British Horror Rises from the Tomb: In the UK there has been a major resurgence in the production of horror movies in the last few years. Jonathan Rigby, author English Gothic – Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015, chronicles the recent developments of an undying genre.
About the Author: Jonathan Rigby is an English actor and film historian whose publications include: English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (2000), Christopher Lee: The Authorised Screen History (2001), Roxy Music: Both Ends Burning (2005), American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema (2007) and Studies in Terror: Landmarks of Horror Cinema (2011). He is also an Associate Research Fellow of the Cinema and Television History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, and has contributed commentaries to the DVD/Blu-ray releases of a number of horror films. In 2010 he was series consultant on the three-part BBC Four documentary A History of Horror and two years later was programme consultant on the feature-length follow-up, Horror Europa.
Something extraordinary happened in 2002. A corpse whose last really noticeable galvanic twitch occurred in 1987 sprang suddenly into a garish and adrenalin-fuelled afterlife. The corpse was that of the British horror film, the previous twitch had been the sadomasochist fever-dream Hellraiser, and the new blood flowed in copious quantities from such 2002 releases as Dog Soldiers and 28 Days Later.
This was an intriguing development on several levels, but especially so for someone who, just two years before, had published a history of British horror cinema and pronounced the form more or less dead. My book, English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, first came out in April 2000, a time when such a grim conclusion seemed inescapable. The halcyon period of British horror, a roughly twenty-year period that began in the mid-1950s, was long gone, and the flatlining of the genre throughout the 1990s had only been interrupted by such scattered, and to be honest not very exciting, blips as Darklands (1996) and The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998).
Of course, as all genre fans know there are few better ways of wishing something back to life than by pronouncing it dead. After all, in horror there’s always the strong possibility that something might return as an undead. And so it proved with British horror. Like the apparently defunct but remarkably persistent killer in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the home-grown horror film suddenly sat up in the rear of the frame, somewhat out of focus at this early stage but more than willing to give the viewer’s peripheral vision a frisson or two prior to embarking on a fully fledged murder spree. So by the time a second edition of English Gothic came around in February 2002, I was able to make a note of those initial frissons, incorporating quite a number of then-new titles. Later, with the full-on murder spree in full swing, a third edition, launched in July 2004, became the first book to chronicle what by then had coalesced into a full-scale revival.
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Literally hundreds more titles have swarmed forth in the eleven years since, so 2015 seems like a good time for a fourth edition of English Gothic – particularly because the most famous name in British horror, Hammer Film Productions, has been revived in the interim. Indeed, the book’s subtitle has been adjusted to Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015 and a substantial new section has been added entitled ‘Risen from the Grave.’ Adherents of British horror will recognise this as an ironic reference to the 1968 Hammer production Dracula Has Risen From The Grave – ironic because the new strain actually owes very little to its 20th century antecedents.
Back in 1973, David Pirie’s book A Heritage of Horror contained the startling statement that ‘the horror genre … remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America.’ Over twenty years later Pirie’s groundbreaking work was an inspiration in the writing of English Gothic, though I chose to take a different approach, reaching back much further than Pirie had done as well as doing something he obviously couldn’t do – taking the story up to the end of the 20th century. I also highlighted 100 representative films from the boom period in addition to discussing hundreds more in less detail, handling them all in chronological order of production to show exactly how the genre developed.
Tackling a fifteen-years-on new edition, I’ve made several cosmetic adjustments, as well as correcting a few things and adding new information where I can. I’ve also seized on the opportunity to add plenty of new illustrations. Otherwise the book is largely unchanged – until it reaches the big horror revival of the last dozen years or so.
With literally hundreds and hundreds of titles on offer, British horror’s millennial resurrection constitutes a genuine, albeit largely unremarked upon, boom. It was enabled in part by the enormous success in 1999 of two American productions, The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project, very different films that nevertheless rekindled interest in a genre that had been stagnating worldwide. Various forms of government tax relief, plus the establishment of the UK Film Council in 2000, also had an impact, but the crucial factor was the availability of affordable new formats, which proved an enormous boon to aspirant filmmakers. In this new climate there arose a renewed hunger for a genre that had remained buried for too long – and which, just as importantly, required no major names or elaborate production razzmatazz in order to turn a profit.
The hunger for this material soon manifested itself in specific themes that had peculiar relevance to 21st century Britain and to which emerging filmmakers turned again and again. Animal rights and BSE appeared in several films, while paranoid ‘outward bound’ scenarios (i.e., people venturing into the countryside or other countries altogether and paying a terrible price) vied for popularity with the ‘reversion to savagery’ motif – something seen in British horror as far back as Witchfinder General (1968) and finding perhaps its most conspicuous modern expression in Eden Lake (2008). Stories of apocalyptic breakdown and mock-documentaries following the ‘found-footage’ template were prevalent too, along with a peculiar little sub-genre involving people (mostly well-heeled women) venturing into alternate realities. Perhaps most notably, a melding of fantasy and social realism succeeded in attracting some attention from the broadsheet press, with the term ‘hoodie horror’ being slapped on any film that demonised inner-city teenagers.
In a self-aware age, these ‘state of the nation’ themes are generally used quite self-consciously. To take one example, a small film made in Derby in 2012 called Devil's Tower features a nightmarish tower block very pointedly called Albion Court. The poster tag-line, meanwhile, is ‘A Hell of a Place to Call Home’ – a nutshell description, presumably, of Britain itself.
If these films sound depressing and nihilistic – well, quite a few of them are. But several modern classics are already discernible in an overcrowded field. Among the most striking products of the 2000s were 28 Days Later (2002), Shaun of the Dead (2004) and The Descent (2005), which also happened to be the most lucrative releases of that decade, making $83 million, $30 million and $57 million respectively. Other significant titles include Isolation (2015), The Disappeared (2012), Outcast (2010), Harold's Going Stiff (2011), The Borderlands (2013) and Let Me In (2010). The last-named is one of the ‘new’ Hammer films; of the others The Woman in Black (2012) was an expertly crafted thriller that ticked all the boxes for new audiences unfamiliar with traditional haunted house stories, making very nearly $130 million worldwide – a phenomenal figure that, appropriately, put Hammer way out in front, commercially speaking.
There are also plenty of modest little pictures like The Cottage (2008), The Devil's Business (2011), The Sleeping Room (2014), Before Dawn (2013) and Cockneys Vs Zombies (2012) that achieve exactly what they set out to achieve and are very likable to boot. On top of this there’s an absolute avalanche of DIY titles that have come along in recent years, new technology having by now revolutionised, not just production, but also distribution. Amid the slew of DTV (direct to video) and VOD (video on demand) material out there, some genuinely imaginative oddities occasionally crop up, among them The Invisible Atomic Monsters From Mars (which has been resident on the Dailymotion video-sharing website since 2010) and the £250 production Claire (made available on Vimeo in 2013).
Whether this new boom can, in future decades, retain the enduring power of the old one is a question that only time, and future film historians, will be able to resolve. In the meantime the new English Gothic charts a bona-fide phenomenon that, where most mainstream commentary is concerned, has flown almost exclusively under the radar.
Jonathan Rigby