CRUCIBLE OF THE VAMPIRE (2019)

Now available in the UK on the Screenbound label, Crucible Of The Vampire is director/writer/editor Iain Ross-McNamee’s second full-length feature. It cleverly utilises the topography of a bucolic Shropshire landscape as well as the history behind the manor house used as the film’s primary shooting location, in order to evoke beautifully the golden era of British horror. But the film is a transparently low budget affair, so brilliantly steeped in a mix of the early‘70s folk horror tropes of Tigon British and the racy lesbian vampire action that writer Tudor Gates made a cornerstone of Hammer Films’ Karnstein Trilogy  -- The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Twins of Evil (1972) -- during the same period, that it really is a mystery why Ross-McNamee also allows proceedings to deteriorate, towards the end, into a mire of cheapo CGI digital effects and choreographed fight scenes. Such tactics quickly ruin the genteel air of old school charm that defines the diffident sort of British exploitation it was presumably intending to mimic the tone of in the earlier portions of the picture, only to replace it with a crude low budget aesthetic that’s a dime-a-dozen everywhere else you look in indie horror circles. Nevertheless, before we reach that final act when it goes slightly off the rails, there’s plenty else here for aficionados of 1970s Brit horror to recognise and doubtless appreciate.

The story itself will seem instantly familiar, being entirely built from tropes and narrative strands that appear countless times throughout the genre and are central to many of David McGillivray’s screenplays for British horror movie directors such as Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren. Ross-McNamee and his two co-writers, Darren Lake and John Wolskel, do a particularly convincing job in the first half of the movie of channelling their interest in Hammer’s ‘70s vampire output and the ‘Big Three’ associated with the Folk Horror subgenre, into what essentially becomes a re-working of Warren’s Satan’s Slave, from 1976 -- with witchcraft, necromancy, a dysfunctional family with a dodgy history and an attractive innocent who is led unsuspectingly into a carefully prepared trap set by devilish forces. This gets combined with an awareness of the methods of construction of supernatural tales by the likes of M.R James and Arthur Machen, which are often uncanny historical palimpsests that reveal their concealed layers through an exploration of architectural and landscape history.  

The film begins in a traditional fashion for this genre, in this case with a black-and-white 1649 prologue in which John Stearne, the main associate of the real-life Civil War-era Witchfinder Mathew Hopkins, hangs an old peasant called Ezekiel Fletcher (played by Brian Croucher of Blake’s 7 fame) from an Oak tree in the Shropshire woodland for the crime of necromancy. His next act is to break into two pieces the cauldron suspected of being used by Ezekiel for his sorcery. Ezekiel’s dead daughter had been seen roaming Jacob’s Wood at night, which is more than enough reason for finding the old boy guilty on the spot without further examination of the issue. Three-hundred-and-fifty years later, though, and one half of what has subsequently become known as the Stearne Cauldron now rests in the University Museum of a young assistant curator called Isabelle (Katie Goldfinch). Conscious that the owners might be attempting to scam the university to pay for repairs, her supervisor sends her to a Shropshire manor house being renovated by a family who claims to have uncovered the other half of the cauldron in their basement while preparing to lay a new gas pipe. It is Isabelle’s job to examine the artefact and decide whether or not the claim is genuine.

Karl (Larry Rew), the owner of the house, tells Isabelle about the history to the building, which was originally built by secret Catholics during the reign of James I, then adapted and expanded during the Victorian era. When he mentions in passing how the Neo-Jacobian pile was formerly a Girls’ School, it sounds like a knowing line included in the script with the intention of it being picked up on by viewers as an obvious reference to Hammer’s Lust For A Vampire from 1971. In fact, a little light research into manor houses in the Shropshire area unearthed the film’s shooting location to be one Acton Reynald Hall: ‘a Victorian mansion incorporating parts of a building dating from early to mid-17th Century’. The building was the home of the Corbett family for generations; but they first moved there in 1644, after their former home became a Royalist garrison during the English Civil War and was destroyed by Cromwell’s soldiery. It was expanded on in the early 19th century by Shropshire architect J.H. Haycock, when the entire village of Acton Reynard, along with several farms, were demolished to make way for the surrounding park. In 1919, though, the building actually was turned into a Girls’ School, and remained one up until 1995! One of the nice things about Iain Ross-McNamee’s film is how it manages to incorporate little bits of the local history of the area into its B movie plot about sorcery, witches and vampirism. At one point Isabelle finds a diary written by a former owner of the house during the Victorian era, which prompts a flashback in the style of M.R. James, where we find out how the half of the Stearne cauldron now buried in the basement was discovered. Jeremiah Cain (Charles O’Neill) describes being led by an unearthly melody floating on the wind in the woods, to the site of the hanging of Ezekiel Fletcher, seen in the 1649 prologue.  It also leads him to the cauldron, which he then takes back to the manor, only to unleash a ghostly presence in the form of a pale, ghostly woman in a black dress who comes to be known as the Dark Lady.

By this point, Isabelle has also been experiencing similar visions of a scary ghostly woman in the night. And there are also countless other odd episodes to deal with involving the, frankly, strange inhabitants who are Isabelle’s hosts up at the mansion: Scarlet (Florence Cady), the rebellious daughter of Karl and his foreign wife Evelyn (Babette Barat), steals Isabelle’s phone and even some of her underwear. And Evelyn insists on providing Isabelle with mysterious bedtime drinks and then hanging about to make quite sure she drains the glass before leaving. These mysterious ‘tonics’ seem to prompt erotic dreams (or are they dreams?) involving white horses and the ghostly pale woman. Even a trip to the local pub results in Isabelle meeting the gardener who works on the estate (played by Neil Morrissey) who then tells her about the terrible fate of his predecessor. The former gardener’s seemingly hostile son follows her back to the mansion along a moonlit path after she leaves the pub that night (providing an opportunity for some very Hammer-like day-for-night photography) issuing incoherent warnings about what might happen to her if she stays at the mansion any longer. Karl himself also becomes more suspect, refusing to allow Isabelle to remove the cauldron from its present site in the manor’s basement and demanding that she arrange to have the museum’s half of the artefact brought out instead to Shropshire in order to find out whether or not they fit together. 

When Isabelle reveals to a barmaid at the local pub that she has just broken up with her boyfriend because he couldn’t accept her religiously derived belief that there should be no sex before marriage, it doesn’t take a genius of a viewer to figure out that Isabelle’s virginal state might have also had some ulterior Wicker Man-style role to play in her being selected to come out to the manor house in the first place. The latter thought is made rather more explicit by the exceedingly forward behaviour exhibited by Scarlet who, not content with confronting Isabelle with the knowledge that she is attempting to seduce her while wearing Isabelle’s own purloined underwear, ends up exploiting a particularly disturbing encounter Isabelle has with the Dark Lady in order to successfully initiate her into the pleasures of Sapphic love!

The plot elements and the sometimes theatrically antiquated performance styles of some of the cast members make it quite plain that Hammer’s trio of films that were very loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla are the main models for the narrative, and for the lightly eroticised style of the movie. The problem with any attempt to recreate this bygone era in the present day is that actors of the personality and stature of Peter Cushing and Ingrid Pitt are not around anymore to do what they so often were able to do for Hammer Films: bring a degree of prestige to the productions they worked on that elevated those films beyond their nominal worth. For instance, the role of head of household Karl is played perfectly convincingly by the performer tasked with the job here, but you can’t help noticing that his role is precisely the kind that would have at one time been played by someone like John Carson if this were a real Hammer film -- and once you see that, it immediately draws your attention to the fact that the actor taking his place can never be an adequate substitute. 

That being said, Florence Cady does make a seductive might-be-a-lesbian/might-be-a-vampire antagonist; and newcomer (and Brie Larson-look-alike) Kate Goldfinch is a suitably engaging lead, although she inevitably struggles with the inconsistency of character that is demanded of her by the script when she goes from being a naïve, out-of-her-depth academic who falls for the same ‘drugged drink’ trick twice in close succession, to an ‘arse-kicking’ superwoman, slashing throats and crushing heads with seemingly no problem whatsoever, who manages to take out a coven-full of robed cult members about to drain her of her virgin’s blood so that they can fully restore their vampire-witch queen to her full glory. Neil Morrissey receives top billing on the cover of the DVD, but in truth turns up for only a handful of scenes, mainly concerned with delivering exposition. He is also given a scene at the climax of the movie just to make it worthwhile his turning up presumably -- although his role in the events depicted is, to be honest, rather minimal. In his director and editor roles Iain Ross-McNamee makes evocative use of the exterior and interiors of Action Raynard Hall to deliver many atmospheric moments in the build-up to the easily predicted climactic reveal; and a dream-like sequence that takes place in total silence and in slow motion is directed (probably unintentionally) like an ethereal Jesus Franco fever dream -- although there’s nothing in the film that's anywhere near as pervy as what ol’ Jess would have presented us with, I’m sure.

But if you can ignore the terrible digital FX, one or two weak performances and a resolution that seems to aim for charged ambiguity but just ends up feeling slightly unsatisfactory instead, there’s still an overall old-school feel about Crucible of the Vampire that is undoubtedly attractive, and will please many fans of the classics of 1970s British horror. It does, in the end, draw many strands of influence together in a way that feels utterly natural and convincing. It’s just a shame the pay-off seems rather rote, and plays by the rules of a more modern breed of horror rather than having the courage to stick with the original low-key style it began with. Screenbound Entertainment has just released the film on dual format Blu-ray/DVD and on digital platforms after it garnered many festival plaudits and awards, so this is a film that will definitely be of interest to many, despite its flaws.                 

         

EURO GOTHIC: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema - by Jonathan Rigby

Jonathan Rigby has previously published two of the most comprehensive and therefore essential guides to the history of horror cinema yet to be made available in the English language. With the exemplary English Gothic, first published in 2000, and its ‘prequel’ American Gothic which followed it in 2007, he gave us two detailed and immensely readable tomes both of which, between them, explored horror movie production in Britain and across the Pond in Hollywood from the dawn of picture-making to the present day (American Gothic terminated in 1956 when, thanks to Hammer, Britain for a time largely took over as horror movie capital. The recently expanded update of English Gothic follows the story right up to recent times, with its inclusion of UK films that entered production in 2015, although all of those mentioned were illustrative of the slew of the forgettable micro-budget digital horrors that these days come and go like clouds in the virtual ether of a subscription to Amazon Video). This being so, news that Rigby was planning a third volume in the series, that would set out this time to tackle the monumental subject of European horror, was understandably greeted by all true genre fans with a sense of expectation that can only be described as gleeful. The wait since that initial announcement has seemed like a long one, but the magisterial Euro Gothic is now finally upon us, and the results are every bit as ‘up to snuff’ as readers of the previous two volumes will have surely anticipated they would be. 

Rigby’s most recent publication before this, Studies in Terror, which came out in 2011, was a wide-ranging overview of the genre, selecting what the author considers to be horror cinema’s greatest ‘landmarks’. It traversed the entire world for horror favorites, to take in everything from 1920s German Expressionism to contemporary Japanese ghost pictures while incidentally offering us a first glimpse at Rigby’s appreciation of some of the classics of French, Italian and Spanish horror cinema. This was to be a mere taster, though, for a commentary on the subject that now reaches the zenith of its full expression in this handsomely produced volume, lovingly chronicling and critiquing scores of European horror and fantasy pictures, most of them dating from the late 1950s through to the end of the 1970s. The author's detailed tour of the genre is book-ended by what can in retrospect be cited as the point of emergence for Europe’s tradition of cine Fantastique, when the first magic effects films of Georges Méliès were produced in 1896 and, a little later, those of Paris-based Spaniard Segundo de Chomón; the end comes, for Rigby, with  the death of much of Europe's genre movie production in the wake of the 1980s VHS home video boom, which itself was petering out somewhat in the years succeeding 1983, after indirectly having forced various changes in the funding structure of the film industries on the continent, which brought about catastrophically deleterious effects in the profitability of genre film-making in countries such as Spain and Italy, whose industries had for decades previously thrived upon it.

In his introduction to Studies in Terror, Rigby reflected on how the success of individual horror movies is often dependent on their ability to generate a series of ‘moments’ that make a particularly strong impression on the viewer: ‘get enough of these moments together in one picture and the filmmakers might have a genuine classic on their hands.’ Arguably, more so than is the case with the horror and fantasy output of any other region of the world, the horror cinema produced in Europe during the bulk of the period covered in this book has predicated itself on just such a philosophy -- often sacrificing narrative coherence on the altar of the striking set-piece. This idea goes back to the genre’s earliest beginnings in Germany, when expressionism gave birth to a new form of cinematic terror that, while based on the motifs of Gothic literature, was also rooted in the psychological upheavals of the Great War. As this volume illustrates profusely, the supremacy of the image and of the horror ‘moment’ in general, was a concept that has continued to play a hugely important role in perceptions of the horror cinema that has been created in many European countries since then: from the poetic surrealism of Jean Rollin’s vampire fables of the late-sixties and seventies, to the outrageous, flamboyantly gore-splattered illogicality displayed by Lucio Fulci’s 'metaphysical' zombie movies, produced and released in the early-eighties.    

This volume, although for obvious reasons the heftiest yet published by Rigby, since it deals with all kinds of films made right the way across the best part of an entire continent rather than merely with the horror movie production of just one country, as did the other two books, offers a not quite so up-to-the-minute picture of the continental horror scene as that which was recently provided for Britain in his newly updated edition of English Gothic: the sheer quantity of movies made in Europe during the genre’s heyday in the sixties and seventies means that, just as, say, every single giallo picture ever made cannot feasibly be referenced here (that in itself would require a book of equal length to this one!) so there has to be a cut-off point to act as an appropriate moment at which to bring the curtain down on this examination of the genre in general. The year this book selects to be that moment is 1983: chosen by Rigby as his end-point apparently because this was also the year in which the European genre suffered its most cataclysmic downturn in production.

This means that there can be room only for the most cursory of mentions for a great many films that come after that date but which are still considered by a sizable group of fans to be genre classics, and therefore no less worthy of detailed comment than some of the avalanche of cheap euro slasher/gore efforts that were tossed out in the early 1980s, but which still get covered here because they come before the self-imposed ’83 curfew. The most striking omissions are Michele Soavi’s extraordinary quartet of films (only mentioned in brief summery on the last page of the book) and Dario Argento’s cinema post 1982’s modern giallo favorite Tenebrea. Though in the latter's case all but the most die-hard fans of the maestro would dare to quibble with the assertion that the quality of Argento’s output has been in marked decline for many years now, Phenomena and Opera are surely still prime period works and would normally deserve more than just a casual mention; while to say that everything that came after them is not even worth that is to considerably short-change such daring expansions of the giallo template as The Stendhal Syndrome – dismissed by many puzzled fans at the time of its initial release, but since re-evaluated as one of Argento’s very best – or even his version of The Phantom of the Opera, which, whatever else may have been said about it, was certainly the last Argento picture to look like it had been even half-decently funded.

This quibble is not intended in any way to downplay, though, the enjoyment that is to be had between the covers of this characteristically superbly written work, the pleasures of which are manifold. It is still easily destined to become the go-to account for anyone seeking instruction in the history of the European horror movie and/or wishes to understand the context of its emergence during the key period covered. The continent produced many unique styles and distinctive flavours as the horror genre slowly took root in many corners at various different points in time, particularly influencing the cinematic output of Germany, France, Italy and Spain during the golden period of horror production from the late ‘50s to the late 1970s. Just about every worthwhile horror picture made in those countries during that time gets covered here to a greater or lesser degree with the book always a compelling read, juggling Rigby's ability to generate real insights and display a deep knowledge of many very different cinematic styles, which he lays out for the reader with his customary knack for descriptive eloquence. As a by-product the book also exposes his evident enthusiasm for the many forms that the European horror film has assumed during its long ascendancy: from the jagged modernist abstractions of the aforementioned silent era German expressionists, to the poeticism at the core of the medicalised body horror which emerged from the French fantastique in reaction to the atrocities of war; from crepuscular 1960s black-and-white and colour Italian Gothics inspired by the success of Britain’s Hammer Productions and Roger Corman’s colour Poe series, to the innumerable numbers of West German Krimi thrillers and their equally fecund offshoot the Italian giallo - both updating the lurid crime literature imported from Britain and America, and popular on the continent after the Second World War. 

Rigby skilfully conjures in writing the texture and sensibility of many of the most well-regarded euro-horror movies of the classic era, such as the subtle Ostend arthouse atmospherics showcased in Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness, or the imaginative, heat-drenched Iberian surrealism which informs the aesthetic delights of Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series. All the big hitters are here, obviously: Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Jean Rollin produced enough timeless classics in their heydays to ensure they each get their due; while the likes of Jess Franco and Paul Naschy were prolific enough also to guarantee themselves a large chunk of coverage herein, most of it favorable. Even if you do not agree with each and every summery and analysis of the 113 individual films written about in-depth here (very many more than that are also given a respectable amount of space), you will be hard pressed to fault the amount of time and effort that has clearly gone in to the research that lies behind Rigby’s assessment of these films and the filmmakers responsible for them, many of whom also have their careers discussed at length during the course of the book.

The book, amply illustrated with production snaps and including two colour sections, is of course impeccably researched, and also highly readable, even quotable (the author pithily sums up the appeal of Jess Franco’s cinema during his latter career as being the product of ‘a filmmaker who needs to film like a shark needs to swim.’) and the layout – which replicates that of Rigby’s other books -- includes cast lists for each major film covered, a quote from a contemporary review (where possible), and a relevant comment from a participant. Throughout its pages, Rigby’s writing always indicates an honest attempt to engage sympathetically with a multitude of idiosyncratic film-making styles and it becomes a sheer pleasure to immerse one-self in this treasure-trove of writing on Europe’s finest horror productions; the book will also become an invaluable reference source, and an educational fount of new viewing ideas for anyone approaching the genre afresh. 

Very highly recommended.