"All that we see, or seem... is but a dream within a dream."
Amidst the myriad video tapes I owned as a child that contained something to the effect of a werewolf - for I was most obsessed as a youth with the transformation 'twixt human being and animal or monster - was, it may surprise some, the Cannon Video release of said dread studio of Golan and Globus' 1988 adaptation of Red Riding Hood. In defence of my younger self, I'd picked up the tape having confused it with half-remembered memories of Neil Jordan's awesome 1984 cinematic take on Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves. Anyway, this tape was watched once or twice in disappointment and eventually lost to the ravages of moving house and carrier bags full of old and unloved books and videos going to charity shops. It was years later, when trying to look up this artefact (did it really star Isabella Rosselini and Craig T. Nelson, or had I imagined it?) that some confusion led me to another 1980s string of fairy tale adaptations produced around the same time as Menahem and Yoram's efforts - this time spearheaded by the late Shelley Duvall (either the embattled Wendy Torrance of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, or Olive Oyl incarnate from Robert Altman's Popeye, depending on whichever 1980 production by a Hollywood maverick one might have in mind).
Henry James' masterful tale and enigmatic tale of psychological horror The Turn of the Screw had been adapted a number of times for the screen - both silver and small - by 1989, as well as a two-act chamber opera composed by Benjamin Britten (which featured a young David Hemmings singing treble as young Miles, long before his roles in Antonioni's Blow-Up and Argento's Profondo Rosso). In addition to Jack Clayton's astounding 1961 adaptation The Innocents - one of the best genre movies ever made, in my opinion - versions of, and variations on, the story that I have seen include Michael Winner's... erm... interesting 1971 prequel The Nightcomers, Dan Curtis' titular 1974 television adaptation with a screenplay by genre stalwart William F. Nolan (a pretty decent version despite things having to be toned down for the '70s US small screen, which has Megs Jenkins reprising her role as housekeeper Mrs Grose from The Innocents as well as featuring an all too brief appearance from the lovely Kathryn Leigh Scott as the spectral Miss Jessel), and a 2009 BBC production penned by Sandy Welch (Mrs Stephen Poliakoff) which I mainly remember for starring Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery and having some pretty steamy dream sequences to illustrate the governess' mounting sexual frustration. Frankly, I found the prim and buttoned-up Deborah Kerr much sexier, but that's probably down to my fetish for Victorian female clothing. I blame watching Jemma Redgrave in Bramwell during my teens.
Directed by Graeme Clifford and airing August 12 1989, the Nightmare Classics rendition of The Turn of the Screw stars Amy Irving as the anonymous governess who is retained by David Hemmings' (a nice piece of casting) louche and slightly dissolute - not an acting stretch for Hemmings, one thinks - uncle, named Mr Harley in this version, to take charge of his young wards Flora (Irina Cashen) and Miles (Balthazar Getty, years before he banged Sienna Miller up the wrong 'un [I'm just jealous, probably - ah, but of whom, dear reader, of whom?]) during a luncheon meet bristling with innuendo as the unnamed minister's daughter-cum-aspiring duenna threads her serviette through the napkin ring very suggestively whilst claiming that "God is Presbyterian, and my father can prove it".
Taking up the position (steady there: I mean the job position of governess), our intrepid ingenue is escorted to the stately Bly manor to be greeted by friendly housekeeper Mrs Grose (mis-spelled 'Mrs Gross' in the credits, played by the not mis-spelled Micole Mercurio with a very odd accent; is she meant to be Irish? South African?) and introduced to little Flora (Cashen) and the other household staff including John the gardener (Olaf Pooley, whose long life - he passed away in 2015 at the grand old age of 101 - and career included everything from Beastmaster III and Star Trek: Voyager [both postdating this] to 1948's Penny and the Pownall Case, but is best known to myself and perhaps others as Primord-producing Professor Stahlman in Doctor Who's 'Inferno'). Young Miles (Getty, the part - like in the 1974 Dan Curtis rendition - having been aged up slightly to a teenager presumably to slightly lessen the 'ick' factor of the lad's sexualised interactions with a grown woman and thereby in your correspondent's humble opinion missing the point that horror should make we the viewers feel uncomfortable) arrives home from school, immediately hitting on the governess with equine innuendo and other horse-based horseplay that gets her all of a fluster. He is, of course, under the malign influence of the ghost of Peter Quint (played here by Michael Harris as a poncier looking version of Quint than that essayed by Peter Wyngarde or James Laurenson, his long hair giving him the appearance of a cross between Miles O' Keefe and Riff Raff) as Flora is possessed by the spectral Miss Jessel (Cameron Milzer, whose resume includes appearances in gems like Cherry 2000 and Troma's Chopper Chicks in Zombietown); these deceased previous household staffers (now, perhaps, household stiffers -both in that they're dead and in the sexual tension they're bringing from beyond the grave) puppeteering the precocious pubescents after being activated by their adolescent scent; the governess all the while spinning out of control as her barely-repressed neuroses come spurting to the surface.
Irving gives us a good central performance (she's no Deborah Kerr, but who is?) and the locations, sets and costumes are up to snuff; my overall feeling is that if this is the only version of The Turn of the Screw you've seen it's absolutely fine, but certainly suffers if compared to other adaptations. The most baffling part if when the lank-haired Quint's spectre appears to slide in and out of shot as though on wheels, like the thing behind the restaurant in Mulholland Drive. Oh, and RIP David Lynch.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Sapphic vampiric classic Carmilla was first published in 1872, two and a half decades before Bram Stoker's Dracula - upon which is was undoubtedly a massive influence - and had seen numerous screen iterations including but not limited to Carl Dreyer's eerie 1932 meditation Vampyr, Roger Vadim's sumptuous 1960 Blood and Roses, Hammer's unabashedly exploitative 1970 romp The Vampire Lovers (and it's two follow-up continuations of the 'Karnstein Trilogy'), the innovative 2014-2016 Natasha Negovanlis-starring web series which clocked up 121 episodes and a 2017 spin-off movie, and the crushingly disappointing 2019 Emily Harris film starring Devrim Lingnau and Jessica Raine.
Helmed by Gabrielle Beaumont - a cousin of Daphne du Maurier and director of the 1980 chiller The Godsend (less auspiciously, she would go on to direct 1996's turgid trequel Beastmaster III: The Eye of Braxus, featuring her husband Olaf Pooley) - the Nightmare Classics adaptation of Carmilla aired on the 10th of September 1989. Uprooting Le Fanu's tale from its mittel-European mise en scene of the Austrian duchy of Styria and transplanting it to the prairies of antebellum America, the screenplay by Jonathan Furst (his - ahem - 'furst' and only screen credit, which may or may not be a bad sign) gives us the story of the lonely, cossetted and closeted - in the sense that she's kept at home and away from the big wide world, as well as... look it's Carmilla, you know - Marie (Ione Skye, from mostly-forgotten but quite good as I dimly recall mediaeval drama Covington Cross, and Dream for an Insomniac) who lives in a big old house with her doting but perhaps overbearing father Leo (Roy Dotrice, real life father of Betty from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and also Father from that TV Beauty and the Beast that starred Hellboy and Sarah Connor). All alone in the word and friendless aside from her dad and the household servants including the faithful Miss Hodgett (Armelia McQueen) after her mother did an Albertine and went disparue, Marie's pretty but dull existence is injected with some blood - which, as we all know, is the life - when a carriage crashes near the homestead one dark night with a sole survivor.
The mysterious, pale, dark-eyed beauty Carmilla (the sorely underutilised Meg Tilly, the sister of the Bride of Chucky herself Jennifer) is taken in by the household to be nursed back to health and the initially frail young woman seems to suddenly begin recuperating after Marie experiences a night terror in which she imagines her black cat is crawling up her bed towards her only to awaken to find Carmilla hovering over her and a newly acquired gaping wound in her throat. Hmmm... a cat, eh? Surely 'pussy' wasn't the euphemism that we know and love now back in the 1870s, was it? Am I overthinking the Sapphism here? Is that even possible? In any event, Marie and her new houseguest begin to become extremely close - almost inextricable, even. All the while the local doctor (John Doolittle; appropriate name for a doctor whether he talks to the animals or not) and Inspector Amos (Peter Vincent, Vampire Killer himself Roddy McDowall ladies and gents) are concerned about the increasing number of local deaths, including that of a beggar boy who was sleeping on the property, found with similar throat wounds and drained of blood and blamed on a plague that has crawled from the South.
As the beguiling vampiress inveigles her way into the heaving bosom of the household, dispatching the suspicious servant Hodgett along the way, the Inspector calls her on her shit by recognising the telltale signs of the undead and devising a test by laying the staircase with dog roses that she is unable to pass (no shame, Cam, I don't like Hampshire either) but the trio of not so fearless wannabe vampire slayers are swiftly stymied by the enraptured Marie's insistence that her new found friend (or fiend) stay and remain unmolested - not that the same can be said for Marie during Carmilla's nocturnal nibbles. The hand having been played and lost, the Inspector is found in the rays of early morn with the stake he intended for Ms Karnstein shoved up in his cranium and being insane in his brain, and both girls vanished from the house to the local graveyard to find a tomb with a view of their own. When Leo breaks into the crypt intent on staking Carmilla and rescuing his daughter from her thrall, he finds in one coffin his vampirised absent wife (Ely Pouget, who would be in further wampyr trouble two years later when she took over the role of Maggie Evans in the rebooted '90s Dark Shadows, though with respect she's no Kathryn Leigh Scott), thus explaining Carmilla's intimate knowledge of their family, whom he has to stake.
The final coup de grace upon our anti-heroine, though, is dealt by Marie who impales her erstwhile lover-cum-parasite, who flashes negative before vanishing as though exterminated by a Dalek. Poor Carmilla; all she wanted was a girlfriend who'd let her feast upon her heart's blood. What is unreasonable about that proposal?
Next up on the roster on October the 29th of '89 was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, yet another in the long line of incarnations of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 tale of the duality of man and the raging beast that dwells within even the most patrician of Victorian physicians - a couple of which we've touched on here - directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg from a script by future Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. Some anticipation-building hype going on for me there, as B5 is one of my top television shows of all time. Let's hope we're in for a Varney-esque feast of blood, rather than a feast of anticipointment. Yes, that's a word.
Anthony Andrews is our double-faced (well, not so much: this is one of those adaptations where they go for minimal make-up and rely on the acting to distinguish the two personas: personal preference I know, but some actors like Spencer Tracy can nail it it and some just... can't) lead, coming in as a bespectacled Jekyll brought to a high society party by his associate Utterson (Gregory Cooke) held by eminent royal physician Dr Laymon (George Murdock, the very voice of the 'God' of Sha-Ka-Ree in the superlative [don't laugh, I mean it] Star Trek V, and so every time he opened his mouth to speak I expected a "YOOOOOUUUUU!!!") where he shyly avoids the respectable advances of Laymon's lovely daughter Rebecca (Laura Dern, herself a scion of respectable family as well as being Ellie bloody Sattler; and to those of us who might have had an early burst of masturbation to a certain scene in it the eponymous - nay titular - Rambling Rose). Jekyll leaves the party after being goaded by the boorish Dr Morley (Nicholas Guest, brother of Spinal Tap and the House of Lords' Christopher Guest) who with his monocle I mistook for Mr Enfield at first, expecting characters from the actual story as I am foolishly wont to do.
Jekyll decides to carry out his experiment in separating the 'good' and 'evil' sides of human nature by testing his theoretical formula on himself of course, this time a suspicious fizzy purple concoction. This particular Cheeky Vimto has a slightly more drastic effect than the usual, after the regulation collapse on the floor he gets up a very, very slightly different man and goes out on the prowl adopting the moniker of Edward Hyde. The differentiation betwixt Jekyll and Hyde as 'achieved' by Andrews removing the glasses, adopting a rigid straight-backed posture pitching his voice up a bit. This combined with his hair being darkened and plastered down and pallid make applied gives the presumably unintentionally comic effect of a ventriloquist's doll like Lord Charles possessed by Harry Lloyd's Baines/Son of Mine from Doctor Who's 'Human Nature' two-parter going out on the razz to whore and kick the shit out of people. Accosting Utterson - who, ludicrously Lois Lane-like, doesn't recognise the man he works alongside every day without his glasses and with his hair a bit different - in a disreputable pub, Hyde indulges Jekyll's repressed desires by beating up the hated Morley and stealing his lady of the night. He also goes round to Laymon's house in the middle of the night, knocking up the whole household and stating his intentions to knock up his daughter before taking up his cane and using the elderly gent as a pinata, making Laymon a sort of cross between Dr Lanyon and Sir Danvers Carew, I guess.
The whole piece is very decently made with nice period sets and costumes, and most of the cast - even those gamely struggling with English accents - are fine, but alas it's all let down by the performance of Andrews himself who I can't decide is just hopelessly miscast or taking the piss with an intentionally ludicrous performance. Perhaps both. The best thing in it is probably Laura Dern who deserves more screen time than she gets, even if her vocal performance eerily reminded me of Winona Ryder in Coppola's Dracula; it's the American actress doing prim Victorian English I suppose, but when the stand-out of the piece is constantly reminding me of a film I enjoyed vastly more (and that film is far from my favourite Dracula - it's certainly more Coppola's than Bram Stoker's) that's not a high recommendation. It's far from terrible, but there are much better Jekyll & Hydes out there.
Based on the 1897 short story by the mysteriously vanishing author Ambrose Bierce - originator of both Hastur and the city of Carcosa, batons that were taken up and run with by Robert W. Chambers (and in the case of Hastur the Unspeakable, elevated into the pantheon of the Great Old Ones by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth) - The Eyes of the Panther was directed by Noel Black and scripted by Art Wallace and aired November 26th 1989. Wallace not only was the original writer and uncredited co-creator of one of my other favourite TV series of all time, the Gothic horror soap opera Dark Shadows, but wrote two great (IMO, obvs.) episodes of Classic Star Trek in 'Obsession' and 'Assignment: Earth'. Seriously, I am somewhat obsessed with the latter (I know, it would be a nicer symmetry to have an 'Obsession' obsession, but there we go) as I've always seen it as what a '60s American version of Doctor Who would look like: we have our mysterious lead with unknown outer space origins (Gary Seven) on a crusade to help ensure humanity's future in spite of itself with the aid of his wits, his curiously sonic screwdriver-esque device and his perky contemporary Earthgirl assistant.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. We kick off our proceedings in the Old West - or rather the Midwest, which I suppose was the Westernmost reaches of the United States before further expansion and the assumed divine right of Manifest Destiny led to it stabbing westward - where we meet an elderly homesteader named Jenner Brading (the Soul Man himself C. Thomas Howell - formerly Jim Halsey in Eric Red's 1986 classic The Hitcher, latterly slumming in stuff like Torchwood's worst season and the Asylum's 2005 mockbuster version of The War of the Worlds - in old age prosthtics that cause him to resemble Salieri from Amadeus's Scooby-Dum style hayseed Hicksville cousin) who takes in harried traveller Malcolm Barrington (John Stockwell, of '80s genre classics Christine and My Science Project). Barrington has been pursued by a panther - an actual Africa black panther, which seems odd for the American prairies; surely a puma would have been more fitting (alas Daphne Zuniga was too young at this point to warrant a 'cougar' joke but I'm noting the intent here anyway) - and claims to have glimpsed a beautiful dark-haired lacy pleading for help. The grouchy Jenner is prompted, like Heathcliff talking to Lockwood (being a Brontesaurus, I just had to get a reference in there), to relate the story of his lost love - replete with scratching at windows.
He relates a tale of some seventy years previous, when Charlie Marlowe (Jeb Brown) and his wife Sarah (Ruth De Sosa, Indiana Jones's mother Anna opposite latter-day Elendil Lloyd Owen's Henry Jones Sr.) were scratching out a living from the Ohio land when the heavily pregnant Sarah is startled by a black panther appearing at her bedroom window one night, leading to her clutching her infant son so tightly that the mite expires. After giving birth to a baby daughter, the severely traumatised woman can only mutter about the eyes of the panther before eventually expiring, leaving her widower - I've always found that an odd word, "widower"; it sounds like they've done it deliberately - alone to raise young Irene who was born in tragic, nay cursed, circumstances. Skipping ahead in time, the wandering Charlie and his now all grown up girl (the lovely Daphne Zuniga, who in such films as The Fly II, Spaceballs and especially Last Rites informed my youth [I'm not going to say first wank, as that was either Susanna Hoffs or Kylie Minogue, or maybe Smurfette, but definitely an early one]) arrive in the township of Ellswood (wasn't he a Blues brother?) where the young Jenner (Howell sans make-up) quite understandably falls head over heels for the beguiling Irene. Befuddled by the passionate (like Masefield's Sylvia Daisy she's a pouncer) young woman's professions of reciprocal love but steadfast refusal to marry on the grounds that she's insane, as well as her doting father's practice of keeping her locked up at night, Jenner soon discovers his beloved's carnivorous feline proclivities due to some sort of transmigration of the soul - perhaps inspired by Rudyard Kipling's 'The Mark of the Beast', written seven years before Bierce's tale - from the big feline into her little foetus.
Bierce's story was the inspiration for writer and film producer Val Lewton's 1930 short story 'The Bagheeta' (not to be confused with Rudyard Kipling's Bagheera), which Lewton would draw on twelve years later for his seminal movie Cat People - note the similarity of the names Irene and Irena, two beautiful but doomed were-panthers hoping for redemption through the love of a puny human male. In addition to the Nightmare Classics version, the story would be adapted once again in 2007 as a twenty-three minute short directed by Michael Barton and starring Melissa Collins as Irene; these remain as of the time of writing the only screen versions of the story, as opposed to the multifarious adaptations of the others in the series.
Altogether, Nightmare Classics stands as a sadly short-lived series (certainly shorter than Duvall's more successful previous anthologised adaptations with Faerie Tale Theatre running to 27 instalments and the more folklore-based Tall Tales & Legends going for nine) but certainly an interesting one that hopefully exposed audiences to less adapted genre fare - certainly 'Eyes of the Panther' qualifies in that department - as well as the more familiar such as Jekyll and Hyde. If, like the Classic Collection Horror Stories book I got for Christmas as a child (I can still picture the rather cool illustration of Dracula on its purple hardback cover), it bewitched and entranced its audience enough to entice them to further explore the genre then it's a job well done and the four episodes can stand for themselves as adaptations of some of the classics of horror.
