Having recently read Phil Baker’s The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, I was moved to revisit the Hammer film adaptations of Wheatley’s novels – The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) and To The Devil A Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976), both of which ‘starred’ pseudo-aristocratic plonker Christopher Lee. The first flick is an ultra-conservative thriller with some occult trimmings that looks absolutely pathetic when compared to what was happening in horror cinema at the time. It is of the same vintage as early post-modern classics like Succubus (Jess Franco, 1967), Rape of the Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1968) and Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968), but looks positively antediluvian in comparison.
With To The Devil A Daughter, Hammer finally caught up with what had been happening cinematically in the late-sixties; they may have been a decade behind the times but the result was still a groove sensation! Just before giving up the ghost, Hammer had finally made a film that rather than being plot driven was based around atmospherics and didn’t rely on a stupid climactic end scene to ‘please’ its audience. There was even some full frontal nudity, albeit very brief . Being arch-reactionaries (and literal Tory party supporters from over-privileged backgrounds) with absolutely no sense of taste or style, Lee and his chum Wheatley loved The Devil Rides Out and disliked the infinitely superior To The Devil A Daughter (which took enormous and much needed liberties with the half-baked novel on which it was based).
Lee’s contributions to the featurette accompanying To The Devil A Daughter in The Hammer Collection DVD box set, reveal him to be an unbelievably vain and pretentious twit. He has a movie career simply because he is tall and can look menacing (he is chiefly famous for his ‘non-human’ roles as Frankenstein’s monster and the ‘undead’ Dracula), few people beyond Lee himself could possibly suffer from the delusion that he can act. Despite this, he witters on about how his Wheatley movies fulfilled the serious function of warning the public of the dangers of the occult. Lee himself is enough of a half-wit to take ‘black magic’ and related hucksterism seriously. It should go without saying that the main danger ‘black magicians’ pose to the wider public is that their attempts to part fools from their money tend to be so ham-fisted that they sometimes make people complacent about the ability of more sophisticated con artists to pull a fast one.
Having had the misfortune to see Lee’s brainless performance on the featurette accompanying one of his best films (although it isn’t quite up there with Beat Girl, directed by Edmond T. Gréville in 1959), I found myself thinking that if this B-movie blockhead really wishes to distance himself from the villains he’s portrayed onscreen, then he really ought to stop behaving like one of the ‘undead’. I therefore leave him and you with the following question to ponder: Christopher Lee, why aren’t you dead? Isn’t it about time he did himself the huge favour of popping his clogs?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Christopher Lee, Dennis Wheatley, George A. Romero, Hammer Films, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Night of the Living Dead, Peter Sykes, Phil Baker, Rape of the Vampire, Succubus, Terence Fisher, The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, The Hammer Collection, To The Devil A Daughter
If you are able to admit to yourself that you were wrong then you will at least have learnt something. When a joke about someone is made in public it is not usually prefaced by an address to the person the joke is about telling them what is about to happen – but it is still in public not behind their back. And while I ignored it in relation to your last comment, since you’ve come back I might as well point out that you not only need to learn to think, you also need to learn to type properly – just look at all the typos in your two short moronic comments!
and what about your typos? as in when a joke about someone is made it public? should that not read is made in public? anyway,im new to all this but i guess your o.k.trippy. on a serious note though, what is this site all about as id like to come on it more.
This is a site about understanding the relationship between the singular and the plural, or the one and the many….
All human cultures in some way have to deal with accounting for the myriad of objects and phenomena surrounding them. We live in a world of infinite objects that are constantly changing, yet even in this imposing world of objects and change, there seems to be an underlying unity and stability. For instance, every human being begins as an infant and then grows into an adult. Every adult is a different object than they were as an infant—in fact, they are unrecognizable as being the same object. Yet we recognize that the are the same object , that something has remained the same even though the infant has changed into an object that is nowhere close to its original state. Likewise a corpse is nothing like the original living human being, but we still recognize that something has remained constant. We can see the same stability and constancy even across objects. While the world is full of trees, there is still some constancy and stability to “treeness” which never seems to change.
This observation of the world of phenomena leads many cultures to believe that the infinity of things and their changes can ultimately be related back to a single object, material, or idea. The problem of finding the one thing that lies behind all things in the universe is called the problem of the one and the many. Basically stated, the problem of the one and the many begins from the assumption that the universe is one thing. Because it is one thing, there must be one, unifying aspect behind everything. This aspect could be material, such as water, or air, or atoms. It could be an idea, such as number, or “mind.” It could be divine, such as the Christian concept of God or the Chinese concept of Shang-ti, the “Lord on High.” The problem, of course, is figuring out what that one, unifying idea is.
Philosophy in the Western world begins with this question; the earliest Greek philosophers mainly concerned themselves with this question. As a result, the problem of the one and the many still dominates Western concepts of the universe, including modern physics, which has set for itself the goal of finding the theory that will “unify” (unify means “make into one thing”) the laws of physics.
In China, the one thing that unifies the universe is the tai chi, or Great Ultimate. The Great Ultimate is divided into two opposite forces (yang and yin) and five material agents. Beyond this, the Great Ultimate is undefined. In Taoism, the “way” or Tao constitutes this Great Ultimate; it is equally undefined.
hi trippy. thanks 4 reply,i feel you are a learned man and for me this is good as iam a deep thinker also. please tell me, you state a better life through chemistry? im wondering if you mean drugs?
Yes in as much as psychedelic drugs are a metaphor for expanded consciousness but they are not the only means to it. I’m happy enough with people using drugs for enjoyment too…. but they can become a problem if they are used to blot out pain.
for many years i used to excess the liquid drug alcohol for that reason,to blot out past events. then i came to know that this practice made my inner feelings far worse. im 50 yrs old now and dont drink much even though life can feel pretty negative to me at times,and i wonder what you could tell me about this? and maybe tell me of alternatives to alcohol that would lift me without the harmful effects of alcohol. forgive me,but i read about your mother,such a shame, i too know the feeling of loss, so i guess that you have had your share of pain too,but like me,your still here. regards, eddie.
We live in a shitty society that encourages people to behave in unhealthy ways…. So most of what happens to most people isn’t their fault. Guilt is pointless, if you’ve done something out of order to other people you do what you can to sort it out and put it right… beyond particularly vicious behaviour, no point blaming ourselves for anything….Still at the end of the day we have to sort out our own problems ourselves given the social structures around us (while bearing in mind we’re not to blame for them and should be struggling to change them).
I’d say if you are feeling negative/depressed the first thing to try is regular exercise if you don’t do that already, like a gym, swimming, cycling, If you haven’t exercised for a while then you should get some help from instructors who you’ll find at any gym, and of course exercise classes can be good. You may be able to get this for free on the NHS if you are in the UK (but I’m wary of doctors myself, and would be careful of what I said to them, but I don’t think it should be that hard to get a GP to prescribe you exercise at a gym for free if you are on a low income). You will feel mentally bad if you don’t feel physically good (obviously within whatever constraints you have in terms of being able bodied or health issues). If that doesn’t sort things, then you need to go deeper and there are a lot of ways to do that. I reviewed a book by Chris Gray on this blog that goes into one way of doing that:
http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?p=2409
But that isn’t the only way, seems to me like a good one for those coming from similar places to Gray….