Reviews

This must rank as one of the great wasted opportunities of the english gothic cinema. After the rich, erotic triumph that was "The Vampire Lovers" had cleaned up at the cinema, this sequel was put into immediate production, so immediately that Ingrid Pitt, so brilliant as vampiress Carmilla wasn't available to return to the role. Instead Yutte Stensgaard, a much lesser performer - at least on the basis of what she gets the chance to do here - filled the role, complete with woefully dubbed voice. The premise sounds ideal for an erotic horror film, with the brilliant lesbian vampiress set loose upon a finishing school for young ladies. But after a brief moonlit swimming scene, screenwriter Tudor Gates suddenly loses interest in the lesbian theme and poor Mircalla is made to fall simperingly in love with the male hero LeStrange. This not only denies us the rich lesbian eroticism of the first film, but makes Mircalla a much less radical figure. In "Vampire Lovers", she was a revolutionary force in the patriachal world of Hammer Horror: a woman who spurned men as unworthy of her or used them as the slobbering dogs she took them for. She was an honest to goodness lesbian heroine. Here she's just a lovesick, dull little straight bimbo who can't survive, even undead, without the chance to Stand by Her Man. One very much gets the sense of male film-makers clipping the wings of a heroine who they had designed as a mere sex-object in the first film but who, with Ingrid Pitt in the role, had broken free of their tyranny to take command of the whole film, to laugh their sex to scorn and make of herself a lesbian revolutionary, not some straight voyeur's plaything. Maybe that's why they didn't wait for Pitt to be available for the role. The film does have a few things in its favour: David Muir's photography is richly textured and Harry Robinson provides another excellent score (even the song "Strange Love" has been unfairly maligned. ) But it would not be until the next Hammer 'Karnstein' film that the

Do you believe there's such a thing as positive fate, a force generous enough to place you at a crossroads of time and place offering rewards far beyond anything your actual actions might have earned? If you don't, then maybe the directors of 'Blair Witch Project' really are geniuses, geniuses at hustling the public mood anyway.

One goes into 'B/W/P' with not only the official publicity but the comments of many for whose views one has respect encouraging one to expect the scariest round-the-campfire story of all time. Instead... well, there's a joke in the film's early stages about someone farting in a tent. As the terrors of the night go, this film is strictly on the level of the latter horror.

And in fact it's the tactic which at first hearing does sound like a stroke of genius - presenting the story like the raw footage of an unfinished documentary - that proves the biggest liability. Initially, it works well in disguising the fact that the 'plot' is the most perfunctory assemblage of horror cliches (we even get the old "you kids never learn" line off of one of the local rednecks: is that copyright 'Friday the 13th.' or 'Scooby Doo'?), but before long it becomes clear that the narrow strictures of this format mean the horror can't extend beyond shaky shots of the characters running backward and forward in reaction to the lamest little bits of trick-or-treat: baby cries, twig figures outside the tent, those two nuisance directors shaking the tent. The dramatic and narrative development one grows impatient for would jar with the open-ended confusion of the mockumentary format. (And it's impossible to believe that Heather - who's shooting most of this footage - could be a directing student: wouldn't she, at least in the earlier stages, have some instinct for, some pride in, producing a coherent image? The most fun post-film game might be to imagine the visual mess a Heather who survived these adventures would make of your favourite movie, be it 'Jurassic Park' or 'Brief Encounter'.)

If a little tension does develop in the last five minutes, it's largely because one thinks: "this is the 'scariest movie ever'. Something scary's got to happen now, surely." One greets that ruined house like a shipwreck survivor sighting land. The supposedly awesome final image feels like a very short-breathed 'Boo!' at the end of a very long shaggy dog story. Its power for others is only of sociological interest in terms of what it says about the deepest fears of the twenty-something target audience. Even the congratulations the film has received for an unironic revival of the supernatural horror flick is dubious: the film lacks faith in the witch idea and comes up with a second monster more tied in to the secular dreads of modern tabloid culture (Yup: it's child molesting again: the red under the bed, the Nazi fifth columnist, of the 90's.) Interestingly, this may well be the least political American horror film of the last fifty years: the fact that witches haunt the actual political past of America is never alluded to.

And even for those who have found the movie scary, it's hard to believe it could have the extended life of a true horror classic. Effective or not, the horror is so basic that there simply aren't the deeper layers for subsequent viewings to uncover of, say, 'Psycho' or 'The Innocents' or 'The Shining.' This picture, complete with its airhead protagonists and their "this is definitely not cool, man,"-type dialogue is closer to 'Friday the 13th. Part 12": only without the same dramatic complexity.

So why the success? The most positive spin might be that this is one more triumph for postmodern democracy. The audience knows this isn't the work of some snooty-nosed genius: a Hitchcock, a Polanski, a Poe; no, many must be thinking "Gee, if only i'd gone out into the woods with my videocam last Hallowe'en, I could have been the hottest thing in Hollywood, too!" But please, guys, don't take that as a suggestion for next Hallowe'en: unless you are another Poe.

One doesn't want for a second to take credit away from screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, one of the most intelligent scenarists the horror film evr had the benefit of. But it's a matter of record that producer Val Lewton, here as on all his horror pictures, was responsible for the initial premise and the screenplay's final draft. And one wonders how much of Lewton - one of those male writers who tended to form his most empathetic bond with his female characters - there is in Irene: like him an eastern european immigrant (she from Serbia, he from Russia, albeit second generation he grew up in an essentially Russian household) living in the very different world of 40's America, both hyper-sensitive (particularly over morbid fantasies regarding cats) and artists of an essentially solitary and modest nature, but prone to fits of violent temper. Certainly, Irene is one of the most vivid and haunting protagonists any horror film ever had. Some critics may disparage the film as inferior to its follow-up, 'I Walked With a Zombie', but although that's a more completely achieved work, none of its characters captures the imagination as Irene does. One scarcely needs to heap more praise on the most celebrated suspense sequences, but the rest of the movie is more than just a set-up for these. It is, for one thing, oneof the supreme evocations of spiritual loneliness in the cinema. As Irene huddles by the doorknob between her and husband Oliver, while the panther in the nearby zoo calls out through the wintery night, this is an evocation of an isolation more than merely physical and tragically irrevocable. Lewton also had on his side, in this instance, the best of his directors, Jacques Tourneur, a sensualist (which could scarecely be said of his successors, Mark Robson and Robert Wise) who makes of the story a sort of tactile poem in the textures of the black fur of Irene's coat, the silk of her stockings, the flakes of falling snow on Irene and Oliver's wedding night, the wet tarmac across which Jane Randolph has to make her scary walk home, the ebony of an Egyptian cat-statue, the fabric of a couch torn by Irene's fingernails, the white enamel of Irene's bath-tub and the gleaming dusky hunch of her wet shoulders as she sits weeping within. This is a subtle movie, but also an intensely physical one. If there is a weak spot, it lies with the casting of Kent Smith as 'good plain Americano' Oliver Reed. His boy next door charm is hopelessly inadequate to the context of Irene's drama and he increasingly seems doltish and blindly insensitive in the blandness of his responses to her torment. The film might have been greater still if Lewton had cast an edgier, fierier actor, one whose incomprehension of Irene might have betrayed its own violent streak and extended the 'cat people' metaphor beyond Irene herself. Think of someone like John Garfield in the role! But Garfield would have been out of Lewton's budget range and one can scarcely harangue the producer for being too modest, in the production of his first quickie horror, for fully grasping how rich a work of film poetry he and his collaborators were in the process of creating. But poetry it is. The horror genre has never produced as much of that as it ought to have done, so for heaven's sake, make the most of this and the other Lewton productions.

The crucial clue to understanding the work of director Terence Fisher is to note that his directing hero was not one of the 'usual suspects' for a horror director, like Lang or Hitchcock, but Frank Borzage, the 30's director of tender, fragile romances like 'Moonrise' and 'A Farewell To Arms'. And as he grew more confident and independent in his work for Hammer films, Fisher's most personal work smuggled Borzagian romance past his producers in horror guise. Forget the usual critical cliche about his work: that it presents rigidly defined black-and-white battles between Good and Evil.This only applies to a handful of his pictures, usually from the earlier part of his Hammer career. In Fisher's mature work, the lines between good and evil are often more ambiguous than in many of the more modernist horrors that came after him (e.g.'The Exorcist' and 'Halloween'). And his most heartfelt work - 'Curse Of The Werewolf','Phantom Of The Opera','Frankenstein Created Woman'and the film discussed here, is a sequence of tragic love stories. Which brings us to 'The Gorgon', one of the most romantic but also the bleakest of these love stories. All the key characters in the film are driven by the most desperate love: the pregnant Sascha in the opening scenes, Professor Heitz mourning and defending a lost son, Carla and Paul in their foredoomed affair, Namaroff oppressing Carla and torturing himself with the love she can never reciprocate, Ratoff(who might at first seem a token thug)worshipping Carla as devoutly as is master does, even Christopher Lee's celibate Meister has a father's anxious protectiveness towards Paul. But in the bleak world which cameraman Michael Reed depicts throughout in grim blues and greys, there is no reward for such devotion but the stony isolation of death. The film, however, is tragic rather than merely nihilistic, for the characters are haunted throughout by the thought that their love might somehow win them a place in some better world somewhere else. This makes Carla's parting from Paul in the castle scene all the more poignant: haven't we all known a moment such as she knows then, when we face the fact that the door to salvation was open to us as recently as a couple of minutes ago, but we looked away at the wrong moment and the breeze blew it shut? That's why this, like all Fisher's best films, is such a treasurable work. It's not about shock effects, but about the beauty and sadness of being alive. It stands as the bleakest of all Gorgon myths, bleaker by far than the Greek originals, for it portrays a whole world whose fate is to turn to stone.

An ocean of mist hangs above a grave. A figure enveloped in a white shroud swirls through that mist with balletic grace, then rakes a hand across a bloody mouth.* A man at his niece's deathbed calls for her missing friend. The call echoes through the empty chambers of the house and down the terrace outside, where the wind blows fallen leaves through the autumn night. The calls merge with older echoes in a cemetery beneath a ruined castle. A woman walks in those mists, clad in her nightgown. The mists dissolve her from sight. * "I want you - to love me - for all your life," pleads a beautiful vampire turning from the view through a moonlit window to clasp the girl she loves with desperate intimacy. * That same vampire woman stands on a terrace in the sunset, tears glinting in her eyes while she listens to the ancestral echoes that condemn her to her fate. *

Yes, this is pure Hammer Horror: a work conceived as sheerest exploitation which somehow transforms itself - in its greatest moments anyway - to an authentic romantic poetry. Yes, of course, a lesbian vampire movie made by men may seem the height of sexism, and at a conceptual level the movie may be open to those charges. But a female gothic artist was involved here: Ingrid Pitt, whose Carmilla is such a vivid presence as to render herself the character we root for and her patriachal enemies as the true pale-faced monsters (Has Peter Cushing ever come across as less loveable?). Other screen vampiresses are bimbos or boogeywomen or upmarket fashion plates by comparison: Pitt is tigerish, witty, tender, passionate, vulnerable, savage and tragic: Perhaps the only actor, male or female, who has brought to full life all the complexities of the vampire psyche. She's great and the other film-makers, at their best, rise to the challenge she sets. The movie is hardly unflawed but when its accidental poetry gels, few movies in its genre can surpass it.