Christopher Fowler -- The View from the Balcony
Christopher Fowler’s column appears in each issue of
The Edge. This is actually the first regular instalment, from the out of print #4 (old series, published 1996).The editor has a winning way with would-be contributors. He wrote me a letter insulting my last book and then asked me to write a regular column. In mitigation he told me I could be as rude as I liked, so don’t blame me for the following text.
There are times when my desire to see a decent horror movie is as burning as the pain Peter Cushing felt when he cauterised the fang marks in his neck with a red-hot poker in Brides of Dracula. Why did I seize on Se7en so desperately? Because it had the guts to go where no one had gone since The Silence of the Lambs, and after such a long wait I needed something shocking. The better than expected Copycat and the overlooked Kalifornia, starring Brad Pitt and David Duchovny, came pretty close, but Se7en went a blade thickness further. Whether it looks as good on video is irrelevant; it worked on the big screen, and that’s what matters.
A Blade Across The Throat
In the same way, watching a widescreen copy
of Dracula - Prince of Darkness can’t recapture the essence of horror
that made it work in the cinema. Those silent-movie reactions to crucifixes -
the horrified throwing up of hands - look pretty silly now, so what made this
minor film special at the time of its release?
Back then, the X Certificate seemed sexier and more dangerous than a little red 18 rating. Seven years had passed since the Hammer Dracula had appeared on screen. With no video or MTV, youthful minds were less saturated with violence. Images still retained the power to shock. Fast cutting had barely been invented. Horror films appeared in double bills, so you knew you’d be tensed up by the B feature before you even got to Dracula.
In this case the first movie was Plague of the Zombies, a tasty appetiser for the main event, not especially gory (only one beheading) but there was something appealing about the anti-toff plot and disturbing about those white-eyed zombies. At the start of the main movie you were teased with the end of the first Dracula film where he shrivelled in sunlight, so you knew the count was dead. You waited for Christopher Lee to reappear. And waited. (This was a number of years prior to Hammer allowing bats to vomit blood onto Dracula’s ashes to revive him.) The next forty-five minutes are arguably the purest simple sequence in horror history, as the camera prowled the gloomy widescreen corridors and you wondered; he’s been cremated, so how the hell can they bring him back?
When Klove slipped his sacrificial victim’s feet into a noose you were even more puzzled, so that the upside-down throat-slashing came as a brilliant shock. The scene was originally to have featured a beheading, which would have been much less effective. Luckily, the censors rejected that idea in favour of a razor across the jugular, proof (if any more is needed) that they hadn’t a clue what they were doing. The film grew more perfunctory after this, prompting Eddie Izzard’s vampire theory (if they can be stopped with crossed swords and candlesticks, you should be able to make a crucifix with just your fingers). But for a while it was perfect. And lest you suspect that I spend my time wallowing in gore-free nostalgia, I must profess a love for Carpenter’s version of The Thing, the recent director’s cut of Reanimator, the aforementioned Se7en and Copycat and - although I’m not quite sure why - the unrated Hellraiser 2: Hellbound and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, perhaps because they’re so damned mean-spirited. A horror movie is like sex; the first time may not be the best, but you always remember it.
Drilling Through David Alton
I figure sooner or later we’ll have to
discuss censorship, so let’s get it over with. Of course the BBFC’s decisions
are irrational, inconsistent and misguided, but have you noticed how they’ve
shifted from scare-flix (perhaps because so few are currently being released) to
those Tarantinoesque road movies so beloved by aspiring film-makers? MPs whose
careers are so inconsequential they need to use horror films to catch the public
eye (step forward pathetic publicity moth David Alton) must be depressed by the
lack of outrage about Redemption’s (admittedly often cut) releases, so they
switch to any film that might find a parallel in daily life. Appallingly, this
leads to MPs using tragedies like Dunblane to raise their profiles in the
censorship debate. Hey, let’s watch Lucio Fulci and try out what we’ve learned
on Alton.
After years in the film business, I’ve never known anyone driven to an act of cruelty by something they saw at the movies. A person predisposed to violence is just as likely to find demons urging him on inside a vase of daffodils as on a video screen. One argument actually proposed by MPs suggests that people who rent videos are, uh, how can I put this, in a different social milieu to cinemagoers and therefore more susceptible to violent images. This means that if you’re working class you must be fackin’ stupid, and exhibits the kind of thinking the judge in the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover used when he asked the jury if they’d allow their servants to read the book.
But of course, the poor old BBFC is a bit of a false target. The tabloids (especially the mortgage ‘n’ Mothercare fixated rags like the Daily Mail) pray for a Psycho-Black-Lesbian-Slasher film to cause a real life murder so they can say ‘We told you so’, the Mail’s idea of perfect bliss being a thatched country cottage containing a white family. Then there’s self-censorship, wherein distributors regularly trim films in order to overcome UK/US ratings disparities. The US censors hacked gore from Hammer films, while their distributors retitled and reedited features to resemble local hits, the most famous example being Witchfinder General’s transformation into The Conqueror Worm, minus Paul Ferris’s brilliant score, plus a hokey poem prologue. That’s nothing compared to what they do to Italian films, as anyone who has seen the two versions of Phenomena /Creepers can testify.
Staying Dry with Stephen King
Why are so few horror, sf and fantasy
films based on good books? What, for example, went wrong with Mary
Reilly? The novel was reportedly great, the film a compromise (although far
from a total disaster). Perhaps horror on the page only really convinces when
set in the past. The thing about setting a book in the Victorian era is that
authors either catch the feeling or they don’t, and if they don’t no amount of
pastiching will help. American authors are brilliant researchers, but are less
inclined to filter their versions through a personal perspective, the exceptions
being Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney
Todd, both of which caught the sense of poverty and horror underlying
Victorian street life. From the UK, Joanne Harris’s powerful, haunting Victorian
thriller Sleep, Pale Sister deserves much wider recognition. She
effortlessly outwrites Anne Rice by dealing in truths (Rice’s Memnoch The
Devil is possibly the worst book I’ve ever stumbled through).
US authors tend to bombard you with hate mail if you make the slightest criticism and, unlike English authors, seem to have outrageously inflated egos, yet they’re largely responsible, in my opinion, for the death of the decent horror novel. Anne Rice crushed the life from the vampire genre while Koontz slaughtered the horror-thriller, leaving only a handful of new books worth opening. I loathe Stephen King’s Gee-Whiz-Shucks-I’m-Just-A-Regular-Guy routine because it’s bullshit; a friend of mine went to Stephen and Tabitha King’s anniversary party, featuring a full orchestra and thousands of guests, but everyone was forced to drink Diet Tab because the Kings apparently don’t drink and don’t think anyone else should - so much for the common touch.
Of course, cultural differences aid American writers. Their country is geared to the nuances of pop culture and feeds a huge national appetite. But while mediocre US scribes are treated like superstars, our own novelists struggle, like Ms Harris, to find outlets for their imaginative tales. Tom Holland’s intriguing Supping With Panthers and Simon Maginn’s brilliant Sheep show where the genre might be taken by British authors. Our hopes now rest with Alan Moore and the film version of his graphic novel From Hell.
Bloody Good Reading Material
People often write to ask me what’s good
to read in the genre. I know how they feel; finding something that’s interesting
and well-written is often a challenge. Stephen Jones’s annual roundup of the
genre in Best New Horror is essential reading, but published horror in
general is having a hard time, and in periods of famine I tend to fall back on
forgotten novels. If you have a decent second-hand bookshop near you, you may
wish to keep an eye out for any of the following, if you don’t know them
already.
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton is a marvellous depiction of a killer’s mind, and will have you rooting for the ‘villain’. Paul Theroux’s terrifying Chicago Loop is another surprise, described by its author as ‘subterranean gothic’. The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson is a truly disturbing, melancholy story concerning the lone inhabitant of a house built near the entrance to Hell. The Other by Thomas Tryon is an eerie tale of tortured family life, with a stonking mid-plot twist. Poe Must Die is Marc Olden’s brilliant evocation of a Poe-Conan Doyle meeting. The Apocalypse is the hard-to-find sequel to The Sentinel (itself much better than Michael ‘I-Couldn’t-Direct-Traffic’ Winner’s film) by Jeffrey Konvitz, and superior in every way. Even harder to locate are all six volumes of Michael (Beetlejuice) McDowell’s strange supernatural Deep South soap opera Blackwater. Kirby McAuley’s Dark Forces remains one of the finest anthologies in - or probably out of - print, while the two very best (and rarest) collections, Mind At Bay and Mind In Chains, are edited by a psychologist, Dr Christopher Evans. These highly experimental horror tales include a transcript of a real argument with a computer and a paranoid form for the reader to fill out. The sad thing is, if you don’t help to keep such tasty volumes on the shelves, they’re pulped and gone forever. It’s already becoming impossible to find my novel Rune anywhere, and publishers won’t reprint without a lot of convincing.
The other problem concerns reader loyalty. Publishers like to build reputations, so that each author is known for one particular style, and fills out a market niche. Which leaves brilliant novelists like Christopher Priest stranded, because each book he writes is utterly different from the last. Yet Priest truly remains the author’s author, providing inspiration for everyone wishing to produce mature, intelligent works of the fantastic, just as JG Ballard provides a template for anyone interested in profoundly human future visions.
What worries me is the fact that anyone interested in the genre now has to search hard for it. My father had a full set of Dennis Wheatley’s witchcraft novels on the family bookshelf, and by the time I was twelve I had read them all. In the Politically Correct nineties such things are spuriously linked to non-existent cases of so-called ‘Satanic child abuse’ and are mostly unavailable. These were just stories, for God’s sake, and pretty hokey ones at that. It’s as if politicians are so unimaginative they can no longer differentiate between fact and fiction.
Creative Horror-Writing Course: Enrolment Here
Which brings me
to writers. Yes, you, out there. Let’s hold our own Open University, right here
on this page. As a guy who edits new writing and sits on judging panels for new
horror competitions, I’m constantly amazed by the quality of submissions.
They’re really appalling. Many people forget that writing is both a craft and an
art. When I read a new story, I expect the young writer to have learned, or show
signs of learning, the basic craft of writing. Grammar, spelling, punctuation,
sentence constructed, narrative clarity. Onto these basics they can build their
art; imagination, flights of fantasy, the unleashed power of a free mind.
What I often get is Mechanical-Monster-Loose (see above) and Stream-Of-Consciousness prose. The latter is an old favourite of would-be free verse poets and anyone else who can’t hack the basic rules, and usually gets filed in the circular tin filing cabinet I keep under my desk. Yes, Picasso painted abstract impressions, but it’s worth recalling that he produced fine realistic art at age four before moving on. Mozart’s later compositions were so dense he was forced to explain that he was writing not for his age but for future generations.
So, writing is a craft first, then an art. This should in no way inhibit your ideas, but rather give them a shape. The stupidest question writers are asked is always ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ The proper answer is ‘Hey, everyone gets ideas, but I know how to translate mine into a workable form on paper.’ How do you know? Because you have your craft.
This also works for people who start to tell you they’ve had a great idea for a book, to which the correct response is ‘I’m very happy for you, and look forward to reading it as soon as you’ve finished.’ (The other questions one frequently gets are, oddly, ‘Do you write under your own name?’ and ‘What have you written that I’ve read?’ - a question that demands clairvoyance in its answer. What impels people to ask these things is a mystery.)
But I guess we should be thankful anyone is reading or writing at all, given the fracturing of leisure time now possessed by the average household. Anyone who has accidentally lost four hours trying to find the time travel coordinates to MYST when they meant to be writing will testify to the truth of this. Heartbreakingly, I was recently forced to remove Sim City from my computer so I could get a story finished. Next point, then: finding time. Yes, you’re busy, and so is everybody else. You’ll have to give up some drinking or TV. I know it’s hard but, hey, when Samuel Beckett was asked what he’d given up for his art, he replied: ‘I have fairly often not gone to parties.’
For this exercise you need two uninterrupted hours, anywhere quietish. Bring a pen and an art-pad, not A4 paper. You’ll also need a magazine or newspaper, the weirder the better. Fortean Times is very good for this. You may have some vague idea in your brain, or you may be a blank slate. Go through the reading material you selected and find a sentence that interests or intrigues you. It doesn’t have to make sense. Find a second one, or use the one in your head. Put the two together and see what you get.
Example: I keep a notebook and jot down overheard remarks, snippets from local news, etc. These get recycled into stories. When I reached the end of my last notebook, I found I had a page of unused snippets, and wove them into a single story.
The snippets were as follows:
A French farmer was killed by a cocktail
cabinet that fell out of a plane.
A schoolteacher lost a pupil in her charge
on the London underground.
A woman fell out of a seaside rollercoaster.
A Jamaican Obeah Man put a curse on an enemy in Notting Hill, and it killed
him.
A sewer engineer was killed by an exploding drain.
An urn full of
ashes got spilled over the head of a guest at a wake.
Someone took a shot at
a Salman Rushdie-type author in hiding.
To these narrative elements I added an imaginative purpose of my own; the idea that people must eventually find a way to return to their families.
I knitted these elements together in a short story, ‘Jouissance De La Mort’ (in my most recent collection, Flesh Wounds). I’m not saying you take so many strands, but you should certainly try the exercise with two snippets, over, say, six pages (I can’t think in word counts). The pen is for doodling when you’re stuck. Write down associated words, or draw them if you feel more comfortable doing so. It’s okay to be silly. Sometimes the right side of your brain makes connections your left logical side would prevent you from considering. Fill a few pages without thinking too hard, and look back at it a couple of hours later. See if you can spot the ‘right side’ ideas that doodles reveal. That’s the stuff you need to write up. We’ll worry about logic afterwards. Making sense of things isn’t always important. Now get out there and be unusual.