowe’en.”

 

© Cork University Press

 

This was a classic example of what today we’d call a ‘satanic panic’ though, with the Northern Irish Troubles in progress at the time, Jenkins offers intriguing evidence that the British Army was stirring the pot with ‘black propaganda’ operations – i.e., trying to convince superstitious Northern Irish parents that the province was overrun with devil-worshippers so they wouldn’t let their kids outdoors at night.  Keeping them indoors meant there was less chance of them getting into genuine bother with the paramilitaries or the security forces.

 

Jenkins also observes that children were among the worst culprits for spreading the rumours.  I can testify to that.  I remember a girl in my class gleefully assuring me there was a family in nearby Enniskillen who drew their curtains as soon as it got dark and then spent all night performing ghastly black-magic rituals.  She also told me about goat-carcasses being found beside the river in Enniskillen with their hearts cut out and, worst of all, a child being abducted there, sacrificed and chopped into pieces.  Needless to say, gullible me swallowed every word of this and, for the next few months, the prospect of visiting Enniskillen petrified me.

 

The trailer for Penda’s Fen (1974)

Today, Penda’s Fen is regarded as a visionary piece of TV drama.  Time Out magazine has described it, rather pompously, as a “multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines…” that fuses “Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness.”   Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, it was, however, seriously offbeat even by the standards of Play for Today (1970-84), the anthology series whose fourth season contained it as an episode.   Maybe that’s why I remember the trailer the BBC showed prior to its broadcast being so scary – the channel couldn’t make head nor tail of it and decided to market it as a folk-horror film.

 

© BBC

 

Two creepy moments of Penda’s Fen were included in that trailer.  Firstly, there was a sequence where the young hero (Spencer Banks) sits by the edge of a pool and sees reflected in it a statue of an angel – the statue stands behind him, but when he looks around it suddenly isn’t there anymore.  I wonder if the TV writer Steven Moffat saw this as a kid and, three decades later, it inspired him to create the Weeping Angels for the 21st-century reboot of Doctor Who (2005-25).  Even worse for my tender sensibilities was a sequence where Banks cowers in his bed while a devilish face hovers over him.  Living in super-religious Northern Ireland, I had no doubt at the time that devils and demons were real.  I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and be confronted by a face like that.

 

Haunted by the images in its trailer, I didn’t watch Penda’s Fen when it was broadcast a few evenings later.  In fact, I didn’t see it in its entirety until several years ago and, of course, it was nothing like what my eight-year-old self had been led to believe.

 

Talos comes to life in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

In my childhood I loved the movie Jason and the Argonauts, based on the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece.  I especially loved the mythical creatures in it like the hydra and harpies, which were animated by stop-motion-animation / special effects genius Ray Harryhausen.  One scene absolutely creeped me out, however, and has stuck in my memory ever since.  That’s when Jason and co. arrive on an island populated by gigantic bronze statues and Hercules (Nigel Green) and Hylas (John Cairney) not very smartly steal a giant broach from a treasure chamber inside the plinth of the statue of Talos.  They’re discombobulated, to say the least, when the head of the titanic statue slowly turns and its bronze face gazes down at them, impassively but accusingly.

 

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

 

I think it’s the creaking noise that accompanies the twisting of Talos’s neck that gets me – every time I watch it.

 

The first half of Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966)

The horror movies made by the famous British studio Hammer Films aren’t regarded today as being particularly frightening.  At their best, they have a wonderful gothic flamboyance.  At their worst, they’re endearingly tacky.  But genuinely frightening?  Not really.  However, when I was a kid, some of them turned up on TV for the first time and, to me then, they did seem scary.  For instance, Quatermass and the Pit (1968) left me shaken.  But it was the first half of Hammer’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness that truly gave me the willies.  I say ‘first half’ because when I initially saw it on TV, that was all of it I could take.  At its midpoint, I threw in the towel and retreated to bed.

 

In part, the film’s impact on me was due to misleading expectations.  I knew Dracula was villainous but didn’t think he could be frightening.  I’d already seen a couple of old black-and-white films featuring the character, made by Universal Studios, where he was played in a raffish fashion, by John Carradine in House of Dracula (1945), or in an urbane and slightly camp one, by Bela Lugosi in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).  So I wasn’t ready for Christopher Lee’s portrayal of him in Dracula, Prince of Darkness, where he alternates between being chillingly imperious – he unsettlingly doesn’t utter a word of dialogue during the whole film – and being a hissing, spitting hell-fiend.

 

In fact, Dracula is hardly in the movie’s first half.  It begins with a prologue showing him being reduced to ashes, by Peter Cushing, at the climax of the previous instalment in Hammer’s Dracula series.  What follows is a grim tale in which four naïve English travellers (Francis Matthews, Suzan Farmer, Barbara Shelley and Charles Tingwell) end up spending the night at Castle Dracula and an acolyte (Philip Latham) slaughters one of them and uses his blood to revive his dead master.  The sight and sound of copious blood splattering down onto the Count’s powdery remains inflicted another scar on my already heavily-scarred young psyche.

 

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

 

I’ll post about more things that terrified my juvenile self shortly.