Stranger Things (2016-2025) may have defined the ‘Kids on Bikes’ genre, but the roots of those stories reach back over 70 years, long before The Goonies came out in 1985.

The work of baby boomers like Spielberg (E.T. The Extra Terrestrial), Joe Dante (Gremlins), Chris Columbus (The Goonies) and Stephen King (pretty much everything) evoke a world of All-American folk memory in which resourceful kids discover monsters in dreamy small-town suburbia, a liminal playground that offers freedom and threat, but with home and safety apparently never too far away.

It’s this combo of the cosy and the terrifying that makes Stranger Things so appealing to modern audiences, over-informed, over-anxious, doomscrolled to death and wishing to God they could retreat to a state of blissful innocence.

But the books and movies to which Stranger Things pays such exhaustive homage are themselves a homage to childhood comforts gone by, specifically the Atomic Age monster matinees of the early 1950s.

One of these movies is a minor classic directed by a major talent and proved particularly influential.

“Invaders From Mars is a very Lewis Carroll, child’s-eye view of a science-fiction story,” says Joe Dante.1

Fellow Monster Kid Steven Spielberg returned to the theatre several times to see it and cites it as a direct influence on both Close Encounters and E.T. “It certainly touched a nerve in all the kids like myself who saw the film at a very young age.”2

It terrified a young American Werewolf in London director John Landis. It was a key influence on Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979). Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper loved it so much he made a homage of his own, a 1986 remake co-written by Dan (Alien) O’Bannon with creature FX by Stan Winston.

Martin Scorsese fought for the movie’s preservation. “[Invaders From Mars] is one of those films that at a certain age, certain people saw and it’s your cinema now.”3 (emphasis mine)

The tale of a little boy who finds a flying saucer hiding just beyond his backyard, Invaders From Mars (1953) was part of the early fifties sci-fi boom, joining a sub-strain of alien invasion pictures that included The Man From Planet X, The Thing From Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still (all 1951), The War of the Worlds and It Came From Outer Space (both 1953). This sub-genre achieved an undeniable masterpiece in 1956 with Don Siegel’s still-chilling Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and by 1957 alien invasions were familiar enough to warrant parody in Invasion of the Saucer Men (UK title: Attack of the Hell Creatures).

Invaders From Mars doesn’t feature alien death-fleets microwaving entire cities (it didn’t have the budget, for a start). Its monsters are more insidious and familiar: regular Norman Rockwell Americans reduced to dead-eyed automatons, radicalised and remote-controlled by an unseen Martian troll-farm.

Popularised by the Roswell ‘crash site’ of 1947, UFO sightings were common headline-grabbers by the 1950s and the flying saucer had become a potent symbol of Cold War paranoia. That sleek, spinning exterior harboured an inscrutable intelligence, almost certainly pledged to some malign manifesto. Invaders, subversives, parasites, colonisers.

Aliens were the ultimate foreign power, armed with a technology so impossibly advanced they might as well be gods. And like wrathful divinities, they stood poised over a button that could extinguish all life on earth.

Come the Atomic Age, the doomsday devices of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers no longer felt like childish whimsy. Joe Dante recalls how every time a plane flew over his schoolyard, the kids would all stop and wait for a big white flash.

Sci-fi had become a worthwhile genre, but Invaders From Mars was neither sensibly scientific like Destination Moon(1950), respectfully Biblical like When Worlds Collide (1951) or The Day the Earth Stood Still, nor grown-up and (mostly) sober like The Thing From Another World.

It was an indie production made on the cheap, a rattled-off programmer bound for the kids’ Saturday matinees, and perhaps lucky enough to have been directed by a struggling legend.

William Cameron Menzies had been one of the most respected and influential art directors in American pictures. A visual auteur, Menzies combined a sense of architecture, depth and dramatic scale, creating a unifying aesthetic for the pictures on which he worked. He was the first to be billed as ‘production designer’, for his monumental work on Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939).

The Burning of Atlanta sequence? That sweeping field-hospital scene? Menzies directed both.

He also torched the Skull Island set from the original King Kong (1933). RKO leased their backlot for the Burning of Atlanta sequence, providing several iconic but disused sets as kindling.

He had a hand in creating immersive storybook worlds for Douglas Fairbanks’ silent The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Paramount’s Alice in Wonderland (1933), the British H.G. Wells adaptation Things to Come (1936) and another The Thief of Bagdad, this time for Michael Powell (1940).

But by the 1940s Menzies was overworked and too often under-credited, and his drinking had made him a liability among the big studios. He was reduced to calling in favours and had to take whatever work came his way.

He followed up Invaders from Mars in the same year with a striking 3D gothic The Maze, before his death four years later.

Child star Jimmy Hunt couldn’t look more 1950s, with his scamp’s freckles, Brylcreem curls, and gee-whiz expression. He plays little-boy protagonist David, a budding scientist devoted to his telescope, “not the type of boy that’s given to imagining things.”

Awakened by a thunderstorm, he peers through billowing curtains and sees a glowing green saucer creeping behind the trees over yonder and sinking into the sandy slopes. (“Gee-whiz!”)

He tells his engineer dad (Leif Erickson), who heads out to investigate.

We watch as if from David’s window as dad heads uphill in his robe and slippers, unaware the sand is sinking into a hole ahead of him, yawning with a strange choral wail. We see him move behind a tree and are left waiting for him to reemerge on the other side. The sandtrap seals as if by magic and our imagination is left to infer what happened to poor pop.

Just like those swallowing sands, Menzies submerges his audience in the terrified worldview of his child protagonist. We’re told David reads too many of “those trashy science fiction magazines”, which is why so many shots in this movie look like illustrations from an issue of Fantastic Adventures, tinted with a pulpy palette of moonlight blue, lurid red and uranium green. We’re literally seeing through the eyes of a boy obsessed with rocket ships, flying saucers and little green men.

The movie’s cinematographer was John F. Seitz, who shot three noirs for Billy Wilder – Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend, (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) – and received an Oscar nomination for each.

By the early fifties, the sci-fi fiction fuelling the boom in sci-fi moviemaking had moved away from its zap-pow origins in the childish pulps and onto classier fare dominated by more grown-up, rationalist, science-forward stories. But Menzies knew his child audience and wisely went against the grain. He’s still telling a science fiction story but does so in the language of fairy tale.

The Martians’ victims aren’t beamed out of existence but rather vanish as if spirited away by the faeries. Kings and queens become wicked ogres. Menzies’ sets look like pages from some half-remembered storybook. We return again and again to that fearful view of the hill with its dark, skeletal trees and that crooked fence leading up over the hill and down into nowhere.

The town police station looks especially unearthly. We’re given just a front desk, two police lamps, and a clock high up on a stark white wall. It’s a police station as imagined by a good boy who has only the vaguest idea what the inside of a police station might look like.

Invaders From Mars feels distinct from other sci-fi movies of its time in being rooted not in perfectly rational fears of what might be going on among the stars (or behind the Iron Curtain), but in the perfectly irrational fears of childhood.

The original script was conceived by John Tucker Battle, a former Mercury Theatre producer for Orson Welles. Battle and his then-wife Rosemary were both sci-fi nerds addicted to the pulps. While daydreaming on their porch, Rosemary not only came up with the premise of a flying saucer burrowing into the California hills, but the idea of the Martians mind-controlling their victims. She recalled a persistent childhood nightmare, “wherein I ran to my mother, but my mother wasn’t my mother… What could be more frightening than to have your own mother turn against you?”4

Coincidentally, prominent sci-fi editor John W. Campbell had the same maternal nightmare, which formed the basis of his novella Who Goes There? (1938), later filmed by John Carpenter as The Thing (1982).

Like any good horror film, Invaders From Mars builds unease by first establishing what is safe and secure. We get the warmth of David’s home and the devotion of his parents. That his engineer dad is pals with a four-star general feels like a child’s idea of parental authority, their power seemingly limitless. Mom and dad can protect me from anything and they’ll always love me, no matter what!

Then the movie starts turning David’s protectors against him. Dad returns from the hills a changed man, sweaty and furtive. David notices a star-shaped scab on the back of his neck.

One by one, David’s guardians go down, next the cops, then his mom, then the general, even the sweet little girl next door, proving that even children like David will not be spared the Martian onslaught.

The sandpit claims them all and – a spooky touch – they all go down without a scream.

They return with thousand-yard stares and mumbling about “important work to do”. There’s a supremely creepy moment when the little girl smiles dead-eyed as she burns down the family home.

David flees into town trying to warn the other grown-ups about the Martian takeover, but either no one believes him or else they have that same star-shaped scar on the back of their neck.

The movie exploits a child’s fear of the aloof unknowability of adults. Grown-ups are rather alien to children, after all. Who knows what they get up to behind closed doors. The flipside of a child’s trust in their parents is a terror those parents might somehow wish their child harm.

There’s a beat in the movie perhaps only apparent to 21^st century eyes. It’s when the freshly alienised dad lashes out at his son, knocking him to the floor. Not-yet-turned mom walks in and finds David on the floor. She looks fearful but says nothing. Far be it from a wife to stop her husband from ‘disciplining’ their son. It’s a hint that there was something rotten in these pristine American ‘burbs long before the Martians showed up and started hijacking peoples’ brains.

The movie’s horror hits its highest pitch when David runs to the police station only to find the chief is one of ‘Them’. Helpless and terrified, the boy is carried off to a cell kicking and screaming, “Please don’t let my father get me!”

It’s the movie’s most unsettling moment, especially so if you’re watching as a kid.

But from here the movie relents and shifts into a more comforting, more generic gear as a soft-hearted desk sergeant decides to make a call to the City Health Department. Helena Carter plays Doctor Blake. A woman of gentle authority, she arrives at the station with the look of a Gil Elvgren pinup in a saviour-white dress. (Carter was a former model who had a short-lived acting career. This was her last movie before she retired. A shame, as she’s great in this.)

A wonderful stand-off occurs when David’s parents arrive to drag their son back to the mothership. But Doctor Blake stands her ground – dressed in angelic white vs. the parents in funereal black – saving David’s soul by spinning a line about the boy needing to be quarantined for polio.

Doctor Blake is intrigued enough by David’s wild story to call “her favourite astronomer”, the tweed-suited, pipe-puffing Doctor Kelston (Arthur Franz). The pair become David’s temporary guardians, while the boy waits for them to come up with a solution to save his folks.

David’s worldview is more than just decoration. His child’s perspective doesn’t just colour the story; it dictates the very fabric of the story’s reality.

We know Doctor Kelston’s a proper astronomer ‘cos he’s got this huge picture of space behind his desk. And like any good scientist, Kelston instantly believes David’s talk of spaceships. He knows all about Martians, see?

Apparently, there’s this very detailed – and as it turns out completely accurate – theory that Martians live in underground cities beneath the surface of Mars where it’s nice and warm. A dying race, they’ve synthesised a strain of artificial beings called ‘mutants’ (pronounced ‘mew-tants’) to ensure their survival.

DR. BLAKE: But, Stu, it’s fantastic!

DR. KELSTON: So was the aeroplane!

The plot of Invaders From Mars unfolds like a Golden Age comic-book. Adult logic becomes plasticised as though a child were relating the story. The complexities of the real world melt and flow into a kind of dream sequence. Characters become archetypes, simplified, reduced yet enlarged, trading emotional detail for a broader mythic identity.

Invaders From Mars is fondly remembered by those who saw it at the right age. I first saw it on the BBC as a kid and its storybook imagery was left freeze-framed in my brain. Years later, I’d describe it to friends who would instantly recall, ‘Oh my God! Was that the one where the sand opens up? The one where he’s got that thing in the back of his neck?’

However, the bits everyone remembers are all from the movie’s brilliant first half. The second half mostly stinks.

The finished movie came in around ten minutes too short for a feature film and Menzies was forced to pad out his second half with reems of stock footage borrowed from WW2 training films.

Once Doctor Kelston alerts the Pentagon to the Martians’ presence, the movie is fairly ruined by endless grainy footage of Sherman tanks and transport trucks trundling around.

Meanwhile, those mind-controlled cops are busy sabotaging a weapons depot, the general has made off with a briefcase full of nitro-glycerine and David’s dad attempts to assassinate a leading physicist.

It turns out the boffins are working on an atomic rocket bound for Mars. They want to establish sentry-posts there via remote control so they can shoot down any missiles should the russkies ever get trigger-happy.

Kelston points out the Martians are only trying to defend themselves against colonisation by Earth. But the movie’s sympathy is short-lived, especially when the Martians start popping their agents’ brains – including that poor little girl – once they’ve outlived their usefulness.

By the early fifties, McCarthyism and the House of Un-American Activities Committee were setting about institutions like Hollywood with torch and pitchfork. Anyone suspected of harbouring even a whiff of communist sympathy was instantly cancelled, their names blacklisted, their careers nuked.

Unsurprisingly, the makers of Invaders From Mars fell into obedient, militaristic line with Uncle Sam.

America was as scared of itself as it was of totalitarian communism.

Things get visually interesting again once the Army TNTs its way into the buried saucer. David and Doctor Blake get sucked inside, trapped in an absinthe-green hell of art-deco chambers and a maze of bubbling caverns, melted into tunnels by the Martians’ infra-red ray guns.

The mew-tants are something of a disappointment, turning out to be little more than gimps in fuzzy green romper-suits, two-fingered mittens and zippers clearly visible down their backs.

Unlike the ravening Id Monster of Forbidden Planet (1956) or the freaky, bollock-brained Metaluna Mutant of This Island Earth (1955), the aliens of Invaders From Mars don’t look scary so much as they do exaggeratedly foreign. The swollen-eyed mew-tants resemble then-familiar propaganda caricatures of the Axis Japanese. Mexican actress Luce Potter – who played several uncredited little-person roles in movies like The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) – plays the Martian Intelligence, hyper-evolved into a bulbous octopoid head with grasping commie tentacles growing out of its neck.

There’s a memorable moment when the creature looks down, creepily dismissive as David pounds on the glass of its goldfish bowl.

Skip to the end if you want to avoid spoilers…

John Tucker Battle’s original screenplay included a lavish Independence Day-style climax with the alien mothership arriving to battle the forces of Earth. But producer Edward L. Alperson was keen to stay within his $300k budget and brought in Richard Blake for a rewrite.

It was Blake’s ending that was filmed, closing with the saucer ticking down to explosion as David flees in panic and the events of the last few days flash before his eyes (cue another pad-the-running-time montage of recycled footage). The saucer goes kaboom and David wakes up in bed.

It was all a dream!

His folks are safe and sound, but as he snuggles back into bed, he sees a familiar glowing green shape creeping across the trees in his backyard and the invasion begins anew.

Battle hated this revised ending so much he had his name taken off the picture. The movie’s UK distributors, British Lion, hated it too, and somehow managed to persuade the producers into filming additional scenes almost a year after production closed. The observatory scene was extended, the dream-ending cut and a new ending added in which the saucer explodes and David falls asleep, exhausted. This version of the movie ran only in the UK and Europe, the additions horrendously shot, with scant regard for continuity and little Jimmy Hunt a head taller than he appears in the rest of the movie.

Writing gurus will often tell you that ‘It-Was-All-a-Dream’ endings are a no-no. They CAN work, but only so long as they reveal a shocking new perspective and don’t simply erase all that’s gone before.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is a classic good example, a nightmare fairy tale eventually revealed to be the ravings of an incarcerated madman. In the same way, the original US dream-ending of Invaders From Mars makes perfect sense, a more rational conclusion would have diminished the movie’s dreamlike feel.

David is now stuck in a time-loop, facing a battle with the aliens all over again – and quite possibly again, a groundhog day of apocalypse.

Like Peter Pan in Neverland and the Spielbergian Stranger Things kids, David becomes a forever-child trapped in the world of his own adventure, frozen in time, suspended in nostalgia.

Similarly, the Martians – and all they represent – refuse to be extinguished. The combined threats of home-grown fascism, high-tech brainwashing, paranoid witch-hunts, military invasion, and the existential threat of the Bomb are 1950s terrors doomed to return in years to come.

Stay weird.

Review copy provided by the British Film Institute.

Invaders From Mars is available from the British Film Institute in UHD and Blu-ray, restored from the original 1953 camera negative, with audio commentary by Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw, extended scenes, featurettes and booklet of essays.

Released on BFI UHD and Blu-ray, Apple TV and Amazon Prime on 11^th May 2026.

You can listen to this essay (and more) using the read-aloud function on the Substack app

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Poor King Arthur.

It was so hard to take him seriously on film after Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), a mortal blow to Arthurian dignity dealt in a clatter of half-coconuts. So memorable is the misty medieval world of that beloved Python parody (an atmosphere ingeniously evoked by Terrys Jones and Gilliam on a budget almost half that of Hawk the Slayer) that serious Dark Age movies are still careful to avoid comparison with high-kicking, shrubbery-obsessed knights and anarcho-syndicalist peasants. (“Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”)

But Arthurian cinema was already considered a lavish joke by then, a genre long overdue for parody.

Camelot (1967), starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave and based on the Broadway musical, was a mega-budget flop, famously savaged by the critics. MGM’s The Knights of the Round Table (1953) was a pompous Technicolour bore full of daft American accents. Hollywood’s take on the Matter of Britain was more Prince Valiant than Geoffrey of Monmouth, the stuff of Arthurian Westerns like Ivanhoe (1952), full of grown-ass men running around like schoolboys thwacking each other with wooden swords.

If you wanted a decent Arthurian movie in the 1970s, you either went to the arthouse and watched Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974) or Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978), or else caught a kids’ matinee re-release of Disney’s The Sword in the Stone (1963).

When John Boorman’s unapologetically straight-faced yet utterly fantastical Excalibur landed in 1981, boasting tits, bums, severed limbs and a dauntless commitment to its own mythmaking, many critics were left bemused.

“What a mess.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) “A misguided folly.” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out) “At its earnest best, Excalibur is Star Wars without the redeeming humour.” (Vincent Canby, New York Times)

Based on Le Morte d’Arthur, the 15^th century compendium by knight-turned-cutthroat Sir Thomas Malory, and featuring an equally legendary cast (including then legends-in the-making Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Ciarán Hinds and Patrick Stewart), Excalibur was part of a short-lived boom in fantasy cinema.

Hawk the Slayer (1980) got there first, followed by Disney’s unexpectedly brilliant Dragonslayer (1981). Excalibur was released on the same day in the UK as Ray Harryhausen’s swansong Clash of the Titans. Soon to follow were Conan the Barbarian, The Sword and the Sorcerer, The Beastmaster (all 1982), The Dark Crystal and Krull (both 1983).

Spurred by the technical innovations and box-office success of Star Wars (1977), secondary world fantasy was finally moving from books to the big screen. But these movies were either aimed at children or else derived from the gutter pulps. Either way, fabled kingdoms and magic swords were not a thing to be taken seriously by critics.

Pauline Kael liked Boorman’s movie better than most, calling it “a serious, R-rated fairy tale… one lush, enraptured scene after another.”

Unique among the fantasy films of its day, Excalibur was a luscious and complex epic fantasy aimed squarely at adults, the kind of thing not seen again until Game of Thrones aired in 2011.

By the 1970s, Boorman had proved himself a brilliant if erratic visionary, as prone to commercial success (Point Blank [1967] and Deliverance [1972] as he was to embarrassment (Zardoz [1974], Exorcist II: The Heretic [1977]).

He undoubtedly dodged a mithril-silver bullet in 1970 when he abandoned a single-movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings commissioned by United Artists and producer Saul Zaentz. Boorman developed the project with architect-turned-screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg and ended up recycling much of it when the pair came to write Excalibur several years later.

This is the fundamental challenge facing writers dealing with mythological stories rooted in actual history: How historically accurate should we be?

How best can we communicate this story to a target audience who may be more familiar with Minecraft than Euripides? How do we manage the conflict between necessary fact and the need for artistic license?

Historical novelist tackles this in his essay, “But It’s Only Mythology!”

Boorman’s Excalibur is set ostensibly in late 5^th century Britain, at a point long after the invading Romans had packed their sacci and gone home and the barbarian Saxons were now at Albion’s gate. Yet the movie doesn’t give us authentically smelly fur-clad Britons1. Instead, it gives us knights in full-plate armour of a kind that didn’t exist for another seven centuries, a goodliest fellowship of men guided by principles of chivalry that likely never existed at all.

Choosing myth over hardline historical accuracy allows Boorman the flexibility to transcend linear time, encompassing within a single believable world the many centuries over which the Arthur story developed2. Like Malory’s source-text, Excalibur evokes a totality of Arthurian lore, a folk memory, a once upon a time.

Crucially, Boorman knows the kind of story he wants to tell and he understands the kind of imagery and symbolic language to which his audience will be most receptive.

And his movie delivers this vision with the kind of all-or-nothing conviction required to convince us of its dignity and significance, as well as a cast of world-class board-treaders who can make all that fairy-tale dialogue sing. Hearing Patrick Stewart roar his lines makes you want to charge once more unto the breach at Harfleur.

Excalibur opens with the boom of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, a deliberately anachronistic note that echoes the neighbouring Norse sagas, themselves adapted in Fritz Lang’s silent Weimar-era masterpiece Die Nibelungen (1924), another epic fantasy movie about mortals struggling to resist the tides of Fate.

Merlin emerges from the mist, an unearthly Nicol Williamson in ragged robes and silver skullcap, his jester voice lilting with ancient Gaelic, capering between whimsy and menace. He’s an avatar of Fate, aloof as he beholds the fiery scrum between Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) and the Duke of Cornwall (Corin Redgrave). The movie’s battle scenes are chaotic, knights crashing into each other, lumbering like elephants, mortals struggling through the mess of the world. Boorman doesn’t beautify his historical violence like, say, Zack Snyder in 300 (2006).

Like Odin, Merlin is attended by crows and, as fantasy-movie wizards go, he’s no kindly grandad Gandalf or ditzy Dumbledore. He has more in common with Bayaz, the bald, underhand sorcerer of Joe Abercrombie’s grimdark novels, pulling the strings of lesser men for his own sinister purposes.

When horndog Uther falls in lust with the Duke’s wife, Igrayne (Katrine Boorman), and breaks a truce between their lands, Merlin is quick to take advantage. He agrees to cast a spell that will enable Uther to take on the form of the Duke and enter his castle, allowing Uther to have his way with Igrayne. But Merlin does this only on condition that Uther surrender the fruit of their union.

Months later, the sight of his newborn son stirs the tyrant Uther into renouncing his violent ways, only for Merlin to appear like Mephistopheles and claim the soul that he is owed. The redemption of one man (and the rape of one woman) mean little next to the fate of the land.

UTHER: “To kill and be king. It that it?”

MERLIN: “Perhaps not even that.”

UTHER: “You strike me with words hard as steel.”

Merlin is inhuman, immune to the loves, lust and sentiment that is our mortal undoing. He’s a cosmic eunuch, genderless. The knights are always telling him he’s not a man; he’s something in-between.

Arthur grows to be a young man (a wide-eyed Nigel Terry) fated to pluck Excalibur from the rock, heralding his destiny to unite all of Britain. Merlin tutors him in the ways of kingship. He speaks of ‘The Dragon’, the irresistible life-force of almighty nature. Kinda like an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds and penetrates us, binding lord, land and serf together.

This spell breaks when Arthur draws upon the Dark Side, summoning Excalibur’s power out of pride and anger to win a duel with the peerless Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) snapping the unbreakable blade as he lands the winning blow.

The lesson Arthur must learn is that the king and the land are one, that he is a literal embodiment of Britain. He must see beyond himself and his macho desires, synchronize with the flow of nature, so the Dragon’s blessings may be bestowed upon those who follow him, and those he rules. Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, Ursula K. Le Guin and Lao Tzu have all been here before.

Magic in Excalibur is as elusive and poetic as the bridge of dragon-smoke upon which Uther rides to meet Igrayne. What does Merlin whisper to those horses on the battlefield to make them run away? What does he mean when he speaks of “other worlds”? What strange force compels an enemy to knight Arthur rather than kill him?

Alex Thomson’s Oscar-nominated cinematography makes the mossy crags of County Wicklow look like the jungles of the Amazon. (Thomson later shot both Legend [1985] and Labyrinth [1986].) The steel of Excalibur shimmers with the same ethereal green. The movie gleams like a dragon’s hoard. The world hums with weirdness.

But the age of magic fades as Arthur and Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi) are wedded before Christ. Merlin laments, “The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent. It’s the way of things. Yes... it’s a time for men, and their ways.”

Arthur and his knights gleam in their armour like Star Wars droids on Oscar night. The mithril halls of Camelot echo the stark, blocky tunnels of the Death Star. Again, a self-righteous empire will be undone by a force of human nature, in this case Lancelot and Guenevere’s pressing need to bang each other senseless.

When Arthur’s malevolent half-sister Morgana (Helen Mirren) goads Gawain (Liam Neeson) into accusing his Queen of infidelity, Arthur and his court, like the damned players of Lang’s Die Nibelungen, must abide by their own laws, doomed by their own decree.

Arthur discovers his wife and his best friend in their woodland bower and drives Excalibur between the sleeping lovers (a motif borrowed from the story of Tristan and Isolde). Arthur’s rage and jealousy sunders the unity of the Round Table. Excalibur is lost and magic gone from the world, along with the wisdom that might have saved it.

The movie’s apocalyptic final third is the euphoria of a medieval flagellant, a fever-dream of visions and omens, mud and pestilence.

Enter Mordred, the Anti-Christ, a child of forced incest between Morgana and Arthur, his birth announced with a bolt of lightning that strikes down the King and the land along with him.

Reality and dream interweave as Arthur lies stricken and his knights take up the quest for the Holy Grail that will restore him. They too must learn that Arthur and the land are one. We follow the vision-quest of dogged Perceval (Paul Geoffrey), taunted by the cackling boy Mordred, an evil cherub in gold armour.

Perceval is strangled on a tree of death, escapes to find Lancelot a bearded madman, sheds his armour and is reborn to pluck the Grail from his very dream, and with it heal the King.

As Pauline Kael wrote, “the whole film is soaked in Jung.”

Trees blossom as a revived Arthur rides to war against Mordred to the crash of Carmina Burana. Infidelities are forgiven, brothers are reunited, and father embraces son at spearpoint before taking the last boat to Avalon.

“What is the spell of this enchantment thrown over a thousand years of English literature and English art?” writes Peter Ackroyd.

Excalibur is as ‘Hero’s Journey’ as they come, a thoroughly male rites-of-passage, the saga of a man cleansing himself of toxicity, of selfishness and vanity, of all conception of himself. While the musical Camelot was perhaps the first movie to portray the Arthurians as real, everyday people, Excalibur’s characters are hewn from pure archetype. (“I was not born to live as other men,” says Arthur. “But to be the stuff of future memory.”) Yet it turns out Morgana – and not Arthur – is the most intriguing of Excalibur’s pantheon.

She’s the coiled serpent to Eve’s innocent Guenevere, Lilith, the original femme fatale. Helen Mirren gets all the best outfits, exuding pure venom in that snake-scale evening gown. (The movie’s costumes by Bob Ringwood are wondrous.)

In compiling at least 300 years of Arthurian canon, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur excises much of the character and motivation of Morgana that had been developed in previous texts. He reduces her to a Loki-like trickster, constantly scheming against her earnest half-brother, but reconciled by the end when she stands as one of the sorcerer queens who bear away Arthur’s body for respite in the mists of Avalon.

In Excalibur Morgana is motivated by a selfish craving for power, but she also wants to destroy Merlin in revenge for the rape and deception of her mother Igrayne. She gets her way by raping Arthur in return while magically disguising herself as Guenevere. (Yes, Boorman’s movie, like pretty much everything in ancient myth might warrant a few trigger-warnings.)

But while Malory chose to redeem Morgana, Boorman has her punished. Having kept herself young and beautiful by way of magic, Morgana is tricked by Merlin into casting a spell that so exhausts her powers that she reduces herself to a withered hag, the traditional comeuppance for women guilty of vanity and an unseemly lust for agency.

Check out Sophie Keetch’s retelling of Morgana’s story, Morgan Is My Name (2022).

Excalibur doesn’t focus on the romance of the Arthurian saga, like the musical Camelot. It’s not excited by spectacles of derring-do, like Knights of the Round Table or the Arthurian Westerns. It isn’t beholden to the charisma of King Arthur himself. Arthur isn’t the movie’s dominant character, not really. Excalibur is about the cold steel of Fate, the sword a liminal totem existing somewhere between civilisation and the earthy id.

Its magic is the wisdom that guides us towards finding a way past our own selfishness, greed and vanity, and we must constantly return to that mystic wellspring, for, as Merlin says, “it is the doom of men that they forget.”

One of the core lessons of fantasy is learning to do without it.

In Labyrinth, Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah must resist the temptation to wallow in her own fancies. To choose not to put aside childish things and remain cloistered in fantasy at the cost of her baby brother would make her as much a monstrous child as one of David Bowie’s goblins.

Fantasy expresses our trials and traumas in a symbolic language that lets us see our way forward more clearly so that we might return to the real world, empowered.

Judy Garland’s Dorothy learns to conquer her terror of that awful Miss Gulch by liquidating the Wicked Witch of the West. We shed a tear when Samwise reminds us that there’s some good in this world, Mister Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.

But we can’t drive with the map pasted to the windshield. We can’t land a punch if we’re forever watching our trainer show us how it’s done. And so we must relinquish our grip on magic and return home. Just as Dorothy returns to Kansas and Sam returns to the Shire, we must put our storybooks aside and return to reality.

Just as Arthur wisely orders Perceval to fling Excalibur back into the lake and let magic return to the dreaming.

Fantasy is always more than the sum of its wizards and artefacts, its magic can’t be hoarded or catalogued, its totality is beyond our grasp or control.

Boorman’s Excalibur is a movie about fantasy, its sword is wisdom unsheathed, a dream, like Arthur himself, the stuff of future memory.

Stay weird.

Excalibur is available from Arrow Video as a brand-new 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative presented for the first time on home video in its original 1.66:1 ratio, along with a king’s ransom of commentaries and featurettes.

You can listen to this essay (and more) using the read-aloud function on the Substack app

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Every drop of reader support helps Agent of Weird get more people smiling, thinking and ready to create.

Check out some of my latest projects, Warhammer crime caper The Wraithbone Phoenix, acclaimed Warhammer Horror audio drama The Watcher in the Rain, and sword-and-sorcery comics collection Black Beth: Vengeance Be Thy Name with art by DaNi and Conan artist Blas Gallego and artist DaNi.

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A life of work-for-hire writing will only kill you if you’re good at writing.

The hack keeps a safe and sensible distance, their indifference to the given material, their often-justified contempt for the readership, insulates them from emotional harm. The hack survives because they give nothing, while the good writer makes an unwise investment of the heart.

Whether you write tie-in fiction or the comic-book adventures of household-name superheroes, writing those stories well, in a way that connects with and moves the reader – that is, the buyer – literally takes it out of you.

Good, emotive storytelling demands you look within and find some unique, personal connection to the material, something that brings you joy, whether that’s making younger readers’ laugh, playing with the grimdark of Warhammer, or speaking your mind on the monster/saviour paradox at the heart of Judge Dredd.

In the same way Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan feel very differently about Batman1, you need to offer your own emotional or intellectual angle on a given property, an angle that thrills you and adds something that differs from all that’s come before, coloured by the prism of your own lived experience.

THAT is the Frankenstein zap that can bestow life upon an otherwise soul-dead corporate property. It’s why Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) is one of my favourite Marvel movies. It feels alive and distinct, heartfelt, less like commercial product, even though it is.

And once you, the writer, have had your fun, exhausted yourself in saying everything you want to say, having brought those borrowed characters to life, you feel them depart the safety of your own head and disappear into the commercial wilderness.

And they take a piece of you with them when they go.

As a hired-gun comic-book scripter and currently-occasional fiction and audio writer, I can say that the possibilities of where your surrogate story-babies will end up varies greatly depending on your profile, your promo, the peeps on your WhatsApp, and whether Lady Fortune will deign to smile on you or punch you in the teeth.

Most publishers reserve their promotional efforts for headline names, they seem to amplify rather than promote. Everyone lower down the pecking order must spend a chunk of their work-day toiling in the toxic mines of social media and risk asbestosis of the brain. Maybe your story will vanish with nary an online mention. Maybe it’ll become a hit. Maybe it’ll make you famous. Maybe it’ll get you cancelled. Maybe you’ll win an award. Maybe you’ll receive royalties. Maybe you’ll keep writing in that vein long enough for those royalties to form reliable income.

But wherever your story ends up, it will never truly belong to you if you’re a writer for hire.

‘Ownership’ is a topic of feverish debate among us work-for-hire comic-book creators, who usually retain zero (or as good as) ownership of whatever we create, something writers of original fiction rarely have to worry about as copyright of their intellectual property is usually a given (until it’s pinched by billionaires to feed gen-AI).

The 1980s saw the rise of the entrepreneurial comic-book creator, led by business-savvy, brand-conscious writers like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and later Mark Millar2. These guys were keen to avoid the same fate as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the legendarily impoverished creators of Superman, comic books’ very first golden goose.

Owning the financial rights to your story can mean potentially lucrative back-end dividends should that comic-book get optioned for movie or TV production, the first step in a story becoming a multi-tentacled franchise like The Walking Dead or The Boys.

I’d say the majority of comic-book creators these days strive to build a career with a popular creator-owned property as their ultimate goal. Back in the 2000s, certainly here in the UK, my fellow creators would generally aim to learn the ropes at 2000 AD (back when they had an always-open submissions window) or Titan, before moving onto the US market with tie-in work at IDW, Dark Horse or Dynamite.

Breaking in at the Big Two, Marvel and DC, was the next step, where you’d stand the best chance of gathering enough of a core fanbase to risk a shot at a creator-owned work that people might actually buy beyond issue #1. The rise of Kickstarter, social media, and the outrage economy continue to provide creators with alternate strategies, though gaining a steady readership and brand-building remains key3.

This career strategy – work the brand until YOU are the brand – would appear to be a sensible model for freelance creators, but it’s still a crapshoot.

The founders of Image Comics – McFarlane, Liefeld, Larsen and co. – made a fortune risking it all to back their own IP, while leaving the door open to their fellow creators. But it feels like everyone’s been chasing that early ‘90s boom-time dream ever since.

For a start, you’ll need an artist who’s willing to work for free for the best part of a year on the promise of a payout that may never happen. And those creators who do score a movie-option are often just paying back what they owe themselves for all those previous years of underpaid gigs, countless unpaid hours lost to brand-building on the socials, and shelling out to attend expensive conventions every year.

It CAN work (fingers crossed), but if you’re calculating projects with a movie-deal in mind, then you’re still writing stories to order. You’re still a hired gun, only this time obeying the dictates of your own commercial enterprise.

Here, ownership means balancing the need to maximise your potential income against working on those projects you feel truly deserve your passion.

Yet ownership encompasses something more, something you can’t commodify, something that goes back to the very reason you began writing in the first place: to figure out who you are, to make sense of yourself and your history, to see your own life’s themes reflected in your characters.

And for the work-for-hire writer that means seeing what you’re saying without the limits of commercial consideration or the filter of someone else’s ideas.

Ownership means owning your own voice, creating a space you can call your own, even if that space is the equivalent of a broke-down shack in the middle of nowhere, a place to speak no truth but your own, to seek communion with those who went before and those who will come after.

As Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) says of blues music in Coogler’s Sinners (2025), “It’s magic, what we do. It’s sacred… and big.”

When I started out in comics, my original ideas were far from sacred.

I threw them at publishers like confetti. It was part of the entrance fee. You couldn’t get in the door without handing over a few good original ideas first.

I paid that toll with over a dozen Future Shock-type stories (tales of military campaigns on alien worlds waged by Hollywood-style ‘war directors’, an Escape from New York-type piece about a famous author trapped inside an orbiting comic convention turned feral, and rich people downloading themselves into a digital afterlife once they die), Age of the Wolf, (with artist Jon Davis-Hunt), a fantasy trilogy about a world overrun by werewolves, and Dandridge (with Warren Pleece), a paranormal adventure series set in a crumbling ‘spookpunk’ Britain that runs on the ectoplasm of harvested ghosts.

The future of those stories is out of my hands. The publisher owns them outright and I’m cool with that, if a little regretful. I understand it was the cost to entry into a career writing comic-books.

But as the years passed, I found myself getting more protective when it came to pitches. Nope. I’m not ‘wasting’ that idea. It’s too weird, too personal. It’s got too much to say and it doesn’t want anyone else telling it how it needs to be. Besides, I’d need to find the right artist and a high-profile publisher who might actually return my emails. Hey, maybe this needs to be fiction instead! Yeah, right. Like I can afford to take time away from comics…

Over Before Christmas was the first bit of short fiction I’d written for myself in forever. It started out as a simple Substack exercise: ‘write a Christmas ghost story.’ But the tale grew unexpectedly and ended up getting rather personal. I polished it for months after posting and though it will likely never appear in an anthology or be widely read, it’s dear to me for the strange and simple reason that it’s mine.

I followed this up with a fantasy tale, The Jagged Gates, upon invitation by editor, author, publisher and all-round awesome human being Oliver Brackenbury to contribute to his magazine New Edge Sword & Sorcery.

The Jagged Gates taught me some harsh lessons about the differences between writing for hire and writing for myself.

It’s not just the obvious stuff involved in switching from comics to prose. I’m used to that. Writing for oneself demands a different mindset, as well as different nuts-and-bolts techniques to which the work-for-hire pro must adapt.

The idea for the story started with an image that washed up in my head decades ago and ended up as scribble in a notebook: “someone awakes on an empty beach and realises they used to be… something else”.

In the way such fragments have of latching onto other fragments and metabolising into scurrying Thing-like organisms of their own, that image of the beach merged with another scribbled-down idea: What if Queequeg, the growling Polynesian harpooner of Moby Dick, were a sword and sorcery hero?

His outsider status, his tattooed physicality, his talent for stabbing monsters in the face. He seemed such a natural fit. Across what strange seas might he stalk even stranger beasts? What wonders and horrors might await discovery on islands remote from time and space? The idea was evolving into something strange and woozy as a mariner’s mirage, almost alien, like Moorcock’s Corum books, William Hope Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories, but with a grounded, hunter’s edge, like something out of Primal or Apocalypto.

I got so excited I did a mood-board…

And a playlist…

Here’s the pitch I ended up with…

And here’s the opening scene…

Read the rest of The Jagged Gates in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #6, available in digital, hardcover and softcover from the NESS webstore.

There’s a lot of debate about plotting vs. ‘pantsing’, whether you write according to a separate synopsis or just write by the seat of your pants and make it up as you go along. To me, it’s a spectrum. Whatever works for you, your mindset and your time-constraints.

Coming from a background in work-for-hire creative writing, tie-in fiction and comic-book properties, outlines are a must. The time-consuming process of pantsing your way through several drafts until the story finds you is for people without deadlines.

I need not only sign-off from the editor/client so they can’t change their mind on the story later on (although it doesn’t always stop them), but also proof of concept for myself, so that I know what I’m proposing stands a good chance of actually working. I don’t want to get halfway through writing the story before realising its premise is shaky, requiring several days of time-consuming repairs before I can get back on the road.

But doesn’t outlining ruin spontaneity?

For me, not at all. Because I still don’t know how the scene will play out until I put pen to paper. While the overall direction of the narrative will likely remain intact, exactly how I hit those beats is still down to the gods. No battle plan survives contact with the main characters, if you’re writing them well.

In The Jagged Gates, my villain, Captain Jaydrid Harrow, morphed mid-writing into a sort of anti-heroine, someone with her own pathology and emotional journey. What if Red Sonja got all the plunder she ever wanted, got old and drunk and twisted, then realised the thing she truly treasured isn’t treasure at all?

Work-for-hire usually means writing within the boundaries of a pre-established property, a world that comes with all manner of branding guidelines, dictates from editors, management, sales, and franchised offspring, aeons of continuity, a catalogue of in-world rules land-mined with revisions, retcons and time-travel paradoxes, ever-susceptible to the tides of online discourse and the whimsy of fans. And there’s often a dearth of concrete reference material to cling to.

The Jagged Gates had no such regulations. It was ground zero, a clean slate. I could really go nuts. Not something I’m used to, and not something I was prepared for.

I threw in all kinds of cool stuff: lobotomised whales whose tears are a powerful narcotic; a giant sword stabbed into the beach by some elder god; spiral hills that were the barnacled shells of immense wandering molluscs; a race of titans whose gigantic bones formed the outlying coral reef, whose immortal blood had infused the waters with all manner of strangeness.

I chased down all these ideas and more as I wrote the first draft, driving myself deeper into a mad conceptual tangle while my word-count went into orbit and vital payday projects were left waiting.

Getting that first draft on the page was rough enough, mainly due to the amount of backstory that required folding into the main story, thanks to our focal character waking up with amnesia on page one.

Even more challenging was the fact that the writing of this story coincided with several months of intense personal issues, the resulting stress and, frankly, underlying terror of which I had to squeeze into a box and somehow forget while I got on with the job in hand. It’s the Great British way, don’t you know. That uncertain focus plus total creative freedom turned out to be a toxic combination.

For me, fiction writing demands greater on-the-job immersion than writing comics.

The formalism of comics, the physical restriction of panels on the page and how much dialogue you can squeeze into a thought-bubble without the letterer having an embolism, means your attention is constantly zooming in and out of the story as you write. You’re zooming into a character’s head to get their dialogue one minute, then zooming back out to get a broader, colder, technical view of how the panels are lining up and whether you’re cramming too much onto the page.

Like writing a haiku or a sonnet, comics-writing is a nifty tango between form and content, between words you’ve just written and images that don’t yet exist.

Fiction-writing requires losing yourself in the deep, without coming up for editorial air until you’ve finished that scene or that draft. And with no artist to think about, all the descriptive heavy-lifting is now down to me.

When writing fiction, I aim for full, engaged sentences, like laying train-tracks, each new sentence influenced by the last. I’ll aim for coherence, always, even when I can feel things coming apart. It doesn’t matter if the rhythm of my syntax falters, if my grammar stumbles, or the beats of a fight scene go down in the wrong order.

When it comes to first drafts, don’t get it right, get it written.4

You can’t sculpt a lovely vase until you’ve drawn clay from the soil. And the first draft is all about generating that clay ready to dump on the potter’s wheel.

I try not to linger and polish. Energy over precision.

Momentum is everything.

But roadblocks abound, minor and major, both types threatening to bushwhack your writing and kill your precious momentum.

A minor roadblock is realising you need to change or add something to the scene (like re-locating to a more dramatic setting, having a character reflect on a previous clue, etc) or else having to figure out technical details (like what kind of armour is this guy wearing exactly, or how do you take apart a Browning M2 .50 Cal Heavy Machine Gun?).

If pausing to fuss over these details means slowing down to do anything more than ten minutes research, then I’ll write a note about what needs doing here. I’ll highlight it yellow, ready to catch the eye of future-me who will do the research and figure things out once the draft is done. Once that note is added, I’ll carry on writing as though that revision had already been implemented.

The first draft is the Mad Max convoy and momentum is the juice, the precious juice, to be protected at all costs.

Major roadblocks are more serious, the impassable chasm that stops you from reaching the other side of the scene or chapter. Oh, shit! The main character I’ve been writing needs to be someone else. Oh, God! This needs to be set in space, not Stratford-Upon-Avon. Oh, for f***’s sake! Where am I even going with this? I’ve lost my way completely.

Major roadblocks force you to take a time-out, figure out whether your story is a complete write-off or whether you can affect repairs enough to get you to the end of that first draft.

Minor roadblocks influence the direction or texture of the scene; major roadblocks threaten the outcome.

I lost my way a lot with The Jagged Gates, as I was sending my heroine down unnecessarily convoluted paths just so I could hit all the required expository beats and see all the cool stuff I wanted to showcase.

My usually rigorous, work-for-hire outlining would have helped me avoid those big roadblocks as it forces me to pay attention to the characters’ arcs, the progress of each beat, and the consistency of my fantasy mechanics (whether tonal or physical). But since I had free reign, I figured I could hold the outline pretty much in my head, which I might have gotten away with if I hadn’t spent so much time grooving with the fairies.

Work-for-hire writing imposes strict word-counts, especially so in comics where you have a usually non-negotiable page-count in which your story must fit. Again, this is where outlining comes in handy. It lets you know how long your story is likely to be and – crucially – how long it’ll take you to write the bastard.

Give me a page-count and a calculator and I can tell you how long it’ll take me to write a comic-script, based on a set of metrics I’ve developed over years of logging and labelling my work-hours.

But when it comes to fiction, I’ve yet to write enough of it to know how long any such future project might take. I’ve written three Judge Anderson novellas, collected as Judge Anderson: Year One (2017), a Warhammer Crime novel, The Wraithbone Phoenix (2022), a Sisters of Battle novella for The Book of Martyrs (2021), and plenty of shorts, including Sharkcop 2: Feeding Frenzy (2015), a parody of ‘80s buddy-cop pictures about a dude who turns into a shark every time he smells blood.

But I forgot to log the hours on a lot of these and almost all of them went berserk in the word-count department, which taints the data and muddies my work-hour budget projections.

This all sounds very cold-blooded and analytical, but as a freelance writer taking time out from my commercial schedule to work – to indulge – on a prose project requires careful consideration. I have to know that I can hit an acceptable work-hours-to-income ratio.

Why aren’t there more working-class voices in fiction? they cry. Because people who are financially secure are usually the only ones who can afford to write it!

As a work-for-hire writer, every hour spent writing for myself feels like a grotesque extravagance. And it certainly didn’t assuage my feelings of guilt when the concept for The Jagged Gates ended up containing so much material that my word-count soared way, way, waaaaaaaay over the limit.

I’d set aside two weeks work-time. That sprawled into three, then four, piling on the stress and an even greater inability to focus. It’s times like this when clarity and certainty fade and the daily task of writing takes on the elastic quality of nightmare, as the gap between you and your deadline shrinks and your story threatens to boil over into the weeks beyond. And all the while, the lunatic in you is screaming that you can’t cut the story short without murdering it.

Maybe writing in third-person limited was forcing me to exhaust every scene more than was needed. Maybe an omniscient PoV might have given me greater agility. I couldn’t tell. I was lost. My inability to focus got so bad that I switched to writing longhand, the solidity of ink on paper helping anchor my concentration. It still went down super-rough and ate up yet more precious hours transferring it to the laptop, but I got there in the end, reaching the terra firma of the between-draft editorial stage.

I was horrified by how much fat I needed to burn, how much psychedelia there was to disperse, cursing myself that all this could have been avoided with tighter outlining.

In my logbook I wrote a note to adhere to while rewriting: “Anything that doesn’t focus on ‘sword’ (action, pace, combat, mythic heroism) or ‘sorcery’ (monsters, weirdness, atmosphere) has to go!”

Having written so much about the sword-and-sorcery genre here on Substack, The Jagged Gates should perhaps feel like some kind of exemplar, a thesis in action. But it isn’t. I had no time and too much going on in my life to set myself guidelines and ground rules.

I just followed the characters, let instinct dictate and everything turned out okay. The finished story feels weirdly innocent, oblivious, bearing no sign of the pain that went into its creation.

As a freelance comic-book guy yet to swear fealty to House Marvel or House DC, I feel like something of a hedge knight, a skilled rover whose bones will end up somewhere in the ditches of comic-book history.

I’m lucky enough to regularly experience the exhilaration of true artistic expression while working on corporate properties, giggling to myself as I come up with a joke or a scare or a secretive twist, getting to play in spectacular worlds, to jam with incredible artists, learning from amazing editors.

But a disconnect still lingers.

Freelancers befriend freelancers while battling in the trenches together. Those friends provide crucial – and for some, life-saving – support, but the publisher that commissions them, the company that hires them, and – most importantly – the readership that reads them, are mostly faceless.

I have barely enough time to write my heart’s desire, let alone spend hours chasing down potential reviewers or contributing yet more kneejerk bullshit to Bluesky.

And so my work-for-hire stories tend to pop like fireworks, a brief and colourful bang followed by a glitter into nothingness.

Did anyone actually read that? Did anyone care as much as I did?

One of the benefits of writing Agent of Weird here on Substack has been seeing reader responses and gaining (hopefully interested) subscribers, coupled with a wider sense of the thriving fandoms that exist in the sphere of sword-and-sorcery fiction and RPGs, fandoms that blossom into projects like New Edge Sword & Sorcery, which itself offers a welcoming and inclusive creative space, alongside every other flavour of S&S anthology, from the traditional, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, to the gnarly and strange, Old Moon Quarterly.

Those subscribers and fellow genre fans offer a sense of closeness, a feeling that there might actually be someone there on the other side of that big black wall.

Ownership of one’s creativity means cleaving to that which you love, and with that comes a greater, perhaps more genuine sense of belonging, community and connection.

And isn’t that the holy grail of any writing? Having people there to read you and not the brand you may represent?

In the meantime, stay weird.

YOUR NEXT READ…

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Lovely to see you! Do sit down.

The fire’s been keeping that armchair nice and warm for you.

Haha! No apologies, please! The word ‘late’ bears no meaning at all under this roof, I assure you. Though I do hope the snow hasn’t left the roads too inconvenienced…

My word! It’s quite the blizzard out there now, isn’t it? I fancy you were lucky in finding the place.

I know this address can be somewhat… elusive.

Brandy? Mulled wine? I can make you a sensational Old Fashioned…

Yes, I do seem to have gathered rather a lot of these fancy-looking bottles. Only the best for my subscribers!

Plus, Waitrose had an offer on.

So, you’ve come for a Christmas ghost story, eh? Well, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve prepared two of them!

Wonderful to see the old folk customs revived, isn’t it? Hats off to that Mister Gatiss at the BBC. I do so look forward to his dramas on a Christmas Eve.

In an age when faces aglow with Christmas spirit may be nothing but a facade of binary code, a predictability of ones and zeros, then a little re-weirding is what’s required.

It all goes back to the Celts, of course, gathering about the fire on the Winter Solstice, telling tales of the Wild Hunt galivanting across the night sky.

The close of the year, the promise of the next, the land dead beneath that glittering shroud, awaiting resurrection. Such a serene, reflective, liminal space. No wonder spirits are so inclined to wander from their beds at this time of year.

Old Ollie Cromwell tried his hand at an exorcism a few centuries ago when he put a ban on Christmas. Let’s keep Britain biblical! Turf out those pagans and Catholics and lay their ghostly practices to rest.

And so the ritual of the Christmas ghost story lay buried for a couple of hundred years, until Charles Dickens chose to dig it up again. Quite frankly, you couldn’t leave the Victorians alone in a parlour for five minutes without them trying to conjure the dead.

By now the skies of England were black with factory-smoke and her gutters choked with starving infants. Whatever happened to Christian charity? The educated classes were becoming nostalgic for kindness, for the bygone folklore that might remind them of their common humanity.

Dickens had written Christmas ghost stories before – The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton (1836) and The Mother’s Eyes (1840) – but it was the success of his now-ubiquitous A Christmas Carol (1843) that prompted him to include more such haunted tales in the yuletide editions of the periodicals he was then editing.

Spectral tales such as Elisabeth Gaskill’s The Old Nurse’s Story (1852), Jane Margaret Hooper’s Bring Me a Light! (1861) and Dickens’ own – greatest – ghost story The Signalman (1866) served not only as fireside entertainments, but also reminders that such wealth and comfort as one enjoys at Christmas is a privilege not available to all.

The great and quiet M.R. James, a cloistered antiquarian and provost of both Eton and Cambridge, carried on the tradition of telling a fearful tale every Christmas Eve, though he did so in a less didactic, more distinctly unnerving tenor.

The first of my two tales, James’s Rats (1929), is prefaced by a Dickens quote. Those opening lines about the ragged, mouldy bedclothes a-heaving and a-heaving like seas comes from the Dickens Christmas story Tom Tiddler’s Ground (1861).

Here… Let me get you a fresh glass. Same again?

I’m not saying my reading - and recording - sounds better when the listener is tipsy, but… Actually, yes that is absolutely what I’m saying. Alas, this humble teller can do scant justice to such a masterful little tale.

It’s set on the windswept coast of Suffolk and concerns humankind’s most vital and troublesome instinct, curiosity.

Just as some Christmas gifts are best left unwrapped, some doors are best left not only closed but very sensibly locked…

My second tale was written by a friend of mine. Well, more of an acquaintance, really. And even more of a bloody nuisance.

It’s called Over Before Christmas and the author has been tinkering with it ever since he wrote it a couple of years ago. He’s a writer for the penny dreadfuls, you know. Poor fellow. He’s so rarely afforded the chance to write a tale of his own.

I believe I have a typed manuscript of it somewhere…

Oh, here it is…

The story is partially set in the town where the author claims to have grown up, a borough south of the Thames called ‘Tooting’, though I’m fairly certain he must have invented that name, and can only have done so out of spite.

He tells me the story contains bits and pieces of past experience, strange encounters, loved ones, and so on.

Funny, isn’t it? The things that end up in the cauldron of story…

Well, it was lovely to see you. Do come again.

Stay warm and hurry home, though I wouldn’t advise taking a short cut through the churchyard. Not at this time of year. One never quite knows where one might end up.

Thank you! A very merry Christmas to you too!

And do stay weird.

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Epic fantasy is what you read when you want to lose yourself in a universe of archetypes strange yet achingly familiar, a chronicle that stakes the restoration of a wounded land upon the courage of the fallible and the powerless, a world rich with fellowships reflecting a panorama of human experience and ambiguity, whose choices petty and foolhardy may nonetheless topple empires, a mythopoetry that measures how we live in accord with eternal chaos, weighing the inevitability of darkness against the hope of healing, often reminding us that even that most inevitable of shadows is not a thing to be feared.

Sword and sorcery is what you read when you want to see a dude stab a giant scorpion in the face.

Rooted in the pagan epics of Gilgamesh and Achilles, by way of the historical swashbuckler, Victorian dino-fiction, and gothic horror, the fantasy subgenre of sword and sorcery1 traffics in the thrill of mortal combat2. It’s right there in the title: here be the sword to which sorcery shall be put.

It’s fantasy’s action-genre, John Wick with a broadsword. Pure, glorious melodrama, prizing spirit, spice, and the weird imagination.

The genre was born a century ago in the pulps, a medium that catered almost exclusively for marginalised readers, “adolescents, the poorly educated, immigrants, and labourers. […] Their taste for ‘trashy’ reading matter was cause for social concern. Cultural commentators throughout the 1930s and 1940s lamented that the proletariat read little else besides pulp magazines.”3

Sword and sorcery icons like Robert E. Howard’s Conan reflected the readership, the unbreakable underdog biting back against a conniving political class. The strong male body – prized as a vessel of labour – revolts against its master.

The genre’s scenes of combat express a certain rage, while the sword-wielder’s grace and swagger satisfy a craving for agency and control.

Violence is both a vital component and a core theme. Sometimes gratuitous, often aesthetic, always cathartic, sword and sorcery’s scenes of steel-on-steel struggle are exhilarating, terrifying helter-skelters of life and death, which grip the reader by the guts, tight enough to feel the creak of sinew behind every sword-thrust, an amoral spectacle to appease the lizard brain.

But prose isn’t moviemaking.

Blow-by-blow choreography looks fantastic on-screen, but it’s rigor mortis on the page. Authors who want to get pedantic about Liberi’s Full Iron Gate Guard stance or the merits of a zweihänder over an Iberian montante risk making their fight scenes feel like a visit to the library.

So how do we make swordfights work on the page?

Here are two brilliant fight scenes from two heroic fantasy classics. They offer an interesting contrast, written 75 years apart, either side of World War Two, one by a bestselling Brit, the other by the Texan pulpsmith who founded the sword and sorcery genre.

Please don’t expect a declaration about which example is best, which is more ethical or politically sound, which technique will score you more readers or contains the least calories.

Oh, how the internet loves to fixate on hierarchy and weird ‘rules’ about writing.

There are no rules, only tools.

A screwdriver is not ‘better’ than a saw, they just serve different purposes. Active voice isn’t ‘better’ than passive; showing isn’t ‘better’ than telling. Such techniques are simply tools to be selected depending on what you want your sentence to do.

But what of realism? The internet says writing must be authentic! It’s one of the ruuuuuuules!

As much as I love those YouTube videos in which experts rate the accuracy of sword fights and shark attacks in movies, I do find their premise a bit weird. That there are people who apparently need it explained to them that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings is not a documentary says a great deal about our current inability to distinguish reality from phantasmagoria.

As a general principle in fictional fight scenes, too much realism can be a buzzkill. Most tend to steer a middle-course between boring real-life and the borderline surrealism of a Zack Snyder movie. How much you value realism in your own combat scenes and how much you wish the reader to relish the hot kiss of arterial spray is up to you and your conscience.

Published in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales4, The Phoenix on the Sword was Robert E. Howard’s first published Conan story. It was a rewrite of a rejected King Kull tale, By This Axe I Rule, jazzed up with the kind of supernatural element favoured by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright.

Having seized the crown of Aquilonia, King Conan finds himself bored (“In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.”). Conan shakes off his funk when he receives a dream-vision from the spirit of a centuries-dead sage, warning him that a crew of conspirators are presently sneaking towards his bedchamber, knives out.

Howard’s omniscient narrator sees the skulking conspirators when no one else can. He emphasises their advantages, their weight of numbers (‘twenty furtive figures’), their ‘stealthy’ feet (Conan can’t hear them coming), their sheer variety of ‘keen-edged’ weapons.

It’s like the opening scene of a monster movie, showcasing the overwhelming force of the enemy. We get the ominous words ‘shrouded’ and ‘red’, promising death on the pages to come.

The conspirators hold back as Conan’s bodyguards are led to another part of the palace by an officer whose pockets have been lined with gold. Another layer of Conan’s defences is stripped away, leaving the hero vulnerable.

We get a little dialogue from the ringleader, Ascalante, a displaced Aquilonian statesman, who plans to take the crown for himself after he’s done away with his co-conspirators, among them a wild minstrel named Rinaldo.

Before we go any further, I’m well aware that Robert E. Howard isn’t Nabokov. This is not a glittering example of literary style. Howard’s prose is coarse and unruly and often in need of a polish.

But it matters not.

Refinement is not what the author needs. Inviting the reader to pause and marvel at the beauty of his syntax would only drain the momentum Howard is out to generate. This is melodrama not literary fiction and warrants different tactics and a different – equally laudable – skillset.

The novel is not ‘better’ than melodrama and vice versa. The forms are two different vehicles serving two different readerships and two different literary functions.

Anyway, back to those firelit halls…

Howard doesn’t give us too much information about that throng of nameless minions at Ascalante’s back. He focuses instead on the ringleaders who personify the attacking force and gives us just enough to distinguish them, so we’ll know who’s who when it all kicks off.

One of them – a bruiser named Gromel – smashes down the door to the royal boudoir, ‘with a snapping of bolts and a rending crash of wood,’ escalating the sense of threat even further. This guy alone would seem enough to bring down our hero. Momentum hits a high note and the assassins feel unstoppable as they burst into the room.

That abrupt three-word opening sentence (‘They stopped short.’) conveys the assassins’ jolt of surprise to find Conan awake and ready to engage in a frank exchange of views. The plot has kinked in an unexpected direction.

Howard’s omniscient narrator becomes a touch less neutral with the admiring word ‘barbarian’, promising the reader that Conan is more than just a ‘man roused mazed and unarmed’. He’s something else.

Howard’s narration teases, knowing more about Conan than both the assassins and the reader, perhaps even Conan himself. Now we want to see what Howard means by his dubbing this character a ‘barbarian’ and the combat promises to reveal something weirder and more conceptual than just the brute physics of hack and slash.

This neat little freezeframe gives us an overview or establishing shot that introduces the combatants – in the blue corner ‘the four rebel noblemen’ and ‘the horde of wild hairy faces’ and in the soon-to-be-blood-red corner, ‘the blazing eyed giant standing sword in hand’ – as well as the arena of ‘the candle-lighted chamber’ in which their battle will take place.

We also see what Ascalante wants – the crown – and it’s this objective that will drive him through the rest of the scene.

Conan’s own objective will be to survive the next twenty seconds.

‘True.’ Howard’s narrator is really showing himself now. He’s less an indifferent observer, more a playful presence, teasing us even more. How the hell can a half-naked Conan possibly be ‘better protected’ than a pack of killers wearing full armour? Jesus! Just how badass is this Conan guy?

Howard promises that we’re about to find out, adding a heady layer of suspense to the proceedings. This fight will be about more than just seeing who beats who.

Careful not to make his barbarian seem too mysteriously undefeatable, Howard gives us Conan’s confusion as he tries to figure out who the hell these intruders are, so the hero is even deeper on the back-foot when the assassins finally steam in.

The anthropomorphic ‘charging bull’ and ‘tigerish strength’ dominate the paragraph, painting a powerful, impressionistic image. Howard doesn’t fuss over stances. Conan doesn’t execute a defensive inquartata, he just ‘swung his sword’. A plain and simple wind-up that lands with a kaboom of dynamic verbs: ‘flashed’, ‘crashed’ and ‘shivered’.

If we think of this fight scene as a narrative in miniature, Conan breaking his sword here is another turning point in the plot. Just as each scene within a story needs to begin with a ‘because’ rather than a monotone ‘and then’, because Conan hit this guy with everything he’s got, he’s now lost his weapon and must find another. That’ll be Conan’s mini-objective over the course of the next few paragraphs.

Sensing their advantage, the assassins swarm in…

Howard doesn’t slow down by describing every cut and thrust. He doesn’t add an extra line to say Conan dodged a blow. More economically, he infers it with the raking of that dagger and the sword flashing before his eyes rather than killing him. Conan’s inhuman strength is also inferred (shown rather than told) when he flings the knife-man aside and punches another so hard that think-jelly squirts out of his ears (two moves in one sentence, by the way).

The dastardly Ascalante moves to guard the door. But instead of making a run for it, Conan re-arms himself with a perilously antique axe that’s been hanging above the mantelpiece for the best part of a century. These actions lend rhythm and character to the scene, a sense of ebb and flow, without which the combat would be nothing but a dirge, roll to hit, wound, roll to hit, wound, and so on.

Howard pauses a moment to re-set the scene in this opening sentence, before plunging back in for round two.

Like Tolkien, Howard harks back to antiquity, his narrator now in full Homeric flight. That sonorous sentence is the stuff of, ‘Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles.’ It conveys Conan’s euphoria, but also feels invocatory, like it’s summoning something from the Pit.

What makes Howard’s sword and sorcery tales work like dynamite is that he’s unafraid of cringe. He puts every ounce of feeling behind these moments of giddy abandon. He writes the way you wrote when you were a teenager, full of song and fire, before you were taught the multitude of ways in which you could get things wrong and embarrass yourself on the page.

Robert E. Howard’s writing is fearless.

Sword and sorcery demands its authors go all-in. For me, this is how the 2025 Red Sonja movie faltered. It felt uncertain, timid, apologetic. Melodrama demands you commit to the punch. Dare to be ridiculous.

The plot of this battle-scene pivots again as it becomes clear the assassins have cornered not a man, but some kind of bestial god, Howard’s concept of the ‘barbarian’, inviting the reader to revel in his righteous, destructive power.

Howard paints an overall impression of force and struggle. In reality, ten men would have rugby-tackled Conan to the ground in seconds and punctured him like a microwave dinner. But reality isn’t what Howard is going for. This is pure romance.

‘Sang and crushed’ pretty much summarises Howard’s prose style at this point. He varies the sweeping action with that specific zoom-in detail of the poor hapless rascal trying to wrestle those preternaturally immovable legs, before the plot swerves again and Conan is gravely wounded.

Notice how the combat is constantly turning as fortunes change: losing a weapon, guarding the door, the barbarian revealed, then wounded. These beats create a melody that plays throughout the scene, instead of just two sides hacking at each other for page after page, ding-dong, ding-dong.

Howard’s operatic narrator takes his voice down a notch as Conan’s exhaustion takes over and the assassins rally, wounding him again and again.

Howard’s narrator is back in Homeric mode with a vengeance, celebrating Conan’s unearthly endurance and defiance, revealing something uncanny, more than just a warrior facing his last stand.

There are three strands at work in this scene: 1.) the assassins out to kill Conan, 2.) Conan trying to kill as many of these wretches as possible before he dies, 3.) Howard revealing something weird and monstrous and awe-inspiring about Conan himself. That third strand allows Howard to add an extra layer of suspense, not only teasing us as to who might win the battle, but making us wonder what exactly is Conan? Adding that extra layer helps vary the melody and allows the fighting to be about more than just dudes hitting each other.

And that’s got to be the most punch-the-air line in all of sword and sorcery.

Lancaster-born fantasy novelist Joe Abercrombie is best known for his First Law trilogy: The Blade Itself (2006), Before They Are Hanged (2007) and Last Argument of Kings (2008). His most recent book, alt-historical adventure The Devils(2025), has been acquired for adaptation by James Cameron.

Abercrombie’s fantasy novels are influenced as much by Westerns and crime fiction as they are by Tolkien and Dragonlance. His books are compulsive, funny and as unpredictable as a rattlesnake on meth.

Their cynical humour helps convince you of their setting, a world more renaissance than medieval, dominated by the machinations of a mercantile middle-class, though primordial magic still lurks in the margins. But Abercrombie’s books are less interested in worldbuilding than in building vivid characters and examining the human cost of war and violence.

Bored by the formulaic epic fantasies he read in the late 1980s, Abercrombie fell back in love with the genre upon reading George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones (1996), which brought a tighter, more realistically ambiguous focus to the Tolkienian epic.

Abercrombie’s gallows humorous and morally ambiguous take on chivalric fantasy has itself coalesced into a genre perpetrated by other ‘grimdark’ authors5, including Mark Lawrence (Prince of Thorns, 2011), Anna Smith Spark (The Court of Broken Knives, 2017), Ed McDonald (Blackwing, 2017) and Anna Stephen (Godblind, 2018), though, as Martin and Abercrombie found, once a story-type has achieved a recognisable genre, then it’s probably time to break it once again.

The First Law novels are epic fantasy rather than sword and sorcery, more concerned with bigger-picture ‘civilisation’ than life and death struggles on the primal frontier. But they do involve a sword and sorcery icon: the barbarian, namely Logen Ninefingers, who’s actually a pretty sweet guy, when he’s not succumbed to his berserker alter-ego ‘The Bloody-Nine.’

Logen answers not only the question ‘What would Conan be like if he were an actual person?’, but also ‘What would it be like to be him?’

The following scene comes from a third of the way through the second novel, Before They Are Hanged, from the chapter Among the Stones. Logen has joined a party of adventurers to retrieve a magical relic from the edge of the world, but a band of mercenaries loyal to a rival power have them cornered on a rocky plain.

Like Howard, Abercrombie opens by establishing his arena of death (a windswept hilltop not unlike that of the Battle of the Mounds in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, 1982).

No glorious sunrise, no stark, dramatic moonlight; it might as well be the view from an office carpark. ‘Creeping’, ‘towering’, ‘muddy’, ‘cold’, ‘dark’. There’s no omniscient narrator here to valorise the characters’ last stand. Those looming clouds and that horizon make this place feel exposed and defenceless.

While Howard wants his reader to relish the coming combat, Abercrombie wants you to feel terror. This is why he places us in the head of the scene’s most terrified character, Jezel dan Luthar, a preening nobleman and a deft touch with a rapier, but hopelessly out of his depth here in the wild.

Like Martin, Abercrombie has gone for third-person limited. No room for the god-like pronouncements of Robert E. Howard here.

Sensing the smaller man’s fear, Logen tries to keep him focused on tactics, but Jezel barely comprehends. There’s only three of them left who can handle a blade and the mercenaries outnumber them at least four to one. And did I mention they’re on horseback?

All Jezal can think about is the unfairness of dying so young. Logen tells him to shout for help if he needs it. And if help doesn’t come, well, it’s probably because help is dead.

You know the situation is serious when even the baddest bastard among you is frightened. This feels like more than just steep odds. It feels like certain death. The only one among them who isn’t scared is Ferro Maljinn, a feral bow-woman with demon-tainted blood and quite possibly insane.

We notice what a character who feels helpless would notice; we feel what a character who feels sick would feel.

There follows an intimate exchange of dialogue as Logen encourages Jezal to focus on those he loves, anything that might get him through the hell that is almost upon them. But Jezal, supercilious shitbag he’s been his entire life, can’t think of a single person who might mourn him.

Logen assures him…

Those who cherish the radiant chivalry of Tolkien often regard grimdark authors like rampaging yobbos, pissing and scrawling graffiti all over the cenotaph of fantasy. But that’s certainly not the case here.

Abercrombie doesn’t take his characters’ courage for granted. Instead, he forces them to dredge resolve from the depths of each other’s souls in the face of existential dread.

Their courage feels earned.

It makes me wonder how much Abercrombie has been influenced by modern war journalism like Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down (1999) or Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (2004). This exchange between the barbarian and the soldier isn’t macho propaganda or a hymn to Homeric valour. It feels embedded and intimate. Abercrombie values humanity just as much as Tolkien, though he finds it in the mud rather than the stars.

These characters value life and family just as much as we do, a precious spark of humanity we don’t want to see stamped out, though it seems Fate is on its way with big hobnail boots.

The fight doesn’t start with a fanfare. The mercenaries don’t herald their arrival with bared blades and operatic death threats. Ferro crouches with her bow, watching them casually dismount, tighten their gear, straighten their weapons. They’re more like builders pulling up to give you an estimate on a new roof.

Ferro manages to shoot a couple of them and we’re off, the combat alternating between short punchy paragraphs, each from the differing viewpoints of Logen, Ferro and Jezal.

Ferro scurries away to find another vantage point, leaving Logen to fight for himself. Abercrombie keeps things exciting by keeping his barbarian on the back foot throughout. Logen’s internal dialogue establishes his mindset; he’s scared but experience has taught him to keep it together. He waits behind a stone to bushwhack one of the mercenaries.

The feel of the sword’s grip and the clenching of Logen’s jaw convey his tension.

This is far from the romance of Howard. This is realism, brutish and ugly. There’s nothing beautiful about bodies ‘flopping over and over’ like tossed binbags. It feels mundane. Abercrombie gives us combat as labour, not a Vegas floorshow.

Like Howard, Abercrombie varies each encounter. This time the minion comes with a startled face, but Logen slaughters him without hesitation. The barbarian’s internal dialogue humanises the man with a nickname, ‘Brown Eyes’, and the violence hinges on Logen making a choice, one that reveals who he is. This is character expressed through combat, as Logen tells himself…

Even for one such as Logen, killing comes at a cost. He notices those brown eyes turn glassy in death. A description from the PoV of a true psychopath wouldn’t have included that detail at all.

The heroes continue picking off the besiegers one by one, the narrative zigging and zagging with the variety of opponents and situations, Abercrombie upping the difficulty setting with each of Logen’s opponents.

Again, as in Howard, we get overwhelming force vs. disadvantage and vulnerability, as Abercrombie establishes the strength and ferocity of the bigger man vs. Logen’s awkwardness on this treacherously rocky ground.

We get more back and forth with this combat, Logen taking a punch that knocks him dizzy, then a blow from that tree-like club that almost takes him off his feet.

Logen lacks the godly perfection of Howard’s superheroes. His actions here are frantic, human, his clumsiness isn’t just funny and relatable, it’s lovable. Again, character expressed through combat.

When the coup de gras comes and Logen thrusts his sword into the big boi’s belly, followed by a dagger in the neck, the blow lands with plain, unspectacular verbs. ‘Stabbed’, ‘sliding’, ‘pulled’ don’t call attention to themselves and slow down the pace. The lack of ornament lets the sentences swish like sword strokes.

Logen eventually faces his final boss, the mercenary captain, Finnius.

There it is again: overwhelming force vs. disadvantage and vulnerability. Finnius’s energy and agility vs. Logen’s exhaustion. Abercrombie varies the combat this time by giving the two fighters a threatening exchange of dialogue, giving this encounter even greater dramatic significance.

We get proper tactical details here, a sense of a cunning mind and a character behind Finnius’ feints and parries. This doesn’t feel like a whirlwind Frazetta painting; it feels up-close and real (despite being completely made-up).

Abercrombie also frames the combat from an unusual angle. When Finnius draws blood, he dances back, waving his sword and laughing, “One to me!” It feels more like a tennis match than the cliched death-dual we’ve come to expect from this sort of thing. That similarity also helps us visualise these two battlers bounding and grunting, each striving to nail the other.

The battle rages for several paragraphs, much longer than the others. Finnius has the cover of a shield, while Logen is leaking like a squished satsuma. Like Conan seeking to re-arm himself after smashing his sword over someone’s head, Logen’s mini-objective over this span of the plot is to get rid of that shield.

He chooses to feign weakness, drawing Finnius into open ground where Logen can generate a decent overhead smash, then rushes in, hacking Finnius’ shield to splinters, then chopping away his sword before delivering a devastating underarm serve.

This uniquely horrible injury reminds me of advice from master thriller-writer (and Pulitzer-winning movie critic) Stephen Hunter about choosing the right gory detail when it comes to writing meaningful, realistic gunfights.

Logen sends his one-footed opponent back to the mud without ceremony, though Abercrombie – as with every other one of Logen’s kills in this sequence – pauses to describe the actual moment of death. The passing of a life – along with all the potential for good or at least not-bad it might have contained – gets just as much airtime as descriptions of flying entrails.

If you’re here for the gore, you need to be here for this as well. Are you not entertained?

These moments feel necessary, reverent, weirdly sacred.

Two fight-scenes, both alike in dramatic dignity in the fair fantasy genre. The House of Howard wants awe, his Conan becomes a vessel through which the reader beholds something weird and divine, very much the endgame of fantasy. Abercrombie feels more akin to horror, his combat scenes feel like you’re being chased by Leatherface.

There’s no ‘best’ approach to writing sword fights, no universal rules, just tools and tactics. You’re wrestling the smoke-monster of your own ideas, trying to pin it into something real on the page. It’s a fight that requires adaptability and being alive to the movements of your foe. So be water, my friend.

Pick a vantage point that gives you the best view of your intended target, that is, what you want your reader to feel: Awe? Terror? Disgust? What game you playing? Or do you believe this sort of thing shouldn’t be a game at all? What tone after you after, Wagner or The Sex Pistols?

Maintain overwhelming force and keep your hero at a disadvantage. Make them vulnerable. Give them no way out and see if they have what it takes to survive.

The clash of steel on steel sure gets repetitive after a while, so make it about something more than what it is. What does this combat symbolise? How does it reveal character? What tactics would these particular combatants choose? Give them a sequence of mini-objectives that might let them gain a winning advantage or at least survive long enough to maybe think of one.

Combat is the continuation of narrative policy by other means.

Don’t stand still, dodge and weave by varying each encounter and each round of combat. Keep your sentences smooth so they slide in like an assassin’s blade.

Read widely. Check out the fight-scenes in The Winter King (1995) and The Last Kingdom (2004) by Bernard Cornwell, Scaramouche (1921) and Captain Blood (1922) by Raffael Sabatini, Gates of Fire (1998) by Stephen Pressfield, Catherine Moore and Molly Tanzer’s Jirel tales and Charles Saunders’ Imaro.

Richard Cohen’s By the Sword (2010) is an excellent book on the history of people stabbing each other with long pointy objects. Oh, and the knife-fight between Paul and Feyd in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) is also a banger.

Add your favourite fictional duals and brawls in the comments below…

Stay sharp. Stay fearless.

And stay weird.

Before They Are Hanged remains copyright of author Joe Abercrombie. Passages are quoted here under terms of fair use for the purposes of criticism and review.

You can find out more about Joe Abercrombie’s work on his website and follow him on BlueSky @joeabercrombie.com

Before They Are Hanged is available in the UK from…

• Gollancz (UK Publisher)

• Amazon.co.uk

• Book Depository

• Waterstones

• TGJones (WHSmith).

And in the USA and Canada from…

• Orbit (US Publisher)

• Amazon.com

• Amazon.ca

• Barnes and Noble

• IndieBound

YOUR NEXT READ

• Evolve or Die: Is this the End for Sword and Sorcery? Can the genre ever move on from Robert E. Howard’s Conan? How can writers possibly innovate within this narrow fantasy subgenre? Is the sword and sorcery barbarian facing his last stand?

• Fantastic Beasts and How to Write Them Some Jurassic examples of great monster-writing

• How We Built Black Beth Resurrecting a British sword and sorcery heroine and what it takes to write a character ‘well’

• Lessons from Hannibal Lecter: How to Write a Human Monster Can horror be scary without the supernatural?

• Swords, Sorcery and the She-Wolf In the age of corporate epic fantasy has pulp-era sword and sorcery become more appealing than ever? Wondering where the genre stands as I discover a forgotten fantasy heroine from the Marvel vaults

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Stories don’t mean shit without theme.

Theme is what your story is really about, beneath all the starfighter battles, lovelorn androids, and moody wanderers jabbing fools with a broadsword. It’s the writer’s emotional and/or intellectual connection to the material. It’s how they feel about the characters and what they’re up to. If the writer can’t connect to a story, the reader can’t connect either. If the writer is bored or just typing their way to an invoice, that apathy will stink up the page like a kipper under the floorboards.

Moby Dick is a novel about the tragedy of pride, but Melville doesn’t state that theme out loud.

Theme is exposition and as such requires a decent burial.

Theme, along with details like where the butler was when Lord Swankington got shivved with a dessert spoon or the fact that your heroine is really, really, really good at kicking people in the head, all this stuff starts out as info awaiting a dump. It’s leaden story-data that must be spun by the process of your writerly imagination into the gold of characters that live and scenes that stir the soul.

Writers lacking skill in this kind of alchemy tend to bullhorn their themes like they’re on a protest march. Or – bless them – they’ll try and educate us like we’ve been dragged into the principal’s office.

This isn’t storytelling; it’s editorial.

Storytellers seeking to confront the reader with a direct message often forget that the reader most in need of hearing that message is usually the one who will clap their hands over their ears and go ‘LALALALALALALA!’

This is just part of our weird modern relationship with theme in stories, certainly as I’ve experienced it writing comics.

I’ve gotten into the habit of always writing to a unifying theme. Doing so provides a sort of compass that helps me navigate how best to put the story together. Would a wintery setting better convey my theme of isolation? What kind of end-boss monster would best embody the hero’s thematic struggle to emerge from his father’s shadow?

As Pixar writer-director Andrew Stanton says, “Theme dictates every decision.”1

Theme also revs my passion-engine. It keeps me excited about the project in hand and stops me flagging if I’m writing over the course of several months. I have to find something in the characters to which I can relate or which I find fascinating, even if that character is a sentient ameboid from the Garvlaxx Cluster or an amoral bastard who punches kittens for a living.

As another Pixar alumni put it, storyboard artist Emma Coats, “Why must you tell this story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.”

Or as I’d put it, “Theme: what’s in it for you?”

When I wrote The Last of Her Kind (2024) for 2000 AD, my first continuation of Hawk the Slayer, I wanted to write a story about the dangers of nostalgia. My Judge Anderson script Hell-Night at the Cine-Pit (2025) is a supernatural take on AI, how human creativity has been rendered into soulless, protean sludge. I’ve just finished the script on my next Durham Red adventure, a neo-noir called Hungry City, and it’s all about the cost of personal freedom and how it feels to be treated like a commodity.

All very grown-up stuff expressed through the kind of pulpy adolescent nonsense I adore: blokes with swords beating up monsters, women who can make your head explode just by thinking about it, and vampire antiheroes struggling to maintain a moral compass while getting a kick out of eating people.

But I don’t wield these themes like I’m attacking a mob of zombies with a baseball bat. The readers (fingers crossed, I have more than one) have paid a fiver to experience a rush of thrill-power, not a lecture on ethics. So I’ll cut any lines of dialogue I feel are too on-the-nose and dial down any too-obvious symbolism.

The more I tell the reader what to think, the more I bully them out of the picture.

Besides, readers can’t be told what to think or feel.

In other words, it’s not all about you, the writer.

Even authors at their most didactic – Dickens in Hard Times, Orwell in 1984, Miller in The Crucible, Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale – still express their allegorical stories through drama and character.

They explore their themes rather than simplify them. They open an imaginative space in which the reader can respond, inviting them to partake in a tango between author and reader that transcends mere words on a page.

Morals are the currency of fable, not great drama.

Morals are themes that have been condensed and simplified, which is why they’re often deployed for the benefit of children. They’re broad statements that brook no argument. Their tone is parental.

The tedious accusation that comics – that is, North American superhero comics – have become ‘too political’ is often just a case of a writer being too heavy-handed when it comes to theme.

Yes, superheroes have always been political. When Captain America first kapowed Hitler back in 1940 he was – and remains – an embodiment of social justice. That said, writing for the moral edification of children and servicemen 85 years ago is very different from writing for the media-savvy adult of today. A superhero can’t just mouthpiece a story’s theme without coming across like a primary school teacher or a drill sergeant.

Whenever I come across a soapbox monologue in a superhero book – that panel when the hero gets an earnest close-up or strikes a pose while delivering heaps of dialogue baldly stating how the writer feels about the world – I almost always agree with the sentiments expressed, as do the readership at which the monologue is clearly aimed.

Sooooo, what’s the point of the monologue?

Is the writer looking to inspire a thought or feeling other than complete and redundant agreement?

Monologues are fine, but they need to be filtered through the character’s perspective. A writer can’t just slam on the story-brakes and deliver an impassioned social media update using their main character as a textbox.

Comics like Judge Dredd: A Better World (by Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt, Henry Flint, Boo Cook and Jake Lynch) or the Dredd prequel series Dreadnoughts (by Michael Carroll and John Higgins) do the hard work of dramatising, deepening and diversifying a conversation about the limits of policing. They don’t arrest the reader with a moral lesson demanding compliance, but rather offer a theme which the reader can explore and engage.

Given the current storm of social injustice, so much of it unprecedented in its shamelessness, readers really can’t be blamed for demanding stories not only say something about the world but scream it out loud.

Readers want to know they’re not alone in their outrage.

But as with the novels of Dickens and Atwood, that zeal must be tempered with craft if it’s going to do more than just add another echo to the chamber. After all, to engage thought and feeling and our common humanity is the real work of changing minds.

The problem we’ve got is that theme has become a commodity.

Take ‘elevated horror’.

Whoever came up with that term deserves a slap, though it seems to have arisen from a genuine need to articulate the impact made on the horror genre by arthouse studio A24. Launching in 2012 with a keen focus on digital marketing and social media, A24 has launched the career of at least one electrifying horror auteur, Robert Eggers (The Witch, 2015; The Lighthouse, 2019; Nosferatu, 2024).2

These movies, together with other ‘elevated horror’ movies from other studios, like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) – all brilliant films – are distinguished by their overt social commentary or else a certain artiness that announces hidden meaning, promising something more than just gore and jump-scares.

These movies’ themes are a major part of what is supposed to ‘elevate’ them above mere entertainment like your average Conjuring sequel. In terms of branding, ‘elevated horror’ is eminently sellable. Discussion of these movies will make you look tasteful and clever. Championing their social commentary will rate you highly on the virtue index. It’ll score you likes and subscribes and fuel the contradictory outrage economy.

Thus, theme becomes currency.

I’m too close to my own stories to always make an accurate judgement as to whether I’m being too cryptic or too obvious when it comes to theme. I mainly write pulpy genre comics (I don’t have enough money in the bank right now to take time out and write much else), but I’m always confident my theme will be there to greet the reader should they ever pause to look for it.

Thing is, the reader never seems to pause to look for it.

My Ego emerges from his bower and snarls about readers failing to recognise my undoubted genius. He bellows like Withnail on the heath…

My Ego also gets very annoyed when it comes to reviews. On the rare occasion my work warrants commentary, the theme goes unnoticed 99% of the time.

Which is ffffffffffine (Alec writes through gritted teeth).

Despite the badgering of my Ego, I know my themes aren’t there to grab attention, but to guide the building of my story, to express how I feel about myself and the world and hopefully inspire reflection.

Readers and reviewers assuming my daft adventure comics have nothing to say is one thing, but the accompanying value judgements are another.

The word “silly” often comes up in comments about my stories, along with “shallow”, “disposable” and “simple enough”. The general feeling is that the stories are competent and fun, but certainly not ‘elevated’.

When I read commentary on other creators’ comics, I get the feeling readers and critics don’t tend to look for deeper meaning unless the theme or social commentary is somehow advertising itself.

This eat-your-greens approach can be hazardous to one’s storytelling, but it’s the approach that will usually get a writer noticed, get your work shared and promoted, talked about, whether it’s being castigated by comicsgate conmen or complimented by the critics.

Theme says you’re a serious, valuable writer. Theme gets you in the right drinking circles and scores you more work.

The writer must therefore be seen to be saying something or else risk irrelevance in the marketplace. Worse still, a seeming refusal to state your theme out loud might risk accusation of your harbouring malevolent intent. Amid such paranoia, it’s understandable that a writer may wish to take no chances and announce their theme in neon letters big enough to be read from inside a cupboard buried on the dark side of Neptune.

We don’t need an episode of Black Mirror to tell us that readers and audiences are less engaged these days. Last year Yanna Lina, a Booktokker with 2.7m+ followers, complained in a since-deleted post that Leigh Bardugo’s fantasy novel Six of Crows contained too much writing. (“Why are the pages so filled with so many words? Like, what the f***?”)

Writing for N+1 magazine, journalist Will Tavlin revealed that Netflix are encouraging their screenwriters to have characters announce what they’re doing while they’re doing it, so that viewers at home can still follow the story while scrolling on their phones.

As with theme-loud storytelling, virality has become more important than writing that actually, quietly engages.

Writers then find themselves caught between what is needed to write well and what is needed to get that writing under readers’ noses. The story needs you to bury (that is, dramatize) your theme, but the attention economy – and your long-term career – would prefer you announce it.

Publicists favour writers who are already self-promoting. Need time to refine your latest novel? Sorry, my guy. But we need you to dance like a monkey on TikTok, answer every comment notification instead of spending time with your kids, and come up with something witty to say on Bluesky at least twelve times a day.

Yeah, we know social media is cigarettes for the brain. But if you want this thing to sell…

So do we write for the story? Or do we write for the algo, which is your best chance of getting that story seen?

Perhaps I’m too old, too resigned to obscurity, too averse to the Necronomicon of social media, but the theme that has always guided my own writing journey is ‘Craft is Everything’.

Theme is the most precious thing in your story because it comes directly from you. It’s your truth, your outrage, your obsession, your lived experience. It’s the reason academics obsess over theme; because it’s the gateway into the writer’s soul. It’s your contribution to our collective understanding of the universe. It’s your take on the eternal question ‘why?’

Learning how best to communicate that unique answer is a chaotic, exhausting, embarrassing process, but it’s how your story gets told.

If you’ve lost someone, if you’ve loved someone, if you’re enraged at a world that wants to punish you for your very existence, craft is how you get that story out of you.

Catharsis cannot be outsourced. Writing is the point of writing.

But craft is also graft. It’s arse-on-the-chair, put-in-a-shift work, not the kind of arty-farty bollocks people like me spout on Substack in the hope of getting quoted.

Here’s how I believe theme works within the ecosystem of any given story.

A story will land somewhere on a spectrum between ‘THEME’ at one end and ‘MOMENTUM’ at the other. A story that leans more towards ‘THEME’ will be slower, more meditative, but in doing so will gain greater depth and thematic richness.

A story that leans more towards ‘MOMENTUM’ will move faster, be more exciting but will sacrifice a degree of complexity. It’s the difference between the novel and melodrama, between On Chesil Beach and Mad Max: Fury Road.

Some stories lean so far into ‘MOMENTUM’ overdrive that their themes atomise into broad, pervasive values, the stuff the story cares about most of all.

And that’s okay. It’s how melodrama works.

Most stories occupy a middle-ground between the two poles, but knowing the expectations of your readership is crucial. Readers expecting a complex graphic memoir about gender apartheid and the treachery of memory might be disappointed if you deliver 100 pages about a barbarian in a bikini trying to punch a hydra. On the other hand, don’t go Barton Fink and get so fascinated with your theme that you forget why your audience turned up.

Theme can speak loud or quiet. It can be complex allegory or just underlying values. But it’s always there, down to your choice of characters and the words you make them speak.

So speak your mind, whether you’re writing One Hundred Years of Solitude or Too Fast, Too Furious but with werewolves. Just remember the cardinal rule of theme laid down by legendary Batman writer Denny O’Neil3: “You can say anything you want, but first you must tell a story.”

Stay weird

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What’s so scary about Hannibal Lecter anyway?

He can’t float through your bedroom window or break through walls. He can’t sprout tentacles, drag you to Hell, hunt you in your dreams, or throttle you with telekinesis. Bullets are a grave inconvenience to him, and he would never be so uncouth as to pick up a chainsaw.

He’s just a man, “a small, lithe man. Very neat.”

So how did premier thriller/horror author Thomas Harris make a character with no supernatural powers so damn scary? How can any writer make us fear a monster so seemingly banal?

Demon psychiatrist Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter is the star of three Harris bestsellers, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999) and an unloved prequel Hannibal Rising (2006)1.

Brian Cox was the first to play him on screen in Michael Mann’s neon-drenched nightmare Manhunter (1986). Cox plays Lecter with subtlety, perhaps too much subtlety for us to see the monster he truly is. It was Anthony Hopkins who immortalised the character as the bug-eyed Mephistopheles wheedling a Faustian bargain out of Jodie Foster in Jonathan Demme’s quintuple-Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991)2.

Hopkins’s Lecter was canonised by the American Film Institute as the greatest villain in US cinema history (ahead of Norman Bates and Darth Vader), his prison-issue muzzle now as iconic as Jason’s hockey-mask or Fred Krueger’s backscratcher.

But the character’s debut was a modest one, a sideline role in Harris’s second novel Red Dragon (1981). This benchmark thriller features Will Graham, a haunted FBI profiler with a genius for understanding the psychopathic mind.

But this genius is also poisonous. Will’s empathy for evil is corroding his soul, turning him into the very kind of asocial ghoul that is his quarry.

As a popular horror-thriller Red Dragon is the perfect organism: lean, elegant, merciless, its structural perfection matched only by its hostility. Harris brought gothic horror to the crime novel, Red Dragon and Silence establishing the genre of the contemporary serial killer novel, exemplified by John Sandford’s Rules of Prey (1989), Jeffrey Deaver’s The Bone Collector (1997), Mo Hayder’s Birdman (2000) and Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004).

Like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, Lecter is pure gothic: a creature of duality, civil yet savage, courteous yet carnivorous, the physician who cannot heal, only kill. His unfathomable pathology is a haunted castle, a labyrinth that invites and consumes. Lecter is the man-eating ogre of fairy tale, the Big Bad Wolf forever one step ahead of the woodsman’s axe.

Yet his intellect and self-assurance are enviable, his repulsiveness tempered by his attractiveness. It’s what enables him to worm his way into our heads.

Harris worked as a crime reporter in ‘60s Texas and ‘70s New York and has confessed (in the few interviews he’s ever given3) that he’s never had to make anything up when it comes to writing novels.4

Lecter appears early in Red Dragon, in Chapter Seven.

Will has already hit a wall in his pursuit of a psychopath known as ‘the Tooth Fairy’. With the killer due to strike under the next full moon, Will is forced to consult the only person who can equal his own gift for perception: Doctor Hannibal Lecter, another maniac whom Will put behind bars three years ago.

The last time they met outside of court, Lecter succeeded in partially disembowelling poor Will, who must now confront not only the trauma of that encounter, but also the disturbing truth that he is not so dissimilar to the psychos he nails.

Harris doesn’t jump straight into this fearful reunion. He has another supporting character to introduce first, the chilly Dr. Frederick Chilton5, Chief of Staff at the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Harris also needs to give us a good reason to fear a man who is safely behind bars when we first meet him.

Chilton welcomes Will into his office, chatty as he offers a chair.

This backstory feels smooth and natural because it’s coming from a character who knows Lecter best of all (which still isn’t saying much). By offering these titbits throughout the scene, Chilton reveals as much about his own personality as he does about Lecter.

We’re too curious to find out more about Chilton to notice that he’s burying Lecter-centric exposition the whole time. Why does he seem more irritated by Lecter than fearful of him? The emphasis on those framed letters betrays an envy of his fellow doctor.

Chilton goes on to set the ground-rules for Will’s interview.

It feels like we’re preparing to view a tiger at the zoo. The feeling is one of safety and curiosity. Reassurance must be established – a protective wall between us and the monster – before that wall can be gradually broken down as the scene progresses.

Moving closer now with suggestions of physical interaction, building a sense of Will approaching the monster. We’re not told why Lecter isn’t allowed to handle paperclips, setting the reader’s mind a-boggle as to what he might be capable of doing with so tiny and innocuous an item.

Will remains focused and taciturn, as eager as we are to be done with the preamble and get to the meeting with Lecter. But Harris isn’t done building suspense, so he has Chilton unwilling to let Will go just yet.

This is the first time we’ve received explicit details of Lecter’s atrocities.

Now we understand why he’s kept under such meticulously high security. He can sniff out the faintest weakness and has the patience of a spider lurking at the fringes of its web. Like the vampire or the werewolf, Lecter’s humanity is just a mask, a predatory ruse, and the monster will come rushing at us when we least expect it.

A terrible threat has been established and it’s beginning to feel like those bars may not be enough to contain the monster. When we finally meet the little man sitting quietly in his cell, it will be in the full knowledge of what he is.

Chilton presents a strip of EKG tape from his desk drawer, a party trick reserved to intimidate visitors. We’re getting a good whiff of sadism from Chilton. He knows how much Will has suffered at the hands of Lecter. (“It may seem gratuitous to warn you, of all people.”) His finger traces the zig-zag that measured Lecter’s pulse during the incident with the nurse.

Here and with the previous line about saving one of the nurse’s eyes, the description doesn’t linger. It’s as clean and succinct as a surgical incision.

Lengthy and loving descriptions of gore and mayhem risk denying the role played by the reader’s imagination.

Red Dragon is a novel about getting into other people’s heads and Harris’s PoV often drifts between characters within a single scene. We feel it here. We’re in Chilton’s head, reading nothing in Graham’s face. But those ‘dry and shiny’ hands steepled under the doctor’s chin feel like they’re being observed by Will, watching Chilton’s smugness and seething at his crude provocations.

It’s the conflict between these two characters and what it reveals about their personalities that make this expository scene so digestible. Chilton’s dislike of people smarter than himself is delicious, his probing of Will betraying his envy of a man clearly more intuitive than himself – a man who isn’t even a doctor. (Will tells him so upon their meeting.)

Chilton talks about human beings like he’s collecting butterflies. He speaks with arrogance, declaring Lecter “impenetrable”. Chilton has reached the limits of his knowledge and wants to know what Will can add – just as Will must tap Lecter for further inspiration on the Tooth Fairy case.

Chilton asks Will if he has conversed with Lecter for any length of time. Will is uncomfortable and unwilling to go into detail. Chilton presses him, telling Will that Lecter is, “very familiar with you. He’s given you a lot of thought.”

The monster is not only powerful, a definite threat, barely contained, we now learn it’s motivated to visit harm upon Will. The threat goes up a notch. Suspense builds. By now we’re itching to see Lecter for ourselves. But Harris isn’t done teasing and neither is Chilton.

Stuck much like Chilton himself, much like Chilton and Will and Lecter are all reflections of each other. The monster feels present in the other characters. No one can quite grasp what Lecter is or how to grapple with him. He’s like that seeping mist in Dracula’s shapeshifting repertoire. By now, those prison bars and security protocols feel terrifyingly insufficient.

Chilton is a petty monster of pride, ego and spite, a baseline human against whom we can measure the indifference and self-control of the far greater monster lurking in the cell downstairs.

Harris uses Chilton as a goad in this scene, forcing Will to reveal just how emotionally vulnerable he is – the very weakness that Lecter is going to exploit.

Chilton having exposed his Achilles Heel, Will has had enough.

Why can’t we cut this scene?

Because it’s introducing a supporting character who recurs throughout the novel. It’s also clearing a lot of exposition that would otherwise clutter the next scene, the climax towards which everything is building and which needs to run fast and smooth if it’s to generate any power.

The scene also establishes two crucial factors without which the meeting with Lecter, our brush with death, would lose its scariness: 1.) the overwhelming, uncontainable threat posed by Lecter and, 2.) Will’s specific vulnerability to that threat.

Will is the character most susceptible to the predations of this particular monster. He’s also the person to whom Lecter can do the greatest and most immediate damage.

The protagonist is rendered vulnerable before the monster is unleashed.

It’s a classic horror technique. Think of the opening scene in Jaws. Poor Chrissie is alone, naked, benighted, more than a little high, and floating in an element not her own, and from which she is unable to escape.

‘Graham knew’ reminds us these two characters have a terrible history. Lecter’s madness is not a physical threat, but a psychic one. The very words he breathes are a poisonous fume. One does not simply walk into Lecter’s lair.

The subtle switches to present tense in this scene feel galvanising, immediate. Will is back in the danger zone with the creature who almost succeeded in relieving him of his lower intestine.

He peeks down the hall and sees the steel bars, a nylon net to prevent Lecter from reaching through. Of all the details within, he notices furniture ominously bolted to the floor, stacked with ‘softcover’ books.

Harris has Will assuring himself of the solidity of those bars, the certainty of his safety. But are prison bars proof against a thing like Lecter? Everything we’ve so far learned about him undermines any sense of security.

With another twitch of the present tense, Harris notes that Lecter’s eyes “are” dark red and reflect the light like crimson pinpricks, causing Graham to involuntarily smooth the bristles on the back of his neck.

There’s no cliched hammering of the heart, no sickness in Will’s stomach. Harris selects a more unusual, delicate, even sensual response.

Lecter doesn’t share the supernature of the zombie, werewolf or vampire, but there’s something infectious about him nonetheless, certainly to Will, our focal character.

Permit me a Dungeons & Dragons-related digression.

I used to read Dragon magazine back in the day and was struck by a Ravenloft-adjacent article explaining how DMs can make players genuinely fear the monsters that get thrown at them. The article warned that most players are savvy. They’ve usually got some idea of a monsters’ stats and know that a demi-lich will give them more of a fight than a wandering ghoul.

Therefore, DMs should avoid explicitly naming a creatures’ species when the players encounter it. Set the stage and present the monster through the eyes of a nervous dungeoneer rather than an encyclopaedia-brained nerd. Watch them freak out as they try and figure out what they’re dealing with – even if all they’re facing is a lowly animated skeleton.

Sensation over calculus.

A monster is more than just a bunch of stats.

Keep the players uncertain.

That’s what Harris does with Lecter in both these scenes. The author never reduces the character to any banal certainty.

Yes, Lecter is just a man. Yes, he’s behind bars and can’t lay a finger on us. But Harris ensures we remain entirely uncertain about all that he is and what he is capable of, leaving us forever on guard and deep in suspense.

In Red Dragon and Silence, Lecter is irresistible because he is unknowable. He becomes far less interesting and more of a negotiable pantomime villain the more we learn about his backstory in the later novels.

Lecter’s relationship with Will transcends Lecter’s physical abilities and gives him the power to harm and intimidate. We meet him through the eyes of the person who fears him the most and to whom Lecter means the most.

Will fears Lecter because of what he represents: chaos, violence, madness. He personifies not only Will’s near-death trauma, but the awful truth that he and Lecter are too much alike.

Lecter is courteous and offers Will a chair.

The Doctor’s fabled manners seem to offer a means by which we might avoid his wrath. If we’re nice and polite, he might be persuaded to leave us alone, the way a crucifix might ward off a vampire. But Lecter’s malevolence abides by no such comforting rule - as that poor, half-blinded nurse found out.

The exchange that follows between Lecter and Will wouldn’t feel half as distinct and spontaneous if all that exposition hadn’t been cleared away in the previous scene, greasing the rails for the rollercoaster to come.

Lecter’s courtesy is spiked with malice. He’s testing Will.

Will is on guard, but Lecter may as well be psychic.

He lulls Will with a veiled compliment, confiding how sick he is of tedious visits from ambitious, second-rate psychologists.

Will compliments him back.

Harris doesn’t give us the tone of that ‘and’ and we’re left to wonder what Lecter meant by it. Does he want to know what Will thought of the article? Or asking why Will is bothering to play games?

Lecter is not Dr. Chilton, alas.

Will replies.

Again, Lecter sees straight through Will and nibbles at his Achilles Heel. Which of these two psychos is conducting this interview? Are these prison bars or a mirror?

Will says he wants Lecter’s help. The Doctor figured as much. He’s aware of the Tooth Fairy murders and says he’s been careful to avoid revealing any morbid interest to his captors.

More innocent people will suffer unimaginable horrors before they die. Harris reminds us what’s at stake in this scene should Will fail to obtain Lecter’s help.

Will offers incentives. He can ensure Chilton provides Lecter with extra research materials. Lecter bristles at Chilton’s name and confides several insights Will himself noticed about the man from the previous scene.

Lecter seems not only psychic, but omniscient.

What does Lecter want? Surely he craves more out of life than foie gras du census-taker and a nice chianti.

Like Heath Ledger’s Joker or Rutger Hauer’s Hitcher, Lecter’s seeming lack of motive is a key factor of his inhumanity. He’s beyond our comprehension, yet there’s the tantalising suggestion that there is something there to comprehend, some method to Lecter’s madness unknown perhaps even to himself.

It’s this paradox that makes Lecter so captivating and more than just Michael Myers with a wine-list.

The swift articulacy of Lecter’s response is what’s frightening here. That he can pull such an erudite response out of the bag so quickly reveals that he already holds command over the conversation.

Will knows full well how he did it.

He and this sordid killer both think alike.

If Lecter was nothing but a cultivated creep with a flamboyant rap sheet, he wouldn’t be very interesting. What intrigues is his personality.

One of his foibles is that discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to him. So when Will delivers his blunt verdict, “you’re insane”, the Doctor is triggered to respond in kind, revealing yet more perilous details about Will.

Lecter has deduced Will has a child in his life.

You don’t mess with dialogue this good, which is why Michael Mann left it pretty much intact when writing his adaptive screenplay for Manhunter.

Lecter eventually accedes and Will hands over the file while he waits in the next room. He’s shaken, numb, gathering himself before returning to Lecter for round two.

They pore over the evidence, sounding like partners working a case, though Lecter fishes for yet more clues about Will’s life. (Go read the novel and you’ll find out why.)

Lecter observes the file’s lack of description regarding the grounds in which the murders took place. He asks what the yards were like. Will tells him.

We can’t help but laugh. Lecter is indeed disarming (in both senses of the word).

He rambles a little before trying to snag Will’s home number. When Will denies him, Lecter bites him again by asking how Will caught him. Graham walks away. Lecter asks again.

Will escapes, but the damage is done.

Lecter haunts Will like a ghost immune to exorcism.

Will visits Lecter in search of the happy ending he wants for this story. To see the Tooth Fairy behind bars, just like Lecter. But as Lecter has reminded him, Will can only capture the Tooth Fairy at the cost of his own humanity, his relationship with his wife Molly and his stepson.

Lecter has imparted a monstrous truth that cannot be staked through the heart, pierced with a silver bullet or laid to rest with arcane rites.

Hannibal Lecter doesn’t need the supernatural to inflict the ultimate disquiet.

Stay weird

Red Dragon remains copyright of author Thomas Harris. Passages are quoted here under terms of fair use for the purposes of criticism.

Red Dragon is available from:

• World of Books

• Waterstones

• Barnes & Noble

• Penguin Books

• Amazon.

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Please be advised, this post contains detailed references to fictional suicide.

If this horror-themed post isn’t for you, check out these alternatives.

As horror-comedies go, An American Werewolf in London is a peculiar beast.

It’s not a loony gross-out routine like Evil Dead II (1987) or Braindead (1992). It’s steeped in werewolf movie-lore, but it’s not a parody like Young Frankenstein (1974), Scary Movie (2000) or What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It’s full of funhouse monsters, but it’s more than just a jokey creature-feature like Gremlins (1984), Lake Placid (1999) or Eight Legged Freaks (2002).

The scares in American Werewolf feel distinct and personal, reverberating deeper than mere surface thrills. Its playful humour shows just how comedy can be applied to horror to make viewers and readers bear the otherwise unbearable.

The movie’s unconventional approach to horror-comedy culminates in its very best scene, a saucy number that everyone remembers, but which gets talked about a good deal less than FX legend Rick Baker’s still-showstopping transformation scene.

Having established his career with three balls-out comedies, The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980), writer-director John Landis switches to a more sensible gear, telling a seemingly straightforward cautionary about American backpackers, David and Jack (David Naughton and Griffin Dunne).

Attacked by a monster on the Yorkshire moors, David survives while Jack is killed. Though Jack returns from the grave with a face like an Amazon parcel that lost a fight with a Dobermann, and warns David that he has inherited the werewolf’s curse.

Beneath the next full moon, David will be unable to prevent himself from rampaging through London unless he takes certain, drastic measures.

The movie casts a jaunty Yank’s eye over nascent Thatcherite Britain, finding both quaintness and decadence as David convalesces in the arms of elfin nurse Alex (Jenny Agutter). The romantic humour is stilted, disarmingly sweet, and punctuated by flashes of pant-pissing terror.

The movie plays like a rom-com directed by Jason Voorhees.

Moments of horror land with shocking abruptness, spasms of noise and violence, creating pure animal terror: the ambush on the moors, the bedridden ghoul, the werewolf’s climatic rampage through Piccadilly Circus.

Editor Malcom Campbell would later specialise in zany comedies like Coming to America (1988) and Wayne’s World (1992) and perhaps understood how best to disrupt the comforting rhythms of laughter. His jolting cuts feel like you’re being bushwhacked by a maddened lycanthrope.

But these jump-scares land with a terrible resonance. David’s dream of shrieking, demonic Wehrmacht arriving to slaughter his entire family in the middle of The Muppet Show is the childhood nightmare of every Jewish boomer.

FOOTNOTE: The Third Reich had a thing about werewolves, as explained in Jon Spira’s illuminating 2019 video essay on this movie, I Think He’s a Jew: The Werewolf’s Secret.

Urbane fears of the violent and irrational are couched in the more ancient horrors of Britain itself. “There’s something wrong with this place,” warns a furtive Yorkshireman.

Cosy pubs are sites of conspiracy and folk ritual, candles burning to ward off monsters. It turns out Britain is not the place of picture postcards and the middle-class fantasia of the Paddington movies. Through how many generations has this werewolf’s bloodline been flowing? How long has it been covered up?

What the Sam Hill have these crazy Brits been up to all these years?!

The humorous and the hideous are embodied in the mouldering spectre of Jack, easily the most vivid character in the movie. He’s certainly the funniest, with a wonderfully sly comic performance by Griffin Dunne.

Jack is no Shakespearean phantom pronouncing from the battlements. In a grim running gag, he appears progressively more decayed with each visitation, still kvetching about the girl he liked hooking up with some asshole she met at Jack’s funeral. (“Life mocks me even in death.”)

He remains chatty despite the shredded face. His manner is as open as his gouged larynx. That personable grin gets wider every time we see him.

In Jack, humour and horror are indivisible.

He’s David’s best bud, a true mensch; but he’s also the movie’s antagonist.

It’s Jack who is trying to convince David to leave the world of love and sex – the very stuff of life – guiding his friend deeper into the icy depths of Hell like some mouldering Virgil.

Jack also does the worldbuilding that makes American Werewolf feel so unique, creating the off-screen “hyperdiegesis”, a limbo-world in which the werewolf’s score of victims are unable to move on until the last remaining werewolf has been destroyed.

FOOTNOTE: Hyperdiegesis is a term coined by Matt Hills in his book Fan Culture (2002). “The creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text.”

Humour is typically used in horror stories as a distancing device, often providing momentary relief during stretches of tension. This allows the storyteller to manage the ebb and flow of suspense, bringing rhythm and levity to what might otherwise be an unbearable monotone of horror.

But humour can also encourage believability.

It’s Jack’s sardonic humour that helps us buy into the potentially cheesy world of the supernatural that he’s asking us to visualise.

We’re too busy laughing at Jack’s complaints about life in limbo (“Have you ever talked to a corpse? It’s boring!”) to notice the true horror of what he’s actually proposing. The amiable comedy of American Werewolf is perhaps the reason why the movie’s true nature is so commonly overlooked.

Like all truly great horror movies, An American Werewolf in London is a tragedy.

Yes, it’s a love story, but one in which love doesn’t conquer all. Declarations of feeling are met with feral snarls. Bullets are the only cure for David’s occult malady. As in Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Shining (1980) and Hereditary (2018), the narrative doesn’t ascend towards healing or resolution; the story of American Werewolf is a death spiral.

Worse still, David has done nothing to invite his fate. Okay, so he wandered onto the moors. That’s hardly a mortal sin. He’s not a fatally flawed Othello or Lear. He’s innocent of hubris, as much a victim of fate and bad timing as Oedipus.

By the end of the movie, David himself is the slaughtered lamb, his doe eyes and blood-red puffer jacket marking him for sacrifice from the very beginning. David must die to take away the lycanthropic sins of the world.

Landis builds his story along the lines of classical tragedy, deliberately borrowing from the granddaddy of all werewolf movies, Universal’s The Wolf Man, released forty years before in 1941.

FOOTNOTE: What we know of ‘traditional’ werewolf lore was almost entirely invented by Hollywood. The infectious bite, the full moon, the transformation, the silver bullet: it all stems not from folklore, but from The Wolf Man’s script written by German Jewish émigré Curt Siodmak.

In doing so, the story gets around the fundamental weakness of many werewolf movies, pointed out by critic Peter Nichols in his book Fantastic Cinema (1984). “The hollowness of the werewolf story, perhaps, is its fatalistic view that a good chap, through no fault of his own, can become a beast. There is not much dramatic pith in this arbitrary cosmic injustice.”

The central conflict in American Werewolf is between Jack and David, the living pitted against the dead, as David gradually succumbs to the survivor’s guilt that will finally drag him to his doom.

Here it is in the starkest dramatic terms: David must end his own life (objective), but he’s done nothing wrong, is in love and wants to live (obstacles). If he fails to achieve his objective, yet more people will die (stakes).

If this movie wasn’t a comedy, it would be unwatchable.

This core conflict resolves itself in the movie’s very best scene, which takes place around 10 minutes before David finally bites the bullet.

Having just learned of several murders that took place last night, David suspects he may be responsible and flees into the city. He enters a red phone booth in Piccadilly Circus. The camera circles him, trapping him inside this cage as he calls home and presses his argumentative kid sister into telling his family that he loves them.

He hangs up and presses the blade of a penknife to his wrist, but he can’t do it. The only light at the end of this tunnel is his dead friend Jack – by now a withered green mummy in a shredded hiking jacket – standing in broad daylight, pointing into a nearby porno theatre.

This scene has been edited for boobies, but still NSFW.

The original script called for a movie theatre full of children. This setting was even storyboarded.

The nearest movie theatre to Piccadilly Circus was the Eros Cartoon Theatre, which in 1976 (apparently sometime after Landis visited the location) switched from showing kids’ cartoons to imported softcore grot like Love in a Women’s Prison (1972) and Sins Within the Family (1975).

FOOTNOTE: I used to work as a projectionist round the corner in London’s Odeon Haymarket, and a lot of the older projectionists who had worked in the West End for donkey’s years remembered the old Eros before it closed in 1985 (with Bo Derek’s Bolero, 1984). The veteran projectionist who trained me up actually wandered onto the set of American Werewolf while they were filming the Piccadilly pile-up. He got to see John Landis arguing with the guy whose job it was to bounce a severed head off the bonnet of a car.

As deliciously transgressive as it might have been to have the werewolf slaughter an auditorium full of children, the porno-palace setting is more thematic. The macabre scene that follows plays against a backdrop of bare bazongas, faked orgasms and bow-chicka-bow-wow.

It’s a parody of intimacy, mocking the loving human life with Nurse Alex that David must leave behind.

Once inside (the auditorium was a Twickenham Studios set) where David finds Jack once again, beckoning from the back row. The ravaged spectre is sympathetic, but wearied by David’s continued reluctance to do away with himself.

Griffin Dunne didn’t want to miss out on a third of his first major role, and so was allowed to puppeteer Jack’s carcass. Once again, he puts in a wonderful performance, full of weirdly human touches like having Jack pause to scratch what’s left of his nose.

The exchange that follows between Jack and David is awkward, perfectly human, grounding the phantasmagoria to come.

David can’t help himself and tells Jack he looks awful. “Thank you,” says Jack through gritted teeth. David apologises, confessing he’s genuinely glad to see his undead pal.

David’s grasping for comfort here but will find none in this haunted grindhouse.

Jack hesitates. You can sense his compassion, his reluctance: “I want you to meet some people.”

Jack reveals another dead man sitting next to him, a mutilated civil servant who wasn’t there a moment ago.

Jack leans in like he’s trying to save David’s blushes. “Gerald’s the man you murdered on the subway. We thought it best for you not to see him as he’s a fresh kill and still pretty messy.”

The “we” in that line feels conspiratorial, as does Gerald’s insistence that this grisly meet-up wasn’t Jack’s idea. We get a sense of the undead characters having consulted off-screen.

“Yes, I do look most unpleasant.” Gerald (Michael Carter) is understandably irked.

Notice how these spectres all have personalities. They’re characters, not just special effects. Their reactions to their circumstances make them feel (un)alive.

“You’ve left my wife a widow and my children fatherless.”

This weighty line really sells the cost of David’s carnivorous lunar activities, wounds that cannot be healed by the resolution of this story.

“And, I understand, I am to walk the earth in limbo, one of the living dead!”

Carter delivers these lines with splendid indignity, like he’s complaining at the front desk and has never heard of anything so preposterous.

His response is as hilarious as it is eerie.

This is the first time David is confronted with hard evidence of the atrocities he has committed, crimes of which he has no memory and no idea what to say in response.

The horror is suddenly inescapable, no longer the primal terror of being devoured by an apex predator or the fear of losing control over one’s body.

Gerald raises a bloody finger and growls with quivering intensity.

“You must die, David Kessler.”

Pure existential dread – rudely interrupted by another orgasmic on-screen moan, making this moment of incomprehensible horror palatable with a laugh.

Jack goes on making introductions like he’s hosting a formal gathering and we meet yet more ghosts at the feast. Here’s Harry Berman (Geoffrey Burridge) and his fiancé Judith Browns (Brenda Cavendish), middle-class airheads still grinning through their gory locks.

The trio of murdered homeless men – Alf (Sydney Bromley), Ted (Frank Singuineau) and Joseph (Will Leighton) – are too working-class to get surnames. These poor gentlemen of the road seem to bear the burden of undeath as just another humiliation life has heaped upon them. They’re impatient and mean.

By now we have several mutilated corpses chatting in the middle of a porno-theatre like there’s nothing at all strange about this.

The dream-like tableau doesn’t land all at once. The weirdness builds, introduction by introduction, guiding you in. David doesn’t react to the sudden appearance of these ragged spectres. He takes it all in his stride and so do we.

Finally, David asks. “How shall I do it?”

What follows could only be delivered as comedy.

Everyone agrees sleeping pills are unreliable and Jack doesn’t trust David with knots, not wanting to cause his friend undue suffering.

“So what? Let ‘im choke!” snaps Ted.

“Do you mind?” barks Jack. “The man’s a friend of mine!”

“Well, he ain’t no friend to me!”

Gerald tries to keep the peace.

Those personalities are bouncing off each other, anchoring the grim surrealism.

“I know where you can get a gun,” says Joseph.

The spectres keep offering ruthless advice.

“Don’t I need a silver bullet or something?” says David.

Jack rolls his lidless eyeballs. “Oh, be serious, would you?”

David’s incredulity at the world of the undead is mirrored by the undead’s incredulity at the superstitions of the living.

David grips his hair and looks away. “Madness.”

The bloody couple offer yet more cheerful advice.

“Thank you,” says David. “You’re all so thoughtful.”

This sounds like a concluding line, but the suggestions keep coming, without mercy, becoming ever more excited and vengeful. The overkill is horrible yet hilarious.

But now the full moon is unveiling above Piccadilly and David – now eerily alone in the theatre – is getting a familiar tingle.

In this scene resides the dark heart of An American Werewolf in London. It’s the moment in which the movie’s separate strands of horror and comedy fully intertwine, and laughter itself becomes bleak and monstrous.

It’s the kind of gallows humour peculiar to British comedy like Monty Python, The League of Gentleman and The Office. British sci-fi is often just as jaded, resigned to cosmic indifference in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, decades of oddball satire in anthology comic 2000 AD and the operatic grotesquery of Games Workshop’s Warhammer.

An American Werewolf in London is a movie that acknowledges the dramatic weakness of the werewolf genre, bolstering its limitations with unique worldbuilding and an alternative narrative structure, all the while overdelivering on the genre’s demands.

You like agonising transformation scenes and wolf-monsters? Well, here’s dream-demons, sarcastic ghosts and a Hell-world of undeath as well!

Landis doesn’t shy from letting the scares reflect his personal fears and outsider perspective. He employs humour not to poke fun at horror’s shortcomings or to have characters crack daft jokes from the sidelines.

The comedy in American Werewolf masks the fact that it’s one of the darkest popular horror movies ever made.

But the humour also humanises the horrors, has us laughing in the face of death.

George Bernard Shaw had a saying, “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.”

As in comedy, so in horror.

Stay weird.

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Not content with founding pretty much every science fiction sub-genre known to humanity, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was also a dab hand at writing fantasy and horror short stories.

A painter encounters a devilish critic in The Temptation of Harringay (1895), a sinister body-swap takes place in The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham (1896), paranormal investigators dabble in astral projection in The Stolen Body (1898), Lovecraftian beings observe us through dimensional peepholes in The Plattner Story (1896), childhood fantasy turns to dark obsession in The Door in the Wall (1906) and a weedy phantom is encouraged to pull himself together in The Inexperienced Ghost (1902).1

(The good doctor provides a delightful read-through of The Inexperienced Ghost, which you can listen to right here.)

The Red Room is perhaps Wells’s finest ghost story, first published in 1896 in sci-fi and horror-friendly British periodical The Idler (who also published several of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder stories).

It’s been much anthologised and was given the Jackanory treatment by Freddie Jones in the first episode of BBC kids’ show Spine Chillers (1980).

It’s the simple yet resounding tale of a young Victorian who dares spend the night in a certain room in (the fictitious) Lorraine Castle - a neat slice of gothic horror, expertly paced and ending on a surprisingly irrational note from an author famed for his rationality.

I’m reading this from one of the first ghost story anthologies I ever owned: Haunting Ghost Stories, first published in 1980 and edited by Deborah Shine with gnarly illustrations by Reg Gray. My favourite bit from the endpapers was the little skeleton hanging from the pendulum of a clock.

I’m pretty sure I got this for Christmas, along with Steve Jackson’s downright satanic Fighting Fantasy gamebook House of Hell (1984) and my long-since treasured cassette of The Ghost Hunter with Stephen Kendall-Lane.

Listen closely and you may hear the creak of an aged spine, mine as well as the book’s.

I’m not a professional audiobook reader, by the way, so apologies for any tongue-tangles, fumbles, pops and crackles that I didn’t have time to edit out.

I’m just giving this a go for the craic.

By the way, this isn’t my regular speaking voice, which usually sounds like that of a distressed chimneysweep. This here’s my posh voice, which I reserve for lodging complaints over the phone and speaking to my betters.

Enjoy and stay weird.

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This year’s Superman opens with the Man of Steel lying spent and bloody on the Arctic tundra. It’s a perfect metaphor for the state of the world’s founding superhero after the battering he took under DC’s chaotic Extended Universe project. An uppercut from the ponderous Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013), a one-two from the joyless Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder, 2016), a body-slam from whatever the hell Justice League was supposed to be (Snyder and Joss Whedon, 2017), then a four-hour beating with a folding chair by Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021).

Thankfully, Kal-El is rescued by a couple of playful white-haired goofballs: Superman’s dog Krypto and writer/director James Gunn, Disney divorcee turned DC Studios CEO.

Supes gets his solar batteries recharged to the tune of John Williams’ still-goosebump-inducing score before the story brings us up to speed faster than a speeding bullet.

It turns out Superman has just had his butt handed to him by a foreign metahuman, payback for Superman taking it upon himself to prevent a landgrab by the hostile Slavic nation of Boravia.

The adults in the room are Lois Lane (an astute Rachel Brosnahan) and Lex Luther (a twitchy, combustible Nicholas Hoult). One tries to convince Clark Kent that maybe inserting himself into the affairs of an aggressive but allied nation maybe wasn’t such a good idea; the other takes the opportunity to turn the tide of public opinion against Superman and get him cancelled from reality.

Gunn’s cinematic rescue mission is a spectacular success, one that restores Superman’s status as a cultural – not just a fanboy – icon. Those expecting another corporate superhero clusterf*** will be surprised by an IMAX-worthy event movie made with heart and no small amount of craft.

And it’s only a smudge over two hours long. Great Ceasar’s Ghost!

Perhaps the movie’s greatest feat is finally moving the character out from under the shadow of the first two Christopher Reeve movies, Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) and Superman II (Richard Lester, 1980). (I still have some love for Superman III [Lester, 1983], though that’s probably just 11-year-old me talking.1)

Reeve’s Superman was a graceful Olympian with laser-blue eyes, a neck like the Washington Monument and a chest the size of Pennsylvania. Much of the beauty of Reeve’s performance in those movies was his ability to morph from stuttering Clark Kent to Man of Steel with a single intake of breath.

Another relative unknown, David Corenswet is almost a decade older than Reeve was when he first took the role (Reeve was 24, Corenswet is 32), though Corenswet’s Superman feels a great deal younger.2

His Superman is the Big Blue Boy Scout, chunky, dimpled, and eager to take on the world. He doesn’t so much fly as tumble through the clouds like a labrador chasing a tennis ball. We learn he’s only revealed himself to the world three years ago and it feels like we’re seeing the messy-years version of Superman we never saw in the Donner original. That movie made a ten-year cut from angry teen Clark booting footballs into orbit to the adult Kryptonian taking his maiden flight from the Fortress of Solitude.

Gunn understands that Superman was always a dork. Batman is forever the epitome of badass cool, while Wonder Woman is too regal to ever get riled by internet trolls. The way Superman frets over the most humane way to despatch a monster has his fellow metahumans rolling their eyes. He says ‘darn it’, rescues squirrels, and has the same taste in music as your dweeby kid brother.

Lois and Clark’s relationship brings the heat, while Ma and Pa Kent’s blue-collar coziness brings even more heart. There’s a moment between Clark and his taciturn adoptive dad (Pruitt Taylor-Vince) that will put a golf-ball in the throat of any man. It’s moments like this that anchor the comic-book world you’re being asked to buy into; without the humanity, the superheroic sturm und drang is as meaningless as it was in the Snyder movies3.

If there’s a weak link in the cast it might actually be Lex Luther. Nicholas Hoult brings a tense, jittery energy to just about everything he does (Fury Road, Nosferatu, The Menu) and the concept behind his Lex is great. Clickbait is the movie’s Dune-spice; he who controls the algo, controls the universe. This Lex is a Muskian tech-guru surrounded by a cult of fawning, young lackies. He puppeteers his automaton soldiers by yelling key-stroke combos for every punch. He’s literally a keyboard warrior.

But Lex’s fragility is perhaps a little too evident. He’s more pathetic than scary, and less memorable than scene-stealing oddballs like Edi Gathegi’s stoic cyber-wiz Mr Terrific, Nathan Fillian’s gum-chewing, bird-flipping cowboy Guy Gardner and Sara Sampaio’s maybe-not-so-ditzy Miss Teschmacher (an interesting carryover from the first Donner movie).

The superhuman slugfests don’t lose you in VFX soup, while Henry Braham’s sunny cinematography and John Murphy and David Fleming’s radiant score combine to hit you like a beam of restorative solar goodness. We get one self-conscious ‘Gunnism’ – a goofy-cool bit of action set to jukebox bubble-gum – which might be annoying if the scene weren’t so damn funny.

While Snyder’s movies offered a chillier, edgelord version of ‘real-world’ superheroes, Gunn doesn’t follow Marvel’s lead. Instead, he embraces what made DC Comics so distinct from their rival and goes back almost a century to rediscover the primal appeal of the world’s premier superhero.

Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in April 1938 (he’ll enter the public domain within the next ten years). He was the creation of writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, a couple of blue-collar sci-fi nebbishes from Depression-era Cleveland, sons of Jewish immigrants forced to flee the advancing Reich.

The alien foundling who became an American folk hero, Superman is unquestionably the story of Jewish-American assimilation: the dual-identity, the golem born of pulp-clay to defend the defenceless, the dark-haired, anti-Aryan übermensch who inaugurated the proud American tradition of superheroes knocking dictators on their asses.

In mythological terms, Superman is up there with Moses and the sun gods, hewn from the same primordial bedrock as Ra, Surya and Helios. He’s as Jungian as they come.

He speaks deeply to lonely little boys who yearn to fit in, to self-improve and impress, to conquer their troubles and liberate their bodies.

It was Superman, Batman and Arnold who got us straining at our dumbbells so the arseholes at school might think twice before trying it on and the girls might give us a second glance.

But Superman was the one who gave us a moral compass, got us wanting be the good guy.

Even the story of Superman’s creators is the stuff of foundational legend, albeit legendary horror, a cautionary tale told to frighten young comic creators into guarding their ideas.

Siegel and Shuster sold the rights to Superman for the grand sum of $130 between them. Their creation went on to earn his publisher millions, established an American art form, and helped build the industry that would eat his creators alive.

It wasn’t until artists Jerry Robinson and Neal Adams took a stand during the run-up to the first Superman movie in 1978 (at the risk of their own freelance careers), protesting Time Warner’s neglect of Siegel and Shuster, that the company finally relented. They granted Superman’s creators (then broke and in their mid-60s) an annual pension, healthcare and their names attached to the iconic character in perpetuity.

There’s a reason legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite gets a namecheck in Gunn’s movie; it was Cronkite who broke the story of the Timer Warner agreement.

DC Comics has always trafficked in gods.

Superman became the bedrock upon which the publisher founded their superhero empire, forming a holy trinity alongside Batman and Wonder Woman. The only flaw in this pantheon was its flawlessness.

When Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four #1 arrived in 1961, they offered a decidedly post-war take on superheroes, a flawed, dysfunctional family that bickered and pranked each other, fighting supervillains not in lofty fairytale Metropolis but among the garbage-cans and graffiti of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, right on many readers’ doorstep.

Next to scrawny neurotics like Spider-Man and the messy, diverse, found families of the Avengers and X-Men, DC’s aliens, billionaires and Amazonian royalty couldn’t help but feel aloof and unrelatable.

The Marvel cinematic universe got through its best years on the wisecracking believability of its comic-book sources. Movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and The Avengers: Infinity War (2018) work hard to rationalise their source-comics, come up with plausible reasons for the silly names, take a stab at explaining superpowers through the lens of real-world physics. The costumes look functional, the geopolitics (kinda) credible, the streets familiar, the cinematography realistically drab.

The best Marvel movies never stray too far from our own world, even when that world is being demolished by aliens or its citizens snapped out of existence.

James Gunn’s Superman instead does what DC Comics have always done best, leaning into something more absolute, closer to myth or fairy tale. Marvel Comics always presented its stories as, “the world outside your window”, but the world outside your window in Gunn’s Superman is more likely to contain a giant space-anemone fighting a Green Lantern like it’s really not much to worry about.

It’s a world so used to gods and monsters that, when a fire-breathing kaiju shows up downtown, bystanders are more likely to take selfies or stand around eating yogurt than run for cover. When office blocks wade into each other like great, crumbling dominoes, we don’t need to ask how anyone could possibly have survived.

Thanks to seventeen years of Marvel superhero movies, there’s less justification required for the delirium to make sense.

By embracing the ridiculous rather than apologise for it, Gunn’s Superman captures the wonder of being absorbed in a vintage superhero book.

It treats us like children – in a good way.

The superhero narrative was originally conceived for the consumption of children and as such can withstand only a limited amount of adult scrutiny before the concept breaks. Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen is the classic chronicle of just such a breakdown.

The geopolitics in Superman are as terrifyingly naïve as Superman himself. The movie even glosses over one late-in-the-game detail that would have triggered World War Three here in the real world.

But we’re not in the real world and it’s okay to be a kid again for just a couple of hours.

We’re adults, after all, and know when to put aside childish things. We recognise a metaphor when we see one. We understand satire and would never get suckered by obvious fictions. We don’t need YouTube videos to explain how Gladiator II wasn’t a documentary. We all know where the line between fantasy and reality is drawn these days, right?

*Anakin stares.*

Right?!

Superman’s much-anticipated political coda turns out to be pretty brazen.

It speaks of a dangerous ideology conceived years ago by radical activists named Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan, who beseeched their followers, “Be excellent to each other.”

It should be impossible to hate on a movie that so wholeheartedly champions basic, human decency.

How did we reach a point where Superman felt so needed?

Recommended Reads (all standalone, easy-to-pick-up graphic novels)

• The Man of Steel (John Byrne, Dick Giordano, 1986)

• Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (Alan Moore, Curt Swan, 1986)

• Kingdom Come (Mark Waid, Alex Ross, 1996)

• Superman for All Seasons (Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, 1998)

• Superman: Birthright (Mark Waid, Leinil Francis Yu, Gerry Alanguilan, 2003-04)

• Superman: Red Son (Mark Millar, Dave Johnson, Andrew Robinson, Walden Wong, Killian Plunkett, 2003)

• DC’s The New Frontier (Darwyn Cooke, 2004)

• All-Star Superman (Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant, 2005-08).

Add your own recommendations in the comments.

And stay weird.

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The Hotel existed long before it was built. Its doors open into places unexpected. Staying in Room 63 is not advised. The Hotel has a way of concealing itself, but you’ll have no trouble finding your way there. Those who visit rarely visit by choice. Things disappear in The Hotel. Things return. We’ll be a…

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I’ve added a spoiler-flag for those who haven’t seen the first movie, allowing you to skip a section in this post. But expect trailer-level spoilers overall.

Having lived through 9/11, Brexit and Covid – while barely surviving the world’s current epidemic of algorithm-induced psychosis – watching 28 Days Later makes you wonder if someone travelled back in time to give Alex Garland a checklist to work from while he was writing the script.

Like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1984) and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) is one of those sci-fi movies that’s become genuinely – and regrettably – prophetic. These movies couldn’t be made today without feeling too on-the-nose. Lana and Lily Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) still has a few prediction boxes left to tick, though I’m confident I’ll be locked inside a goop-filled AI-pod by the end of next year.

While a lot of modern science fiction seems content to state the bleedin’ obvious1, 28 Days Later undertook the harder, riskier, more imaginative task of predicting a possible future. Director Danny Boyle (still riding high after Trainspotting, 1996) and writer Alex Garland (still hot from his backpacker bestseller The Beach, 19962) tuned their creative antennae into the anxieties of their day – terrorism, bio-weapons, refugee crises, impending war in Iraq, surveillance culture, recession – and came up with a nightmare vision that would have left Rod Serling in need of a straight Scotch.

The movie opens with perhaps its most prescient image: a captive ape, imprisoned by screens, brainwashed by endless rage-bait. We’re in a virology lab somewhere in Cambridge and a group of animal liberation activists are about to make a very poor decision. The title card intervenes and 672 hours later we find Jim (a young Cillian Murphy in the role that made him a star) waking from a coma to find himself in a deserted hospital, unaware that the population of London has become a horde of screeching berserkers who want to pound him into a smash patty. These ‘Infected’ are contaminated with a virus that brings about a permanent state of homicidal rage, much like scrolling through Facebook.

Garland was initially inspired by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara’s 1996 Capcom classic Resident Evil. (He found the game’s fast-moving Dobermans way scarier than the shambling zombies, which gave him the idea to make his movie-monsters sprinters rather than shufflers.) Further influenced by George A. Romero’s ‘Dead’ trilogy and John Wyndam’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), Garland’s script owes just as much to Romero’s lesser-known outbreak movie The Crazies (1973) in which a small town is infected by a virus that turns the living into homicidal loons.3

A surprise hit in the US, 28 Days Later made well over $84m out of a shoestring budget of $8m. It also kickstarted a hunger for the zombie apocalypse, which overran horror media in the 2000s and beyond: movies – Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), Zack Snyder’s adrenalized remake Dawn of the Dead (2004, possibly Snyder’s best), Romero’s fourth instalment in the ‘Dead’ saga, Land of the Dead (2005), Ruben Fleischer’s splatter-comedy Zombieland (2009), Marc Forster’s World War Z (2013) – video games – Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara’s Dead Rising (Capcom, 2006), Mike Booth and Chet Faliszek’s Left 4 Dead (Valve South, 2008) – comics – Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead (2003-20194), Kirkman and Sean Phillips’ gleefully horrifying Marvel Zombies (2005) – and the apparently unkillable TV franchise still growing out of The Walking Dead (2010-2022).

Despite moments of electrifying terror, 28 Days Later is less an exercise in ever-tightening suspense and more a grave survey of the English apocalypse, dowsing the dying embers of ‘90s Cool Britannia with a cold shower of third-world hardship.

Welcome… to the Great British Breakdown.

The movie was shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, a key cinematographer of Dogme ’95, the Danish filmmaking movement that embraced austerity and authenticity over showy technique. Filmed on handheld digital cameras, 28 Days Later looks like crap, deliberately unvarnished, stark and grainy. The early sequence of a bewildered Jim wandering the empty heart of London is not only authentic (filmed on Sunday mornings at the crack of dawn), but eerily familiar from Covid lockdown.

Cutting between static shots of abandoned landmarks evokes the feeling of switching between surveillance cameras. We see everything, yet nothing, just vacant streets awash with litter, an overturned bus, a wall of missing-persons posters, cheerful ads for Costa and Benetton appealing to customers long-vanished.

It’s unnerving to see a western city so exposed and vulnerable, laid to waste by an invisible enemy whom no one saw coming.

9/11 occurred just over a week into filming.

Like any good Irish ladeen, Jim ends up in church. But the only order of service he finds here are the painted words, ‘THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH!’ The pews are piled with bodies, several of which are far from dead. They gape at Jim for a chilly few seconds before the priest bursts in with a head full of devils.

Making the monster hordes living rather than undead brings the story a step closer to the credible (Garland says he was keen to explore a scientific rather than occult angle), but it’s a moot point in terms of story. What does affect the scenario, drastically escalating the threat level, is the fact these human monsters can move like jet-propelled velociraptors, and it takes more than being smashed in the face with a petrol bomb to put them off their stride. Physical performers – dancers, gymnasts, sprinters – were cast as the Infected, while tinkering with the camera’s shutter speed gave their scenes a frantic, skittery feel.

When traditional Romero-style shamblers bring about the apocalypse, the terror is more subtle, more tantalising, tense and atmospheric. The zombies may have the numbers, but their ambling gait at least gives you time to think, to plan, to hope. If you’re smart, lucky or ruthless, you could thread your way through this groaning crowd and buy yourself another few days of existence. But if your plan hits a locked door or your sidearm clicks dry at the wrong moment, they’ll gorge on your innards like pigs.

And they’ll do it slow.

The Infected of 28 Days Later lack the Jungian resonance that comes from being devoured by former loved ones. The Infected are more like shock troopers. They give you no time to think and no choice beyond ‘run or die’. If they catch you, they’ll pulp you like a pack of enraged gorillas. At least it’ll be over quickly.

Their rate of infection is just as urgent. If a dab of diseased blood hits your eye or seeps into an open wound, you’ll transform in seconds.

In any zombie/infected apocalypse story, the choice to kill is always morally revealing. Consider the rooftop game played by the survivors in Snyder’s Dawn remake, so dehumanised they’re now amusing themselves by popping the heads off undead celebrity lookalikes.

As zombie movies evolved in the 2000s into projects like Zombieland, they became more like first-person shooters, inviting the viewer to take dead-eyed pleasure in survivor-on-zombie violence, indulging the very redneck fantasy that Romero’s movies warned us about. The Infected of 28 Days Later are too swift, too relentless to allow for moral consideration, to sob about having to bash in the brains of a former loved one or to line up a trick-shot to amuse your bros.

In a shocking scene, a wounded survivor gets the telltale jitters of infection and is immediately hacked apart by his machete-wielding companion. It’s an abrupt, fleeting, horrifying moment. No quips. No tears of regret. No slo-mo to relish the splatter. No moral choice at all, just necessity. Be quicker to the kill than they are, become even more monstrous than the monsters.

28 Days Later is at its best when it speaks the least, its monologues less effective than the memorable visuals like Jim wandering a deserted London, rats fleeing ahead of an Infected stampede, the city of Manchester burning on the horizon for want of firefighters. Most indelible is the scene in which Jim returns to his parents’ house, a moment that bites all the deeper for its lack of dialogue, making us piece together the awful picture for ourselves: the gentleness of the funeral hymn Abide With Me as Jim mounts the stairs to his parents’ bedroom, sleeve pressed to his face to keep out the stench; the slow, reluctant pan that reveals what’s on the bed; the empty glass on the nightstand; the scattered pills; the photo of Jim as a boy gripped between yellowed fingers; Jim’s crushed response to the epitaph scribbled on the back: ‘With endless love, we left you sleeping. Now we’re sleeping with you. Don’t wake up. X’

It's the most devastating scene in the movie – perhaps the entire trilogy – and it isn’t the scariest, but the most emotionally raw.

28 Days Later maintains its jittery, unnerving feel by emphasising the fragility of its main character. Cillian Murphy’s Jim isn’t Chris Redfield, biceps bulging either side of his Racoon City-issue Kevlar. He’s not Will Smith in I Am Legend (2007), prowling the grassy sidewalks of Manhattan with a Law Enforcement Carbine and a convenient doctorate in virology. He’s not even Ben from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1969), a sleeves-rolled-up everyman, armed with nothing but a tire-iron and a plan.

Cillian Murphy was around 25 when he made this, but he looks a lot younger. The first time we see him, we’re peering down at him like he’s a newborn, sprawled hungry and naked on a hospital gurney. The movie constantly exposes Jim’s physical and psychological vulnerability, how little he’s aware of what’s going on, his compassion compared to the ruthlessness of spike-haired survivalist Selena (Naomie Harris whom this movie also made a star), his skinniness next to burly cockney cabbie Frank (Brendan Gleeson), his long-lashed androgyny compared to a crew of horny squaddies.

With his dazed blue eyes and alien cheekbones, Murphy is one of those actors whose beauty feels unearthly. Like Anya Taylor-Joy, David Bowie or Tilda Swinton, he looks like he’s just stepped out of a flying saucer. In 28 Days Later, he’s an angel who must learn to become a demon if he is to survive the hell in which he’s found himself, journeying north to Manchester in search of a military safe-haven, along with Selena, Frank and his young daughter.

Skip ahead to the next image if you want to avoid spoiling the ending…

The light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a locomotive in the form of Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and his crew of rowdy soldier bros, working-class geezers delighted to have taken over a stately manse in the country.

The threat these heavily armed men pose makes itself known by their barely maintained order, the boyish delight they take in blowing up the Infected, and by the uncomfortably formal dinner Jim and his companions are forced to attend. The Major asks the ladies, “I don’t suppose you can cook can you?”

It turns out this ramrod patriarch has robust views on the best way to re-establish society, or at least to keep his men from killing themselves. It’s he who delivers the film’s most chilling line: “I promised them women.”

Until now Jim has been a reluctant killer, still feeling bad about despatching an Infected child during a gas station pit-stop. But when his female companions are threatened sexually (another horrible moment in which Selena forces the young girl to take a heavy dose of valium in preparation for what might come next), Jim is now forced to become the protector, a male that can out-alpha the Major, the ultimate monster, whose onslaught is so savage Selena mistakes him for one of the Infected.

It’s here – when Jim goes feral and becomes a Leon-like killing machine – that 28 Days Later falters, concluding thematically if not convincingly. Characters who would almost certainly know better make tactical blunders just to keep the story moving, while Jim’s rescue plan relies on improbable quirks of luck and timing. The climax becomes a gothic melodrama, out-of-synch with the stunned realism of the first two thirds.

The movie literally stalled at the last minute as the filmmakers ran out of money before a proper ending could be filmed.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers kept the punters happy with an upbeat ending, though it would have been more on-theme to let the monster die for his sins.

Towards the end of 28 Days Later, the survivors realise that passenger planes are still crossing the sky and the rest of civilisation is carrying on without them. It turns out Europe enforced its own Brexit upon the UK by placing the country in quarantine to stop the rage virus from infecting the rest of the world. In reality, we Brits found out the hard way that quarantines are less useful when your PM would rather you just washed your hands and let the bodies pile high.

The tenuous notion of quarantine is the central focus of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s ferocious sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), which takes a more commercial, conventional route into Resident Evil-type action-horror.

By the time the sequel was green-lit, Boyle and Garland were already committed to making their ambitious sci-fi drama Sunshine (2007). Impressed by his paranormal thriller Intacto (2001), they chose Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to take over and co-write the script5. Thankfully, the team were just as interested in humanity as they were in seeing body parts zing through the air under the rotor-blades of a ducking helicopter.

The movie opens with a terrifying calm-before-the-chaos sequence so masterful it deserves a separate breakdown. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see how this scene expertly pulls the viewer in before freaking them the hell out, and I’ll post a full breakdown next month…

In summary, our main character Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) are hiding out in a country cottage along with the kindly, elderly owners. A brittle sense of peace and safety pervades. Until it doesn’t. Suffice to say, it’s like the movie takes a bite from one of its own Infected and wigs out into abrupt and shocking anarchy. The scene’s turning point is a devastating character reveal that leaves Don alive, and us unsure how to feel about him for the rest of the picture.

Shot in a combination of digital, and grainy 16mm, it’s a sharper, clearer film with even more expansive views of lockdown London, whose empty streets have lost none of their power to unsettle. It’s a more hawkish view of the capital, seen through the eyes of the American-led NATO forces helping to repatriate the surviving Brits now the Infected have finally starved and died off.

Four months before the movie was released in May 2007, President Bush had announced his “New Way Forward” in the Iraq War, pledging to commit an additional 20,000 troops to the region to combat the virus of sectarian violence and insurgency.

In 28 Weeks Later, the American-made quarantine zone is a peninsula on the River Thames into which the Brits are penned until the Yanks are done fumigating the rest of the capital. Bored snipers prowl the office rooftops itching for something to shoot, overseen by the watchful General Stone (a monolithic Idris Elba, then fresh from TV’s The Wire). The reason his Chief Medical Officer (Rose Byrne) is dismayed to find children among the captive Londoners is because she knows her CO is prepared to order a Code Red; if he sees a single person exhibit so much as a sniffle, he’ll exterminate every last one of them.

It turns out that Don has made his way back to London and is now reunited with his kids (Mackintosh Muggleton and a pre-stardom Imogen Poots). He’s somehow become a high-level caretaker in the quarantine zone with a handy Access All Areas pass. It’s here that credibility starts creaking like frayed rope, giving way to the entirely unbelievable in the sequence of events that lead to the inevitable outbreak.

But it’s hard to be pernickety when a horror movie is this fast and this furious.

Fresnadillo is not only great at capturing those moments when the tables abruptly turn but is alive to the truth those moments reveal in his characters. (His feature debut Intacto was a magic realist piece in which luck is a commodity.) When the Infected attack a lightless basement full of evacuees, it’s less like the real-time surveillance footage of the first movie and more a cannibal nightmare straight out of Goya. The director loses you in the ugliness, monsters gorging on their prey like rabid wolves in a sheep pen. (The Infected feel more like biters than beaters this time.)

When the carnage spills onto the streets, the snipers face the impossible task of picking out Infected targets among the terror-stricken civilians. The American forces have all the guns, all the expertise, all the angles, but no control. Troops are forced back and General Stone declares open season on anything that moves. This midpoint sequence recalls the slippery thrill of the opening scene in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) when the cable news team realise just how FUBAR the situation has become and start abandoning their posts.

Societal breakdown is as liberating as it is terrifying, as – unlike the cold-blooded General Stone – our lead sniper Doyle (a pre-Hawkeye Jeremy Renner) chooses not to open fire on fleeing civilians but instead play the hero. The second half of the movie follows his escort mission to get Don’s kids to the extraction point, alongside Rose Byrne’s wounded medic, before the streets get dosed with napalm.

Renner’s action hero is the opposite of Cillian Murphy’s string-bean nobody. He’s stout, dependable, warm as apple pie; he looks like Sam Gamgee as a Navy SEAL. We’re back among the renegade SWAT troopers and stalwart flyboys guiding us through the apocalypse in Romero’s Dawn and Day of the Dead (1985).

However, 28 Weeks Later takes place in a moral universe far more ruthless, where the choice to do right or do wrong amount to pretty much the same thing. Here courage goes unrewarded, and heroes burn the same as cowards.

Unlike the first movie, the sequel ends on a satisfying downer.

All roads in the zombie/outbreak genre still lead back to Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, in which we’re powerless to prevent the apocalypse from making either meat or monsters of us all.

Stay weird.

Sources:

• The Oral History Of 28 Days Later (Ralph Jones, Inverse, 2023)

• Pure Rage (Toby James, making-of featurette, 2002)

• 10+ Years Later: 28 Weeks Later Has a Fierce Bite (Kurt Hayfield, Screen Anarchy, 2017).

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House? It’s more of a mansion, really. Maybe even a chateau, a palatial country estate fallen to ruin among the trees. It seems to grow an extra storey of broken windows every time you look up at it. Turn a corner and you’re walking down a row of boarded doorways, more like an abandoned street than a single residence.

This is no …

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The classic sci-fi novella Who Goes There? by ‘controversial’ editor John W. Campbell has become something of a footnote next to the popularity of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Carpenter’s masterful 1982 movie has not only consumed Campbell’s 1938 story but replaced it in the public consciousness with an eerily perfect adaptation. It’s a cultural eclipse made all the more startling when you consider John W. Campbell is one of the most influential figures in 20th century American science fiction.

Campbell was in his late twenties with a respectable career as a sci-fi author by the time he took over editing Astounding Stories in December 1937. It was the dawn of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, a period that lasted until roughly the end of the Second World War. He quickly re-titled the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction and set about moving the genre away from the gee-whiz Flash Gordonisms of previous years.

Campbell liked his sci-fi hard.

With war looming in Europe, he wanted the genre to ask how might science, technology and rational thinking save us from annihilation.

Under his stewardship, science fiction took a quantum leap in terms of ambition and quality, as Astounding launched the careers of Isaac Asimov1, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt2, Lester del Rey3, and, yes, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

In the age before paperbacks, Astounding fed the sci-fi fandom that had amassed within the letters pages of earlier pulps, a readership that was now maturing to find even greater meaning – even transcendence – in the genre they loved as kids.

Campbell retitled the magazine Analog in 1960, serialised Frank Herbert’s first Dune books from 1963, and managed to hold his own against classy competitors Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He continued editing the magazine until his death in 19714.

John W. Campbell won more Hugos than I can be bothered to count and helped shape modern science fiction as we know it today: inventive, rigorous, thematic, humane, clairvoyant. He challenged intellectual dogma, was generous with his own fertile ideas, propelled by the righteous belief that science fiction could change the world.

However, Alec Nevala-Lee’s superb four-way biography, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, reveals Campbell as a man exhaustingly provocative, certain of his own brilliance, overbearing in his opinions, an alpha nerd, an edgelord teetering on the precipice of his insecurities.

In a typically show-off move, Campbell published the apocalyptic short story Deadline in February 1944. Having studied atomic physics at MIT, Campbell fed author Cleve Cartmill technical details on the supposed composition of an atom bomb. Campbell’s guess was sufficiently educated to warrant both him and Cartmill a visit from Counterintelligence agents who suspected a leak on the Manhattan Project. It was a stunt that almost got Astounding shut down.

Campbell’s hankering for science-fictional ideas with real-world applications drove him increasingly onto the lunatic fringe. He went all in on L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics (the earliest form of Scientology), which Campbell was instrumental in developing. He championed several crackpot inventions, including a potentially fuel-free space drive and a machine he claimed could tune into psychic vibrations.

The so-called ‘New Wave’ broke upon the shores of Science Fiction in the 1960s, exploring softer, more humanist sciences, spearheaded by Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison and Judith Merril. These experimental bohemians drew ideas from outside the sci-fi ghetto, a world that Campbell had built and from which he now refused to budge.

The pulps were no longer the final frontier. Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek (1966-69) was exploring strange new worlds of science fiction on television, seeking out new civilisations of mainstream fandom. The genre Campbell had formalised was rapidly outgrowing him. Instead of adapting, accepting that science fiction was bigger than just one man, he doubled-down.

His messianic fervour scared off both his wife and many regular writers, including Heinlein and Asimov, while his contrarian nature became ever more embittered and outspoken.

Campbell remained obsessed with the notion of the “competent [white] man”, the hands-on intellectual who might evolve into the Nietzschean Übermensch – the Chosen One who shall save us from the queers, negros, commies and feminists.

His editorials trolled the women’s movement, declared homosexuality a herald of cultural apocalypse, and suggested African-Americans might be better off under slavery.5

And, no, his prejudices were not “of their time”. They stemmed not from passive ignorance but conscious ideology, theories made all the more detestable for their purported rationality.

Campbell thought Samuel R. Delany was a brilliant writer but rejected his 1968 novel Nova on the grounds that Analog’s readership wouldn’t be able to identify with a Black protagonist. How much more profound and far-reaching might Campbell’s impact have been on his beloved genre had he broken the limits of his own biases.

We find the same paranoia in the algorithm-maddened fandoms of today, in online communities all over. We see those who allow an ideology to absorb them so completely that it becomes everything that they are. Anything that queries or objects to that ideology now becomes an existential threat, since the ideology in question is so inextricably tied to the person’s identity. Any challenge becomes potentially infectious, threatening to obliterate all they believe themselves to be. Everything outside the echo chamber becomes a chaos of probing, flailing, threatening ideas, a kaleidoscopic monster from which isolation provides the only protection. Considering any perspective outside your own must be resisted at all costs, in case it absorbs you, turns you into a thing that isn’t you.

Campbell wrote Who Goes There? under his favoured pseudonym ‘Don A Stuart’6, published in the August 1938 edition of Astounding, shortly after Campbell took over as editor. It remains the story for which he’s best known, scoring a retro-Hugo award in 2014 for Best Novella7, as well as inspiring a record-breaking Kickstarter anthology of spin-off tales, Short Things, edited by the manager of Campbell’s literary estate, John Gregory Betancourt8.

Originally titled Frozen Hell, the novella likely borrowed its striking Antarctic setting from Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which had been serialised in Astounding (née Astounding Stories) just two years ago in 1936. Campbell gives his polar research station plenty of authentic squalor and technical details, thoroughly researched from coverage of polar explorer Richard E. Byrd.

The story is instantly familiar to anyone who’s seen the Carpenter movie, opening with a group of men standing around the reeking autopsy of an alien thing hacked out of the ice after a million-year power-nap. The men thaw it out (somewhat ill-advisedly) and the shapeshifting intruder makes an aborted attempt to absorb a kennel full of sled dogs. The resident pathologist has a violent freak-out and has to be locked inside his cabin. When it becomes clear the entire planet could become infected should the Thing reach civilisation, the men become paranoid and devise a clinical test that will determine who among them might be hiding tentacles under his cable-knit sweater.

The names are familiar too: McReady, Blair, Norris, Dr Copper, Commander Garry, dog-handler Clark. Though Campbell’s characters are uniform he-men of science, action nerds prone to reams of ‘as you know’ exposition, competent men to a man.

McReady is essentially Doc Savage in an orange parka, more Jack Reacher than Kurt Russell. Campbell adores him.

Unlike the flailing, crawling appendage-salad concocted in latex and KY by the mad genius of special effects legend Rob Bottin, Campbell’s thing assumes a signature form. It’s a hateful Medusa with three blood-red eyes, electric-blue worms forming a writhing hairdo.

Campbell based the monster on his mother.

Dorothy Campbell was a domineering parent prone to violent, mercurial moods, who threatened to extinguish the self-assured, competent man Campbell yearned to become. She also had an identical twin. As a child, Campbell would rush home from school to embrace his mother, only to find himself pushed away by an icy doppelganger.

Campbell strives to make his story feel science-forward and authentic, as far away from the ray guns and romance of Buck Rogers as he could get. But the result often feels over-detailed, over-rationalised and pedantic. His prose is stilted, his characters little more than an indistinguishable debate club, with dialogue that can sound like it should be headlining a trailer for Invasion of the Saucer Men.

But the concept of Who Goes There? remains brilliant. As a vehicle for suspense, it’s perfect, as stark and merciless as its snowbound setting. Ironically, the novella feels at its best when it plays to its pulpy core instead of fussing over the latest passivating processes that go into making acid-resistant magnesium alloy.

Campbell’s writing really kicks into gear when he focuses on action and atmosphere.

Unlike the home-ground advantage afforded by the hidey-holes and peek-a-boo spots that riddle the Nostromo, Crystal Lake or the Overlook Hotel, Campbell’s Antarctica is a setting lethal to man and monster alike.

Skip the next few paragraphs if you’re troubled by spoilers for the book…

Campbell’s ending is as optimistic as Carpenter’s is famously downbeat.

Having narrowly managed to torch the Thing, the survivors discover an anti-gravity backpack and atomic generator, which the alien had cobbled together in its shack to reach America and from there take over the world. The monster is dead. The supremacy of the competent man is confirmed, his galactic backyard successfully defended.

Yet the story ends on a mingled note of awe and terror as the survivors realise how the Thing was smart enough to build a means of escape using nothing but “coffee-tins and radio parts, and glass and the machine shop at night. And a week – a whole week – all to itself.” In the end, it was the creature’s advanced intelligence that posed the most decisive threat.

It’s Campbell’s worldview in a nutshell: IQ prized above all, brainpower as superpower. If intellect is a force strong enough to threaten civilisation, it might just as easily save it.

Campbell may have been dismayed to find his optimism wasn’t shared by the movies that adapted his work.

Sci-fi historian Bill Warren speculates9 that it may have been author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett who brought Who Goes There? to the attention of Howard Hawks. She was certainly grateful to Campbell for the early break he’d given her as a pulp writer before they parted ways and she went on to co-write Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946)10.

The Thing From Another World (1951) is crisply directed by Christian Nyby, Hawks’ editor on The Big Sleep (1946) and Red River (1948)11. With a decent budget of $1.5 million, it was a major film that dared take its sci-fi seriously. Along with The Day the Earth Stood Still (released later that year) and George Pal’s double-whammy of Destination Moon (1950, co-written by Robert A. Heinlein) and When Worlds Collide (1951), The Thing was a landmark picture that helped bring science fiction into the mainstream. Heavily publicised, it kept its monster under wraps, much like the marketing for Predator (1987) and Nosferatu (2024) decades later.

The result is classy but conventional, the monster reduced to a standard Karloffian brute (played by James Arness of TV’s Gunsmoke) wisely kept to the shadows (aside from a still-great jump-scare). Campbell’s concept of the alien shapeshifter is dropped, replaced with the idea of a bloodsucking humanoid vegetable. (“An intellectual carrot! The mind boggles!”) Perhaps a distant cousin of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, this Thing spawns a tray of pulsating saplings that wail like hungry newborns through a doctor’s stethoscope.

The paranoia angle went too, the movie focusing instead on the tension between the Air Force jocks (led by a horny Kenneth Tobey) and the pipe-puffing boffins (led by Robert Cornthwaite in blazer and turtleneck), while the visiting newshound (Douglas Spencer) hustles for the scoop. The misguided eggheads try and reason with the beast and get a backhand for their troubles, while the flyboys – who know all too well the horrors science wrought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki – are happy to risk a court martial by frying the Thing into oblivion.

The Hawksian banter is cool, but there’s little tension. Everyone’s too full of wisecracks, the men too damn competent for the invading Thing to feel much more than an inconvenient guest.

The Hawks movie had been held in high critical regard for thirty years, fuelling antipathy towards any ‘remake’, though Carpenter was really making a closer adaptation of the original novella.

Released in 1982 to underwhelming box-office12, the movie faced the flamethrowers of critics and sci-fi authors alike. Pauline Kael called it, “a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects… Carpenter seems indifferent to whether we can tell the characters apart; he apparently just wants us to watch the apocalyptic devastation.” Harlan Ellison raged in his column for LA Weekly, “The Thing did not need to be remade, if the best this fearfully limited director could bring forth was a rip-off of Alien in the frozen tundra, this pointless, dehumanised freeway smash-up of grisly special effects dreck, flensed of all characterisation, philosophy, subtext or rationality.”13

Carpenter’s Thing scurried into cultural purgatory where it remained frozen and forgotten. Ten years later, movie-hound Quentin Tarantino cited it as a major influence on his groundbreaking Reservoir Dogs (1992). The British Film Institute canonised Carpenter’s movie as a BFI Classic in 1997 with an excellent monograph by Anne Bilson. The generation of monster fans – Tarantino among them – who had already discovered The Thing on VHS were now finding each other on the internet, building the famous fansite Outpost #31. These days, John Carpenter’s The Thing is a staple of alt-movie posters and YouTube reaction videos.

Carpenter returns to the suspense and paranoia that made Campbell’s novella so effective. Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper wrote an early draft of the script and Bill Lancaster (son of Burt) wrote the last. The finished screenplay shares 80% of its DNA with Campbell’s source novella, the remaining 20% nothing but improvement.

The cast is reduced from 32 to a more manageable 12 angry, paranoid men. No longer uniformly competent, the boys are diversified as irritable, gruff, introverted, Black, podgy, funny, and – in one case – very, very high. Everyone gets just enough personality for you to wince when they dissolve into screeching protein-taffy.

Among the all-male cast – as Anne Bilson points out – the Thing itself is the monstrous feminine, as in Campbell’s original.

Our focal hero MacReady (Kurt Russell on fine laconic form) is no longer a hulking meteorologist, but a growling chopper pilot with a mean hangover. (“First goddamn week of winter.”)

Carpenter had already established Russell’s action credentials as the one-eyed Eastwoodian stud of Escape From New York (1981). Again, we find Russell lantern-jawed and scowling from under that shimmering chestnut mane, though an early scene of MacReady playing computer chess establishes him as a thinking man, a strategist, albeit one who’d rather blow everything up than lose a single game.

Filmed on location in glacial British Columbia14, the movie tops and tails Campbell’s story quite brilliantly. The opening scene nails you from the get-go, prickling you with questions. Why is that helicopter chasing a Huskey across the ice? Why are these Norwegian jerks trying to shoot the poor doggie? Why are these guys so scared? What the hell got us here? Why is their chopper loaded with kerosene? What are they planning to do? We soon find out, establishing what’s at stake for the men of Outpost #31 as they battle to avoid the same horrific fate.

Then there’s the ending. It’s one of the most perfect in all cinema, up there with Charles Foster Kane’s ‘Rosebud’ and Charlton Heston howling at the Statue of Liberty.

In creating his monster, Carpenter wanted to avoid the guy-in-the-suit solution he’d seen in Alien (1979) and all those flying saucer movies he’d seen as a kid.

Special effects god Rob Bottin was 22 at the time, a rabid fan of Carpenter’s Halloween, and who had previously wrangled himself a makeup job on The Fog (1980)15. Bottin had some wild ideas about returning to Campbell’s original concept of an alien comprised of every lifeform it had ingested on its tour of the galaxy. He took his concepts to Marvel-artist-turned-storyboarder Mike Ploog16.

Heading a crew of over thirty creative technicians, Bottin ended up living on the interior set at Universal Studios for an entire year, working seven days a week, at one point causing a fireball to engulf the stage from a brew of toxic chemicals used during the defibrillator scene, and finally became hospitalised with exhaustion.

Bottin’s flesh-twisting showstoppers (“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding!”) get all the attention and remain unforgettable – marvellous feats of craft and imagination, mesmerising, alarming, tangible, inspiring – but it’s the smaller, half-glimpsed weirdness that works just as well: the arterial rivulets frozen to icicles on a dead man’s wrist; the anguished face parted like strings of melted mozzarella on the coroner’s table; the victim dragged away by his own liquefied face; the blank-eyed scientist raising dripping, misshapen claws, caught in the intimacy of his own transformation, howls in outrage at his executioners. Half-seen, these passing horrors all build the movie’s monster-ridden premise without you even realising.

The big scenes would feel adrift and gimmicky without them.

Like many Lovecraft stories, Campbell’s source novella wins on concept rather than craft; Carpenter’s movie has both.

By 1982 the director was famed for his taut brilliance and works his widescreen frame with typically Hawksian precision, keeping you off-kilter, watching every conspicuously unoccupied space, fearing the shadows. There are fans out there who say they’ve figured out who infected who and when, but the movie puts the squeeze on us so efficiently that most of us are happy to take it on trust.

Carpenter knows that breaking things down like Agatha Christie would only diminish the mood.

Like all Carpenter’s movies, The Thing is unpretentious. Carpenter doesn’t work to a complex intellectual thesis like genre contemporaries David Cronenberg or Wes Craven. His movies are primarily exercises in storytelling. He’s not blind to his themes17; he just works them from the gut. Paradoxically, it’s Carpenter’s refusal to give The Thing any definite intellectual shape that opens the movie up to all manner of readings.

Watching the men ponder global infection rates while locked away in their cabins feels unnervingly familiar post-Covid.

“Trust is a tough thing to come by these days,” says MacReady. Indeed it is. Who today can look at their neighbour and not wonder whether they might cast the vote or harbour the opinion that will blow up your world. MacReady’s lament, “Nobody trusts anybody now – We’re all very tired” has become so depressingly relatable it’s now a meme.

Unscrupulous tech bros direct AI programs like Things digitised, ravenous databases working in the shadows, snaring and absorbing the soul of humanity, replacing authentic creativity with uncanny imitation, art - a pinnacle of human endeavour - reduced to mathematical currency.

Eleven of my own books currently count among the estimated 7.5 million stolen by pirated-book database LibGen, pilfered in turn by Zuckerberg’s Meta and other companies to train their AI systems. My fellow writers and I are left feeling like MacReady, itching to fling a stick of dynamite in the face of overwhelming greed.

Campbell and Carpenter share not only the same vision of the apocalypse, one in which humanity can be rendered into protean slurry, but also the same sense of defiance, of hope in the face of horror.

Campbell’s competent men endured their frozen hell, but in doing so realised the vast potential of the human intellect. Carpenter’s MacReady may be morose, petulant, self-destructive, but his flaws become survival traits, signifiers of humanity, value in a perfectly inauthentic world.

Stay weird.

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God bless Guillermo del Toro, patron saint of the fantastic. Creators of the weird and wonderful should have a candlelit icon of the Mexican maestro framed above their desk, his boyish mop haloed with tentacles, third eye peering from an open palm, owlish behind those glasses, bearded and beaming like an eldritch Santa.

He’s one of our greatest living fantasists, the monster-kid made good. As an Oscar-winning filmmaker, artist, producer, writer and fanboy, he balances a child’s love of the lurid with the artist’s grasp of what it all means. As critic Michael Atkinson puts it, “He’s as much a descendent of Borges, mad for ancient anti-science and reflective labyrinths, as he is an heir of EC comics.”1

His output straddles the popular (Hellboy [2004], Pacific Rim [2013]) and the personal (Pan’s Labyrinth [2006] remains his masterpiece with The Devil’s Backbone [2001] a close second, while The Shape of Water [2017] finally won him Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture). His name carries clout enough to headline TV shows (Trollhunters [2016-18], Cabinet of Curiosities [2022]), but he’s so far resisted being subsumed by his own brand. He remains an icon of the bizarre, an artista of the arcane, a santo of the strange.

And it all started with his micro-budget, debut Cronos (1992).

Made when del Toro was in his late twenties, this vampiric fairy tale lacks the finesse of his later films, but its talons sink deep, establishing del Toro’s trademark obsession with beatific monsters, ecstatic horror, gold-plated gimcrack, and the insectile banality of evil.

A 16^th century alchemist2 flees the Inquisition and settles in Mexico where he fashions a bloodsucking clockwork scarab that bestows eternal life. Stashed inside the bust of an archangel, the gold-plated doodad is discovered four centuries later by aging antiques dealer Jesús Gris (a gently determined performance by the late Federico Luppi, a legend of the Latin American screen).

While Jesús spends his autumn years doting over his mute granddaughter, grasping industrialist Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook, another legend) spends his time in germophobic seclusion, barking orders to seize the so-called Cronos device in the hope it will save him from cancer.

Ron Perlman plays de la Guardia’s nephew, a preening knucklehead sent to fetch the device, which has already sunk its spring-loaded fangs into Jesús’s veins. Now it’s Christmas-time and Jesús has found himself reborn with a decidedly unholy thirst.

Mexican horror cinema had entered a general decline by the late 1970s3, as the government reduced state funding and generally favoured more respectable fare. By 1991 Mexico’s feature film output had shrunk to a mere 34 movies, most of which were produced by the country’s two dominant outlets: production company Televicine and state-owned movie-making institute IMCINE (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía).

Neither of them liked horror.

It took del Toro eight years to get Cronos off the ground, three of which he spent negotiating with IMCINE, who wouldn’t sign a cheque until del Toro had not only storyboarded the entire project, but also built a prototype of the Cronos device itself.

Another $600k in funding had been promised by an American producer, but the cash never materialised, and Cronos was left stranded half-way through filming. Ron Perlman agreed to carry on without pay4, while del Toro was forced to take out a loan against his house.

The finished film so appalled IMCINE that they banished del Toro to Cannes with a handful of posters, a roll of Scotch tape and the certainty that he’d return with a grovelling apology for wasting their time. Del Toro came back months later with ten international awards, including the Mercedes-Benz Award from Cannes.

Cronos offers a striking, original take on the vampire myth. Like the Cronos device itself, the movie is a work of grand Catholic baroque rendered in miniature, infested with secretive details and radiant with symbolism. Indeed, it chases so many themes that it often lacks focus, but is never less than fascinating.

Here the curse of vampirism is passed on not by an older vampire, but by a mysterious Lovecraftian bug that nests inside the gilded shell of the device itself. We half-see it pulsating like a blackened lung surrounded by exquisite clockwork.

This blasphemous trinket suckles at Jesús’s breast like a bloodsucking infant, its sticky venom serving to smooth his jawline and improve his libido but reducing him to a helpless addict. As in Robert Egger’s beautifully fetid Nosferatu (2024), there’s nothing remotely sexy about blood-drinking here.

In a revolting sequence, Jesús follows a man with a nosebleed into a swanky bathroom where he fingers a dollop of blood left on the marble sink like he’s dabbing at a wrap of coke. When he's on his hands and knees lapping blobs of plasma off the floor, we’re not meant to envy him the way we do the undead hotties of Interview With A Vampire or True Blood, but rather mourn the kindly gentleman we’ve now lost.

Jesús is no longer human; he is nothing but appetite.

Nor does eternal life come with eternal beauty. When Jesús eventually returns from the dead he’s appalled to find that vampirism – like the elixir of life in Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992) – fails to airbrush one’s mortal wounds.

With his funeral suit on backwards and mortician’s staples laddering his cheeks, he staggers home to his granddaughter. But the scene plays not for terror, but tenderness, as the little girl stashes him in her toybox with a teddy tucked under his arm, safe from the scorching sunlight.

Vampire movies aren’t often told from the point of view of the (non-vampire) senior citizen. A youth-focused movie like The Lost Boys (1987) revels in loud music, edgy fashion, gorgeous faces, great sex, and the feeling of wanting it all to last forever.

The elderly main character of Cronos has already suffered the loss of that youthful vigour; he flirts with immortality because he wants it all back. The lesson he learns is that to resist death is to become a monster, like the American moneybags de la Guardia. Instead, Jesús refuses his grisly impulses, finds solace in family, and accepts oblivion with dignity.

Del Toro dedicates the film to his late grandmother.

Cronos has a faith in humanity that restrains it from becoming all-out horror. As Kim Newman puts it in Nightmare Movies. “Cronos peers deeper into the dark traditions of South-of-the-Border horror, tapping into the familial theme of the Crying Woman cycle – la llorona weeps because she’s done the terrible thing Jesús Gris is strong enough to hold back from, murdering a child of her own blood.”

Cronos is too heroic to be horror, too heartfelt. Like the bulk of del Toro’s work, it’s more gothic fantasy than terror tale. It makes no thrilling flight from death but instead welcomes it with a warm and hard-won smile.

Stay weird.

Review copy provided by the British Film Institute.

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Upon reaching the limits of civilised knowledge, the mapmakers of yore would resort to monsters. Hic Sunt Dracones – Here Be Dragons. In truth, cartographers almost never wrote this1, but there’s a reason the phrase has endured.

It conjures images of fabulous beasts prowling the margins of the world, of plumed leviathans coiled around galleons daring to cross seas uncharted. Here be not only dragons, but the eternal boundary between science and the wild unknown.

Fantasy writers and Dungeon Masters alike often take a similar top-down view of the secondary worlds they create and stage-manage. That’s why so many fantasy novels open with a helpful map and why the bestiary might be the first section you turn to in a new RPG.

Your standard-issue, Lord of the Rings-derived medieval fantasy is usually dominated by peoples more or less civilised (humans, elves, dwarves, the magically inclined), or at least somewhat housetrained (orcs, goblins, randy barbarians). You’ve also got your various revenants, demons and elementals, all regimented by the arcane laws of magic.

Then there’s the wildlife, those feral beasts, carnivorous critters and lonely titans born not of alchemy but the natural world, of the wilderness that awaits beyond the familiar bounds of city or farmstead. These are the dragons that dwell in regions uncharted, in dungeons drowned, in deserts unmappable, in jungles unbridled as the id. Here be the nesting hydra, the bellowing cyclops, the web-weaver the size of a Humvee, all hungry for a fresh bundle of bones to strew about their lair.

Such monsters are essentially animals and – unless they’re legends like Shelob or Moby Dick – they rarely come with a backstory. They’re fluent only in growls and bellows and have few interests beyond eating and lurking. The rest is a mystery. Wizards seem to know more about conjuring the dead than they do about local zoology.

Monsters are commonly identified with their environment, making it easy for writers and DMs to reach for them in a pinch. We’re in a desert. I guess a few Giant Scorpions will do. A forest, eh? How about a Shambling Mound.

But writers often fall into the trap of deploying monsters like captured Pokémon, siccing them on their wandering hero, setting up the creatures as obstacles, threshold guardians or XP dispensers. The monster’s job here is to liven things up a bit, give the hero a taste of the wild and the chance to flash their blade skills.

The monster is all too often disposable, reduced to a commodity by professional slayers like the Witcher. They end up being just part of the scenery and don’t have much of a life beyond their narrative function.

Who can blame fantasy writers and DMs for falling in love with some glorious monstrosity they’ve found in a bestiary and wanting to throw it at their characters at the first drop of a spiked helmet?

Yet authors who apply the Ash Ketchum approach to monster-wrangling often succeed only in making a monster feel airdropped into a story, instead of having them arise out of a need to dramatize a fantasy ecosystem or symbolise a certain theme.

Early Dungeons & Dragons delighted in the ‘funhouse dungeon’, a chocolate box of trap-rooms and encounters, with random monsters seemingly parachuted into their lairs with a childlike disregard as to how they might actually react or even survive.

The sole reason for the monster’s existence here is to eat adventurers or die trying. Such chaos may be fun within the improvised, collaborative storytelling of a role-playing game, but in the more calculated realm of realistic fantasy fiction it spells death.

(For a superbly thought-out and comprehensive tutorial on how to create monster-encounters for RPGs, you need to read What Makes a Monster by .)

Like the owner of any exotic beast, the author must take care to integrate their monster into its surroundings. The creature needs to mean something to the story, or else it may as well be extinct.

Dinosaurs are the monsters with which many of us first fell in love, and they offer a perfect baseline when it comes to examples of good monster-writing. Indeed, it was the ancients’ discovery of fossilised dinosaur bones that lent a wonderous credence to their tales of the dragon, the giant and the griffin, mythic creatures that share the dinosaur’s awesome size and ferocious appetite.

Yet dinosaurs have a complex appeal all of their own. Separated from us by the abyss of time, they are as unknowable as any dragon and yet unquestionably real. They are concrete yet protean, morphing over decades of palaeontological debate, from Biblical leviathans to outsized lizards to feathered scavengers. They are symbols of power and majesty, and the fragility of that dominion. No wonder the British were so fascinated by them during the age of Empire. The dinosaur is the dragon whose death symbolises the passing of an age.

Dinosaurs hold a seemingly instinctual fascination for children, for whom they offer the thrill of primordial violence from the safe distance of some 66 million years. To look up at a tyrannosaur skeleton as a child is to see a thing that was even bigger, older and more powerful than your parents, as your imagination furnishes those granite bones with several tons of plodding, predatory muscle.

Yet the notion of dinosaurs is not even 200 years old. Cameras and calculators have been around longer than the word ‘dinosaur’ (meaning ‘terrible lizard’), which was coined by British palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen in 18422. Owen’s newly identified Megalosaurus got a name-check in the opening of Dickens’ Bleak House (1852), while Owen maintained a highly entertaining feud with his rivals in the scientific fraternity. Their public quarrels helped build a more comprehensive view of the creatures’ evolution, as well as packing ‘em in at museums and exhibitions. But public interest in dinosaurs had become extinct by the turn of the 20^th century. European missionaries, explorers and empire-builders had left few corners of the world unexplored.

Here be dragons no more.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in his early fifties and thoroughly fed-up writing Sherlock Holmes by the time he published The Lost World in 1912. Originally serialised in The Strand, it may not have been the first novel to feature dinosaurs as the main attraction3, but it was the bestseller that revitalised the popular fascination with dinosaurs that endures to this day4.

Influenced by the filigreed escapades of Jules Verne and the colonial rip-roarers of H. Rider Haggard, The Lost World follows the bullish Professor Challenger and his team charging into the Amazon to prove the existence of an isolated plateau where dinosaurs and ape-men still thrive.

Challenger himself is tremendous fun5. Dismissed by his peers as a violent crank, he’s something of a dinosaur himself, bullying and bellowing his way through the sweating thickets under threat of professional extinction. The adventure chugs along agreeably (though you do have to weather a lot of late-Victorian racism), but lights up when we get our first, unflinching view of the book’s most memorable monsters.

The narrator’s horror achieves Biblical proportions with its reference to Dante. “Like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-coloured shawls” feels wonderfully witch-like, a distinct and evocative simile that anchors the fantastic (“gigantic”, “web-coloured”) within the familiar (“old women”, “shawls”). The scene feels hellish, a blasphemous “congregation”, dead yet somehow alive (“more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures”). But that’s exactly the problem with these monsters; there’s little sense of life. Labelled with all those empty adjectives (“hideous”, “obscene”, “horrible”, “filthy”), they feel like exhibits in some hushed Edwardian gallery, striking but inert.

There’s a similar – crucial – lack of threat when Malone, the young reporter and narrator, gets ambushed by a Megalosaurus.

The dinosaur stalks him, sniffing out his trail…

Malone makes a run for it, thinking he’s managed to lose the monster, but then it catches up with him…

Likening his dino to the peculiar hopping of a kangaroo or the stance of an erect elephant says ‘circus sideshow’ more than ‘apex predator’. The comparison to a toad is one of revulsion rather than terror. Overall, this monster feels more like a scientific curiosity than a threat to life.

And when the beast gives chase, it feels disengaged from its surroundings. We’ve been told of its “enormous size and power”, that it, “could tear down an ordinary tree as though it were a reed”, that its senses are “exceedingly alert”, but we see no evidence of this. The monster doesn’t smash obstacles out of its way. There’s no moment in which it picks out its prey in the darkness, giving Malone no place to hide. Those “enormous teeth in his open mouth, and the gleaming fringe of claws upon his short, powerful forearms” may as well be there for decoration.

“Behind me the thick, gasping breathing of the creature sounded louder and louder. His heavy footfall was beside me.” But Malone doesn’t feel that breath on his back, doesn’t report any sense of heat or smell, and that “heavy footfall” is merely “beside him” rather than shaking the earth and threatening to knock him off his feet. It doesn’t help that this is all coming second-hand (“Even now when I think of that nightmare…”) and riddled with passive verbs (“was”, “were”), robbing the chase of immediacy and danger.

Chicago-born pencil-sharpener salesman turned pulp god Edgar Rice Burroughs takes an All-American swashbuckling tack with his dino-fiction but runs into similar problems. The Tarzan creator wrote two series of lost world adventures: the Caspak trilogy set on the Antarctic island of Caprona and which begins with The Land That Time Forgot (1918, very heavily influenced by James De Mille’s novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder from thirty years before)6 and another series set in the Vernean hollow-earth of Pellucidar, which begins with At The Earth’s Core (1914) and runs to six more novels7.

Burroughs’s plots come at you like machine-gun fire – and then and then and then and then – told in a breezy, daydreamy style that worships speed and spectacle. Combined with his instinct for primal myth, it’s easy to see why Burroughs became a pulp icon.

But in The Land That Time Forgot, for example, Burroughs deploys his monsters like speed-bumps, hiccups to keep things interesting and jiffy things along to the next confrontation. Like those in Doyle’s Lost World, Burroughs’s dinosaurs feel too docile.

Burroughs’s narrating hero is too busy with his tape-measure (“ten feet high”, “a foot in diameter”, “about an inch wide”), creating a too-static portrait. It’s like reading stats in an RPG bestiary.

But at least Burroughs gives us more than Doyle did in showing what his monster can do, like gulping down fifty pounds of venison in one go. He shows even greater flair when the dinosaur attacks. Having absorbed a volley of rifle-fire, the monster refuses to die and instead makes a charge. But Nobs, the hero’s loyal airdale terrier, rushes to his master’s defence.

Burroughs writes a far more dynamic dinosaur encounter than Doyle, dramatizing the monster’s power as it soaks up a hail of bullets and scores a field goal with the hero’s dog. But as the plot progresses and the explorers venture deeper into the island, Burroughs becomes more interested in feuding ape-people than in dinosaurs. His monsters fade into the foliage, there to get bagged and grilled like grazing buffalo as the heroes advance to conquer this new world.

A giant of 20^th century science-fiction, Ray Bradbury was among the first generation of monster kids. As a boy, he devoured Burroughs’s Tarzan books, wrote John Carter fan-fic, mourned when King Kong was assassinated atop the Empire State. To Bradbury, dinosaurs were more than just plot devices. In tales such as The Foghorn (1951)8, they’re melancholy symbols of nostalgia and eternity, of the wearying passage of time. In his 1980 introduction to The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, he wrote of dinosaurs, “rising here in nightmares to founder there in loneliness and despair.”

That Bradbury’s monsters stand for something beyond their function, that they touch an emotional nerve in the author and his viewpoint characters, is what gives those creatures their resonance, making them more than just cogs turning the plot.

Bradbury’s much-anthologised short A Sound of Thunder (1952) is perhaps the most widely read dinosaur story outside Jurassic Park. A commercial time-traveller named Eckels goes on a prehistoric safari in the hope of bagging a T-Rex.

Bradbury sets the stage without resorting to visual techniques9. He doesn’t describe the hunters actually leaving their time-machine and setting foot on prehistoric soil, recording their every twitch and motion as though documenting real-time through a movie-camera. Instead, Bradbury angles his descriptions in such a way that allows the reader to fill the gaps for themself, further immersing you in this primordial world. The repetition of “the jungle was” along with “forever and forever” is overwhelming, giving a 360-degree sense of being surrounded, isolated. Same with “sounds like music”, “sounds like flying tents.” You can hear the ‘thwump!’ of the pterodactyl’s wings without having it spelled out. And these flying critters are more than just local colour; they’re charged with metaphorical meaning, “gigantic bats of delirium and night fever”.

Warnings are given and tension builds as the time-travellers venture forth and finally spot their supposed prey.

The first thing we see in detail are those legs, then those armoured thighs, “the great breathing cage of the upper body”, the arms, the neck and finally the head. Describing these elements in sequence, gives the feeling of slowly looking up in mounting awe and horror, like this thing’s just too damn big to take in at once.

We get the overall scale of it against the trees. We get measurements and tonnage, but they feel imprecise, at-a-glance, hyperbolic. And this monster isn’t likened to some goofy kangaroo, but “a great evil god.” There’s strength (“a ton of stone lifted easily) contrasted with the delicacy of its “watchmaker’s claws”. This thing has substance; its presence affects its surroundings, “crushing aside trees” and smooshing pawprints into the mud, putting all that power and weight into action. How alive does this monster feel compared to the daguerreotypes of Doyle and Burroughs? How much more overwhelming and dangerous?

"It can't be killed," shrieks Eckels. "We were fools to come. This is impossible." What enables all this poetic description is the terrified perspective of the viewpoint character, suddenly realising he’s hopelessly out of his depth, reduced to the stature of a helpless child. For all his ten-thousand dollar cheques, his years on safari, his firepower, this adventurer has suddenly found himself on the lowest rung of the food-chain.

The monster is so big it’s death throes take up a whole other paragraph, in which it uproots trees and drowns its tiny killers in torrents of its own blood, leaving the men throwing up, cursing and shaking with aftershock.

This is gold-standard monster-writing: power, poetry, viewpoint.

Harvard Medical grad Michael Crichton was over twenty years’ deep into his career as a bestselling author and movie director when he published his blockbuster novel Jurassic Park in 1991.10

Though it stars another tyrannosaur in a headline role, Crichton’s novel is a very different beast to Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. Crichton was a theorist not a poet. He wrote fast-paced techno-thrillers that distilled sprawling scientific theories for the mass market. And if you want to keep those pages turning, then poetry must defer to pace.

Dr Crichton’s style is as clinical as a tray of surgical instruments and applied just as ruthlessly in Jurassic Park’s masterful midpoint suspense sequence.

The first half takes place mid-tour as young siblings Tim and Lex are in a rail-jeep with the PR guy, while heroic fossil-duster Alan Grant, prehistoric plant-lady Ellie Sattler and sexy mathlete Ian Malcolm are in the one behind. (We’ve all seen the movie.) Grant is the cool-headed viewpoint character, waiting for the gene-hatched tyrannosaur to take the bait of a tethered goat. Crichton gives us the first whiff of his monster, “a garbage stench of putrefaction.” Death lurks on the other side of those 10,000-volt wires.

He recognises it as an “animal”, not a “monster”, not a “great evil god”, neither of which we’ve ever seen. But most of us see an “animal” every day. Crichton couches his dinosaur in the language of the mundane, helping the reader buy into the fantasy.

Just the head. That’s all we get for now. There’s no grand, full-shot unveiling as in Bradbury, Burroughs and Doyle. Like Jaws, this one’s a lurker. But there’s realism in the tyrannosaur’s hesitancy as well as suspense. Like Grant, we feel like we’re visitors at the zoo, frustrated at having to wait for the lion to emerge from its den. This subtle familiarity makes the dinosaur feel all the more real.

Grant the expert says they may have to wait a while before the tyrannosaur emerges, only to be contradicted instantly as the dino springs out and nabs the goat. So much for Grant’s expert prediction. Throughout the sequence, Crichton strips away the characters’ every assertion, every certainty, every defence; a classic horror technique.

This dinosaur doesn’t behave like a Harryhausen monster, writhing and bellowing centre-stage. It’s nervous, dainty in contrast to its enormous size. Grant has seen this hesitancy in big cats becoming cautious after their kill, fearful of competing predators. This monster isn’t some dumb brute or living monolith. It’s something that thinks.

There’s no soaring verbs, no fancy nouns, none of the theatricality of Bradbury. The writing is plain and believable as we witness what this monster can do from a safe distance, leaving us grateful for the protection of that electric fence - and yet dying to see it come down.

With his Chekov’s T-Rex nicely foreshadowed, Crichton builds suspense over the interim of the next four chapters, in which a maelstrom looms and the tour makes a pitstop to attend a sickly Stegosaur. Cracks in the park are starting to show as life finds a way, the midpoint-dam finally breaking when turncoat computer-wiz Dennis (‘See? No one cares’) Nedry goes to steal those million-dollar dino-embryos and shunks off the park’s power supply.

For the second half of Crichton’s big monster-moment, we switch to the viewpoint of the youngest, smallest, most vulnerable character, little Timmy. We sit with him in the stalled jeep as the rain comes down, still in radio-contact with Grant in the other jeep, and thinking about how cool it would be to see a tyrannosaur up-close.

Crichton ratchets up the tension by keeping us cooped up with the kids for a while. They’re bored, hungry and annoying. Whether as a parent or a child, we’ve all been here. The author lulls us with the familiar, the plausible, before his dino comes crashing in. Tim scans the dripping trees and spots something through his night-vision goggles, something that definitely isn’t a tree. Crichton gives us a glimpse, nothing more.

The monster isn’t poised like Nosferatu, claws threatening murder. It doesn’t act like a monster at all. It’s “just standing there”. There’s nothing gothic here; in contrast to Bradbury, the tone is understated, naturalistic, believable.

I wonder what it’s thinking about. Thank God, that fence is still working, huh?

As soon as we see the animal’s paw gripping that dead wire, we switch viewpoints to that of the publicist, Ed Regis. Why? We switch because…

He’s the character who understands the true extent of the danger they’re in.

Ed pees his pants and flees, leaving the kids unprotected. Lex panics (“he left us, he left us!”), while Tim remains transfixed by that watchful tyrannosaur, “motionless and huge. Rain dripped from its jaws.” Crichton zeroes in on that dripping rain, a small but vivid image that evokes both the animal’s stillness and the sense of rain dripping from something rooftop-high and wide.

Bradbury’s T-Rex was way too awesome and otherworldly to be so clumsy, but this stumble is a neat naturalistic touch, one that finds the animal at odds with its artificial environment.

As it prowls the jeep with the kids inside, sections of this huge creature – its feet, its head, its tail – are constantly blocking Tim’s view through the windows. By never giving us a complete, all-in-one view of his dinosaur, Crichton implies its enormity, so huge and all-encompassing it’s like the surrounding jungle has come alive to menace Tim and Lex.

The old horror trick of assurance-contradicted is played rapid-fire now as the pace of the scene intensifies. Speaking through the radio, Grant assures the kids the tyrannosaur won’t see them if they to stay put. But the dinosaur has already seen them; it knows there’s something tasty squirming around inside that funny metal box. Grant tells the kids if they stay quiet, the tyrannosaur won’t find them. The huge creature not only finds them but starts tearing up the jeep like a dog with an Amazon delivery.

Having weathered the creature’s initial assault, Tim tells Grant they’re okay, only to find his sister unconscious and covered in blood, the dinosaur now peering through the smashed windshield directly at Tim.

The dinosaur’s enormity is broken down again, the intruding tongue feeling like a separate entity, a monstrous worm.

What carries the second half of this monster encounter is something more than just naked suspense. Our tyrannosaur has a clear, motivated need: it wants to eat the kids. But there’s an obstacle; they’re dug inside the car like juicy little ticks. In trying to get them out, the dinosaur slices its tongue on the broken windshield.

Enraged, the tyrannosaur lifts that battered lunchbox in its jaws and hurls it into the brush, those two confounded morsels still screaming inside it. Throughout the scene, the monster exhibits a sequence of emotions and responses: curiosity, hunger, frustration, pain, anger. It’s a character within the scene, just as much as Tim.

A common mistake I see in monster stories (and ghost stories) is failing to treat the monster like a living (or unliving) thing possessed of its own needs, temperament and perspective. The first two Alien movies take care to establish the xenomorphs’ ecology. The monsters don’t go around killing willy-nilly, but are driven by a sense of monstrous purpose. They want to bundle you away and paste you to the walls of their burrow, ready for a smooch with their eight-legged larvae. The alien queen hunts Ripley while seething with the desire to avenge her incinerated brood. The later movies abandon all that, reducing them to screeching berserkers, seemingly incapable of thought.

A monster is all the more terrifying if we can get a sense of its will, its hunger, its purpose. It gives monster-writers something to work with and their characters something to fight, even if that struggle does nothing but define their own helplessness.

All the best monsters have feelings too.

Stay weird.

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs are both public domain works. A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury and Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton remain copyright of their respective authors. Passages are quoted here under terms of fair use for the purposes of criticism.

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Bearing the seal of bleeding-edge studio A24, The Green Knight was trailered in 2021 as a dank, horror-tinged adaptation of a bygone fantasy text. Heads caught fire like they did in the studio’s 2018 shocker Hereditary. Gujarati-heritage heartthrob Dev Patel was daringly cast as King Arthur’s nephew Gawain, while the head-lopping Green Knight was recast as some sort of murderous Treebeard.

But fantasy fans recovering from the double-disaster of Covid and Season Eight of Game of Thrones, found this solemn, woozy, puzzle-picture a little too much. To be fair, I took in a double-bill of Joker and The Lighthouse the day before lockdown and it made me want to hide in a cupboard.

Those hoping for a hearty Arthurian romp may have been better served by previous adaptations like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1973) or Sword of the Valiant (1984)1.

Director David Lowery instead takes a deep breath and plunges inward, deep into chivalric pathology and beyond, into the wild and ferny wellsprings of fantasy itself. Like John Boorman’s still-wonderous Excalibur (1981) and Lowery’s own previous film A Ghost Story (2017), The Green Knight finds oceans of meaning in a premise of fairy-tale simplicity.

Like Robert Zemeckis’s dead-eyed CGI-fest Beowulf (20072), The Green Knight returns to a foundational fantasy tale, namely Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian poem written in tiddly-om-pom-pom Middle English some 600 years before the dawn of Brandon Sanderson3.

All that’s known about the original author is that he was most likely from the Midlands (non-UK readers, think Winterfell and Sean Bean). The poem has been famously translated by Tolkien – his version published posthumously in 1975 – and West Yorkshire-born poet Simon Armitage in 2007. Sadly, it’s become a dreaded set text in British schools and over-analysed by generations of scholars (not least of all by Tolkien himself) to the point where your eyes glaze over and you achieve a sort of nirvana of tedium.

The Green Knight, then, sets about a comprehensive re-weirding of this dry narrative soil, strange new saplings taking root in the cracks, releasing a heady perfume that melts reality and fantasy into a beguiling blur. The movie’s quest is ponderous at times, perhaps overly cryptic, and it’s probably best if you already know your Sir Bediveres from your Bertilaks. But stick with it. The Green Knight all adds up to a masterpiece of Arthurian cinema.

We first meet Gawain (not yet a ‘sir’) in the straw and squalor of a medieval bawdy house, a boyish layabout, happily drunk in the arms of his low-born lover Essel (Alicia Vikander). Far from the flower of knighthood, Dev Patel’s Gawain is more of a weed, the scrawny, estranged ‘nephew’ of King Arthur (Sean Harris), not to mention the son of a witch, Morgan Le Fey (Sarita Choudhury)4.

But it’s Christmas and the aging Arthur’s pallor has become as wintery as the land over which he rules alongside his equally cadaverous consort Guinevere (the wonderful Kate Dickie bringing the same avian menace she brought to Lysa Arryn in Game of Thrones). Bidding Gawain sit beside him at the Round Table during the Christmas revels, Arthur confesses regret at being so distant from his… er… ‘nephew’ for so many years and wishes to know more about him. But Gawain searches his soul and confesses he has nothing to tell.

“Yet,” says Guinevere with a maybe-vengeful smile.

There’s a folk-horror feel of dreadful ceremony about these early scenes, with lots of secretive, ritualistic imagery (pentagrams, tarot-tiles, towering tabernacles) set to a creepy choral score by Daniel Hart with stark costumes that reduce the characters to pieces in some sinister game of chess. (The vivid costume designs by Malgosia Turzanska recall the dark pageantry of Fritz Lang’s two-part mythological masterpiece, Die Nibelungen [1924], the first classic of epic fantasy cinema filmed in Weimar Germany decades before The Lord of the Rings was even written). Morgana pulls teeth and burns totems like she’s offering up her son for sacrifice to the Green Man, the May King, Jack-in-the-Green (Ralph Ineson) who duly gatecrashes Arthur’s Christmas party, on horseback no less. And I’m pretty sure neither bothered to wipe their feet.

With a face like an uprooted tree and a voice like the Yorkshire Moors, the Green Knight extends the holly branch of peace and proposes a merry Christmas game. He’ll allow any man here to chop off his head, if that man would return to the Green Knight’s bower one year hence so that he might return the favour. As Christmas games go, it’s preferable to Monopoly.

Eager to prove his worth before the men of the Round Table, Gawain sends that booming stump bouncing across the flagstones, then watches in horror as the headless giant plods over to retrieve it.

“One. Year. Hence.”

The seasons pass and Gawain gets his Christmas wish. Lays are being sung, portraits painted. Gawain has become a folk hero, though death be the cost of such lasting fame. Gawain must obey the code of courtesy if he is to become truly a man of honour. Like any right-minded Englishman, he would rather have his head chopped off than be impolite.

In interviews, director David Lowery has professed his love of 80s fantasy cinema, notably Dragonslayer (Matthew Robbins, 1981), Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985) and – his favourite – Willow5 (Ron Howard, 1988). And his fascination with those quest narratives certainly shows as he expands Gawain’s travelogue – montaged in the poem within a mere two pages – into the first half of the movie.

Gawain’s journey was filmed in the pissing rain on the blustery moors of Ireland’s County Tipperary6, where the forests look like pagan monasteries, pillars of pine reaching into infinity. The world of The Green Knight feels romantic, tactile and threatening.

Waylaid by bandits (led by a horribly puckish Barry Keoghan), Gawain is robbed, bound and left for dead on the forest floor. From here, the camera does a slow 360, winding forward like a clock, passing the chirp of Spring birds, the whistle of Winter winds, before halting at the mouldering bones of our hero. It then winds back to the present where Gawain finds the strength to struggle free. It’s like reaching one of those ‘Your Adventure Ends Here’ paragraphs in a Fighting Fantasy gamebook before you thumb your way back in time and find a different route.

It’s also one of several times in which The Green Knight ricochets through time like the plot of some transcendental Tarantino movie, following paths untaken, revealing the man Gawain may have become. It’s like tracing the roots of some great tree of Story.

The source poem makes a fleeting mention of Holy Head (today a port town on the Isle of Anglesey, Wales), which Lowery expands into an eerie side-quest on behalf of fellow beheadee St Winifred. “Are you real or are you a spirit?” asks Gawain. “What is the difference?” she says.

Gawain journeys on, starving, shivering, ignored by a troupe of bald female giants as the camera winds again, turning reality itself on its head.

The ominous symbolism of it all would become intolerable if it weren’t such a deeply rooted expression of Gawain’s inner journey, his vulnerability, his hunger for self-worth, his desire to do better, to achieve greatness, his terror of change.

With his narrow, glowering features, Dev Patel’s vulpine good looks (his spirit guide is a fox) gives his Gawain a tense, furtive energy. He doesn’t kung fu his way out of confrontations but tends to shrivel in fright. The actor’s Indian heritage, like the emerald hue of the Green Knight, emphasises his otherness in this otherwise bone-white world. Note the movie’s title drops the ‘Sir Gawain and’ bit. Our boyish hero (Gawain the greenhorn) and his manly executioner are one and the same.

Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, Gawain eventually reaches the castle of Sir Bertilak (jovial Joel Edgerton) and his Lady, where lines blur even further and things get decidedly gooey. As per the poem, Gawain’s host proposes to give him the choicest cuts from his daily hunt in return for whatever Gawain might receive in his castle that day, leaving Gawain to protect his virtue (not entirely successfully) from the advances of lord and lady alike.

Alicia Vikander plays the dual roles of both Gawain’s peasant lover Essel and the Lady Bertilak, much like Margaret Hamilton played twin harridans Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Just as Judy Garland’s Dorothy must confront the Wicked Witch to learn how to stand up to Miss Gulch back in Kansas, Gawain must make his peace with both Essel and Lady Bertilak to solve the riddle not of steel but of Woman.

Lady Bertilak takes his portrait (in a method that looks suspiciously like an old-timey camera), capturing a man frozen in boyhood, just as Essel warns Gawain of his prideful quest (“this is how silly men die,”), just as those lady giants dwarfed Gawain in passing, like adults looming over a little boy.

And this isn’t some modish jab about toxic masculinity; it’s as mythic as they come, a tale as old as time – the need for rites of passage, for the child to become an adult.

The Green Knight is one heady draught of elf-mead, its fantasy several multiverses away from the shallow stuff of snarky, self-aware adventurers, fusspot magic systems and greenscreen mega-battles. Wisconsin-born and Texas-raised, Lowery has an astonishing feel for the misty melancholy of the English imagination. As a translation of the poem, his movie draws you into a medieval mindset, to a time when all was faith and mystery.

Lowery’s only real departure from the source text is also his most audacious, when Gawain finally reaches the Green Knight’s fateful grove and the movie sprouts another unexpected tendril through time.

Is it really possible to spoil the ending? Where have you been for the last 500 years? Suffice to say, the poem ends with the Green Knight relieving Gawain not of his head, but his ego.

Next to Disney’s equally kaleidoscopic magic-realist fantasia Encanto, The Green Knight was one the best fantasy films of 2021. But is it a Christmas fantasy for the ages, a movie to rival It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Gremlins (1984) or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005)?

Well, of course it is.

How well it captures the strained courtly gathering of Christmas Day, that liminal week-long journey between Christmas and New Year, the hope of shedding who we once were and setting forth renewed. It makes perfect sense that Lowery directed Ralph Inseson to play the Green Knight like Santa Claus, albeit bearing a headsman’s axe in lieu of a sack of presents. And how many would feel grateful for such a gift after a long day spent with relatives?

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Presented with what was ostensibly a cartoon about talking bunny rabbits, the British Board of Film Classification declared in 1978, “Animation removes the realistic gory horror in the occasional scenes of violence and bloodshed… while the film may move children emotionally during the film’s duration, it could not seriously trouble them.”

Watership Down was duly awarded a ‘U’ certificate – suitable for all – and a cult movie was born.

Released in the October half-term of 1978 and first aired on the BBC over the 1985 Christmas hols – just before bedtime – Watership Down hit younger viewers like a vision of the apocalypse. Children raised on Bugs Bunny and Peter Rabbit were unprepared for the movie’s naturalistic savagery, replete with nightmare imagery straight out of The Shining. It was ruthless in its depiction of life on the lower rungs of the food-chain, a view of the world through the eyes of its most vulnerable; no wonder children responded to it so strongly.

The source novel was published in 1972, when author Richard Adams had only just turned fifty and spent most of his life as a civil servant. The tale of a colony of rabbits forced to undertake a dangerous odyssey across the English countryside in search of a new home, it was published and marketed as an adult novel, yet won two prestigious awards for children’s fiction (the Carnegie Medal for Writing and the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize).

The book sprang out of tales that Adams rattled off for the amusement of his daughters during long car journeys between London and Stratford Upon Avon. At the girls’ insistence, Adams got those stories down on paper, developing his own leporine mythology and invented language, while drawing upon Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces1 to embrace eternal themes of (male) heroism, mortality and nature.

An immediate hit, Watership Down sold 100,000 copies in the UK (from an original print run of 2,500) and spent eight months on The New York Times Best Seller list. Adams sold the film rights to American producer turned director Martin Rosen.

Two years later, Rosen had adapted the book into a British animated feature at a time when British animated features were virtually non-existent.

Rosen initially selected American animator John Hubley to direct. By then, Hubley (along with his wife Faith) was a three-time Oscar-winner and multiple Oscar nominee, who began his career at Disney in 1935 and went on to create the famously myopic Mr. Magoo.

Cloistered in a shabby workshop in London’s Fitzrovia, Hubley worked on Watership Down from 1975, but was fired by Rosen a year later. Hubley was unable to discuss the matter due to legal proceedings, though he was later interviewed by animation historian Michael Barrier2 who observed, “it seems plain that Rosen wanted a more violent and emotional film than Hubley was prepared to give him.”

Despite having zero experience in either animation or direction, Rosen decided to helm the project himself.

Rosen’s movie opens sweetly enough, with a storybook telling of rabbit-kind’s creation myth, how the sun-god Frith created the world and all its creatures, how a bunny folk-hero named El-ahrairah was punished for his hubris with the creation of the hawk, the fox and other predators, but also blessed with the gifts of speed and cunning, so that his people might endure.

The movie’s life-and-death stakes have you by the throat as it opens out onto the real world of the North Wessex Downs3. Here the ‘Golden Afternoon’ of Lewis Carroll becomes a blood-drenched survive-o-rama closer to Conan the Barbarian than Alice in Wonderland.

A shaky young rabbit named Fiver (voiced by a tremulous Richard Briers) beholds rivers of blood pouring down the hills, prophesising an oncoming catastrophe that threatens his colony’s warren. He convinces his cunning older brother Hazel (John Hurt, lending the same rangerly tones he gave Aragorn in Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 Lord of the Rings), along with several others, including a heroic bruiser named Bigwig (Michael Graham Cox, who also voiced Bakshi’s Boromir).

Fleeing their warren in search of Fiver’s promised land, the rabbits make their desperate exodus across the home counties, barely surviving beast-haunted woods, speeding cars and strangling snares (the kids got to watch one of their favourite characters choking on his own blood as his comrades scrambled to save him). Death strikes this rapidly dwindling fellowship from all directions. Birds of prey snatch away the innocent in puffs of fur. Graveyard rats tear at their ears. Shotgun-toting farmers blow them away.

The movie’s pace is unrelenting, pitiless in its regard for our cuddly heroes. Few movies – let alone children’s favourites – do such a tremendous job at evoking the breathless terror of the hunted. Perhaps this tightness has something to do with Rosen’s script cramming in so much from a source book of over 600 pages (and somehow managing to make very little feel lost).

Propelled by Fiver’s shamanic visions and haunted by the shadow of the Black Rabbit of Inlé – rabbitkind’s own Grim Reaper – the movie’s quest story has a feverish sense of magic and the supernatural, creating an epic fantasy in miniature within the cosy hedgerows of England. Yet nothing in this green and rarely pleasant land is invented; only the rabbits’ perspective and culture. Fiver, Hazel and co. have their own folklore and customs, their own views on society. They’re baffled by the purpose of roads and believe speeding trains to be messengers of Frith. Watership Down presents not a secondary world, but rather a secondary world-view.

In the second half of the movie, the rabbits find themselves in trouble with local despot General Woundwort (Harry Andrews), a terrifying, one-eyed fascist who rules the dystopian warren of Efrafa. As the rabbits launch a daring rescue of several captives, the story ventures into allegory like other, more comprehensive animal fables like Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus and Orwell’s Animal Farm (itself made into a British animated feature in 1954), depicting animal society as a means of reflecting the foibles of our own.

Adams was called up in 1940 and served in the 250 Light Company, Royal Army Service Corps, 1st Airborne Division, notably at the Battle of Arnhem. Though he based several characters on the men with whom he served4, Adams – like Tolkien – always maintained that his novel was no wartime allegory. “It’s just a story about rabbits,” he said. In an interview with BBC Berkshire, he stated, “It's simply a tale… it's in no sense an allegory or parable or any kind of political myth. I simply wrote down a story I told to my little girls.”

Yet Watership Down the movie is entrenched in the iconography of World War Two, with its lop-eared Fuhrer, bloody massacres and gasping Auschwitz nightmares.

Two more animated epic fantasies, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards (1977) and Lord of the Rings (1978), similarly feature Nuremberg addresses and tramping jackboots, not forgetting all that Triumph of the Will business at the end of George Lucas’s Tolkien/Campbell-influenced Star Wars (1977).

All these movies were released in the late seventies, an era when the threat of Western fascism must have felt enviably distant.

Moorcock was no more a fan of Adams’s book than he was of the bourgeois pastorale of Tolkien, though Rosen’s adaptation is far from docile.

What gives the movie such resonance, what makes its story so riveting is that Death abounds. The charcoal spectre of the Black Rabbit lurks everywhere, reminding us of the characters’ terrible fragility. Indeed, with its flinty themes of sacrifice, death and rebirth, Rosen’s Watership Down has more in common with the pagan folk horrors of The Wicker Man (1973) and Starve Acre (2023) than Songs of Praise and The Antiques Roadshow.

Death is right there on that sinister, original poster; did you notice the snare around the rabbit’s neck?

Wombles songwriter Mike Batt was commissioned to produce the movie’s wrenching theme song, Bright Eyes, sung by Art Garfunkel. In an interview with film critic Charlie Brigden5, Batt explained, “John Hubley said ‘I’d like you to write a song about death.’ I went home and I just thought, how the hell do you write a song about death without it being morbid or too dark? And then I thought it’s the big thing we all ask. One of the most important questions in most of our lives is what happens when you die?”

The commission came at a time when Batt was losing his father to cancer. “The words ‘bright eyes’ came into my mind, thinking about how bright the eyes are before they suddenly aren’t anymore. Later in life, I saw my dad after he died and it came round to me really strongly at that point that that’s what happens, that the eyes just lose all life and you know there’s no life in that person any more. And that’s what the song is about.”

The song fades in when Fiver receives news that Hazel has been shot. Refusing to believe he’s dead, he follows the spectre of the Black Rabbit into the twilight mists in the hope of saving his brother. Batt’s dreamy lyrics are sung with angelic tenderness by Art Garfunkel, as Fiver’s pursuit dissolves into a surreal montage. Hazel’s body turns into a swirl of autumn leaves and bleeds back into the soil as the airy melody resonates not with despair, but wonder. There’s no fear, only an enticing strangeness.

The movie concludes on the same beautifully ambivalent note. Like two other classics of fantasy cinema, Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams (1989) and Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), Watership Down ends with hope in the face of oblivion, reminding us how much fantasy is the flipside of horror, striving to achieve growth instead of despair.

Bright Eyes went on to become one of the bestselling songs of 1979, in the UK and across Europe.

Two other animated adaptations followed Rosen’s movie: a cheerful UK/Canadian cartoon series that ran for three seasons (1999-2001), aimed squarely at children, and the Netflix/BBC CGI-fest from 2018, both decidedly limp lettuce next to Rosen’s full-blooded stew.

Now sensibly upgraded to a ‘PG’ rating, Watership Down is commonly held up as a Gen-X curio, the movie that launched a thousand childhood nightmares. But its achievements as a work of dramatic fantasy are what truly resonate. Though it may lack the mythic sprawl of its source-novel, Watership Down packs a clawing excitement, emotional wallop and feral weirdness all of its own.

Stay weird.

• Long unavailable to buy or stream, Watership Down has been newly restored and released in 4K by the British Film Institute, available in Limited Edition UHD and Blu-ray formats on 25^th November.

• Each contains identical special features, including both new and vintage audio commentaries, a host of featurettes breaking down every aspect of the movie’s production, and an 80-page perfect bound book of critical essays.

• Available for pre-order from the BFI shop in UHD and Blu-ray.

Review copy provided by the British Film Institute.

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There can surely be no rational defence of Terry Marcel’s ramshackle British sword and sorcery movie Hawk the Slayer (1980). By no sane definition can it be considered great cinema. It falters too often, its ambitions too clearly out of range of its meagre budget. Why then is it so greatly loved? Why are its devotees happy to accept the wayward acting, the threadbare production values, the Silly String special effects, and invest so deeply in its misty medieval world? Social media reveals micro-communities of miniature-makers, role-players, prop hunters1, fan artists and writers. These followers aren’t showing up to look down on a camp extravaganza; they’re here to take part.

It’s the tale of a Cain-and-Abel clash between two brothers: one-eyed bad guy Voltan (Jack Palance, going apeshit in every single scene) versus wandering good guy Hawk (John Terry, hardly acting at all). When Hawk inherits the ancestral Mindsword, Voltan runs amok and kidnaps a nun, forcing Hawk to recruit a rescue team of former comrades: a mallet-hefting giant (Carry On stalwart Bernard Bresslaw), an elf bowman so quick on the draw he’s like a medieval machine-gun emplacement (Ray Charleson), and a whip-cracking, snack-obsessed dwarf (Peter O’Farrell).

Hawk the Slayer has been subjected to many a smug, piss-taking commentary on YouTube, though as an example of ‘So-Bad-It’s-Good’ Hawk is ultimately unrewarding. Even its harshest critics will admit that much love clearly went into its making. The movie has such a boyish enthusiasm for high adventure in an age undreamed of that laughing at it can’t help but feel mean-spirited. VHS-era sleaze like Teodoro Ricci’s Thor the Conqueror (1982) and John Watson’s Deathstalker (1983) are far more deserving of vicious mockery.2

Over three decades after Hawk the Slayer’s UK release during the Christmas hols of 1980, 2000 AD publishers Rebellion acquired gaming and publishing rights to Hawk in 2015. Following a Kickstarter movie sequel, Hawk the Hunter (which didn’t quite make it), Rebellion published a five-part comic-book sequel, Hawk the Slayer: Watch For Me In The Night, written with verve and humour by Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys) with seething, vibrant artwork by Henry Flint.3

“I genuinely love Hawk the Slayer, for what I hope are all the right reasons,” Ennis told Nerdist in 2021. “And I wrote this story in the same spirit that I enjoy the film. It’s larger than life, it’s got the sometimes (beyond) hyperbolic language and characterization typical of its genre, it requires massive suspension of disbelief—but it’s got a lot of heart, the story goes in a straight line and never falls apart, the heroes are likable, and the villains are extremely memorable.”

Then there’s the follow-up, Hawk the Slayer: The Last of Her Kind, written by myself4 with brooding artwork by Simon Coleby, the first episode of which lands in this year’s Christmas edition of 2000 AD.

For me, Hawk was canonised via repeated taped-off-the-telly viewings on VHS, which was a lot cheaper than the multiple rentals of Krull that I craved. Aside from the Dungeons & Dragons animated show, I was starved of then-modern movies featuring the kind of sorcerous adventures I was reading in Deathtrap Dungeon and Warlock of Firetop Mountain. I wasn’t old enough to watch Excalibur or Milius’s Conan, so when it first aired on ITV in May 1985, Hawk the Slayer ended up being my go-to fantasy movie fix. Somehow the sight of Hawk and his mates storming a monastery amid volleys of fluorescent ping-pong balls (a “whirlpool of flying firebolts”, apparently) was indescribably thrilling.

In writing my 2005 book Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema, I was determined to set my rose-tinted glasses aside, though my evaluation of Hawk the Slayer was perhaps a little too sober. As the years passed, Hawk stuck with me for reasons beyond nostalgia. Unlike the Californian canyons of Beastmaster or the Spanish sierras of Conan, Hawk’s muddy Britishness made the fantasy feel tantalisingly close to home, as if that grim world of perilous adventure wasn’t quite so far away after all.5 As with the warehouse never-worlds of The Dark Crystal (1982) and The Company of Wolves (1984), Faerie seemed to lurk somewhere not over the rainbow, but on the other side of the M25.

But Hawk invites the imagination in other ways. Like Star Wars (1977), Hawk makes frequent use of what Professor Matt Hills calls “hyperdiegesis”, “the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text.” The Clone Wars, Tosche Station, the Kessel Run, all hyperdiegesis. Much of the dialogue in Hawk works in the same way, fleshing out the distant corners of the world as travellers speak of archery tournaments in Brackley, of wizards gathering in the south, of northern barons hoarding plunder. Where’s Brackley? Who are these wizards and why are they gathering? The absence of answers prompts you to visualise everything you cannot see. Perhaps the reason why the worlds of Star Wars and Hawk are so fondly remembered – and why we can be so fiercely protective of them – is because our imaginations have played such a vital role in creating them.

For a movie famed for its shortcomings, it seems Hawk the Slayer does a great deal very well indeed.

Hawk the Slayer is in fact a milestone of sword and sorcery cinema. It was first out the gate during the early ‘80s fantasy boom that erupted in the wake of Star Wars, preceding Clash of the Titans, Excalibur, Dragonslayer, Beastmaster, The Sword and the Sorcerer (all 1981), The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian and Destroyer (1984), Krull, Fire and Ice (both 1983), the lot!

Hawk was almost beaten to the punch by producer Milton Subotsky, co-founder of British horror studio Amicus. Subotsky had been angling for the rights to Conan since the late sixties (at one point, he approached bodybuilder and sith lord Dave Prowse for the role). Subotsky settled instead for Lin Carter’s more family-friendly barbarian Thongor. No doubt sensing the broadening cultural appeal of the fantasy sub-genre, Subotsky formed Sword & Sorcery Productions in 1975 and hoped to make Thongor into a monster-heavy adventure like his Edgar Rice Burroughs movies The Land That Time Forgot (1974) and At The Earth’s Core (1976). United Artists picked up the project at Cannes in 1978, then dropped it six weeks after Screen International announced Thongor in the Valley of Demons was good to go.6

Hawk the Slayer was also the first modern sword and sorcery movie, that is, one not adapted from heroic myth like the Italian Hercules pictures or Harryhausen’s swashbuckling Jason and Sinbad, but conceived by a writer-director fluent in the founding texts of 20^th century sword and sorcery fiction. Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Solomon Kane stories, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, Jack Vance’s Cugel the Clever, Marcel had read and loved them all, remaining an avid fantasy fan throughout the seventies while assistant directing on movies including Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and several Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther movies.

It was while working on his directorial debut, Why Not Stay For Breakfast (1979), that Marcel befriended film composer and fellow fantasy fanatic Harry Robertson7. Marcel pitched him an idea about relocating A Fistful of Dollars to lawless medieval England. “Originally, it wasn't a sword and sorcery story,” Marcel told Martin Sheffield of the British Entertainment History Project in 2022. “The idea was we were going to do a sort of medieval version of the Japanese sword films.”

Bashing out a first draft while on holiday in Spain, Marcel had an image in mind of a wandering English badass, a rogue knight having returned from the crusades with an immense broadsword strapped to his back. But Marcel couldn’t figure out the best way for the hero to draw such a cumbersome weapon. “I thought, why don't I make this a magic sword that he can summon into his hand. And that's where it turned from a sword movie into a sword and sorcery movie.”

Marcel and Robertson managed to secure a budget of £600k8 from Chips Productions, a subsidiary of Lew Grade’s TV distribution company ITC. “And we got called into Lew Grade’s office, Harry and I,” Marcel says. “We thought he was going to pull [the movie]… And he said, ‘Sword and sorcery. I like it.’ He said, ‘What I'd like to do guys,’ he said. ‘Let's forget the £600,000 budget. Why don't we make it into a big major movie, but you [Marcel] can't direct it and you [Robertson] can't produce it. But you can be executive producers. What do you think?’”

Marcel and Robertson were too in love with their vision to give it up. They turned down the golden handshake and chose to make Hawk the Slayer their way.

Faults with the finished picture are many and obvious: Jack Palance’s gothic performance (Marcel admits he pretty much left Palance to get on with it), the lopsided dialogue, the chaotic fight scenes, and the 1970s Doctor Who-level special effects9.

The movie’s less hilarious achievements have been largely ignored. As veteran storyteller Garth Ennis points out, Hawk the Slayer’s plot is perfectly sturdy and gallops along as any good adventure story should. Palance’s Voltan makes for a suitably fearsome villain, his operatic bark equalled by a murderous bite. And who’s talking about that terrific supporting cast? The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Patricia Quinn as a sightless, whispering witch, Annette Crosbie as the kidnapped abbess, Roy Kinnear as a quailing innkeeper, Christopher Benjamin as a melodious backstabber named Fitzwalter, Warren Clarke as a snarling witch-botherer, and Declan Mulholland as a slave-master with worse table-manners than Jabba the Hutt10.

The synthesiser score by Harry Robertson? It’s genuinely brilliant. Jeff Wayne meets Ennio Morricone with a dash of disco laserbeam. Yet it works perfectly, beguiling, romantic, exhilarating, one of the best fantasy movie soundtracks of all time.

Yet for all its Boys Own exuberance11, Hawk the Slayer harbours a thread of melancholy. The hero’s three non-human comrades – the giant, the elf and the dwarf – are each the last of their kind, their homelands long destroyed. “At night. I can hear the call of my race,” says Crow the elf (in that weird robo-Shatner monotone of his.) “They wait for me. Once I join them. We will be. Forgotten.” As in John Boorman’s Excalibur, there’s a sense here of the pagan world fading, replaced by whatever God it is those nuns are praying to.

“I yearn for the old days,” says Gort the giant, patting his middle-age spread, echoing the sentiment of the movie’s ageing male fanbase who so loved this movie when they were boys. “The iron hills are no more,” says Baldin the dwarf. “If I am to die, why not amongst friends?”

Contrary to common belief that Hawk the Slayer was a box-office flop, the movie did well in the UK, though was never released in the US due to the collapse of its distributor ITC. Forty years on and the movie continues to sell to territories worldwide.

Marcel (now in his eighties) remains cheerful and content in interviews, unfazed by faltered sequels12 and cancelled TV spin-offs, gratified by the cult he inspired by sticking to his sword.

Integrity is another factor in Hawk the Slayer’s peculiar resonance. The movie never wavers in its commitment to its own vision. Marcel never winks at the audience, never talks down to them, never breaks the fourth wall to say ‘I’m better than this’ in the hope of scoring a more respectable gig. It’s this sincerity that would qualify the movie as ‘Camp’ according to Susan Sontag, who stated in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, “The essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.”

But that seriousness is also the very ingredient that makes the fantasy work.

Belief.

Neither Conan nor Tinkerbell can live without it. All fantasy, but sword and sorcery and epic fantasy in particular, must pledge itself to its own wild premise. Jokes, doubt, self-consciousness, snark, all these do is tarnish the magic. Let the hipsters and sceptics laugh. They’ll never know how it feels to soar within that dream.

It’s that vision which sustains Hawk the Slayer, Marcel’s concept of the knight errant, the Gawain-With-No-Name roaming the bandit-haunted woods of pagan Britain in search of mystery and adventure. Yes, it’s hackneyed, but it’s coherent, even when the movie itself is far from coherent.

Even after Hawk has ridden into the sunset and the credits have rolled with a raptor’s scream, we can still see the hero living his adventures, legends yet to be told.

Stay weird.

• Hawk the Slayer is available to stream on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

• It’s also available of DVD and Blu-ray, though it looks like you’ll have to dig around for it. Try eBay…

• Hawk the Slayer: Watch For Me In The Night by Garth Ennis and Henry Flint is available as a graphic novel from the Rebellion webstore, World of Books and Amazon.

• Hawk the Slayer: The Last of Her Kind is a ten-part series, the first episode appearing in the Christmas edition of 2000 AD, now available for pre-order.

Sources

• The British Entertainment History Project (interviewer Martin Sheffield, 2022)

• The Fantasy Podcast (Oliver McNeil, 2015)

• Rebellion (Rob Power, 2015)

• Starburst (Paul Mount, 2015)

• The Guardian (Nick Curtis, 2015)

• 2 Warps to Neptune (author unknown)

• Cool Ass Cinema (author unknown)

• With thanks to Steve Green and Barrington Boots of the 2000 AD Online Forum.

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Fantasy, according to Ursula K. Le Guin, “is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence.”1 The genre speaks the timeless language of symbol and metaphor, of strange transformations and grail quests and Big Bad Wolves. Allegory lends form to the ineffable, speaks the unspeakable, wrings meaning out of meaningless chaos. No wonder the genre has proved so adept at processing trauma.

Reeling from a cancer diagnosis in the early 1980s, fantasy author David Gemmel threw himself into writing the book that would eventually be published as Legend (1984), the saga of an ageing but dutiful man facing his last stand within a body of stone besieged by a malignant invader. In Maus (1980-91) graphic novelist Art Spiegelman comprehended his parents’ survival of the holocaust through the symbolic hierarchy of animal fable, casting Jews as skittering mice and the Nazis as rapacious cats. “The mouse metaphor allowed me to universalise,” Spiegelman says. “To depict something that was too profane to depict in a more realistic way.”2

Another comic-book roman à clef, James O’Barr’s The Crow (1989) was among several key texts in the goth subculture of the early 1990s, including DC Comics’ The Sandman (1989-96) and the White Wolf role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade (1991). Readers more familiar with The Crow from its later, trashier movie adaptations might be forgiven for thinking the source-comic is merely the stuff of violent adolescent fantasy, fit only for potential school-shooters and teenage poets with too much eyeliner. But the comic needs to be read with at least some knowledge of what drove writer-artist James O’Barr to create it. Like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, The Crow is best read as symbolic biography.

According to O’Barr himself3, his birth-mother was too blitzed to remember exactly when he was born, so the Detroit care-system had to date his birthday as 1 January 1960. He spent much of his childhood in the care system, loaned out on weekends to potential foster parents, some of whom “shouldn’t have been allowed to have pets, let alone children.” He learned to stay quiet, struggled to communicate and taught himself how to draw from studying classical paintings and Michealangelo sculptures. At age seven he and his brother were adopted by a stern, hard-working couple who forbade James from drawing in the house as it would never help him get a job.

He fell in love at age 16. She was charming and funny and brought him out of his moods, and he loved her with the kind of fervour only a young man deprived of love for so long can feel. They hoped to marry after graduation, but she was killed one night by a drunk driver.

O’Barr tried hard not to self-destruct. At 18, he joined the seminary, then the marines, then picked up a pen and began drawing The Crow, the story of a man who returns from the dead as a homicidal Pierrot with a vendetta against the scumbags who murdered him and his fiancée.

Discharged from the corps, O’Barr returned to Detroit and worked in the body shop of a car dealership, sweating 8-10 hours a day before coming home and drawing until the early hours, fuelled by rage, cigarettes and Joy Division LPs. Initially, he planned to do nothing more than abandon The Crow once it was finished, a project whose sole purpose was its very creation. “It was basically something I just did for myself,” he says. “I had no intentions of publishing it anywhere. I never showed it to anyone. It was just this vehicle for me to, y’know, this cathartic-type thing that was supposed to be helping me.”

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It took him nine years to complete the book, by which time he had shopped it around a few publishers. None of them got it. They told him no one wanted to see their hero crying or else wanted to turn it into a Punisher knock-off.4

By 1988, Gary Reed, founder of Caliber Comics - and then-manager of O’Barr’s local comic-book store - was looking to set up a publishing company that could showcase all the burgeoning talent that frequented his shop (Guy Davis and Vince Locke among them). The Crow eventually launched under Caliber as a five-part limited series in 1989 and quickly burned through its initial 10,000-copy print-run. Issue one eventually sold around 30,000 copies according to Comic Scene5, spectacular figures for a low-rent indie book. Trade collections found their way into record stores, attracting readers from the music scene, and gaining The Crow a fierce cult following.6 O’Barr has joked that the ‘Goth Starter Pack’ back then came with a Cure album, a pair of Doc Martins and a copy of The Crow.

Published when North American comic books were on a cultural upswing in the wake of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen (both 1986), The Crow has little in common with its more respectable peers. It’s not a construct of visionary intelligence like the writings of Alan Moore. It has none of the puckish literary allusions of The Sandman. It’s a resounding primal scream and no less powerful for its incoherence.

O’Barr’s monochrome artwork is obsessively detailed, his noirish cityscapes clearly influenced by The Spirit (Eisner gets a storefront name-check) but rendered in scratchy, grungy lines, abyssal blacks and heavenly white spaces. Billed as a love story, The Crow is really more like a dirge: melodic, funereal, broken, an outpouring of grief that’s by turns irrational, lucid, brutish, beautiful, poetic, inarticulate, a chaos of feelings struggling to find order on the page.

The author’s avatar is Eric, a slim, prickle-haired angel of goth conceived as combining the gaunt androgyny of Bauhaus vocalist Peter Murphy with the rippling physicality of Iggy Pop. Murdered by roving gangbangers along with his fiancé, Eric is guided back from the grave by a mysterious crow. In the watercolour flashbacks to his former life, he’s a rather sweet young man, until death grants him the tactical nous of a Navy Seal, as well as the undead’s traditional disregard for bullets. This Dante with a Remington 12-gauge hunts his killers through a hellscape Detroit, an alabaster harlequin with a rictus of black lipstick. He takes lives with maniacal flamboyance, announcing his presence with unnerving non-sequiturs (“I am the boiling man come to break the bones of your sins, meat puppet.”). He dances through the book like a crazed actor performing for whatever audience is applauding in his head.

He’s so compelling a creation none of the other characters manage to register. There’s Shelly (the murdered girlfriend), the indistinguishable mob of bastards who killed her, a little girl from the ghetto, and an overworked police captain trying to keep up. But they’re all phantoms next to Eric, whom O’Barr keeps centre-stage throughout, often isolating him, framing him like a performance artist. The artwork is fascinated by Eric’s tortured musculature, so contorted you can almost hear the sinews creak. In these moments, The Crow isn’t interested in advancing story beats or revealing character, as it is in abstract expressions of grief and rage. These pages weren’t drawn to entertain you; they were drawn for the author to scream into.

In this “temple to sadness” male pain is converted into violence. The real-life tragedy of a death by drunk-driving is reimagined as a premeditated ordeal of gang-rape, murder and worse. It’s upon this altar that the non-character of Shelly is sacrificed to motivate Eric’s vendetta. It’s the book’s ugliest conceit. Yet O’Barr is operating in such a raw and private vacuum that moral judgement feels intrusive. The Crow is so clearly a therapy piece, a dark yet safe space in which even the author’s meanest feelings may be expressed without censure.

However, The Crow is no longer a private work, along with all the movies and merch based upon it. Does this render it ‘problematic’?7 Well, that depends on your tolerance for graphic scenes of self-harm, sexual assault and gun violence, and whether you feel they count as valid expression or else a degrading force in the world. Whatever your view, The Crow is a work that demands to be processed on its own terms or not at all.

A possibly redeeming factor is that the comic takes no pleasure in its own bloodshed. Though he shares Batman’s talent for terrorising evildoers, Eric is never venerated as a hero. The carnage he unleashes feels listless and squalid, often depicted off-panel or in claustrophobic asides. Action pages are staged more like the climax of Taxi Driver than a John Woo bullet-ballet. Headshots don’t take up entire splash pages. Exit wounds aren’t detonated in your face for shock value with every squirt of plasma artfully arranged. There’s no attempt to beautify. O’Barr dwells instead on morbid forensic details, like the way a man’s hair might catch fire if you shoot him in the back of the head at point-blank range. (O’Barr studied medicine in addition to his service in the marines.) The violence here is too real, too ugly, too rooted in human pain to be any fun.

There’s no mounting suspense as Eric hunts his prey, no agonising setbacks followed by glorious release. Of all Eric’s paranormal gifts – his speed, his ferocity, his grace – the one we feel most keenly is his ability to soak up bullets and tolerate agony. This is the Grim Reaper as janitor, revenge as a chore. “I’m eager to be done with this,” Eric says.

Sure, he throws down a few sick combat moves in the final show-down, taunting his adversaries by licking blood off the tip of his own nose. (“If anyone would like me to dial 911, please raise your hand.”) But by the time he’s done cleaning house, the sense of emotional desolation is palpable. The Final Boss dies unrepentant, and Eric has nothing left to do but curl up in the snow and die.

We don’t cut back to the other characters – to the little girl or the cop – and see how Eric’s rampage has made life any less excruciating for them. The city hasn’t been granted any measure of healing and Eric himself feels nothing but weariness. “It’s over,” he says. “I’m coming home.”

The Crow is not so much about revenge than it is about simply not wanting to be here, in this place, in this feeling. It’s not a story about coping with grief. It doesn’t articulate the experience of actually losing someone. It’s eye-of-the-hurricane stuff, raw and furious, yet surprisingly meditative.

Scattered with lyrics from British post-punk bands like Joy Division and The Cure, the comic reads like a concept album. It’s perhaps unsurprising that when the movie rights were picked up shortly after the comic’s publication, one producer wanted to turn it into a Michael Jackson music video.

Fortunately, Aussie director Alex Proyas came on board, along with star Brandon Lee (son of Bruce), a formidable martial artist and charismatic leading man in his own right, hoping for a breakout role.

The first adaptation of O’Barr’s book, The Crow (1994) was among the wave of comic-book movies that followed the success of Tim Burton’s Batman (89) and Batman Returns (92). Adapting lesser known (more affordable) properties, The Crow’s contemporaries include Steve Barron’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (both 1990), Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer (1991), Chuck Russell’s The Mask and Russell Mulcahy’s The Shadow (both 1994), Danny Cannon’s Judge Dredd and Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl (both 1995).

Splatterpunk author David J. Schow was brought in to rewrite The Crow’s initial screenplay by cyberpunk author John Shirley, hot-rodding O’Barr’s brooding source-material with a rip-roaring exploitation plot and a substantial supporting cast. Loveable Ernie Hudson plays the sympathetic cop busted down from homicide for caring too much, alongside thirteen-year-old Rochelle Davis as the gravel-voiced skater girl who has befriended Eric and Shelly.

While the character of Shelly (Sofia Shinas) remains the same sacrificial angel she was in the comic, the bad guys become a more manageable, more memorable crew of street soldiers, mobsters and weirdos, among them leering scuzzbag David Patrick Kelly (creepy but making less of an impression here than he did in The Warriors), inquisitive, sharp-suited henchman Tony Todd, and Bai Ling as an incestuous witch with a thing for eyeballs.

At the top of this twisted criminal tree is a marvellously growly Michael Wincott (surely up there with James Earl Jones as one of the greatest, gravelliest voices in movies). He plays ‘Top Dollar’, a silken-haired kingpin with the fashion sense and drug habit of a regency duellist; though we’re never quite sure how he manages to retain criminal control over the city by burning it to the ground every year on ‘Devil’s Night’.

Eric becomes a rock guitarist and gets a surname – the suitably Poe-ish ‘Draven’. He also receives the postmortem gift of psychomancy, which lets him glean painful shreds of backstory by touching items and people connected to his former life – a handy exposition-tool neatly wielded as an impromptu weapon during the movie’s church-tower showdown.

Set in a gothic Detroit closer to the realistic Gotham of Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022) than the art deco fairy-tale of the Burton movies, The Crow cleaves to the melancholy spirit of the source-comic, but has way less time for introspection. While the comic doesn’t welcome visitors, the movie rolls out the bloody-red carpet. This is a full-throttle revenge-o-rama that cordially invites the audience to relish the thrill of the hunt.

Proyas, then best known for his music videos, has a visceral feel for vibe and imagery, timing the action to a soundtrack full of prowling, pounding numbers like Burn by The Cure and Dead Souls by Nine Inch Nails. It’s when we share Eric’s righteous outrage that The Crow truly soars.

In a resoundingly gothic scene, Eric – having crawled out of his grave – returns to the ruins of the loft apartment in which he was murdered trying to protect his fiancée. Everything he touches electrifies him with flashbacks, memories jolting his dead body like Doctor Frankenstein turning up the juice on his creation. Fully charged with emotional voltage, Eric punches the mirror.

It’s alive! It’s alive! And, boy, is it pissed!

Eric proceeds to build himself a monster out of greasepaint and stage leathers as lightning supercharges the sky. He poses by the window, his face revealed. Death is coming and we can’t wait to see the look on his victims’ faces.

Momentum builds as Eric swoops among the rainswept tenements, pinning his prey with their own throwing knives (“Somebody stuck his blades in all his major organs in alphabetical order.”), sticking them full of morphine or launching them off a pier in their car marinated in gasoline and dynamite. The movie understands the eternal pleasure of watching the bully get what’s coming to ‘em. It relishes their looks of helplessness, their hysterical denials. (“You can’t be you! There ‘ain’t no coming back!”) With his vampire pallor, Joker’s grin and Terminator relentlessness, Eric is an embodiment of gothic terror, only this time the monster’s on our side and we get to share his sadistic power. It’s an experience as morally questionable as it is exhilarating.

Brandon Lee…

He lost 20 pounds for the role, trained relentlessly, learned to play guitar, helped choreograph the fight scenes, did most of his own stunts, got a say in the script (successfully petitioning to remove a stereotypical Asian bad guy), and everybody loved him. Having demonstrated his chops in vigorous low-rent actioners Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991) and Rapid Fire (1992), The Crow would almost certainly have made Lee a mainstream star. But thanks to an improperly prepared firearm, Lee was accidentally shot and killed on set, while filming his own murder scene and two weeks away from marrying his own fiancée, Eliza Hutton. He was 28 years old.

Production stalled, though Proyas and most of the crew wanted to shut down permanently. Michael Massee – the actor who unwittingly fired the gun – was left traumatised, and James O’Barr wished he’d never written the damn comic in the first place - he later donated most of his movie royalties to charity. Lee’s fiancée and mother insisted the movie be finished, but Paramount were refusing to pay for reshoots. Miramax eventually stepped in to cover the rewrites, body doubles8 and VFX required to finish the movie without its star.

What footage remains of Brandon Lee in The Crow just about qualifies as a complete performance and - mercifully - it’s terrific. His Eric Draven is a magnetic presence, lithe and gleeful, full of gloomy swagger, wholly deserving of his status as a goth icon, though a macabre and sorrowful epitaph to Lee’s life and career.

From a comic book inspired by tragedy to a movie that ended in tragedy, the real-life poignancy of The Crow has been ill-served by the sequels9 and Funkos and Call of Duty skins that followed. Michael Wincott’s Top Dollar offers a prescient monologue in the movie…

One wonders how James O’Barr must feel about all this, to have created a work so personal, so desperately authentic, and to watch that work run away from him and become a commercial entity, from therapy piece to meal ticket? And how much does this development shackle the creator to their trauma, to forever identify them with a work that represents the most painful years of their life?

The Crow’s original comic, its first movie adaptation, along with the tragedies that haunt them both, encourage moving on from trauma, not to fetishise it. Judging by the fan outcry over the 2024 Crow movie for even daring to be being made – let alone the mess it turned out to be – it seems audiences may feel the same way.

As any goth will tell you, a grave left undisturbed is all the more beautiful.

Stay weird.

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Check out some of my latest projects, Warhammer crime caper The Wraithbone Phoenix, acclaimed Warhammer Horror audio drama The Watcher in the Rain, and sword-and-sorcery comics collection Black Beth: Vengeance Be Thy Name with art by DaNi and Conan artist Blas Gallego and artist DaNi.

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