HITS FROM THE ARCHIVE
Masterpieces of 70s TV Horror: 'Baby' from Nigel Kneale's Beasts
More
often than not, it's a losing game when the adult fan of
horror-themed films and television tries to recapture childhood thrills.
Images and concepts that were once deeply impressive are now mundane. Special
effects or monster designs that a kid will buy into completely are an
unconvincing rip-off to the grown-up who tries to rediscover their frisson.
Rarely, a jewel with staying power can be found amongst the dross,
rising above technical limitations or mediocre performances.
During a
recent YouTube search for BBC adaptations of M. R. James stories, I stumbled
across a video package someone's put together of scenes from classic 70s
British TV horror. At the end of the montage is the terrifying,
culminating image of a teleplay that disturbed me profoundly when I first
encountered it as an eight-year-old. For years, unaware of the name of the
program or its author, this scene would sometimes come to mind like a
beacon of possibility after viewing horror fare that failed to satisfy.
The teleplay is called 'Baby', produced in 1976 as part of a series of Nigel
Kneale stories called Beast.
Kneale
remains one of the most revered of British screenwriters and authored the
esteemed Quatermass quartet of science fiction television programs. The film
based on the Quatermass and the Pit series made by Roy Ward Baker for Hammer
Films in 1967 fits the categorisation outlined above perfectly; the special
effects are a bit ropey, the acting can be a bit off the mark, but there's an
enduring philosophical gravity in its premise, a compelling atmosphere in the
story's structure and execution. On recent re-acquaintance, 'Baby' has lost
very little of the power it had for me as a youngster. It's a reminder of a
time when creators of terror for the small screen, often with limited budgets,
relied on their faith in a good story rather than CGI effects and flashy
editing (a tendency that sometimes spoils recent, more ostensibly professional
television productions like American Horror Story).
Beasts was
a six-part horror anthology with a double meaning in its title: each story has
a particular creature as its focus, but they're also metaphorical examinations
of man's bestial nature, our capacity for the inhumane. 'What Big Eyes' has an
insane amateur scientist attempt to reveal the truth contained in legends about
lycanthropy, but it also deals with a father's psychological cruelty towards
his daughter. 'The Dummy' tracks a downtrodden actor's descent into madness and
ultimate identification with the monster he plays in exploitation films. On one
level, these televisual plays work fine as psychological dramas rather than
strictly genre-based pieces. There are two episodes in the series that are pure
horror stories - 'During Barty's Party', in which a rat invasion occurs that is
all the more terrifying for being unseen, and 'Baby' which deals with pregnancy
and the occult.
'Baby'
is a ghost story in the M. R. James mould, but there's also some parallels with
American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's 'Dreams in the Witch House'.
Interestingly, Kneale said he'd never read Lovecraft - he came up with his own
distinctly British version of cosmic horror through the influences of James,
H.G. Wells and the culture of myth and superstition in his native Isle of Man.
A Ramsey Campbell short story of the same name was published in 1976, the same
year Beasts was aired, but originally written two years
earlier. Campbell's 'Baby' also centres on the theme of the witch's familiar,
but it's an urban pulp shocker in the EC Comics tradition, set in his native
Liverpool. Kneale's 'Baby' draws in a Jamesian fashion on the occult eeriness
of the English countryside.
Campbell
and James are masters of terror glimpsed from the corner of the eye and, to use
a term Campbell uses for what he admires in the best of Lovecraft's work, the
'orchestration of effect' through the accumulation of oblique, suggestive
detail. The 'glancing phrase of fear', to quote Campbell again, is a
phenomenological approach to horror, capable of greater psychological resonance
than the sensational tactics of the jump scare and gore: along with the
apparitions and unearthly sensations, there are also queasy insights into
the obscure workings of our own brains. The Kneale story features a young
pregnant woman who, like the Mia Farrow character in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's
Baby, may be suffering from a severe case of prepartum paranoia or
undergoing a genuine encounter with the occult. Simple, unadorned camerawork
and editing create the feel of real time pacing despite frequent
transitions; this Bazinian sense of reality in John Nelson Burton's
direction, combined with the ambiguous nature of the story, produces a
distinctly unnerving atmosphere.
Peter
Gilkes (Simon MacCorkindale) wants to contribute his veterinary skills
somewhere he can be of real benefit rather than treating pampered city pets, so
he and pregnant wife Jo (Jane Wymark) have moved to the country. An
earthen pot containing a mummified animal is discovered during the
renovation of their old cottage. Peter can't work out what the creature is and
neither can his partner Dick Pummery (T.P. McKenna) or the two workers who are
carrying out the renovations, Stan Biddick (Norman Jones) and Arthur Grace
(Mark Dignam). It's described variously as a piglet, a cat, a lamb with claws
and a monkey, but all agree it's a deviation from natural processes of
conception and birth. Peter suggests some random farmyard inter-breeding was
involved. It looks to him as though the thing was never actually born.
Jo's
immediate maternal uneasiness is heightened when Arthur, a local with knowledge
of ancient lore, posits that the creature was brought into being to harness
occult energies by "someone wise in them powers." He suggests its
purpose would have likely have been harmful. Even more alarmingly to Jo, he's
certain it would have had to have been suckled by a human. Through
Dick, the couple learns the last childless owners of the house failed
to establish a dog breeding business. In fact, no animals have been born in the
surrounding land for generations, an anomaly the two vets put down to
persistent outbreaks of contagious abortion.
Like
the haunted meadow in Clark Ashton Smith's story 'Genius Loci', the environment
around the farmhouse seems to be under the influence of something
inimical. Jo's cat flees from the house as soon as it's brought into it.
When she tries to locate her pet in a nearby forest, Jo, in turn, flees from a
shadow that comes spreading across a pond towards her. It moves in a way
suggestive of a bird in flight over its prey, but without any definite form or
origin; a disembodied cloak of darkness that emerges out of the surrounding
landscape. It's probably the most basic optical effect, and an eerie evocation
of cosmic power, as though some patch of interstellar space, some zone of
entropic negation, had been tethered by magic and made to crawl along the
forest floor. The shadow's accompanied by a sound like a dove's coo, but more
threatening and unreal, simultaneously maternal and malevolent. Jo starts
hearing this sound around the house and sees other unreal phenomena - a rocking
chair moving by itself, the outline of a black cloaked figure disappearing
around a corner.
Full
disclosure must be made that the special effects in the climax have all the
limitations of the age - the important thing is, it doesn't matter. What has
been built up in terms of suspense, suggestion, an impression of inescapable
doom, is so powerful that you don't perceive the effect. Your mind goes
straight to what is being represented: the embodiment of alien wrongness, of
unholy perversion. In 'My Roots Exhumed', a chapter in S. T. Joshi's 2001
study, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction, Campbell has
written about the impression a viewing of the cover of the November 1952
edition of Weird Tales in a newsagent's window made on him as
a seven-year-old (and on his subsequent career as a writer). Upon finally
acquiring the edition a decade later, he realised the surreal vision he thought
he had seen was largely a product of his imagination. The actual illustration
was much more conventional; his subconscious had acted out of some transformative
urge for the other-worldly. Seeing the climax of 'Baby' again recently made me
realise that something similar had happened to me with this program. What's
gratifying is that my invention was still there in a sense, superimposed on the
prosaic. I was able to appreciate once again how effective the
teleplay was in creating a sense of horrified anticipation. My youthful
imagination was jolted into perceiving something more purely nightmarish than what was
actually there on the screen.
The story's
strength also overcomes slightly substandard acting. Simon MacCorkindale,
in particular, is overly forceful in his performance, but youthful brashness is
in a way apposite for the arrogance and insensitivity of the character. At
least John Cassavettes' Guy in Rosemary's Baby had the sense
and the skill as an actor to pretend to be caring towards his wife. Peter
Gilkes comes across as particularly self-obsessed and pig headed. He rarely
expresses any real warmth towards Jo unless there's some intersection between
his interests and hers. This marriage is very unstable and the young woman has
already experienced one miscarriage; the strained domesticity accentuates
viewer unease. Jane Wymark's acting is also a little green and nervous as the
pregnant woman, but this actually helps the performance in a way - we feel the
vulnerability in the character and sympathise with her growing fear and
isolation. Wymark's performance may not be in Farrow's league, but there are
compensating character strengths - Jo Gilkes is feistier and more liberated
than Rosemary Woodhouse - and they share a similar quality of doomed, youthful
beauty. Mark Dignam is good as old Arthur, his vague intimations of
ancient sorcery a source of frustration for Jo who, like one of Campbell's
unfortunate heroines, is left trying to sort truth from apocrypha in his rural
wisdom.
All
the really great authors of horror fiction that deal with the occult - James,
Campbell, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen -
are concerned with the perennial human questions of evil and power. Somewhere
in the past, some person (or what was once a person) has sold his or her soul
for access to abominable energies, the repercussions of this act reaching
ineluctably into the present. Kneale, who at his best can definitely be counted
in the aforementioned literary lineage, manages to compress themes that he had
already dealt with on a grand scale in the Quatermass stories in a short form
that is all the more potent for its simplicity. They play out in 'Baby' against
an aural background of hypnotic quietude - one of the great strengths of the
teleplay is the complete absence of music from opening to closing credits.
There are no manipulative cues keeping us alert. There's just the oppressive
silence of a rural environment, punctuated by the cawing of birds that may well
be malign psychopomps.
The
dreamlike Jamesian approach to the ghost story, where the supernatural and the
everyday traverse with alarming inevitability, has parallels with the style of
Japanese horror films, particularly Hideo Nakata's Ringu and Dark
Water. The J-Horror sub-genre has in turn influenced some of the
better recent works of American horror cinema. Scott Derrickson's Sinister has
an element of gore, but it resides far more in suggestion than the redundant
repulsiveness of torture porn. A sustained atmosphere of occult evil lingers in
the viewer's mind with greater effect than blunt visceral strategy.
'Baby' is a powerful exemplar of this tradition of subtle, insinuated fear and
it's one of the finest works of television horror.
Text:
(C) JONATHON KROMKA 2013. All rights reserved.
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