The Morbid Imagination

Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986) attempts to recount events from the summer of 1816 in Geneva, when Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley shared ghost stories on stormy nights and subsequently challenged each other to write their own chilling tales. To say that Gothic misses the mark is being kind, but for director Ken Russell taking liberties with the facts is usually only a starting point.

Gothic gets many details right initially but after the first half hour it degenerates into a typical, over-the-top Ken Russell mish-mosh of visual excess, incoherence, and kinky sex. And after all that, the movie ends with a short, out of place narration that points out that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a result of her summer reading spooky tales with Lord Byron. It’s almost as if the producers watched the rough cut, realized that it made no sense at all and felt obligated to provide the audience with some clue as to why what they just endured mattered.

The greatest crime committed by Gothic is what the movie does to the memory of Mary Shelley. Poor John Polodori gets completely screwed as well, but at least he was a hack writer. Mary Shelly, on the other hand, wrote one of the enduring masterpieces of English literature…when she was only 19.

I just finished reading Miranda Seymour’s excellent biography, Mary Shelley, and was struck by how different the real Mary Shelley was from her popular portrait as the mild mannered wife living in the shadow of her brilliant husband. In truth, Mary was better educated than either her college dropout husband, Cambridge frat boy Byron, or Doctor John Polidori, and she was known for being an intimidating figure in intellectual conversation.

Contrary to popular legend and Mary‘s own later mythmaking, Frankenstein did not arise as the result of a dream Mary experienced following a stormy night of reading ghost stories in Switzerland. There was indeed a challenge between Mary, Shelley, Byron, and John Polidori to each write their own horror tale, but Frankenstein was assembled from a patchwork of Mary’s literary influences, existing story fragments, scientific discussions held throughout that summer, and bits of history and geography picked in their recent travels. This included a visit two years earlier to the vicinity of the Castle Frankenstein, where alchemist Conrad Dippel had supposedly attempt to reanimate the dead.

Gothic, however, gives all the credit for the inspiration of Frankenstein to ranting conversations between a bed-hopping Byron and an opium maddened Shelley, leaving Mary as little more than a weepy spectator.

From its initial publication in 1818, Frankenstein was an important and influential book. Although Frankenstein was published anonymously with a small print run that was mainly distributed amongst English literary circles it quickly gained notice for Mary. Most of its readers knew Mary and were aware that she was supposed to be the author, although some thought that Shelley had either written it himself or had a heavy hand in its development. This unfortunate mis-perception continued throughout Mary’s life and long past it, especially as Shelley’s fame grew posthumously.

Frankenstein is a tremendous literary accomplishment and it is all Mary’s. At the time, Shelley was an obscure figure, known more for his scandalous life than his poetry and Mary was famed from birth as the daughter of two towering figures of English intellectual circles.  This was the sort of greatness expected of her by her father’s friends, but sexism and her own later dedication to the memory of her beloved Shelley helped to rob Mary of her proper due.

So, to clarify: Mary Shelley, brilliant; Ken Russell, self-indulgent hack. And poor Polidori was not ugly or gay and in fact was quite handsome.

While watching Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell (2009) a smile of recognition crept across my face. Here was another fine adaptation of M.R. James’ classic tale of terror “Casting the Runes.”

James’ short story is not credited, but the plot elements are there: a powerful occultist is offended and lays a curse on their tormentor, unseen forces begin to torment the victim, then demonic forces threaten them directly, and finally the victim come to realize that the only way they can escape destruction is to transfer the curse back to its originator by passing the object used to create the curse.

M. R. James was one of the finest authors of Victorian ghost stories. Generally, his stories revolved around a scholar doing research in a remote village or ancient cathedral leading to the uncovering and unleashing of some dark force of evil. The best moments in James’ fiction are small moments of suggested horrors, such as this example from “Casting the Runes”:

“At last he produced a series which represented a little boy passing through his own park – Lufford, I mean – in the evening. Every child in the room could recognize the place from the pictures. And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly. Mr Farrer said it gave him one of the worst nightmares he ever remembered and what it must have meant to the children doesn’t bear thinking of.”

The power of suggestion was splendidly carried forward in the most noted adaption of James’ “Casting the Runes:” Night of the Demon (1957), directed by Jacques Tourneur. Night of the Demon is a masterful example of the use of lighting, sound, editing, and smart screenwriting to build suspense and generate a mood of horror. This isn’t surprising, since Tourneur had previously directed some of Val Lewton’s subtle horror masterpieces (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man). Famously, the producers inserted model shots of a demon after shooting was completed, which Tourneur and others thought ruined the subtle effects originally intended. I am not convinced of this, except in a few moments featuring clumsy special effects. I think the power of the key scenes, as originally shot, still carry the weight of the film.

Raimi pays tribute to Night of the Demon by setting his final scene in a railway station and at some points in Drag Me to Hell he actually relies on suggestion rather than gore or pyrotechnics. But it would expecting too much from the genius behind The Evil Dead (1981) to not feature projectile eyeballs or explosions of maggots. Drag Me to Hell delivers good scary fun, but remains in the general modern mainstream of effects laden shock fests.

The full text of “Casting the Runes” may be read here:

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~fadey/castrunes2.html

Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” is perhaps the greatest novel of the supernatural in the English language. Or maybe it isn’t. And that’s what makes it a great piece of literature.

In the “Turn of the Screw” a young, inexperienced governess is hired by a dissolute English nobleman to care for his orphaned niece and nephew. When she arrives at his country estate and meets the children she comes to realize that the previous governess and the handyman were carrying on a scandalous sexual liaison. Both died under tragic circumstances and it appears the children had been directly affected by the whole affair. The governess begins to see shadowy figures haunting the estate, reacts hysterically, and the story escalates to a tragic end.

The power of “The Turn of the Screw” is that it is never really clear whether the governess is actually seeing the ghosts of the doomed pair or whether she is suffering from some form of sexual hysteria. Thus, it is either a great supernatural tale or it is a great tale of psychological horror. I think it is both and is indisputably the greatest novel of horror ever written. (OK, well, the greatest one I have read)

The most notable film adaptation of James’ masterpiece is The Innocents (1961), masterfully directed by Jack Clayton and starring Deborah Kerr as the governess. The film was beautifully photographed by Freddie Francis and uses shadows, camera effects, and suggestion to create an atmosphere of dread and horror. Kerr is especially good, as are the two young actors playing the niece and nephew.

The one flaw of the movie is that, unlike the source material, it comes down firmly on one side of the ghosts/no ghosts proposition. It doesn’t spoil the film, but it does waste the primary power of the novel.

One of the interesting facts I ran across during research for this post is that the actress who plays the niece Flora with such creepy assurance went on to star in several notable horror movies. A few years after The Innocents, she appeared in the excellent The Nanny (1965), starring Betty Davis. And she had one of the leading roles as an adult in the well made Haunting of Hell House (1972). In Hell House, she had a memorable scene where she invites a ghost into her bed and allows him to make love to her, awaking to find a rotting corpse on top of her (implied, not shown). She also starred in lesser efforts like Food of the Gods (1976) and Satan’s School for Girls (1973).

Despite it’s Freudian leanings, The Innocents remains one of best ghost story movies ever filmed.

I have been immersed in vampires lately, as part of a book project I was tinkering with, and along the way, I came upon what I think is the best ever anthology of vampire stories: The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, edited by Alan Ryan.

Included in this collection are essential pieces such as The Vampyre, by John Polidori; Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu; For Blood is the Life, by F. Marion Crawford; and excerpts from Varney the Vampire, by James Malcolm Rymer. Anyone wanting to understand the development of the vampire myth in modern Western culture can gain considerable insight from this collection.

Also included are terrific stories from 20th Century authors such as: Shambleau, by C. L. Moore; Over the River, by P. Schuyler Miller; Drink my Blood, by Richard Matheson; and The Mindworm, by C. M. Kornbluth. There are no sexy, unscary vampires in this book, just old-fashioned stalkers of the night.

The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories is available through Amazon and should be considered essential to any horror literature collection.

He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.”

It is tempting to think that, before the rise of mass media, Horror had a respectable place in Western culture. But truthfully, the stages of 19th Century England, France, and America were stained with stage blood and fake entrails, thanks to the Grand Guignol and adaptations of penny dreadfuls like “Varney the Vampire.” Novels like Dracula or The Picture of Dorian Gray enjoyed some standing, but most Horror fiction and art were relegated to sideshow status.

What mass media accomplished was to permanently stigmatize Horror as low culture. It was easy to limit Horror to pulp magazines, mass market paperbacks, drive in movies, and comic books since Horror has always been popular and therefore, was easy fodder for producers and publishers looking to make a quick buck.

But genuine expressions of True Horror have emerged from the ghettos of popular culture nonetheless and remain as guideposts. My goal with this blog is to acknowledge familiar acheivements, uncover forgotten or overlooked gems, and to discuss the place of Horror in Art.

That isn’t to say that this will be a genteel expedition into mild goosebumps. I believe that True Horror stabs deep into the unconsious and is more dependent on psychic dislocation than on fear. I believe that fear actually springs from the dislocation that a truly horrifying event generates. Our minds are conditioned to maintain equilibrium but True Horror threatens that by exposing old wounds, exploring terrifying new possibilities, and unleashing primal fears from the oldest corners of human consciousness.

For that reason, I may occasionally stray towards art that shocks and revulses, and may sometimes drift into realms not normally considered part of the Horror domain, such as Film Noir or music. I am, if nothing else, committed to breaking down artifical divisions and classifications that have hindered the development of True Horror in Art.

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
Edgar Allan Poe