horror, page 5 of 63

Mister Magic (2023) is a variant on the “cursed film” genre I’m drawn to, the cursed kids’ TV show. Thirty years ago, Mister Magic, the longest-running TV show in history (it began on radio, then transitioned to TV) ended in mysterious circumstances. Now, the kids who made up the final cast are invited back to the remote desert location in Utah where it was filmed, to be interviewed for a podcast. Of the six kids, only four have been found until Isaac (one of the cast, now grown up and working as a private investigator) tracks down Val, who has remained completely hidden until now. Unfortunately — or fortunately — they find her on the day of her dad’s funeral, her dad being the one who took her off the show and kept her hidden ever since. Val, meanwhile, has no memory of Mister Magic at all, knowing only that she has had to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, should some unidentified someone track them down. Suddenly learning her mother is not only alive but living near the reunion location (in the town of Bliss), Val decides to go along, to find out what happened to her and the show that she’s wiped from her own memory…

Along the way we start to learn more about Mister Magic. The show was about six children playing in a world that made their imaginings real. One of the cast, Marcus, would “paint” scenery, and the kids would interact with it. For additional help, and to extract themselves from the scrapes they’d got into, they could form a circle and summon the black-cloaked Mister Magic. (Nobody can remember if he was played by an actor in a costume, was a puppet, or a special effect. To the kids in the show, he was real.) Towards the end, though, Val — who, it turns out, was the leader in the group — tried to get them to rely on Mister Magic less and less. What had she learned about their supposed benefactor?

The novel is peppered with nicely-done little extracts from the internet — a Wikipedia page, a chat forum, social media posts, and so on — of people trying to recall the show, which they evidently feel nostalgic about. But no video, stills, or documentary evidence exist, and the occasional article that pops up with genuine information always disappears. A key thing about the show everyone remembers, though, is the little songs the cast were constantly singing, all of which were trite little morals, like:

When we care about others
We share what we’ve got
But if you don’t work for it
Nothing is your lot

The novel does a good job of building an air of mystery and nostalgia about the show, and of increasing darkness, even supernatural evil, about it, too — at first, anyway. The house where the reunion is to be held (and where the cast used to stay while it was being filmed), gets its Hill House moment:

“Val wonders if all houses have deep roots, whole sections of their bodies hidden beneath the ground. But this house, this inexplicable house, refused to stay buried and is rearing to its full height, ready to strike.”

But ultimately, I think the novel spent too much time on this “air of mystery” stage. Not so much with regards to the show itself and how the kids left it, but the questions that arose once I knew all that. For instance, the supernatural element. There’s two things you can do with the supernatural, once you’ve spent time setting it up as mysterious and scary. One is to let it remain unexplained, the other is to describe something of its nature, and thereby give it more of a specific meaning. Here, the supernatural has to be explained in some way, because it’s wrapped up in a children’s TV programme, and that’s not the sort of thing the vast and unknowable cosmic entities of, say, a Lovecraftian horror would be found doing. The trouble is, because White hasn’t dropped any hints about the nature of her particular supernatural thing, we get a situation I don’t think works well (I also wrote about it in my look at John Gordon’s The Waterfall Box), where a character has to suddenly intuit all the information they need about this thing right near the end, mostly in one go. Which, unless you’re really wrapped up in the story, just feels like a writer telling rather than showing, in a situation which really benefits from showing rather than telling.

Another element that was unexplained, for me, was the operation behind the TV show. As a mild spoiler, this proved to be a cult-like group, a split-off from the Mormons. At this point, I’d already taken a quick glance at the author’s note at the end of the book, where she says “Yes, I was a Mormon. No, I am not anymore.” The story obviously has a lot of personal meaning for her, but I think perhaps this led to her fictional cult being underdeveloped. Just what were their beliefs? Why were they doing what they were doing? How did they justify it to themselves? Did they have larger, world-threatening plans? Were they using the supernatural thing, or was it using them? And how was that power-balance likely to go? A lot of questions were left unsatisfactorily even unhinted at. (This sort of thing leaves me with the sinking feeling the author might have decided to put it all in a sequel, which I’ll never read.)

There’s a certain similarity to Stephen King’s IT, with its grown-ups returning to put an end to an evil they’d faced as kids, but IT, through its very lack of any specificity, managed to make itself into a universal tale about childhood fears. Here, we’re dealing with something more specific, though still widespread — the coercive need to make children behave — but the story fails to hit that archetypal note that would really make it feel universal.

Published in 1998, John Gordon’s The Flesh Eater is a couple of decades on from the heyday of 70s and 80s folk-fantasy YA I’ve been reviewing on this blog, but in terms of feel, it absolutely belongs. (Although it’s more horror than fantasy.)

Set in Gordon’s beloved East Anglian fens, the protagonist Harry Hogge is in his late teens (old enough to be driving, young enough that his parents aren’t on at him to get a job — a very narrow margin), son of the proprietors of the town’s largest hotel, the Pheasant and Trumpet. His girlfriend is Miranda Merchant — beautiful, yet with a hint of the mercenary about her — but another girl stumbles into his life, the somewhat clumsy and anxious Emma Judd “with the wild black hair and the skirt with a lopsided hem”.

Researching local history, Emma has become obsessed with the legend of the “Mary-Lou”, a monster said to tear people apart and gnaw their bones. Her Great Aunt Rose has an even more vivid take on it:

“That’s what the Mary-Lou always done to them. Skewered them up somewhere like a butcher, so as he could come back and get them when he wanted a bite o’ fresh meat!”

Emma has discovered that the tale of the “Mary-Lou” originates with the first constable of the local castle, Guy de Marais, who kept a particularly vicious torturer as a servant, and it’s this servant who became known as the Mary-Lou — the marais loup, or Marsh Wolf. But, unknown to her or anyone else, the current occupant of Barbican House — built over the ruins of the old castle — one Guy March, a direct descendent of Guy de Marais, is intent on finding the burial place of the Mary-Lou, and continuing his forebear’s “necromantic practices”.

I first became aware of Gordon thanks to a Ghosts and Scholars article on him, which focused more on his earlier book, The House on the Brink. (Come to think of it, that would have been before The Flesh Eater was published, anyway.) The Flesh Eater certainly fits the Jamesian mould, with its unearthing of an ancient undead evil, also bringing in an element of “Casting the Runes” in the way the Mary-Lou is guided to its next victim.

But like all of the John Gordon books I’ve read so far, The Flesh Eater gives equal time to teenage relationships as it does to the supernatural. As I said in my review of The Waterfall Box, there’s a four-way tangle that appears in a lot of Gordon’s fiction, with the protagonist being drawn to two girls (one beautiful and sexually sophisticated but ultimately self-centred, the other less showy and more genuine), with a rival male (usually more physical) waiting to step in. That situation seemed to be emerging at the start of The Flesh Eater, with the athletic Donovan Brett (Miranda’s former boyfriend) an unwelcome presence in Harry and Miranda’s relationship. But just as I was expecting teen tensions to really ramp up, Donovan becomes the first victim of the resurrected Mary-Lou. And the looming confrontation with Miranda over Harry’s involvement with Emma is another thing that disappears almost too quickly. It’s as if Gordon has, at some level, dealt with this tangle and no longer needs to really gnaw at it as he did in his earlier fiction.

One thing it does mean is that the balance between the teen tangles and the supernatural investigation is much better — pretty much perfect, in fact — than in, say, The Waterfall Box, which had to cram in too much of the supernatural element in the final chapter to be really satisfying. Here, the relationships are handled much more as background to Harry and Emma’s investigations into the Mary-Lou, but tick along nicely.

There are a few other character moments that point to areas the novel could have explored — the difficulty Harry has in admitting he doesn’t believe in God, for instance — but it’s a short book, that just hints at some themes, rather than investigating them fully. (Harry’s public admission of atheism is there largely to bring out his mother’s snobbishness, anyway.)

One — perhaps the most interesting, as it combines the love story with the supernatural — is that Harry and Emma have occasional telepathic flashes where they realise they’re hearing one another’s thoughts. This is set against Guy March’s telepathic connection with a woman we don’t meet until the end, a woman who keeps indoors and “sees” the world through her pack of cards, but (mentally) accompanies March everywhere he goes. Harry immediately knows that the telepathic moments he shares with Emma are down to their relationship being grounded in genuine love, but what does this say about Guy March and his woman, whose identity, we learn at the end, points to a perhaps unhealthy kind of connection?

The Flesh Eater is, I think, a much more successful take on the same sort of story as The Waterfall Box, and it certainly makes me want to read (or re-read, in a couple of cases) some more of Gordon. Amazingly, for instance, he had another book published the same year, The Midwinter Clock. But then, I’ve got his boy-and-girl-go-into-a-fantasy-world novel The Edge of the World on my shelf, just begging for a re-read…

After his 1987 novel Weaveworld, Barker at first thought to return to short stories, but instead produced a short novel, Cabal, which (for the first and only time) he drafted using a dictaphone. It was published standalone in the UK in 1988, but in the US was packaged with the stories in the last volume of The Books of Blood.

It starts with Aaron Boone, a troubled man who thinks he’s started to find some peace at last, thanks to the woman he loves, Lori, and a psychiatrist he trusts, Philip Decker. Unfortunately, Decker is a serial killer, who proceeds to convince Boone that, during hypnosis sessions, he’s confessed to a series of horrific murders — which, in fact, Decker himself committed. Distraught, Boone wanders off and, after a failed attempt to take his own life, hears rumours of Midian “a place of refuge… where whatever sins [he had] committed—real or imagined—would be forgiven…” He sets out to find it, but discovers it to be a massive, walled cemetery. Inside, he’s confronted by two men — or not-quite-men — one of whom bites him. Fleeing, he’s found by Decker, who has the police in tow. The psychiatrist persuades Boone to come out of hiding, then shouts to the police that he’s armed, and everyone opens fire. Riddled with bullets, his body is taken to the mortuary, but sometime after that disappears. He’s not dead, but, thanks to that bite in the cemetery, is one of the Nightbreed now. He returns to Midian, where this time he’s welcomed in. Two people come in search of him, though: his girlfriend Lori, and Decker. And upon learning about the Nightbreed, Decker is determined to goad the local police into exterminating the lot of them.

The persecuted and hidden tribe of monsters with which the protagonist ultimately finds a home is a theme that’s popped up in Barker’s work before, from early stories in the Books of Blood (“Twilight at the Towers” and “Skins of the Fathers”, for instance), to the magical/theatrical Seerkind of Weaveworld. Part of the “coming home” feeling is that these “monsters” allow the protagonist to accept his true, full nature, as not quite fitting into the societal norm. (There’s also a parallel to be drawn between Cabal and The Hellbound Heart, as Cabal is, also, a love story, in which a living woman, Lori, seeks to redeem a dead-but-living lover, Boone.)

Of course, there are two types of “monster” here. There’s the Nightbreed, who “didn’t belong to Hell; nor yet to Heaven. They were what the species [Boone had] once belonged to could not bear to be. The un-people; the anti-tribe…” Monstrous in form, they’re nevertheless far more human in behaviour than the second type of monster we meet in this novel, who look human, and fit into society — in fact, occupy positions of trust and authority — but whose actions prove them to be utterly monstrous inside.

Of the latter type, Decker — “the one in the well cut suit, with the doctorate and the friends in high places; he was the man, the voice of reason and analysis” — is the arch-monster. In contrast to Boone who, once transformed into one of the Nightbreed, will say “I’m not behind this face. I am this face”, Decker must don a mask to become the monster he is. And that mask, Button Head — like “a sewing-box doll: zipper for mouth, buttons for eyes, all sewn on white linen” — is the essence of the scary-yet-bland conformity Decker represents. If Decker had his way, everyone would be “sane” — outwardly normal, with their darker and stranger impulses thoroughly contained and repressed, locked inside just as the Nightbreed are forced to live underground. In Decker’s world, only those in power are allowed to indulge this dark monstrousness: Decker’s own murderous sprees, for instance, which he can get away with because he can foist the blame on his vulnerable patients, or the police, whose local chief Eigermann’s philosophy is: “Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.”

While Decker’s kind of dark monstrousness is all about repression and secrecy, the Nightbreed have reached a state where they can no longer hide what makes them different, like Narcisse, who “could pretend nothing: his wound was a vicious honesty”. But this is what makes them a community, at whose heart is the being they call Baphomet (“Who made Midian. Who called us here.”), whose very essence is a wounded suffering: his enemies took him apart, but he is somehow preserved as “the Divided One”, his sundered body suspended in a flame that both represents his supernatural power and his exceptional pain. Decker, meanwhile, does the wounding to others. As the serial killer Button Head, he likes to attack his victims’ faces so thoroughly they become as indistinguishable as his own blank mask.

I don’t think it’s ever stated explicitly why Decker so instantly feels the need to wipe out the Nightbreed, but in a way it doesn’t need to be: in their unabashed oddity, their explicit woundedness, they represent a sort of dangerous honesty that undermines his own need for conformity and control.

Cabal, then, is rich in themes Barker has explored before. If I have a criticism, it’s that the last section of the novel — where the attempted extermination of the Nightbreed really gets going — began to feel a little oppressive in its atmosphere of goodies/victims (the monsters) versus baddies/oppressors (Decker, the police, a hastily-assembled town mob). I could see it was necessary — we need to see the persecution and attempted extermination of the Nightbreed for what it is — but the switch from Barker’s usual subtlety of characterisation to something a bit more clichéd in a way had the opposite effect. Instead of the (moral) horror of actual human beings perpetrating genocide, we see a cartoon all-guns-blazing mob at work, which has much less of an impact. Barker’s at his best when he’s dealing with his characters’ inner transformations and responses to the unusual, mysterious, and horrific (as with Lori, here: “She’d been touched by a knowledge that had changed her inner landscape out of all recognition.”). Perhaps this sort of Western-style shootout isn’t his thing — or maybe it’s just not mine.

Barker apparently intended this to be the first of a series of intertwining tales about the Nightbreed. Certainly, it ends with a new start: Boone is renamed Cabal, and is given his mission to reunite the scattered Nightbreed and heal the sundered Baphomet.

The film adaptation, Nightbreed (released in 1990), became Barker’s second full-length feature as director, one he also intended to be the launch of a franchise. “At last the night has a hero”, ran the tagline to the first paperback edition of Cabal, but it seems that audiences — or film executives, anyway — weren’t sufficiently of the night to see the need for it to have a hero. Personally, I find Nightbreed lacks the dark atmosphere that made Hellraiser so effective. It’s presented far more as the sort of action-fantasy that might well have gone on to be a franchise, only the imagery was perhaps too explicitly horrific for that ever to work for the sort of audience numbers required.

And both Nightbreed and Cabal have a certain amount in common with Underworld (1985), the first full-length film Barker scripted. An underground-monsters-versus-overground-mobsters plot, you can equate Cabal’s police with Underworld’s mob, and the former’s Decker to the latter’s Dr Savary, a man who’s invented the perfect pain-killer — or, one that would be perfect, if only it didn’t leave its users with horrific disfigurements, ending with them living as pariahs in a sewer. Both films culminate in gunfights with the overground forces trying to rid the world of the monsters. Barker was very unhappy with Underworld, but I think if you don’t expect much from the film, it’s not too bad. It looks like a mid-budget 80s music video, so has a certain dreamy, stylised tone, and has some good actors, even if they’re not being particularly stretched: Denholm Elliot, Steven Berkoff, Miranda Richardson and Ingrid Pitt, as well as Nicola Cowper, last seen in this blog as a child actress in Break in the Sun.