Paul Butler's Blog

Can a dramatization of supernatural horror be, well, too horrible? Episode Two, Oil and Water, a New Woman in Black discusses Hammer film’s 2012 movie of Susan Hill’s novel. Does visceral, real life horror clash with the chill of the supernatural? Or is just the way of all horror in the 21st century?

Episode One

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/paulfbutler

This podcast is a journey into supernatural fiction, drama, TV, and film through the ages. We will explore what frightens us most about ghost stories and why we are still drawn to them.

Episode one explores Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, the novel and the play.

In episode two, due for publication on 23 September, I will recruit a horror fan from Generation Z to argue the merits of the book, the play, and screen versions — the 1989 TV version scripted by Nigel Kneale and the and 2012 James Watkins-directed Hammer movie.

This will be a journey into supernatural fiction, drama, TV, and film through the ages. We will explore what frightens us most about ghost stories and why we are still drawn to them.

Check this space for updates.

If the supernatural novel or short story is the most challenging type of fiction, what can be said of the supernatural memoir? If, like the first of the entries below, it’s the kind of memoir that seeks to convince the reader, then mere suspension of belief isn’t enough. Literary devices, like foreshadowing and suggestion, are likely to prove not only redundant, but counterproductive.

Little Stranger s and Haunted Mansions

The most striking thing about Guy Lyon Playfair’s This House is Haunted: The Amazing Inside Story of the Enfield Poltergeist (published in 1980, and reissued by White Crow Books in 2011) is the absence of any of any such literary tricks. This is entirely deliberate on the late author’s part. Playfair, an experienced journalist with a special interest in psychical research, warns in the preface that those looking for the “exotic thrills” of the horror genre will be disappointed. “This,” he says, “is because This House is Haunted, plot, dialogue and all, is true. And while truth may be stranger than fiction, as indeed it can be, it is also far less well organized.”

[image error] Cover of the 2011 White Crow Books edition of This House is Haunted

This story has repetition. It has questions without answers. The answers that do come seem to contradict each other. And, inevitably, there is anti-climax as the big question of causation remains hanging.

Playfair’s memoir follows the story of a family living in a council house in the north London suburb of Enfield during a fifteen-month period between 1977 and 1978. Janet, who is eleven when the story begins, is the younger of two sisters and the apparent centre of an incessant series of poltergeist occurrences. Some of these — being flung out of bed, for instance — might easily be explained by a psychologist as an example of ‘acting out’, conscious or otherwise. The home in question, though loving, is also a broken one. The father of the children turns up once a week with maintenance payments. Playfair notes that the happenings seem to become worse around the time of these visits.

Some of the events, on the other hand, do not have explanations that fit within the known laws of physics. Marbles and toys are thrown across rooms when no one is near. Banging and thumping noises come from within the walls or under the floorboards, and chairs move across the room on their own. These events are witnessed by the family, neighbours, journalists, several members of the Society of Psychical Research, and even by a police officer. Several of these people have a vested interest not to seem gullible. Their testimony, which was also recorded independently of Playfair’s book, is compelling.

Playfair, together with inventor-turned psychic investigator, Maurice Grosse, camps out day after day, week after week in the stricken home. They witness escalations and occasional lulls in activity. While they record each instance with scientific vigour, Playfair’s approach, and his narrative, take a disconcerting turn when he invites a number of mediums into the house. The author seems to show them exaggerated respect, even when the conclusions the various practitioners come to are at odds with each other. All start, not surprisingly, from the assumption that the disturbances are caused by spirits of the dead.

There are more mundane, but no less unpleasant, upheavals. A parade of psychologists and health professionals come into the home and delve into the mystery from a care perspective. Playfair is scornful of some of these people for their apparent coldness, especially when their conclusions suggest that Playfair, Grosse and the media may be feeding the problem. While the psychologists in question may have been callous, the reader is likely to feel they might also have had a point.

In the 2011 edition’s appendices, Playfair provides some afterthoughts on the more scientific side of the poltergeist phenomenon. These include a suggestion that the poltergeist sufferer may have a rare variation of Tourette’s syndrome, one which, for reasons as yet unknown, ticks and disturbances extend to the environment far outside the body. Janet, in the Enfield case, did display some classic Tourette’s symptoms. Playfair also presents evidence of a 2010 study of anomalous patterns in sound charts from poltergeist activity. Compared with human-made knocking, the poltergeist sound is more akin to an earthquake with no discreet beginning and a slower falling off of volume.

In 2015, a three-part drama series entitled The Enfield Haunting, loosely adapted from Playfair’s book, was released. Written by Joshua St. Johnston and directed by Kristoffer Nyholm, the story aims to create the dramatic structure that Playfair deliberately avoided. The Enfield Haunting draws an emotional connection between the death of Maurice Grosse’s daughter a year before the start of the Enfield case and Grosse’s sympathy with the central poltergeist victim, Janet (Eleanor Worthington Cox). Coincidentally, Janet shares his late daughter’s name. All these details are in Playfair’s memoir too, but by using the Grosse-Janet connection as the spine of the drama, the series explores the theme of causation. Could the needs of grieving father, Grosse (Timothy Spall) be creating a hothouse of poltergeist activity?

[image error] Janet (Eleanor Worthington Cox) in The Enfield Haunting (2015)

The drama series, like Playfair’s book, provides a portrait of a family in crisis. Like the book, The Enfield Haunting creates a number of possible solutions including an (apparently fictional) malicious old man, Joe, who had died in the house.

Playfair’s book remains a fascinating record both of the extent and the limits of understanding poltergeists. As the author notes, the experience of family members and observers alike is far from glamorous. It is, in fact, as grueling as any other serious domestic trouble which can’t be resolved. In the end this is also what makes the story difficult to dismiss.

***

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell 2019 (William Collins) is a memoir of very different kind. Weaving through the landscape of stories, novels, television and film adaptations, Parnell creates a tapestry of memory and emotion using the supernatural in literary arts. It is also a work of cultural conservation, capturing the influences on the generation that grew up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s.

[image error] Ghostland: In Search of Haunted Country

Some of the influences, such as M.R. James, and the TV adaptations of his work, are well known. James’s work comes to the fore in the opening chapter, Lost Heart, which centres around the west Suffolk location of the legendary author’s upbringing. Later, relating how cancer threatens the lives of his own family of origin, Parnell returns to James and to Suffolk both geographically and metaphorically. The chapter is ominously titled Who is This Who is Coming? after the Latin script engraved on an ancient pipe excavated in James’s Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.

Suffolk Horror: A Jamesian Inversion

Some chapters reclaim less well known writers such as Norfolk-based author John Gordon whose novels The House on the Brink (1970) and Fen Runners (2009) explore East Anglian Fenland folklore. Other episodes are very much about childhood. Parnell recalls coming across a 1980s television adaptation of Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe. Much later, he visits the house of its setting, which was also the author’s home. Magically, Parnell hears about, and even experiences, some mild poltergeist occurrences.

The author’s muse is, by necessity, fluid and unpredictable, like a like stream of imagination running beneath the more linear details of personal biography and literary appreciation. For the right generation of readers, Ghostland is likely to awaken quite unexpected memories, throwing up odd bedfellows in the process. Along with literary works such as L.P Hartley’s The Go Between we experience one of Britain’s morbidly effective television ‘public information films’ aired during the 1970s when everyone watched the same two or three channels. A deathlike figure lurks in the background while children play around a deserted pond. We see tragedy unfold to the doom-laden narration of actor Donald Pleasance.

As Ghostland is essentially a memoir of theme rather than place, Parnell moves from east to west at will exploring, for instance, David Rudkin’s coming-of-age folkloric television play, Penda’s Fen set in the Malvern Hills, with Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius providing the ruminations about national identity and divine judgement.

Excavated Devils and Pagan Kings

One story Parnell revisits is Rudyard Kipling’s They set in Kipling’s adopted county, Sussex. They makes what is, for the classic ghost story, a surprisingly rare connection; it places the supernatural within the same emotional space as personal loss. The bereaved Kipling invokes the spirit of a child much like his own late daughter.

The sense of grief which you would think ought to be at the very centre of the ghost story is, traditionally, quite absent. This contradiction provides the pivotal theme of Ghostland. Real tragedy, it seems, pushes out the genre. As Parnell notes in the later Suffolk chapter in which he faces his father’s terminal illness, “I’d stopped reading ghost stories by this point. Suddenly the didn’t seem as entertaining.”

For the depth and scope of information about British-based supernatural art — literary and filmic — Ghostland is a remarkable work. But in sustaining a juxtaposition between real life loss and supernatural fiction, it may also be unique. It is certainly poetic and highly original.

***

Paul Butler is the author of Mina’s Child, a novel which shifts Dracula‘s story ahead one generation from the 1890s to the 1920s and deals with the doubts that the Harkers’ daughter has about her parents’ tales of an evil foreigner and women’s demon sexuality.

Mina’s Child is widely available through most book retailers and can be ordered in time for Christmas 2020. In Canada, it can be purchased through any good independent bookstore, through the publisher Inanna, through the Chapters-Indigo chain or through amazon.ca. In the US, Mina’s Child can be purchased through Barnes and Noble or amazon.com In the UK, it is available through W.H. Smith’s and amazon.co.uk.

Note: This article first appeared in Voices from the Vaults, the publication of the Dracula Society. Details about the Society and a link showing how to join are below this piece.

***

‘But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set and high duty seemed to shine through it…’ (Dr Seward’s diary, Chapter 16, Dracula)

Rarely has male violence against women been presented in such perversely self-righteous language as in this passage of Bram Stoker’s celebrated 1897 novel. Before Lucy Westenra is staked by fiance Arthur Holmwood, the look in her eyes causes Dr. Seward to muse that if he had to kill her he would go about the task with “savage delight.”

The sexual landscape in Dracula is one of extremes. The Lucy of Stoker’s novel must not be confused with the sexually liberated character who turns up in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 epic or, more recently, the third part of 2020’s Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat mini series.

[image error]

A fun night out with the Count: liberated 21st century Lucy (Lydia West) in Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s 2020 Dracula mini series.

[image error]

Flirty Victorian Lucy (Sadie Frost) in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’.

Until she dies and rises with demonic, “voluptuous” power, Stoker’s Lucy is all about sweetness and “innocence” which in late-Victorian world means submissiveness and sexual inexperience. When she receives multiple marriage proposals within a short time Lucy reacts like a twittery child. One of her suitors, Quincey Morris, even repeatedly calls her “little girl” as he declares his love.

It is the contrast in Lucy alive and Lucy (un)dead that so unhinges Seward. He tells us he sees Lucy “in form and colour; but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew.”

It might be tempting to believe that Dr. Seward’s descriptions are part of a literary trick. If these passages appeared in a novel from a much later era, we might assume Seward is an ‘unreliable narrator’ and that his reactions have been planted to disquiet the reader and make them confront misogyny head on.

But there is little in the novel or in Stoker’s life to suggest he was interested in sneaking  feminist codes into his novels, nor that he intended his band of brothers — Seward, Harker, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood — to be anything other than valiant knights saving Lucy’s soul from depravity.

[image error]

Lucy confronting the cross before the “mercy-bearing stake”.

To try to understand Stoker is to take in a number of contradictory aspects of his life and character. He was a conservative man, especially when it came to ideas of gender roles, yet he was drawn to bohemian circles. He was undoubtedly interested in prestige and societal approval but took the riskiest path towards achieving his ends, deserting a legal career, and throwing his energies into serving the great actor Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre. Most importantly, he was always extremely busy, and likely compensated for multi-tasking by hyper-focus and overwork.

[image error]

Stoker as a young man: respectable, ambitious but enigmatic and a risk-taker

While Dracula was meticulously planned and timetabled, it is the author’s fevered imagination, driven by (in modern language) subconscious fears and emotions that drive the plot. This is one of Stoker’s strengths as a writer. In Dracula and other works, he  draws from folklore without inhibition or any sense of worry about what he might be revealing about himself. He even gives us a hint of this in the early chapters of Dracula when Jonathan Harker refers to the Carpathians as an “imaginative whirlpool” which draws in every superstition. This ‘imaginative whirlpool’ is the perfect metaphor for Dracula, a novel which draws from Stoker family memory, folklore and research ranging from Ireland to eastern Europe. And it also draws from every fear. Like all constructed folktales, the moral values end up being merely a reflection of the era in which the story is written.

Reviews of Dracula were at the time fairly positive overall. The criticisms that came tended to focus on the believability factors and there was little, if any, mention of misogyny. The closest comes, and it’s not very close at all, from a publication called The Athenaeum June 26, 1897, which noted  that “The people who band themselves together to run the vampire to earth have no real individuality or being” (Retrieved from The Bela Lugosi Blog). This blind spot to those aspects of Dracula that are all too obvious today suggests that in its view of female sexuality, Dracula was an accurate barometer of its age.

For the twenty-first century writer wishing to revisit the novel the question is this: What was it about the 1890s that shielded author, reviewers, and readers to the most disquieting aspect of the novel?

Dracula was written during the last gasp of the Victorian era. Despite Mina’s facetious reference to “the new woman”, the novel’s reader will sometimes have to pinch themselves to remember that the suffragette movement had been in full swing for decades by the time of its publication. Even before the Great War, the patriarchal and cap-doffing society represented by Arthur Holmwood and friends might be seen to be numbered. It’s easy to imagine people, consciously or otherwise, holding on with an even firmer grasp than usual to some old-fashioned notions.

The emerging discipline of psychiatry, very much in evidence in Dracula, is a perfect convergence of old and new ideas. It still inhabited a murky borderland with pseudo sciences such as physiognomy (the determining of a person’s character by the shape of their skull), in which Stoker had a particular interest.

Asylums, such as Dr Seward’s, were often  about social control, especially of women. One concept in contemporary use was  ‘moral insanity’.  This designation was used by alienists to explain how even if a person acted rationally, their deviation from moral norms might still be harmful to society. This backdrop of belief might go a little way to explain how 1890s readers might not have balked at the idea that it was necessary for Arthur to ‘stake’ Lucy.

While the novel stresses the completeness of Lucy’s possession by evil, the fact that she recognizes and speaks to Arthur by name suggests she is still the same person. It is possible to argue then that Dracula‘s contemporary readership was primed by the then-current notions of insanity. Lucy is neither insane nor completely possessed. But her behaviour is so far removed from accepted norms that the men feel justified in putting an end to her. The fact that Lucy in the story is already technically dead is the device through which Arthur, Seward et al avoid responsibily for her death in any legal or moral sense.

[image error]

Edvard Munch’s painting ‘Vampire’ (1895), a glimpse into 1890s fear of women’s sexuality?

Dracula remains a many-layered labyrinth of horrors largely because Stoker kept his imagination open and unfettered and he wrote by instinct. My hope in Mina’s Child is that in moving the action ahead one generation to 1921 to a less obviously gendered society, and one whose understanding of the mind was a little more rooted in science,  some more ‘hidden’ aspects of Dracula‘s horror will be thrown more sharply into relief.

Note: The Dracula Society welcomes anyone with an affinity for supernatural fiction. Details on how to join can be found here!

Paul Butler is the author of Mina’s Child, a novel which shifts Dracula‘s story ahead one generation from the 1890s to the 1920s and deals with the doubts that the Harkers’ daughter has about her parents’ tales of an evil foreigner and women’s demon sexuality.

Mina’s Child is widely available through most book retailers. In Canada, tit can be purchased through any good independent bookstore, through the publisher Inanna, through the Chapters-Indigo chain or through amazon.ca.In the US, Mina’s Child can be purcahsed through Barnes and Noble or amazon.com In the UK, it is available through amazon.co.uk.

A cold and crusty middle-aged antiquarian. Unseen horrors, half-animal, half-spirit, lurking in a fen. An unearthed relic from the ancient past, a Last Judgement painting which fuses Christian and pagan symbolism into a Hieronymus Bosch-style nightmare.

Together with its rural East Anglian setting, these elements seem to belong to a story from M.R. James (1862-1936), perhaps Britain’s most admired writer of ghost stories.

But the antiquarian in Michelle Paver’s novel Wakenhyrst (2019) does not belong to James’s world of confirmed bachelors. Emotionally frozen though he is, Paver’s Edmund Stearne is a man of lustful appetities and incessant demands. Without a shred of remorse, he sleeps with his underage maid and drives his wife into multiple miscarriages and ill-health by insisting on his ‘conjugal rights’ every night regardless of her situation. 

[image error]

His hunger for arcane knowledge is equally obessive, especially when it comes to a lost fifteenth century manuscript relating to one Alice Pyett, mystic and saint.

Commandeering his undervalued daughter Maud to act as his secretary, Stearne prepares his modern translation and exegesis on the Pyett document. Stearne notes how literate and efficient Maud is compared to his slower son. But he regards her obvious capabilities with amused irony. In true Schopenhauer form, he believes nature has mistakenly bestowed some limited intellectual powers to a woman, who, by virtue of gender, will lack the depth necessary to use them. He also disparages the memory of the wife once he’s driven her to the grave, suggesting that her mediocrity “was holding [him] back.”

But in the case of Maud, the joke is on him. We experience Stearne’s thoughts through the ‘secret’ diary Maud has discovered. Stearne’s daughter has ideas of her own, as well as her own particular loves which include the surounding fen with its mysterious night calls, its swamps and eels, as well as her pet magpie, Chatterpie, and the undergardner, Clem.

Stearne is unnerved by the ancient Doom (Last Judgement) he encounters by accident the tries to conceal. “The man who painted that Doom,” he notes, “believed in Hell as completely as he believed in his own existence.” In fact, he decides, “there is nothing sacred about it, and that it possesses a quality of the infernal.” 

[image error]

Hieronymus Bosche, the Dutch painter Stearne thinks of when he sees the ‘Wakenhyrst Doom’.

 

The parrallels with M. R. James are quite striking, in particular with the The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral in which an overly ambitious cleryman, Archdeacon Haynes, senses the carved figures in the Barchester stalls becoming imbued with a distinctly unholy presence.

In its depiction of a stuffy patriarchial world, its lurking malignity and its Suffolk setting, Wakenhyrst might be considered a riff upon James’s universe. But it’s also an inversion.

James was an extremely male author and he was also a writer for whom working class people were most often comic relief. Here, Maud, the overlooked daughter, Stearne’s mistreated wife, and the working-class Clem are the characters with whom the reader most identifies.

And the pyramid is also inverted in terms of the supernatural themes.

Malign forces creep stealthily through James’s eccentric characters and comedic situations until the supertural threat becomes the most real and unsettling aspect of the story. In Wakenhyrst, the living fen, vivid and mysterious, is a constant presence but the most monstrous agency by far is entirely human. 

Wakenhyrst begins with a newspaper account of a journalist’s meeting with the elderly Maud sixty years after the main events in the novel. So the reader knows in advance that the story in the past is leading to bizarre and inexplicable violence. Intriguingly, we are invited to piece togther from Stearne’s research and his diary the motivations which lay behind the infamous event.

One of Michelle Paver’s recurring themes, explored also in Thin Air (2016) and Dark Matter (2010), is a sinister or threatening environment that reflects something about dysfunctions of the characters and the times in which they live. The aforementioned titles address the last gasp of the era of exploration in the 1930s. For those yearning for an Edwardian horror story yet also long to see the genre revisited through a progressive lens, Wakenhyrst is the perfect tonic.

Paul Butler is the author of the newly-released Mina’s Child  and 2017’s The Widow’ s Fire

[image error]

It’s 1921, a generation after the events depicted in Dracula.

The ‘heroes’ of Bram Stoker’s novel, Jonathan and Mina Harker, have lived through the Great War. The Harkers have lost a son, Quincey, named after the martyred Texan hero in Dracula. Their daughter, Abree, is skeptical about the late-Victorian values of her parents, especially their blind trust in authority, as embodied by their friendship with the aristocratic Arthur Holmwood. To Abree, loyalty to the class structure is what led the world to the catastrophe of 1914-18 and the death of her brother, Quincey.

[image error]

Caught in the crosswinds of social change, Abree tries to commit herself to studying literature at King’s College. But external concerns are about to overtake the Harkers. They find themselves haunted by two characters, one living, one dead: A young professor from Wallachia reawakens the Harkers’ suspicion of foreign strangers, and Lucy Westenra, victim of Arthur Holmwood’s stake, weaves her way through their collective dreams, threatening to unearth a forgotten crime.

Here, as a brief preview, is a 5-minute reading of Mina’s Child.

Mina’s Child is available for order or pre-order through amazon, Chapters-Indigo chain, Barnes and Noble, and all good independent book stores, but, because of Covid-19, the quickest and most reliable way for now is directly through the publisher, Inanna Publications.

Upcoming June 11!

Mina’s Child will be included in the virtual book launch, hosted by Inanna along with The Talking Drum by Lisa Braxton, Carousel by April Ford, The Negation of Chronology: Imagining Geraldine Moodie by Rebecca Luce-Kapler, and Seeds and Other Stories by Ursula Pfug. Everyone is free to sign up for this exciting event!

[image error]

THE EARLY 18th CENTURY. A plough scores its way through the earth. Farmhand Ralph  stops his horse to rest, turns around and takes a look at his work. He notices a cluster of pigeons gathering around a newly-formed furrow. Moving in closer, he sees feathers scattered around the soil. Then, nudging aside a stone, he discovers a tuft of lack fur, an oddly-formed skull, and a staring eye.

[image error]

The ‘fiend’s’ staring eye in Blood on Satan’s Claw

Ralph runs away.

The opening titles roll to Marc Wilkinson’s lyrical score. Woodwinds weave a  romantic folk melody. In the background, staccato tympani strikes mischievous notes as though depicting some creature hopping around in the undergrowth. A raven perches below a lowering sky. Twigs and ferns curl like claws, their seeds quivering in the breeze.

Blood on Satan’s Claw, directed by Piers Haggard in 1971, had the misfortune to be released in a period when the British horror film had begun to degenerate into gratuitous sex and dismal youth-oriented gimmicks. But, despite the association, Blood on Satan’s Claw is an outlier in the history of British film, a true inheritor of Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen’s celebrated Haxan (1922) in its attention to art history, visual composition, and a total  abandonment to the full scope of nightmarish imagination.

Screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons, who had an interest in William Blake’s visionary writings as well as Irish folklore, worked closely with director Haggard on the many startling visual sequences.

The skull unearthed in the opening sequence belongs to a ‘fiend’ who, with the help of village children, is slowly reconstituting itself using patches of fur which have been growing on the skin of the villagers.

A local doctor (Howard Goorney) opens a book of ancient lore about witches. He shows an illustration to a visiting nobleman, ‘The Judge’ (Patrick Wymark), saying the visage in question is very similar to the skull described by Ralph.

“Doctor,” the Judge snaps. “Witchcraft is dead and discredited. Are you intent on reviving forgotten horrors?”

[image error]

Urban Enlightenment: Patrick Wymark as ‘The Judge’

“How can we know, Sir, what is dead?” The doctor retorts. “You come from the city. you cannot know the ways of the country.”

[image error]

Rural wisdom: the doctor (Howard Goorney)

Cinema goers in the early 1970s  would have been used to Hammer Films’s systematized approach to horror in which a satanically evil character was often pitted against a hero wielding Christian icons like a crucifix or holy water. A threat such as a vampire came complete with an already-established FIFA-style rule book about the extent of its powers and the means of its destruction.

In Blood from Satan’s Claw a more obscure battle rages. This fight is not between conventional ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but between the Enlightenment, personified by the urban Judge on the one hand, and darker primeval forces characterized by the doctor and villagers on the other. It is the Judge himself who, after a series of tragedies and murders, finally determines that there is indeed an evil which must be purged. The dream-like climax sees him impale the almost complete ‘fiend’ with a decidedly medieval-looking spike which he then holds high above the fire within the church ruins before lowering it onto the sizzling flames.

As the end titles roll the Judge’s eye is seen through briefly parting flames, an image that clearly  recalls our first glimpse of the fiend’s eye staring up from the furrows. Is the Judge an Enlightenment equivalent of the fiend he has vanquished? This would certainly seem to be the implication. But ultimately, like Haxan, the story bypasses the intellect and appeals to the senses and the imagination. The interior sets have more than a hint of the Dutch masters, with their autumnal hues and attention to domestic arrangements such as pots, wicker bird cages, and hanging herbs. The exteriors, captured by cinematographer Dick Bush, are gorgeous and bucolic, an ironic counterpoint to the children led by ‘Angel’ (Linda Hayden) who play murderous games while serving their dark master.

THE FORCES OF DARKNESS and light in the English countryside received a more obviously cerebral treatment three years later in the television film Penda’s Fen (1974) written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke.

[image error]

BBC Poster for Penda’s Fen 1974

Nearing his eighteenth birthday, Stephen (Spenser Banks), an earnest young vicar’s son, pens an effusive tribute to Edward Elgar’s opera The Dream of Gerontius, the tale of a man led by an angel to the throne where he will confront the “piercing glance of God”.

The music, writes Stephen, attempts to capture the “fearful dissonance” of  looking upon the face of the Creator and also the moments of worrisome self-judgement that lead up this climatic event.

An intensely patriotic young man, Stephen reacts angrily against a bohemian neighbour, a playwright (Ian Hogg), who disparages the “psychopaths” who wield the real power behind British politicians. Stephen rails (to his parents) that the playwright is “unnatural” — his plays always have “someone unnatural” in them — and this is why the the writer and his wife have not been blessed with children.

The parents look at each other with weary resignation. Their son, they realize, has very little self-awareness. They have seen the way he looks longingly at the young milkman who comes to the door in his t-shirt.

Assailed by dreams in which an angel hovers over his shoulder by day and a demon sits on his chest at night, Stephen also dreams he can turn the a demon perching on his father’s church spire back into an angel.  A church’s spire, according to his father (John Atkinson), can act like an aerial to forces of both good and evil because it presents the “Manichean challenge” — the struggle of forces of light not to be overwhelmed by darkness.

[image error]

Vicar’s son, Stephen, and angel in Penda’s Fen

Stephen’s own notions of darkness and light are rigidly conventional. In a speech before the class he harangues his classmates about the dangers of a ‘subversive’ tv documentary Who was Jesus? and praises a couple he calls “the mother and father of England” who were successful in their injunction to have the programme banned.

But Stephen’s worldview is about to be challenged not only by his own burgeoning sexuality but also by the discovery that his father’s opinions are far more radical than he thought. On a bookshelf he finds his father’s old thesis, The Buried Jesus, which mourns that fact that the “name of this life-enhancing, revolutionary Jesus should be dangled like a halo over a sick culture centered on authority and death.” 

His father later explains that to live in the world you must be “two selves” the one who needs to survive and must play along with authority, and also the real self. His view of Christianity is similar. There is the “life enhancing” Jesus but there are also the “institution men” — like Paul and Augustine — who degraded the Christian message.

The Penda’s Fen of the title is the ancient name for Stephen’s village, Pinvin. Penda was the pre-Christian king and throughout the film there is a sense that the surrounding institutions — the Anglican church, Stephen’s military-style private school, the various levels of government — are interlopers in a land still haunted by ancient tradition.

[image error]

The spirit of King Penda, Penda’s Fen

For such a richly-layered film, Penda’s Fen also conveys a sense that the landscape is very much alive — in the Shropshire vistas, and in the beautiful sunsets, especially in the scene in which Stephen’s father suggests that the spirit of Penda still lives in the hills that surround them.

Time has been good to both Blood from Satan’s Claw and Penda’s Fen. Both works explore particular kinds of disquiet and ambiguity, and above all, a sense of unpredictability and agency in our natural surroundings.

Malignant Nature I: Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. 

 

Paul Butler is the author of the upcoming  Mina’s Child  and  The Widow’ s Fire

[image error]

Great flocks of them came to the peninsula, restless, uneasy, spending themselves in motion; now wheeling, circling in the sky, now settling to feed on the rich, new-turned soil; but even when they fed, it was as though they did so without hunger, without desire.

(Daphne du Maurier, The Birds, 1952)

[image error]

Virago short story collection featuring The Birds

So thinks protagonist Nat as he enjoys his solitude on his lunch break. Injured in the war Nat sustains his family by doing odd jobs about a farm, mending fences and digging ditches. Today he watches as an odd assortment of birds — gulls, finches, songbirds — wheel and dive around the furrows.

The birds, he decides, are in a panic because of a cold snap that seems to herald the coming of winter. They are suddenly aware of their own mortality. As a war veteran this is something he understands: Apprehensive before their time [people] drive themselves to work or folly, the birds do likewise. 

But a night of horror is about to follow. The birds invade Nat’s home, terrifying his children, going for his young son’s eyes. This is quite unlike anything he has heard of or experienced.

At first he can’t get the farming community to take it seriously. “Foreign birds maybe,” someone tells him. “From that Arctic circle.”

The rural people around Nat seem insular and small-minded. When at last they do believe there is a genuine problem, their response is to go out with guns and try to shoot the birds.

The Birds is at least partly social satire. Nat, we are told, is held in some suspicion by the rural community. He is said to be superior. Read[s] books and the like.

Du Maurier’s short story is set in one of the gloomiest periods of British history, during the post-war years when the trauma of  conflict was still present and the sense of deprivation was yet to lift. Nat directly compares the blind savagery of the birds’ attacks to the air raids he experienced over Plymouth. It’s as though the war never really ended and the siege of the blitz is everywhere.

The final scenes, with Nat’s family holed in in their farmhouse, have an apocalyptic flavour: Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

Nat moves the dial on the radio and finds no stations are broadcasting. He throws his final cigarette package — the last trapping of luxury and civilization — on the fire.

***

[image error]

Daphne du Maurier around the time of Rebecca’s publication, (1938)

When author du Maurier heard that Alfred Hitchcock wanted to adapt her short story, she had every reason to be both pleased and confident that the result would reflect the themes of her original. This had been the case with Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) based on du Maurier’s bestselling novel published in 1938.

But it had been David O. Selznick, Rebecca‘s producer, who had insisted the film remain as close to its literary source as possible. Selznick had just produced epoch-defining Gone with the Wind and saw himself as the guardian of modern literary adaptations.

Hitchcock, in contrast, was all about film, and he was no longer the youngish director working under Selznick trying to get a foothold in Hollywood. After several smash hits, including, most recently, Psycho (1960), he was in creative control of his projects. To the veteran director, a literary source was something to be exploited for what it might yield, not slavishly followed to please the fans of its author.

[image error]

A study in helplessness: Hitchcock’s publicity poster for The Birds (1963)

So, for Hitchcock, the gloom of southern England becomes the breezy freedom of Northern California. Understated farmhand Nat becomes dashing San Francisco lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), and in the most surprising liberty of all, we are introduced to rich socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a creation reminiscent of socialites played respectively by Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and North by Northwest (1959).

Melanie Daniels’  sole purpose in the first third of the film is to stalk (in modern parlance) Mitch who she she has come across by accident in a pet store. She uses her  connections as the daughter of a newspaper proprietor to trace Mitch’s licence plate and follow him in her sports car to remote Bodega Bay.

This character is pure Hitchcock. No such character as Melanie Daniels exists anywhere in the real world, let alone in du Maurier’s parochial farming community. While Tippi Hedren was criticized at the time for her mannequin style of dress and behaviour, Hitchcock himself must take the lion’s share of the blame.

He “discovered” Hedren by accident watching a TV advert for a diet soda. In the ad, someone wolf-whistles and she reacts archly, a scene which is repeated in The Birds when we first encounter her. With no real acting experience, Hedren had little choice but to closely follow Hitchcock’s meticulous direction, which included precise instructions about movement and facial expression; this last aspect is notably absent except for a hint of smugness. As Hitchcock once intimated, Melanie represents an all-too-human confidence in our own indomitable power. We are supposed to find her overconfident.

Aside from Melanie, the tone and setting could hardly be more of a contrast to du Maurier’s original. Bodega Bay may be ‘rural’ but the characters — Mitch’s oddly possessive mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy),  Mitch’s former girlfriend, Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) — are worldly and sophisticated.

Only in one scene set in a local diner does a sense of social satire come to the surface with various types reacting to the story of the savage birds. Beret-wearing ornithologist Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies) is naturally skeptical and rather indignant at the idea. Drunken prophet of doom (Karl Swenson) sees it as the apocalypse but we get the idea he has predicted the end of the world many times before.

[image error]

Famous set piece: birds gather for attack

The Birds, perhaps more than most Hitchcock movies, is about its set pieces: the schoolyard climbing frame gradually filling up with crows to the sound of a nursery rhyme from within the school while oblivious Melanie looks the other way and smokes her cigarette; the series of accidents at a gas station which culminates in a man dropping his cigarette butt in a growing pool of spilled petrol. The inferno caused by this incident leads to perhaps the film’s most effective cut. We are suddenly high above the town and looking from the point of view of the gulls as they amass in preparation for attack.

In some ways The Birds seems like an odd project for a director so interested in plot. There is not a great deal of story until the birds start attacking and then there is little room for anything except bird attacks. Both du Maurier’s short story and Hitchcock’s film are inconclusive, although the original implies the likelihood of impending death for Nat and his family. Hitchcock generally liked resolution, even when it meant a great deal of exposition at the end of the movie, as in Psycho.

But the memory of World War II resounded with Hitchcock as much as with anyone, and The Birds is an exploration of this kind of fear. During the war Hitchcock had returned to London to make morale-raising documentaries for the British government. His stay in West End hotels during the blitz was an experience he didn’t forget.

The Birds is unsettling both in its prose version and in Hitchcock’s movie precisely because it’s a story that strips away human agency. The birds are not attacking for a purpose. Humans are not the cause for nature’s hostility nor do we have the means to solve the problem. And this, our helplessness amidst greater forces, is one of our deepest fears.

Paul Butler is the author of the upcoming  Mina’s Child  and  The Widow’ s Fire

[image error]

Great flocks of them came to the peninsula, restless, uneasy, spending themselves in motion; now wheeling, circling in the sky, now settling to feed on the rich, new-turned soil; but even when they fed, it was as though they did so without hunger, without desire.

(Daphne du Maurier, The Birds, 1952)

[image error]

Virago short story collection featuring The Birds

So thinks protagonist Nat as he enjoys his solitude on his lunch break. Injured in the war Nat sustains his family by doing odd jobs about a farm, mending fences and digging ditches. Today he watches as an odd assortment of birds — gulls, finches, songbirds — wheel and dive around the furrows.

The birds, he decides, are in a panic because of a cold snap that seems to herald the coming of winter. They are suddenly aware of their own mortality. As a war veteran this is something he understands: Apprehensive before their time [people] drive themselves to work or folly, the birds do likewise. 

But a night of horror is about to follow. The birds invade Nat’s home, terrifying his children, going for his young son’s eyes. This is quite unlike anything he has heard of or experienced.

At first he can’t get the farming community to take it seriously. “Foreign birds maybe,” someone tells him. “From that Arctic circle.”

The rural people around Nat seem insular and small-minded. When at last they do believe there is a genuine problem, their response is to go out with guns and try to shoot the birds.

The Birds is at least partly social satire. Nat, we are told, is held in some suspicion by the rural community. He is said to be superior. Read[s] books and the like.

Du Maurier’s short story is set in one of the gloomiest periods of British history, during the post-war years when the trauma of  conflict was still present and the sense of deprivation was yet to lift. Nat directly compares the blind savagery of the birds’ attacks to the air raids he experienced over Plymouth. It’s as though the war never really ended and the siege of the blitz is everywhere.

The final scenes, with Nat’s family holed in in their farmhouse, have an apocalyptic flavour: Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

Nat moves the dial on the radio and finds no stations are broadcasting. He throws his final cigarette package — the last trapping of luxury and civilization — on the fire.

***

[image error]

Daphne du Maurier around the time of Rebecca’s publication, (1938)

When author du Maurier heard that Alfred Hitchcock wanted to adapt her short story, she had every reason to be both pleased and confident that the result would reflect the themes of her original. This had been the case with Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) based on du Maurier’s bestselling novel published in 1938.

But it had been David O. Selznick, Rebecca‘s producer, who had insisted the film remain as close to its literary source as possible. Selznick had just produced epoch-defining Gone with the Wind and saw himself as the guardian of modern literary adaptations.

Hitchcock, in contrast, was all about film, and he was no longer the youngish director working under Selznick trying to get a foothold in Hollywood. After several smash hits, including, most recently, Psycho (1960), he was in creative control of his projects. To the veteran director, a literary source was something to be exploited for what it might yield, not slavishly followed to please the fans of its author.

[image error]

A study in helplessness: Hitchcock’s publicity poster for The Birds (1963) 

So, for Hitchcock, the gloom of southern England becomes the breezy freedom of Northern California. Understated farmhand Nat becomes dashing San Francisco lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), and in the most surprising liberty of all, we are introduced to rich socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a creation reminiscent of socialites played respectively by Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and North by Northwest (1959).

Melanie Daniels’  sole purpose in the first third of the film is to stalk (in modern parlance) Mitch who she she has come across by accident in a pet store. She uses her  connections as the daughter of a newspaper proprietor to trace Mitch’s licence plate and follow him in her sports car to remote Bodega Bay.

This character is pure Hitchcock. No such character as Melanie Daniels exists anywhere in the real world, let alone in du Maurier’s parochial farming community. While Tippi Hedren was criticized at the time for her mannequin style of dress and behaviour, Hitchcock himself must take the lion’s share of the blame.

He “discovered” Hedren by accident watching a TV advert for a diet soda. In the ad, someone wolf-whistles and she reacts archly, a scene which is repeated in The Birds when we first encounter her. With no real acting experience, Hedren had little choice but to closely follow Hitchcock’s meticulous direction, which included precise instructions about movement and facial expression; this last aspect is notably absent except for a hint of smugness. As Hitchcock once intimated, Melanie represents an all-too-human confidence in our own indomitable power. We are supposed to find her overconfident.

Aside from Melanie, the tone and setting could hardly be more of a contrast to du Maurier’s original. Bodega Bay may be ‘rural’ but the characters — Mitch’s oddly possessive mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy),  Mitch’s former girlfriend, Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) — are worldly and sophisticated.

Only in one scene set in a local diner does a sense of social satire come to the surface with various types reacting to the story of the savage birds. Beret-wearing ornithologist Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies) is naturally skeptical and rather indignant at the idea. Drunken prophet of doom (Karl Swenson) sees it as the apocalypse but we get the idea he has predicted the end of the world many times before.

[image error]

Famous set piece: birds gather for attack

The Birds, perhaps more than most Hitchcock movies, is about its set pieces: the schoolyard climbing frame gradually filling up with crows to the sound of a nursery rhyme from within the school while oblivious Melanie looks the other way and smokes her cigarette; the series of accidents at a gas station which culminates in a man dropping his cigarette butt in a growing pool of spilled petrol. The inferno caused by this incident leads to perhaps the film’s most effective cut. We are suddenly high above the town and looking from the point of view of the gulls as they amass in preparation for attack.

In some ways The Birds seems like an odd project for a director so interested in plot. There is not a great deal of story until the birds start attacking and then there is little room for anything except bird attacks. Both du Maurier’s short story and Hitchcock’s film are inconclusive, although the original implies the likelihood of impending death for Nat and his family. Hitchcock generally liked resolution, even when it meant a great deal of exposition at the end of the movie, as in Psycho.

But the memory of World War II resounded with Hitchcock as much as with anyone, and The Birds is an exploration of this kind of fear. During the war Hitchcock had returned to London to make morale-raising documentaries for the British government. His stay in West End hotels during the blitz was an experience he didn’t forget.

The Birds is unsettling both in its prose version and in Hitchcock’s movie precisely because it’s a story that strips away human agency. The birds are not attacking for a purpose. Humans are not the cause for nature’s hostility nor do we have the means to solve the problem. And this, our helplessness amidst greater forces, is one of our deepest fears.

Paul Butler is the author of the upcoming  Mina’s Child  and  The Widow’ s Fire

[image error]