Joshua Reynolds's Blog, page 15

Under-London

Today’s look at the world of the Royal Occultist introduces the redoubtable men of the London Tunnel Authority, and the dangers of Under-London…

The body known as the London Tunnel Authority has existed, in one fashion or another, for as long as London itself. It is possibly older even than the offices of the Royal Occultist, supposedly having existed since London was Londinium.

According to what few sources from that time remain, the first iteration of the Tunnel Authority was created not long after the Roman Empire signed the Treaty of Pompelo with the Folk Below. Composed of gladiators fresh from the arenas, the group functioned as the wardens of the secrets roads running through the dark beneath the earth. Hundreds of secret battles were waged, even as Rome’s grip on their island territory slipped. When the Empire at last departed, the wardens of the secret roads remained, bound by oaths stronger than iron.

Currently, the Authority recruits members from the police and armed forces, rather than gladiators. The Royal Occultist is considered a ‘civilian adviser’ by the Authority and often works alongside them in order to investigate some mystery or to stave off some dark horror, such as the Rotherhithe Incident of 1834, during which Isambard Kingdom Brunel was rescued from a horrific burrowing entity of enormous size.

The Authority are responsible for the entirety of Under-London, patrolling the depths in grim rotations, twenty-four hours a day. The ghost-stations of the Underground, the semi-detached cellars, forgotten tube tracks and the sewers are their beat, and they wage an on-again, off-again cold war with the Folk Below, tracking and eliminating renegades who seek the surface.

More than once in recent years, the men of the Authority have been forced to enter some squalid East-End cellar with guns and fire and deal with what was nesting there, or wall up a long-lost tunnel in order to contain a lurking horror. Only time will tell if they’re winning the war in the dark, or whether their efforts are doomed to failure.

The London Tunnel Authority was inspired by one of my favourite short stories, “Far Below”, by Robert Barbour Johnson. The idea of a select squad of men, fighting eldritch horrors far below the unknowing streets of a major metropolis, was too good not to borrow. After all, someone must have dealt with the sinister forces slumbering beneath London before the position of Royal Occultist was created.

Since their introduction in “Iron Bells”, they’ve appeared a handful of times, always ably led by Ian Stanhook, the night-manager of the Thames Section. Stanhook is the sort of Sid James-ish genial everyman I like to imagine being responsible for such a daunting task.

He’s become one of the most popular supporting characters in the series, right after Philip Wendy-Smythe. And as with Wendy-Smythe, I have often considered writing London Tunnel Authority-focused stories, centred around Stanhook and his subordinates. So far, I’ve resisted the temptation. I think Stanhook and co. work best as supporting players for the Royal Occultist, though I reserve the right to change my mind at a later date.

LATEST NEWS

Below you’ll find all the latest news in regards to Josh’s work, including interviews, appearances and new releases. Check back regularly for updates!

LATEST FREE STORY

This month’s free story has just been posted to the blog! “A Test of Fortitude” is a tale of the Styrian monster-hunter, Baron Vordenburg, and it finds him beneath a Venetian palazzo, hunting an alchemical horror. As always, it’s absolutely free to read, but if you enjoy it, please consider buying Josh a coffee. 

LATEST INTERVIEW

Josh sits down with Anjuli to talk about Zombicide: Last Resort!

LATEST NOVEL

Zombicide: Last Resort is Josh’s first foray into the apocalyptic world of ZOMBICIDE. Join Westlake, Ramirez and El Calavera Santo as they battle undead park rangers and worse in the Adirondacks.

The zombie apocalypse has driven humanity up into the Adirondacks. Enter Westlake, a hardened career criminal on the path of “the Villa”, a legendary mafia hideout where he can escape the devastation. When he’s ambushed by the undead, an old FBI “friend” and his squad of survivors rescue him… and then force him to reveal his secrets. Reluctantly, Westlake is saddled with an oddball team to navigate minefields, trip wires, and flesh-eating zombies at every turn to find their safe haven…

Find Out MoreAmazon USAmazon UK

LATEST SHORT STORY

“Bruno J. Lampini and the Sanguinary Assignation” is the fourth Bruno J. Lampini story to appear in print, and the wildest outing yet for the amoral acquisitionist of the eldritch!

Enter freely, and drink deeply of fifteen vampire tales told by a sanguinary collection of modern horror authors. Here you will find both traditional vampires, and those who stretch genre boundaries. Not all of these Nosferatu drink blood, but they all share an unholy thirst for human lives. So step into the shadows, and listen for the children of the night.

With Stories by:
Amanda DeWees
Donald F. Glut
John Linwood Grant
Leanna Renee Hieber
Paul McNamee
Chris McAuley
Lee Murray
Josh Reynolds
Cat Scully
Jeff Strand
Plus:
A new Sonja Blue story by Nancy A. Collins
A New Bubba the Monster Hunter story by John Hartness
A New Deacon Chalk story by James R. Tuck
A new Jonathan Crowley/Carter Decamp story by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge
And introducing Renard Duvall in a story by Cliff Biggers

Amazon USAmazon UK

The Ghost-Finder

Out you go!

-Thomas Carnacki, The Horse of the Invisible, 1913

William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki outlived his creator with a tenacity that Hodgson, a bantam rooster of a man, would have appreciated. Thomas Carnacki, resident of 472 Cheyne Walk, London, first appeared in a series of five stories (“Gateway of the Monster”, “The House Among the Laurels”, “The Whistling Room”, “The Horse of the Invisible”, and “The Searcher of the End House”) in The Idler Magazine in the January through April, as well as June, issues of 1910. But despite Hodgson’s death in World War I, Carnacki carried on in a further four stories (“The Thing Invisible”, “The Hog”, “The Haunted Jarvee” and “The Find”) retrieved from Hodgson’s papers by his wife. All nine stories are available in a variety of printed, electronic and audio forms.

But that wasn’t the end. Carnacki’s career was further chronicled by other writers, including A. F. Kidd, Andrew Cartmel, Barbara Hambly, Alberto Lopez Aroca, Kim Newman, Willie Meikle and Alan Moore. He battled evil alongside the Second Doctor and Sherlock Holmes, as well as Mina Murray’s League.  He appeared on television, played ably by Donald Pleasance.  He’s even inspired a concept album! But in each of his incarnations, Carnacki combined ancient sorceries and Edwardian science to face the squealing, swine-faced threats of the Outer Void.

Hodgson’s Carnacki tales function at a level removed from the reader. Told from the viewpoint of ‘Dodgson’, one of a circle of friends who gather on a regular basis at the strange little flat at 472 Cheyne Walk, London to hear Carnacki talk about his latest adventure, the formula reads like a tale told by a friend of a friend. But these degrees of separation lend a strange sort of veracity to the stories, making Carnacki’s outlandish descriptions, delivered in a dry, witty style, all the more believable.

And the situations are outlandish…in “The Thing Invisible”, a cursed dagger kills of its own accord; in “The Hog”, a porcine nightmare from another reality invades a man’s dreams and the waking world; and in “The Horse of the Invisible” the titular equine threatens the lives of a cursed family. The sad, lonely ghosts of drowned sailors and lovelorn maidens are not for Carnacki. His interests lie in more dangerous territories, hunting the horrors that populate the void between worlds.

Of course, he doesn’t always find them. The answers to Carnacki’s mysteries range from the rational to the irrational to the ridiculous. For every monstrous HOG, there is a cunning murderer or antique booby-trap. It is this gamut of explanation that makes the stories as intriguing as they are. A new reader won’t know what they’re getting until the final climax (and sometimes not even then!).

As for Thomas Carnacki himself, we know little about him, beyond that he is financially secure and an adjudged and recognized expert in a number of fields. The upper classes seek his aid as readily as the police, though Carnacki appears not to take a fee. Like John Silence, interest appears to be his main motivation in taking a case. And like Silence, he appears to have sprouted fully-formed from Hodgson’s mind. How he came to be, how he learned what he now knows is never touched upon, much in the same way that Sherlock Holmes’ origins are never mentioned. We get brief, tantalizing glimpses, but nothing concrete. Carnacki is, simply, Carnacki, and that is enough.

However, unlike either Silence or Holmes, Carnacki’s resolutions of the mysteries he faces come not through serene practiced omniscience, but via hard graft. Carnacki is, like Shiela Crerar, a sleuth first and an occultist second. His investigations combine the otherworldly and the mundane in a unique fashion, and Carnacki appears to live by the adage, ‘expect the obvious and prepare for the impossible’.

If a defense can be conjured, prepared or built, Carnacki does so with an almost anal-retentive mania. After all, he’s seen what happens to those who face the unfriendly deeps armed only with positive thoughts or British bluster, and it’s this caution which enlivens the character for the reader. Carnacki, unlike Silence or Crerar, is, at points, terrified. And he’s not shy about sharing that fact. Nor is he shy about pointing out when his boldness was unwarranted or when his preparations were underwhelming.

But while Carnacki isn’t the sort to meet a fallen angel face to face (though the eponymous monster of “The Hog” might well qualify) without flinching, neither is he the type to wish to do so, knowing full well that being noticed by his quarry is always the worst mistake a hunter can make.  Still, like all good hunters, he’s prepared for that eventuality.

Seemingly self-educated in matters of the occult, Carnacki employs stratagems straight out of the Sherlock Holmes guide to investigative technique but melds them with the occult sciences. Employing flash photography and fingerprinting techniques side-by-side with the Saamaa Rituals of the esoteric Sigsand Manuscript: his guidebook to the invisible world which provides him with odd protections concerning the color spectrum and the power of certain elements over others.

It is the Electric Pentacle, however, which stands paramount. Exactly what it sounds like, the Pentacle is composed of nothing more than a generator and vacuum tubes with colored bulbs. But, by situating it within a chalk circle (or, in one case, a circle of water), Carnacki can flip the switch and hey, presto-instant magic circle. Granted, it seems to work only about half the time, and on at least two occasions its usage almost gets Carnacki killed, but it’s nonetheless symbolic of his approach to combat with the forces of unreality.

And it is combat, if of an unusual nature. When the culprit is in fact a malign entity rather than a human being, Carnacki stops at nothing to banish it, pitting himself against horrors he has little concept for, all in the name of sanity or friendship.  Interest gets him involved, but courage keeps Carnacki in the fight.

And at the end, when his story is told, he sends his friends out into the night with a warm feeling of safety to replace the dread he has engendered and a hearty, haunting “Out you go!”

At least until the next time.

*Author’s Note: This essay originally appeared in 2011, at Black Gate Magazine.*

Fright Festival 2021

And that, as they say, is a wrap. With the graves a-yawning and the winds a-howling, another Halloween comes to a close. Thirty-one horror films over thirty-one days, with thirty-one reviews to show for it. I’ve linked them below, just in case you haven’t been following along, or if you’ve been waiting to read them once I finished.

Every year I think I’m going to do something different, and every year I wind up doing the same thing – a mix of old and new, chosen largely at random. The only real difference this year was having to write something about each one. Reviewing is not a skill that comes naturally to me, so it was a bit of a challenge; but if I’m being honest, that’s why I did it. It’s also why I’ll probably do it next year.

I made a conscious effort to watch more new films this year, and I managed eleven – not quite half, but close. I wanted to expand my horizons a bit, rather than just mainlining old favourites. That meant getting out of my comfort zone some, but on the whole I found it to be a rewarding experience. There was really only one stinker out of the bunch, and I decided not to even bother writing about it.

If you have any suggestions for what I should watch next year, please feel free to drop them in the comments below. And if you enjoyed these reviews, why not drop some change in my Ko-Fi account to help keep the lights on, so to speak? Either way, the list is below, with links. Enjoy!

Curse of Frankenstein (1957)White Zombie (1932)The Giant Gila Monster (1959)Candyman (1992)Dog Soldiers (2002)The Black Gloves (2017)No One Gets Out Alive (2021) Boar (2017) Jakob’s Wife (2021) The Old Dark House (1932) Q – The Winged Serpent (1982)Kandisha (2020)Phantasm (1979)Dawn of the Dead (2004)The Night Flier (1997)The Black Cat (1934)Son of Frankenstein (1939)The Mummy (1959)Tremors (1990) Demons 2 (1986) Night of the Sea Gulls (1975) Night Teeth (2021) The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)Dracula (1958)The Last Man on Earth (1964) [.REC] (2007) Return of the Vampire (1943) Noroi: The Curse (2005) The Brides of Dracula (1958)Halloween (1978)Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

House of Horrors

The next time I tell you that I saw something when I saw it, you believe me that I saw it!

– Wilbur Grey

Day 31. Halloween. There’s no surprise about today’s film, no switch-up, no whim. It’s always the same – for every Halloween, as far back as I can recall, I’ve watched Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). It’s a tradition I’ve held fast to, however I feel, whatever the circumstances – come the day, this film will be on and I will laugh at the same scenes every time. It’s a ritual, a Halloween rite – it’s my virgin blood, my tana leaves, my bolt of lightning. I need it to make it through the rest of the year intact. It has never failed me, and God willing it never will.

There’s a lot to like about it, even if you’re not a fan of humour in your horror. It’s the last real go-round for the Sons of Shock – Lugosi as Dracula, Chaney as the Wolf Man and Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein’s Monster – and by and large, it sends them out on a strong note, and on Halloween no less. It’s a better monster rally than either House of Frankenstein (1944) or House of Dracula (1945), with a tighter plot and an interesting twist on the formula – the Wolf Man attempting to put his curse to good use by aiming it at Dracula, while the latter attempts to revivify the Monster in order to use the brute as his servant. Of the Universal films that bring together multiple monsters it’s the only one other than Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) that doesn’t feel somehow forced. Even better, all of the monsters get to interact to some degree.

The real strength of the film, however, is in how it carries itself. The horror elements are largely played straight – you could remove Abbot and Costello’s bumbling Chick Young and Wilbur Grey from the film entirely and still have a perfectly entertaining film. The humour is left to the comedians and the horror is left to the monsters and only rarely do the twain meet.

Even today, it’s still one of my Desert Island Five. I have watched multiple copies of this film into the grave, going from VHS to DVD. It was the first Universal monster movie I ever saw, and my love for those characters – for horror as a genre, even – is due entirely to this film. Heck, my career as a writer is because of this film. Every bit of dialogue I’ve ever written has its genesis in the rapid fire back-n-forth of the characters in this film. This is the film that will be playing on my hologram headstone in the graveyard of the future.

If you’ve never seen it, watch it. If you have seen it, watch it again. And then do it again next year.

The Devil’s Eyes

Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.

– Loomis

John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher, Halloween. There’s not much more to say about it really, given the reams of essays written about it and its influence on modern horror cinema. I’ve watched it every Halloween since I was introduced to it in high school by a savvy creative writing teacher (hi Miss Cooper!). It’s one of the few annual traditions I hold to.

There are other Carpenter films I enjoy more – The Fog (1980), for instance. But there’s something about this one that sticks in the mind. It’s at once realistic and nightmarish; while there’s no overt supernatural element, Michael Myers’ implacability and utter lack of dialogue serve to create an atmosphere of the inhuman about him – he is simply the Shape. He has no personality, no motivation, no…anything, save his knife and mask. He is a vessel, full of cacodemonic malice and nothing else.

Myers is a force, rather than a character, but with brief flashes of spiteful humour; the trick in the treat, the bump in the night. He stalks his prey; teases and taunts them. He waits for a moment of his choosing – as killers go, he’s less opportunistic than cinematic. He chooses the moments for the fear they will elicit, the pain they will cause. He’s a giallo killer loose in suburban America.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode is the perfect foil for such a monster. She is…utterly human. Normal. The only thing special about Laurie Strode is that she’s not special at all, save that where her peers die she manages to survive. Indeed, her durability mirrors Myers’ own monstrous resilience. Strode, like her tormenter, is iron at her core. If Myers is a sword, Strode is the shield, deflecting him again and again, until Donald Pleasance’s obsessed Dr. Loomis manages to corner and slay the monster he’s so doggedly sought.

Except, of course, that he doesn’t. Michael Myers survives. It’s what he does. And if recent additions to the franchise Carpenter unwittingly spawned have proven anything it’s Laurie Strode survives as well. Like Van Helsing and Dracula, they’re two sides of the same dark coin, destined to go round and round again and again.

Forever.

A Beast of the Night

Only God has no fear.

– Dr. Van Helsing

In 1960, Hammer decided to follow up Dracula (1958) with a sequel, Brides of Dracula. Originally titled Disciples of Dracula, the film focused on Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing rooting out and destroying one of Dracula’s followers – a disciple of the vampiric cult described by Van Helsing in the first film.

The film’s change of title suits it, I think. A case could be made that David Peel’s spoiled, savage Baron Meinster is both disciple and bride – a youth, given over to Dracula in a dark pact and made over into something monstrous. But despite this, Meinster is but a pale shadow of his master. Dangerous, but ultimately lacking in ambition and cunning.

I think that’s why I dig this one so much – Lee’s Dracula is the epitome of the vampire: an arrogant predator, stalking the forests of the night. But Meinster is…not. An evil child, throwing a bloody tantrum. But it’s the evil child who comes the closest to ending Van Helsing’s career – leading to one of the best scenes in all of Hammer’s history, that of Peter Cushing cauterizing his own jugular before pouring holy water over the charred wound in order to cleanse himself of the taint of vampirism.

And while Meinster is no Dracula, he is a unique evil in his own right. One thing Hammer was good at was creating memorable villains for their vampire films, and Meinster is no exception. A pampered aristocrat, corrupted into a petulant leech who corrupts everything around him. Seeing him destroyed is the epitome of a cathartic experience. Its only a shame his destruction didn’t take longer.

Another reason I like this film is that its a look at what might have been – Cushing’s Van Helsing was strong enough a character to carry a film without his archfoe. Imagine if Hammer and Cushing had stuck with it. Brides might have been followed by a second stab at Disciples of Dracula, then…who knows? Curse of Dracula, Shadow of Dracula, etcetera and so on, with Van Helsing hunting down Dracula’s followers across the strange Mitteleuropa that the Hammer films inhabited. Alas, such was not to be and Cushing would not reappear as Van Helsing until Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972).

I Want the Truth

My God! The pigeons!

– Mitsuo Hori

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, found footage films aren’t normally my thing, but Noroi: The Curse (2005) was recommended to me as a must-see so I decided to give it a watch. Long story short, I’m glad I did.

Honestly, it’s probably one of the best found footage films I’ve seen. It’s a slow build to be sure – methodical, almost – with a distinct lack of CGI nonsense until some very effective scenes towards the end but a creep factor that’s off the scale from the jump. Seriously, bad signs and evil omens litter the first forty-five minutes like road flares on a dark night, and the tension ramps up with incredible swiftness once Jin Murkai’s Masafumi Kobayashi begins closing in on the truth behind this complex mystery involving ancient curses, dead dogs and kidnapped children. This film has everything you might want – cursed shrines, weird ghosts, a psychic who covers himself in tinfoil…it’s quality, is what I’m saying.

But really, Kobayashi’s investigation is, I think, why I enjoyed the film as much as I did. I’m a big fan of occult detective fiction, and Kobayashi fits the bill to a ‘T’. A paranormal researcher with a bull-headed dedication to uncovering the truth behind unexplainable events, he’s a Carl Kolchak for a new millennium. As he unravels the mystery of Kagutaba, Kobayashi finds himself in the unenviable position of being the only one capable of stopping the evil he’s uncovered.

Unfortunately for Kobayashi, while he’s just as dogged a journalist as Kolchak, he lacks the latter’s cockroach-like ability to walk away from his encounters with the supernatural unscathed – or maybe not, depending on how you parse the film’s climax.

Me, I like to think that Kobayashi is still out there, searching for the truth.

I give it five dead dogs out of five.

It’s Night Again

You’re a very brilliant woman, but a foolish one to pit your strength against mine.

– Armand Tesla

So, today’s film was supposed to be John Gulager’s 2005 horror-comedy, Feast, but…well. I watched it, didn’t enjoy it, and didn’t feel like writing about it. So instead, inspired by pal David Annandale, I watched the 1943 Columbia Pictures vampire film, The Return of the Vampire, which I did enjoy, and do want to write something about. Lucky you!

Anyway, the main draw here is obviously Lugosi as a vampire who is definitely *not* Dracula, but might as well be. If Armand Tesla isn’t as intense as Dracula was in his 1931 appearance, he is just as spiteful and monstrous. The character occupies a middle-ground between the silken menace of Dracula and the monstrous schemer of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), but like both is burdened with an infernal hubris that ultimately proves his undoing (interestingly, in both this film and in Abbot and Costello… that undoing comes in the form of a werewolf; here its Tesla’s lycanthropic servant, Andréas, and in Abbot and Costello… it’s poor old Larry Talbot. Between these and his role as the unfortunate Bela in The Wolf Man (1941), Lugosi doesn’t have much luck when it comes to lycanthropy…)

It’s that Satanic pride that differentiates Lugosi’s vampire from those of, say, Christopher Lee. Lee’s Dracula has the arrogance of a tiger, but it’s not the same. He doesn’t possess the same smug sense of superiority that Lugosi’s undead drip with. Tesla or Dracula, it doesn’t matter; they all radiate the same haughtiness – an old world pomposity that no English aristocrat can quite replicate.

But the film doesn’t belong to Lugosi alone. Frieda Inescort, as Lady Jane Ainsley, is the requisite Van Helsing stand-in, and she holds her own against Lugosi at least as well as Edward Van Sloan did twelve years earlier. Watching Inescort wrangle with the sceptical Sir Frederick over the existence of vampires, and match wits with the rapacious Tesla not once but twice, is a thing of beauty. I’ve included one of the best scenes between Inescort and Lugosi below – in point of fact, it’s this scene that made me wish that Lady Jane had gotten her own three picture spinoff.

All told, The Return of the Vampire is a slick pastiche of Universal’s better-known formula. It moves at a fair clip, with only a few digressions into slapstick (“Blimey, ‘e’s ‘opped! Lord Love-a-Duck!”) to lighten the tone. Though in his sixties, Lugosi is still swinging for the fences, and his Armand Tesla is, if not as memorable as Dracula, a worthy addition to the pantheon of cinematic counts. But don’t take my word for it – give it a watch for yourself.

While You’re Asleep

We have to tape everything, Pablo. For fuck’s sake.

– Ángela

For Day 26, I decided to watch something I haven’t seen before – the 2007 Spanish found footage film, [.REC]. I’ve seen the 2008 American remake, Quarantine, but never the original. So today, I dug up a copy and settled in. As far as zombie movies go, it does some interesting things with the concept – the pseudo-mystical origins of the zombie virus, for instance.

Found footage has never been my favourite sort of film – it often requires a supreme effort of suspension of disbelief on my part to buy that some fool is continuing to film despite being pursued by zombies. But [.REC] does it better than most, with the video being shot as news footage, and the camera often being dropped or bashed around to add to the realism of the moment. And the idea of a self-contained zombie apocalypse – in this case taking place in a single apartment building – is one I enjoyed. Knowing that some form of authority was outside, intent on keeping the characters from escaping added another layer of tension to things. And the zombies themselves were fun; fast moving, strong and creepy.

The only real let-down of the film were the characters, save Manuela Velasco’s Ángela Vidal. Most of them were little more than sketches, there to be zombie-chow and little else. Only Velasco’s dedicated reporter gets any sort of development, as she becomes determined first to expose what she believes to be a conspiracy, then to simply chronicle what’s happening so that someone, somewhere, might see. It gives the film a strong centre if nothing else.

That said, I’ve found this lack of character when it comes to characters to be a common weakness of many recent zombie films, so I wasn’t altogether surprised. Otherwise, I enjoyed the film quite a bit. If you haven’t seen it, give it a shot. You might enjoy it too.

I give it three screeching zombie toddlers out of five.