England's Screaming

Movie fans come in all shapes and sizes and ages these days, but I wonder if this isn’t really a book for someone like me who’s of an age to have seen almost all the films mentioned in it – from the prize-winners, to the cult movies, to the just-plain-atrocious-movie-you-watch-anyway-because-you’re-a-horror fan and saying it’s bad is no reason to hope there won’t be something good in it somewhere?

(Example: In The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1972), Count Dracula has manifested himself as modern-day property developer D. D. Denham, and is funding research into a strain of the bubonic plague that will realise his long-cherished dream of wiping out humanity for good. Fabulous idea. Just a pity the film’s so awful. No wonder Christopher Lee packed in playing the count when he was done with this.)

Because what we have here in this fabulously inventive book is author Sean Hogan finding links between different characters in (mostly) post-war British horror films and imagining how they might have met in an alternative universe. And how they all tie together into one single narrative. 

And not just main characters such as Dirk Bogarde in 1963’s The Servant, (whose unctuous, manipulative manservant Barrett attends late-night poker games with Jack Carter and Harold Shand*, before winding up working for Damien Thorn of The Omen films). Or Richard Burton in 1978’s The Medusa Touch, (who finds his catastrophic psychic powers put to use by the Machiavellian Christopher Lee (who has two tiny walk-on parts playing secretive government representatives in two totally unrelated 70s horror films: Death Line and Scream and Scream Again (the latter a film that makes not one lick of sense but is such, such fun).

Here, small roles assume significance too, as with John Bryans, who played A.J Stoker, an estate agent, in 1971’s The House That Dripped Blood. In this book’s reality, he goes on to specialise in finding haunted houses for damaged souls – such as the hapless victims of a centuries-old famine in the 1972 BBC play The Exorcism, and Mia Farrow in Full Circle from 1977.

Read this great book for the unexpected links. Read it for Sean Hogan’s wonderful imagination. And if you haven’t seen them, then go out and track down all the films.**

*The leads in Get Carter (1971) and The Long Good Friday (1980) respectively.

**Well, you could safely miss The Night Caller (1965) – unless you want to see professional actors demonstrating why they’re called ‘professional’. And those final three Dracula films are pretty hard to take. As for The Night of the Big Heat… you can catch up on the ironing or the household accounts while that’s on.