When we ask ‘What is folk horror?’ we’re grappling with a problem of categorisation. We want there to be simple rules and neat boxes. But in the murky world of genre, those do not exist.
There are many well-argued attempts to define folk horror, running in length from a single sentence to hundreds of pages of dense academic prose.
What’s fascinating to me is that whichever definition you place in front of people, their immediate reaction will be to try to break it:
“Oh, so by this definition To The Manor Born is folk horror?”
My instinct is to find this infuriating: that thing is obviously not folk horror, and you don’t want it to be folk horror. You’d be disappointed if I sold you a box set of folk horror films that turned out to contain Dawn of the Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, right? Even if it wouldn’t be that difficult to construct a clever argument for their inclusion.
I guess I expect the thought process to be:
This thing feels to me as if it might be folk horror.
What tests can I apply to see if/how it might fit?
I was right/wrong! That’s interesting.
Rather than:
These tests exist.
What’s the oddest shaped item that I can put through these tests that will pass?
I get a medal for being cleverer than the person who devised the test.
Talking about this on BlueSky the other day another thing that occurred to me is that people are sometimes eager to broaden the definition, or to squeeze in a particular favourite film or book, because they think the folk horror label is a mark of quality, rather than simply a way to file media. (On a shelf, or in your brain.)
Perhaps we’ve been trained to think this way by other definitional debates: punk is better than not punk; indie is better than not indie; craft beer is better than not craft beer. (None of these are true either.)
I think it’s fine for the definition of folk horror to be quite narrow. I think it’s fine for things to fall outside of it, especially when there are alternative, more accurate, often overlapping labels that might fit better.
For example, I am baffled by the repeated suggestion that The Stone Tape is an example of folk horror, but I’m quite comfortable with it being described as ‘hauntological’ or an example of ‘English eerie’. Or just as a ghost story, for that matter.
For a few years, though, the folk horror label has carried value as a sales tool. Publishers were looking for folk horror to publish; producers wanted to produce films that could be marketed as folk horror.
In that context, maybe it’s understandable that people would want to fight to get their thing inside the tent.
A test I’ve often applied in conversations about genre or category (I’ve done it above, re: Dawn of the Dead) is this:
Would someone be confused if they liked a quintessential example of folk horror (say, The Wicker Man), asked for a recommendation, and I pointed them to [media product X].
There’s a lot of debate about whether Witchfinder General really fits into the folk horror genre, for example, and I can imagine people who didn’t know the backstory being baffled by it as a ‘Now watch…’ recommendation. While others might say, OK, I get it, I see the connections.
But partial matches and fuzzy edges are OK, too.
Genre categorisation helps us triangulate and facilitates discussion. Items can sit in multiple categories, or move categories, or sit on different shelves in different people’s mental models.
Novels about juvenile delinquents, short films about consumerism, and a weird classic I got round to far too late are among my cultural highlights from the past year.
I like these little bits of end-of-year housekeeping – looking back, sorting and filing, debating with past Ray the stupid ratings he gave months ago.
I often find that a book or film I wasn’t sure I’d liked has stayed with me and become a reference point, or an inspiration. Liking isn’t everything, it turns out.
Still, those ratings are useful because they help me remember how I felt in the moment, and make it possible to pull out highlights for a post like this.
I’d like to read more. My annual target of 50 books is do-able, just about, but slightly stresses me out. I certainly couldn’t read much more without it turning reading into another task at which I feel I’m failing.
My approach is to write a little capsule review of each book after I’ve finished and mark any book that I had a strong positive feeling about with an asterisk. A ‘strong positive feeling’ might be that it left me feeling cleverer, or moved me, as well as that it was simply enjoyable.
As for films, I don’t have a target, but I do try to watch films rather than TV or (ugh) YouTube. Of course I do watch YouTube, because it’s irresistible, but often feel dirty afterwards. In the hour I spent watching some bloke build a castle out of lolly sticks I could have got through most of a 1940s horror movie.
Films I review and rate on Letterboxd. That gives me quite a granular sense of the real standouts, especially as I’m quite stingy with any rating of four stars or more.
The best new-to-me books of 2025
The Furnished Room by Laura Del-Rivo, published in 1961, is a stone cold classic and anyone who likes both crime fiction and angry young man novels ought to read it. My copy, tatty and yellowing, came from the 50p bin in a charity shop, and its state of near disintegration seemed quite fitting. It’s about a young man who might be a psychopath, who has paedophilic and Nazi fantasies, and who thinks he’s better than everyone else despite being, essentially, a bum. It reminded me of Absolute Beginners (it’s a great West London novel), The Talented Mr Ripley, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Perhaps there’s even a little of Billy Liar there, if Billy was a killer.
Big Man by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) from 1959 is in a similar vein, but set in New York City rather than London. I was astonished by its brilliance and vigour and think it might be the best thing McBain wrote in a long, prolific career. The protagonist is a street punk who drifts into a life in organised crime because the mob identify him as someone who can be groomed, and trained to be an emotionless killer. It has several genuinely shocking twists and an utterly bleak ending.
I wrote more about both of the books above in a blog post about juvenile psychopaths earlier in the year, which also includes notes on The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch.
1992’s A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is a big, high concept sci-fi novel which is bewildering at first but then, when you get used to it, has the pure thrills of a Lucasfilm adventure. My favourite characters were the Skroderiders, sentient plants who have symbiotic relationships with small carts on which they whizz around. There are also packs of intelligent dogs, each of which shares a consciousness and personality, and plenty of big spaceships.
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai, from 2023, is a murder mystery set in an American private school that plays with, and criticises, the tropes of true crime and podcasting. It’s also about the Me Too movement, male privilege, and institutional wagon circling – conscious or otherwise. I found it both entertaining (“I couldn’t put it down” &c.) and thought provoking, which is always a pleasing combination.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, 1974, is a rather brilliant study of intergalactic war, spanning centuries, from the point of view of a single soldier. It’s Band of Brothers in space. The constant references to the increasing homosexual population reads as homophobic but I buy the argument that this is supposed to depict the alienation of veterans from the societies for which they fight. (Hey, guess what? It’s about Vietnam.)
Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners, 2021, is a short, punchy novel that at times reads like weird fiction, and at others like a modern melodrama. A woman hears a mysterious hum. Her family can’t hear it and think she’s losing it. Then she finds that one of her students can hear it, too, and they form a bond that destroys her career and marriage. Slowly, she drifts into what might be a cult, depending on your point of view.
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, 1951, is brilliant, compelling, and maddeningly oblique. I think the plot (if plot is the word) is that student Natalie is raped; disassociates; goes through a period of psychedelically intense psychosis; then emerges with new clarity, and new strength. But I spent most of the book feeling anxious and bewildered, in the best possible sense.
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, 2020, isn’t quite a novel. The plot unravels, the characters are cyphers. Part autobiography, part philosophical ramble, part political tract, it has interesting things to say about Bulgaria, nostalgia, conservatism, and the end of human history. The premise is the hook, though: in a world gone mad, a therapist creates domestic spaces where people can go back in time and ignore the present. But these comforting fantasies prove irresistible and, soon, begin to spread across wider society.
Fleischerei by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin, 2025, was quite a challenge for me, Britain’s Most Uptight Man™, concerning as it does an intense cannibalistic affair between two outsiders in Berlin. It’s beautifully written, though, and there’s something thrilling about reading what feels like a forbidden text.
Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell, 1859, was a real highlight of the year, republished as part of the Penguin Archive series as a small, plain paperback. It’s about a young woman in 17th century England who is despatched to America and finds herself a victim of witch madness in Salem. It is tragic and atmospheric, with some brilliant depictions of haunted landscapes:
Sights, inexplicable and mysterious, were dimly seen – Satan, in some shape, seeking whom he might devour. And at the beginning of the long winter season, such whispered tales, such old temptations and hauntings, and devilish terrors, were supposed to be peculiarly rife. Salem was, as it were, snowed up, and left to prey upon itself. The long, dark evenings, the dimly-lighted rooms, the creaking passages, where heterogeneous articles were piled away out of reach of the keen-piercing frost, and where occasionally, in the dead of night, a sound was heard, as of some heavy falling body, when, next morning, everything appeared to be in its right place – so accustomed are we to measure noises by comparison with themselves, and not with the absolute stillness of the night-season – the white mist, coming nearer and nearer to the windows every evening in strange shapes, like phantoms, – all these, and many other circumstances, such as the distant fall of mighty trees in the mysterious forests girdling them round, the faint whoop and cry of some Indian seeking his camp, and unwittingly nearer to the white men’s settlement than either he or they would have liked could they have chosen, the hungry yells of the wild beasts approaching the cattle-pens, – these were the things which made that winter life in Salem, in the memorable time of 1691-2, seem strange, and haunted, and terrific…
I was so impressed by the first two books in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy that I’d been saving Unconditional Surrender, from 1961. It’s incredibly readable and often very funny, almost ‘Bertie Wooster goes to war’. At the same time, it has profound things to say about the coming of the modern world, and the banal inhumanity of modern conflict, which is all paperwork and silent death.
Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha, 2025, is the book I’ve been naming when asked for recommendations. It’s a collection of thematically linked stories about the apocalypse, mutation, denial, and family relationships. They’re all at very least good, and some are truly great. My favourite story was ‘Where the Old Neighbors Go’ which is about urban gentrification, flavoured with fairy folklore and Ghibliesque talking animals.
1958’s Spotted Hemlock by Gladys Mitchell, my favourite of the golden age mystery writers, was a treat towards the end of the year. A girl goes missing from an agricultural college for women, which is twinned with a similar school for men several miles away across country. The characters, the gothic atmosphere, and the observational humour carry a slightly less than brilliant plot. The sheer raging horniness of the girls in particular is very funny.
I came across The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa in the new Vintage Classics ‘Weird Girls’ series. It was originally published in English in 2008 and comprises three long short stories, or short novellas. They’re all rather sick. A girl who tortures a child, while lusting after a fellow inmate at her orphanage. A woman who casually, unconsciously poisons her pregnant sister. And, in the the third and best story, ‘Dormitory’, a sinisterly empty student accommodation block with only one resident and a predatory caretaker.
Finally, BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara, 1935, is a brilliant evocation of the speakeasy era in New York City. It tells the story of the tragic downfall of glamorous Gloria Wandrous, a wild child with many lovers, who has never not been preyed upon by men.
The best new-to-me films of 2025
I’ve been strict here and limited myself to flagging films that I rated 4.5 stars or higher – plus a couple of entries that, on reflection, I should have rated more highly at the time.
Writer G.F. Newman’s Law & Order, broadcast in four feature-length parts in 1978, is an astonishing achievement. It explains how police corruption works in practice, and why it’s a problem, as we watch the ‘fitting up’ and imprisonment of a low-level criminal from multiple angles. Detective Fred Pyall is the bland, teddy-bearish villain of the piece, abusing his power and knowledge of the system to extract bribes and choose who does and not go to prison. Pyall is played by Derek Martin and his victim is played by Peter Dean, both better known for playing characters in Eastenders. Almost every other face is familiar from British TV soaps or comedies, or British films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Alan Ford is here, for example, and Ken Campbell gives a surprisingly restrained performance as a corrupt solicitor.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, directed by Peter Weir and released in 1975, took a long time to get to the top of my watchlist. Somewhere along the line, I’d got the idea that it might be an endurance test, perhaps because people keep describing it as ‘dreamlike’ and ‘ambiguous’, which can often mean vague and tedious. But, no, it’s utterly brilliant. From the opening scene, I was mesmerised by the mix of beautiful, hazy visuals and hypnotic, exotic music. Years before The Blair Witch Project or Fargo pulled the same trick, it sells itself as being based on a true story, which is enough to blur the audience’s sense of what is real and what is not. As in reality, as in true stories of crime and disappearance, things don’t make sense in neat and tidy ways. This film is the essence of ‘weird fiction’: ambiguous; unsettling; not only about haunting but actually somehow haunted itself.
The Lonely Shore, Ken Russell, 1962, is an astonishing short film unearthed and shared on the excellent BBC Archive YouTube channel. It feels like one of the apocalyptic short stories written by Michael Moorcock or J.G. Ballard for New Worlds – surreal, weird, disturbing, and deadpan funny. It is packed with breathtaking images conjured up from the contents of a junk shop arranged on a desolate beach. The radiophonic ambient horror score is the icing on the cake.
The Children of Dynmouth, Peter Hammond, 1987, is a TV movie made for the BBC’s Screen One strand. It’s a strange, perverse take on Billy Liar, based on a novel by William Trevor. Timothy Gedge (Simon Fox) is a disturbed teenager with a voyeurism habit. He sticks his nose into the business of the respectable people of Dynmouth and casually blackmails many of them, either to get their help with his talent show act, or just for the sake of entertainment. Sometimes, his accusations are accurate; on other occasions, they’re pure self-dramatising fantasy – but no less dangerous for that. This was Fox’s only acting credit and his drama coach gets a special credit at the end. His non-professional performance only adds to the weirdness, as if an actual oddball has wandered onto the set and is bothering everyone. The character is supposed to have a poor understanding of boundaries, and to be intensely irritating, but I’m not sure the viewer is supposed to find him almost unwatchably annoying, too. I’m glad I persevered, though, because the final act of the film has overtones of Patricia Highsmith, the oblique school of weird fiction, and perhaps even Royston Vasey. This film startled and mesmerised me. It tapped into a bunch of my obsessions – small towns, West Country life, the darkness beneath the surface of suburbia. And, because it’s so obscure, it felt delightfully fresh.
Dinner in America, Adam Rehmeier, 2020, is a delightfully uplifting film from an alien world of Christian family dinners, bullying jocks, and raging punk arsonists. All the performances are excellent but it would be nothing without Emily Skeggs as Patty, a girl who is not secretly a genius, and doesn’t suddenly become a raging beauty when she removes her glasses and shakes out her hair. No, that only happens when a smile or a giggle breaks over her face as she feels real happiness for the first time, and it’s as if a searchlight has been flipped to full beam. The pivotal moment in the film, for me, is when she gets the opportunity to sing a song with Simon (Kyle Gallner), AKA her favourite punk musician John Q. As the intro plays out and she readies herself to sing there’s suspense in the moment. If she can’t sing, and her lyrics are bad, then she’s just the subject of yet another cruel joke. Spoiler: there’s a good reason her song causes a tear to roll down Simon’s bruised cheek.
The Family Way, Roy Boulting, 1966, has a reputation as a bit of a flop. I’m not sure why. For me, it’s the perfect midpoint between the angry young man Northern kitchen sink drama and the swinging sixties sex movie. It’s best known these days as an artefact of Beatles history: the soundtrack is (sort of) by Paul McCartney and hints at the bandstand brass to come on Sgt. Pepper, and some shots of terraced houses and gasworks look like Eleanor Rigby sounds. In itself, however, it’s a sweet little film about a young couple, played by the equally adorable Hayley Mills (Jenny) and Hywel Bennett (Arthur), learning how to be married under the prying noses of family and neighbours. The most surprising theme, however, is queerness. Ezra (John MIlls), Arthur’s gruff working class dad, begins to fear his son is gay. After all, he listens to classical music, reads books and, crucially, hasn’t yet consummated his marriage. When challenged by his wife, however, he becomes gentle: of course he wouldn’t shame his son for it, if it were true; of course he’d be there for him. But there’s more: she points out that Ezra brought his best and closest friend Billy on their honeymoon; that he and Billy were inseparable; that they started each day of the honeymoon with a walk on the beach together, leaving her in the hotel. He becomes dewy eyed when he talks about Billy and misses arm wrestling with him. And Arthur is, it turns out, probably Billy’s son – and reminds Ezra so much of his lost friend that it makes him weep. I mean, blimey.
Strange Days, Kathryn Bigelow, 1995, is a film I could have seen at the cinema when it came out, or on VHS, or on DVD. I finally got round to it 30 years after it came out, and more than a quarter of a century after it is set, on New Year’s Eve 1999. This vision of the then near future is all about organic virtual reality and not, as actually transpired, Netscape Navigator and the Nokia 3210. The details might be wrong but the point holds true: the retreat into nostalgia, the dependence on technology, and the place pornography always has at the cutting edge. It’s beautifully realised with hardly a clunky detail, and shot like a film from ten years later. The lack of obvious CGI must help in this regard. The scenes of violence towards women are hard to stomach, and are supposed to be – here, put this on, don’t look away, you need to watch to understand.
As for new films, I watched and enjoyed both The Brutalist and Nosferatu, but I’m not sure anyone needs more words on either of those right now.
I also want to mention an extremely bad film that is among the maddest things I saw this year. Cipayos, Jorge Coscia, 1989, is a dystopian film from Argentina which has Buenos Aires occupied by British troops – and the tango has been banned! But the underground resistance keeps the dance alive, in back alleys and speakeasies, as they get ready to see off the arrogant invaders once and for all. Key scenes involve British dignitaries at a garden party getting the shits and the Irish soldiers joining in a musical number in which they gaily sing ‘Brits out!’ before switching sides. I want to find more of this kind of thing in 2026.
If you’ve seen all of the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, and want more of the same, I’ve got good news for you.
Last year I put together a list of films, short films and TV episodes that seemed to me to capture something of the vibe of the Lawrence Gordon Clark era of BBC ghost stories for Christmas.
Since then, I’ve come across quite a few more examples.
A misty, melancholy adaptation of an Edith Wharton story. The premise is fascinating – you won’t realise you’ve seen the ghost until long afterward, goes the legend – but unfortunately sets up a disappointing ending. Still, it is fascinating to watch a period ghost story with a female protagonist, from a story by a female author.
The Mind Beyond: Stones, 1976
The Mind Beyond was a series of TV plays on supernatural themes produced by Irene Shubik for BBC 2’s Playhouse strand. They’re all interesting but this particular episode has stone circles, cursed tomes, and possessed children, putting it squarely in folk horror and hauntology territory. It has the usual pondering and bickering for the first 40 minutes or so and then accelerates towards a rather powerful ending.
The Lake
The Lake, 1978
The short film Lindsey C. Vickers made before The Appointment. It’s about a young couple who go out to the countryside to see a famous ‘murder house’ and then find themselves being stalked, or haunted, by a mysterious presence. It’s available on the first of the BFI’s Short Sharp Shocks collections (recommended) and also as an extra on their disc of The Appointment.
Andrina, 1981
This one’s a bit special: it’s a ‘lost’ Bill Forsyth film, made between Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero. It’s more melancholy and bittersweet than the BBC ghost stories but shares their stillness and reliance on rural landscapes to create a sense of lonely unease. It’s about a lonely old man in Orkney who is blessed to meet a young woman who takes charge of his life and cares for him. I’d never heard of it until ‘Afterglow’ posted about it turning up, surprisingly, on YouTube.
Night Terrors: The Hospice, 1987
A 50-minute TV film that quite adequately interprets one of Robert Aickman’s best ‘strange stories’. It has to stretch the material a little, amping it up somewhat in the process, and the ending feels slightly less ambiguous than in the original text. But many of the key moments and images are there, and every bit as disturbing. Where the film benefits is in the performances by Jack Shepherd as Maybury, Alan Dobie as the sinister manager, and Jonathan Cecil as Maybury’s unsettling roommate Bannard. Cecil in particular seems to have been given the instruction I imagine actors love to hear: take it as far as you like, love; go as far over the top as you like. His chinless, rubbery British face, through a fish eye, looming too close to Maybury, and too close to us, is truly disturbing.
Loving Memory
Loving Memory, 1970
Tony Scott’s directorial debut. Country folk keep to themselves and follow their own laws. When Ambrose and his nameless sister kill a young cyclist they don’t only hit and run – they take the corpse with them and make it part of the family. All three performances are excellent although it’s David Pugh as a blankly staring cadaver, surrounded by buzzing flies, who perhaps has the greatest challenge. It’s available on a BFI disc along with his brother Ridley Scott’s first short film. You can also rent it online via the BFI.
Haunted: The Ferryman, 1974
A one-hour TV film based on a story by Kingsley Amis and starring Jeremy Brett. A writer (an avatar of Amis himself) achieves great success with a novel about a haunted pub. Then, resenting the attention that comes with success, he runs away for a weekend in the country with his wife. They’re not quite happy, perhaps because his ego takes up too much space in the relationship, and there’s tension around their lack of children. They end up in a pub that has almost the same name as the one in his book. The manager has almost the same name as his pub manager. The barman has almost the same name as his barman. Has he been here before, or is there a crack in reality? It’s got that pleasing mix of stillness and shock that marks so many supernatural British TV productions of this era and Brett is magnetic, if unsubtle, in the lead role.
The Pledge
The Pledge, 1981
A macabre short by Digby Rumsey which marries shots of desolate moorland with close ups of maggots wriggling in the mouth of a corpse dangling from a gibbet. It’s not about the living dead but the dead dead – and what happens after death. It’s given an enormous lift by a propulsive theme tune by Michael Nyman. It’s an extra on the BFI disc of Schalcken the Painter and is also available on BFI Player.
I don’t know if I’ll have enough for another list next year but do feel free to make suggestions. I know about The Stone Tape and Schalcken the Painter, though.
I’ve been reading about New York during prohibition, thinking about Stanley Kubrick, and writing in the Edwardian mode.
This blog is what I do instead of starting yet another Substack newsletter.
You can subscribe to this blog (enter an email address, get updates when I post) using the widget at the bottom of the screen.
Or, if you use an RSS reader like Feedly or Readwise Reader, you can add this blog there.
This particular post is the third in an ongoing series inspired by someone saying: “I don’t really want to read writing advice from authors… I just want to know what they are reading and thinking and doing.”
If you follow me on Bluesky, you already have a pretty good idea of what I’m reading, thinking and doing at all times. These are some edited highlights.
Adrian Bailey’s cover illustration for the Penguin edition of BUtterfield 8.
Reading John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8
The entire premise of this post is a fib, by the way, because what I’ve really been thinking is “Ugh, I’m so ill”, and what I’ve been doing is sleeping, coughing, and generally feeling run down.
But I couldn’t lead with that because other people’s illnesses are utterly tedious.
When the flu was at its height, I couldn’t even read. I spent two days mostly lying in bed with my eyes closed, only half listening to podcasts and audio dramas. In a low key way, this made me somewhat anxious, because I knew I had a yearly reading target to achieve.
That target is a very manageable 50 books. It’s just challenging enough to make me take a book from the shelf and read it rather than looking at my phone, but not so tough that it becomes a chore. As the end of November came around, I’d read 47 books, and needed to stay on track.
When the flu began to lift, I grabbed almost the first thing I saw with an interesting cover, and that was John O’Hara’s 1935 novel BUtterfield 8.
It’s a startlingly frank, sexy novel, with an undercurrent of sexual sickness. Gloria Wandrous is a flapper (although that term had gone out of fashion by the time the book is set, in around 1931) with many boyfriends, and dark memories of being abused by a family friend when she was eleven.
Her latest boyfriend, Weston Liggett, is a married man unhappy with his wife and overcome with lust for the 18-year-old Gloria. When he unwisely takes her to the family apartment after a day of drinking, she steals his wife’s mink coat, which careless act brings everything crashing down around them.
I didn’t realise until after I’d finished it that it was based loosely on a true story, that of a woman with the equally unlikely name Starr Faithfull, born Marian Wyman in 1906. The truth is even more grim and sad than O’Hara’s reinvention.
What O’Hara does brilliantly is to capture the whirl of conflicting feelings and emotions in the mind of a young person who has not been well cared for. She’s sexually uninhibited, she’s socially conservative; she wants a platonic friendship, she is offended that her one platonic friend doesn’t want to have sex with her; she feels dirty, she knows she is the most beautiful woman in New York City. The most important thing is never to stand still, or be alone, or think even for a moment.
For the beer blog I’ve been writing with my partner since 2007 I wrote a post highlighting O’Hara’s depiction of the New York speakeasy – an incidental but not unimportant aspect of the book.
It’s just a podcast, not a documentary or an academic text, but within those bounds it was a great primer on the films I haven’t seen, and a reminder of what’s interesting about those I have.
It made me think I need to prioritise seeing Lolita, which I’ve put off until now because, well, I’m basically a prude, and even the basic premise of the book/film made me feel uneasy.
It also made me want to watch Eyes Wide Shut again, having not seen it since it was released in cinemas in 1999. Back then, I was bewildered and bored by it. Now, with a bit more life behind me and more patience, I suspect I’d get more out of it.
I should say that Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This seeded this idea. That’s less of a podcast and more like a documentary and in a series from a couple of years ago, Erotic Nineties, Longworth made a strong case for Eyes Wide Shut over the course of two long episodes.
As you might know, one of my particular obsessions is the way cities are recreated on studio backlots, like London in Los Angeles. One of the features accompanying the new Criterion Collection release of Eyes Wide Shut is a documentary about how Kubrick went about recreating New York in London, commissioning Lisa Leone, a friend of his daughter’s, to photograph the real New York in intense detail to inform the design of the set.
This feels like a fascinating creative project in its own right and there’s something fascinating about seeing photos of rubbish bins (sorry, trash cans) and shop fascias presented like evidence in a trial, or as if intended to communicate the concept of America to an alien from another world.
It’s also given me an idea for a project of my own. Watch this space.
Writing like an Edwardian
One of the principles behind my next collection of weird stories is to try to avoid nostalgia and retro pastiche. At the same time, I’ve written quite a bit of that over the years, and might put out a separate collection of only Victorian-Edwardian-style stories at some point.
As I have done for a few years in a row, now, I want to share a ghost story for Christmas on this blog. This time, I weakened, and decided to write something vaguely in the style of M.R. James or one of his contemporaries. It’s a long way from Municipal Gothic but what the hell, it’ll be free. The important thing, really, is that I enjoy writing it.
With that in mind, I’ve spent three evenings after work to get to a finished draft of about 2,800 words. What’s particularly enjoyable about writing in this mode is learning little historical details on the way. For example, you know those all-in-one underwear suits with a little flap on the bum? Those were known as ‘union suits’ in the US and as ‘combinations’, ‘woolly combinations’ or ‘woolly comms’ in the UK.
The story needs an edit and will be out in time for Christmas. Hopefully it’ll offer at least a little of the thrill of the real thing.
Broadcasts
I’m recording a podcast tonight, another episode of CinéClub with Joe Tindall, talking about the BBC ghost stories for Christmas and similar. That’ll be out before Christmas too, I hope.
A few weeks ago, with my professional hat on, I was the guest on another podcast talking about content design in healthcare. You can listen to that now.
Purely as a matter of aesthetics, on an emotional, instinctive level, I reject the use of generative AI in the creative arts.
When people were playing with Craiyon a few years ago, I found something interesting in the disturbing, woozy, weird images it generated. I experimented with taking its lo-res outputs, blowing them up, and blurring them to all hell to create what felt like snapshots taken with a camera I’d somehow smuggled into my own nightmares.
But as the images these tools could generate got ‘better’ – sharper, cleaner, more convincing – they slipped across a line into a kind of creepy I didn’t like. Oily. Rubbery. Like fairy treasure that turns to shit when you see it in broad daylight.
At what concentration do you start to discern the peculiar tang of AI in art you’re consuming? Setting aside ethical concerns, and arguments about solidarity between creatives, there’s an amount of AI I can just about deal with on an aesthetic level.
The Brutalist contained some background prop imagery, seen in passing, generated with AI, and used AI to massage some of Adrien Brody’s Hungarian dialogue. I wish they hadn’t done it, I don’t think it was necessary in either case, but it didn’t outweigh the vast bulk of human effort and brilliance evident throughout the film.
Late Night With The Devil, a trashier, sillier film, also used AI-generated imagery for a few onscreen graphics. Again, these were seen in passing, and made up about 0.05% of the film’s running time. They were bad, like someone dubbing a little fart noise onto the soundtrack three or four times during the film’s running time, but David Dastmalchian’s dominating performance was real enough that I could waft them away.
Watching the latest installment of British Cryptids yesterday, I was charmed by the typography, the music, the authentic 1970s patrician voiceover, and the invented folk mythology. It reminded me of Look Around You and The Day Today but with an added Fortean thrill.
Then a question occurred to me: how on earth had the creator managed to source or create all the incredible vintage images? The video was crammed with old photographs, engravings, paintings, and illustrations. Some appeared, to my eyes, to have been adapted from real archive images. Others, however, seemed to have the telltale signs of being generated with AI.
It was like biting into a delicious pie and, after taking several bites, finding a wriggling maggot.
I then began to worry every mouthful had maggots in it.
I doubted the voiceover, for example, which was too steady and repetitive in its rhythms. Where had they found a performer able to deliver this on a YouTube creator budget? I’m not 100 per cent sure, perhaps it is a voice actor, but I now think that was generated using a service like Speechify, whose ‘Russell’ voice is quite a close match to my ears.
When two brief video clips appeared I was certain they were AI-generated. They had the unstable, slippery quality of moving images generated with something like Sora.
I felt that lurch in my gut, that sense of having been pranked, and stopped watching.
When I talk about this emotional reaction to AI-generated text or visuals – when I say I don’t enjoy consuming things created with it – one counter argument is: “But what about CGI?”
To which I can smugly say, well, I’m not keen on computer-generated imagery or digital post-production either.
I tolerate it if it’s not intrusive and doesn’t outweigh the narrative and performances. But if I never see, say, another digital matte painting of the London skyline with too much detail and digital smoke, but which is also somehow completely unconvincing, that’s fine by me.
This is probably the reason I mostly watch older films and haven’t seen anything from Marvel since the first Avengers film. The finale of that film left me cold, with its digital characters being flung around a digital city, battling digital monsters, surrounded by digital smoke and digital flame.
But there’s no point in counter-arguments. This isn’t about logic, it’s about feelings.
I manage to read about 50 books a year and watch around 200 films. I want each of those to be an opportunity to connect with the creativity and craft of other human beings.
That has to go beyond having an idea and pressing a button to generate the end product.
Even if you press the button many times, and choose the best bits of whatever gunge is extruded to stitch together into a slightly less stinky, repellent object, you still haven’t made anything.
At best, I don’t care and won’t engage with it. At worst, I will hate it, and resent your attempt to feed it to me.
It’s cowardice, isn’t it? That instinct that draws horror fans to old movies; camp, arch, silly films; and contemporary films set in the comforting warmth of the hand-knitted past.
The word ‘cosy’ has become an irritating background note in conversations around horror fiction.
It’s usually spoken about as a specific subset of work in the genre that offers “that happy ending, or low stakes”, as explained by Agatha Andrews on the podcast Books in the Freezer on 30 May 2023. It’s perhaps about friendship and love more than it is about cruelty.
But beyond that explicit cosiness, there’s an implicit cosiness baked into much of the genre.
Few consumers or fans of horror like to think of themselves as craving cosiness. Horror is edgy, grim, and dark. It’s for kids who don’t fit it and, like, see the world differently, man.
Horror critics speak approvingly of horror films as ‘disturbing’, ‘harrowing’ and ‘unflinching’ – ordeals through which we put ourselves, tests of our mettle, proof of our resilience in the face of fucked up shit.
In practice, however, we don’t want to be disturbed or harrowed. We want to be able to flinch. So, we protect ourselves with a range of distancing factors:
1. Time. Stories set or written in the past are less threatening than those which are strictly contemporary.
2. Geography. If the setting is physically distant from us – Texas, Italy, deep space – we feel safer.
3. Realism, or its absence. Freddy Krueger might be mean, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films might be gory, but they’re also close to being fairy tales.
4. Personal experience. We all know what will feel like salt in our own psychological wounds and can choose to avoid it.
5. Topicality. Difficult topics become less difficult when they’re no longer live; nuclear war was less scary in 2003 than in 1984.
Don’t look away
The 2020 film His House (dir. Remi Weekes) is about as far from cosy as I can imagine. It’s about a couple, refugees from South Sudan, who are dumped in a council house on an estate in England. The house turns out to be haunted by those they left behind on the gruelling journey.
It is set now. It is set in the UK, in a landscape I recognise. Remove the ghosts and it is an example of brutal social realism.
With its narrative about war, the danger of small boat crossings on the English Channel, and the vicious heartlessness of the UK asylum system, it could not feel more topical.
And, though I had it easy compared to these characters, the setting and sense of poverty reminded me uncomfortably of my own childhood – of scraping by with bugger all, constantly on edge.
I admired it, and am glad to have seen it, but cannot say I enjoyed watching it. At various points I actually felt the beginnings of a true panic response.
That’s what horror writers often believe they want to achieve, or to evoke. In reality, however, for the consumer of horror, the effect desired is more often a shiver, a pleasant thrill, or perhaps even a giggle.
I have a colleague (a woman, very politically aware) who talks about 1980s slasher movies as ‘comfort viewing’.
These are films in which one person after another is brutally murdered, often in graphic, gory detail; these people are often young, often female; and the feel of the films is often distinctly grimy.
But they are generally so over the top, so ridiculous, and so clearly set in another time (the 1980s) and place (Everytown USA) that, for British viewers, they’re a reassuring arm’s-length away from real fear. They make us jump and gasp but they rarely stay with us, or haunt our dreams.
That distance only increases when modern filmmakers or writers recycle slasher tropes and evoke the idealised Spielburbian settings of our collective childhoods. In Stranger Things or Fear Street Part One: 1994, both on Netflix, there’s an added layer of retro kitsch, or ironic detachment.
‘Trauma dumping’
A lot of contemporary horror fiction, or weird fiction, is inspired by the authors’ personal, physical or mental trauma.
Modern short stories are often ‘about’ some raw, real personal issue, such as child abuse, depression, racism, chronic illness, or gender transition. Or big, pressing existential problems like climate change.
They force us to confront complex, difficult subjects to the extent that reading for pleasure can feel like watching the news through a fictionalising filter, or listening to a deep, painful confession.
By turning them into fantastic stories, the authors are giving us a comfort blanket – a tiny degree of cosiness. But is it enough? For many readers, the answer is, no. It still feels too much like homework.
Or, to put that another way, they are often more enjoyable for the writer to write than for the reader to read.
(And I say this as someone who cannot stop writing stories attempting to process my own experiences of childhood poverty, often without intending to do so at all.)
Tweed, jerkins and knitwear
When I think of ‘cosy horror’ my mind leaps to M.R. James. His stories often have historic settings – they are set decades before they were written – and their revenants are older still. Now, in addition, we have more than a century of additional distancing. The tweediness of Edwardian prose tells us that we’re perfectly safe.
You might argue that James’s stories present eternal, subconscious fears: loneliness, unresolved sexuality, child murder… This is true. ‘Lost Hearts’, for example, certainly gave me shivers, as did its 1970s BBC TV adaptation.
At the same time, the way these stories are framed as fireside yarns in the original texts, or as ‘ghost stories for Christmas’ on TV, offers us a protective shield.
Similarly, I prompted some disagreement on Bluesky when I argued that folk horror is an essentially cosy sub-genre. As the filmmaker Paul Duane observed in response, folk horror often deals with “harsh” themes.
Equally, however, most of the best known examples are now viewed through a fog of 1970s film grain with half the cast in literally cosy vintage knitwear (dark Hygge) or 17th century jerkins and buckled boots (heritage horror).
Because that patina is part of the texture of folk horror, modern takes on this sub-genre are often also set in the past, as is the case with Starve Acre or Robert Eggers’s The Witch.
We get people in wigs discussing old news, with perhaps the odd talking goat or immortal rabbit to remind us that, by the way, none of this is real.
Even better, or more cosy, are Hammer films, and those from similar British studios such as Amicus. Does anybody watch these expecting to feel scared?
We might feel a little unnerved, perhaps, by the occasional striking image, or be made uneasy by the sexual politics. But more often, our reaction is to laugh at the big performances, at the Home Counties playing dress-up as Transylvania, and at blood as red as primary school poster paint.
The zombie apocalypse is another strong example of a cosying mechanism. These are really visions of our world post-plague, post-apocalypse, which give us a safe space in which to ask: could I shoot my neighbour in the head if they came for my resources, or threatened my tribe?
Anyway, enough of all that. I’m off to escape the horrors of the modern world in the warm embrace of a silly, colourful film in which a pair of binoculars fire spikes into someone’s eyes.
You know, in a cosy way.
This piece first appeared in issue two of the General Witchfinders zine. Issue three is out shortly and features a new short story by me called ‘We Have Always Battled Monsters in this Castle’.
I’ve found the Blu-ray box set Shadows in the Fog to be a great introduction to the West German Krimi genre despite, on paper, being a collection of also-rans.
‘Krimi’ is a description applied to a run of films made in Germany between the 1950s and the 1970s, based on or inspired by the works of British crime writer Edgar Wallace.
The six films in this set were made by CCC Filmkunst as an attempt to cash in on the better-known Rialto Film series.
Rialto’s films were adapted directly from the novels of Edgar Wallace but CCC cannily enlisted Wallace’s son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, as the mascot for their knockoff series.
CCC’s films were all supposed to be based at least on ideas by Wallace the younger, although really the important thing was to get his name on the posters and in the opening credits.
Much has been made of the influence of Krimi on the Italian giallo genre. Often, the suggestion is that the giallo realises fully what the Krimi only half grasped. It’s true that gialli are generally bolder, more erotic, and more colourful.
Being British, it’s easy to scoff at the version of England presented in these films, recreated on Berlin studio backlots, on suburban streets, or in the grounds of historic buildings.
If you’re even remotely sensitive to architecture and design, you’ll notice the absence of London brick and the jarring presence of baroque stonework. And wven with the careful placement of extras in British police helmets and strategically parked Jaguars, you can’t turn smart Berlin apartment blocks on a neat grid into Soho or Whitechapel.
It’s only fair, though, isn’t it? At the same time the UK’s Hammer Films expected us to buy a country park as the wild mountain forests of Mitteleuropa, and its own backlot dollhouses as ‘Carlsbrück’ or ‘Karlsbad’.
The Mad Executioners, AKA Der Henker von London.
It doesn’t really matter that the London of the Krimi film is unconvincing because in this context it is merely a mythic playground for archetypes. (See also the landscape of the western, as various critics have observed.)
It has more in common with the foggy Universal backlot London of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s than with the real thing.
In fact, Sherlock Holmes is clearly an unspoken reference point for the Krimi.
For example, the plot of The Phantom of Soho (Franz Josef Gottlieb, 1964) concerns a group of wealthy conspirators being hunted down one by one as revenge for a crime committed overseas – a plot structure Conan Doyle used multiple times.
As in the Holmes stories, we often get lords and wards and family secrets, with stately homes as key locations.
The films perhaps have more in common with the money-grubbing post-war Holmes pastiches of Adrian Conan Doyle, or with August Derleth’s Solar Pons stories, both of which tend to the macabre and the melodramatic.
One of the films in this set, The Curse of the Yellow Snake (Franz Josef Gottlieb, 1963) suggests a contemporary of Holmes, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, with all the racism that entails. It also feels like a precursor to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and, going full circle, Young Sherlock Holmes.
Unlike Sherlock Holmes stories, Krimi credits the dogged men of Scotland Yard with a certain amount of genius.
The chief protagonist is usually a police inspector, like Jeff Mitchell (Harry Riebauer) in The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle (Harald Reinl, 1963) or John Hillier (Hansjörg Felmy) in The Mad Executioners (Edwin Zbonek, 1963).
They’re often the sharpest men on screen, both in terms of brainpower and fashion sense.
There’s never anything supernatural afoot but the films often hint that there might be. The killer in The Phantom of Soho wears a skeleton mask while in The Mad Executioners a gang of vigilantes rides about the Home Counties in a horsedrawn Gothic hearse straight out of Dracula.
The more Krimi I watch, the more I want to watch.
They’re reassuringly formulaic but also constantly surprising. The music is groovy, jazzy, and often surprisingly electronic. The faces are fascinating – household names in Germany but mostly unknown elsewhere, unless they cropped up in war films playing Nazi officers.
And this fantasyland of nightclubs, secret tunnels, laboratories, ruins, wild moors, and foggy Spreeside-Thameside streets is such a wonderful place to escape the here and now.
Watching the film Hundreds of Beavers and a product of Shakespeare’s Henry V in the same week was something of a crash course in the suspension of disbelief.
Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2022) is a slapstick comedy about a fur trapper (Ryland Tews) using ever more elaborate methods to catch beavers.
Except the beavers are people in cheap beaver costumes and much of the action was conjured up using deliberately unconvincing digital effects.
Even if we allow the excuse that it’s supposed to resemble a cartoon, the quality of the animation is often so janky that it jars. More South Park than Snow White.
Does this in-your-face fakeness matter? Clearly, in this case, it’s intended to be a selling point, with phrases like “lo-fi” being used to describe what, in other contexts, might be referred to as “shit”. But whether it’s a plus point or not, it certainly doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the story.
If there’s one thing human brains are good at, it’s working with the limited information they’ve been given to create sense from chaos.
In this case, once you’ve been told a person in a beaver costume represents a beaver, and that a paper cutout style animation represents a man climbing a tree.
After all, what do you need to know to follow the story? That the man is climbing the tree to catch and kill the beaver. They could almost be represented by boardgame counters or, indeed, plain text.
If you want to be notified when I post something new, usually once every week or two, do subscribe. 👇
Insane Root’s production of Henry V employs similar tricks to evoke crowded, chaotic 15th century battlefields with a cast of seven, minimal sets, and a handful of props.
What’s interesting about Henry V in particular is that Shakespeare addresses the question of suspension of disbelief head on, in the text. He has the Chorus (the MC, or narrator) address the audience at the beginning of the play, urging them to get on board:
…pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth; For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, Turning th’ accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass; for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history; Who prologue-like, your humble patience pray Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
In both the 1944 and 1989 film versions of the play this preamble works brilliantly, highlighting the artificiality of the filmmaking process while also gaining a note of ironic self deprecation.
Because, of course, film can have a broader canvas than theatre, and better special effects, and hosts of extras in period costume.
But watching the Insane Root company shrouded in smoke, swinging swords in balletic slow motion, mimicking the hunched posture of mounted soldiers, I can’t say that I missed any of that.
I played along.
I accepted that (hiking boots and sunglasses aside) we were in 15th century France on a field strewn, horrifyingly, with butchered corpses – even if those corpses were nothing more than scattered red tennis balls.
A third strand in my accidental study of suspension of disbelief this week emerged from reading German Expressionist Cinema by Ian Roberts, published in 2009. It’s a slim volume designed as primer on the subject and includes observations like this:
The Austrian novelist and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal [claimed] that “all the working people are looking for in the movie theater is a substitute for dreams”… Yet with hindsight we can acknowledge that this oneiric quality, the ability of film to transport the viewer to a world of dreams, is precisely why cinema went on to confound its critics, and why the films of the Weimar period contribute to our understanding of the process whereby cinema was transformed from a vaudeville sideshow for the masses to a global entertainment industry and a major art form in its own right.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene in 1920, is perhaps the most famous example of expressionism on film. Its obviously, unashamedly painted sets aren’t intended to feel real. They use contrasting paint to create light and shadow, and forced perspective to imply depth. They are intended to read as beyond real, as dreamscapes, or as projections from a troubled mind.
The lack of realism isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s style. It supports the themes and mood of the film. And it’s one of the main reasons people are still talking about Caligari more than a hundred years after it was made.
If audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief and play along, filmmakers should feel more confident in doing things the cheap and dirty way.
Not everything needs to look cinematic or hyperreal, especially if that aspiration becomes a barrier to making anything at all.
Being aggressively handmade and imperfect might also a way to push back against the rise of computer generated imagery (CGI) and images generated with artificial intelligence.
If horror film makers have nothing else they can always rely on a cheap mask to bring a sense of the uncanny, playing upon our deepest instinctive fear of The Other.
Watching the 1974 Spanish horror thriller Night of the Skull, directed by Jess Franco, I was struck by how it instantly seemed to step up a notch when a character in a mask appeared on screen.
The mask in question isn’t a lovingly crafted custom design. It’s not carved or sculpted. No, it’s a typically floppy, tacky rubber Halloween mask, as you can see in the picture above. But that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that, suddenly, there’s a human on screen whose true features we cannot see or read – who is utterly blank.
A few years later the same trick was used to even greater effect in Halloween, from 1978. John Carpenter’s film, which really kickstarted the ‘slasher’ craze, gave its enigmatic killer Michael Myers a mask which, as everyone knows, was adapted from a novelty product supposed to depict William Shatner as Captain Kirk.
In that case, the mask is more detailed and comes with the added oddness of feeling vaguely familiar. Should we recognise this face?
Demonstrating just how broadly we might define a mask in this context, the monster at the heart of the Friday the 13th series, Jason Voorhees, at first wore a simple sack over his head. Then, from the third film in the series, he gained his trademark hockey mask – a white ellipse with a few dark holes punched in it.
Alice, Sweet Alice.
In proto-slasher Alice, Sweet Alice (Alfred Sole, 1976) the mask is the cheapest, simplest plastic mask you can imagine – the kind I might have bought with my pocket money at the seaside, held on with a string of thin elastic. And it still works. The killer’s face becomes fixed, glossy and rigid, frozen in a smile that our animal brains read as uncanny.
There are examples of real life murderers wearing masks. The perpetrator of the 1946 Texarkana Moonlight Murders, for example, wore a white cloth mask.
And the Zodiac Killer who terrorised San Francisco and the surrounding area in the late 1960s wore a hood that concealed his face, turning him into a folkloric bogeyman.
For people like this, the mask is a way to become more than their pathetic selves, and to assert their dominance.
If you can’t see my face, but I can see you, then I’m in control.
Ed Gein, the inspiration for Norman Bates, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and many other fictional serial killers, made a mask from the peeled skin of his victims. His motive seems to have been to possess them from within – to steal their identities in a sense that predates online fraud.
Kansas City Confidential.
Accessories to crime
The mask gives anonymity to criminals of all kinds, from lads riding eBikes too fast round the local park to hardened blaggers.
Criminals pull a pair of tights over their heads, or a balaclava, and in an instant their features are concealed or distorted.
In the heist movie, as much as the horror movie, masks create an instant visual hook. Think of the gang in Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952) with their unsettling felt masks, or the crew in Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991) who wear comical rubber masks representing various presidents of the USA.
In A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) the juvenile delinquent Alex wears a particularly grotesque, phallic mask during an instance of home invasion and rape.
Alex, left, and Noseybonk, right.
And when hauntologically minded British people over fifty talk about being ‘terrified’ of the 1970s children’s television character Noseybonk, consider the similarities between Alex’s mask and Noseybonk’s.
Much as they are empowering masks can also be dangerous.
The best section of a book I did not otherwise care for, Grady Hendrix’s 2023 novel How to Sell a Haunted House, is a side narrative which depicts the danger of masks. It tells the story of a troupe of avant garde puppeteers who fashion and don masks in the likeness of Pupkin, a sinister haunted puppet, and lose control of themselves:
It’s hard to describe what it feels like to wear a mask. You’re aware of what’s going on around you but it all feels far away. The longer you wear the mask, the more distant the world becomes through your eyeholes. Bits and pieces of time go black because the mask is active and you slip into a semi-somnolent state, but it feels good because you’re not in control. Nothing is your fault. You’re a puppet. Like Clark said, ‘A puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor.’ And a mask turns a person into a puppet.
In Kaneto Shindō’s 1964 film Onibaba, set in medieval Japan, the particularly sinister mask below equates to a curse. Yes, it confers power, but it also extracts a fee, binding itself to the wearer’s face, with removal only coming at too high a cost.
Onibaba.
Creating horror from nothing
Masks are scary, among other reasons, because they deny us the cues we rely on to assess threats.
They turn our fellow humans into creatures that are humanlike but different enough to trigger deeply programmed fight-or-flight subroutines.
I’ve never been to Los Angeles and probably never will. But it’s a city that exists as a high fidelity virtual model in our collective imagination as a result of more than a century of dominance over mass media.
What percentage of American films and TV shows are set in LA? A disproportionate number, I’m certain. And that’s before you take into account those that are filmed there even though they’re set in New York City, Las Vegas, Dallas, or wherever.
As a result, we all know aspects of Los Angeles’s landscape that would otherwise be insignificant to outsiders.
For example, there’s the concrete trough in which its river runs. Built to guard against flash flooding between the 1930s and 1950s it has since become a favourite location for filmmakers looking to shoot car chases and action sequences.
Griffith Observatory is another landmark that turns up in movie after movie, from Rebel Without a Cause to Bowfinger.
Watching Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat for the first time this week I was struck by the deliberate choice of less frequently filmed locations, often quite anonymous. But even these spaces, beneath flyovers and in the car parks of malls, seemed familiar. If we haven’t seen these exact spots, we’ve seen similar ones in, say, episodes of T.J. Hooker, or Bosch.
Perhaps it’s because filmmakers so often live in Los Angeles that they so often make films about the city, or in which, as the cliché goes, “the city is a character in its own right”.
Films like To Live And Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) present particular versions of the city. The former shows us a dusty Wild West city of backrooms, guard dogs, and industrial zones. The latter takes us back in time and attempts to magic back into existence the Los Angeles of the director’s childhood.
Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969), Cisco Pike (Bill Norton, 1972) and L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) are all set in ostensibly the same city but each present it from a different perspective, in different light. There are a thousand others.
Together, they allow the outsider to begin to triangulate – to understand how the city fits together, and how it has changed over time.
L.A. Confidential is based on a novel by James Ellroy whose literary version of Los Angeles is both vivid and idiosyncratic. It’s similar to the city presented by Raymond Chandler in his Philip Marlowe novels, or by Chandler’s disciples in their LA private eye stories, only meaner and more brutal. Chandler’s LA is at least romantic, in a cheap, rather superficial way.
Chandler was an outsider, born in America but raised and educated in England, and looked at Los Angeles as if it were an alien planet. This is from The Little Sister published in 1949:
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood – and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.
Another British writer who observed Los Angeles from a similar distance was critic Reyner Banham whose 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies feels like a manual for understanding the city. Read a chapter or two and you’ll start to feel like an insider – as if you’ve seen LA’s top secret schematics.
Beyond literature and highbrow criticism, there are a million other ways that Los Angeles infiltrates the brains of people who live in, say, Luton, or Lübeck. If you listen to podcasts the chances are that you’ve heard the hosts fill the first ten minutes comparing notes on their drives to the studio, the weather, where’s good to eat, and how they’ve been effected by whichever natural disasters or episode of social unrest has most most recently occurred.
It’s an interesting aspect of the parasocial relationships we form with these strangers who murmur unscripted nothings in our ears every week for years on end.
Every month the excellent movie podcast Pure Cinema has an episode running down what’s showing at The New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. It’s interesting not only as a list of recommended viewing but also because of the ambient notes on life in the city, including casual asides about which actors have been spotted where, doing what.
Before podcasts there was radio and vast chunks of old radio shows from Los Angeles are now readily available on YouTube. As with podcasts, the pleasure here is in the snippets of chat between songs, and the evocative advertisements.
The songs, though, shouldn’t be ignored. Listening to The Beach Boys, The Byrds and The Monkees, as well as all those Nuggets fodder one-hit wonders, also transports you to Los Angeles.
British music fans talk casually about the Capitol Building and the crack session musicians later christened the Wrecking Crew. The most obsessed listen to hour after hour of bootleg recordings, absorbing the good vibrations of Gold Star Studios in the near silence between takes.
Surely with all of this data – all those episodes of Columbo and Adam-12 – at some point we’ll be able to conjure up a four-dimensional immersive model of a sunny Los Angeles we can wander about in, or even escape into for good.
There have been a few attempts already. The 2011 game L.A. Noire was an attempt to make the world of James Ellroy explorable and playable. To achieve that its creators, Team Bondi, recreated a vast swathe of Los Angeles approximately as it looked and felt in 1947.
It wasn’t perfect but in a rather moving article games journalist Chris Donlan wrote about playing the game with his father who grew up in LA in the 1940s. He found it pretty convincing:
The accuracy with which the city structures and roadways are recreated is really astounding, and the details were almost perfect… To be able to experience it again with my son who was born 20 years after I first left the city was, I think, wonderful for us both…
Then there are the several not-quite Los Angeles cities of the Grand Theft Auto games. The 2004 game GTA: San Andreas gives us Los Santos, an almost parodic version of LA circa 1992. The GTA V from 2013 develops Los Santos further, in higher fidelity, to the point where players were able to shoot their own films in its ultra-realistic environments.
If, like me, you’re not very good at games, there’s also Google Street View – a wonder of the age that so many of us take for granted. It’s easy to lose hours wandering jerkily from one street or roadscape to another, feeling both close to the city and impossibly far away.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 