Tales That Witness Madness

 I saw Planet of the Apes here with my dad and brother in the 70s.

 It looks appropriately desolate.

I'm very much a product of one of the last television generations. When I was growing up, the mouldering art deco picture houses (like the Ritz in Strathaven) were the home of seedy sex comedies, witless sitcoms on the big screen, and fads like Blaxploitation and Kung Fu. There were the odd cultural blips throughout the 70s- The Exorcist, Jaws and The Omen. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Fever and Grease were screamfests for young girls: the teens who'd transferred their confused feelings for the dubious fairground charms of Showaddywaddy to feather-cut NYC hustler Travolta. The pictures had become a dismal haunt for those who fancied having someone interfere with them on a wet Wednesday.
Star Wars really changed all that. Lucas and Spielberg invigorated cinema and made it mass-market entertainment again. But for teenagers in the Punk Era, the only place to see horror films was on tv. This is my second blog on the BBC horror double bill seasons that began in the 70s before migrating to Channel 4 nearly twenty years later.

 I was never really disturbed by Universal or Hammer films. Something like the second feature accompanying The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in 1974: that was far more traumatic. I'm talking about Lost in the Desert aka Dirkie.

This cartoon accurately depicts every nightmarish trial the little boy and his dog experience in this sadistic South African "children's" movie. I guarantee most 15-year-olds I know would soil themselves if they had to sit through it. If you've never seen it...don't say you weren't warned.

I'm not discussing family-oriented monster movies here- the likes of At the Earth's Core (or as I think of it, the third Doctor Who movie) or the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad ( the snake woman really unsettled me as a kid) or even the Creature from the Black Lagoon. They are a matter for another time.

 By the late 70s, the monster fad at Marvel was on its last legs. The mystery/supernatural titles like the ones below were largely gone and the Howard, Lovecraft and Poe bandwagon had been replaced by another shot at Edgar Rice Burroughs' interplanetary romances. As we'll see another time, heroic fantasy paperbacks were quite resilient in this decade.

 The only remaining Grindcore Marvel stars were Dracula, Shang-Chi and Conan; only the Cimmerian would continue into the next decade. But in the year of the Queen's Jubilee, the Filth and the Fury and See-Threepio, BBC2 broadcast what was probably its finest selection of horror double-bills: Dracula, Frankenstein and Friends!
2nd July 1977
- Dracula (1931)
- Frankenstein (1931)
9th July 1977
- Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
- Brides of Dracula (1960) This is the one with Baron Meinster and the burning windmill. Brilliant!
16th July 1977
- The Mummy (1932) "He's gone for a little walk! Ahahahaha!!"
- The Wolf Man (1941)
23rd July 1977
- Son of Frankenstein (1939) "Well, Hello!"(Donnie Dunagan)
- Kiss of the Vampire (1964) This one ends with an occult ceremony and a swarm of bats.
30th July 1977
- Dracula’s Daughter (1936) Haven't seen this one again!
- Plague of the Zombies (1966) I didn't see this one until many years later.
6th August 1977
- The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) Cedric Hardwicke plays the Ghost.
- The Premature Burial (1961) Ray Milland and Corman. May have been the one and only time I saw it.
13th August 1977
- The Raven (1935)  Elvis Presley dies on the 16th August.
- The Black Cat (1934) I can't have seen either of these. See below.
20th August 1977
- Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) Larry Talbot Lives!
- The Raven (1963) Price, Lorre, Karloff. Jack Nicholson.
27th August 1977
- House of Frankenstein (1944)
- The Reptile (1966) Blake's Seven's Jacqueline Pearce
3rd September 1977
- Son of Dracula (1943) Lon Chaney IS Count Alucard.
- The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) "Revenge of ---"  is far better
10th September 1977
- House of Dracula (1945)
- The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
This was the longest season ever broadcast. The greatness does peter out with the Carradine Draculas from the mid-forties but there are some crackers here. I didn't see the original Raven or the Black Cat because we were on holiday at the time but that bizarre Art Deco Satanism flick has become a favourite.We were staying in the Rhins of Galloway, north of Stranraer. We rented a caravan for a week, in remote Portobello Bay.

There was a rusty iron plaque bolted into the crag to commemorate the death of a young man who had fallen to his death, trying to stop his cap from blowing away. As if that weren't gloomy enough, Elvis Presley died in the middle of the week. Here are some of the tunes that remind me of that holiday:
Way Down, Roadrunner, Spanish Stroll Lizzy's Dancin' in the Moonlight, Donna Summer's Theme from the deep and Nobody Does it Better.
My poor mother had been in hospital earlier that summer and she had to struggle with me, my brother and three dogs. We tried to walk to a country fair at a "nearby" castle and fortunately a passing driver took pity on us: it was much too far for three thirsty dogs and a post-op lady.
I had enjoyed the nightly hospital visits to Stonehouse because the cafe sold comics. What can I say? I was fourteen and very selfish.

 Yes, Nazi Bondage Queen, I have plans to blog about Gil Kane soon...

There were a number of months in '76 and '77 where Marvel comics just didn't appear; the X-Men didn't ship at all between issues 100 and 109 (it was bi-monthly so that was a sixteen-month hiatus!). I was much more of a DC fan therefore in the late 70s. Still no horror books as such, though.

 

 I followed that Don Newton/ Conway New Gods revival for a year...

 That August, I went into S3 at Strathaven Academy and it signalled the beginning of one of the happiest times of my sticky, miserable adolescence. Disco music was dying out and we were moving into the post-punk New Wave/Power Pop era. Allegedly...
There were a couple more examples of television horror that I wanted to mention: the first was the BBC's stylish adaptation of Dracula, starring Louis Jourdan:

It was the first version  I'd seen that depicted Drac skittering down the castle walls. Although I didn't actually see it on transmission, rather some years later. Saturday nights in that summer of '77 featured a now- forgotten anthology series called Supernatural. The framing device in the show was an exclusive Club of the Damned,  where applicants each had to tell a juicy, macabre story in order to join. There were also hints of a grim fate if the story wasn't entertaining enough...

I remember the two-parter Countess Ilona/ The Werewolf Reunion and the vampire story Dorabella; also, Bach's Tocatta and Fugue as the Sig Tune. To my knowledge, the series was never repeated.

 In contrast to the previous year, the 1978 summer season of horror movies was much shorter. It was also called, imaginatively, Monster Double Bill. It's nowhere near as good either.
8/7 Murders In The Rue Morgue/Man Who Could Cheat Death
15/7 Fantastic Disappearing Man/Man With The X-Ray Eyes. Don't think I saw this pair.
22/7 Quatermass Experiment/The Crazies  I have never watched the original Crazies all the way through.
29/7 The Electric Man (Man Made Monster) /The Mummy's Curse
5/8 White Zombie/House Of Wax
12/8 Them!/Incredible Shrinking Man  This one I think I missed
19/8 Voodoo Island/Phantom Of The Rue Morgue Bad monkey!
26/8 King Kong/Superbeast -  What a fantastically shlocky title.

I was a very lucky teenager because my parents-both working- fitted two holidays into this summer. The first, possibly mid-July, was in Morecambe and the second in a caravan at Lendalfoot, outside Girvan, in mid-August.
I liked Morecambe principally because you could get old comics in the market:

 I remember Lendalfoot in the main for the huge rocks on the shoreline; reading Dr. Who Target Books like this one:

  and playing Monopoly because it rained quite a bit. The tunes I remember are: The Man With The Child In His Eyes, Miss You by the Stones, Movin' Out by Billy Joel, Jilted John and Ca Plane Pour Moi, Cerrone's Supernature (from the Kenny Everett Video Show); and You're the One that I Want and Dreadlock Holiday, which both seemed to be Number One for the entire summer.

This was the year that the pencils of John Byrne really made their first big impression on me:

 DC Comics meanwhile were on the brink of their infamous Implosion: too many titles of dubious quality and  too much imitation of Marvel:

 Fortunately, there was also some elegant work by Dick Dillin (the Phantom Stranger on the Batplane wing!) and James Sherman's avant-garde designs for the beginning of the Earthwar epic (Great text pages too!)

 Given that my dad would have picked us up from Central Station or Motherwell- and in the case of Lendalfoot, from the village itself- we would have been home in time to see the double bill. But without my diary, locked up in the cupboard at Cumbernauld Road, I don't have the dates of our holidays to hand.

Researching the transmission details via the internet, it strikes me that the '77 season featured the greatest number of quality films. But it's not the one that's best and most widely remembered. For that, we have to meet again here at the crossroads at midnight...next time.
Next: Casting the Runes

The Legal Bit: all images are presumed copyright of their respective owners.