Alison Peirse

A Broken Tradition: British Telefantasy and Children's Television in the 1980s and 1990s

This article examines a hitherto unexplored area of British television history: the relationship between telefantasy (a term that encompasses fantasy, science fiction and horror on television) and British television drama for children during the 1980s and early 1990s. It suggests that British telefantasy can be conceptualized as a broken tradition, with peaks marked not only in the family- and adult-orientated productions of the 1970s and late 1990s, but in childrens drama from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Analysing the BBC serials The Box of Delights (1984), Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993) in relation to their aesthetic, economic and generic contexts, this article explores a lost history of British telefantasy, not only adding to the existing literature on telefantasy, but also transforming it.

Speaking for herself: Andrea Dunbar and Bradford on film

In October 2010, the radio broadcaster Philip Dodd interviewed Clio Barnard about her new documentary, The Arbor (2010), based on the life of the late playwright Andrea Dunbar. As part of the film-making process, Barnard recorded audio interviews with Dunbar’s family then hired professional actors to lip-synch the responses in the film. Dodd had a major problem with this method: The Arbor is rooted in the lives of working-class Northern women, yet for Dodd, ‘they’re not good enough to be seen’. In a passionate defence, Barnard argued ‘I wanted people to speak for themselves’. This article examines Barnard’s film in conjunction with Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, for which Dunbar wrote the screenplay. A paradox is considered, where the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ female voices of Dunbar, her family and neighbours are then mediated by cinematic form; this is placed within a wider argument about how issues around realism and representation in documentary and fiction film contribute to our understanding of the North in popular culture. The analysis then situates this thinking in terms of the representation of Northern writers and spaces, considering how the site-specific locations of writers affect the kind of cultural texts that they are able to produce.

The Script, The Séance And The Censor: Writing Night Of The Demon (1957)

In his memoirs, screenwriter Charles Bennett reflects upon writing the British horror film Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur). He reveals his lack of fondness for the film’s executive producer, commenting ‘Hal Chester, if he walked up my driveway right now, I’d shoot him dead’. Chester rewrote elements of Bennett’s script to focus attention on the fire demon, and arranged additional filming after Tourneur had completed directing duties. This much of Night of the Demon’s production history is well documented. However, drawing upon extensive research at BFI Special Collections and the BBFC, this article offers an alternative reading of the film. Focusing on creative process, I utilize draft screenplays, reader reports and letters to piece together how the original writer envisaged Night of the Demon and how various institutional pressures impacted upon the final script. Crucially, by examining the séance – the act two midpoint – I provide a revisionist account of the film, one that draws away from the now-standard discussion of whether Bennett and Tourneur knew the fire demon would be shown at the film’s beginning and end. Instead, this article is a consideration of the power of storytelling to generate fear.

How to Write a Horror Film: The Awakening (2011) and Development Practices in the British Film Industry

This article reveals how screenwriter Stephen Volks idea for a sequel to The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton) became, over the course of fifteen years, the British horror film The Awakening (2011, Nick Murphy). It examines practitioner interviews to reflect on creative labour in the British film industry, while also reorientating the analysis of British horror film to the practices of pre-production, specifically development. The research reveals that female protagonist Florence Cathcart was a major problem for the project and demonstrates how the Florence character changed throughout the development process. Repeatedly rewritten and ultimately restrained by successive male personnel, her character reveals persistent, problematic perceptions of gender in British horror filmmaking.

The feminine appeal of British horror cinema

When Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964, Bryan Forbes) was set for release, cinema managers were advised that ‘feminine appeal’ was a strong angle for publicity, and the film went on to be a critical and commercial success. Yet, it is relatively unknown in existing academic histories of horror cinema. The female lead, spiritualist premise and psychological horror make it an uneasy bedfellow with existing accounts of 1960s British horror films, which focus on the sexualised colour-saturated violence of Hammer Studios and its associated offspring. This article reverses this trend by revealing a cycle of 1960s black-and-white British horror films whose primary textual address is to women, manifested through complex female characters, interiority and stories of motherhood, stillbirth and child murder. Utilising Mary Ann Doanes work on maternal melodrama, the article explores the parallels between this cycle and the womans film, and draws upon reception analysis in order to consider how the critics responded to the female-centred films. It is suggested that not only have film historians failed to note that this cycle exists, but more importantly they have also failed to understand how frightening the films could be for a female audience.

Ocularcentrism, horror and The Lord of the Rings films

The majority of the analyses of The Lord of the Rings films centre on extratextual dimensions: the political economy of film production, of audiences and fandom, and the impact of technology on envisaging the series. Instead, this article explores the aesthetic qualities of the films, focusing on the visualization of the chapter ‘Lothlorien’ from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, and ‘The passage of the marshes’ and ‘Shelob’s lair’ from The Two Towers. In making The Lord of the Rings, Director Peter Jackson engages with the cinematic possibilities of vision and images of the eye; he then borrows spectatorial conceits from the horror film in order to relate the ocularcentric to the vulnerability of the individual body of Frodo Baggins. In visualizing the trilogy, an obsession is born, not only with the image of the eye, but also with the horror of being watched and of watching.

The impossibility of vision: vampirism, formlessness and horror in Vampyr

Abstract This article argues that the shifting bodily borders of male protagonist, David Gray, and female vampire, Marguerite Chopin, evoke horror in Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932). Situating the film within the ‘loose, ambiguous narratives’ of European art cinema, it is suggested that the films central trope is the confounding of spectators ability to make sense of the events taking place within the text. Grays bodily borders vacillate throughout the film, moving between active and passive and alive and dead, evoking formlessness and uncertainty. Vampyr even includes an uncanny moment in which Gray looks upon his own dead body laid out in a coffin. Even when Gray is active, the mesh screens, closed windows and locked doors distance him from his object of pursuit and undermine his gaze. Through the formless female vampire, oblique narrative and form and white mise-en-scéne, Vampyr reveals the impossibility of vision and the limitations of the spectatorial gaze.