A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1920 #4 Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (USA 2020: Dir John S Robertson)

Time for another look back at a fantastic film made 100 years ago. There had already been a number of adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novella before this one, which uses as its basis the 1887 stage play of the same name adapted by Thomas Russell Sullivan, a source which had also been used for a 27 minute version of the same story in 1913, directed by Herbert Brenon.

We open with a card which states 'In each of us, two natures are at war - the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose - what we want most to be, we are' (the assumption here is that by now the viewing audience will already know that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same person). John Barrymore plays both Jekyll and Hyde and Charles Lane is Dr Richard Lanyon, Jekyll's more conservative scientific colleague in contrast with the progressive Jekyll. "You're tampering with the supernatural!" Lanyon says as he looks into Jekyll's microscope (footage of microscopic activity on film had been a thing for twenty years already). 

Jekyll's lab is fully stocked and both he and Lanyon are well dressed; we are told that Jekyll self funds medical services for the poor, and his duties mean he'll be late for dinner. No such problem for Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), announced in his title card as 'always as far from misery and suffering as he could get', who finds Jekyll's philanthropic tendencies (which are ladled on to enhance the difference in Jekyll's Hyde incarnation) incredible. Unfortunately his daughter Millicent (Martha Mansfield) is Jekyll's intended; although incorrigible, Carew's life experiences have led him to shelter his daughter from any moral harm.

When Jekyll arrives, Carew, clearly trying to test the good doctor, goads him: "The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it," he says, and invites Jekyll to a music hall, where he introduces him to a dancer, Gina (a first role for Nita Naldi, who would go on to be a great star of the silent screen). The meeting sees the first stirrings of a baser nature within Jekyll and the desire to separate the good and bad in a person; and Gina is clearly a woman for hire.

After a period of intense medical experimentation, Jekyll develops a potion that he believes will achieve the separation; Barrymore's first transformation into the being he will call Edward Hyde, mainly achieved via facial contortions and a little makeup, is still powerful to watch, and the administration of the antidote produces equally ghastly physical results. While the first experiment is pretty uneventful, Jekyll asks his butler Poole to give Mr Hyde permanent access to his home, and secures separate accommodations so that Hyde will have a base; he also changes his will to leave everything to his evil alter ego.

Jekyll, as Hyde, sets forth on, as the title card describes it, 'a sea of license', neglecting Millicent and focusing his attention instead on Gina, although he will soon tire of her. Jekyll briefly attempts to lay off the drug, trying to patch things up with his fiancée, but Hyde bursts through without chemical stimulus. On his nightly tours through opium dens and flophouses, Hyde discovers a broken Gina in a bar and revels in her fallen status. 

It seems that Hyde has completely taken over Jekyll, who is effectively missing. In an incident which, in print terms, is the first scene in the novella, Hyde knocks down a child in the street, and is restrained by several of Jekyll's colleagues. Hyde agrees to pay a sum to recompense for the injury, but the cheque he presents is in Jekyll's name; the men find out from Poole that Hyde has been given the keys to Jekyll's house, circumstances which confuse them.

Carew confronts Jekyll, returned to his 'good' persona, and asks him about his relationship with Hyde, claiming that continued friendship with the 'fiend' threatens Jekyll's impending marriage to Millicent. Jekyll's response is to blame Carew for tempting him in the first place and making him ashamed of his goodness. He then transforms into Hyde in front of his friend, pursues Carew and bludgeons him to death.

All roads lead to Hyde as the culprit for Carew's murder; the police are alerted and search Hyde's lodgings, fruitlessly. Back at the lab Jekyll struggles not to let Hyde take over again. He attends Carew's corpse in the street and Millicent implores him to help find the killer. But Jekyll is powerless to resist. The evil appears to him at night in the form of a huge spider which creeps onto Jekyll's bed and into him; he awakens as Hyde. Unable to trust himself, Jekyll imprisons himself in his lab. Millicent arrives but just as he's about to let her in he changes, and it is Hyde who admits and confronts her. Millicent escapes, and Jekyll regains his body one last time before he expires, killing himself by administering poison from a ring stolen from Gina.

Arguably the first horror feature, in terms of the grotesquery on display, Barrymore's performance as Jekyll and Hyde still remains powerful 100 years on. His increasing deformity as Hyde is rather hideous, and the scene where, as the Hyde spider, he crawls onto Jekyll's bed to occupy (seduce?) him, is a very fine early example of weird cinema. The injection of a 'love interest' for Jekyll was a cinematic creation and one picked up in later adaptations, but the striking thing here is the contrast between Jekyll's wealthy existence and the poverty surrounding him, and how Hyde bridges the gap between those two worlds.

1920 saw a number of other adaptations of the novella. F W Murnau's Der Januskopf (aka The Head of Janus) was an unauthorised version of the story, now a lost film (Murnau would do the same thing to Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens two years later). A month after the release of Robertson's version, J Charles Haydon cast veteran actor Sheldon Lewis in the Jekyll/Hyde role, a rather threadbare production with a decidedly histrionic central performance. And finally two comic burlesques of the same story were also released in the same year: Hank Mann starred in a two reeler version, and comedian Charlie Joy was in the four reel When Quackel did Hyde. Busy year!

Top 10 Films of 2020

I may only have seen 16 films at the cinema/big screen this year (compared to 123 in 2019) but I sat through just over 420 films online and via physical media: a first for me but for some viewers I understand that 420 is junior league stuff. Anyway of that 420, here are 10 that I thought worth singling out:

1. Relic (Australia/USA 2020: Dir Natalie Erika James) A haunted house movie both internally and externally, James' debut feature for the most part holds off the supernatural and gives us a story about love, loss and duty, featuring a brave central performance by 78 year old Robyn Nevin as a woman in the grip of dementia and maybe something even darker.

2. Parasite (South Korea 2019: Dir Bong Joon Ho) Often cited as a companion piece to Jordan Peele's Us, this deservedly cleaned up at the 2020 Oscars, provoking a predictably racist response from a certain tangerine buffoon. A coming together of the haves and have nots, Parasite was by turns darkly comic, frightening and moving, with a story that gripped like a vice. A movie that got bums on seats in the cinema both by word of mouth and unanimous critical praise, while adding another superb film to the director's stellar CV.

8. The Invisible Man (Canada/Australia/USA 2020: Dir Leigh Whannell) Previous entries in the Universal monsters 'Dark Universe' re-boot franchise hadn't fared that well, so it was a surprise that Whannell's revisit of the Invisible Man character was so successful. As mentioned in my review the movie would be nothing without Elisabeth Moss (whose other genre credit this year was Shirley, a film which has featured in many critics' films of the year lists, somewhat bewilderingly as I didn't like it) but its merging of Sleeping With the Enemy and Hollow Man was unexpectedly layered and gripping.

7. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France 2019: Dir Céline Sciamma) One of the last films I saw at the cinema before the first big lockdown, and I'm pleased I got to view it on the big screen where its sumptuous visual palette could be best admired. A romance between a female painter and her (female) subject, Sciamma's fourth feature pushes men to the background and explores the relationships between art, nature and humanity. It's a woozy, unhurried piece of filmmaking.

6. The Hunt (USA 2020: Dir Craig Zobel) Zobel's darkly funny backwoods thriller possibly wouldn't have made it to the list except for one of the standout performances of the year from Betty (GLOW) Gilpin. Gilpin plays one of a number of working class Republican countryfolk, captured for hunting by a group of elites. Her incredible physicality, as she gradually turns the tables on her attackers and attempts to find out who's behind the whole thing, is nothing short of breath-taking. 

5. Exit (UK 2020: Dir Michael Fausti) One of four UK movies to have made it into my Top 10 list this year, 2020 has been very strong for indie UK horror. Exit follows on from a number of Fausti's classy shorts. As the title suggests, although this isn't a 'state of the nation' movie as such, the Brexit inspired divisions in UK society run all the way through this story of two sets of couples forced to stay the night together after double booking the same holiday rental. Economic, strongly scored, and with more than a whiff of European arthouse cinema to it, Exit is an intelligent, visceral thriller/drama.

4. Jo Jo Rabbit (New Zealand/Czech Republic/USA 2019; Dir Taika Waititi) Although Waititi's very human satire had played a number of festivals the year before, its official UK release was on 1st January 2020. Another of the 16 films I caught at a temporarily open cinema, I'd always been slightly cautious about this director's previous movies. Jo Jo Rabbit however manages its tricky subject matter - a young boy in Hitler's army encounters a Jewish girl hidden in his home - boldly, directly, and with two excellent performances from Roman Griffin Davis as JoJo and Scarlett Johansson as the hidden girl Rosie. And if you don't find the end sequence - with its rousing use of Bowie's 'Heroes'- life affirming, you're wired up wrong.

3. Silence & Darkness (USA 2020: Dir Barak Barkan) This one came totally out of the blue, one of the best indie dramas I've seen all year. A terrifying story of two sisters, one deaf, the other blind, who live with their scientist father in a strange, controlled environment which initially seems to offer protection to the girls, but turns out to have far darker origins. Subtle, intense performances and some of the most harrowing scenes I've experienced in modern cinema, Silence & Darkness is truly extraordinary.

2. Host (UK 2020: Dir Rob Savage) This year's pandemic provided some creative challenges for filmmakers, but none responded more persuasively than Rob Savage. As Leonard Maltin used to say in his movie guide, 'Welcome back from Mars if you haven't heard about this one yet.' Six friends get together for a Zoom chat (the movie lasts the duration of a Zoom call ie 50 minutes), the aim of their gathering an online séance. But as usual in these things the séance goes wrong, and we the viewers watch as the supernatural events unfold in each of the Zoom windows. On the back of this Savage has secured a major deal with Blumhouse, which is great news, but time will tell if Host is the start of a great career or a bizarre one off fluke. Either way it's quite brilliant.

1. Saint Maud (UK 2019: Dir Rose Glass) The sixth of my Top 10 viewed in an actual cinema, and featuring an astonishing central performance from Morfydd Clark as the titular Maud, an agency care worker whose relationship with her client, a dying dancer played by Jennifer Ehle, leads to violence and either severe mental disorder or something more religiously profound (the film doesn't provide easy answers). In my review I wrote "taut, economical and beautifully controlled, Saint Maud contains an almost constant threat of violence on the part of the title character, undercut with a painful vulnerability." Astonishingly good.

Honourable mentions: The Personal History of David Copperfield, Rent a Pal, Survival Skills, Possessor, Mangrove, Luz: The Flower of Evil, A Ghost Waits

A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1920 #3 - Genuine aka Genuine, die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses aka Genuine: The Tragedy of a Vampire aka Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire (Germany: Dir Robert Wiene)

Now pretty much everybody has heard of Robert Wiene's movie The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, but Genuine is far less well known, which is a great shame. Wiene, a former student of law, had moved into acting and then film production and direction. Genuine was one of five films he directed in 1920; TCoDC's success gave him the opportunity to become more independent and bolder in his choice subject matter.

The German title of the movie translates literally as Genuine, The Tragedy of a Strange House. 

Like TCoDC before it, the film opens with a framing story: we're in the living room of the painter Percy (Harald Paulsen). Two friends arrive; they are concerned that after painting his most recent portrait, which hangs on his wall, covered up - that of the heroine of legend, high priestess Genuine - he has become irritable and half crazy. A visiting dealer offers to buy the painting, but Percy flatly refuses to sell. Left alone, he uncovers the portrait, opens a book and reads the legend of Genuine. She is described as "beautiful and perverse. As priestess of a religion, she fell into esoteric mysteries so that, from her childhood, she had witnessed the most cruel spectacles, to which she would later become an accomplice," although above all else she "loathed acts of cruelty." As Percy sleeps, the figure of Genuine comes to life and steps out of the portrait. The story begins.

We see Genuine, who has been taken captive "in the midst of a war between rival tribes, and wound up in a slave market" where she is purchased by an old eccentric man named Lord Melo (Ernst Gronau). The other slaves on offer are naked and docile, but Melo prefers the wild and savage Genuine, who, he learns, has become barbaric due to her treatment following her capture and her priestess training. Melo takes her home to his house in Ireland and locks her up against her will in a geo-chamber full of fauna from Genuine's homeland; this is the first time we are exposed to the strange, oddly proportioned sets painted by expressionist artist César Klein, a form which made Wiene's previous movie so notable. Melo justifies Genuine's incarceration, telling her that "up there is life and its ugliness." Pleased with his 'purchase', Melo hobbles around his chambers, full of strange, fractured mirrors, odd masks on the walls and a life sized skeleton with a clock face for a head.

Lord Melo lives in seclusion; he's visited at noon every day by his barber Guyard (John Gottowt); his manservant (Louis Brody, a Cameroon born statuesque black actor who had a long career in German films) organises a monthly delivery of provisions to Melo's house. The locals see Melo's isolation as suspicious, and request that the local magistrate question Guyard about what goes on behind closed doors.

The request to interrogate Guyard is authorised and the barber is summoned to attend the magistrate at noon the following day, meaning that he can't make his daily appointment with Melo. Guyard has recently taken on his young nephew Florian (the impressively named Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) as an apprentice, and asks him to step in to attend the next daily visit to Melo.

Melo's grandson Percy requests to visit his grandfather after a long period of absence, which makes Melo unhappy; he clearly is not a man to have his routines interrupted.

Genuine manages to break out of her underground prison via stepladder, and enters Melo's chamber, only to find Florian shaving the now sleeping Lord Melo. She bewitches Florian into slitting Melo's throat with his razor as revenge for her captivity. She implores him to take the ring off the dead Melo's hand, as ownership of it will control the manservant, enraged and seeking to avenge the death of his master. A besotted Florian is asked by Genuine to take his own life, but refuses; Genuine takes the ring from Florian and commands the manservant to "kill him and bring me...the proof!" The manservant fails to kill the now deranged Florian as requested, but covers up his actions by cutting his own arm to provide a cupful of blood that is the proof she requires (while it's not explicitly shown, one account of the plot suggests that Genuine's savagery extends to blood drinking, hence the request for the 'proof').

Melo's grandson Percy arrives at the house and immediately enquires about the circumstances of his grandfather's death. Percy meets Genuine and her strange charms win him over, but Genuine, who appears to be in the process of throwing off her primal urges, returns his love (although a scene of her lasciviously fondling a knife suggests that the savagery hasn't totally deserted her). Percy's friend, level headed Henry, arrives and Percy claims "that woman wants me dead!". Henry plays a trick on Genuine, telling her that Percy has died, which provokes a genuine outpouring of emotion. Genuine fails to work her mystical mojo on Henry; has she finally become human? Henry suggests to Genuine and Percy that he will help them leave the house.

Florian returns to Guyard and, tortured in bed by terrible visions, confesses his murder of Melo. Guyard in turn, who presumably previously remained tight lipped when first asked about Lord Melo's home set up, informs the magistrate of the horrors imparted to him by his son. Guyard summons a mob armed with scythes and stakes (possibly the first example of the angry mob trope that would be deployed in the horror film going forward) storms Melo's house. The still infatuated Florian steals back into Melo's home and confronts Genuine, who tells him she's in love, but not with Florian! And as the mob enter the house, Florian kills Genuine.

The painter Percy awakes; the framing device has returned, and Genuine is back in her frame. Percy moves to stab the painting but his friends restrain him. The art buyer returns with a higher offer for the painting (it is now clear that this character is Lord Melo as the cheque is signed in his name); Percy accepts the revised offer and the painting is sold.

The role of Genuine was played by Fern Andra, originally an acrobat who learned acting under Max Reinhardt; her strange performance in this film, by turns writhing, spider like or coquettish, is a joy to watch. The 'Vampire' of the alternative title refers to a mysterious and exotic woman who seduces and destroys men for the sheer joy of doing so. The extent of Genuine's savagery, which includes blood drinking, is only ever hinted at in the film, but when we first see her she's wearing a strange outfit that looks more like the markings of an animal; these were actually painted directly on to Andra's body, but as her humanising process develops, she starts wearing (relatively) conventional clothes. 

On release Genuine was not universally well received, it appears; the popular view expressed was that, while TCoDC had used expressionism to tell its story, this movie was an exercise in expressionism for its own sake. While performances were praised, Carl Mayer's script was criticised for narrative and psychological incoherence. One reviewer summarised that the substance of the film was to be found in "the magic work of the fantastic" and it's the sense of magic realism in Genuine that makes it genuinely interesting.

Sources for this post include IMDb, Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg's essay 'The Invisible Man behind "Caligari": The Life of Robert Wiene' (Indiana University Press 1993) and 'Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Weine' by Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg (Berghahn Books 1999)

Until recently, Genuine was only available in a shrunk down 43 minute condensation, but you can see a fuller 88 minute tinted version here. 

Dark Eyes Retro Reads #2 - the NELs of 'Raymond Giles'

Night of the Warlock 1968
first US edition

I originally owned Raymond Giles's three 'Night of the...' New English Library published books at the age of 10 or 11 years old, and re-reading them confirmed why a young boy was not the target audience for these things. I'm pretty sure I found out about them through a review of Night of the Vampire included in an edition of 'Target' magazine (also a NEL publication, whose weekly featured books were all, perhaps unsurprisingly, NEL titles). However because of the ubiquity of horror literature at the time, I could equally have come across them while rifling the bookstands of any branch of WH Smith or Woolworths.

So, to Raymond Giles; not his real name (of course!) but a pseudonym of American author John R. Holt. I'm not sure whether he wrote under any other nom de plumes (apart from Elizabeth Giles - see below) but by 1990 he'd finally decided to pen works under his own name, writing three horror novels during the decade: When We Dead Awaken (1990); The Convocation (1992); and Wolf Moon (1997). That, maybe, is the subject of a future post.

Beyond his birth and death dates - 24 September 1926 to 20 May 2006 - little is known about Holt, so it's left to his writing to speak for him, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor. Sandwiched between the three 'Night of the...' books and the 1990s Holt volumes, in his Giles guise the author wrote the tie-in book adaptation of the film of Buzz Kulik's Burt Reynolds/Dyan Cannon vehicle Shamus in 1973; but perhaps more controversially he delved into what is now termed - and I wish I'd invented the term but sadly can't make that claim - plantationsploitation fiction, obviously inspired by Kyle Elihu Onstott's 'Mandingo' novels, which amazingly ran from 1957 to 1988!

In 1970 he wrote a novel of 'black passions and forbidden love' called Dark Master, and in 1975 followed up with Rogue Black (I don't think this was a book about snooker). But this stage of his career really kicked off later that same year the first of five 'Sabrehill' novels, chronicling the trials and tribulations of Jeb the slave, suffering at the hands of wicked plantation owners. The first, Sabrehill (the name of the place where Jeb was employed) was followed by Slaves of Sabrehill (1975), Rebels of Sabrehill (1976), Storm over Sabrehill (1981) and finally Hellcat of Sabrehill (1982). But we're not here to talk about those (and honestly I don't even know where I'd start if I had to). You want me to get to the meat of my post - the horror!

Night of the Warlock This was first published in the USA in 1968 by the Paperback Library company, then by New English Library a year after (and subsequently reprinted in 1970 and 1974 - obviously a popular title). The cover, by NEL go to sci fi artist Bruce Pennington (then 25 years old and who a year earlier had produced the iconic cover for NEL's re-issue of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune) is suitably horrific, but only slightly resembles any of the action in the book. The rest of the painting on the back of the novel, showing a young woman running away from a spooky house, is perhaps more on point.

Dana Knox, a model, receives some shocking news when she finds out that her uncle Hugo, the only remaining member of her family left alive, is dying of cancer in a Manhattan hospital. On his demise she finds out that in his will he has bequeathed her his vast mansion in upstate New York. It's a house she grew up in with her mother, but of which she only has vague - and unsettling - memories, having left it due to an unrecalled trauma. But there's a catch; to inherit both the house and the rest of the $4 million estate, she must live there uninterrupted for an entire year.

The only other occupants of the house are housekeeper Nicole Duhamel and her son Bayard, who will inherit the fortune if Dana is unable to fulfil the commitments of the will. Dana's on/off boyfriend Martin Lott, a writer whose books debunk magic and superstition but with a lifelong interest in the occult and who sports a talisman round his neck, resists the request to join Dana at the Knox home, so it's just her, Nicole and Bayard, who were also resident at the house when she was a little girl. [Sidebar: Lott is 35 in the book, and early on there's a, well for this author anyway, disquisitive riff on growing old. "He had heard that after you passed thirty-five you learned things about death that you could never know when you were younger..." Hang on, 35?! So I did a bit of research, and guess what the life expectancy of a US male in 1968 was? Just under 70 years, so maybe 35 wasn't that arbitrary after all (and as I've mentioned before, we shouldn't forget that one of the NEL titles available at the time was 'Sex for the Over Forties'). Sidebar ends]

But what Dana doesn't know, and the reader does, is that Hugo was a powerful warlock and the whole request for Dana to stay at the house is a setup to enable a magic ritual that will bring Hugo back from the dead; also that Dana and Bayard - also a warlock keen to help Hugo's return - are half brother and sister (which makes Bayard's attempted seduction of Dana rather dubious, as Hugo is dad to both). Add in Martin's new found magical powers and the stage is set for a battle of the dark arts, with Dana's soul as the prize.

After reading this, it came as no surprise that I didn't get on with Giles's prose as a youngster. He very much writes in the tradition of US gothic romance writers; but here with an added incest storyline, a few Lovecraftean 'nameless ones' touches and quite a lot of ritualistic detail. Dana is a classically adrift heroine, bouncing between the cool charms of Martin and the moustache twiddling advances of Bayard; pretty much all of her actions are at the diktat of a man and she takes no independent action throughout the novel. I also wonder whether the TV series Dark Shadows may have been an influence, as, apart from the gothic trappings, there are hints of other creatures in the book deserving of their own stories: of which more later. NotW's break with tradition is a rather gloomy ending in which the heroine doesn't win and Martin emerges as the star of the piece: a sequel beckons in the closing words, but was clearly not to be.

The 1969 US edition of Night
of the Vampire by Avon Publishing

Night of the Vampire Before its NEL UK printing in 1970, NotV was first published in the US in 1969 by Avon publishers, who specialised in gothic romantic fiction, which is essentially what this is. Clearly NEL re-packaged his books for the UK as straightforward horror novels, which they clearly weren't.

The cover of the Avon edition shows a cowled coven huddled together behind a swarm of overlarge bats; the image could also be construed as a depiction of some rocky edifice, picked out against a moonlit backdrop. The cover of the NEL version, painted by renowned British illustrator Richard Clifton-Dey (1930 - 1977), depicts a winged woman in flight, fully naked,  whose head faces toward the viewer, mouth agape, while below another winged but hairier beast stands over a prone man, his bat wings also unfolded, while coven members, one clearly also naked under her robe, look on. Quite a difference, but both are relevant to the subject matter within.

The story of NotV concentrates on six disparate souls who, thirteen years ago as naïve and thrill seeking youths, participated in a series of rituals as part of a coven, swearing their allegiance to Satan, in the American lakeside town of Sanscoeur (translated in English as 'heartless', presumably a play on Sacrecoeur). This group comprises: Duffy Johnson, a psychiatrist; gold-digger Bonnie Wallace; successful architect and part time private dick Zachary Hale, who was responsible for the formation of the coven all those years ago; sociologist Ward Douglas and his partner, anthropologist Jeanne Retz; and goody goody librarian Lily Bains, with whom Duffy once had a thing, and who is the only coven member never to have left the town. To this cast list is added another former Sanscoeur resident, Roxanne, who as a youth was nicknamed locally as 'the Wolf Girl' and who Duffy has since married, despite her obsession that she might be a lycanthrope.

Thirteen years on, the group are psychically summoned by a cult of devil worshippers who have the ability to change into bats at will; their particular interest seems to be the wolf girl, Roxanne, the last of the Sanscoeur family, but it's not long before the bat people start offing the original coven; first Bonnie gets it, lured out into the countryside at night by the full time town sheriff (and part time bat person) Talbot Grennis. Town suspicion falls on Roxanne, and we learn a lot about Roxanne's past, her difficult relationship with, well pretty much everyone really, and the discovery of her lycanthropic tendencies. Roxanne's 'issues' and neediness pushes Duffy to re-ignite his relationship with Lily (the wolf girl's hyper-sensitive nostrils pick up Lily's scent on his clothes, fuelling her anger). Meanwhile Hale uncovers a historic pattern of murders centring around the Sanscoeur house (the one in which Roxanne grew up), linked to the coven he formed. He knows too much and is subsequently mauled to death for his troubles.

The original coven, now scared to remain in the town, fail to leave in time, and the bat people close in to eliminate them, headed by someone who has a particular agenda.

The plot of NoTV feels rather slung together, a mix of romance, psychological and horror elements which don't really gel. The central figure, Duffy, is a guy who has seduced an innocent woman (Lily) and then paid for it with a guilt-ridden marriage to Roxanne based on pity rather than love. There is never an explanation of the origin of the bat people, nor is Roxanne's lycanthropic state conclusive, which makes the book's coda all the more ridiculous. 

This one was, sadly a bit of a chore to get through. Artist Gahan Wilson, reviewing the novel in the October 1969 edition of 'The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,' described NotV as "an unabashed romp...and it is fun if you don't mind cardboardish characters, a creaking plot, and a hero named Duffy Johnson." So let's not disabuse ourselves that Giles's book felt like old hat even over fifty years ago. Next!

One of the three US editions of
Children of the Griffin 

Night of the Griffin This book was originally published in the US in 1971 under the name Children of the Griffin with the author's name given as, not Raymond, but 'Elizabeth Giles'. The following year - 1972 - the same 'Elizabeth Giles' wrote a gothic novel, As Darker Grows the Night ("A strange and deadly presence turns Carol Maxwell's refuge of love into a mansion of fear").

The NEL's retitling of the book as 'Night of...' both links it to Giles's earlier novels (it advertises them as the third in the author's 'soul chilling series' although nothing plot wise links the books) and again establishes it as a straightforward horror novel (complete with menacing Clifton-Dey cover depicting a scene that doesn't occur in the novel). But, unlike the other two, this is a full on gothic romance which flirts with (then very fashionable) themes of witchcraft and the occult.

Told in the first person by lead character, Beth St. Denis, Ms (actually make that Miss) Saint D is a woman drifting through life, single and desperate for a man to make her complete. Although Beth feels she's singularly lacking in the talent department, to her surprise she seems to be a natural at tarot card reading, when introduced to the occupation by her flatmate Nina and Nina's boyfriend Victor. Nina arranges for Beth to be introduced to the mysterious Maretta who lives in Griffon House, a sprawling out of the way mansion in the Pennsylvanian countryside. Maretta is holding a Halloween party which is a thin disguise for some kind of sabbat; the party guests hail from various parts of the world (a setup clearly borrowed from Dennis Wheatley's 'The Devil Rides Out'). Beth witnesses the start of the ritual, but is whisked away following the arrival of Maretta's brother Robert, with whom Beth falls instantly and madly in love. The pair stay up all night talking, the only sour note being a mysterious presence in the house which threatens to overwhelm the over-sensitive Beth.

Within days the pair have chastely courted and announced to the others that they are to be married. Beth hands in her notice at work - in 1971 marriage and employment seemed to be an either/or affair for women - and moves her things into Griffon House. But Robert's waters run deep; he has scars on his wrists from a previous suicide attempt, and on the night of the wedding, instead of the passionate evening she was expecting, Beth is faced with an angry Robert who tells her that she must leave the house immediately, and locks himself in an upstairs room to continue his studies.

Robert's advice is echoed by the family doctor and indeed Nina and Victor. Beth learns that Robert is prone to severe depressions (which gave rise to the previous suicide attempt) and she is unable to help him, or indeed spend any time with him. Faced with the possibility of ending her marriage before it's even begun, It's only when Beth looks into what her husband has been studying, and learns of the satanic cult called the 'Children of the Griffin,' that she understands the danger. For Maretta is the high priestess of a sect who sell their souls to a demonic griffin figure (who, contrary to what the book's cover suggests, never appears) in return for protection from damnation. And Robert is, reluctantly, one of the 'Children'; Maretta is keen for Beth to join them too.

NotG is 140 pages of one woman's torment as she is prevented from being with the man she loves. Robert, for reasons we later find are entirely related to Beth's protection, acts like a total bastard to her for most of the book, failing to disclose the nature of his concerns to his wife (which doesn't bode well for their future partnership - yes they live to tell the tale). Initially the reader has some sympathy with Beth but reading about her endless attempts to connect with Robert while the rest of the characters happily and mercilessly gaslight her gets pretty tedious; and yes, everyone's in on it, except for the local vicar. There's a brief, bloody climax to the piece, but there's nothing really supernatural going on here.

There is, however, finally a connection with one of Giles's other NELs. While Beth is trawling through Robert's research books she comes across a tome entitled 'Night of the Warlock' by Raymond Giles; this would have been a bit more meta if one was reading this with the author named as Elizabeth Giles, but in the NEL version it's just silly. 

So what's this all about then? Well the clue is in Beth's closing remarks: 'Be warned, my children, Evil is positive, Satan lives...' indicate that Mr Holt has written his last 'Night of the...' book as a warning against tampering with the dark side, an approach similarly taken by Mr Wheatley, who made a lot more money from his books than Mr Holt, I'll wager.

A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio (Argentina/New Zealand/UK 2019: Dir Various)

Ah the anthology, or portmanteau movie. Ten years ago you'd be lucky to see one a year but these days the short film concept is such an established form of movie making that you can't move for the blighters.

Rod Wilson (James Wright) hosts a horror radio show where callers phone in and recount horror and spook stories. Wilson acts like a kind of EC horror comic host, introducing a range of shorts made independently (I know, I've seen a couple of them at various film festivals). So this is best seen as a short film programme of seven mini movies (eight if you count the prologue, which is Jason Bognacki's visually stunning four minute short 'In the Dark, Dark Woods') with interruptions from people phoning in; oh and the added possibility of the studio, and indeed Wilson himself, being haunted (with echoes of Bruce McDonald's 2008 movie Pontypool here).

Joshua Long's 'Post Mortem Mary' from Australia uses, as the basis for its story, the 19th century obsession with death and photographing the recently deceased. Little Mary (Stella Charrington) and her mother travel across the continent to make dead bodies look alive and photograph them for posterity. Their latest assignment is particularly challenging; a two week old corpse of a young girl. While her mother consoles the grieving family, Mary is left alone to dress and capture the body on film. But the corpse is not as compliant as the girl expects.

In 'A Little off the Top' from 2012, directed by Canadian Adam O'Brien, Sylvio, a hair stylist (David Nerman) has one last session with a famous star, but his long standing bitterness towards those who have achieved fame translates into a literally hair raising conclusion. We're back to Australia for Matthew Richards' 'The Disappearance of Willie Bingham.' Bingham, a killer, faces execution, but is subjected instead to extensive surgery, the precise amount determined by the bereaved family of a schoolgirl he raped and murdered, as part of a new justice programme. As the amputations and organ donations continue, Bingham is exhibited in state high schools as a salutary lesson about keeping to the straight and narrow.

In Sergio Morcillo's 2017 shot 'Gotas' a Spanish dancer, 16 year old Marta (Marina Romero), orphaned at 14, is troubled by intense stomach pains. At their height, they materialise into a demonic figure who is linked to her grief and fear of the adult world. More terrorised young girls (or a young girl in this case) occurs in A.J. Briones' 2015 short 'The Smiling Man' from the USA, where a little moppet is menaced in her own home by a scarily mischievous balloon wielding clown/demon. In Pablo Pastor's 2016 Spanish I Spit on Your Grave influenced short 'Into the Mud' a girl (María Forqué) awakes naked in the forest, held captive by a male hunter. She makes her escape and when she reaches water undergoes a transformation which allows her to revenge herself on her captor. And for the last short we're in the UK with 'Vicious' which is actually an episode from the 2015 TV series Strange Events. A young woman, Lydia (Rachel Winters) is grieving the loss of her sister Katie. But the house she's living in is occupied by a malevolent presence which may or may not be her dead sibling.

The short films don't really have much commonality, although the theme of women being terrorised is pretty consistent, and over the course of the feature a little wearing. But each short is never less than well crafted and some, notably 'Post Mortem Mary', 'The Smiling Man' and 'Vicious' are nastily effective. The wraparound story is pretty flimsy, and the knowledge that the shorts existed prior to making this doesn't help. But overall this is one of the better modern anthology films, and is worth a look.

A Night Of Horror: Nightmare Radio will be available on Amazon and Google from 21st December and iTunes from 30th December.

Scary Christmas round up of (mainly) new horror movies: Reviews of The Nights Before Christmas (UK/Canada 2019), Let it Snow (Ukraine/Georgia 2020), Black Christmas (USA 2019), Unholy Night (Canada 2019), Happy Horror Days (USA 2020) and Why Hide? (UK 2018)

Normally this post would be a seasonal Supermarket Sweep (see 2018 and 2019's roundups here and here), but my usual outlets have been a bit mean with the seasonal swag this year. So I've cast the net a little wider and rummaged around to bring you some Christmas fright flicks which are either new or that I haven't yet covered.

The Nights Before Christmas NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 (UK/Canada 2019: Dir Paul Tanter) Back in 2017, UK producer/director Tanter made a film entitled Once Upon a Time at Christmas, of which this movie is a direct sequel; but don't worry, you don't need to have seen the first one to understand what's happening, because not only do you get flashbacks to that movie, but the events in OUaTaC are frequently referred to.

Set four years after the first movie, various survivors of the killing spree have left the area, either voluntarily or via victim relocation schemes. Courtney (Keegan Chambers), whose character was in the first film, but played by a different actor, is still in mourning for Joe, murdered by the Santa killers. Courtney's father catches up with her, now living in New York. But dad becomes the first victim of a new wave of terror perpetrated by the killers from the first movie, 'Santa Claus' (Simon Phillips) and his accomplice 'Mrs Claus' (Sayla de Goede). 

Natalie Parker (Kate Schroder) is the FBI Agent who works out pretty quickly that Mr and Mrs Claus are back in town. Meanwhile Doctor Monica Mudd (Jennifer Wallis), who is Courtney's psychiatrist, was also the shrink treating the killing couple, whose real names are Nicholas Conway and Michelle Weaver; they met at an asylum, which allows me to slip in my 'there ain't no sanity clause' line. Mr and Mrs Claus catch up with Mudd at home, and murder her daughter Becky (Anne-Carolyne Binette) who's been upstairs doing a striptease for her boyfriend. The FBI apprehend Michelle, who has attended Becky's funeral, but its not long before she's escaped and the crazy pair are running rings around the cops, and continuing their murderous plan.

Tanter's film is incredibly frustrating. It looks fantastic; the photography is first rate. Canada stands in for the USA (like the first film) and its snowy forest scenery provides a dramatic backdrop to the action. But there's a problem; there isn't a single original idea in the film (although 1991's The Silence of the Lambs is clearly a big influence, with the Parker character standing in for Clarice Starling) so while it looks great, it's actually pretty boring. A 105 minute run time doesn't help. 

Casting wise gravel voiced Phillips keeps losing his American accent and de Goede visually channels Harley Quinn from this year's Birds of Prey but with the psycho cutie mannerisms of Sheri Moon Zombie; it's pretty grating. Elsewhere Kate Schroder looks awkward in her role, not helped by a pitiful cliché ridden script; but there's a drinking game to be had for every time a character mentions the killer's naughty or nice list; "It's like an actual list!" Again and again. Not very good then.

Let it Snow (Ukraine/Georgia 2020: Dir Stanislav Kapralov) Three years before the events in the movie, a prologue shows two snowboarders crashing into a young girl on the slopes and fleeing the scene; the girl dies. Three years later it's Christmas, and two Americans, cocky Max (Alex Hafner) and sensitive Mia (Ivanna Sakhno), book into the same resort near where the incident took place. Both are free snowboarders, and Max is looking forward to some fun on the infamous Black Ridge, but Lali, the unsmiling, creepy receptionist (Tinatin Dalakishvili) tells them that it's been closed off, and not to try and access it because people have disappeared there.

On their first day as they prepare to take a helicopter to their chosen location, they see a corpse in a body bag being taken to the hotel for identification; the body is that of a man, seemingly left for dead on the Black Ridge. He's yet another casualty of the mountain. As they fly past the area Max and Mia see a cross. The pilot tells them that some say the ghost of the dead girl haunts the Black Ridge and kills tourists.

With this rather good setup in place, the film proceeds to go downhill rapidly (pun intended). Max and Mia are attacked by a black clad rider on a snowmobile (they have failed to notice a hand sticking out of the snow while boarding past it). Mia recovers to find Max missing; she catches up with him only to see him being towed away by the snowmobile. The driver then lets off a small bomb which causes an avalanche, in which Mia gets trapped. And thus the movie sheds itself of anything approaching the supernatural and becomes a lame slasher movie crossed with a survival story, a sub genre very popular last decade, you may recall.

Let it Snow is set in and around the ski resort of Gudauri in Georgia (an actual place, so perhaps not the greatest bit of advertising for it). As you might expect, the scenery is stunning, and photographed beautifully. But many of the action scenes are confusingly shot and often very brief, making the film feel bitty. There some very good individual scenes, and Sakhno is put through her paces to quite a gruelling extent, but as a whole Let it Snow is a terrible mess, and most will be able to spot its final reveal coming from a very early point. A fairly shaky feature debut from Kapralov; his intentions may be good, but his execution is very far from it.

Black Christmas (USA/New Zealand 2019: Dir Sophia Takal) I'm not exactly sure why Takal and co-writer April Wolfe chose Bob Clark's 1974 movie as the jumping off point for a very loose adaptation which says some interesting things about gender politics. But I'm kind of pleased they did.

It's Christmas and the students of Hawthorne College (named after its founder, the racist, sexist patriarch Calvin Hawthorne) are preparing for the holidays. Well most of them. A bunch of girls from an all female sorority house, who for one reason or another aren't travelling home, are preparing for the annual 'Orphans dinner'.

Chief among them is Riley (Imogen Poots) who is in recovery after she was sexually assaulted by one of the students, Brian (Ryan McIntyre). Riley's complaint after the attack was not handled well; it was deemed that she was complicit and Brian escaped punishment. The incident leaves many of her friends bitter and angry, not least Kris (Aleyse Shannon) who is waging a one woman war against all forms of oppression; starting with a petition against one of the lecturers, Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes) for his refusal to stop teaching the works of 'old white men' in his classics class (a rather good scene has him quoting Camille Paglia in an attempt to dismiss feminist critique of male language; he's a condescending so and so). The girls put on a revue show, with Riley standing in at the last minute, and the highlight of their set is a blistering put down of the male hegemony on campus. Which of course infuriates the boys.

But, as numbers dwindle in the houses, they reduce further courtesy of a black cowled figure (or is it figures? It seems to be everywhere at once) who's offing the girls one by one. Riley witnesses a ritual involving some of the guys and the bust of Hawthorne (which Kris successfully campaigned to have removed from college grounds). Is this in some way connected with the murders? Well yes and no.

The very on point themes of male oppression and millennial anger underpin a lot of what's happening here. The Kris character personifies much of this tension. "They're classics," she says of the choice of authors in Gerson's English class. "But they're not mine." But Black Christmas is also about Riley's journey back from victim to heroine; at one point she goes looking for one of her friends and finds her about to be forced into having sex with one of the frat boys. Riley quietly stays in the room, silently forcing the boy to leave; it's a great scene.

Takal's nods to Clark's original film pop up now and again; the infamous dirty phone call scene turns out to be a bad connection with the mum of one of the missing girls, and the 'plastic bag' murder is recreated, but this time over the head of one of the oppressors. I can see how a lot of people wouldn't have liked this movie; its politics are not subtle and it's a very 'triggery' film, to use current parlance. But I really liked Takal's reboot. Yes it's a PG-13 horror movie and yes it's been designed with a certain demographic in mind, but it worked for me.

Unholy Night (Canada 2019: Dir Chris Chitaroni, Kristian Lariviere and Randy Smith) It's Christmas and lonely Lilly (Jennifer Allanson, who like a lot of this movie's cast, were in Lariviere's entertaining 2018 flick Hens Night) is a put upon nurse whose ward manager is just a big meanie, ordering her around something rotten. Lilly, who struggles with self image issues, doesn't make a stand. She gets assigned to a older patient, Mr Iblis (Jim McDonald), who's nearing the end of his life. He has with him a scrapbook, the contents of which he discloses to Lilly, in the form of two stories. 

The first is 'Christmas with the Cannibals.' A young couple, John and Iris, very much in love, are travelling over to Iris's parents; it's the first time John has met them. To take the pressure off Iris suggests they have some 'shrooms, which means that they're pretty baked when they arrive. Iris's family are decidedly odd, and John's high means that he's occasionally hallucinating. But he certainly isn't seeing things when he finds a freezer full of body parts in the basement. Yes, Iris's family are cannibals (a fact she obviously hadn't previously disclosed). John attempts escape but it seems the whole town, including a police officer - and Iris's ex - is in on the act; John's protestations about cannibalism fall on deaf ears.

The second story, 'Drunk Dead Debbie', concerns a group of women who, while putting together an audition tape for a TV dating show, learn of the legend of 'Drunk Dead Debbie'; the Debbie in question was a shy office worker whose colleagues pranked her by getting her drunk at an office party (the prank backfired as Debbie choked on her own vomit and died). As a result, the story goes that if you look in a mirror and say 'Drunk Dead Debbie' three times, Debbie will come back from the grave. So they do. And she does. And a rather nasty end awaits them all.

The final story is also a conclusion to everything we've seen so far. Lilly gets off her shift, and goes home to her hideously overbearing mother, who has clearly systematically put her daughter down her whole life, including a ritual of locking her in a cupboard every Christmas Eve. Well Lilly's about to undergo an epiphany, as she finds out exactly why her mother locked her up, discovering her true self for the first time. And it ain't pretty (it also explains the prologue to the film). 

This modestly budgeted ($20,000 and that might be Canadian dollars) sort of compendium movie might be very rough round the edges, but I really liked its shoestring inventiveness. It's not hugely funny but it has an anarchic feel and everyone looks like they had a great time making it. 

Happy Horror Days (USA 2020: Dir Various) Well if you thought the last movie was low budget, try this one on for size. Bit of a cheat including this because of the nine short films that make up the feature, all of which refer to American holidays, only one of them relates to Christmas. Watching this was a bit like viewing a shorts programme; some were ok, some were awful and/or incomprehensible; and all round Happy Horror Days was fairly uninspiring. Anyhow, this is what's included.

New Year's Eve; 'Father Time' - a pregnant woman learns that far from being a benevolent old soul, Father Time resurrects himself every year in the body of the new year's first born. And guess whose waters break with five minutes to go until midnight?

St. Patrick's Day; 'Becoming Patrick' - baffling short short in which a boy is abducted, tortured and returned to his family as, well, Saint Patrick. No, me neither.

Easter: 'Forty Winks' - a lively but difficult to interpret film in which a woman refuses to observe the no meat eating observance of the holiday and turns into a sleepwalking potential killer who eats the family dog and threatens her husabnd, who ties her up.

4th July: '4th July' - a very nasty little film. Two trailer trash white racist MAGA types, a man and a woman, break into the house of a black couple. The black guy is raped by the white man while the MAGA couple let fly with the N-word. Worse is to come, and just when you think there's going to be retribution, the white racist cops arrive. Jeez.

Labor Day: 'Labor Day' - a pregnant woman becomes stuck in a time loop, where it's forever Labor day, and her birth experience becomes more bizarre the more times she re-lives it. But is she actually pregnant in the first place?

Halloween; 'Candy' - a couple move into a home in the hills, vacated in a hurry by the previous owners who have left all their stuff. The home has problems including a leak in the ceiling and a thing in the shed, but more problematically the hills are alive (at least the foliage is) and nature claims the couple via strangling creepers. So that's what happened to the last owners!

Thanksgiving; 'Cranberry Sauce' - a short moral tale. A woman has only enough money to buy a tin of cranberry sauce (required by her mother) or cigarettes. She chooses the fags but when she encounters an entity in a tunnel, who won't let her pass, she goes back to the shop and swaps the cigs for the tin; a much more effective weapon against the entity.

Hanukkah; 'Hanukkah' - Crystal, a gold digging young woman, is getting set to fleece older guy Soloman over dinner at his house. Unfortunately Soloman's wife returns to celebrate Hanukkah, and the stage is set for a rather difficult, and murderous dinner.

Christmas; 'Merry and Fright' - at the Anderson's Christmas party, Bob decides to tell a story about two generations of killer Santas, father and son.

Why Hide? aka Christmas Presence (UK 2018: Dir James Edward Cook) A group of friends are off to the country to stay with Rose McKenzie (Charlotte Atkinson), who has rented a house for the Christmas holiday. It's Rose's first Christmas without her father; her twin sister Daisy disappeared when Rose was 10, and her mother subsequently died of a broken heart. Her friends consist of new age-y Anita (Lorna Brown) and her bickering husband Marcus (Mark Chatterton), and would be writer Samantha (Elsie Bennett) and her partner, cheese obsessed (Welsh) valley girl Jo (Orla Cottingham); Samantha has just switched to women. Bitchy fashion designer, Hugo (William Holstead), makes up the party. 

As they settle in, the tensions within the group become manifest. Anita pretentiously sees herself continuing a family tradition of healers and mystics. McKenzie holds forth about the pushing of the LGBTQ+ agenda, and Hugo utters a string of sotto voce putdowns aimed at everyone in sight; it could be a long first evening. But when Hugo dishes out his presents early because he has to leave the next day, his gifts to the group - prototypes of a new range of underwear he's developed, the 'Why Hide?' range (crotchless skimpies, basically) - trigger a drunken photoshoot which breaks the ice somewhat. Later that night a drunk Anita dances in the house grounds, summoning spirits.

The next morning Hugo goes missing after seeing something on the edge of the grounds. Has Anita conjured something forth unknowingly? The rest search for him, and find that his car (with tyres slashed) and clothes are still around. Hugo's body is later found. When the rest try to ring for emergency services, the phone has been cut off. Some time later McKenzie finds Hugo tied up in a cupboard, still alive. So who is the body in the kitchen? It's Hugo too. McKenzie twigs that something supernatural is going on which directly links to her missing sister; her friends, and McKenzie herself, are all in grave danger.

Why Hide? (I preferred the Christmas Presence title although this isn't really a Christmas themed movie per se) starts off a little like Abigail Blackmore's 2019 movie Tales from the Lodge, with a group of not quite friends gathering in a country house and facing danger. It takes a little while for the evil - in this case a shape shifting entity - to expose itself, so along the way we get a lot of spooky red herrings. The budget doesn't allow for a full on final reel (although there is a fiery finish, ending up with a pun on Boxing Day), but when the movie shifts up a gear it's quite fun. Whether you like the early scenes banter between a group of people, who don't like each other that much, getting pissed and opening up is a matter of taste. Jo and Hugo get the best lines but after a while the snark starts to grate. I've seen this movie twice now and it's a strangely comforting home grown horror pic, well photographed and with enough content to survive a second watch.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 #11: Reviews of The Understanding (UK 2020), His House (UK 2020), Vengeance of the Leprechaun (UK 2020), Medusa, Queen of the Serpents (UK 2020), Redwood Massacre: Annihilation (UK 2020) and Hosts (UK 2020)

The Understanding (UK 2020: Dir Adam Starks)  Xander Addington (Joshua Copeland), a confused man with little memory of childhood, travels out of London back to where "it all began." Specifically he heads to the town where he grew up: Graveshill, population 4000. It's a place where messages like 'Turn back' are painted on tree trunks: a forgotten town with historic devil worshipping connections. 

The purpose of his visit is to hear the reading of the will of his late father, who took his own life; Xander had become distant from him. The will leaves him his father's house and the local asylum, which dad also owned; he was an influential man in Graveshill. The solicitor in charge expects that Xander will want to sell both properties and has already lined up interested developers. But Xander surprises him; he wants to move in. 

In the woods he meets a deaf and blind man who wears a full head mask. He also encounters Tyler (Starks), who is surprised that anyone would return to the town, particularly as there had been around 700 murders in the area in the previous decade, and as a result Graveshill had cut itself off from the rest of the world and become self sufficient.  

Tyler comes to see him later that evening, after Xander glimpses some shadows in the house. He tells him that the asylum was built in 1870. The town was built around it. In 1910 the asylum was closed and the inmates were rehomed in Graveshill. The people committing the crimes all said they were driven by voices. The whole town is descended from mad men and criminals.

Pretty much everyone in the town is either angry at his return or shocked; Tyler shows him an article written a while back declaring Xander dead. Henry Walker, the Town Mayor (Rick Klink) wants to buy the asylum. The frosty reception continues with the girl behind the counter at the local cinema, who carries a wad of notes and a stun grenade in her bag. In fact the only person who's friendly to him is the woman behind the bar of the local, but she ends up dead. Xander's sketchy memories of his childhood included one Dr Landon, who used to make house visits. He decides to track Landon down; big mistake. 

Starks' debut feature sadly seriously overreaches itself. It's got enough plot strands for about three movies, and becomes more baffling as it progresses. Considering the paucity of budget, Starks manages some clever effects including some creative gore, but he's let down by flat performances (Copeland is pretty uninteresting as the movie's lead). Starks mentioned to me that some of the film was shot in 2019, with the remainder completed this year during lockdown; as a result, it wasn't what the director had envisioned. It's a pity as the project is well photographed, and there are some good soundtrack choices. Here's to him having more luck with his next one.

His House (UK 2020: Dir Remi Weekes) Bol Majur (Sope Dirisu) and his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) escape from a war torn country and make their way by boat to the UK, tragically losing their daughter during the voyage. After being held in detention in the UK, they are housed, at an address of the Government's choosing, on condition that they do not work or move from the property they've been allocated (a fact that keeps them tied to the house when the weirdness starts). It's a home in the middle of a run down housing estate (filmed in Tilbury). Normally refugees would be expected to share accommodation, but strangely the Majurs have sole occupancy of the house. Their social worker Mark (Matt Smith) is impressed at Bol's confident signature on papers; "I work in a bank. I worked in a bank," he says. 

Although the authorities urge them to fit in, the challenges of being strangers in a strange land combine with their post war stresses and grief at the loss of their child. They literally don't know where they are living; even people of colour on the estate are racist towards them. 

Bol is determined to adjust to his new country; he buys western clothes and suggests that he and Rial use knives and forks when they eat. Which makes it all the more problematic when he starts to see things in the house; visions of demons and witches. Rial is more accepting of the supernatural threat, but it's not clear whether the house itself is haunted or the pair have brought something into their new home. Either way, Bol concludes, "we've been marked." 

Written and directed by Remi Weekes, His House has been compared to Babak Anvari's 2016 movie Under the Shadow, which is a bit lazy. While both films deal with the subject of people fleeing war and encountering the supernatural, the threat in Weekes's film is much more abstract; and, the odd well mounted scary shot aside, it fails to terrify. In fact it more closely resembles the 2018 South African movie The Tokoloshe with its migrant-community-meets-the-monster storyline, a film which, like His House, becomes mired in its own earnestness.

Dirisu and Mosaku both make rather unengaging leads; I got no real sense of their reality falling apart, and the experiences they've been through don't show in their faces. The later scenes of the movie, which border on magic realism, feel rather disconnected to the 'refugees in the UK' storyline; I felt that this was two separate films slightly at war with each other. Overall then, rather a disappointment.

Vengeance of the Leprechaun aka Vengeance of the Leprechaun's Gold aka The Leprechaun's Game (UK 2020: Dir Louisa Warren) Yes, Warren's back with her fourth (!) film this year, after Scarecrow's Revenge, Return of the Tooth Fairy and Virtual Death Match. The latest character to populate the director's low budget horror 'universe' is, as the title suggests, the leprechaun!

Warren reminds us at the film's opening of the familiar Irish folk story of the leprechaun, who guards the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and comes after you if you steal it. This is later supplemented by an update from Warren regular Shawn C. Phillips who tells us that the leprechaun is in fact a soul collector appointed by Leviathan.

And in a prologue we get a taste of this rather less jolly version, when two girls on the run from the leprechaun are murdered, one being turned blind and then hammered to death, and the second knifed in the neck; oh and this is a full-sized version of the character too, unlike the one featured in all those wretched 'Leprechaun' movies of the 1990s.

Carl (Daniel Sawicki), a bit of a grifter, is informed by his girlfriend Mischa (Warren) that she's pregnant; as a result they're going to need some money. 

Carl receives a call from his mate Marshall (Marcus Brooks-Henderson) offering him a job which, like all the other jobs they've done together in the past, is dodgy. John (Mike Kelson), a collector of odd folk artefacts, like Bigfoot's claw and the sack used by Krampus, is offering £100,000 to the person who can locate and bring back the legendary pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Carl is skeptical but needs the cash, so to speed up the finding process, employs four more people to help them on the hunt.

Mercifully there's not that much trudging around in the woods before Marshall finds a bag of gold. But the team get greedy and, instead of bringing it back to John, decide to split the loot and keep it for themselves. Which of course triggers the leprechaun to track down the thieves and off them (and their partners if they get in the way), announcing his arrival with a little chuckle.

One of the team, Ruby (Magda Vero), who also took her cut as she needs cash to help her sick partner, goes to her psychic to find out what to do, when she learns that her colleagues are ending up dead. "You've been dabbling in black magic!" the psychic says, and tells her that there's only one way to stop him; the four leaf clover. I kid you not.

I've enjoyed Warren's previous movies this year, admittedly some more than others. But this is not her best work. I can't help feeling it was completed in a rush (a laptop date shows late March so I think she probably finished the film in lockdown); lines are fluffed, actors look at the camera, and the visual FX are below average. As per her other movies, acting quality varies considerably, but at least the cast aren't required to adopt US accents this time round. The leprechaun itself (Bao Tieu) looks quite good, but his Irish accent makes it quite difficult to hear what he's saying, when he's not being drowned out by the soundtrack. I think the big problem with this is the whole concept of the movie; it's just rather daft, although Carl and Mischa watching one of Warren's films on TV, and Carl admitting that he didn't understand it, raised a smile.

Medusa, Queen of the Serpents (UK 2020: Dir Matthew B.C.) Although B.C. is a first time feature director, the person behind this is prolific UK producer/director Scott Jeffrey, who already has three features out this year. Apparently Jeffrey got the idea for the film after ordering a snake head mask by mail order; when it arrived it looked fairly unconvincing on screen so he reshot the scenes in which it featured. Jeffrey also maintains that the script folds in the myth of Medusa, the snake haired gorgon whose gaze turned men (and probably women) to stone. We'll see.

A group of prostitutes lives in a group of caravans somewhere outside Canterbury, run by a madam, Val (Nicola Wright). Addict Carly (Megan Purvis) is driven to the site by her pimp Jimmy (Thomas Beatty) where she reunites with her friend Simone (Sarah T. Cohen). Jimmy takes her to a client, and she's told to ask for Alexis, which turns out to be the client's snake. When they have sex the snake bites her; this soon brings about a bodily change. When she returns to the client's home to find out what happened, she meets Alexis in human form (Jamila Martin-Wingett), who appropriately enough offers her a cocktail; a 'Snake in the Grass.' Alexis tells Carly that she was chosen for a specific purpose. 

Back at the caravan site, a john has beaten another prostitute, Maura (Nicole Nabi) pretty badly. But Carly, who is swiftly changing into something quite powerful, is to be the salvation of the girls as her transformation completes.

MQotS is for the most part a social drama into which themes of horror are gradually introduced. Some time is spent establishing the characters, particularly Carly, whose descent at the dual hands of her drug addiction and her pimp seems unstoppable. But Carly's discovery of her own power, assisted by the enigmatic Alexis, gives way to a rousing final act and a satisfyingly redemptive conclusion. B.C. and Jeffrey have, to use a phrase I tend to employ often, done a lot with not much at all here. Some impressive rural photography and great turns from some of Jeffrey's regulars in unusual (for them) roles - namely Cohen and Wright - make this a slowburn delight with a solid heart. 

Redwood Massacre: Annihilation (UK 2020: Dir David Ryan Keith) This is a sequel to Keith's 2014 slasher movie The Redwood Massacre, which introduced us to a burlap bag headed killer who takes out a bunch of Scottish campers staying in the same area where he carried out a string of murders twenty years previously. RM:A starts much the same way the first one did; with the killer finishing off the last victim of his most recent spree. Pamela, the final girl from the first one (Lisa Cameron, uncredited). 

It's ten years after the events of the first film; Tom Dempsey is the father of Sarah, one of the missing girls, who has written a book about his search for the murderer. He's introduced to a guy called Max (Damien Puckler), who has  an interest in finding the original Redwood killer and has certain Redwood memorabilia as authentication; like a burlap face bag.

Dempsey's other daughter Laura (43 year old pint sized scream queen Danielle Harris playing a character about twenty years younger than her actual age) feels that her father's obsession is ridiculous. But Tom wants to trek out to an abandoned RAF base where he thinks they might find The 'Evil Highlander' from the first movie. Their trip is augmented with brick outhouse Gus (Gary Kaspar) and Jen (Tevy Poe) who has some practical skills; both are Americans and, apart from keeping their countrywoman company there's no reason why they're there at all. Laura thinks Max is shady and she'd be right: in reality Max is a serial killer (whose bonkers credentials are firmly established in a scene where he captures a married couple, kills the wife and has sex with her while her husband is tied up and forced to watch). His plan is to meet and possibly team up with the killer. 

It turns out that the military facility they're looking for is underground, which gives an awful lot of opportunities for wandering around corridors, flashlights cutting through the gloom. It also seems to have shifted continents; the entire second part of the movie loses any Scottish connections, passing itself off as a US based flick; very strange. It also turns out that the killer is actually an experiment in genetics, perpetrated by a scientist working deep in the bunker - American obviously (Stephanie Lynn Styles).

RM: A was the sequel nobody asked for. It's a well photographed, passably acted and painfully drawn out mess (105 minutes? Really?). Harris has obviously been cast based on her horror CV (including both of Rob Zombie's Halloween reboots) irrespective of her suitability for the role, but she at least shows off good fighting skills. Puckler is a serial killer who sort of forgets his motivation, but is no stranger than the whole movie morphing into something entirely different at the half way point. The gore scenes are very much of the practical Hatchet franchise variety; well done but impressive rather than horrifying, with some set pieces just aching to be included in the next 'Fangoria' issue. Sorry but this is terrible stuff, lacking both wit and imagination.

Hosts (UK 2020: Dir Adam Leader, Richard Oakes) Leader and Oakes's debut feature, for its first half anyway, feels like a domestic TV drama, character rather than narrative driven. Jack (Neal Ward) and his partner, teacher Lucy (Samantha Loxley) are deeply in love and looking forward to spending Christmas together. Unfortunately, they've been invited to spend Christmas Eve at their neighbours, the Hendersons. But while they're exchanging presents, strange lights in the garden announce the presence of...something, which takes over the pair, making them the (undisclosed) entity's hosts.

The Hendersons function as you would expect a TV drama family to do; lazy dad Michael (Frank Jakeman) skips out of helping prepare dinner, his wife Cassie (Jennifer K Preston), who delivers a dinner table confession that she is in remission from cancer (just before the real violence kicks off), son Eric (Lee Hunter) and their other kids, young Ben (Buddy Skelton) and older sister Lauren (Nadia Lamin), who is hesitant about accepting her (unseen) boyfriend Matt's marriage proposal.

On the TV news the newsreader talks about the decline of the traditional Christmas and the rise of pagan beliefs, and also about fracking related electrical anomalies in the area. Jack and Lucy arrive, now taken over, but the Hendersons don't seem to notice or care. Michael shows them his workshop, including his late dad's old non-functioning television and, er, a shotgun. Lucy stows a borrowed hammer under the dining table. Cassie's declaration about her all clear seems to trigger a bout of violence in which the pair imprison the family in their own home while carrying out experiments on their human victims.

 

"Demons come as angels of light" is the explanation given when asked who Jack and Lucy have become. Lucy delivers a long speech about them being children thrown out of their father's house who have come home to wreak havoc; it's an explanation that has a Biblical, or a Greek tragedy whiff to it. Are their controllers aliens or something closer to home? We never know, but frequent shots of an open maw in the ground suggest the latter. 

Hosts is a very impressive feature debut, morphing from its strange domestic setup to something infinitely darker at the click of a trigger. It certainly doesn't stint on the gore - one scene is truly shocking both for its ferocity and its suburban backdrop - and the film is all the better for not providing easy explanations. Good work.

The Ringmaster (Denmark 2018: Dir Søren Juul Petersen)

Opening with a warning, parodying Edward Van Sloan's fourth wall breaking caution to the audience at the beginning of Frankenstein (1931), I found myself wondering whether to expect a film as shocking as the audience of nearly one hundred years ago found James Whale's breakthrough horror movie. And presumably that's the effect that Søren Juul Petersen wants to achieve here; nice try.

While the entire population of Denmark gets ready to stay home and tune into to a football match, one where the country have made it to the final, two girls of very different backgrounds staff a petrol station night shift. Agnes (Anne Bergfeld), whose father owns the station, is a diligent student hoping to sneak in the back and work on her college thesis, having been dropped off by doctor boyfriend Benjamin (Kristopher Fabricius), leaving Belinda (Karin Michelsen) to front up the counter, text her disinterested petty criminal boyfriend Kenny and deal with being thrown out of her mother's home for continuing to be support her bloke.

But the quiet shift is about to change for the worse; flash forward scenes showing the women being abused confirm this. A series of shady looking customers come into the station at intervals; they're not bad as such but they're clearly up to something; and Belinda thinks she sees a woman in the back seat of one of the cars entering the station, possibly drugged, her mouth sealed with duct tape.

The growing unease of Agnes and Belinda, clearly vulnerable in their remote outpost, takes up most of the first half of the film; it's handled well and Bergfeld and Michelsen, both making their feature film debuts, are appealing leads, with Agnes as the cool headed psychology student attempting to understand why people like Belinda are attracted to bad boys like Kenny.

The movie's second half sadly reverts to that rather tired old standby, t*rture porn. The setup is familiar; a 'Ringmaster' (sleazily played by Icelandic actor Damon Younger) streams a live show, 'Escapismus', to an internet audience, while a group of elites behind a two way mirror get their kicks viewing the action. After a first act, watching Benjamin get tortured and eventually killed, the Ringmaster turns his attention to Agnes and Belinda; will they have the strength to survive his ministrations?

Based on the novel 'Finale' by Steen Langstrup (and the title under which the film originally played festivals) The Ringmaster has a lot of very well done elements - it's crisply photographed and its fracturing of the narrative is intriguing - but honestly we've seen it all before, and basing a story around innocent women suffering at the hands of men is very much last decade's thing, even if the point is to show how much people can endure pain, and also what we as an audience are prepared to call 'entertainment.'

An opening narration disabuses the audience of any thoughts that Denmark is just a land of fairy tales and happy people in terms of what we're about to see, but to me it merely informed the fact that Danish filmmakers need to find less tiresome subjects for their movies, no matter how well their product may be put together.

The Ringmaster will be available on DVD & Digital Download from 30th November and may hit cinemas when they re-open.

Possessor (Canada/UK 2019: Dir Brandon Cronenberg)

A black woman, Holly (Gabrielle Graham), enters a bar and kills a man, brutally stabbing him multiple times, after which she says, seemingly to no one, "Pull me out" and turns a gun on herself. Unable to fire it, she is taken down by cops who storm the bar. In an austere medical facility a woman wakes up; she is Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), a 'possessor' employed by a company to interface into other people's minds to carry out assassinations on behalf of rich clients who have paid handsomely for the service. But, as would be expected in such a risky undertaking, it is not without emotional and physical consequences; Vos has to be tested to ensure her own memory has remained intact (involving her naming objects from her past).

But the signs of Tasya's mental unravelling are clear; when she meets up with her husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland) and son Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot), from whom she is separated, we see her rehearsing the words of greeting she'll use when she meets them, like trying on real life for size. Michael, not knowing of Vos's vocation, wants her to rejoin the family, but it already looks like it's too late; she's almost a dead woman walking.

Vos's boss Girder (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) presents her with her next project; the company's biggest yet. She is to 'possess' the mind of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), an ex drug dealer who has hooked up with money; his girlfriend Ava (Tuppence Middleton) is the daughter of John Parse (Sean Bean), CEO of a very powerful data mining company; John has grudgingly given Tate a shop floor level house surveillance job, which is as sleazy as it sounds. The client commissioning the work is John's stepson, Reid (Christopher Jacot), who wants to take over the company. Vos, as Tate, is to kill John, Ava and then himself, allowing Reid to assume control. But there's a bigger plan; the company Vos and Girder work for then want to 'buy' Reid, giving them access to that company's data resources.

Vos accepts the job. The interface is successful, but either Tate has a stronger mind than her other jobs, or Tasya is losing control. So while she moves to complete her mission a battle of wills commences, which could have fatal consequences for everyone involved.

I wasn't too enamoured with Brandon Cronenberg's feature debut, 2012's Antiviral, and on the surface his follow-up revisits the same near future territory of science deployed cynically into a narrative that fuses dream and waking states. But where that movie somewhat aped Brandon pere's similar obsessions, Possessor finds him truly branching out, making a humane and touching film, full of WTF moments and with an impressive visual palette which belies the movie's modest budget.

The film is elevated to greatness by two actors with a reputation for subsuming themselves into their roles, physically and emotionally. As Girder, Tasya's exhausted but ultimately benevolent boss, Jennifer Jason Leigh gives a subtle and care worn performance as a scientist whose whole life has been devoted to perfecting the process of 'possessing', and losing her moral compass along the way. But the real star here is Andrea Riseborough; as the ethereal Vos it's one of the standout performances of the year, her bland face a tabula rasa for other personalities. It's a difficult role to pull off; for much of the film she's in the body of Colin Tate (also a fine performance from Christopher Abbott) but Vos's non-personality - she's a cipher for the bodies she inhabits - and her desperate need to cling to her own identity are powerfully rendered.

The tussle between Vos's identity and those of the bodies she inhabits is apparent from the get go. When Girder asks her, when 'possessing' Holly, why she chose a knife to kill her victim rather than the pistol provided, Tasya responds that she thought the knife would be more in character. "But whose?" Girder responds. And it's at this point that the viewer realises that it's Vos who is the assassin, not those whose bodies she occupies.

Thematically Possessor is a game of two halves; the first plays almost like an entry in the 'Mission: Impossible' franchise, with Vos being given a role to play, a pre-planned endgame (the pick up zone, if you like) and the elaborate scientific preparations for her interfacing. We learn that the longer Vos occupies the body the greater the negative impact on her own body and mind, and after five days of occupation she will be irrevocably trapped. The second half, with the unravelling of the Tate mission, takes us into more abstract territory, and the identity crisis subplot positively reeks of the writings of Phillip K. Dick and, to an extent, the memory politics of the films of Christopher Nolan. There's also a moment in the film, when Ava's friend Reeta (Tiio Horn) comes onto Tate and Vos realises that they've been sleeping together (a fact that wasn't in the mission plan) which reminded me of Jennifer Garner finding out, as a child in a woman's body, that her adult self wasn't very nice in the 2004 age swap comedy 13 Going on 30.

The 'scuffed future' of the movie may be a familiar one - prosaic locations against shiny almost but not quite familiar technology - and the mission concept a sci fi/action movie staple; but Cronenberg is also happy to step outside the norms of this type of movie. At one point for example Vos, as Tate, travels across town to watch Michael and Ira, desperate to re-connect with them, and there's a realisation that although Vos has inserted herself into her host/victim with a mission to fulfil, these stories are playing out in the same city (Toronto) at the same time; it's quite the moment.

Ultra-violent, mind-messy and unflinchingly sad: in Possessor Brandon Cronenberg has made a sci fi movie for the 21st century that he can be truly proud of. See it.

Possessor is released on digital platforms on 27 November from Signature Entertainment.