We Have Met The Enemy

The keys to the new Academy building were finally handed over yesterday but I've been packing for weeks. The kids got four extra days holiday to accommodate the move, despite complaints by some parents. It's been back-breaking work, especially in Music and Technical. 

 This is Dave's room. Mine has fewer boxes but the same manky curtains

 

Now the Easter holidays have officially begun, however, I 'll have some time to catch up on a number of posts, including a Bronze Age Batman crossover with my Materioptikon blog. But this morning's post concerns Horror.


We celebrated World Book Day and World Read Aloud Day earlier in March, since many kids, in my experience, find reading boring and challenging. As a member of the English department, I try to promote reading as much possible; our brilliant new librarian is trying to make our library less staid and old-fashioned but Heritage is very big up here. Anyway, I thought Charlie Higson's The Enemy, The Dead and The Fear might appeal to reluctant readers (especially boys). 

 The premise of Higson's trilogy is a plague that transforms everyone over the age of fourteen into decaying zombies ( As I said to my classes, you may feel that's already happened.) The books revolve around the attempts of several disparate groups of children to survive in zombie-infested London.

 There are flashes of black humour throughout the first novel: the zombies are nicknamed "strangers" recalling the paranoia over "Stranger Danger". They're also known, with macabre irony, as "fathers and mothers" since their delicacy of choice is children. Higson's zombies are often grotesque parodies of consumerism in ragged designer clothes and of repulsive middle-aged physicality: balding and paunchy. There is also an element of particularly savage satire in the Royal Family imprisoned in Buckingham Palace: ravenous zombies on thrones caked in their own filth.


Of course, my generation has been primed for the apocalypse since at least 1975 with plague drama Survivors, rebooted in four years ago by the BBC. Younger readers might recognise the London of 28 Days (and Weeks) Later. I've devoured the trilogy in under a month- they are utterly compelling- but I found the tone cynical and depressing. After a tragic twist in the first novel which really caught me off-guard, the brutal fate meted out to most of the children becomes numbing. The description of the infection with its pustules and weeping sores becomes predicable. One one level, I may be a victim of my own success here, promoting the novels. There are some genuinely chilling set-pieces but the level of violence and the introduction of characters like Greg the Butcher or the Collector, whose trophy house is reminiscent of an Ed Gein, seem too full-on for the sensibilities of our 12 to13 -year-olds.

There were more child deaths in the movie The Woman in Black, which finished its run here on Thursday. I had tried and failed to see it in Glasgow last month. It stars Daniel Radcliffe and is the first brand-new Hammer film that I've ever paid to see in the cinema. Based on the novel by Susan Hill, it tells the well-worn story of a young widower whose legal work takes him to a decaying house, where he uncovers the haunting of a murderous, vengeful ghost.


 I've only seen one and a half Harry Potter films but I thought Radcliffe made for a suitably anguished hero. However the first thing that took me out of the picture was that, bizarrely, he share his name with Tommy Steele's Cockernee character in  Half a Sixpence. Eel Marsh House, meanwhile, reminded me of Eel Pie Island, the R'n'B haven of the Sixties and  the site of Pete Townshend's recording studios. 
I sympathised with Kipps as he scoured the householder's papers. I was packed for the move in a school day but I've spent weeks disposing of my predecessor's paperwork. I had to empty twenty-one ring-binders for the recycling: every one containing two or three units of work, each individual sheet of paper in an individual poly pocket. The heady days of unlimited photocopying!



The numerous plot holes of WIB didn't bother me since the damp, dreary landscape and the dilapidated house gave the film a nightmarish quality. The cast all seemed to have been chosen for their memorably unlovely faces. Even Harry didn't fit the Hollywood mould: I haven't seen such luxuriant and characterful eyebrows since Sean Connery in Hell Drivers.
 It was a genuinely creepy movie (sometimes I felt my hands moving to cover my face!) and I felt the story had some of the cool cruelty of Hill's I'm The King of the Castle, which S3 studied earlier this term.  But after being keyed up by the malevolent atmosphere and some of the moments of sheer weirdness ( the dogs in the cradle!), I emerged into the spring sunshine feeling a bit depressed and wrung out . Time for something less morbid.

Coming soon: Batman in the 70s and 50s; Matt Smith: Series One; and Power Comics.
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