Barry Forshaw

Streaming services may be in the news for a variety of reasons (not all positive), but, thankfully, the physical disc — comfortably still the best way to collect favourite films – remains in rude health, with some cherishable current items and a host in the works. In our continuing (and diligent) quest to record as many Blu-ray commentaries as we can, Kim Newman and I have just contributed to a beautiful-looking new 4K disc of the best British gangster film ever made: Mike Hodges’ GET CARTER (with a matchless Michael Caine), coming in a splendid new Blu-ray from BFI. Kim and I made an effort to come up with insights that had not appeared previously; it will be up to you as to decide whether or not we have done so.

BFI also have a new acquisition that will please many Nigel Kneale admirers: his famous (and notorious) adaptation for television of George Orwell’s NINETEEEN EIGHTY-FOUR created a scandal in its day, but modern viewers have had to take it on trust as to how upsetting (or otherwise) the adaptation was, as it’s been very hard to see. The new Blu-ray from the company shows quite how wrong the censorious were – Kneale and Rudolph Cartier really do justice to Orwell’s vision (which looks presciently like the modern Russian regime!), and it’s fascinating to see Peter Cushing in the performance that made him such an attractive proposition for Hammer.

Another commentary that Kim Newman and I recorded was for Sergio Sollima’s tough Italian poliziotescho, REVOLVER, with Oliver Reed and Fabio Testi, coming from Eureka (see opposite). This new 4K restoration does full justice to another film that has been difficult to see for some time – and it’s hard to imagine it looking and sounding better than this. Still with crime thrillers, Kino Lorber has a new collection of vintage classics, FILM NOIR: THE DARK SIDE OF CINEMA VI, which collects a variety of hard-to-see thrillers by key directors.

The always-reliable Blu-ray company Arrow has a very tempting set with FASSBINDER VOLUME 1 containing some of the late German director’s most striking and innovative films, and another four Claude Chabrol films in a new set TWISTING THE KNIFE (I’m involved in the commentaries), while Eureka has THE MONSTER TRILOGY including work by the most accomplished of American science fiction directors of the 1950s, the great Jack Arnold.

It’s really difficult to come up with an eloquent description for the bizarre and eccentric HUMAN LANTERNS (from 88 Films); Chung Sin’s eye-popping martial arts extravaganza really plays like no other film ever made, and it’s been crying out for a restoration that does full justice to its lambent colours. It’s another film for which I’ve have done the booklet essay, and I performed a similar function for StudioCanal, who are issuing two Peter Cushing cinema films in which he plays British TV’s premier science fiction protagonist: DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS and DALEKS’ INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D. And more science fiction in George Pal’s CONQUEST OF SPACE (Imprint/ViaVision, with Kim and I on commentary duty). 

We’ve been working on a variety of new Blu-rays films directed by Britain’s premier cult horror director Pete Walker, in the company of Walker’s ex-screenwriter, the inimitable David MacGillivray (whose stories of the films’ making are customarily priceless). One Pete Walker film we did not cover is HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS (Fabulous Films), the director’s last film, with its copper-bottomed cast of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and John Carradine (not to mention the wonderful Sheila Keith, Walker’s go-to actress). Admittedly, more time is spent with a charmless Desi Arnaz, but there is enough of the legendary horror stars make the film worthwhile for horror fans.

Among the forthcoming 4K blu-ray sets, there will be a warm welcome for the ALFRED HITCHCOCK CLASSICS COLLECTION VOLUME 2 from Universal – perhaps not as welcome as that for volume 1, as the earlier set collected the most sought-after classics, including Psycho, Vertigo and The Birds. Volume 2, however, does have Hitchcock’s own favourite among his films, Shadow of a Doubt and it will be good to see his controversial late masterpiece Marnie in a spruced-up 4K edition. Other forthcoming titles of interest include CREATURES THE WORLD FORGOT from Powerhouse Indicator. The title of Don Chaffey’s film, of course, refers to human beings rather than the dinosaurs we might expect, but it’s still an accomplished piece of work. The same company also has a really interesting curiosity: THE BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY the work of cult director that has remained unseeable over the years; it will be very welcome in this new edition. And there has been a welcome announcement of a long missing title in 4K; new restoration of Jess Franco’s FACELESS from Severin: gruesome but compelling, and perhaps the most star-studded of Franco’s films. And did I mention NETWORK? Some very interesting things coming from the company, which I’ve worked on. It’s good to keep busy!

Twilight’s Last Screaming is the latest volume in my ongoing series of books of cinema metafiction. (Other titles in the sequence include England’s Screaming and Three Mothers, One Father.) A hybrid of criticism and fiction, the books are both an examination of genre cinema from the inside out, interweaving disparate characters and narratives from various films as a means of drawing connections and comparisons across decades of movies; and also a look at how genre films can provide an invaluable lens through which to perceive modern society in its entirety. So, much as England’s Screaming used British post-war horror movies to look at issues of class, culture, and country in the UK, and asked exactly what notions of Englishness might mean in an age of increasingly bitter political isolation, Twilight’s Last Screaming travels the various narrative highways and byways that have been mapped out across some eighty years of US cinema, searching for the American Dream promised to us by the movies but finding only the country’s dark heart.

In writing this series, I was heavily influenced by David Thomson’s seminal novel Suspects, and anyone familiar with that work will doubtless find echoes of it in these books, which similarly consist of a number of biographical accounts of movie characters, taking their stories far beyond the confines of the films that originally birthed them and interweaving them with other, entirely unconnected, cinematic narratives. But whereas Thomson takes film noir as his subject, I wanted to go even darker in tone, utilising horror cinema as a means of probing concepts of national identity and our collective unconscious. So many genre films can be already seen as a metaphorical exploration of the contemporary socio-political issues of their day that it seemed an entirely natural step to start connecting the theoretical dots between the various titles I selected, and in doing so, weaving blackly satirical shadow histories of the countries and societies they depicted.

That said, I also wanted to push my definition of ‘horror cinema’ far beyond its normal boundaries. Given that ‘horror’ is first and foremost an identifiable human emotion and not a genre, it seems to me that, as such, it can in fact be located in a number of wildly different areas of cinema. So in Twilight’s Last Screaming, you will find characters and references derived from not only more traditional horror films, but also noir/crime (Nightmare Alley, Detour, The Friends of Eddie Coyle), dark character dramas (Taxi Driver, Last Summer), political state of the nation movies (The Parallax View, The Candidate), and even black comedies (After Hours).

In writing Twilight’s Last Screaming, I hoped above all else to create a kind of American counter-epic, a summation of everything that these movies have meant to me and what they might yet mean for all of us. Some of these films are canonical classics, others are cult obscurities, but they all have a great deal to tell us about the increasingly parlous times we inhabit.

Pre-orders are available now:

https://blackshuckbooks.co.uk/tls/