Supernatural Tales

A new paperback (and ebook) from Telos brings us fourteen tales set in a part of the world I know well, as I live not far south of the border. Editor Paul Finch has cemented his reputation as an assured and inspiring creator of regional anthologies. As well as the stories he offers a series of non-fiction items on various legends and real-life horrors, so I'm reading them one at a time too. The first is 'Bastions of Dread', which looks at some bloody shenanigans that took place at lowland castles.  It's nice to see some familiar names from ST here. Paul Finch himself, of course, plus Reggie Oliver, Tracy Fahey, and Steve Duffy. But most of the contributors are unfamiliar to me. First up is 'The Moss-Trooper' by M.W. Craven, set in a pub at Gretna, right on the border. Gretna is of course famed for eloping couples being married by the village blacksmith. But the tale told here is about as grim as it gets, a reminder of just how low humanity can sink in times of p...

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee star in a non-Hammer horror film about a huge monster that is the source of primal evil. Columbia pictures produced this mini-classic, which was directed by veteran British actor Freddie Francis. It's a bonkers story by any standard, with Cushing as the idealistic but careless boffin who unearths a giant skeleton in the East Indies. This being, the natives say, should not have been unearthed because it is very, very evil indeed... So of course he brings it back to his English country home for further analysis. It turns out that the creature can be restored to full fleshy awfulness by simply adding water - it's dehydrated evil! Cushing discovers this by starting to clean a finger then lopping it off - a move that has unfortunately consequences later.  Meanwhile Lee, as Cushing's nasty brother, is keen to get the credit for the discovery himself and finds this easier to achieve as things get rather weird. Lorna Heilbron co-stars as Cushing...

h/t Ro Pardoe

On YouTube you can find a lot of old ABC Movies of the Week, dating from the early Seventies. I've already mentioned Trilogy of Terror, but there's also The Cat Creature (1973), scripted by none other than the great Robert Block of Psycho fame. Bloch also wrote for The Twilight Zone and early Star Trek, so he had good TV chops. What's more, The Cat Creature is clearly a love letter to all those classic Hollywood movies in the Egyptian Gothic school, complete with a mummy, an amulet, and a cat goddess cult. 

 Available on the BBC iPlayer if you can access it, this wartime tale of strange forces and stifled passions in a Caribbean island has worn well.  Canadian nurse Betsy (Frances Dee - her character has no surname) leaves a chilly Toronto to care for the wife of British sugar planter Tom Holland (Paul Conway). She finds that Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon) is in a kind of trance, and Holland's boozy American half-brother Wesley Rand blames Tom for this. A love triangle and voodoo shenanigans emerge in parallel as Betsy falls for Tom. There's some interesting stuff about the medical science of the day, including an attempt to cure Jessica with shock treatment involving of a diabetic coma. But in the end, it is the drums in the night that prevail... Any film of this period with a large cast of black extras involved in the occult might be expected to have a lot of cringe-making moments. But in fact the script by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray is almost 'woke' in its sympathy...

In 1922 M.R. James published a collection of a dozen 'true' medieval ghost stories collected by Cistercian monks at a Yorkshire Abbey. You can read them online in translation here . 'What I write is a great marvel. It is said that a certain woman laid hold of a ghost and carried him on her back into a certain house in presence of some men, one of whom reported that he saw the hands of the woman sink deeply into the flesh of the ghost as though the flesh were rotten and not solid but phantom flesh.'