Chris Wood
www.britishhorrorfilms.co.uk
Not now, James... we're busy
Last week, undemanding readers everywhere were mourning the loss of one of sci fi horror-thriller writing's most successful exponents, Michael Crichton. Crichton was one of those authors with the happy knack of being able to write very cinema friendly novels, which meant that every time he came up with a high concept book, it was turned into a high concept film. From the Andromeda Strain (invisible bug goes mental and kills lots of people) to Westworld (robots go mental and kill lots of people), from Coma (hospital goes mental and kills lots of people) to Jurassic Park (dinosaurs go... ah, you get the idea), Crichton enjoyed a rich double-header pretty much every time he put pen to paper. And along the way he also invented George Clooney, or something.
Writing novels is a notoriously low paying business. Even writers who knock out a best seller often won't be raking in the cash. In order to do that, you really need someone to snap up the film rights to your book. And not everyone is as lucky as Mr Crichton - particularly in the world of the British horror novel.
When I was a teenager, back in the neon-soaked, pointy shoed, ra-ra-skirted heady days of the 80s, I was a big fan of lurid horror fiction. It seems a tad odd now, but my parents were quite happy to let me read books like Guy N Smith's The Crabs, Stephen King's Carrie or James Herbert's The Rats from the tender age of 12. Yet there was no way they would have let me watch a film with the same level of gore and sauciness.
Come to think of it, such films never existed - most horror films, especially of that time, are pretty tame when compared with the horrors on the printed page. Even now, in this world of Saw 15 and Hostel 27, with the gore ever more extreme and the censors seemingly unable to do anything about it, we still haven't reached the insane levels of full-on sex and graphic blood-letting you get in someone like N Smith's most family-friendly offering from the 70s.
Before the video nasties scare of the 80s, there was a bit of a stir in the UK about the luridly covered skinny little paperbacks which poured out of the lower rent publishing houses after the success of James Herbert's The Rats. They were everywhere, these printed "nasties" - all with gold writing on a predominantly black background, all with vile painted covers depicting acts of extreme violence. And most of them, taking Herbert's tale as a template, telling tales of a previously harmless item of British fauna running amok. You can still find them lurking on the shelves of charity shops and second hand book stalls - tales of crazed, flesh-hungry cats, pigs, cows, slugs, sheep, ferrets... anything with teeth, basically. Most off them were, and are, absolute toot as well.
Guy N Smith's Crabs series (yes, there was an audience for more than one book on the subject) is a prime example - lots of bad sex and death brought to those who perpetrate the bad sex, usually whilst still naked following said act, and always at the claws of an enormous, angry crustacean.
Why these crabs were so big was never really explained, or if it was, it wasn't in any of the bits I read. But then again, I don't think I've ever read a whole one - N Smith's Crabs books, and all the others he knocked out in the 70s and 80s, weren't meant to be read from start to finish. They weren't even meant to be owned and lovingly placed on a bookshelf in your lounge to impress your dinner party guests ("Oh I see you've got the new N Smith - didn't you just love his use of language when describing the reaction of the teenage swimmer as he has his cock snipped off and eaten?"). They were specifically designed to be passed around a classroom by sniggering teenage boys, with all the "best bits" circled in fluorescent marker.
And what is perhaps most surprising about the Crabs is that at some point in the 70s, N Smith was approached by Brit horror specialists Amicus to produce a film based on the books. That film was never made, but negotiations obviously progressed quite far - by all accounts N Smith made enough out of the deal to pack in the writing (therefore missing out on the Orange prize) and open a shop in the middle of Wales.
Just step back a minute from your computer screen and ponder the utter insanity of a film based on a book in which giant crabs perform violent coitus interruptus on a variety of badly thought-out stereotypes. Done on a shoestring budget. In the 1970s, with 1970s special effects. In Britain. Actually, come to think of it, it would have been brilliant - but for all the wrong reasons.
Strangely enough, N Smith is one of the few British horror writers who's actually done okay out the country's film business. Earlier, the venerable R Chetwynd-Hayes saw a number of his short stories adapted by Amicus for their portmanteau films (the wonderful From Beyond The Grave being the best example), and towards the fag-end of the 80s Clive Barker hit paydirt when his subtle meditation on heaven and hell (and having your guts ripped out by hooks and barbed wire) Hellraiser hit it big on screen both home and abroad. But they are the exceptions which tend to prove the rule.
In the nasty world of British horror pulp novels, the man who followed hard on the heels of N Smith was Shaun Hutson, whose astonishingly brutal books are so grim and graphic they are actually quite hard to read. Young Hutson wrote books like The Slugs in the early 80s very much as his version of the aforementioned 70s gore fests, and has always been very honest about his "well if they can do it, I can do it" take-the-money-and-run attitude to his work. He even boasts of how he once wrote a book in a week to meet a deadline. It's that very attitude which probably explains the US film adaptation of The Slugs, which, even by my standards as a lover of bad film, is astonishingly poor. It also marks the only foray onto the screen for Hutson's work, which is probably a relief for sensitive eyeballs everywhere. On his website www.shaunhutson.co.uk both the writer and his many fans have vented their frustration at the lack of foresight by companies like Merchant Ivory in not taking on a series of balls-to-the-wall adaptations of Hutson's oeuvre, but realistically, it seems unlikely that there would be much of an audience for the catalogues of vaguely-plotted depravity that unspool within his pages.
Of course, over in the US it is a very different story. The world's most successful horror author, Stephen King, as seen pretty much everything he's ever written turned into films of hugely variable quality, from the genius of De Palma's Carrie, Darabont's Shawshank Redemption, and Kubrick's The Shining to the utter shite of Maximum Overdrive and King's own TV movie adaptation of The Shining (he didn't like Kubrick's vision).
King's opposite number in the UK has always been seen as James Herbert, but whereas King has continued churning out a book a year, Herbert has gone a bit quiet recently. Perhaps because he's pissed off at the lack of cinematic interest in his work.
Like Crichton's books, Herbert's are cinematic - and unlike someone like Hutson's, they aren't totally repellant and have the benefit of linking the gore with a strong narrative.
But as yet, Herbert hasn't seen much silver screen success, which is a shame - because some of his earlier works in particular would make mighty fine gung-ho horror spectaculars.
So far, we've only seen reasonably faithful adaptations of a handful of his books, and they weren't the greatest source material to begin with. Haunted is a Sixth Sense-ish tale about a grumpy psychic debunker cum investigator (think Most Haunted's Yvette Fielding played by Aiden Quinn) tasked with investigating a ghost-ridden house with predictably dreary results. Fluke is a family tale about a dog who thinks he's a man, or a man who thinks he's a dog, or a dog who thinks he's a man who thinks he's a dog, or somesuch. The dog then solves a murder (think The Littlest Hobo played by Matthew Modine). The only real draw for Haunted is the opportunity to catch a young Kate Beckinsale in the nuddy (again), and Fluke, with its PG rating, doesn't even have that.
Possibly the most successful film based on a Herbert book is one that everyone always thinks is British, but is in fact Australian. The Survivor tells the story of a man who miraculously walks away from a plane crash, only to wish he'd died in the carnage. Think Final Destination with a bit of Unbreakable, starring Robert Powell and Jenny Agutter. But it has to be said that the film doesn't really pursue the novel's storyline with much conviction.
There has also been a daft version of The Rats, made on a shoestring budget using sausage dogs as the titular rodents, but that's about it. Which is a terrible shame, as even through the befuddled haze of the past 25 years I can still remember Herbert's finest written moments - and can see that many of them would make terrific modern British horror films. Many of his earlier tales are massive in scope, with entire cities destroyed in armageddons of all types. In The Fog, possibly his greatest work, a glowing green cloud escapes during a violent earthquake in a peaceful English village, and proceeds to lay waste to everything before it - turning men, women and children into murderous, sex-crazed nutcases. Some of the set pieces are so vivid they have remained with me to this day - schoolboys teaching their PE teacher a lesson in bullying he'll never forget, psychotic fog-crazed cows on the rampage, the streets of London awash with writhing naked bodies... The Fog has all this and more. Some people think that Herbert's novel has a connection with John Carpenter's film of the same name, but there's no real contest between the two - given the choice between electropop pirates clunking about in dry ice or London laid waste to by psychos, I know what I'd rather see.
Herbert's books the Rats and its sequel Lair are slightly smaller in scale, and even I struggle to see how entertaining a film involving swathes of people being cut down by rampaging rodents would be - even if it had modern day production values and special effects. However, the third in the loose Rats trilogy, Domain, would make an absolute cracker of a film. In it, London (and, one assumes, the rest of the world) is devastated by a nuclear war. The survivors pick their way out of the rubble, only to be greeted by an even worse fate - a big, fuck-off mutated one in the form of thousands of murderous hairy bastards. Post-apocalyptic tales are so in vogue at the moment that I'm really surprised no-one has picked this one up to film. London is also devastated in The Dark, which is basically The Fog again but this time with a big lump of darkness created by satanic nutters. Getting caught in the Dark means instant psychosis - it's been a while but I can remember a terrifying scene with people cowering in a house as the darkness literally presses on the windows - and for some reason, a scene involving a murderous petrol pump attendant. A lump of sentient marauding darkness is the kind of thing that modern special effects do very well - how could it fail?
Later on in his career, Herbert tempered his blood n' guts approach somewhat - but the stories and the shocks are still there in all his books, and I firmly believe that any one of them would make a cracking, and successful, horror thriller. The combination of large scale set pieces, leather-jacketed anti-heroes, recognisably British locations and genuinely spooky asides would be box office gold.
Of course, all this depends on someone with a bit of vision grabbing hold of the rights. Perhaps the only genuinely Herbertish film to come from these islands wasn't based on one of his tales, and was beset by numerous problems both during and after filming, but it's still a delight - and offers some idea of how Herbert's vision could look on the silver screen.
Based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson and directed by Tobe Hooper, Lifeforce (1985) is one of those films that's so off the wall it's quite possible to believe that you didn't watch it at all and it was just a cheese dream. In it a joint US/UK space shuttle mission heads off to the tail of Halley's Comet, inside which they find a gigantic spaceship. Inside this, there's a lot of dead aliens and three glass coffins. And inside those are three very naked human beings in suspended animation.
The astronauts decide to bring the three humanoids back to earth, where they proceed to wreak havoc on the streets of London in a way that only naked space vampires can do. The trio are actually two men and a woman, but the males are pretty much superfluous to the plot - all cameras (for some inexplicable reason) are trained on the bouncy form of their vixenish mate (Matilda May), who insists on disrobing whenever she can. These vampires don't suck your blood - instead they relieve you of your "lifeforce" in a welter of 80s optical effects, turning you into a weird zombie/vampire hybrid who then spreads the problem by sucking the lifeforce out of the nearest untouched human. The group of British character actors on the female vampire's tail follow her off on a wild goose chase to Yorkshire, find out she's not there and then return to London, which by now is awash with zombies. And to really make their day, the spaceship from the beginning of the film is in orbit above the city, gleefully sucking up all the spare lifeforces there are floating around above Big Ben.
If all this sounds confusing, that's because it is. Lifeforce is a classic example of a film that makes absolutely no sense, whether you're watching the hacked-to-pieces original cinema version or one of the myriad extended cuts (some complete with unhelpful voiceover) there are out there. People arrive and disappear for little reason, every so often the action takes place off-screen and requires some exposition that never comes, zombies show a remarkable inconsistency (even by zombie standards), spaceships come and go, sweaty men fall in love with busty extra-terrestrial beauties, and one man thinks he can woo an imperious-looking naked nutcase with the offer of a particularly limp-looking sandwich. But none of this matters, because Lifeforce is, quite simply, ace.
Depending on which version you watch the film is either extremely confusing or just very confusing. If Hooper had a vision for this sprawling, inconsistent mess it was lost
somewhere in amongst the dodgy acting, insanely ambitious scenes and scissor happy editing. But it gives a rough idea of how good a large-scale British sci-fi horror could be if done right, and if anyone out there in British film-making land is looking for some corking source material to really do the genre justice, I really hope they look at getting hold of one of Herbert's books to do it.
James Herbert, your time is now.
Chris Wood
www.britishhorrorfilms.co.uk
