Bookended by Tom Baker's recitation of the above extract from Coleridge's masterpiece this fifth series episode of the ITV series 'Dramarama' with it's folk horror aura would have been well at home in it's seminal 'Spooky' series.
Young Peter Ibbotson is dropped off for the day on Romney Marsh - the setting for Russell Thorndike's 'Doctor Syn' books and numerous E.F. Benson stories - where he roams the area taking Polaroid photos while, all the time, being followed by a hooded figure.
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'Moviedrome' ran, intermittently, on BBC2 from May 1988 to June 2000. The format was simple, hosts Alex Cox (series 1-7) and Mark Cousins (series 8-12) introduced a 'cult movie', or two, of the sort that were almost never shown on British TV and, in those halcyon years, long before the arrival of the internet, were often unheard of by those of us growing up in more remote parts of the country, with little or no access to any sort of 'arts' cinema, and it quickly became a Sunday night staple for my circle of friends, with each film taped and dissected over the following week.
The film below is an affectionate celebration of the series made in 2025 by the BFI and featuring contributions from Cox, series creator Nick Freand Jones and fans Samira Ahmed and Stewart Lee.
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The final episode of series 2 of the children's spooky anthology show Shadows, written by Ewart Alexander - who also wrote episodes in series one, 'After School', and three, 'Eleven O'Clock' - is a bit of a strange one.
George (Julia Lewis) is obsessed with the historical figures she's postered her room with and lost in the mosaic she's creating in the garage, while her brother Steve is freaked out by the grecian urn at the bottom of the stairs that has seemingly taken on a life of it's own, is hearing voices, being attacked by pictures of Napoleon and generally struggling to cope with life.
There's a real Sapphire and Steel vibe to the whole thing and a fabulous hissing, burbling, throbbing soundtrack. It's fantastically odd, makes very little sense and is all the better for it.
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Some 13 years after releasing 'Tomorrow's Harvest' Boards of Canada return with an album that reflects our times whilst retaining the distinct sense of otherness that has characterised their work.
'Inferno' is suffused with religious imagery. Beyond it's opening triumphant fanfare, it's first half is bathed in the acid-soaked hallucinatory rapture of the apocalyptic evangelist, it's one moment of light coming in the form of a mutated Hari Krishna chant - the slightly heavy-handed 'Naraka - that hints at the more transcendent moments to come.
In it's latter half the duo offer a more melancholic perspective, the tension softened by a hopeful optimism that seems to find almost Blakean visions of salvation as 'All Reason Departs' and 'You Retreat In Time and Space'.
After so long away it was always gong to be take a bold move by the brothers to land their return and that move proved to be to hold on to the vision that has always defined them, of occult conjurings from an oneiric otherwhere cluttered with the unreliable debris of memory, a psychedelic soundworld aswirl with the colours of a 1970s UK council estate childhood and a Lynchian penchant for sinister whimsy.
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Out now from the folks at Tartarus Press is a stunning new collection of 28 short stories from co-publisher R.B. Russell, 'The Sanctuary And Other Strange Stories'.
From the release notes...
Gathering together lost souls on the Sussex Downs, houses demolished and rediscovered, and half-remembered dreams, The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories collects uncanny fiction written by R.B. Russell over two decades. Many stories are rooted in moments of real life, but are transformed into something disquieting, from the enigmatic commune of ‘The Sanctuary’ to the ex libris of a lost artist, these stories drift between memory, history and imagination.
Inspired by writers as varied as Mark Valentine and Ian Fleming, Robert Aickman, and Reggie Oliver, and shaped by influences, from forgotten cults and stamp collecting, Russell’s tales explore the boundaries between the ordinary and the otherworldly. Love, death, music and off-beat literary researches intertwine, giving rise to stories that feel both intimate and unsettling.
I was lucky enough to get an early look at this and, a few stories in, am loving it. As it says in the press release, there are shades of Mark Valentine, Robert Aickman, and Reggie Oliver, but Ray's own voice shines through and this combination makes for graceful and compulsive excursion into the uncanny.
Released in Tartarus' signature, beautifully crafted hardback edition and limited to 350 signed copies it's available from the publisher at...
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Sinister secrets, maple syrup and dark, unrequited desire. Meet the Shrivelwoods - Vermont's strangest, most eccentric denizens! A once-powerful dynasty that grew wealthy and decadent through their control of the state maple syrup monopoly. Now their freakish inbred descendants have retreated to Shrivelwood House, a crumbling Gothic mansion where chaos and bedlam hold court. Contains two darkly humorous yarns for fans of Gothic Romance, The Addams Family, Dark Shadows and Vivian Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlingson End.
Here's another of 2000AD writer KEK-W's fun little chapbooks. The first one I read explored the stranger territories of weird fiction whereas this one wanders off into distinctly gothic territories with two fabulously silly gothic romance pastiches - the first the more successful - about the deeply, profoundly, exceedingly, homicidally eccentric maple syrup dynasty, The Shrivelwoods.
Two tales, the first of which I would have loved to have been much longer and more fully realised giving a more immersive visit into the world of the Shrivelwoods, which share a kinship with Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse's 'The Bojeffries Saga', but truthfully at only 34 pages this book doesn't hang around long enough for comparison but while it lasts it's good, daft fun.
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In 'The Other Window' was the final episode of the first series of the supernatural anthology series 'Shadows' scientist father John Woodvine ('Knights of God', 'Enys Men') brings home a fresnel lens to amuse his three children, Elizabeth (Gwyneth Strong), Mark (Roy Jacobs) & Jan (Sophie Ward). After taping it to the window the children begin to see figures from the past through it, visions from their family's history that begin to take on a sinister aspect.
Written by husband and wife, J.B. Priestley ('An Inspector Calls') and Jacquetta Hawkes ('The Lonely Shore'), it's a pretty insubstantial affair slowed down by an over long explanatory section in the middle that takes valuable time that could have been better used in the finale and there's some frightfully shrill drama school performances from the children but in it's naivety it has some charm.
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Hauntological pioneers, Boards of Canada, brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, have announced their new album, 'Inferno', will be released on 29th May on Warp Records.
Following a teasing, month long, campaign involving anonymous VHS tapes, enigmatic posters and, last week, an actual new piece of music, 'Tape 05', today, the band released a short video announcement of their first album release since 'Tomorrow's Harvest', 13 years ago.
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Newly announced by Tartarus Press and shipping this week is the new collection of essays from Mark Valentine, 'Tea and Gargoyles'.
These collections are always fascinating and always manage to be the cause of much consternation with my bank account as Mark lifts the lid on more strange delights.
From the Tartarus Press website...
In Tea and Gargoyles, Mark Valentine explores fiction that seems to hover on the edge of the uncanny, including work by Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen, Gladys Mitchell and Walter de la Mare. He also discusses the more unusual and obscure metaphysical thrillers of the mid twentieth century.
Another essay looks at books that are rarer still: the imaginary titles conjured up in fiction which often, however, seem strangely familiar. His enjoyment of the recondite continues with a delight in a forgotten Edwardian nonsense poet and a shadowy relic of the 1890s, in old board games, and in the esoteric music and journals of the 1970s.
Valentine also celebrates the menagerie of seventeenth-century book-sellers’ signs, an old book about a town populated by bears which has a bookshop open all night, and the book¬shop detectives who uncover even more places to find books. The collection concludes with joyful accounts of book-browsing expeditions in the Marcher country.
'Tea and Gargoyles' is published in a 350 limited edition run of Tartarus Press' beautiful hardbacks and is available now from the publisher here...
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Carwyn and Rhian – the last in a long line of
sheep farmers – are living out a brutal year on their hillside farm,
deep in the mountains of North Wales. When Carwyn discovers a
buried prehistoric ruin in one of the fields on their land, his
curiosity quickly descends into obsession. His wife, Rhian, meanwhile,
is confronted with the growing realization that the man with whom she
shares her life and home is becoming a frightening stranger. As
the harsh winter closes in, Rhian finds herself alone with her
increasingly unrecognizable husband, and the mountains, and the looming
megalithic stones.
Treading similar ground to Andrew Mihael Hurley, but relocated to North Wales, Liam Higginson's debut novel is a folk horror descent into the unknown depths, historical, geographical and mythological, of the area.
On their farm in the Eryri National Park (formerly known as Snowdonia) Carwyn discovers an ancient burial mound where, with visions of riches, he begins to amateur archeologise his way into it. As he becomes increasingly obsessed it's left to Rhian to take care of the farm and deal with his increasingly unhinged behaviour. Beyond this, the wider story of the mound unfolds in snatches alongside glimpses of the couple's past slowly providing an understanding of how they came to be where they are.
It's a nicely written piece, delicately paced with a satisfying, if maybe predictable, conclusion and whilst Higginson perhaps doesn't quite yet have Hurley's poised lyricism there's a real storyteller at work here teasing out the descent into both man and mountain and perfectly situating each in the existence of the other. Higginson is careful to provide a definite sense of place that's only intermittently broken when the couple, who, as North Wales hill farmers, I assumed to be pretty much always speaking in Welsh, suddenly, drop actual Welsh words and phrases into their dialogue which yanked me out of the storyworld every time. I get what he was trying to do with it but, for me, it seemed anomalous.
It's an impressive debut, grounded, humane and yet deliciously eerie, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Higginson does next.
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For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work:
- a book or author,
- a film or TV show,
- a piece of music or a musician.
This month: Alex Older
Alex first came to my attention via an Instagram post by David Tibet enthusing about his novel 'The Animals Praise the Antichrist', which proved to be a fabulously strange love story revolving around two music obsessed teen outsiders.
Where to start with this neglected jewel of a novel? If you like Kafka, Arthur Machen, surrealism, mid-century gay writing, books with atmospheres both weird and eerie, time slips, paranoia, descriptions of the English countryside that are by turns lyrical and nightmarish, then this may be a novel for you.
It’s a great shame that The Image of a Drawn Sword isn’t a Penguin Classic, that it’s only available second-hand or via print-on-demand. It ought to be better known. In rural Kent, not long after the end of the Second World War, a solitary bank clerk named Reynard Langrish is drawn into an opaque world of mysterious army operations which are taking place in the countryside around his home. He’s recruited, ambiguously, by an elusive man, Captain Roy Archer, who remains vague about what his unit is up to. Is another war imminent? Is Britain already secretly at war again? Or is a civil conflict brewing? Langrish isn’t sure. Moreover, he’s preoccupied with his own inner struggles – a burdensome ennui, a growing sense of unreality, a teetering on the verge of personal dissolution. His perceptions and his memory seem unreliable, his understanding of his own situation somewhat limited. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that time is not behaving normally and that identities are uncertain and unstable. Characters age at different rates, facial features alter and become indecipherable. Langrish may be attracted to Archer’s world in part because he finds soldiering – training, gymnastics, boxing – erotic, but it is never stated to what extent he realises this about himself. In a Machenesque touch, a Roman earthworks, perhaps of dubious authenticity, is a crucial site in the novel. Brooke had certainly read and admired Machen. A skilled botanist, he is capable of writing about the English countryside with an evocative skill reminiscent of Machen’s descriptions of Wales. But menace and fear and sexual anxiety hang over everything; there is little respite from the condition of existential dread, not even in rural Kent. This is also true in another of Brooke’s novels, The Scapegoat, a short work of fiction that is never explicitly supernatural, but that has an oppressive atmosphere and a theme of ritual sacrifice fans of folk horror might enjoy.
Despite its cosy trappings, its cottages and pubs, Brooke’s Kent is one that is rendered truly strange by latent violence, and by a mystifying military bureaucracy. At times, the sights and sounds of war intrude weirdly into the supposedly peaceful Garden of England; on other occasions, Langrish’s fruitless searches for the unaccountable Archer and his enigmatic troops happen in a landscape grown silent and eerie. And the restless Langrish cannot reconcile himself to either of these states. At the end of the novel, a literal fog descends, but metaphorically it’s been there all along.
I’ve been thinking about The Image of a Drawn Sword a great deal recently. Aspects of the novel are very much of its time, but it remains contemporary as well. This is true most especially in relation to the unspecified “Emergency” that forms the novel’s backdrop. The origins and the nature of this Emergency are hard to fathom and never spelled out, which seems, sadly, all too familiar. Then, too, the disoriented protagonist of Image repeatedly searches for an answer to a troubling question: Are we at war? As I write this, it is an unfortunate fact that I know exactly how he feels.
Music The Cure - Charlotte Sometimes
War, time slips, and splintered personalities haunt my music choice as well.
I’ve loved this song ever since I was a teen: it’s four minutes of gothic perfection. I like the way it was never an album track, it only enhances the sense I have of “Charlotte Sometimes” being a hermetic sound world with its own special atmosphere. It’s like a sunless aural space I can walk into at any time. And I do walk into it quite often. In fact, I often feel I have been living inside this song – living within its gloomy precincts – for most of my life.
So, for me the song is a kind of portal, a portal into a particular grey and doleful place. But the song is itself about portals. Robert Smith’s inspiration for “Charlotte Sometimes” is the 1969 children’s novel of the same name by Penelope Farmer. It’s a book about a girl at a English boarding school named Charlotte who finds that her dormitory bed acts as a portal into the past. While she sleeps she exchanges places with a girl named Clare who slept in the same bed decades ago. Clare was at the school during the First World War, and she and Charlotte keep swapping places between the war years and the 1950s.
If this sounds like an opportunity for exciting adventures, then it really doesn’t turn out that way. Charlotte Sometimes is nothing like a children’s book of today. There are no heroics, and identities are not affirmed – on the contrary, they are always under threat of disintegration (the b-side to “Charlotte Sometimes”, also inspired by the novel, is called “Splintered In Her Head”). It’s such a monochrome, mournful book, shaped by war, disease, death, and grief. The Cure captured its muted melancholy very well. Indeed, some of the song’s lyrics are lifted more or less directly from the novel. Grief and loss are subjects that have reoccured in my writing frequently: there is often an absent other shaping my stories. I’ve been preoccupied with these themes since childhood. Robert Smith has touched upon them repeatedly too: the most recent album by The Cure, Songs of a Lost World, is manifestly a work about grief.
Film
The Company of Wolves
After all that grey, we need some bold colours. My film choice is also about a girl who, whilst in bed, passes through a portal of sorts: the portal of her dreams.
Again, this work is a lifelong love of mine. The earliest dream I can recollect, from when I was very small, is an Alice-style nightmare of tumbling down a hole in the earth into a strange, flickering black-and-white room. For that reason, and perhaps for reasons to do with childhood loss, I’ve always been obsessed with the notion of children passing from one world into another. These stories often focus on young girls, and The Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber, is one such film.
In the film, a young girl, Rosaleen, is sleeping in her artfully cluttered room in an English country house (if you look closely you can see a picture of The Cure on her wall). The objects in her room, and her sister and parents, are all woven into her fantastical dreams of a fairytale-like world of forests and wolves, folklore, and a wise old grandmother, played brilliantly by Angela Lansbury. Essentially, the film is a gothic retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but with a number of embedded stories along the way, stories of wronged women, wolves, and even the Devil driving in the forest in his white Rolls-Royce.
Director Neil Jordan is Irish, but The Company of Wolves is a certainly a British film, made here, and very much shaped by the magnificent imagination of Angela Carter, who co-wrote the script. That said, one of the things I adore about it is how un-British it is. British films are rarely allowed to be this sumptuously symbolic – especially when the symbolism is mostly about sex and desire and reproduction. It’s all dark pathways, werewolves, hair, blood, flowers, eggs, mirrors: a veritable forest of Freudianism. It was made on a tight budget, which shows sometimes, but nonetheless it manages to be wonderfully overripe and extravagant. There isn’t enough of that in Britain, I sometimes feel. We could do with more artistic opulence and profusion. I first saw The Company of Wolves when I was very young, and I think I learned from it that sometimes you just have to set your imagination running free.
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John Travers has been hanged for the murder of his mother-in-law Helga, but to those who knew him something is amiss. Driven by justice and a sense of uncanny forces at work, John’s friend Doctor Toogood recounts a haunting tale of love and jealousy under the fell influence of a shadowy and implacable evil. First published in 1927, this novel by husband-and-wife writing duo Rosalie and Edward Synton (real surname Corse-Scott) has been lost for nearly a century and returns now from the Library collections to deliver its occult thrills anew.
A
newly rediscovered novel of the occult unearthed by the venerable
Johnny Mains and presented here by the British Library's Tales of the
Weird imprint, a most fitting home.
The Syntons, pen-names of Rosalie & Edward Corse-Scott, the
former a teacher, the latter a soldier and farmer, tell an
occult story of murder and manipulation across three perspectives, with the first doing most of
the heavy lifting.
Sometime in the 1920s, in the aftermath of WWI, John Travers is
hanged for the murder of his mother-in-law, Helga. Telling his story
is his friend, and fellow Helga-hater, Dr Toogood who reveals her
devious, manipulative and possibly supernatural nature as he relates the effect she had on his friend and the actions taken. The novel's second part is provided by Travers as he awaits execution before the book ends with the maleficent mother-in-law herself.
I was really quite pleasantly surprised by this one. Admittedly, it drags in parts but generally it's a nippy little tale with an unusual premise and an unexpected denouement.
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WELCOME TO THE NEW ABNORMAL! Award-nominated
writer, KEK-W, presents a sextet of weird tales that blend Horror and
Absurdism with the banal strangeness of Post-War British Science
Fiction, summoning up a future-past that is fantastical and disturbing,
yet oddly familiar.
Here we have six short weird tales that put me in mind of the likes of M. John Harrison and Joel Lane. The stories range from Prisoner style dystopian spy-fi - which I could very happily have kept reading for the entire book; through hermitic territory wars; dadaist, Kafkaesque bureaucratic hellscapes and half-remembered books to a techno-apocalypse and the Dreamtime.
Altogether it made for an entirely fascinating read and one that held the potential for more extraordinary excursions to come.
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Filmed by Ken Russell in 1962, one of the 21 films he made for the BBC arts programme, 'Monitor', 'The Preservation Man' is an affectionate short about the artist, performer and great British eccentric, Bruce Lacey.
'The Preservation Man' captures Lacey in full creative flow and it's not a stretch to view this as almost a companion piece to 'The Lonely Shore'. In that earlier 'Monitor' film the post-apocalypse archeologists make conjectures about the ephemera of our day to day world whilst here, one rejects work-a-day knowledge and instead reappropriates, reconfigures and reinterprets with an infectious abandon.
NOTE: The film is muted, from 8:15 to 9:06. a transcript of the missing section where Lacey discusses dressing as a policeman and crashing parties can be found in the comments of the video.
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The furthest edge of the universe, far into the future. Cyd Finlea is photojournalist working for the publishers Global Neographic, travelling deep into outer space — otherwise known as THE OUT — and cataloguing the sights and alien societies that she encounters. She’s been doing this for so long, she can’t remember how far she is now from Earth, but regardless she keeps going — just her and her camera...
I'd been fancying giving this series a go for a little while now mostly thanks to spotting an image for the next book that features the main character hitching a lift from a passing spaceship. The story tells of Cyd Finlea, a photo-journalist travelling 'The Out', the deepest regions of deep space. So deep in fact that she has no way of knowing where Earth is anymore. On her travels she experiences war, death and rebirth as she searches for adventures, parties, other ex-pats and one other thing, the most important thing.
It's a really fun trip and a nice change for me to see Abnett in a more playful mien away from the grim and grimy wars of his 40k playground where he excels. Harrison has been a regular on the Galaxy's greatest for a long time and have to admit to having never been particularly enamoured of his art - or painted comic art in general. It's vibrant and imaginative, and when he's doing splash pages it's borderline sublime, but a full page of panels is just too hazy and busy for my tired old eyes - oh and his mouths are really distracting - but I stress this as a purely personal preference, the man can definitely draw.
I'm very glad I took the plunge. Of the very few graphic novels I buy these days most are 2000AD related and I'm rarely disappointed and this turned out to be a very fun read and I'll definitely come back for more when Vol. 2 appears.
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