is there a name or a phrase for or anything much written about that distinctly British CREEPY VIBE prevalent in TV shows and movies of the '60s/'70s? (e.g. The Prisoner, Sapphire and Steel, Baker-era

Hey So' - yeah I'm sorry about that. Imagine seeing it as a kid though! It's so O/T from the original thread I shouldn't have posted it here really - it just popped into my head while I was thinking of the other stuff.

Just want to call attention to this show, as followers of this thread may dig it:
The Returned (French supernatural drama on Channel 4)

Can't believe no-one on this thread's mentioned The Changes. Super creeped me out as a kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYkkfBMK-7c

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/disk-product-image/public/disk/robin-redbreast-dvd.jpg http://www.ukhorrorscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/supernatural-1977-001-dvd-pack-shot-212x300.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41BMBNJWspL._SY300_.jpg

^ all out at the end of the month, but i've never seen any of them myself. any good?

someone tell me that's steven stapleton in robin redbreast

Robin Redbreast has not been repeated since 1971, and yet is often recalled by viewers of the time, probably because of its eerie atmosphere, and particularly for its horrifying and surreal finale.

Not seen any of those, let me know if they're good.

its eerie atmosphere, and particularly for its horrifying and surreal finale

sounds like my journey to work tbh

anyway, if it really hasn't been repeated since 1971 then i'll be surprised if anybody here's seen it. the cover made me want to not read any more of that synopsis tho so i don't spoil it.

Another couple of things that are coming out as part of this BFI gothic thing are Schalcken the Painter, and Scary Stories ("a collection of creepy kids films from the Children’s Film Foundation featuring The Man from Nowhere, Haunters of the Deep and Out of the Darkness") *blank look*

Dead Of Night - The Exorcism is on YouTube.

always glad to see this great thread revived!

Robin Redbreast is being touted as 'the folk-horror precursor to the Wicker Man'. The alternative cover for it:

http://www.ukhorrorscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/robinredbreast.jpg

saw this one recently. kim stanley's face in lighting is v creepy.

http://www.leytonstonefilmclub.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/seance_on_a_wet_afternoon_uk_dvd.jpg

I like how http://scarfolk.blogspot.ca/ satirizes these aesthetics and is sometimes legitimately creepy in its own right

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-f9XlZ0ImI1U/UQ-5YwFySKI/AAAAAAAAA44/WR4LYc8XEl8/s640/Children+and+hallucinogens.jpg

ha! oh damn - must read whole thread

I love Seance, Matt P.

Not sure whether this has been mentioned yet but series 3 of the League of Gentlemen is such a rich and under appreciated exercise in this style

In other news I've started watching the Children of the Stones and it's great!!

Since this thread has been bumped, I'd like to put forth an idea of mine for discussion: Am I the only one who sees the movie Hausu (1977) as a Japanese culture-bound manifestation of similar uncanniness?

Dead Of Night is ok. I had seen the first episode before so skipped it, but from memory it was quite good. The second story is rather uninteresting but Anna Massey is good value in the third.

Struggling with Supernatural. Two episodes in and it's heavy Gothic pastiche with little to recommend it. Maybe it will pick up.

In order to pitch in to this excellent thread I can only add that The Omega Factor was not just shown in scotland, though it may have been a northern thing as I was living in Darlington at the time.

Am I wrong to think that some of the uncanniness in the many HTV productions persisted into Robin of Sherwood

Ah, glad someone revived this thread, I can never remember what it's called exactly and is difficult to search for. Have bookmarked now.

I too have watched DEAD OF NIGHT this week - appropriate in this DOCTOR WHO anniversary week, as there are some deep old school Who connections (Innes Lloyd, Louis Marks, Robert Holmes). Perhaps the creepiest thing about the three surviving episodes are their opening credits - totally 'hommaged' in BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO - although the first story on the disc, 'The Exorcism', def. has its moments. There's a great dinner party scene where the food and drink suddenly turns inedible: there's a kind of marxist subtext throughout, with past crimes against the poor revenged on today's middle classes (though the only way the underclasses get to speak here is literally through the (possessed) voice of the ruling class). Both 'The Exorcism' and 'The Weeping Woman' (the one w/ Anna Massey) belong to the 'property horror' genre, typified by the later AMITYVILLE HORROR series - nice, middle class houses becomes sites of trauma and oppression.

ROBIN REDBREAST also fits into this genre, while at the same time totally anticipating THE WICKER MAN with its emphasis on an outsider unwittingly drawn into pagan ritual and sacrifice. Bernard Hepton gives a particularly creepy performance as a local history expert ("I'm a reading man") and some of the black and white cinematography is really atmospheric. It's a keeper.

I dunno if this is the right place, but god did I enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi9pZEhNQvQ

Wow, saw Robin Redbreast last night and really really enjoyed. The b&w print makes it hard to guess it was from as late as 1970 though. It's been a while since I was on the folk-horror tip but I think I might have to rummage around some more again.

Supernatural is mostly great so far (6/8 watched). 'Mr Nightingale' and 'Viktoria' especially.

I'm enjoying it a lot, but it's not particularly creepy in the sense of this thread. It's too fun. 'Viktoria' maybe comes closest, and is written by Lake rather than Muller, but even then it's more of a romp.

Also, yes, it's period gothic rather than contemporary - most of the things that fit here are contemporaneous w/ the era of broadcast, but permeated with a mystic/mythic ancient type spook.

Didn't even know there was a TV version of Red Shift, so v. excited abt that:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/announcements/bfi-dvd-releases-announced-augustseptember-2014

watched Children of the Stones recently on Youtube and loved it so fuckin' much. Had never heard of it before this year. You guys (teh britishes) are lucky to have had such staggeringly strange TV in that decade. Jesus christ I want the soundtrack for CotS so bad! Of course none has ever been released. I ripped the audio from the main title but what I really want is the great choral stuff for when the happy-dayers are in their ritual circles.

The Boy From Space is out there now

http://www.theartsshelf.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/819dLz1Wb2L._SL1500_.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zIbEoGRt-Q

Also "Red Shift", which is all kinds of bonkers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-YkmZPA5K0

Still not sure if The Prisoner belongs on this thread, and the fact that it's been scarcely discussed suggests other people agree with me.

woah

this thread hits the spot - in fact I think Ward Fowler recommended it when we met up and were discussing some of this stuff in Glasgow a while back.

some great recommendations here (still haven't seen Robin Redbreast.

I've got a sort of theoretical model which is horribly generalised but goes something like this, so bear with me (er, this turned out to be a long post, sorry):

At the end of the 19th Century there was a schism in horror/ghost writing. Arthur Machen is the key person here, with his mixture of malign pastoral (that is to say it is not edenic or supernal), chthonic malevolent faeries (almost certainly versions of the Celtic so-called 'barrow-folk'), Roman syncretism (displacing chthonic, and 'spiritual'/of the stars), and the tentacle, or black degradation, itself a part of the Neoplatonic chain-of-being expressed by by the Silurian mage, Thomas Vaughan, as I wrote elsewhere:

The 17th century mystic Thomas Vaughan, like Machen a Silurian Welsh, wrote of the chain of being where ‘beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians called it tenebrae activae.’ This crudely sentient and primal darkness is like a canker that infects first soul and then flesh. So it is that Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, Mrs Black in The Inmost Light, and Francis Leicester in The Novel of the White Powder all end up ‘a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being#mediaviewer/File:Great_Chain_of_Being_2.png

^ great chain of being, see base for boiling pitch

The interplay between these is complicated, and it's worth saying that MR James had also had a very effective tentacle in, I think, Count Magnus.

Arthur Machen's important for this genealogy is because the American journalist, Vincent Starrett, who had a fascination with Machen, wrote an article on him, and was friends with HP Lovecraft. It was in this way that the tentacle stretched across the Atlantic, and in HP Lovecraft's hands multiplied into a mythos with, like Machen, separate chthonic and stellar aspects.

Crucially it seems to me are the visual elements of Lovecraft - much English ghost story writing was quite reticent in this respect (MR James in particular nests his horror in shadows or heavily framed narrative/pictorial devices). Machen did visualise, but the moment of revelation was usually also the end of the piece. Lovecraft was all MORE TENTACLES GIVE ME MORE I MUST DESCRIBE THE UNDESCRIBABLE TERROR. Sometimes I feel this is a division between horror and ghost writing, though I'm not sure that's right (horror writing doesn't always heavily visualise). What I *do* think is that heavily visual element in Lovecraft (and subsequently horror writing in general) lent itself extremely well to comic books and film when they came along. It became part of popular culture.

At the same time in the UK, Machen had dropped his malign pastoral, and started concentrating on supernal stuff, Grail legend, still with elements of the little folk, but without the black degradation - he himself wrote 'Here then was my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil.' Completely RONG of course, but n/m, point is it took him in a different direction that was characteristic of English supernatural writing generally.

I've got loads of gaps here, but as far as I can tell, English supernatural writing was free of visual horror throughout the first half of the 20th Century. The supernatural pastoral strain is extremely strong. Writers like diverse figures like John Betjeman, Denton Welch, the composer John Ireland, Jocelyn Brooke, Michael Powell (P&Pressburger) were influenced and were fans of the uncanny pastoral. Edwardian (and later) children's writing is full of it (E Nesbitt's Psammead is a chthonic fairy, the Hobbits are barrow folk, there's a fuckton of Graal stuff). Walter de la Mare belongs here too. It sat closer to high culture than it did popular culture. The reticence I mentioned earlier means there's a 'writing of unease' or even 'the unpleasant' (such an English word) - Eleanor Smith wrote some good gypsy/circus based stuff, Roald Dahl's short stories probably fit here. There's a very good set of stories by the young Elizabeth Jane Howard (with Robert Aickman) called We Are For the Dark. This is a genre probably best described as the 'macabre'.

I don't think the effect of the two wars can be dismissed here - the First World War, like the Boer war, saw a mass level of death of youth, which resulted in a fuck load of spiritism, table tapping, ghosts summoned up by grieving parents. Reading Edwardian children's fantasy both wars saw a lot of displacement to the countryside (for different reasons - wealthy children moved out 'while Father's away' in the WWI stories, evacuation in WWII obv) which perpetuated the pastoral - rus v urb distinctions.

John Wyndham I feel is essentially pastoral - it was a criticism I think of Brian Aldiss on JW that his novels always basically ended up with a return to a pastoral eden. The village of the Midwich Cuckoos is essential for the claustrophobia, but is also a v English Victorian genre location - I liked clemenza's point above though about US suburbia, which is often available for parables of uniformity, but i think that is different to John Wyndham's use here.

Chocky is the great counter-example.

John Christopher's incredibly bleak and effective The Death of Grass is also an eco/pastoral catastrophe.

In the US, it feels like science, the military, nuclear power, and space exploration are the crucial WWII elements - the stellar and alien precedes space exploration of course, and I'd suggest it's essentially the English druidic/mystical strain (a Romantic crypto-history), filtered through Machen-Lovecraftian monstrosity, with the religious elements removed. It becomes v difficult and probably meaningless to separate out much horror and science-fiction in the US post-war.

there's a quote I picked up the other day, which was originally in The Gentleman's Magazine, which sums up the British status for me:

“In England, everything of unknown origin is instinctively assigned to one of four - Julius Caesar, King Arthur, the Druids or the Devil.”

— TG Bonney - The Gentleman’s Magazine 1866

That was referring to the hazy archaeological theories of stone age monuments and remains, but such theories were extremely strong in late British Romanticism, and persisted culturally, so that you could say that of an awful lot of

The UK television that's mentioned in this thread sits firmly in this strain. Penda's Fen, which I will have to watch again cos it's great - v strong pastoral both musically - Elgar - and spiritually - pagan loca sacra. Nigel Kneale is central here. He introduces US science fiction elements to his horror, pulling together the two lines that had split early on: Quatermass and the Pit is a direct SF interpretation of Machen (separate strands of chthonic little folk and interstellar horror), the final Quatermass picks up on the popular revival of Neolithic monument theorising and adds the Quatermass-UK-tradition of nuclear and radio research to the mix. Extremely effective. See also Children of the Stones and Kneale's The Stone Tape. These are all the elements of that late Victorian Romanticism/archaeological theory, but with the crucial innovation of bringing in science-fiction. This gives brings British horror up-to-date in a way it hadn't really been, and also gives the science-fiction a very British flavour, that I'd located at the centre of this thread.

Kneale's Beasts sits somewhere between those Tales of Unease and traditional horror - Baby is the most remarkable of these imo.

plenty of gaps here: i'm interested in any 'ah no but because' responses. also interested to know about exceptions to early 20th C British horror writing theory, and also more about that yoking together of SCIENCE+ANCIENT HISTORY (or Romantic history - caesar, arthur, druids, devil bit).

Clearly The Avengers and The Prisoner don't fit into this - and I STILL haven't seen Sapphire and Steel, for shame.

there's some old good k-punk posts limning this stuff, aren't they? or maybe it was just a long parenthesis whilst talking about the Fall again. but mentioned the stone tape and the later quatermass.

one wonders if you could include: those creepy public info spots ('apaches' etc); the wicker man; i had a third, but i have forgotten whilst writing this sentence. m.r. james? enh.

― thomp, Sunday, May 1, 2011 9:55 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i need to read these! can you remember where they are?

For what it's worth, I see The Fall along with Nigel Kneale as the other great example of bringing English supernatural writing into modern times - I wrote more about this on The Fall ballot thread.

For the third great post-war figure - JG Ballard - I'd also say much of his writing deals explicitly with versions of pastoral.

let's try that chain of being pic again:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Chain_of_Being_2.png#mediaviewer/File:Great_Chain_of_Being_2.png

> The ugly-wuglies scene in The Enchanted Castle by Elizabeth Nesbit definitely qualifies, although the rest of it is distinctly uncreepy. No videos available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4QtHGlJMcY

watched some sapphire and steel today. steel's such an arsehole. assignment 2 (the railway station one) is fantastic.

Very glad you found this thread Fizzles. I believe that Rob Young is working on a bk about all this kind of tv stuff.

I recently read some Machen for the first time and was struck by how in The White People, the main bulk of the narrative reads like Joycean stream of consciousness, complete with a strong female/erotic narrative pov.

I want to insert into yr history, somewhere, the English working class roughies, tho' I don't really know much anywhere near enough about Penny Dreadfuls etc to offer any kind of content analysis. But somebody like James Herbert seems to me as 'modern' in his way as Ballard. Herbert really brought gore cinema aesthetics - which are of course predicated on SHOWING YOU IT ALL - to the previously rather gentlemanly literary tradition. His early books were published by New English Library and have some of the same sensibility as a 'Richard Allen' - urban, crude, exploitative, some tough goddamm stuff - but also very flash and conceptual, as befitting Herbert's background in advertising. Of course, as he got more respectable and technically more polished, he ending up writing rather ho-hum haunted house stories and the like, but his first four or five books all packed a real punch and are, in their way, inimitable (tho' not, I concede, particularly ineffable - something like The Rats deliberately pisses on the English pastoral tradition, and goes out of its way to avoid shadows, mystery, the spiritual-cosmic.)

This kind of disreputable/cynical/outsiderish attitude is all over the roughest/cheapest English horror movies, from all eras. To mention Michael Powell again, the early Soho-set scenes in Peeping Tom, complete with an appearance from English nudie queen Pamela Green, are Powell kissing off his more whimsical pastoral past in favour of Freud, modernity, inner horror (Anglo-Amalgamated, the studio behind Peeping Tom, also gave us Horrors of the Black Museum and Circus of Horrors, cheapies that capitalised on, but did not emulate, Hammer's fairytale Gothics, which were already looking a little...tame...by 1960, and Psycho/Peeing Tom).

The White People is great - that stream of consciousness side of things is very heavily deployed in the very strange The Hill of Dreams, which is not really horror, but an interior monologue of mental obsession and delirium. I think The White People is considered Machen horror canon though, and I'd forgotten about that main narrative ... it's a diary isn't it? being so fluid and childlike - very effectively so iirc.

James Herbert! yes. I tend to dismiss Clive Barker as 'effectively American' in his manner, but I'd completely forgotten about James Herbert, who is definitely UK/London. Only read the first Rats, and that when I was about 12, so should go back and have a look. Haven't seen Horrors of the Black Museum of Circus of Horrors, but will see if I can seek them out.

mentioning Penny Dreadfuls does make me wonder what was around in the way of horror for station paperbacks at the time of stuff like Bulldog Drummond. Seems hard to imagine there wasn't anything - feels like it might've been Yellow Peril or Rider Haggard stuff.

Guy N Smith is, I think, the touchstone for the Richard Allen comparison (acknowledging Crabs probably only became publishable because of Rats). Ramsay Campbell stands fairly tall as the primary Brit involved in tying folk horror and Lovecraftian HORROR <SHUDDER> together, and Colin Wilson's fiction works are definitely in this field - I have a real soft spot for Return of the Lloigor, which plays heavily on the sense of isolation in the 'wrong' community on the Welsh/English border.

Horror seems to have taken a dip in the post-WWI era, or at least not have been pushed into the mass market. Yellow Peril, or at least the expansion of the concept into other 'unexplored' areas seems to have been the main theme and it's probably out of that we see the first reference to Zombies in The Magic Island. They caught on quickly, especially in the US and probably because of their proximity to Haiti (leaving aside the whole aspect of preying on fears that you couldn't know whether the black people around you weren't from there) - so much so that White Zombie was released just three years later.

There's probably a thematic link with the end of the war and just not wanting to read about more people dying - or at least not chaps of the right sort (since the Hodder Yellow Jackets, for example, still had lashings of violence and death for the types that deserved it i.e. furriners)

Yep, I wanted to mention ppl like Guy N Smith, Shaun Hutson, Brian Lumley, definitely all modern inheritors of the pulp/station paperback tradition.

Fizz, I wouldn't go out of your way to see Black Museum or Circus of Horrors, unless you have a particular fondness for mildly sensational cheap British horror movies of the late 1950s (personally I like the idea of their post-war flash harry, sexy soho, fly-by-night quality - their marginality to mainstream British cinema - more than I actually like watching the films themselves.)

Another name I was groping for last night - Tod Slaughter, who unites the British horror film with staged, theatrical terror, which also seems key to the visual horror tradition (Stoker working for Henry Irving, the first Universal Dracula and Frankenstein being based on stage adaptations, grand guignol, etc etc)

I really like Circus of Horrors, but agree with you that it's not necessarily for all and certainly that the idea of it - the "distinctly British seedy vibe" if you will - as much as anything else. It's always the people involved in these sort of things that intrigues me and draws me in (see, for example, Michael Winner's early nudie-cutie work); CoH, for example, has musical work by Tony Hatch and one of the songs ends up on a Heinz album.

I'd argue that Peeping Tom straddles the line between the CREEPY VIBE and the SEEDY VIBE aspects, and probably pushes the line into the latter. It's true that sensationalism is a major trend in some of the progenitors to the CREEPY VIBE material but there's probably a defined split into the pulpier (and therefore seedier) aspects and creepier ones in the early 70s. (? citation needed)

Theory: girl's comics fall into the CREEPY VIBE in a way that boy's comics didn't.

Some magnificent stuff on this thread recently - a broiling chthonic upsurge of undead UKILx in itself.

I was just thinking, the obvious antecedent for "The Prisoner" is G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday", right? Which has nothing of the pastoral, really, but it has that dreamlike (sub-titled "A Nightmare"!), somewhat supernatural vibe that makes "The Prisoner" so different from any other spy fiction of that era, which is usually concerned with post-nuclear Cold War reality, be it glamourising (Fleming) or attacking (Greene, Le Carré) it. I think this sort of whimsy (far more benign in Chesterton than in "The Prisoner") can maybe be traced back to the nonsense of Carrol and etc, which provides the connection to the pastoral stuff? Might be wrong.

And as far as things that don't really belong in this thread go, Baker-era "Doctor Who"? What I've seen lines up more with a post-Hammer sensibility of gothic camp than anything else...

I wld also say that visually the Prisoner takes lots of cues from psychedelia/Sgt Pepper, which is obv drenched in Victorian whimsy, and overt references to all the druggy aspects of Alice, so it all fits.

I'm sure aldo and sic know this stuff better than me, but yes, Doctor Who transitioned from Quatermass/Pertwee to Hammer/Baker (tho after a while the Who production team were under pressure from Mary Whitehouse etc to tone down the Gothic/horrific elements.) Dcotor Who goes Gothic at almost exactly the same time that Hammer starts to die away - so another transition, from film to television, from adulthood to childhood.

Stewart Lee's short radio documentary on The Children of the Stones from a few years back is still on iPlayer (seemingly available for eternity)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n1rbx

Found The Stone Tape disappointingly un-unheimlich. 90 minutes of 1970s businessmen in flares shouting at each other, doing comedy Japanese impersonations and assuming all women are fragile creatures on the verge of a breakdown, with two minutes of ultra vague lovecraftian not so horrible horrors at the end.

day of the triffids was good though (bbc4 repeats to tie in with sci fi season)