horror, page 43 of 66

I remember seeing Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock on TV, probably when I was about 11 or 12. It must have been my first experience of a film that didn’t provide a proper solution to its mysteries, and my response was to be quietly devastated. Those beautiful, evanescent girls, all golden-lit and white-gowned, climbing into the penetralia of Hanging Rock like a reverse version of Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (of which he wrote, “I have drawn so many toes lately that when I shut my eyes I see a perfect shower of them”) — never to return. Nor to have their disappearance even explained. But that’s the thing I most love about the film now, its refusal to explain what happened, its keeping faith with the mystery. Because, Picnic at Hanging Rock isn’t so much about the disappearance of the girls and their teacher into a million-year-old maze of volcanic rock, but the devastating effect this has on those who remain.

The film starts with a vision of intensely Romantic adolescence: the girls of Appleyard College swapping poetic Valentines, then setting out, white-gloved and straw-hatted, for Hanging Rock. (They’re told that, as the day is hot, they may remove their gloves, but only after they’ve passed through the nearby town, as though the sight of so many nubile female fingers might set the working classes into a frenzy.) There, in the midst of a mid-day swooze, four girls set out to explore the rock. Everything assumes an unreal, almost ritual air. Moany Edith cries, “Where in the world are they going? Without their shoes?”, and the answer is, of course, that they aren’t going anywhere in the world, they’re going out of it, and the fact they’re not wearing shoes is like one of those odd bits of folklore about the dead, such as that their heads are on back to front, or they cast no shadows. The girls engage in a bit of dreamy philosophising:

“A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves.”

and:

“Everything begins and ends at the exactly right time and place.”

Then… they disappear. There are some odd, UFO-like details that emerge, such as the fact that their teacher, Miss McCraw, was last seen without her skirt, and that the recovered girl Irma was without her corset. (The doctor who examines both Irma and moany Edith is always sure to point out that the girls, apart from a few scratches and sunstroke, are “quite intact”.) This loss of garments seems to be more about shocking the proprieties of the ultra-conventional upper-middle classes than providing any clue to what really happened to the girls.

There are three levels of reality in Picnic at Hanging Rock — or, two of reality, one of unreality. There’s the “reality” of those upper-middle classes, which mostly consists of an education in deportment and senior needlework, the attendance of overdressed garden parties, and sitting dully under the shadow of Hanging Rock, looking at nothing, feeling nothing. Faced with the incomprehensibility of mystery, this level of “reality” shakes its head and retreats behind the wings of an overstuffed chair, to read about it in a newspaper. (Squeaky Miss Lumley, who teaches at the girls’ college, finds it almost frightening that someone should do such a strange thing as sit on the stairs in the dark, so it’s no wonder she can’t face the idea that some of her charges might have disappeared altogether.) Then there’s the grounded reality of the working classes, the servants and local townspeople. Theirs is a much more human reality, all about the simple pleasures, and the simple un-romantic love of two servants in Appleyard College catching a spare moment to jump into bed together. Faced with mystery, they resort to lurid theories and melodrama — kidnappings and Jack the Ripper style murders. (Only the old gardener knows the right way to face this kind of situation: “There’s some questions got answers, and some haven’t.”) Finally, there’s the unreality of the evanescent — the adolescent girls wrapped up in their poetry and idle philosophising, evaporating in the heat of the Australian sun before they have to face the reality of their looming adult lives. (The exception to this, of course, is the scientific-minded Miss McCraw, with her “masculine intellect”. Why she disappears is a mystery about this particular mystery.)

Michael Fitzhubert (played by Dominic Guard, who also voiced Pippin in Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings), though part of the self-blinded upper classes, finds one of the girls — Irma — but only after searching obsessively enough in the outback heat that he falls into a fever. It’s as if he has to pass from reality into unreality to fetch her. (“I’d give my head to really know what happened up there,” the doctor says, after examining the concussed Irma, and it’s probably the price he’d have to pay — though it would be the loss of his rational, sane mind, not his actual head.)

The original theatrical release featured a brief, failed romance between Fitzhubert and the rescued Irma, later excised in Weir’s director’s cut. It’s a pity, because Fitzhubert’s inability to fall in love with Irma, and his continued obsession with the absent “Botticelli angel” Miranda, is all part of the devastating effect the mystery has — you get the feeling that this young man will never get over the disappearance of a girl he only ever glimpsed once, crossing a stream in a beam of sunlight, and will in fact be unable to love any real woman. She didn’t just take herself from this world, she took his soul, too.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those rare films that sustains a ghostly, fantastical air without any resort to the supernatural. For me, it fits perfectly alongside films such as The Spirit of the Beehive, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or David Lynch’s Lost Highway or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, as being set in the liminal zone between outright fantasy and interior psychology — “a Dream within a Dream”, as it says (quoting Poe) at the start of the film.

(The film Picnic at Hanging Rock was based on a novel of the same name by Joan Lindsay, who was married to the artist Daryl Lindsay, who was brother to the artist & writer Norman Lindsay, who featured in the 1994 film Sirens.)

I was intrigued to find that, aside from Stephen King’s, there’s another book called IT, this one by William Mayne, published in 1977. I was even more intrigued by the plot: Eleven-year-old Alice Dyson, looking at her home town from a distance, spies a hill she didn’t know existed, and resolves to explore it. At the top she finds an ancient, faintly-carved stone, similar in shape and design to three crosses that mark the boundaries of the town (and of which her grandfather, a vicar who has written a local history, believes there to have once been a fourth). Digging idly in the mud beneath it, Alice finds a dark hole. She puts her hand in — and feels another hand grasp it. When she withdraws her hand, she still feels the presence of that other hand; hers is “still haunted by what had held it”.

Alice gets on with her everyday life. She’s a bit of a trial to her family, the sort of child who’s always doing the wrong thing. Her grandfather, a bit of an authority-figure in the family, in particular finds her wanting (“she was always a miserable milk-and-water miss, with the milk curdled and the water tepid,” he says). But this is not as bleak a book as the Mayne novel I reviewed last time, A Game of Dark — Alice herself has a lightness and humour that prevent these family tensions from building up to anything like the awful alienation that exists between Donald and his parents in that book.

Alice learns of a possible explanation for the ghostly hand:

“…a witch, or sorceress… had taken refuge in the town and then come into the Market Place and made terrible frightening threats against the town. Before she had finished them a retribution had come upon her and she had fallen down dead, some said struck by God, and others by the Devil, stabbed with an invisible knife in full daylight in front of a crowd of people.”

Returning to the hill, Alice pokes about in the darkness with a piece of rusty metal she finds nearby. Suddenly, she feels she has stabbed something, and the ghostly hand leaves hers. She, then, is the cause of that “invisible knife”. But her troubles are not over. She has attracted another presence. This is not the witch, but the witch’s familiar, a poltergeist-like spirit keen to attach itself to Alice as it once did to the witch. It starts providing Alice with rings that are meant to bind them together — often as not lifted from other people. Alice, quite sensibly, hands them into the police. The spirit starts trying to follow what it assumes are Alice’s wishes — she wins a game of monopoly with every dice roll landing in her favour; a friend who throws a snowball at her gets showered in the snow from a nearby window ledge; when Alice gets angry, the spirit starts to break things.

What stops William Mayne’s IT from being a horror novel is that Alice isn’t isolated by her strange experiences. In fact, several adults, including her grandfather, a local bishop, and her mother, all accept what’s going on. As her mother says:

“Don’t forget that I was… in New Guinea… I was your age at the time, and I was older, and we’re both quite familiar with wandering spirits that attach themselves to people for a time, so at least we knew what was going on. Believe me, we met far worse ones than yours. But of course out there it was much easier to talk about things like that.”

Perhaps it was because I was expecting IT to be more of a horror novel that I found it slightly unsatisfying at the end. Although the effects of the ghostly hand and the later familiar spirit can be quite spooky (whenever Alice approaches a church, she’s enveloped in her own little storm, as “IT” tries to prevent her from entering the holy place, which it can’t follow her into), Alice herself isn’t overly spooked, and instead, feeling sorry for this childlike spirit that’s attached itself to her, tries to find a way to free it, and her, from an unwanted bondage. She realises a ritual has to be carried out involving the four crosses that once surrounded the town. Usefully, there’s an annual parade that, if Alice can persuade the committee, could have its route changed so as to provide the sort of magical act required. She does this in a series of quick-cut brief scenes that bring a comic feel to the story. But Mayne’s skill at characterisation, and Alice’s constant little difficulties with people, particularly her family, prevent it from being the sort of E Nesbit lark-with-magic that might make it sound like.

IT passes through spooky territory, then, but never becomes a horror novel. Nowhere near as bleak as A Game of Dark, neither is it as powerful, though it has its moments. What lingers, rather than the sort of trials Donald Jackson went through in that earlier book, is the light touch and resilience of Alice’s character, and the way her determination to see this strange experience through, in her own way, finally wins round her previously disapproving grandfather, and the town as a whole.

I can’t let Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary pass without a Whovian post. For me, the highpoint has been Mark Gatiss’s excellent, and wonderfully moving, drama about William Hartnell and the beginning of the whole thing, An Adventure in Space and Time, plus the recovery of The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World. Though I wrote a while ago about Why I Like Doctor Who, I’ve been thinking that that blog entry only answers — or, perhaps, asks — half the question. I might know why I like it, but what is it, exactly, that I like? What is the thing I’m liking when I say I like Doctor Who?

Kim Newman, in his excellent little critical appraisal of the show for BFI TV Classics, offers a few nuggets. It is, he says:

“BBC-TV’s most eccentric saga, at once cosily familiar and cosmically terrifying.”

(Though I wouldn’t say it’s cosmically terrifying in the Lovecraftian sense — something else I wrote about a while back, on Lovecraftian Who. It is, however, most certainly eccentric and cosy.)

It is, he says:

“…a continually rewritten fiction…”

Which answers my own feeling that I don’t really care too much about the continuity, or world-building, aspect of the show. It doesn’t matter to me that, for instance, Atlantis gets its comeuppance in — is it three different ways? They might be alternative Atlantises in alternative time streams. I don’t care. I don’t care either that the Time Lords in The War Games seem to be different to the Time Lords in The Deadly Assassin. All I care is that there are good stories, and that each one is in done in, as a lawyer might say, a good and Doctor Who-like fashion.

So, what is a good and Doctor Who-like fashion? What is the essence of this thing called Doctor Who? Newman says:

“Boiled down to its simplest format, Doctor Who is a character actor and a police box.”

The best definition of fantasy, as a genre, comes from, I think, Brian Atterby, who says it is a “fuzzy set”. A fuzzy set is a group of things where we’re more sure of what belongs to the set than why. “Games”, for instance, is a fuzzy set. If you try to define “a game” as, say, “something with rules”, then you realise that some games don’t have rules — childhood make-believe games, for instance — or if you define it as “something done for fun”, then you realise that sports are games done by professionals, and so on. For everything you can say is a defining feature of “a game”, there will always be at least one example of something that is a game, but doesn’t have that feature, yet it shares enough other features with other games to be a game. Doctor Who is a fuzzy set, too. There have been episodes without the Doctor, and stories without the TARDIS, but they were still Doctor Who. Each story simply has to have enough Doctor Who-ish ingredients to overcome any potential non-Doctor Who-ishess, and then it can be classed as Doctor Who.

Of course, Kim Newman was writing about the TV show, and Doctor Who is so much more than that. For me, at the start, although the TV show was the focus of it all, it was such a rare event (only 26 or so episodes per year, a poor-but-perfect 25 minutes each), that other things had to make up the bulk of my Doctor Who focus. And for me, this meant the Target books and the weekly/monthly magazine (as well as an awful lot of making up stories in my head).

Without access to the TV show, you had to be a sort of archeologist, piecing together fragments of the past. The magazine had photos and plot summaries, the books had covers and fleshed-out stories. You married it all together in your own head. I remember, at the Brighton World Horror Convention a couple of years ago, a panel discussing people’s experience of the old black & white classic horror movies, where someone said they first learned of these old horror movies through books and magazines, where all you’d have would be the same small set of stills, and that these stills were full of such promise, it made you long to see the film. But when you got to finally see the film, the result was often a slight disappointment. My experience of much old Doctor Who has been the same. I knew those few oft-recycled stills from the old shows so well, and each new, not-seen-before photo was like a treasure. Seeing the actual shows often came as a shock — mostly, for instance, at how clumsy those fantastic-looking monsters moved (the Ice Warriors, so fearsome, noble and warrior-like in photographs, so clumsy in actual motion). Similarly, though I loved the Third Doctor’s Earth-bound adventures in the novelisations, I found him off-puttingly arrogant and short-tempered in the actual TV shows. But I wonder how much part of my experience of Doctor Who was all about that effort of reconstruction — putting together the stories with the photos, archeologically reconstructing those (as I thought) never-to-be-seen adventures of yesteryear from what remained. Being involved in Doctor Who was as much an effort of imagination as it was of passive appreciation.

I recently re-watched the first ever episode of Doctor Who — still one of its best — and realised how appropriate it is that it all starts in a junkyard. Because, if it’s anything, Doctor Who is a junkyard, a junkyard of the imagination, as much full of wonders as rubbish — and often of things that are both at the same time. Like a junkyard, one of the great charms of Doctor Who is unusual juxtaposition, the fantastic beside the familiar — Daleks trundling over Westminster Bridge, Cybermen emerging from the sewers, a hulking Krynoid charging round the grounds of some old country house, Egyptian mummies in a Victorian Gothic folly.

And, of course, junkyards are full of old things. Doctor Who is full of old things, too. And old things means nostalgia. There are, I’d say, three types of Doctor Who nostalgia. There’s the most obvious one, of revisiting the episodes I watched as a kid — and not just that, but re-experiencing the whole texture of TV back then, something that, for me, is particularly evident in something like The Brain of Morbius, with its gloomy studio feel, its flash-bang effects, and the peculiar look of the period’s video technology, that conjures up a whole aesthetic of that time. Another sort of Doctor Who nostalgia is a borrowed nostalgia that comes from learning about shows from the past that I never saw, and vicariously experiencing other people’s fondness for them — the whole quaintness of Dalekmania, for instance, or realising just how 60s the 60s shows were. But there’s a third sort of nostalgia, which is about how Doctor Who plugs you into a much larger stream of the culture as a whole. Mostly, it has to be said, this comes from the show’s own junkyard mentality, of grabbing ideas from elsewhere and trying them out — Doctor Who does Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor Who does Hammer Horror, or Doctor Who does dinosaurs — but also from the way it makes use, as any long-lived, pulpy kind of story-anthology of its type can’t help but do, of all those stock characters and situations of adventure fiction, or science fiction, or British fiction — the retired colonels, the stuffy bureaucrats, the stodgily unimaginative politicians, the mad scientists, the embittered ex-soliders-turned-mercenaries, the fanatic idealists intent on reshaping the world, the dangerously eccentric millionaires, the disfigured geniuses lurking in catacombs — from the way, then, that it plugs you into a cultural nostalgia for archetypal adventure stories.

Presiding over this junkyard is, of course, the Doctor — I. M. Foreman from 76 Totters Lane — who lives, and travels, in a box. It may take the outward form of a Police Box, but this is, really “the box” — the telly itself — and it is through this, the medium of telefantasy, that the Doctor travels, changing time zones and planets as you might change channel, then pausing to observe them through his own TV screen. I’ve never really cared that Doctor Who’s effects haven’t been that great; I like, in fact, its very televisualness, its staginess, its sets-and-rubber-monsters-ishness, its wobbly spaceships on strings. Perhaps this is because my initial experience of what Doctor Who was came as much from those still photos and book covers, which allowed my imagination to bring the stories to life way before I got the chance to see them (again, or for the first time) on DVD. And so I know that the TV show itself can only ever be an approximation to the real thing that is Doctor Who, which is formed within my head.

So to me, Doctor Who isn’t just a TV program. It’s a whole bunch of stuff. Particularly, it’s a whole bunch of random, weird stuff shoved haphazardly together, presided over by a cantankerous and oddly changeable proprietor, who occasionally fits these cultural cast-offs and odd bits of the past together into futuristic or fantastic shapes, and puts them to strange but ingenious uses.

When I say Doctor Who is a junkyard, I really do mean it as a compliment.