‘The Witches’ by Peter Curtis

The Witches (1966) is one of Hammer’s lesser-known productions.  Lacking the Gothic trappings most commonly associated with the studio’s horror output, it was designed as a star vehicle for Joan Fontaine (an Oscar-winner for her performance in Hitchcock's Rebecca over a quarter of a century earlier), who had acquired the rights to film a novel called The Devil’s Own by Peter Curtis, a pseudonym employed by bestselling historical novelist Norah Lofts.  

The movie, scripted by Nigel Kneale and based around the survival of a Satanic witch-cult in a contemporary English village, is chiefly of interest as a precursor of (and apparent influence on) The Wicker Man.  In its best moments it conveys an air of creepy menace and growing paranoia although it fails to maintain the terrifying tone of classics such as the The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw.  Joan Fontaine, as its middle-aged head-mistress heroine Miss Mayfield, bears an unfortunate resemblance to one Margaret Hilda Thatcher and is arguably upstaged by an outrageously camp performance from supporting actress Kay Walsh as high priestess of the coven.  The final, stylised Black Mass / orgy scene rapidly descends into unintentional hilarity, like some piece of experimental art-theatre improvised by over-zealous GCSE drama students. 

The Devil’s Own has been reissued in paperback as The Witches by the renascent Hammer, as part of a series of movie tie-ins and novelisations (it has also previously appeared as The Little Wax Doll under Norah Lofts’ own name).  Unfortunately, Hammer has chosen to saddle the book with an embarrassing generic cover which bears no relationship to its contents and is evidently designed to mislead fans of Twilight and similar 'young adult' sagas.  Anyone seeking ‘supernatural romance’ in The Witches is in for a cruel disappointment; a more sexless tale could not be imagined; the novel, first published in 1960 and set in 1959, is a relic of an era in which an unmarried woman in her forties had to accept that she was a hopeless ‘spinster’ and destined for a solitary life.  The compensation was that she was allowed to pursue a career; hence Miss Mayfield’s willingness to take on the role of headmistress at the remote East Anglian village of Walwyck.

Miss Mayfield is a quietly idealistic character who has not long returned from a twenty year stint teaching at a mission school in Africa.  She wishes to escape from the drudgery and squalor of working at her most recent appointment in an inner-city school and living in ‘digs’ with another woman teacher.  As the story progresses, we learn that she has survived an unspecified mental breakdown in Africa which led to her return to England.   Apart from a chilling reference to ‘the Mau Mau oath’ (colonial ethnopsychiatry held Kenya’s Mau Mau rebels to be ‘an irrational force of evil, dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism’, which aided the killing of more than 20,000 of them and the torturing of suspects by the British) much less is made in the novel of African voodoo than in the film.  In his newly commissioned introduction, Cyril Franke, the film’s director, proudly refers to his ‘production of Man of Africa and first-hand experience of witchcraft among the natives’.  It therefore seems likely that Franke was responsible for emphasising this element, which is crudely-presented and adds nothing to the film apart from an unpleasant and unnecessary injection of racism.

Another difference to is that Canon Thorby (Bax in the film), who runs the private school to which Miss Mayfield is appointed, is a genuine cleric, rather than an eccentric imposter.  Unlike the ruin depicted in the film - so reminiscent of The Wicker Man - the village church is intact and still functioning as a site of Christian worship (alongside the occasional Black Mass).  Thorby’s sister Isabel is eventually revealed to be the coven leader; could it be that Hammer shied away from depicting a churchman so closely implicated in Satanism, for fear of censorship from the BBFC?  The Canon and his sister are much more boring characters in the novel, with the latter hardly seen until the climax.

Much of the novel runs the same as the film, with the addition of extra characters and a number of pointless plot digressions.  After Miss Mayfield becomes suspicious that a death in the village has been caused by witchcraft and vows to reveal all at the inquest, she bangs her head on a desk in a mysterious ‘accident’ and conveniently (and unconvincingly) loses her memory.  This leads to her being parcelled off for a rest cure at a Fawltyesque boarding house in Hove, inhabited by bridge-playing old ladies and a retired General with their attendant nurses (there's not much fun to be had for the Twilight crowd here!)  Eventually she escapes back to Walwyck and regains her memory just in time to rescue Ethel, a teenage girl who, Rowan Morrison-style, has been secreted away prior to being the focus of Walwyck’s ‘All Hallowse’en’ sabbat which is to take place in the church itself.

 

The fate that has been planned for Ethel – defilement at the hands of a pantomime-clad ravisher - is much less horrific than the Ed Gein / Elizabeth Bathory gruesomenesss threatened in the movie, during the nastiest moment of which we observe the village butcher, who has already been graphically shown skinning a rabbit, whetting his knives in readiness.  This was possibly not expected to be the case in the minds of Ms Lofts’ genteel lady readers; any suggestion of nakedness or sexuality is couched in terms of the utmost horror and repulsion.  As she hides in the church, the mere sight of the villagers’ uncovered bodies at the start of their ritual causes Miss Mayfield so much distress that she is forced to pretend to herself she ‘is back home, in bed’, rather than face up to ‘the fat round haunches… the pendulous breasts like empty paper bags…’ paraded in front of her.  This scene is prefaced by a jaw-dropping reflection about her time in Africa; ‘she had time to think that black skin was, in itself, in some strange way, a kind of raiment; no black-skinned people could look as naked as these Walwykians did.’  

The film suffers from a preposterous conclusion in which Miss Mayfield is finally invited along to the human sacrifice by Thorby's sister for no apparent reason and then manages to sabotage the proceedings via supernatural means. By way of contrast, the novel’s ending is plausible enough but dull.  Besieged in the church tower with the hypnotised girl, Miss Mayfield finally realises that ’she was, in a fashion, the victim of her own faith’ and that the witches are without any supernatural capabilities; ‘if they had any power other than their own, they wouldn’t throw themselves against the door.’  Miss Mayfield saves Ethel by human means, Isabel Thorby bangs her head against the font and dies and, in a final ‘twist’, the girl destroys out of modesty the cine film that her rescuer has made of the ritual so that no record remains of Walwyck’s lurid Satanic revels.

The Witches, with its unquestioning depiction of post-war attitudes and morals, is a snapshot out of time. Although its premise is a promising one, the story is poorly paced and offers little of interest by way of characterisation.  It might have been rendered more interesting had the heroine been less strait-laced and old maid-like (the word 'dowdy' is used to describe her appearance throughout).  A frisson of attraction between her and the Canon would have offered an additional pole of interest; instead all we have is her fending off the attentions of a mildly louche, elderly wine-dealer in a purposeless distraction to the main story.  

As we have seen, The Witches doesn’t really count as supernatural fiction, although Ms Lofts was not averse to including spooky passages in her 'modern gothic' novels such as Gad's Hall (1977) and even published an entire collection of ghost stories; Hauntings (1974).  Written prior to the mainstreaming of Wicca and modern paganism, the story’s depiction of witchcraft comes straight from the pages of Malleus Maleficarum, although in Miss Mayfield’s sensibly modern, rationalistic brand of Christianity, witchcraft is seen as an atavistic survival rather than an active force of evil and most of its adherents are to be pitied rather than condemned:

‘And she remembered a phrase… “God has no hand but man’s to work with.”  It was equally true of the Devil.  Everything else – black magic, white magic, miracles, answered prayers – they were left-overs, dregs, the vestigial remains of primitive man’s bewildered recognition of things beyond his control.’

So what can have inspired such a tale?  In the mid-1950s, witchcraft and murder had been linked in the public mind with the publication of Detective-Superintendent Robert Fabian’s sensational memoirs Fabian of the Yard (1955).  In these, he offered a grippingly embellished account of an unsolved murder that had taken place in 1945.  In a case which became known as ‘the Lower Quinton Witchcraft Murder’ an elderly Warwickshire farmworker named Charles Walton was found savagely slain in a manner described by Fabian as ‘like the kind of killing the Druids might have done in ghastly ceremony at full moon’.  Alternatively, the manner of Walton’s death, pinned to the ground by a pitchfork through the chest and slashed across the throat with a billhook, closely resembled the 19^th Century execution of a suspected witch by a mentally deranged young man in the same area.  Fabian found his investigations blocked by obstructive villagers and reported an eerie encounter with a ‘Big Black Dog’ that related to local legendry involving Walton.  He secretly concluded that the murder was committed by a farmer with a financial motive (he could not record this while the suspect still lived due to libel laws) but the idea of a present-day hideous crime linked to the survival of ancient beliefs in a backward rural community is a powerful one that may well have provided an impetus for The Witches.

It is on record that Nigel Kneale’s original screenplay included elements of humour that the producers rejected.  It is easy to see why he would wish to satirise this material and the completed film retains camp elements that are absent from the novel.  It is impossible not to snigger, for example, at the prurience with which Ms Lofts alludes to a bodily act which she is primly unwilling to describe yet nonetheless invites us to guess at and imagine:

‘Then she lifted the cup, and saying, “Here is his blood,” offered it to Granny Rigby, who did with it something so degrading that Miss Mayfield shut her eyes and released her finger’s pressure on the camera, hoping that she had been in time.  Not even for purposes of evidence did she want a picture of that!’

So - who is going to enjoy this book?  Well, no one who is attracted by the cover, that seems certain.  Its appeal will mainly be limited to diehard Norah Lofts fans (who will probably have read it already) and Hammer completists. Wicker Man scholars and may also wish to check out both the book and the film.  For myself, I am always intrigued to read the book that inspired a film I have enjoyed and The Witches was a thought-provoking, if somewhat dull, read

Fat controller runs out of steam - "Hell Train" by Christopher Fowler

Hammer horror, the romance of travelling by steam train; what can possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot, it seems. Despite the framing device, in which an American screenwriter pitches it to Michael Carreras, Hell Train's main story just doesn't bear much resemblance to a Hammer film (although it does borrow elements from Horror Express, which many people seem to think is a Hammer film). Considering the ending, it could be argued that this is part of the joke, but all it does in reality is render the Hammer link gratuitous. A cynical person (not me, of course...) might even view it as a blatant attempt to cash in on the reborn studio's resurgent popularity.

The story, taken by itself, is an acceptable piece of pulp, but it's easy to see why Fowler should want to "distance" himself from it - another reason for the framing sections.  He clearly, for instance, hasn't bothered to find out anything about trains; how is it for instance, that passengers manage to get from the train on to the footplate of the locomotive (annoyingly called the "engine room") when it's moving?   The Americanisms are irritating; I know the story-within-a-story's supposed to have been written by an American, but the author doesn't even know the meaning of at least one of the words. On p.229, one of the characters, "in the engine room", watches the "stoker" whilst "trapped against the caboose" (i.e. the brake van - famously found right at the back of an American freight train)!

The characters are stock ones and don't interact in a particularly interesting way. They are all given their own separate little story, leading some reviewers to compare the plot to a that of a portmanteau horror film such as Doctor Terror's House of Horrors , but those were made by Amicus; nothing to do with Hammer. The idea of each person being "tested"by the train itself for some moral flaw in their character is rather boring. It would have been much more interesting to see their characters develop as they responded to a mutual threat together. So far as the monsters are concerned, there are way too many zombies (oh, how bored I am with zombies!), once again decidedly un-Hammerlike as the studio only ever made one zombie movie in its huge output.

I  quite enjoyed the framing sections which convey the "feel" of Hammer reasonably well, although there are a couple of sloppy mistakes. Nigel Hawthorne was never in a Hammer film and Ingrid Pitt didn't join the roster until 1971. Also - I can't imagine a writer who had previously worked for the notoriously miserly Roger Corman making the mistake of turning out a script that would go over budget for Hammer.  Overall, there is so much more could have been done with the setting of the studio and the wonderful people who worked there.  Fowler employs one of his characters to make observations about the company's declining fortunes and how these related to changes in society; but these do not go beyond the journalistic insights reflected in a work such as Sinclair McKay's A Thing of Unspeakable Horror.

By the time I had got near the end and was introduced to the "bloated" Controller, complete with his stovepipe hat, I started to feel that I really had been taken for a ride and had alighted on the Island of Sodor. At least the Rev. Awdry did his homework properly and was scrupulously correct about railway operations!  I can only assume that this is a deliberate joke, but it is irrelevant and only serves to undermine "suspension of disbelief" at a crucial moment.

Fun, but nothing special, Hell Train is on a level with the type of writing that used to be churned out in industrial quantities by paperback houses such as NEL in the '70s and '80s. As I rarely read much modern horror, could it be that the high praise dished out to this book is a measure of how far the genre has deteriorated since that era?

Full praise however has to be given to Graham Humphreys' gorgeous cover painting. In these days of photoshopped blandness, it is a sheer delight to see work of this standard adorning a paperback. Let's hope it starts a revival of high quality pulp art.

HUNT: Beyond the Frozen Fire

Gabriel Hunt is a new cycle of pulp paperbacks created by Charles Ardai, editor of the Hard Case Crime series. It is aimed at reviving the “two-fisted” genre of men’s adventure tales.

The gimmick of the series is that the hero's name appears on the cover of each book as though he were the chronicler of his own extravagant exploits. It is only on the title page that the name of the true author appears; "as told to ...". As the stories are narrated in the third person, this "ghost-writer" concept isn't exactly followed through, but it does give the books a very distinct brand identity, aided and abetted by the classic pulp artwork of Glen Orbik. It is clearly hoped that Hunt himself will become a strong enough draw to sell succeeding volumes.

It didn't really work that way for me however, as I purchased this novel primarily because it was penned by Hard Case's first female writer, Christa Faust, who shot to fame with the noir thriller Money Shot, in which she grippingly explored the nastier reaches of the porn industry. Beyond the Frozen Fire is a far lighter piece of work which shows another dimension of her talents.

Something of a cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond, Gabriel Hunt is the sort of fantasy figure most men would secretly love to be, and most heterosexual women would like to get more closely acquainted with. Backed by the multi-million dollar resources of the Hunt Foundation, administered by his younger brother Michael, he has the onerous job of roving the world in search of missing ancient artefacts, an activity which necessarily seems to involve sexual entanglements with a wide variety of alluring and dangerous women.

I haven't read any of its predecessors, but my guess is that Beyond the Frozen Fire raises the bar in terms of exotic locales and outré happenings. To set the scene, it kicks off with a short adventure set in Eastern Europe, in which Hunt seeks to retrieve a priceless Cossack knife from a beautiful but treacherous female archaeologist. This short story within a novel is all that is needed to introduce the protagonist to newbies like myself and gets things off to a rollicking start.

The story proper is set off by the arrival on the scene of "a tall, auburn-haired beauty" who introduces herself as one Velda Silver. She is the daughter of a distinguished scientist who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances from a research station at the South Pole. Hunt quickly agrees to help her find her missing father and sets about assembling an expedition.

One of Ms. Faust's talents is the creation of interesting supporting characters and this is given full reign here. Sexual tension is introduced by the inclusion of one of Hunt's old flames, a tomboyish Brazilian mechanic named Rue Aparecido. It doesn't take long, however, for a liaison with the passionate Velda to take place; "her fierce, urgent heat threatening to melt through the polar ice beneath them."

It would be unfair to divulge too much of the ensuing plot, which is pure pulp hokum of the very best kind. Suffice to say it revolves around a “hollow earth” encounter with a lost tribe of Aryan Amazons. Close shaves and finger’s breadth escapes abound, including one memorable incident in which Hunt finds himself tied up by the Queen of the Amazons in a manner that is perhaps not surprising from a writer who lists “rope bondage” among her personal interests!

All this well-paced action is spiced with lashings of innuendo and lively banter between the characters. There is absolutely no pretence at profundity and the novel aspires to be nothing more than a light-hearted piece of entertainment. As such, it is ideal escapist reading for these troubled times, and one can only hope that Charles Ardai’s hope of sparking a pulp revival comes to fruition.

The only criticism I could make concerns the cover, which illustrates the East European prequel. I am a great admirer of Glen Orbik’s work, but this is a bit disappointing. The foreground figure seems too dark and takes up too much space for my liking, and the perspective is very confusing. Above all, it would have been nice to have a depiction of the blonde woman warriors who figure so large in the story (“dressed, if you can call it that, in scraps of black-and-tan-striped fur …”). However, it seems that Ardai’s modus operandi was to have Orbik produce the pictures first, and then distribute them to the authors for inspiration.

I shall certainly be seeking out more episodes of Gabriel Hunt's adventures. What seems most promising is that the individual writers are allowed to keep their own voice; Beyond the Frozen Fire is unmistakably a Christa Faust novel, no matter what name is written on the front.

A further Faustian treat is due early next year with Choke Hold, in which Angel Dare, the superbly characterised ex-porn star heroine of Money Shot, returns for another stab at society’s dark underbelly. Sporting a gorgeous Orbik cover, this is bound to sell in stacks. With a movie of Money Shot also in preparation, things seem to be on the up and up for the writer dubbed by Richard Prather “the ‘First Lady’ of Hard Case Crime”.

Attack of the Killer Earthworms

“God, when I think I used to pick them up as bait for fishing when I was a kid. Never again!”

In the pulp world of the mid ‘70s to early ‘80s, Nature was revolting. All manner of creatures had developed homicidal, if not genocidal, tendencies and were turning against their human overlords.

The first stirrings of this uprising had actually taken place way back in 1917 with the publication of Arthur Machen’s novella The Terror. As a committed Christian and former member of the Golden Dawn, Machen offered an esoteric explanation for the “great revolt of the beasts”, interpreting it as a response to Man’s spiritual abdication during the horrors of the Great War;

“He has declared, again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign… If he were not king he was a sham, an imposter, a thing to be destroyed.”

The story ends with a warning; “They have risen once – they may rise again.” How true that was to prove!

Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds, set in a bleak Cornish location, offered no explanation for the behaviour of its feathered antagonists, although its year of publication (1952) led some to read it as a Cold War allegory. Two years later, the science fiction movie Them exploited a related anxiety; the effects on nature of the atmospheric testing of atomic weapons. Low tech special effects were skillfully employed to depict a colony of giant ants, genetically mutated by radiation from the New Mexico tests and breeding in the storm drains beneath L.A. Much suspense is generated from the police investigation into mysterious deaths caused by the ants, which do not themselves appear in the movie for quite some time.

Hitchcock’s movie of The Birds (1963) transferred the action to a Californian location and added a screwball romantic plot. It was inspired by an actual incident which jogged the director’s memory of the option he had purchased on du Maurier’s story. A Santa Cruz newspaper had reported a bird attack in which, possibly as the result of seafood poisoning, a flock of seagulls had shattered windows and flown into streetlights, leaving dead birds littering the streets. The adaptation, with its screenplay by Evan Hunter (more widely known for his crime writing as Ed McBain!), did not find favour with du Maurier herself, but was a great critical success.

The “revolt of the beasts” really entered the world of the pulp British paperback in 1974, with the publication of James Herbert’s notorious debut “The Rats”. The novel recounts with gusto attacks by giant rats in a London still pockmarked by bombsites, its unbridled gore and grimly realistic setting making it an instant bestseller and a landmark in the horror genre. The floodgates were open. No creature was too small and innocuous, too cute or too fluffy for a starring role in a pulp horror novel as publishers rushed to cash in on Herbert’s success.

Most notably, Guy N. Smith's Crabs series maintained just the right blend of sex, gore and excitement. Smith conveyed the authentic feeling of a small community under threat in his evocation of the Welsh seaside resort of Barmouth, but his main talent lay in keeping his tone just the right side of tongue-in-cheek in describing the villainous over-sized crustaceans, which became more ludicrously indestructible with each sequel. Who, after reading Night of the Crabs, could read those ghastly syllables “clickety-click” without a shudder (or at least a chuckle)? The Crabs series extended to six volumes and maintains a cult following to this day. (A private amusement of mine is to enquire politely “Do you have Crabs on the Rampage?” when visiting particularly staid secondhand bookshops.)

The Morgow Rises (1982) was penned by Peter Tremayne, the pseudonym of respected academic historian and biographer Peter Berresford Ellis. Engaging in some literary legerdemain, Tremayne swaps genres half way through the book, leading us to believe at first that we are reading one of his trademark Celtic supernatural tales. In fact, it even seems possible that he may have adapted an existing text to the cookie-cutter “Nature runs wild” formula demanded by the publisher.

In the finely realised setting of a Cornish fishing village, we are faced with a mad old witch, a family curse and an intriguing slice of Celtic legendry as the attractive heroine, Claire Penvose, arrives to visit her retired mining engineer uncle, Henry “Happy” Penvose, on his birthday, only to find him missing in the corridors of a disused tin mine called Wheal Tom he is hoping to reopen. His disappearance appears to be connected to an ancient prophecy concerning the return of a monstrous creature;

"Beware when the Morgow rises,
Lament for the living,
Lament for the Unborn.
All things end!"

Meanwhile, local fishing craft are being destroyed and threatened by a mysterious whirlpool at sea and sightings are made of “a black, rubbery thing, something like a gigantic slug”. Reporters and other outsiders converge on the village as news of these happenings spreads.

So far, so good, until we learn the real secret of Wheal Tom. The mine should not have been sold by the Government to “Happy” Penvose (who has by now, met a grisly end in its tunnels) at all, and had only been doe so as a result of “bureaucratic error”. It should really be “a strictly prohibited zone” due to its use as a store for radioactive waste (page 100). Readers familiar with Them and its countless imitators will of course have guessed the rest of the plot by now, but have to wait a further 55 pages for an identification of the Morgow from a Government scientist;

“Lambert cast a nervous glance towards the group of angry press reporters.
‘Strictly between ourselves … I believe that the radiation attacked the most primitive cell forms – chaetopoda – earthworms or marine worms, causing a disruption in their growth.’
Neville stared at the man’s calm scientific assessment.”

Scientific indeed. Note the way in which “marine worms” are needed to explain why attacks are taking place at sea as well as on land, although no concessions are made to the biology or habits in the working out of this tale. (In fact, in a couple of places the creatures are referred to as “eels”, leading to a suspicion that Tremayne may have changed his mind at some point).

After munching their way through various characters including the local witch (who goes out to entreat with the Morgow); a “male chauvinist” reporter; an adulterous ecologist and his “well proportioned” secretary (“but she felt her bottom was perhaps too broad and her breasts too full” – it is her demise that is so pleasingly illustrated on the cover) and most of the crew of a coastal shipping vessel, the worms are eventually, and somewhat perfunctorily, dispatched by the RAF, armed with high explosives and napalm bombs;

“Being worms they have no central nervous system, so no bullets harm them. You all know what happens if you slice through a worm with a garden spade. The two halves can wriggle away!”

Following an obligatory homily about the dangers of messing with nature, the novel ends with the suggestion that one of the creatures has escaped, making room for a sequel, although none was ever written. Nor is it likely to be,

Tremayne is mining a vein of literary gold nowadays as the creator of Sister Fidelma, a 7^th Century Irish nun whose “whodunnit” style adventures have attracted a huge following, organised into the International Sister Fidelma Society. He shouldn’t be judged too harshly on “The Morgow Rises”, after all it’s an entertaining and amusing read that, despite its ridiculous premise and clichéd conclusion, does manage some moments of tension and terror.