Little Shoppe of Horrors #29 - The Abominable Dr Phibes

Although it has been out for the last six months or so I had not got around to reading this issue of Richard Klemensen’s long running British horror magazine until now – a few days before the next issue, focusing on Hammer’s Vampire Circus, is released.

In reading this issue on the Dr Phibes films I had an epiphany of exactly what it is that I so like about Little Shoppe of Horrors. It is the polyphonic, kaleidoscopic, triangulated approach that Klemensen takes.

Triangulation is a concept that I first encountered in relation to map-reading and orienteering and then in relation to social sciences research. It means that when you have multiple takes or perspectives on something then you are better able to pinpoint exactly what that something is.

Or, to bring it back to a British horror subject of particular relevance this week, that of Peter Cushing’s centenary, it is the way in which just about everyone who ever worked with Cushing indicates how he was a gentleman, a consummate professional, and was heavily affected by the death of his wife Helen.

Or, in relation to the Phibes films, it is how the various authors’ contributions not only cumulatively tell you just about everything you could ever want to know but also give you a sense of where the truth likely lies on those occasions when there are multiple conflicting or mutually reinforcing accounts.

For instance, the tension between Vincent Price and Robert Quarry on the second Phibes film appears to have stemmed less from anything either actor did than certain third parties insinuations that the latter was being groomed as a replacement for the former. Additionally matters of sexual orientation may have played their part, with contributor David Del Valle noting that Quarry was openly gay and Price’s daughter that her father bisexual and closeted.

Away from the Phibes films specifically another thing that emerged from the issue is the importance of the TV series The Avengers for 1960s and 1970s British fantasy cinema. While this had earlier been argued for by Matthew Boot in his study of the British horror cinema Fragments of Fear, it is the detailed discussion of director Robert Fuest’s work as a designer on The Avengers that makes all the difference here.

Another point that several contributors make is how The Abominable Dr Phibes makes little sense when considered in terms of conventional narrative logic (who/what is his mute assistant Vulnavia, for instance), but nevertheless works despite – or indeed because of – this. This in turn leads on nicely to the Vampire Circus issue, insofar as that film is so atypical and fantastique in the Hammer canon.

No Blade of Grass

The film opens with a voice-off indicating that by the early 1970s conditions were ripe for an environmental catastrophe, accompanied by a montage of stock images of pollution, over-population, rampant consumerism and starvation, culminating in the explosion of an atomic bomb.

Similar images will appear throughout, sometimes interpolated in with no direct relation to the narrative. There are also frequent flash-forwards, tinted in red, and flashbacks, with the narrative sometimes chopping back and forward between past and present without clearly indicating so.

The catastrophe, as indicated by the title, stems from a plant disease that attacks grasses – i.e. the key crops for men and livestock alike. First appearing in East Asia, the disease is reported to have spread to Africa and South America, with the current death toll estimated at hundreds of millions in these areas. Social order in India has broken down and starving refugees from China have flooded into Hong Kong.

Not that any of this, as reported on the television playing in an up-market restaurant or club, appears to have had much effect on most of its patrons, a cross section of gluttonous bourgeois grotesques who seem to have wandered in from an Eisenstein or Buñuel film.

Three of those present have a different understanding. One, Roger Burnham (John Hamill), is government scientist party to information that the media dare not reveal. The second, his friend John Custance (Nigel Davenport), is an architect and ex-military man. The third, John’s brother David (Patrick Holt), owns a farm in the Lake District.

David advises John that he and his family should leave London as soon as possible and head for his farm. David says Roger can come along as well, in case they need someone for the pot – a joke whose reality is then indicated by news reports of cannibalism in some parts of the world.

With cities of over 300,000 people about to be sealed off and martial law imposed, along with rumours that there is only a week’s supply of food remaining, John and Roger decide to get out of London.

There’s a nice sequence of match edits around this point, as filmmaker Cornel Wilde cuts from John and Roger’s shocked “Jesus!” and “Christ!” to the image of John’s son Davey at his public school, a choir singing “Was born for thee...” on the soundtrack. Davey then coughs, his cough being taken up by a man on TV who is interviewing government ecologist Sir Charles Brenner (Burnham’s boss) about recent developments.

It seems the Chinese government has nerve gassed 300 million of its own people. Brenner accepts this action as rational in the circumstances, being “necessary for survival”. He then predictably evades the question of whether similar measures would be countenanced for the UK.

The group barely manage to get out of London after getting caught up in a confrontation between a hungry mob and the police – a scene whose images of the former using petrol bombs and the latter teargas and rifles perhaps had a special resonance for British audiences of the time in relation to the Northern Ireland “Troubles”.

The refugees go to pick up Davey and agree to take his friend ‘Spooks’ with them. Their next task is to get some guns and ammunition from a gunshop owner Custance knows, Mr Sturdevant. Sturdevant trusts the authorities and refuses to hand over the weapons, even when Custance explains how things are only going to get worse. Custance and Burnham move to take the guns, only to find themselves covered by Sturdevant’s assistant, Pirrie. Pirrie proves more amenable to Custen’s arguments, shoots his erstwhile employer and throws in his lot with the refugees.

Their next encounter is a roadblock manned by soldiers, whom they find themselves forced to kill:

Ann Custance: “There was no other way, was there darling?”
John: “No”

Clara Pirrie: “Why did you do all the shooting?”
Pirrie: “I had to”

The violence and disorder continue to escalate as the group continue on their way towards David’s farm, with encounters including a marauding biker gang, who rape the Custance’ 16 year old daughter Mary (Lynne Frederick); a rural posse who take their food, vehicles and weapons; a Farmer Palmer type who refuses them food, with predictable consequences; another group of refugees with a pig-headed self-appointed leader, and soldiers who mutiny against their commanding officer. Then, by the time the farm has been reached brother is pitted against brother...

Though released after George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead this survivalist horror can also be seen as a follow-up to director-producer-co-screenwriter Wilde’s own The Naked Prey. In that film a group of white hunters in Africa anger the native population – this, of course, a staple theme of the cannibal film – and are killed with the exception of one of their number, who is then allowed to fight for his life in a Most Dangerous Game type man-hunt.

For the main theme of the film, that of the narrow boundary between modern/civilised and primitive/savage man is one that recurs here and which can also be seen in a number of films of the time, including Straw Dogs, Deliverance, Deep River Savages, Last Cannibal World, and The Hills Have Eyes.

A significant difference between No Blade of Grass is the way it approaches the issue of the other. For in No Blade of Grass there is not an identifiable 'other' against which 'we', via our on-screen representatives, are positioned. Rather, there is the rapid emergence of a state of war of all against all, as per Hobbes or Bataille, where the enemy is (or was) us:

Ann: What kind of people are you?
Leader of posse who rob them: Same kind of people you are, ma’am.

As such, the main reason we identify with the protagonists is more that it is their story we are following rather than their being particularly morally superior to their antagonists, the exceptions being the rapist bikers and the establishment elites.

This scene is also notable for seeing Ann, who had previously questioned the necessity for violence, taking Pirrie’s rifle and cold-bloodedly shooting a wounded biker as he pleads for mercy.

One perceptive IMDB commentator has suggested that there are some intriguing parallels between No Blade of Grass’s main quest narrative, of the search for the promised land, and the Old Testament story of Exodus, with John and Pirrie the Moses and Joshua figures respectively.

While sometimes clunky in its execution, No Blade of Grass remains worth a look for its chilling and plausible portrayal of apocalypse. For ordinary people like us, driven to extremes, are ultimately more terrifying than flesh-eating animated corpses or humans effectively zombified by an implausible rage virus...

The Shrieking Sixties: British Horror Films 1960-1969

Edited by Darrell Buxton of Pass the Marmalade, this new volume from Midnight Marquee is a comprehensive guide to British horror films of the 1960s.

The bulk of the 220-page book is comprised of year by year listings of titles, each of which gets one or two detailed reviews.



Horror is defined in broad terms, such that some science-fiction and fantasy films like Dr Who and the Daleks and Jason and the Argonauts are included, along with certain sui generis entries including Girly and The War Game.

British horror is defined in terms of being a UK production with the consequence that the likes of Jess Franco’s films for Harry Alan Towers are included whereas Michael Reeves debut The She Beast is not.

An appendix lists numerous problematic or borderline titles.

Although the usual suspects from Hammer, Amicus and Tigon are well represented, the real strength of the book lies in bringing less well-known films and filmmakers to light.

Some names and titles that are prominent in this regard are Vernon Sewell, with House of Mystery, The Man in the Back Seat and Strongroom; Robert Hartford-Davis, with The Black Torment, Corruption and Incense for the Damned and an abortive Titus Andronicus; the self-explanatory pre-Reptile The Snake Woman; the British Sign Language film The Return of Dracula, and the apparently woeful The Vulture.

This aspect is also to the fore in the appendix of short films, which includes early entries from the likes of Michael Armstrong, the odd Harrison Marks skin-flick and some even more obscure sex films.

The reviews are informative and manage to raise some interesting points without getting bogged down in over-analysis. So, for example, a queer subtext to Gorgo is brought out, without ignoring the fact that it is first and foremost a monster movie.

In his introduction, Buxton identifies a number of inspirations and models – Fragments of Fear, English Gothic, Ten Years of Terror and A Heritage of Horror. His book can stand tall in this company and is a must read for fans of British horror cinema.

Corruption / Laser Killer

[Note that this review contains spoilers]

After his fiance Linda Nolan (Sue Lloyd), a model, suffers horrible facial burns in an accident, respected surgeon Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) vows to restore her beauty.


The generation gap

This leads him to study Ancient Egyptian texts, which he uses in conjunction with pituitary glands and a laser to effect a remarkable transformation.


Linda after the accident, but before the operation

Its effectiveness proves transitory, however, prompting John into a succession of murders in a bid to meet Linda’s ever more desperate demands...

Scripted by John and Derek Ford and directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, this 1968 British horror obscurity is best known today for presenting Peter Cushing in some of the most extreme situations of his career.

But unlike Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, where Cushing, co-star Veronica Carlson and director Terence Fisher were taken by surprise by Hammer boss James Carreras’s demand they film a rape scene to spice the film up, we may surmise that Cushing knew from the outset what he was letting himself in for.

The script, after all, was by Donald and Derek Ford. Admittedly, the latter hadn’t yet sunk to the levels of the likes of the softcore Sexplorer and hardcore Sex Express AKA Diversions. Nonetheless, a filmography that had already included the likes of Primitive London and The Yellow Teddy Bears hardly pointed to the likelihood of Corruption being restrained, tasteful, well-made horror in the by then classic (if also thereby arguably aging) Fisher manner.

Moreover, the writers obvious source of inspiration was Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, a film whose unflinchingly rendered real life surgical horrors made the Hammer Frankenstein films look tame by comparison.

As such, I’m tempted to think that there is a hint of Cushing’s wariness coming through in the scene in which Sir John wanders through Soho at night looking for a likely victim. For, rather than being shown on location, we get what look like studio shots of Cushing superimposed over stock or second unit footage.




Cushing superimposed over Nudist Paradise at the Jacey

An uncut version of the film, which included Sir John’s picking up and killing a prostitute, whose head he takes, would probably help clear things up here.

The superimposition is also, however, very much of a piece with Robert Hartford-Davis’s showy direction, in which rack focus, hand-held camera, distorting lenses, shock zooms and rapid-fire editing are the order of the day in a Repulsion / Blow-Up / The Sorcerers type manner.


Cushing in full-on maniac mode

As the synopsis suggest, the story is replete with non-sequiturs: Where did the Egyptians learn about laser beams and the endocrine system, exactly?!

It also suffers from inconsistent characterisation: One minute Linda is expressing horror that John has experimented upon a guinea pig, the next encouraging him to cold-bloodedly murder the seeming innocent who has wandered into their orbit.

In retrospect, however, it all makes sense. The clue here is in the ending, in which it is suggested that most of what we have just seen, from the point of Linda’s injury onwards, has taken place in Sir John’s head.

Yes, it’s a projection of his subconscious...

If this seems fanciful, an excuse for weak writing, consider the aforementioned Diversions: While that film explicitly presents its vignettes as (sexual) fantasies, we are surprised at the end to learn that, rather than being a convicted prisoner she is in fact one of the police officers escorting the prisoner.

Put another way, there is a consistency of theme here, of Derek Ford looking to challenge middle-class respectability in his images.

More coincidentally, there are also thematic links to Fisher’s pre-Frankenstein film The Stolen Face, in which a surgeon believes a young woman’s malignancy is down to her facial deformity, cures her and then discovers that her ugliness was more a manifestation of an evil soul, with this in turn prefiguring Frankenstein Created Woman’s Christina.

All told, then, Corruption is not a good film in and of itself, but it is one that is certainly of interest to the British trash fan for various reasons.

X Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker

Over recent years Reynolds and Hearn has established itself as one of the leading publishers on cult British cinema, with volumes such as Jonathan Rigby’s self-explanatory English Gothic and Simon Sheridan’s Keeping the British End Up, about the British sex film, and Come Play with Me, a biography of perhaps its biggest star, Mary Millington, vital additions to the bookshelves of anyone interested in the subject.

This latest volume, co-authored by Stanley Long and Sheridan, takes a different approach from the latter’s previous works on the British sexploitation film in that it’s the former’s memoirs of working in the low-budget exploitation end of the British film industry from the 1950s to the 1980s. As such its gives a more direct and personal take on things, presenting a valuable counterpoint to the drier chronological and genre based account presented in its predecessor.



The two accounts complement one another to a large degree, with Long’s discussions of such industry figures as Derek Ford, a former film-making partner who increasingly merged business and pleasure by moving into illegal hardcore territory, according with Sheridan’s previous work.

But they also show the potential pitfalls in taking a genre centred approach when addressing the work of an outfit like Compton / Tigon and a producer-director-cinematographer-distributor-whatever figure like Long.

As producers, Compton / Tigon dabbled in horror and (s)exploitation; as Long comments they were the two genres that for a time more or less guaranteed a profit, though he admits that horror wasn't really his thing.

As a cinematographer Long worked on Repulsion, where he stood in for the credited Gilbert Taylor after shooting overran its schedule, and The Sorcerers, where he recalls Michael Reeves’s intensity and apparent blood kink.

In his capacity as a pilot, Long also helped Polanski scout locations for Cul de sac; talk about a jack of all trades.

Though Long respected Polanski and Reeves, he is also forthright about the difference between his own no-nonsense approach to the business of film-making and the creative excesses of such more artistically inclined figures, that their imaginations could outstrip the means at their disposal.

Long has far less time for the snobbish critics along with Mary Whitehouse and other moral entrepreneurs of the day, viewing the former as out of touch with the ordinary audience member who just wanted to be entertained and the latter as little more than a canny self-publicist. On both counts, it’s hard to disagree.

The BBFC come across a bit better, particularly John Trevelyan, with Long acknowledging the position they were caught in between film-makers keen to push the boundaries forward and the Whitehouses who wanted them pushed back to some pre-permissive golden age.

Long is deservedly proud of his own accomplishments, giving work to actors and technicians who would otherwise have been unemployed and pleasure to his target audience, and bringing in his films on time and on budget.

Informative, entertaining and a pleasure to read, X Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the shadow / unofficial history of the British cinema, of the films audiences really went to see rather than the ones the critics favoured.

Dr Blood's Coffin

Or another film this month to link to Konga.

The first, and most obvious, point of connection is that we have yet another arrogant mad, bad and dangerous to know scientist meddling in things really best left alone, in this case the unfortunately named Dr Blood (Kieran Moore).

The second, and less obvious, is that the other monster – or the monster-as-victim rather than the real monster – in each film is played by Paul Stockman, who filled the ape suit there and is here buried beneath a layer of zombie-type.

The story begins with Dr Peter Blood getting thrown out of the prestigious Vienna medical school after he caught carrying out some organ transplantation experiments, of the sort that definitely wouldn’t pass an ethics board by his mentor, Professor Luckman (Paul Hardtmuth).

Returning home to the sleepy Cornish village of Port Carron, where his father, Dr Ian Blood, is the local GP, Dr Blood junior secretly sets up a laboratory in some abandoned mines nearby and starts looking for new experimental subjects and material amongst the local populace; in Peter’s eyes anyone inferior to himself and other geniuses is fair game.



He also finds time to start romancing the pretty and recently widowed Nurse Linda Parker (Hazel Court), [spoiler alert] who doesn’t realize that Peter has been experimenting with her deceased husband and would like to eventually re-introduce them to one another… [/spoiler alert]

Obviously inspired by Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein, in which actors Hardtmuth and Court appeared as brain donor and love interest respectively, Dr Blood’s Coffin is nevertheless distinctive enough in various ways to be of interest for the British horror fan.

Baron Frankenstein is someone whose experiments are usually sound but are compromised by the uncomprehending, traditional 19th century society around him.

Dr Blood is someone who talks a good game, whose experiments failing because of his own inadequacies, with modern society comprehending his experiments and their Nazi heritage all too well.

Related to such distinctions, one of the more unusual aspects of the film is its use of colour. As a number of commentators have argued, British horror films of the late 1950s and early 1960s often exhibited a divide here that could not be explained purely on budgetary or aesthetic grounds.

Contemporary-set films often used black and white whereas their historically set counterparts used colour. It's been argued that the combination of colour and the contemporary was too close to home, or the lived reality of the audience and that this helps explain, for example, the acceptance of Hammer's early psycho thrillers compared to the rejection of Peeping Tom.

While there's probably more to it than this, insofar as this period saw a profound change in the semiotics of colour and black and white film, with the previously established fantasy / spectacle and reality / documentary connotations undergoing something of a reversal, it is a useful starting point for a more developed year-by-year analysis of the contemporary critical responses to individual texts.

Another intertextual point is the setting, with its affinities with the later Hammer Plague of the Zombies. Ironically, however, Peter's use of curare to induce a coma state indistinguisable from death, perhaps comes closer to the origins of the voodoo zombie than the black magic using Squire Hamilton. Both, however, clearly point to a return of the (colonial or foreign) repressed, of bad things being brought back to England from abroad.

Nic Roeg was camera operator, while Hammer men Les Bowie, Scott MacGregor and Philip Martell performed FX, production design and conductor duties respectively; the score itself, by Buxton Orr, is pretty good.

Invitation to Hell / The Last Night

When I was offered a promo DVD of Invitation to Hell and The Last Night I was intrigued: Two British horror films I had never even heard of? While I would not claim to be an absolute completist as far as the form is concerned, nor to have the degree of knowledge of Darrell Buxton, whose excellent Pass The Marmalade site seeks to document every horror film ever made in Britain, I have seen my fair share of obscure stuff over the years.

Well, as it turns out, the two films contained on the DVD are obscure on account of the simple fact that they are not very good. While I don’t want to be too harsh, inasmuch as it is often something of an achievement to even make a film, the need to inform the potential consumer emerges as paramount.

The thing that swayed my decision was the age and nature of the films. It’s not just their obvious lack of budget, but also that they were made in 1983 and are too long to be short film calling cards and too short to be independently made features: We are emphatically not talking about Sam Raimi’s Within the Woods as show-reel and enabler for The Evil Dead.

Rather, what have are two of the type of film which emerged in the UK in the wake of the home video boom of the early 1980s and which then just as quickly disappeared with the passing of the Video Recordings Act and the requirement for all videos to carry a BBFC certificate.

The hunger for product circa 1981-84 meant just about anything could be put onto home video and return a profit. Away from big name releases, at the time few and far between because the major studios regarded video as a threat rather than an opportunity, the consumer was often renting a pig in a poke. And, indeed, checking on the UK pre-cert website’s database, we find that the two films were in fact released by fly-by-night outfit Scorpio Video.

Then, with the post-VRA need to pay a certification fee of a few hundred pounds for a work that might well need cuts before it could be granted a certificate, and which may only have barely made back its certification fee, if that, made such releases uneconomical.

As films which lack not only ability but also ambition - there is no sense of whichever film came second building on whichever came first - it should be little surprise that their scenarios are so derivative.

Invitation to Hell is part Virgin Witch, part The Evil Dead, as a virginal female student is invited to a fancy dress party in a haunted house now owned by some friends; taken to a coven; is drugged; wakes up with mysterious marks upon her body Rosemary’s Baby style, and is then told by her apologetic friends that she’s to be sacrificed to Satan.

The Last Night is part Theatre of Death, part The Flesh and Blood Show, part (Soavi’s) Stage Fright, as the last performance of a convoluted murder-mystery play by a provincial amateur theatre company is visited by a couple of escaped killers.

The resultant self-referential aspect, that we’re watching a bad play within a bad film, is aesthetically disastrous, as we’re treated to one-note performances that have the same lack of convinction in both the ‘fiction’ and the ‘reality’. Moreover, we also see that director Michael J. Murphy has little grasp of either theatrical or cinematic technique.

It’s telling here that Scorpio Video’s other release at this time was notorious New York trash film and off-off Broadway director Andy Milligan's Blood Rites. For, remarkable as it may seem, Murphy actually makes Milligan look accomplished by comparison.

Note should be made of the quality of the transfers, or lack thereof: I have downloaded AVI’s of Greek and Finnish pre-cert videos that look better than the transfers here.

In sum, I can think of few situations in which you would want to shell out on Invitation to Hell and The Last Night. One is that you are a British horror completist with a fondness for pre-cert marginalia. Another is that you are an aspiring film-maker and want something to remind you of what not to do. Another is for bad film bragging rights over those who've 'only' seen a Don't Open till Christmas or Death Shock.

Salvage - Edinburgh International Film Festival review

As someone who grew up watching Hammer horror and who regretted that new British horror films were few and far between at the time, I never thought I’d find myself responding to a film like Salvage in a “what, another one?” kind of way.

Put it down to over-familiarity with the form, a sense of having seen it all long before, and done better.

Or, to itemise, if you’ve seen some or most of The Birds, Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies, Shivers, 28 Days Later, [Rec] and Diary of the Dead, you’ll find nothing new here.

We begin with a scene of suggested violence as a paperboy encounters something in the trees behind an ordinary suburban house. Santa and snowman decorations outside most of the houses on his route – significantly excluding the one the paperboy visited just before being offed; the one belonging to the brown skinned family – establish the season.

Following this we get a slice of social realist drama as a dad takes his reluctant teenage daughter, Jodie, to spend Christmas with her mother, during which they happen to catch a part of a radio broadcast about a metal container having been washed up on a nearby beach. It’s hardly the most subtle piece of information planting, but is at least generically conventional if we think of the likes of Night of the Living Dead’s returning space probe and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s reports of grave-robbing.

After being deposited Jodie accidentally catches her mother, Beth, having sex with a man and, already not being in the best of moods, responds predictably by running over to a neighbour’s house. Mum follows and attempts, without success, to explain things to her daughter.

Just when you start to wonder what is happening horror-wise – although the mise en scene is already suitably edgy, with good use being made of the widescreen space – all hell breaks loose as a group of soldiers in black combat gear appear, shoot the aforementioned brown-skinned neighbour, Mr Sharma, after he advances on them with a knife, and force everyone else back indoors at gunpoint.

A bit of social comment is then inserted as Beth’s one-night stand, Kieran, speculates that Mr Sharma must have been a terrorist, despite her remarking, in a more reasoned fashion, that he is a Hindu (i.e. the darker skinned non-terrorist, as unofficial ‘swarthology’ discourse might have it) rather than a Muslim (i.e. the darker skinned potential terrorist).

Not, however, that Beth is a perfect model of calm responses in other ways as, with all communications suspiciously closed off, she desperately tries to contact her daughter in the house opposite...

The problem I had with Salvage at this point was it really had nowhere left to go. It doesn’t get more intense but rather just continues at the same would-be fever pitch for the next hour or so, continuing to rely on the same well-worn techniques – the sudden noise, the sudden cut, the sudden appearance in the frame etc. It also has a monster which, when eventually revealed, is not that impressive, nor terribly convincingly explained away.

As ‘bad’ mother Beth Neve McIntosh is suitable frenetic, with the fact that the breakdown of her marriage was not due to alcoholism, drugs or infidelity – each of which the opening moments seems to invite us to presume – but that she put her legal career first, a nice subversion of expectation. But, at the same time, the strong female / weak male reversal of pre-feminist horror film has arguably become a new cliché in these post-feminist times.

Likewise, if the Muslim = Arab = terrorist equation has become a cliché in Hollywood productions, a more politically correct counter-treatment has become just as much of a norm in low-budgeted, somewhat more engaged British productions. They are, one suspects, fearful of offending the liberal establishment and its sensibilities.

Whereas, for example, neo-Nazi David Copeland’s bombing campaign in Soho inspired 2001’s Gas Attack, we’re still waiting for a similar treatment of Finsbury Park Mosque and the July 7 bombings.

Two real horrors thus emerge. First, British horror directors are playing it too safe at present. Second, anything they do that is grounded in reality – i.e. a 28 Days Later or Salvage rather than a Dog Soldiers – cannot match up to the horror of the reality we are actually in.

“It’s only a movie,” indeed...