Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

Of dogs and dreams: the strange case of Lindsey C. Vickers’ The Appointment, 1981

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date December 17, 2022
2 Comments on Of dogs and dreams: the strange case of Lindsey C. Vickers’ The Appointment, 1981

“Extract from police report number 727a, strictly confidential, unpublished and unavailable. Subject: Sandy Freemont. The last positive sighting was on her way home from a school orchestra rehearsal. This was on Tuesday May 14th at approximately 6:30 in the evening. At about this time her friend Janey Carr places her positively as entering the footpath through the area known as Cromley Woods, a then popular shortcut for several of the children living in Millard Heights…”

In the suburbs of a middle English town, a schoolgirl walking takes a shortcut through a wood. From the undergrowth, she hears the mischievous laughter of children and her name is called. She pauses and then, in a moment of sudden, startling violence, disappears.

These events, accompanied by amplified natural sounds, an off-kilter music box theme and, finally, shrieking strings after Bernard Herrmann, establish the tone of Lindsey C. Vickers’ 1981 British horror film The Appointment.

The rules do not apply here; anything might happen; brace yourself.

It’s possible you’ve never heard of The Appointment. I hadn’t myself until 2021, via a mention by Elric Kane on the Pure Cinema Podcast.

At that time, the only way to see it was via a VHS rip on YouTube. Once I’d got used to it, the video murk and constant hiss only added to the unsettling quality of the film.

Nor was it inappropriate: this film was only ever released on VHS, in the early days of the home video boom.

It was hard to find much information about Vickers online and, in fact, quite a few writers had assumed he was a woman. So I cobbled together my own potted biography from newspaper archives and scraps.

Vickers was born in 1940, brought up in Norwood Green, Southall, London, and educated at Dormers Wells Secondary School and Southall Technical College.

He left school without qualifications and got a job working as a messenger at London Airport (now Heathrow) before moving into film, starting as a cinema projectionist.

He went on to study film at the University of London and became a film assistant at the BBC where he directed a documentary short called ‘Impressions of Richmond’.

He became assistant director to Denis Mitchell before moving to the Government advertising office, COI, where he made a film a week for global distribution.

He worked as an assistant director on a slew of Hammer and Amicus films throughout the 1960s and 70s, including Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sady, 1970) and The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

In 1978, he was given the chance to write, direct and edit a short film called The Lake which pre-empts the mood, themes and imagery of The Appointment. It’s beautifully shot and highly effective, despite limited resources, and was made available, fully restored, on the 2020 BFI collection Short Sharp Shocks.

The Appointment was Lindsey Vickers’ first and only full-length feature film as director, which perhaps explains why the astonishing opening doesn’t quite connect with the rest of the film.

My suspicion on first viewing was that the first five minutes were shot separately as a ‘sizzle reel’ to convince investors. I’ve since learned that it was the other way round: the intro was shot later to spice up the completed film.

In 1981, the British film industry was in trouble. According to a contemporary article in the BFI magazine Sight & Sound, only 27 features were produced in the UK that year. The Appointment was one of them.

It cost £650,000 to make and was funded in large part by the National Coal Board Pension Fund – resolutely unglamorous.

It was produced by Vickers’ own company, First Principle Film Productions, with hopes of breaking into the US market.

After that startling pre-credits sequence, the narrator disappears, never to return, and we find ourselves, unexpectedly, in a suburban family drama with engineer Ian (Edward Woodward) obliged to break the news to his daughter Joanne (Samantha Weysom) that he won’t be able to attend her school concert.

The opening sequences are calculatedly bland and the performances almost blank.

Edward Woodward, in V-neck and sensible spectacles, chats to his friend, a mechanic, and to his wife (Jane Merrow) with the same dry tone as Jack Torrance speaks to his new employer at the Overlook Hotel.

Woodward consistently defaults to a half-smile. Even so, just as in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), everything feels just a touch off.

In an interview he gave in 2020, Vickers said, ‘I live in the supernatural world up here. The World of the uncanny. The world of ‘How can that be?’ We can see that in The Appointment.

Even before anything truly horrific happens, Joanne’s over-strong reaction to the news that her father is going away – only enhanced by Weysom’s eccentric delivery of the lines – puts us on edge.

Where is he going? To give evidence at the inquest following a fatal mining disaster in which his engineering firm was implicated, apparently no more to him than an inconvenience.

After he snaps at Joanne and sends her to bed he spends an uncomfortably long time staring at the door to her room, thinking about turning the handle. Does he often visit her room at night?

Things really get interesting when Ian tries to get some sleep before his early start the next day.

We’ve all been trained to understand that a prowling camera means we’re seeing through the eyes of someone or something; this someone or something is at Ian’s house, moving through the garden, through the door, along the hallways, in the midnight blue.

Time stops – a recurring theme – as Ian dreams that his wife, in a red dress, turns into his daughter, touching him with more than filial affection.

He is woken by a sudden image of a furious barking of a slavering Rottweiler. When he returns to sleep, he dreams again, this time of his forthcoming journey, and his own death.

The film’s long third act answers questions about that dream: was it a nightmare, or a premonition? From suburb to motorway to service station to remote country roads (filmed in Wales) he is stalked by those black dogs in a way that would amount to a decent gag in a less disturbing film.

There are startling images throughout, with distortions of time and gravity, accompanied by equally disconcerting sound design: wind, unexpected echoes, sudden silences, skittering and skipping.

Much weight is added by Trevor Jones’s romantic, melancholy music, interspersed with electronic droning.

When the end comes, it is shocking and surreal, starting with a biblically tempting apple that seems, somehow, to fall upwards and fly away into space.

In a more mainstream horror film, we’d get a Van Helsing, a priest or a policeman – perhaps that narrator from the opening sequence – to explain what’s going on and to conquer the evil.

Here, there’s no such bow-tying. We’re left bewildered and are expected to put the pieces together ourselves.

Is this a story about a poltergeist summoned by a rage-filled teenage girl? Is it about a demon or the devil? Are we trapped in Ian’s dream?

I have my ideas. You’ll no doubt have yours.

Sources

‘British film production 1981’, Sight & Sound, Autumn 1982, pp.258-261.
‘Making the grade in filmland’, County Times and Gazette, 15 July 1966.

This piece was originally written for the defunct British horror website Horrified. Since its publication in 2021, The Appointment has been released on Blu-ray by the BFI, with The Lake as a bonus feature. It also has a commentary by Lindsey C. Vickers along with other bonus features. To my delight, a quote from my piece featured in a press advert for this new release.

Tags horrified, horror films

Fiction municipal gothic

FICTION: Last Christmas

Christmas Day, four in the afternoon, and the stale air in the front room feels like a weighted blanket.

Dad is asleep in his grubby chair, whistling through his drooping white moustache. Mum is fussing about, back and forth from the kitchen, groaning every time she puts weight on her hips. My sister is staring at her phone, scrolling, liking, scrolling, liking…

We’re not allowed to watch TV because our family tradition is to play board games and card games, except that doesn’t happen any more, not since Aunt Jenny died and Uncle Terry stopped coming. Now, we just vegetate and compost.

Two more nights to go. Just two more nights.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ I say, surprising myself. ‘Get some air and the last of the light.’

And I’m coat on, out the door, before anyone can stop me.

It doesn’t feel much fresher outside. Like most Christmases, it’s grey and almost muggy.

One foot in front of the other, walking nowhere in particular.

I’ve lived away up in the city for twenty years and my home town feels psychedelically weird, like one of my stress nightmares. Is this really where I grew up? Are these really the streets I used to play on?

The pylons that run the length of the main road on the estate crackle as the evening dew begins to settle. I feel the hairs on my neck spring.

Nobody told me the pub was gone. There’s just a bare space now, surrounded by a wire fence, and notices about planning permission.

On the corner, there’s a phone box. One of the glass and steel type, skeletal and unromantic. It was where I used to call my first girlfriend during university holidays. I stop for a moment and look at the dangling handset. I wonder if it still works.

Then it rings.

There’s no traffic on the roads, no sound at all from the nearby houses, and the electronic chirruping seems outrageously loud. I feel embarrassed, as if I’ve made it happen, and quickly walk on. The phone keeps sounding behind me, calling after me even, but eventually fades out of range.

I take the next left, towards Holy Trinity Church and a patch of grass we used to call, charitably, The Green. That’s where Deano Tremlett broke my ankle playing football, with the ‘NO BALL GAMES’ sign for one goalpost and a cricket stump for the other.

I pass a shuttered cornershop, a shuttered fishing tackle shop, and a house lit up like a Las Vegas casino. An inflatable peeping tom Santa is staring through the window of the bedroom.

As I near The Green, I remember something: next to the post box and the concrete planters full of cigarette ends, there’s another phone box. I’m not exactly braced this time but I am ready. When it rings, though, I still say ‘Bloody hell!’ out loud.

Oh, I see. I get it. Someone’s watching me and they’re calling it from a mobile. It’s a prank. I smile for the benefit of my hidden audience and reach for the handset.

‘Hello?’ I say.

I’d forgotten how bad they smell, phone box handsets: bad breath, mould, metal. The black plastic feels cold in my hand.

The line crackles slightly.

‘Who is it?’

Then I hear something. Drums. A thin echoing beat, like hold music.

Now this makes more sense. It’s a robocall. Spam. I breathe out, relieved, and slam the handset back into place.

Keep walking. Past the church, up a rough path by the side – Hog Alley we called it as kids – and through into Chamberlain Court. Follow that towards the secondary school, the primary school and the health centre.

Through windows and net curtains I see families on sofas or in armchairs, staring towards the TV, either slumped or wrestling with game controllers.

I notice the phone box on the corner of Franklin Road well in advance. Its glass is stained and fogged. There’s grass growing around its base. I think about avoiding it but don’t want to turn back the way I came.

And of course it rings.

‘Fuck off,’ I shout at it.

The ringing, somehow, gets louder, so I have to answer it before anyone else comes along.

This time, the music starts immediately, before I have time to speak. This time, I recognise it.

It’s the intro to ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! with its chugging synthesisers and a wordless vocal. George Michael’s voice squeezes through the small speaker as he sings the first line: ‘Laaaast Christmas…’

Then the recording catches.

It’s not quite like a record skipping but, rather, an insistent hard-edged loop.

‘Last Christmas/ Last Christmas/ Last Christmas/ Last Christmas/ Last Christmas/ Last Christmas/ Last Christmas/ Last Christmas–’

It’s the same few seconds of music but seems more intense with each repetition.

I drop the handset and leave it swinging as I walk away.

I can still hear the music for a few steps, dissolving into pure treble, then disappearing altogether.

It’s getting cold now and I need to be home where it’s safe. I break into a jog.

Each phone box I pass rings for me, desperate to tell me something.

I run up the garden path and turn my Yale key, the one I’ve had since I was fourteen.

In the kitchen, Mum and Dad are hobbling about the dining table, bickering over the pickled onions and the cheese board.

‘What’s the matter?’ asks Mum.

Clammy and shaky, I force a smile.

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just glad to be here.’

And I mean it.

If you enjoyed this story then check out my collection Municipal Gothic which has thirteen stories about ghosts on council estates, devil dogs in supermarket car parks and haunted tower blocks.

Tags ghosts

Film & TV

Goodbye Aquarius: how sickness, sex and death got tangled up in British films 1968-72

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date September 24, 2022
1 Comment on Goodbye Aquarius: how sickness, sex and death got tangled up in British films 1968-72

Sleeve notes for a Blu-ray box set that doesn’t exist.

In April 1969 the British film director Bryan Forbes became head of EMI Films in the UK. His statement of intent summed up a particular view of the state of the national film industry at the time:

We have gone too far with pornography and violence… There is simply no reason why filthy violence should be dragged into pictures. You do not have to lower your sights to entertain. We must see to it that entertainment does not become a dirty word.

Meanwhile newspapers were full of talk about “the permissive society”. More specifically, they were asking “Has it gone too far?” Here’s Rosemary Simon in an article in the Illustrated London News:

The saddest aspect of the whole situation is the needless waste. Healthy boys and girls who channel their energies into creating a disturbance instead of concentrating on sport, work, or helping in the community… Attractive girls with their whole future before them who, instead of enjoying their youth and eventually getting married, find themselves pregnant and are faced with the tragic alternative of seeking an abortion of of giving birth an illegitimate baby.

Tabloid newspaper The People reported that its readers had come out 4 to 1 against the permissive society based on the sentiment of correspondence received, like this letter:

A housewife has to try to make a happy home knowing her husband is queueing up to go to work beside a see-through, bra-less, mini-skirted girl… that he chats up a topless barmaid at his pub, while he spends the evening at his club watching strip-tease… If he can afford it, a sexy girl will even cut his hair. Unless he is made of stone he must get involved somewhere… A housewife feels hurt, inadequate, dreary and cannot compete. This is where the children begin to suffer. – Mother of four. Name and address supplied.

That’s terrible, said the public. Appalling. Tell me more. Like, what exactly are they getting up to, these dirty bastards?

In this context British films walked a difficult path. They knew people wanted to see films with sexual content, especially if it was transgressive. But couldn’t be seen to condone it.

So they made films which suggested sexual liberation had gone wrong, that perversion was rife, and that this was a serious Problem of Our Age… while also depicting it more or less frankly, with actors who were more-or-less lovely to look at.

Like American films of the 1930s and 40s who had to make gangsters pay for their crimes to justify the preceding hour of swagger and violence, British ones of the late 1960s had to make sure the swingers suffered for their pleasure.

London Wall as seen in The Ballad of Tam Lin, 1970

A cinematic uniperverse

There are a slew of films from 1968 to 1972 that aren’t formally related but which catch a similar mood and bounce off each other.

They sometimes share cast members, or at least types – ostensibly angelic blonde youths frequently feature, for example, as do sexually confident older women, and kinky establishment men.

Most of them are set in and around London and use the city to highlight the contrast between the old world (decaying, Victorian, Gothic) and the new: motorways, modernist towers, coffee bars, discotheques and pop art pads.

Their soundtracks steal from pop music of the period while always being a little too square, more Alan Hawkshaw than Mick Jagger, straight off the library shelf.

As for the tone, it’s about sickness. Yes, they’ll show you pretty young things with their kit off, to varying degrees, but they’ll also make you feel slightly queasy.

Brothers and sisters put hands and lips where they shouldn’t. People sweat and fret, suffering from physical and/or mental wounds. They mix sex and death at every opportunity. And adults frequently behave and even dress like children – which says what about their lovers?

Is it ever sexy? Fleetingly, sometimes, but more often it feels like the aversion therapy Alex undergoes in A Clockwork Orange.

Twisted Nerve

Georgie likes ducks

The film that feels to me like the start of this run is Twisted Nerve (dir. Roy Boulting, 1968) starring Hywell Bennett as a baby-faced blonde psychopath called Martin.

Barry Foster plays a lecherous lodger employed in the film industry, who says at one point: “If you want me to sell your crummy films, I say you’ve gotta give it a good dose of S&V. That’s what the public wants. Sex and violence.”

What a disgusting attitude, we are invited to think, before gorging on our own helping of S&V.

At the time, the controversy around Twisted Nerve centred on its treatment of the subject of Down’s Syndrome and its tangling of chromosomal conditions with mental illness. That’s even less comfortable for viewers today.

But it exactly demonstrates the tendency of these films to balance turn-ons with turn-offs. Twisted Nerve starts with Martin engaged in an extended discussion with a doctor about his brother’s incontinence, likely early death and parental abandonment. It’s pointedly bleak.

Martin then adopts, or rather inhabits, an alternate personality – Georgie, a childlike character presumably based on Martin’s observations of his own brother. As Georgie, he stalks Hayley Mills and inveigles his way into her home. He then seduces her mother (Billie Whitelaw) who, remember, is up for it, despite believing that he has the mental capacity of an eight-year-old.

Martin is sick but so is almost everyone else, including his own respectable but uncaring parents.

Goodbye Gemini/Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly

An infamous double bill

It’s astonishing that two of the key films in this cycle were released simultaneously and often shown together as a double bill. That is Goodbye Gemini (dir. Alan Gibson) and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly (dir. Freddie Francis) both released in 1970.

Of the two, Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly is the better and more interesting film. It tells the story of a strange family – or is it a cult? – living together in a large country house.

The matriarch (Ursula Howells) and her servant (Pat Heywood) run the house while Girly (Vanessa Howard) and Sonny (Howard Trevor) run around in school uniform playing The Game.

To play The Game, you need playmates, so they occasionally go out into the world to seduce or bamboozle vulnerable men into joining them at the house. Those men are imprisoned and played with until they break the (impenetrable, unwritten) rules, at which point they are murdered.

When this film was released in the US it had a new title – Girly – and Vanessa Howard was the focus of the marketing. Dressed as a schoolgirl, the then 22-year-old actress sometimes plays the character as a seductress, and at other times as genuinely childlike. The audience is invited to fancy her, then to feel unclean for having done so.

It’s a grubby, disturbing, slimy film that makes my skin creep in the same way as Death Line, only without the gore. The other comparison might be The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which also finds horror in twisting the traditional family structure.

Goodbye Gemini is more generic. It opens with rapidly cut shots of a coach arriving in London along the motorway, soundtracked by thumping Hammond-driven rock music. It’s meant to tell us we’re arriving in the big city, in the modern world, but of course it all looks a bit damp and tatty.

Judy Geeson and Martin Potter play cute blonde twins Jacki and Julian. They’re in their late teens or twenties but act younger, often deferring decisions to their teddy bear, Agamemnon. Decisions such as whether to throw the housekeeper who’s supposed to be looking after them down the stairs, for example, so they can enjoy London without restraint.

Julian loves Jacki a bit too much, in a way that’s not healthy. For a while, they share a boyfriend, hippy hipster Clive, who also wants to be Julian’s pimp. To seal that deal, he arranges for him to be raped by two men. So Julian and Jacki arrange for Clive to die. And so on into ever-descending spirals of blood and hysteria.

It’s a sweaty, feverish, unsettling film that tells us sex is a nightmare, love is a sickness, and that only death can set us free. It was also released under the name Twinsanity which is less tasteful but gives a clearer idea of its tone.

Vanessa Howard in What Became of Jack and Jill, 1972

Sickness is in, baby!

There are plenty of other films that fit alongside those mentioned above, many of them included in the excellent book Offbeat edited by Julian Upton, which presents an alternative canon of British film.

I’ve already mentioned Dracula AD 1972 which brings Dracula to modern-day swinging London. Here, the obligatory handsome blonde boy with a black heart is Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame). His sickness takes the form of a master-slave relationship with Dracula himself. You could take Dracula out of the equation and retool this as a story about a delusional psychopath loose among the hipsters of Chelsea with relative ease. Like Goodbye Gemini it opens with shots of London – jet planes, flyovers, tower blocks – accompanied by pounding rock-funk. The following year’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula, also directed by Gibson, provided more of the same, with the addition of a satanic sex-power cult.

What Became of Jack and Jill (dir. Bill Bain, 1972) has Vanessa Howard, AKA Girly, as one half of a murderous young couple opposite Paul Nicholas. They shag on his granddad’s grave as they plot the murder of his grandmother. Their plan is to scare her to death by convincing her that the young are rioting in the streets and rounding up the elderly.

Unman, Wittering & Zigo (dir. John Mackenzie, 1971) isn’t set in London but transplants swinging London icon David Hemmings to a public school in the country. His pupils, arrogant little bastards, tell him they killed his predecessor and will kill him if he doesn’t submit to their will. As they engage in a battle of wills, the boys stalk and eventually attempt to rape his wife. Sonny from Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly would fit right in. He might even make a good pal for the unfortunately marginalised Wittering.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End from 1970 is beautifully made – definitely more art than exploitation. But it still gives us the beautiful blonde boy with a kink in his brain (John Moulder Brown), sexual relationships that cut uncomfortably across age barriers, and sex scenes that are more disturbing than arousing. He plays Mike, a 15-year-old boy who gets a job at a swimming pool in East London. On day one his colleague Susan (Jane Asher) initiates him into a job on the side pleasuring older women in the sauna rooms. He is driven mad by his infatuation with Susan and their complex relationship (she rejects him, then brings him close) leads to the inevitable mingling of sex and death.

The Ballad of Tam Lin (dir. Roddy McDowall, 1970) cuts across sub-genres. The first act takes place in that familiar, slightly square version of swinging London with beautiful young things in mod clothes speeding around in sports cars. The sequence in which they race out of town, past the modern office blocks of London Wall and up the M1, recalls the opening scenes of both Goodbye Gemini and Dracula AD 1972. They are the acolytes of a beautiful older woman (Ava Gardner) who seems to draw strength from their youth. There’s no room for dead weight in her commune-cult, though, and we see that she uses people up and discards them. The second half of the film fits more comfortably into the folk horror bracket, however.

These films are all quite different, I realise, in both intent and quality, but you could pick any two and run them together as an effective double bill.

When I asked people on Twitter about this they suggested a whole slew of other candidates. I’ve compiled those, along with the films listed above, into a watchlist on Letterboxd. Let me know what’s missing.

Tags film, films

buildings concrete Film & TV

Unhomely: new towns on film

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date July 16, 2022
5 Comments on Unhomely: new towns on film

On film, the post-war British new town is an uncanny space – heaven, hell, or somewhere between, but certainly not quite real.

The idea of the new town was born out of hope and optimism. With population growth, cities half-demolished by the Blitz, and increasingly demanding expectations around quality of life, ordinary working people in Britain needed new and better homes.

The British government set about identifying sites across the UK where large residential towns could be built from scratch, or by drastically expanding existing smaller settlements.

This was revolutionary, contrary to the usual British wait-and-see gradualism, and not everybody was convinced by the idea. It’s certainly difficult to find wholly positive depictions of the new towns project on film outside government propaganda.

Contemplating life in the post-war Britain to come in They Came to a City, 1944.

Right at the beginning, when the new towns only existed in plans and papers, Basil Dearden directed a film based on J.B. Priestley’s 1943 play They Came to a City. Released in 1944, it’s not explicitly about new towns but rather about the need to reorder British society along fairer lines after the war.

It just so happens, however, that Priestley’s metaphor for this new society is a city. A new one.

Priestley’s script acknowledges that not everyone wants to come on this journey – and those who choose to stay behind have their reasons. Nonetheless, the argument is clear: things need to change and someone needs to have the guts to explore the frontier.

Almost as if they couldn’t help themselves, however, Dearden and Priestley make the new town not only ambiguous but also unsettling, alien and even a little threatening. A supernatural, spiritual force rather than the product of pure bureaucracy.

Dearden’s previous film, Halfway House, had a similar structure – strangers gather to solve an existential mystery – only in that case, the twist is that they have all gone back in time to fix their mistakes. Here, they’ve gone forward, and are being given a chance to prepare for Things to Come.

We never get to see the town, only the giant portal and staircase that lead to it, and the alternately appalled or euphoric faces of the visitors as they return. That makes it all the more unnerving. What on earth can be at the end of that staircase? Surely something more exciting than, say, Harlow.

After the war, the New Towns Act of 1946 triggered the building process. Development of the first wave was focused on London and the South East.

From then on, the idea of the new town as a point of tension – new versus old, planned versus organic, urban versus rural – would be played out on film, consciously or otherwise, time and again.

An alien colony or a home counties new town? (Quatermass II.)

Some filmmakers were drawn to new towns because, half-built in the 1950s, they offered plenty of unsettling atmosphere off the peg. They were strange spaces. Silent. Disconnected from the world. Alienating.

Literally so in the case of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass II.

The original 1955 BBC television series features scenes set in a ‘prefab town’ built for workers at the sinister secret facility around which the plot revolves. By the time Hammer adapted it for film in 1957 (dir. Val Guest) the setting was very clearly a more permanent new town, filmed on location at Hemel Hempstead.

It is presented as bleak and windswept, like a colony on Mars. The houses, in rippling rows, are surrounded by moorland. From one angle, it is urban. From another, rural. Both, and neither.

This plays on a feeling that new towns simply should not be. Towns should grow over the course of decades, over centuries – not overnight.

In his 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie Mark Fisher wrote about a container port in Suffolk as “a weird phenomenon, an alien and incommensurable eruption in the ‘natural’ scene”. Its silence, when viewed from a distance, contributes to this sensation. New towns can have a similar effect.

There’s also cold war paranoia in Quatermass II, and a suspicion of anything resembling socialism. The people of the town are unwitting worker drones for alien invaders, their servitude bought with these bland, identical homes, and the promise of food on the table in return for no questions asked.

A later television production, Danger Man, took a more head-on approach to the same idea. In the 1964 episode ‘Colony Three’ John Drake (Patrick McGoohan) is kidnapped and taken to Hamden New Town. (Played by Hatfield.) It’s perfectly clean, perfectly civilised, but of course it’s not an English town at all – it’s an unnamed Eastern bloc country and is a training ground for spies.

X marks the spot. (The Big Job.)

This sense of the uncanny, of the new town as an unnatural invader, is even present in ostensibly comic films.

In The Big Job, a not-quite-Carry-On from 1965 directed by Gerald Thomas, Sid James (also in Quatermass 2) plays a gangster who buries the spoils of a robbery in a country field. Fifteen years later, when he is released from prison, he returns to find that a new town (Bracknell) has been built on those very fields – and a police station right on top of his treasure.

It’s a funny setup but it also underlines the pace of change in post-war Britain. Who would expect deep English countryside to become a settled English townscape in such a short span of time? Turn your back and the very fabric of the country will shift.

This leads us to another question: what does the new town bury or replace?

All this used to be fields. (Requiem for a Village.)

In the American film Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982) a Spielburbian planned community (housing estate) is built on the site of an old burial ground that was never cleared, which is the source of its haunting.

But almost every inch of Britain is a burial ground or battlefield.

Requiem for a Village (dir. David Gladwell, 1975) is almost a ghost story, or perhaps an example of folk horror, built around the growth of a new town around a country village.

In the opening scenes we see an old man set off from a modern housing estate on the edge of the town, wobbling along on his bike. He negotiates roundabouts and a dual carriageway, eventually finding his way to a secluded village church. While tending the grounds, he has a vision of bodies rising from the graves, returning to the pews in the church. He follows them and so begins a trip through his own memory, and a collective memory of a lost rural life.

The new town here isn’t bad – the houses are large, clean and comfortable. And the past is murky, too, blighted by war, poverty and rape.

But, still, there’s a suggestion that the modern world has rolled concrete, closes and crescents over something richer and more complex. The bulldozer is an existential threat.

New town madness in The Alf Garnett Saga, 1972.

A less arty but perhaps no less heartfelt take on some of the same ideas can be found in, of all places, the second film based on the TV sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.

Released in 1972, The Alf Garnett Saga (dir. Bob Kellett) relocates Garnett from the East End of London to a tower block in a new town – Hemel Hempstead, once again. He not only dislikes it but cannot cope with it. It has the trappings of a community, such as a pub, but is configured in a way that leaves him bewildered, imprisoned and humiliated.

At one point, he takes LSD, imagines himself to be a chicken and nearly falls from the balcony: “Out the window, fly away… Open the window, open the cage…”

In an essay translated into English as ‘The Uncanny’ Sigmund Freud actually uses the German word unheimlich – ‘unhomely’. Are new towns homely?

A common criticism of new towns and overspill estates is that they lack soul or character. “Rows of houses that are all the same” are contrasted with the individuality of the buildings found in towns which developed organically over centuries. And because these houses are built in clean, straight-line modernist style, they seem to lack individual texture.

There’s another kind of place they call to mind, especially when seen in their pristine state in films from the 1960s and 70s: the ‘tin towns’ in which the British Army trains for urban warfare. Or, of course, standing sets on studio backlots, whose houses are usually hollow shells.

Beige, white, oatmeal and ‘elephant’s breath’: the bland perfection of a new town flat in I Start Counting.

In both I Start Counting (dir. David Greene, 1969) and The Offence (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1973) the new town is dangerous in another way: as the hunting ground for a serial killer.

I Start Counting makes explicit an alienating quality in new town life. “The rain don’t even fall on us here,” says Granddad, looking forlornly from the window of the family’s tower block flat. The flat is actually a studio set and, painted beige and white throughout, evokes the alien simulation of a bland hotel room where Dave Bowman ends up at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If the new town feels unreal, like a simulation, then what might that do to the mind of a psychopath already struggling to ascribe real feelings to, or empathise with, his victims? They’re just non-player characters in an open world game.

Then there’s the would-be utopian landscape of pedestrian underpasses, footbridges and green space. A dream in the promotional films made by new town corporations to market themselves to the young city dwellers they hoped to lure. But also appealing to parasites looking for opportunities to kidnap, maim or kill.

Something something liminal spaces something something. (The Offence.)

In I Start Counting it’s parkland at the end of the bus route – the new town’s weirdly hard edge – where young women are most vulnerable. In The Offence, it’s tunnels running beneath brand new roads where a child-killer strikes.

Built-up but sparse, populated but somehow empty, this new town (Bracknell, again) feels especially psychically dangerous. Look what it does to Detective Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery): he loses his grip on reality and morality, brooding in his tower block flat and the new-build brutalist police station like a man in purgatory.

New towns are appealing to criminals of other varieties, too. As a composite of both Kray twins in Villain (dir. Michael Tuchner, 1971) Richard Burton plans the perfect payroll robbery to take place on the beautifully empty roads of (yet again) Bracknell.

For the East End villain, this is ideal: do your business out of town, on the wild, distant frontier, with only provincial policemen in your way.

Bloody kids. (A Clockwork Orange.)

And then, of course, there’s Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which used Thamesmead, marketed as “London’s new town!”, to represent a dystopian future.

More than any other film, this cut through the PR and foresaw problems to come. When footbridges and underpasses cease to be cared for, when the gardens become overgrown, and the concrete sickens, the shine can go off a new town pretty fast.

Despite the recurring portrayal of the new town as uncanny, unsettling and alienating, it’s not all bad news. In two notable sex comedies, it’s not a training ground for aliens, spies or criminals but for randy teenagers. It’s a playground. A safe space to practice being an adult.

A backdrop to young love in Gregory’s Girl.

In fact, rewind: there’s even some of this in I Start Counting. It offers glimpses of a town centre where young people are given places of their own – record shops, cafes, nightclubs – and where there are plenty of precincts and arcades, squares and parks. They’re new and shiny, too, not yet haunted by Alex and his droogs.

In Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (dir. Clive Donner, 1968) and Gregory’s Girl (dir. Bill Forsyth, 1980) the focus is entirely on the struggles of young men to understand young women.

The bland, clean safeness of their new town backdrops (Stevenage and Cumbernauld respectively) saves us from the heavy ‘issues’ that so often bog down British youth films. We don’t need to think about urban decay when there’s love in the air. In Forsyth’s film, Cumbernauld looks positively Californian, its concrete bathed in golden hour light. Shangri-La.

Christopher Ian Smith’s 2017 documentary New Town Utopia, about Basildon in Essex, gets the balance right. With time, it argues, memories have accrued and traditions have developed. If they aren’t paradise, these Pinocchio towns, have at least achieved their dream of becoming real places.

Sources and further reading

‘Discovering Britain’s New Towns on film’ by John Grindrod (MidCentury Magazine)
‘Nasty, Brutish & Tall: The Utilisation & Representation of Brutalist Architecture in British Cinema Post 1970’ by Jonathan N.D. Smith (PDF, University of Manchester)
Requiem for a Village review by Frank Collins (medium.com)
reelstreets.com – screenshots and notes on the filming locations of hundreds of British films

Tags film, new towns

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Staying afloat

Everyone manages their mental health differently. For me, it’s about treading water to keep my head above the waves.

As a teenager and twenty-something I was a wreck: depressed, often thinking about suicide, prone to panic attacks and insomnia.

Now, in my mid-forties, I still have low days, still don’t sleep well, and sometimes catch myself saying “Ugh, it would be easier if I was dead.”

But it’s under control, generally speaking.

That’s thanks largely, I think, to a single course of counselling on the NHS. I know that doesn’t work for everyone, or isn’t enough, but it worked for me.

It helped me stop worrying about what I can’t control (sleep); to let myself step off the high-achiever treadmill; and to address the scars left by childhood poverty.

I’ve also learned to talk to my other half when things feel bad – which isn’t often. Sometimes just verbalising it makes it go away.

That’s especially true of what I call, coyly, “the old SI” (suicidal ideation). Mostly, it’s an escape valve thought, an extreme form of “Ah, fuck it all.”

Stability and routines help, too. A wise friend once told me there are two types of people in the world: those who want a rollercoaster ride and those who want a steady life.

I’m the latter.

I wake up at the same time, seven days a week.

I know my plans days and weeks in advance.

I run on a set schedule.

Oh, yes, that cliché: I hate running but I have to take my medicine. If I skip a run, my mood dips noticeably.

I can also be thrown out by working late or at weekends, which doesn’t happen often; by too many social occasions in a row; or by, oh, you know, global pandemics.

Things like that interrupt the rhythm of my little legs, churning away under the waves, causing my head to dip below the surface.

That need for stability has probably prevented me being successful as a writer, to a degree. I need a nine to five job to cling to and it’s hard to write when you’ve been working all day.

But I also know that I’ve been lucky to enjoy 15 plus years of relative calm.

I don’t take it for granted. After all, it might only take one bad day to drag me right back down.

This quick post is a risk in its own way. “Talk about your mental health!” we’re constantly told. It’s good. It’s healthy.

Well, not for me. It’s like picking at a scab. I’ll decide when to do it, thanks, and might never do it again.

grave digger's boy municipal gothic

Playlists are my secret weapon for writing

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date February 5, 2022
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When I’m working on a novel or script, playing an imaginary soundtrack snaps my head back into the project and gets me ready to write – a kind of hypnotic trigger.

As a teenager, I used to make over-elaborate compilation tapes. Then I got into making complicated iTunes playlists. Since 2011, though, Spotify has been my go-to playlist playground, with what feels like all the world’s music a click or two away and clever algorithms to help me find pieces connected by mood.

The first book I recall making a soundtrack for was a now-abandoned conspiracy thriller police procedural called Long Knives. If you’re curious, here’s the playlist:

Although it’s one hour and forty minutes long, the most important tracks are the first two. The first track, ‘Electroconvulsive Shock’ by Peter Broderick, is a kind of instrumental overture that sets the mood – forlorn, minimal, ever-spiralling.

The second is a song, ‘You are a Knife’ by Danish band VETO, which I imagine playing over the opening credits of a TV adaptation or film version.

The funny thing is, neither of these is the kind of music I usually listen to. They were chosen purely because they seemed to work for the book, as if I was the music editor on that imaginary TV adaptation.

I used to make visual mood-boards and sometimes still do; this is an extension of that.

In this particular case, I think I was also after something that would help me picture the action as if it was a Scandinavian crime drama on BBC4, all washed out colours and frosty cityscapes. The theme tune I choose doesn’t sound unlike the one from The Bridge.

The book that eventually got published, The Grave Digger’s Boy, also has a soundtrack. This is more melancholy, with lots of solo piano and mournful cello, as befits a book about memory and obsession. Here it is if you fancy a listen. The same thing applies – I probably wouldn’t wander around listening to most of this music for fun and couldn’t tell you much about most of the artists.

The single most important track – one that I ended up playing on repeat for hours, sometimes – was ‘Theme’ from the 2009 soundtrack album And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

There’s a passage in the book where the protagonist, Ben, is with his mother on a beach. I found it difficult to write and extremely emotional. This music – quite cheesy, now I listen back – seemed to suggest ‘bittersweet’ perfectly and helped me access feelings that I keep buried most of the time.

Sometimes, I berate myself over the time I spend tinkering with these playlists. Why have I just wasted fifteen minutes trying to find just the right piece of music when I could have been increasing my word count? Classic displacement activity, you idiot!

Except the more I think about it, the more I think my brain knows exactly what it’s doing.

First, it’s a way of engaging with and meditating on the project without jumping straight into writing. I’m restless with a short attention span – not great for a would-be novelist – and struggle to spend time thinking when I could be cracking on. An hour spent in Spotify focusing on the mood and tone of the book, with the plot and characters slowly marinating, is progress, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.

Secondly, the playlists are important because they help me envision the finished product and conceive of it being credible and successful. If there’s a TV or film adaptation it must be good, right? And it’s certainly no worse than some of the stuff that does end up on TV. This tactic is vital in overcoming impostor syndrome and the fear of the blank page – of the 80,000 words left to write.

Once I’ve got the soundtrack, it also makes me more productive. I can listen to it while I’m walking and thus force myself to think about plot or character problems. It also means that wherever I am – the canteen at work, a hotel room, a train – I can immediately slip back into a virtual version of my own work space.

There are a couple of bits of music that I use in less specific ways.

The first track from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports has become a sort of magic reset button I can hit when I’m suffering from writer’s block. I don’t know exactly how I trained myself with this habit but it works: I hear the first couple of cycles of the piano loop and the tap comes unstuck. It also seems to magically slow my heartbeat when I’m stressed. Handy, that.

My other half isn’t a fan of Michael Nyman or Philip Glass and I’m not sure I am, necessarily, except when I’m writing, but I do find them useful.

Glass – specifically this slightly weird playlist I made myself – doubles my productivity in short bursts. Repetitive, insistent… A kind of amphetamine for writers.

Nyman, on the other hand, is where I turn if I’m working on characters and need to give my emotions a prod. In particular, his soundtrack for Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland is a go-to, giving ordinary lives a kind of poetic grandeur it’s easy to deny them.

And his song ‘If’, written for a Japanese animated adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary, is similarly soupy but what can I say – I’m a sap. It makes me well up and sometimes I need to be in that state to write what needs writing.

One of my current works-in-progress, the title of which I’m going to be coy about for now, has a soundtrack and theme tune already. The score is a mix of Shostakovich, Bernard Herrmann and David Shire – dark, moody and just a touch spiky. The theme is this wonderfully wonky piece from Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols:

That should give you a clue about what you can expect from the book when it’s done.

And my most recently published book, a collection of ghost stories called Municipal Gothic, has its own playlist, too. It’s a mix of genuinely unsettling field recordings, discordant modern classical music and synthesiser instrumentals. I don’t listen to it for fun but when I want to get into the right frame of mind to write about revenants and ghouls, it’s just the thing.

You’ll notice that I go to quite a bit of trouble over the cover designs, too. That’s another version of the psychological trick I described above: if I can see something that looks as if it already exists, that feels as if it’s got a physical form, it encourages me to make it happen.

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books municipal gothic

Municipal Gothic: the other type of scary

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date February 3, 2022
No Comments on Municipal Gothic: the other type of scary

Ghost stories are about the uncanny and, of course, about fear. But when do you ever feel really scared?

As in, fight or flight. As in, heartbeat up, breathing shallow, nerves twitching.

For me, it’s in subways, when I’ve committed to the tunnel and have nowhere to go, and I see someone blocking the exit up above.

Or when I find myself on a street I don’t know on an estate I don’t know, maybe walking towards a dead end, while whispering men stop whatever they’re doing in that alleyway to watch me pass.

That reminds me of the most scared I’ve ever been, I think, on the top deck of a bus going through Clapton after midnight. Between Central London and the east, it emptied, until it was just me and some hyped-up lads making a lot of noise about someone who was going to get shanked, if he wasn’t careful.

After a while, they noticed me on my own on the back seat.

“Excuse me,” one of them said, with surprising politeness, “but are you a police officer?”

Back then, I did kind of look like I sort of might be – a sturdy bloke with a shaved head, often wearing a white shirt and black trousers.

What was the right answer? Which would make them less likely to want to beat me up, or stick a knife in me?

While I thought about it, my heart began to thump. I knew my voice would wobble if I spoke.

So, after a moment, I smiled slightly and gave a slow shake of my head.

They stared. I stared back.

After a moment, their leader shouted, “Five oh”, and they scattered off the bus as it pulled into the next stop.

It was a while before I breathed again.

That’s logical, sensible, real-world fear. The fear of actually being injured and, perhaps worse, humiliated.

In my case, this is at least partly the result of growing up on an estate, in a town, where, if you weren’t careful, you’d get a ‘smack in the face’ for glancing at someone for too long, or failing to say hello, or for saying hello with the wrong tone.

It wasn’t so bad, not really – not as long as you remained hyper-vigilant at all times, took no risks, scuttled everywhere by the safest paths, thought constantly about your escape routes, didn’t make eye contact with anyone at any point, and got home before dark.

The problem with that is, you go into adulthood hyper-vigilant, taking no risks, scuttling everywhere… I’m in my mid-forties and still carrying it with me.

On the upside, all that internalised terror means I’ve never been mugged, touch wood, or even beaten up. I’ve got no shame about crossing the road if I don’t like the look of what’s up ahead on this side. I’d rather my face be intact than my masculine pride.

Writing ghost stories with resolutely real world settings, as in my collection Municipal Gothic, I want to draw on some of that energy.

Because when a ghost appears in a place or situation where you’re already on edge, it feels all the more horrifying.

But it’s also important not to lapse into the cheap cliché of the ‘faceless hoodie’ as a stand-in for zombies or ghouls.

And I certainly don’t want to write stories about gentlefolk wandering onto the wrong side of the tracks and forced to confront the ultimate horror: The Working Classes!

I’ll leave that to H.P. Lovecraft.

“He brings a quality that is rarely found in stories that have a genuine power to disturb – wit. Sharp, focused and never to the detriment of atmosphere, his deployment of raillery and even snark, gives his characters a depth of believability.”

David Southwell, Hookland Guide — *Municipal Gothic is out now as a paperback via Amazon UK, Amazon US and around the world.*

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books Fiction municipal gothic

Municipal Gothic: 13 ghost stories

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date February 2, 2022
1 Comment on Municipal Gothic: 13 ghost stories

Council estates, motorway underpasses, bypass hotels, concrete cathedrals and run-down pubs. Places we all know, that we see where we live in suburbs and towns. Why shouldn’t they be haunted?

Municipal Gothic, my new collection of ghost stories, shows that they very much can be. It is now available as a paperback via Amazon, at £8.99 in the UK, $12 in the US and around the world at various prices.

In these thirteen stories you’ll meet a demonic black dog tasked with administering a lineal curse in the age of sperm donation; a witch’s familiar forced to live off fried chicken bones; an architect whose buildings can drive you mad; headless villains, and more.

It includes a revised version of ‘Modern Buildings in Wessex’, originally published as a zine or chapbook to some acclaim in 2020. It’s ghost story in the form of an architectural guide – M.R. James meets Ian Nairn.

David Southwell, of Hookland fame, is a fan of this particular piece which is how I got up the nerve to ask him to supply a foreword for the collection. He has plenty of interesting things to say about how ghost stories work, about working class fiction and, of course, about the power of plausible fake ephemera to conjure places that don’t exist.

In a similar vein, you’ll also find a new piece: ‘An Oral History of the Greater London Exorcism Authority’. Inspired by the kind of self-congratulatory in-house publications put out by public bodies in the 1970s and 80s, and by my love of institutional branding, it started life as a few mocked-up images on Twitter…

https://twitter.com/MrRayNewman/status/1324078769586536452

…but before long, I knew I’d have to write something more substantial to back up those ideas. It became an exercise in tone of voice – could I write first-hand testimony from multiple people? (Neville Hutchinson, the GLEA engineer who does not believe, and his colleague Ernest ‘Cabbage’ Lacomber are my favourites, I think.)

‘The Curse Follows the Seed’ is, as they say, ‘a very personal piece’ for reasons you might be able to work out when you’ve read it. It was the first story I wrote with the concept of municipal gothic in mind. Has anyone ever before set a key scene in a story in the area by the bins in a supermarket car park? I can’t help myself.

Other stories in the collection evolved from an abandoned novel. Why, when I try to write social realism, do ghosts, premonitions and black dogs keep turning up? See ‘Who Took Mary Cook’ for evidence of this.

Certain pieces emerged slowly, over the course of years, as I worked on them with my Wednesday night writers’ group. I must thank Andy Hamilton, Corinne Dobinson, Mike Manson and Piers Marter, and others who have come and gone, for their encouragement and advice. They saw scraps of ideas and helped me find the way, as with ‘Protected By Occupation’, which first landed with them in 2019 as a scrappy period piece inspired by the Lamb Inn haunting (PDF, bris.ac.uk).

Please do buy a copy of the book and let me know what you think. Or, more importantly, let Amazon and Goodreads know what you think – a quick rating and review is worth more than you can imagine.

Tags ghost stories, ghosts, municipal gothic

Film & TV

Learning to love movies again

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date December 23, 2021
No Comments on Learning to love movies again

In 2021, I taught myself to sit down and watch films like I used to as a kid.

Not just easy films, or comfortingly familiar ones, either – films I’d never heard of; often old, sometimes slow, frequently strange.

Through work weariness and pandemic funk I’d drifted into some bad habits: evenings spent watching two or three episodes of some American police procedural or other that I didn’t even like or enjoy. Mentally chewing gum as I waited for bedtime.

Then I moved house and, for the first time in years, my collection of DVDs was where I could get to it. I found discs I’d forgotten I had and which I’d never got around to watching, or not seen in 20 years.

And, as it happened, the winter-spring lockdown was the perfect time to explore.

It wasn’t a resolution, as such. I’m not good with resolutions. But I did find myself thinking, come on, now, Ray – if you’ve got time to watch sodding Bones, which is terrible, you’ve got time to watch The Fifth Cord. How bad can it be? (It was great.)

I also got better at resisting the urge to dither: just pick a film; it doesn’t matter all that much.

Before long, watching films had become a new habit. Or, at least, a revived one, because I used to do this when I was a teenager, too.

Back then, I’d tape films from the TV with the VHS recorder I inherited from my grandmother when she upgraded. I had stacks of tapes, each with two or three films on, carefully labelled.

I’d stay up past midnight watching oddities on BBC2 or Channel 4, and spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons with canonical classics such as Casablanca or The Third Man.

At sixth-form college, I ran the film society, choosing films and writing programme notes for the other five or six attendees to snigger at. (I was a pretentious little berk.)

This year was about scrambling to catch up on a lost decade or two.

To some degree, I’ve trusted the curatorial instinct of labels such as Arrow Films, Indicator, Masters of Cinema and the Criterion Collection. If they’ve bothered to release a film on a pristine Blu-ray disc, you can be sure it will be worth a couple of hours of your time, in one way or another.

Podcasts like The Evolution of Horror, Second Features and Pure Cinema are a great help, too, suggesting films I’d never think of watching if it wasn’t for the enthusiasm of their hosts.

They also led me to books such as Danny Peary’s Guide For the Film Fanatic from 1986, which provided yet more items for my watchlist.

The watchlist isn’t just a scrap of paper, either: it’s on Letterboxd. Using that platform properly for the first time has really worked for me. Making myself log, rate and review each film I watch has kept me focused on my target of watching 150 films this year.

Not every film I’ve seen this year has been a joy – others may love Alice, Sweet Alice but I did not. But learning to sit through the duds, and think about them in context, is all part of the fun.

There’s a long list of films I’ve enjoyed and would recommend on Letterboxd but here’s my top five:

Fallen Angel, dir. Otto Preminger, 1945
Naked City, dir. Jules Dassin, 1948
Deep End, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970
Sunset Boulevard, dir. Billy Wilder, 1950
I Start Counting, dir. David Greene, 1969

If you only get time to watch one, I’d say I Start Counting was the standout – an unsettling coming of age drama with a serial killer on the side, all set in a post-war English new town.

And if you’ve got recommendations for 2022, I’d be delighted to hear them.