Dead and Loving It

 The severe weather which which Moray was threatened has arrived- it's a grey, wet and windy morning- and Doctor Who returned from his summer holiday with a mash-up of Indiana Jones and The Beano. So the autumn must have started.
Previously on Place, we talked about the Horror Double Bill which was a late-night feature on BBC2 during the mid-to-late 70s and 80s. It was this annual fixture in the summer schedule that inspired Mark Gattis' History of Horror series and the double bill's most enduring image was this Radio Times cover that featured "Night of the Demon" and "The Ghoul".

 Last summer I tried to recreate the experience with budget dvds, mainly of the Universal Frankenstein cycle. This year, Corman's Poe adaptations featured most regulalry. Here's the line-up for the Summer of 2011:

Dracula's Daughter (Stagey and fatalistic with a lesbian subtext)
The Gorgon (Slow and downbeat variation on vampire story. Odd to see Christopher Lee cast as a hero)
 Son of Dracula (Moody, morbid plantation romance)
 The Raven (Comedy sorcery romp)
 Tales of Terror (Portmanteau movie- the Valdemar zombie story is the best of the trio)
The Tomb of Ligeia (Occult take on "Jane Eyre" with striking location work and the original Emma Peel!)
Quatermass 2 ( Dark and brutal sci-fi; watched this one on iPlayer)
Quatermass and the Pit (Apocalyptic sci-fi that leaves the really interesting questions unanswered)

Hammer's Gorgon was probably the most disappointing- I was frustrated that I couldn't get the Cushing/Lee Curse of Frankenstein, which I haven't seen for years or Hammer's Mummy. Dracula's Daughter reminded me most of Golden Age comics, the likes of The Batman or Doctor Fate, although it had more psychological depth; while Son of Dracula is a surprisingly evocative Southern Gothic melodrama.
I've been a fan of The Raven and its frothy haunted house approach since I was a kid. The predictable Ligiea is very similar to the "Morella" segment of Tales of Terror except that it features Diana Rigg's rather butch predecessor. Quatermass and the Pit just ends after the rampage of the Martian mutants - leaving us to wonder how life might resume in London on the next day. It was Quatermass 2 that really surprised me: an uncompromising story of alien invasion whose imagery is reused wholesale in 1970's seventh season of Dr. Who. Q2 is superior in every way to the meandering  Torchwood: Miracle Day with its post-war anxieties about new technologies and new communities and the fascism that seethes beneath the surface of British society. It was rather jarring, however, to watch the rocket scientist morph from stiff, stout American to dour and hirsute Scot between two movies.

Another feature of my summer was a fad for Bronze Age comic books, from What If to Conan to DC's 100 page Super-Spectaculars. The reprinting and repackaging of Marvel's black-and-white horror line has enabled me to catch up with stories and characters I read about in Foom Magazine over thirty-five years ago. My most recent purchase was Vampire Tales Volume 2, which features Morbius and Lilith.

Lilith was Marvel's second attempt to cash in on Vampirella after Satana (who featured in the previous volume) and a riff on Dracula's Daughter. Lilith is meant to be slightly more altruisticthan Satana in that she was, River Song-style, created as a weapon-specifically against Drac- but will protect other women who are attacked by men. Also, she doesn't need blood for sustenance; she just treats it ( if I'm quoting Steve Gerber accurately) like Coke, a "fun beverage". However, she wafts about here in her unsexy, revealing costume through an ugly, paranoid story by the Bad Dream Team of Wolfman and Gerber, illustrated in a Colan-esque vein by Tom Palmer and Bob Brown. I've written before about Wolfman's writing, particularly his excrutiatingly unfunny comedy and Jim Shooter's blog implies that I was not mistaken about how technically weak it is. Lilith is a uninspired and ludicrous character but I find that endearing. Unfortunately in this opus, Martin, a nerdy hippie, has pity sex with Lilith's human host after his girlfriend is beheaded by an axe-murderer. Lovely.

Aside from the Gil Kane reprint which recounts the B-Movie sci-fi origin of the Living Vampire from Spider-Man, I found the Morbius stories virtually unreadable at present.  Don McGregor's literary devices, including  multiple narrators, are horribly overwrought and pretentious; the artwork by Tom Sutton is suitably grotesque. The pig-snouted scientist rescues tragedy magnet Amanda Saint from an occult sect in a variety of gothic locales, including  Malevolence and Gallows Bend. Humorously, no one will take Morbius' hideous appearance at face value.

Aside from the photo-features on Dark Shadows (which I believe was never screened in Scotland) and Hammer films, there was an ongoing text feature authored by Chris Claremont, whose pseudo-academic approach help lend the monster mags their college-boy sophistication. The Vampire: His Kith and Kin really was written in 1928 and you can read it on the interenet. Claremeont also scripts "Angie's Soul", an urban crime vampire mash-up and prequel to the Daughters of the Dragon story "Safe Streets" (in which middle-class comunity employs vampires to police street crime). "Streets" was printed in Bizarre Adventures in 1981. I suspect it was originally intended for the Deadly Hands of Kung Fu b/w mag, given the previous 1977  Misty/Colleen story by Claremont and Marshall Rogers.

In addition to a couple of attractive short story adaptations by Giordano and Maroto, there's a story by Paul Gulacy that demonstrates his blend of cinema and Steranko; and lush pencils by Filipino artist Alfredo Alcala who brought an ornate level of detail to Buscema's Conan. A one-page strip by Isabella and Chua (Chan) retells the Hebrew story of Lilith and Sanvi, Sansanvi and Semangelaf; finally explaining what the Hell was going on at the climax of my Italian reprint of Syd Jordan's Jeff  Hawke serial, "Shorty's Secret"!

Ultimately, the Marvel Horror Magazines were a logical outgrowth of the anti-hero trope that had given the company sales superiority over DC. The alienated and ambivalent Hulk, Sub-Mariner and Silver Surfer had been succeeded by barbarians and then by vampires and succubi. These characters would, in turn, be eclipsed very quickly by secret agents and vigilantes like Wolverine and the Punisher. In Vampire Tales, we see clever and earnest young men trying to bring a literary dimension to comic books in a publication that wasn't constrained by the Comics Code. That the experiment was frequently silly, affected or bathetic is of less importance than the fact it happened at all.

Next: Deutschland is happy and gay.

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