Scream Theory #2

TEN HOURS OF TERROR: BRITISH HORROR HITS HAMMERSMITH

"Our basic aim with this book is to force a re-evaluation of the seventies era, and shake off the dusty image of British horror once and for all." So speaks Harvey Fenton, one of the co-editors of a new Fab Press volume that considers the importance of 1970s British horror cinema. Entitled Ten Years of Terror, the book provides an exhaustive yearly account of the British horror films produced during the decade, with Fenton and his co-editor David Flint assembling an impressive line-up of genre writers and respected film critics to do the reviewing honours.

As with other FAB Press books, Ten Years of Terror combines the company's trademark features of a critical consideration of otherwise marginal texts alongside a striking collection of visuals (here displayed through an awesome collection of stills and posters that the editors have been researching and archiving since 1993). The volume achieves its aim to be the most thorough account of UK horror productions from the era via the inclusion of a series of appendices charting short and experimental films from the era, related horror productions that were made for television and foreign genre movies shot in Britain. (The volume even contains a section accounting for those films that were announced but never reached post-production or release.)

While the lavish design and construction of Ten Years of Terror make it a must-read volume for cult cinema completists, the book will also be of interest to historians wishing to chart the wider social and cultural trends that impinged on British horror cinema during the era. For Harvey Fenton, this remained one of his key motivations behind the project. As he stated: "Most people - including most of those who have written histories of the British horror film, unfortunately, think that British Horror = Hammer. It's easier to simply not look beyond this narrow definition. However, Hammer made up barely 20% of the output in the period concerned. We were much more interested in unearthing the real core of the British independent horror scene."

Many examples of this so-called 'real core' of seventies British horror were screened at the 'Horror Show' event, which took place at Hammersmith's Riverside Cinema on 23rd June 2001 and acted as the book's official launch. Screenings at the event ranged from Norman J. Warren's controversial Gothic slasher Terror (1978), to Jose Larraz's daring lesbian drama Vampyres (1974) and Alan Birkinshaw's rarely seen Killer's Moon (1978). Watching these explicit and nihilistic films again, it becomes clear the extent to which British horror cinema of the seventies had transgressed from the 'accepted' model of home-grown hokum offered by Hammer. As Harvey Fenton commented, "Hammer declined because they were too insular, too stuck in their old ways to move with the times. It was a completely self-inflicted downfall. When Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist were coming from the States, Hammer was still bashing out Frankenstein films with Peter Cushing. Hammer were by this time simply hopelessly out of touch with the contemporary audience."

THE KILLING MOON: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAN BIRKINSHAW

One of the guests present at the Horror Show event was the cult British director Alan Birkinshaw, who introduced a rare cinema screening of his 1978 exploitation classic Killer's Moon. The film explores the disruption of a rural community and its inhabitants following the escape of four crazed mental patients who are undergoing 'radical' forms of therapy as a way of dealing with their inner rage. Directed by their psychiatrist to use their dreams as a forum to vent their most sexually aggressive urges, the four patients rape, mutilate and torture the locals (and their pets), believing their own actions to be part of a crazed dream scene.

In true exploitation fashion, the focus for the inmates' mayhem takes place in a deserted hotel where a group of teenage schoolgirls have taken refuge for the night. This plot devise allows the film to wander an uncomfortably thin line between archaic St. Trinians style antics and more contemporary forms of softcore titillation that were popular in Britain during the decade. Birkinshaw was himself no stranger to these milder forms of 'English' eroticism, having previously directed The Confessions of a Sex Maniac (1974), a breast and buttock laden farce about an architect attempting to model his designs on the female bosom. However, in Killer's Moon, the combination of blood, breasts and British seaside humour makes for uncomfortable viewing, a factor that confirmed by the film's graphic on-screen violence and acts of implied animal cruelty.

Birkinshaw later directed another minor cult hit with the jungle adventure film Invaders of the Lost Gold (1981). Here, B-movie regulars such as Stuart Whitman, Harold 'Odd Job' Sakata and British character 'bad boy' Edmund Purdom (literally) rubbed shoulders with grindhouse regulars such as Laura 'Black Emanuelle' Gemser, while searching for hidden world war two treasure in the Philippines.

In this exclusive interview for Scream Theory, Birkenshaw discusses sex, suffering and the reasons why the bottom fell out of British exploitation cinema of the seventies.

Xavier Mendik: Today's event is a celebration of 1970s British horror and exploitation cinema. What were your memories of working in this era?

Alan Birkinshaw: Well, it was all good fun. I think that these days, too many people take themselves too seriously, which we didn't back then. I know that there is a lot of money involved in making a film, but people should remember that we are all here today and gone tomorrow.

Some of the themes of 1970s British horror: urban alienation, harsh and inflexible state structures and repressive family structures imply that they should be taken seriously. Would you not agree?

I don't really know. You never quite know how these things are going to turn out and quite often it's a surprise when they turn out brilliantly and then people start looking for wider themes or social issues in them which perhaps were not intentional, but may be present anyway. Obviously you went out to make the very best film that you could, most of them didn't work and occasionally one of them did, but most of these films were made for fun. We came up with an idea and wrote a script, some people liked it and put some money in, I put some of my own money into these projects and off we went.

We tend to associate you with British horror cinema, but your first film was a sex comedy entitled Confessions of a Sex Maniac.

We did that purely because I had a friend who was prepared to put some money into various film projects. We had no idea what kind of film to do, so we thought we would test the market by doing an exploitation picture. If it worked, then we would come up with a bigger budget and a different type of film so that we could start to work up towards the films we really wanted to make.

The film seems to have had a curious production history, some reports even suggested that it was mistaken for a hardcore porn movie?

I think the French distributor who brought the rights for the film cut in a sequence that he had shot himself which was far more explicit than the original cut I had prepared. Someone I know was in France and they saw the film advertised, popped into the cinema to see it and was quite bemused by what they saw in it! However that wasn't anything that I shot, and that wasn't even the intention of the film.

The most obvious difference between hardcore and the British sex comedy is that the former celebrates the excesses of male potency while the latter just pokes fun at phallic 'failure'. Would you agree?

(Laughs), Yes, and that comic failure was exactly how Britain was during the seventies! You could have sex, but you couldn't have 'serious' sex. So what you had to do was dress it up, and the best way of doing that was by playing it for laughs. So you would have these scenes of naked girls running in and out of a room, so those who wanted to see naked flesh could see, but it was dressed up in a kind of comic farce, so that you could get it passed the censor.

Yes, but the theme of lacklustre male leads seems also central to Killer's Moon, which was screened at the festival today. The hero's opening line is to comment on his own flagging libido to his girlfriend.

Yes, this was because that particular line was written by a female. I should actually tell you that my sister is Fay Weldon and she wrote some lines of dialogue for the film.

The 1970s saw the decline of Hammer horror and a very different kind of British horror movie took its place. Would you classify Killer's Moon as part of that new trend in British horror?

Well we certainly tried to make a contemporary kind of horror picture and it nearly came off! I wouldn't ever claim that it was the greatest film in the world, but there were some quite good things in it. There were things in that film that did work, while others clearly didn't. If I was going to do that movie again I would do it entirely differently.

The film's scenes of animal cruelty offended many People, particularly the implication that one of the maniacs has chopped a dog's leg off.

Well of course this did not really happen, I would never allow it to happen, as I love animals. In fact we owe a great deal to the dog as he managed to get us a great distribution deal! The dog had quite a history, having been given a 'doggy VC' for his courage. Apparently, he used to be a pub dog whose owner was being held up and animal's leg was wounded when it went to protect his master. We needed a dog with a leg missing for the film and initially I intended to use the dog I had at home. So I tried tying this dog's leg to make it look as though it was missing a limb, but it couldn't run and kept on falling over! So then I had the bright idea of getting this three-legged dog instead. Anyway, when it came to publicising the film's release, we knew that the press would love a good 'animal story'. So we had a photo-call at Peppermint Park, which was a fashionable cocktail bar in London. At 10.30 in the morning, the press turned up and we had arranged the dog sitting in the bar with a cocktail drinking straw in its mouth surrounded by all the girls from the film. So the photographers took all these fabulous photographs and the story appeared in The Times, The Telegraph and all the other newspapers. At the time we were playing in just a couple of the cinemas in the ABC circuit, but following the publicity, the exhibitors gave us a full release. So we did quite well out of the dog!

Although clearly made on a very tight budget, Killer's Moon, does contain a number of stylistic flourishes, such as unconventional point of view shots.

Yes, well I stated off my career as a television cameraman, and I recognise that in any film the use of camerawork is of the utmost importance. The cameraman for Killers Moon was one of the best cameramen around at the time… but he had a slight drink problem! This was a real shame because he had worked on some really big film projects … and also had been taken off other big film projects because of his drinking habits. I met him by accident and liked working with him a lot.

Beyond the film's visual 'look', the soundtrack to Killers Moon also had an experimental feel to it. How did that evolve?

I do think the music for the film is very interesting, though once again we did not have the budget to a totally effective soundtrack. As a result, there are points in the film where the music is not quite right. At certain points some of the music seems terribly old fashioned. I looked at the film the other night, after not having seen it for more than ten years. What struck me was that some of it was incredibly creaky, but other sections of it are quite fun and unusual.

The film did tend to bracket your work very much within the more disreputable end of horror cinema. How comfortable did you feel about this?

Why I made a horror film was that it seemed to be the next step to making the sort of films that I would rather have made which were thrillers. If I had a cinema hero, it was Roman Polanski and at the time I guess that's the direction I would liked to have gone in. Hindsight tells me that if the sort of film I wanted to make first that's what I should have been making first, instead I went down this rather circuitous route.

Moving away from Killer's Moon, you are also remembered in cult circles for your jungle action adventure film Invaders of the Lost Gold. What are your memories of this film?

It was a real experience! I was writing that every night before we were shooting it the next day. The script that we had originally was so appalling that we couldn't shoot it! So every night I was re-writing the movie and would have to present the actors with a new script the next morning, and retrospect tells me that this is not the best way to make movies.

The film featured American actor Stuart Whitman, who seemed to appear in many exploitation movies during the seventies.

Stuart Whitman, I thought was a brilliant actor and I really enjoyed working with him. We had the opportunity to make this film and there we were in the Philippine jungle, shooting in the same locations that Apocalypse Now had left a year earlier, with quite a few of the people who had been in that film.

Did the film's location make Invaders a difficult shoot?

Most definitely so. Every single thing that could conspire to go wrong during the filming did. Every single day we couldn't film, sometimes for up to eight hours at a time for the most extraordinary reasons. The dialogue was so bad it had to be constantly re-written, which lead to rows with the actors and some of the local actors we had to use were terrible. There were a couple of people that were so bad that I had to remove them only to find that this caused political problems in the area, so then I had to give them different roles! After all that, we ran out of money at the end of the shoot and I took over the UK rights in order to salvage the picture. However, in the end it only got a very limited release.

Beyond your use of Stuart Whitman, the film employed the talents of character actor Edmund Purdom, who often appeared as a British bad guy. What was he like to work with?

He was a really lovely guy. You have to remember that Edmund Purdom was a big named leading actor at one time. When he was in The Egyptian, it was one of the biggest films of all times. The problem with Edmund was that he was a bit eccentric and also he was a bit of a sex maniac! He got hounded out of Hollywood for seducing a studio head's wife or daughter, so he disappeared to Rome where he has now lived for over thirty years. Because he went on to work extensively in the Italian film industry and also in another language, there was never anyone to really guide him with these roles. As a result, all his performances appear to be a little over the top.

Just to close, the new Fab Press book Ten Years of Terror ends with a discussion of the death of the British horror film. Why do you think this form of genre cinema declined?

The bottom did drop out of the horror film market. Partly this is because its now so difficult to get money to make films, there are all sorts of strange people coming in with the authority to say "yes or no" to the funding of projects. Around 80% of films made in England don't even get shown in this country, and those that do are pretty dismal anyway. There are some filmmakers who are clearly gifted, the first film that they make turns out to be wonderful and they are off and running. For the rest of us lesser mortals it's just hard graft!