Tag Archives: horror

Lumpen corpses and lustful hyena-women

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Reading Killing the Dead by John Blair for the Telegraph, 13 November 2025

St Cuthbert lived on the island of Lindisfarne on a diet of raw onions and died (with what sense of relief we can only imagine) in 687 CE. Four centuries later his coffin was opened, and his revealed corpse looked for all the world like a living man. Some duly proclaimed a miracle, but archaeologist and medievalist John Blair can’t help wondering: “Might his lifelike corpse have raised concerns?”

Comprehensively surveying the world’s undead was, Blair says, a project he saved for his retirement. Killing the Dead speaks to a lifetime’s storing up of mischievous treasures; also to Blair’s sheer enjoyment now, that teeters often (and who can blame him?) on unholy glee. What’s not to love about discussions of China’s “lumpen corpses and lustful hyena-women”, or about a book with chapter titles like “Lying Undead in a Ditch: England, 700–1000”?

Dullards will call “cheat”, since the title mentions vampires while the book embraces all varieties of the undead. But be patient: Blair’s global history of the dangerous dead (restless dead, undead, revenant shroud-chewers — call them what you will) is structured to address this very point.

Blair reckons that vampires, commonly conceived, are a literary invention, and comparatively youthful. Our first true vampire novel is a pamphlet from 1600, now lost, featuring the widely florid tale of Johann Kunze of Bennisch.

Everyone knows that vampires are Slavic but, says Blair, “the intensity of a phenomenon at a late date does not prove that it existed from an early one;” also that historical discussions of the phenomenon “have hugely over-emphasized bloodsucking.”

Blair’s history begins around the 8th century BCE with the Neo-Assyrians, whose remarkably laid-back attitudes towards the restless dead found their way to Greece and from there to Rome, where they cross-fertilised with some Asian ideas (“veering between pathos and bawdy comedy”) about predatory female shape-shifters. These folkloric strains twisted and darkened as they head north, giving rise to some magnificent Icelandic monsters.

Scandinavian colonisation cast these “Viking-style revenants” across northern Europe, where they shaped beliefs in northern Germany, Poland, and Bohemia (witness “an intensive corpse-killing epidemic, which erupted during 1546–1553 in a series of small Saxon towns”). This lore then intensified and spread south-eastwards, eventually linking up with more oriental-flavoured Balkan beliefs. So while vampires are younger than we think, there’s no need for disappointment: their ancestry is much richer and more various than we ever could have imagined.

Some huge questions are being begged here, and Blair is assiduous in addressing them all. (Blair’s book’s over 500 pages long, and he wastes not a single one.) First and most important: are the undead a story we tell each other, or a real phenomenon?

For the phenomenon to be real, Granpa doesn’t actually have to leap up from his bier and chase us around the parlour. It would be enough that we shared some cognitive glitch that made us susceptible to belief in the undead. Perhaps we’re all inclined to see signs of life in post-animate matter. And it is true that corpses do not say still, they groan and fart, stiffen and flex and, when they finally decay, do so at rates that are far from normative.

These days we consider death a singular event — ironic, really, given how our medicine repeatedly brings us up against the processes of death. Earlier societies didn’t have quite so much understanding of coma, anoxia, brain death and vegetative states, but they steered much closer to reality (and offered infinitely more comfort to the bereaved) in viewing death as a process, not an event. “The cessation of breath, the laying-out, the liminal stage at the wake, the burial, and the ensuing physical decay are steps along a road that must be followed precisely,” Blair observes of the rites that grow up in these societies — the only wrinkle being, “if that journey is impeded, the implications can be horrifying.”

Except when it wasn’t. After all, the most memorable resurrected body of all belongs to a much-loved and still revered religious visionary who got up and left his tomb after actually dying. Solid enough — an animated corpse if ever there was one — Jesus Christ nevertheless also managed, in true vampiric style, to pass through the stone stoppering his tomb. No wonder some of the first Christians “found the bodily Resurrection problematic”.

Blair is less interested in picking holes in what people saw; he’s more interested in how people interpreted what they saw, and what this says about their ideas of life in general. In Shamanic societies, fluid spirits flow promiscuously in and out of matter: to be animated at all is to be possessed. Christians and Muslims pack the souls of the dead off to various divine resorts, so can only explain reanimation through the mischievous activities of unearthly (presumably devilish) agents.

Generally, though — and with the notable and quite niggling exception of the Resurrection myth — the phenomenon proves too slippery for dogma to easily attach itself: “One event gives rise to multiple folkloric forms,” Blair explains, “which, when reformatted by the observer… take on forms that we may not even recognize as the original event.”

In other words, whatever psychological universals underpin our experiences of the undead, they’re ever so quickly drowed out by all the inventive stories we spin around our experiences. Are the undead psychically real, or are they just an old wives’ tale, endlessly reglossed? The answer, frustrating as this is, is “Yes.”

A more productive question: what summons the undead? They get about a bit, it’s true, but they’re hardly an everyday occurrence. In the book’s single sophomoric moment, Blair says that their appearances are “triggered by attitudes, perceptions, and fears that are not automatic, but spring from social, economic, political, religious, and cultural variables.”

Don’t anyone panic: he’s quick to put flesh on these modish bones. Wars, plagues and religious controversies unsettle us enough that the walls between the living and the dead start to shiver. There’s also the well-documented abuse and tyranny dished out by Slavic matriarchs, right up until the early 20th century, to consider. Deliciously inconvenient, politically speaking, they have also generated the most recent outbreaks. The latest undead-mother-in-law-killing — a proper stake-through-the-heart affair — took place at Vâlcea, Romania, in 2019. Most vampires are a public nuisance, but undead babushkas are worse: they come after their own.

Ultimately (and somewhat incredibly) Blair’s history of the vampire provides inspiration and comfort. Digging up the dead and decapitating them with an iron spade is a gruesome business, for sure, but a sight less disgusting than treating a living human being the same way. Blair argues convincingly that corpse killings are prophylactic against the kind of mass hysterias otherwise burn witches or throw children into ovens. “Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards,” is Blair’s insouciant conclusion: corpse-killing is “mainstream”.

Blair leads us through innumerable vales of terror and out again, trembling, yet unharmed, and even enlightened, with the elan of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka (who, now I come to think of it, was another pretend retiree). No apologies — if I don’t deliver this crushingly obvious paean, who will? — Killing the Dead is a book to die for.

What’s not to like?

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Watching Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting for New Scientist

A bratty 12-year-old girl. A feckless stepfather who loses her trust and feels increasingly out of place in his own home. Oh, and a giant spider.

Kiah Roache-Turner, a relatively new director on the horror scene, understands that real originality has almost nothing to do with who and what you put in front of the screen. What matters how is you set those elements to dancing. Like 2023’s killer-doll hit M3gan, with which it shares a certain antic humour, Sting cares about its characters. Charlotte (Alyla Browne) hero-worships her absent father, and this is slowly driving her stepdad Ethan (Ryan Corr) up the wall, since he knows full well that Charlotte’s real dad lives only half an hour away “across the bridge”. (Sting is ostensibly set in Brooklyn, New York; actually it was shot in Sydney and aside from a couple of establishing shots its action takes place entirely within a brownstone apartment house, all drywall and ducts.)

Ethan’s a struggling comic book artist who finds himself borrowing (and spoiling) Charlotte’s own much livelier ideas. When Charlotte’s pet spider (it arrived in a meteor during an ice storm — never a good sign) grows to man-eating size and drags Ethan off through the air duct, Charlotte, plugged in to her earphones, her videogames and her anger, simply fails to notice. The scene tries to hit the sweet spot between horror and comedy that M3gan struck again and again, and if it doesn’t quite succeed, I think it may have less to do with the writing or direction as with the film’s basic premise, which is, when you come down to it, very thin.

Comparisons to the original Alien are inevitable, if only because of the spider’s break-neck growth rate and all those ducts. And as far as the special effects go, Sting the Spider stands up pretty well. Wisely, the film prefers glimpses, shadows and one or two very well-judged sight gags to full-on goo and muppeteering.

The house — a realistically over-stuffed gothic interior full of corners and cabinets — is the family in metaphor. The ducts connecting Charlotte’s bedroom to the sitting room of Helga, her senile grandmother (Noni Hazlehurst, having more fun than the rest of the cast put together), are the torturous lines of communication by which these good people struggle to maintain a sense of family. Sting favours suspense over surprise. We learn very early on that Charlotte’s fast-growing pet cannot bear the smell of mothballs and that Helga, wrapped in umpteen threadbare shawls, stinks of them. For a second we teeter on a fairytale in which an old woman and a young girl will save the “real” adult world.

True, nothing kills a good story faster than cleverness — but a few more touches of that sort wouldn’t have hurt. Instead we have an efficient, entertaining light-hearted script, very ably realised, and one and a half hours of light entertainment that, though not at all wasted, are not exactly filled to the brim, either.

Why, then, has Sting acquired global distribution and, even before its release, such glowing trade coverage?

Well, for one thing, it’s refreshing to see a movie that puts its characters through the wringer in psychologically believable ways. Charlotte saves Ethan from the spider. Ethan saves Charlotte. In the face of a Fate Worse Than Death (trust me on this), the pair learn to cooperate. A weak man gains strength, a lonely child learns there’s value in other people, a cowardly exterminator loses his head and a bitter landlady plummets down a lift shaft. What’s not to like? Storytelling this pure looks effortless, but if it was, films in general would be a lot better than they are.

“I want you to laugh openly at it”

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Watching Sebastien Blanc’s Cerebrum for New Scientist, 12 July 2023

A year after the car he was driving span off the road and into a tree, William is shown into an all but empty room. There’s a camp bed. A TV. It’s not his old bedroom — it might not even be his house, it’s so anonymous — but it’ll have to do. William’s still learning to walk again, and the stairs will be too much for him. This is a shame, because he wants to see his mother, who never comes downstairs, never visits him, and is, it seems, constantly “under the weather”.

William scribbles a message to Richard, the man who brought him here: “Is she angry?” and Richard protests just that little bit too much. Already we feel we shouldn’t be watching, not because there’s anything bad going on, but because the script, by first-time feature director Sebastien Blanc, absolutely refuses to acknowledge our presence.

The camera work is no guide, either. Shot in the flat, pseudo-factual style of a British soap opera, Cerebrum views everything that happens with same dispassion. No jump scares. No plangent chords. We’re going to have to figure all this out for ourselves.

And so we do. Richard is William’s adoptive father. The house, for all that it is virtually empty, is indeed — or was — their family home. Dad is killing and burying women in the garden. And Mum is — or jolly well ought to be — dead, killed in the accident for which William (rightly, as it turns out) blames himself.

“You have no idea what I am doing to fix what you have done,” says Richard, in a rare moment of lost temper, and hands the astute viewer pretty much the entire plot.

It’s a gutsy, deliberate move, placing suspense over surprise. We know our Frankenstein. We know what happens to the mad professor in the attic. For one hour and 37 minutes we watch, with growing excitement and gathering horror, as the expected denouement approaches, and Ramona Von Pusch, playing William’s mother, gets the briefest of brief moments in the limelight.

Tobi King Bakare’s more or less mute turn as William, damaged in both body and mind, is visceral to a fault. Best of all, he never plays for sympathy: William hates himself so much, we rather hate him too, at least at first.

Steve Oram, who plays Richard, is a ubiquitous presence on British TV, but nothing prepared us for this. It’s impossible to keep in mind that the man is acting. Richard is a terrifying creation: a quiet, unimaginative man building his very own road to Hell.

When the floodgates finally crack, and Richard sits William down for a spot of family therapy, things take a very dark emotional turn. “I want you to visualise what is troubling you,” says Richard, “and then I want you to laugh openly at it” — at which point half of me wanted to cheer at the scriptwriter’s chutzpah, the half to run screaming from the living room.

Cerebrum is not an important movie. It’s a no-budget labour of love that gives writer-director Blanc something to talk about in pitch meetings. Structured entirely around suspense, the film can’t help but leave us feel disappointed in the final reel, though I can’t help but feel that any extra twists would have felt tacked-on. The script, which gives a black twentysomething white adoptive parents, and then hands everyone plenty of conversational rope with which to hang themselves, suggests Jordan Peele’s superbly queasy 2017 debut Get Out — but the threads here aren’t gathered nearly so tightly or so cleverly.

Watch Cerebrum for its performances, for its chillingly spare script, and for the trust it puts in its audience. Don’t expect miracles. Richard did, and look what happens to him…

We’ve learned a valuable lesson today

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Watching M3gan, directed by Gerard Johnstone, for New Scientist, 25 January 2023

Having done something unspeakable to a school bully’s ear, chased him through the forest like a wolf, and driven him under the wheels of a passing car, M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3 Generative Android”, returns to comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece. “We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” she whispers.

So has the audience, between all their squealing and cheering. Before you ask a learning machine to do something for you, it helps if you know what that thing actually is.

M3gan has been tasked by its inventor Gemma (Allison Williams, in her second Blumfield-produced movie since the company’s 2017 smash Get Out) with looking after her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), recently orphaned when her parents — arguing over who should police her screen time — drove them all under a snow truck.

M3gan is told to protect Cady from physical and emotional harm. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Gemma works for toy company Funki, whose CEO David (comedian Ronny Chieng) is looking for a way — any way — to “kick Hasbro right in the d—.” In a rush to succeed, Gemma ends up creating a care robot that (to paraphrase Terminator) absolutely will not stop caring. M3gan takes very personally indeed the ordinary knocks that life dishes out to a kid.

The robot — a low-budget concoction of masks and CGI, performed by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis — is an uncanny glory. But the signature quality of Blumfield’s films is not so much their skill with low budgets, as the company’s willingness to invest time and money on scripts. In developing M3gan, James Wan (who directed the 2004 horror film Saw) and Akela Cooper (whose first-draft screenplay was, by her own admission, “way gorier”) discovered in the end that there was more currency in mischief than in mayhem. This is the most sheerly gleeful horror movie since The Lost Boys.

Caring for a child involves more than distracting them. Alas M3gan, evolving from Funki’s “Purrfect Petz” (fuzzballs that quote Wikipedia while evacuating plastic pellets from their bowels) cannot possibly understand this distinction.

The point of parenting is to manage your own failure, leaving behind a child capable of handling the world on their own. M3gan, on the contrary, has absolutely no intention of letting Cady grow up. As far as M3gan is concerned, experience is the enemy.

In this war against the world M3gan transforms, naturally enough, into a hyperarticulated killing machine (and the audience cheers: this is a film built on anticipation, not surprise).

M3gan’s charge, poor orphaned Cady, is a far more frightening creation: a bundle of hurt and horror afforded no real guidance, adrift without explanations in a world where (let’s face it) everything will eventually die and everything will eventually go wrong. The sight of a screaming nine-year-old Cady slapping her well-intentioned but workaholic aunt across the face is infinitely more disturbing than any scene involving M3gan.

“Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal,” wrote the social scientist Sherry Turkle back in 2011, “but it consigns us to a closed world — the loveable as safe and made to measure.”

Cady, born into a world of fatuous care robots, eventually learns that the only way to get through life is to grow up.

But the real lesson here is for parents. The robot exists to do what we can imagine doing, but would rather not do. And that’s fine, except that it assumes that we always know what’s in our own best interests.

I remember in 2014, at a conference on human-machine interaction, I watched a a video starring Nao, a charming “educational robot”. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me, to my shame) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come it shows a mother sweating away in the kitchen while a robot is enjoying quality time with her child?

Nicholas, c’est moi

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Watching Color Out of Space for New Scientist, 12 February 2020

Nicholas Cage’s efforts to clear his debts after 2012’s catastrophic run-in with the IRS continue with yet another relatively low-budget movie, Color Out of Space, a film no-one expects much of. (It’s in US cinemas now; by the time it reaches UK screens, on 28 February, it will already be available on Blu-Ray.)

Have you ever watched a bad film and found yourself dreaming about it months afterwards? Color Out of Space is one of those.

To begin: in March 1927 the author H. P Lovecraft wrote what would become his personal favourite story. In “The Color Out of Space”, a meteor crashes into a farmer’s field in the Massachusetts hills. The farmer’s crops grow huge, but prove inedible. His livestock go mad. So, in the end, does the farmer, haunted by a colour given off by a visiting presence in the land: a glow that belongs on no ordinary spectrum.

This is Lovecraft’s riff on a favourite theme of fin-de-siecle science fiction: the existence of new rays, and with them, new ways of seeing. The 1890s and 1900s were, after all, radiant years. Victor Schumann discovered ultraviolet radiation in 1893. Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896. J. J. Thomson discovered that cathode rays were streams of electrons in 1897. Prosper-René Blondlot discovered N-rays in 1903 — only they turned out not to exist: an artefact of observational error and wishful thinking.

And this is pretty much what the local media assume has happened when Nathan Gardner, the not-very-effective head of a household that is downsizing after unspecified health problems and financial setbacks, describes the malevolent light he catches spilling at odd moments from his well. The man’s a drunk, is what people assume. A fantasist. An eccentric.

The film is yet another attempt to fuse American Gothic to a contemporary setting. Director Richard Stanley (who brough us 1990’s Hardware, another valuable bad movie) has written a script that, far from smoothing out the discrepancies between modern and pre-modern proprieties, manners, and ways of speaking, leaves them jangling against each other in a way that makes you wonder What On Earth Is Going On.

And what is going on, most of the time, is Nicholas Cage as Gardner. Has anyone before or since conveyed so raucously and yet so well the misery, the frustration, the rage, the self-hatred of weak men? Every time he gets into a fist-fight with a car interior I think to myself, Ah, Nicholas, c’est moi.

Even better, Cage’s on-screen wife here is Joely Richardson, an actress who packs a lifetime’s disappointments into a request to pass the sugar.

Alien life is not like earth life and to confront it is to invite madness, is the general idea. But with tremendous support from on-screen children Madeleine Arthur and Brendan Meyer, Cage and Richardson turn what might have been a series of uninteresting personal descents into a family tragedy of Jacobean proportions. If ever hell were other people, then at its deepest point you would find the Gardner family, sniping at each other across the dinner table.

Color Out of Space mashes up psychological drama, horror, and alien invasion. It’s not a film you admire. It’s a film you get into internal arguments with, as you try and sort all the bits out. In short, it does exactly what it set out to do. It sticks.

The Endless: Timeless avant-garde

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Watching Benson and Moorhead’s The Endless for New Scientist, 21 July 2018

SINCE they escaped a UFO death cult, nothing much has gone right for Justin and his younger brother Aaron. They clean apartments for a living, subsist on junk food and have rotten luck with women. The arrival of a mysterious videotape convinces them that they should revisit the cult for the sake of “closure”, though it’s obvious that Justin is only going for Aaron’s sake, and what Aaron actually wants most out of this is some decent salad.

But when Justin attempts to jog around the settlement he gets caught in time (although he doesn’t know it at first). Other things are amiss, too, like the third moon. And the rope into nowhere. And an evening heat blur that turns the whole valley into shimmering mirrors.

It transpires that the friendly, gentle people our heroes ran from a decade ago are living in the presence of an unidentified “something”. It is invisible, but it isn’t hiding. Indeed, it is trying to communicate by showing them, through old photographs and videotapes, what it sees.

This low-budget Lovecraftian thriller explores territory we more usually associate with the heavyweights of the 1970s avant-garde – with the tangled story arcs of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the cunningly withheld narrative revelations of Andrei Tarkovsky’s groundbreaking film Solaris. In fact, I’ll stick my neck out here: The Endless is very nearly this decade’s Solaris.

But while the intelligent planet in that film was innocent, even as its little “gifts” sent the scientists studying it clear off their heads, the entity presiding over The Endless is more overtly malign: like the wanton boy in King Lear killing flies for sport, perhaps.

It is trapping people in time, affording them just enough free will to recognise their plight, but not quite enough to escape it.

But then, isn’t that just like life? We nearly all live out days that by most objective measures are more or less the same as each other.

Justin and Aaron’s cleaning job was certainly a trap of this sort. And are they any worse off now? It is, after all, a very laid-back, well-behaved sort of death cult, up there in the hills behind San Diego. Its spokesman Hal talks a lot, but he’s not in any real sense a leader. The group seems happy, and the beer they make and sell is top notch. All is as Aaron remembers from his childhood: a lot of nice people preparing a lot of good food.

Maybe Justin’s the one with the problem, that he cannot see the charm in living a looped existence here. Knowing they are trapped and being looked at, this “cult” at least has the graciousness to imagine that they are also being looked after. And who’s to say their metaphysical jailer has not handed them a chance – an endless series of chances, apparently – to become the best people they can be?

The directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead also play the brothers Justin and Aaron. (Benson is, wonderfully, a dead ringer for Richard Dreyfuss.) And they have made The Endless dovetail neatly with their first micro-budget feature Resolution (2012). This kind of self-reflexive game-playing can get old extremely quickly, and a rather clunky emotional working-out between the brothers at the climax of the movie should serve as an amber light. Any further with this and self-indulgence will swallow them whole.

My guess, though, is that these two know what they are doing. In Spring (2014) they managed to turn the love affair between an American soldier and a vampiric octopus into one of the most funny, touching and ultimately profound screen love affairs since Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Benson (who writes) and Moorhead (who wields the cameras) take the hokiest ideas and discover in them rich seams of human experience. They’re not ironic. They’re not distant. They’re not portentous. And if they can only hold their nerve they will improve the science fiction genre immeasurably.