Beyond Hammer - Press Reviews and Recent Acquisitions

Since its publication in May 2009, Beyond Hammer has been reviewed in Sight & Sound, Empire, Filmstar, Total Film, SFX and Deathray: Kevin Stuart, in his review for Filmstar, states the book is "well-written and enlightening, managing to tread that difficult line between academic depth and easy readability" whilst in Total Film the book is described as "a genre primer that lucidly skin-peels four decades of scares and subtexts". Deathray's review comments that the chapter on Hellraiser is interesting, a comment reflected in the Stuart review. Other chapters singled out for commentary included The Descent, which Nigel Floyd, in his review for Sight & Sound states "Saving the best for last, however, the essay on Neil Marshall's The Descent is cogent and insightful".

Beyond Hammer has also been recently acquired by the BFI National Library and Harvard University.

Notebook Extract

Whilst writing the Reading the Apocalypse article for MediaMagazine, I looked through my notebooks and found a text regarding Jimmy T. Murakami's When the Wind Blows. Here is the notebook entry, in full:

In addition to The War Game and Threads, a further Cold War/ Post-apocalyptic narrative would emerge from Britain: based on the graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows is an animated film that recounts the effect of a nuclear strike on the UK from the perspective of an elderly couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs. Like its predecessors, the film depicts narrative events from an extremely realistic point of view - Jim and Hilda’s radiation sickness brings about both calming hallucination and terrible sickness, their lack of food and water steadily starving them until, eventually, both die in their sleep. The film’s sense of tragedy is compounded not just by the simple metaphor that Jim and Hilda represent but because of their very lack of knowledge of how to cope in the situation they are forced into. Throughout the film Jim and Hilda recount there experiences of the Second World War, describing it as a violent period but one in which the threat was known and one in which society pulled together as a unified whole to overcome this shared enemy. The war, for them, was in another country, far, far away. From these experiences emerges their unwavering faith in the government. As Jim and Hilda drink cups of tea, Jim assures his wife that everything will be alright and that he is sure the government is working effectively to bring everything back to normal. For all his faith, Jim fails to realise that there probably is not a government and that although they have survived the nuclear blast, they are now subjecting themselves to fallout and radiation poisoning. Whilst the film shifts towards its extremely bleak ending, there are moments of stark humour that contrast sharply with the stark reality the film depicts, culminating in a film that is as poignant as it is terrifying.

Recent Commissions

I recently completed a commissioned article for the February Fantasy themed edition of MediaMagazine: Reading the Apocalypse is an overview of British post-apocalyptic film and television, covering The War Game, Threads, and both versions of Survivors. In the original draft there was a section concerning 28 Days Later but this was, eventually, cut due to the required word count.

Never one to waste words, it is included here...

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

While a nuclear assault destroys the physical landscape, a viral pandemic only destroys the populace, leaving in its deadly wake a litter of corpses but buildings, shops, and homes all still standing and untouched. Such a quality allows filmmakers to create desolate images of familiar locations, poignantly creating the horror of the consequences of a viral outbreak. The potential for these images to be so dramatic is validated by 28 Days Later: having woken from a comma, young bicycle courier Jimmy (Cillian Murphy) finds the British population virtually eradicated by the accidental release of the Rage Virus: stumbling outside, he finds a very familiar London totally devoid of people. There no corpses, just the empty streets, an overturned bus, and bank notes blowing in the wind. As he wanders through he streets, Jimmy passes familiar landmarks – Tower Bridge, the London Eye and Cenotaph – that are all rendered as if grave markers to the deceased population.

As Jimmy’s story of survival unfolds, the theme of family very quickly comes to the fore: being chased by a group of the Infected, Jimmy is saved by Selena and Mark. Taking him to their underground hideout, Jimmy is informed of the current national (if not global) situation. The three seem to form a family unit, but it is one cut very short when Selena thinks Mark might be infected and quickly – and rather brutally – kills him. From this act it would seem that the notion of the family has been totally voided by the pandemic but as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the film is not just about surviving in a post-apocalyptic world but starting a new and better family in this new world. As a consequence, Jim’s personal narrative trajectory becomes the search for a father figure, which leads him into encounters with two ‘families’ – the normal domestic of past offered by Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) and that of the future represented by a military outpost. Soon, Jim has to make his choice between the two and, in a violently cathartic conclusion, takes on the role of the Father himself to eradicate the threat presented to him and those he cares for. For a violent and pessimistic film, 28 Days Later ends on a perversely optimistic end: the three survivors – Jim, Selena and Hannah – are seemingly rescued as the Infected slowly die of starvation.

The film’s writer, novelist Alex Garland, has stated that the influences upon 28 Days Later ranged from the classic texts by Wells and Wyndham as well as more recent American cinema, particularly the zombie films of George A. Romero. Using the realist elements of these texts to guide him, Garland created the fictional Rage Virus – a seemingly genetically engineered disease - as a blood borne disease. With such a construct, the Rage Virus becomes an obvious metaphor for the nation’s fears of Ebola, SARS, Avian Flu as well as the sustained awareness of AIDS.

Current Commissions

October has been a very busy month, hence the complete lack of posts . I have been working hard on multiple projects, all now complete and with their respective editors awaiting publication:

I finished the final amendments on The Devil's Backbone Study Guide and signed off the final proofs. The book is now set for publication and should be with the printers this week.

The article on Horror Mockumentaries is now finished and ready for publication in the next edition of Media Magazine.

The text on Vigilante Cinema has now been completed. A few minor changes were made and is now ready for publication in the Winter edition of Electric Sheep.

The essay on Tim Burton's early shorts - Vincent and Frankenweenie - is due for publication in the next edition of Splice.

The interview with Colin director Marc Price has been conducted, transcribed and formatted ready for publication in a forthcoming edition of Offscreen.

And finally, the interview with Hardware and Dust Devil director Richard Stanley is due for publication in this month's edition of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

Personal Project Extract

I have, for the past year, being working on a personal project exploring traces and evidences of the Uncanny within the work of Guillermo del Toro. As personal research, this has fed directly into the writing of the forthcoming Study Guide on The Devil's Backbone as well as generating three potential texts for publication. What follows is a very rough draft from the conclusion of one of these essays, concerning the uncanny interrelationship between The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth.

"Inherently integrated into all these elements is the possibility of the uncanny. Because del Toro works consistently within the genres of horror and fantasy – genres that specifically attempt to generate the uncanny feelings of fear and dread – it is perhaps very easy to suggest that the uncanny is indeed a more subtle but overarching auteuristic trait. Yet such a conclusion seems arbitrary and clumsy. A more focussed analysis would, of course, prove this either way, but for the purposes of this conclusion it is worth noting that the uncanny elements embodied by Jacinto and Carmen reverberate throughout del Toro’s oeuvre: this is most explicitly seen in Pan’s Labyrinth, a sequel of sorts to The Devil’s Backbone: in many respects the two films are uncannily related because they double themselves (almost to the point of déjà vu, of being a copy of each other) and bear similarity in character. Carmen, from The Devil’s Backbone, not only has her name doubled in Pan’s Labyrinth but also her castrating quality is echoed in Pan’s Labyrinth's Mercedes as she also emerges from her narrative as an uncanny woman: victimised and then nearly tortured by antagonist Captain Vidal, Mercedes assaults him with a paring knife, not only repeatedly stabbing him but inserting it into his mouth and slicing open his cheek. This injury, like the one Carmen inflicted upon Jacinto, is not only a physical attack but also a castrating assault upon Vidal’s beauty and sense of masculinity. Throughout the film he is seen to be continually preening himself, forever looking clean, smart and in control. This appearance becomes a physical manifestation of his anger, violence, and power over the narrative’s other characters and so embodies a perversely ugly image of masculinity. Moments before Mercedes slices open his cheek, he verbalises this power by telling his officers to leave him and Mercedes alone. When questioned, Vidal spits out “For God sake, she is only a woman”. As he speaks, Mercedes draws her knife (a phallic weapon that mirrors Carmen’s equally phallic walking cane), ready to attack.

It seems logical that if Carmen is reflected in Mercedes, then Jacinto should be reflected in Vidal. As already stated, Vidal, like Jacinto, presents an image of masculinity that is, on the surface, attractive yet that very same masculinity is vile and thoroughly evil within that same person. Whilst Jacinto and Vidal share this quality, they also share a similar preoccupation with their past and in particular their childhoods: whilst Jacinto wants to destroy his past, Vidal is desperately trying to live up to his: throughout the film he is seen to be examing the watch his father held at the moment of his death. It preoccupies him, torments him, setting itself as a standard to be achieved. In his final moments, when faced by a group of armed Republicans, Vidal takes out his own pocket watch and crushes it, doubling his father’s actions at the moment of his own immanent death."