Spooky Isles: Mary Shelley and the Birth of Frankenstein, Part 5

Originally published on Spooky Isles, June 29th 2012, as the final instalment of a five-part series; available here.

By the time of her death, Mary Shelley was the respected author of seven novels, at least twenty-three short stories, and even some children’s literature. She was also an accomplished biographer, poet and editor of the works of her husband Percy, whose status as one of the major poets of the Romantic period was largely assured by her efforts. Despite the significance of works such as The Last Man (1826), however, her full importance as a writer is only just beginning to be understood: it’s interesting that, when her later work was more critically acclaimed at the time, it has mostly been forgotten, while Frankenstein’s reputation continues to grow.

It’s one of the most accomplished Gothic novels of the period, borrowing heavily from the conventions pioneered by her father among others, but at the same time its voice is unique. Mary’s own chequered personal life provides themes and preoccupations which are not articulated as strongly by anybody else – her insight into the traumas of childbirth and parenthood, as well as her own struggle to live up to the reputations of her famous parents, shine through in Victor Frankenstein’s struggles to create a human being and then to make a man. The suggestion that the two are not the same is one of the keynotes of the novel.

Science fiction as a genre in English largely owes its existence to Frankenstein, which is probably the earliest and one of the most influential examples. Even modern writers acknowledge its influence; elements of Shelley’s work have been in detected in the shocking twist of Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory and Stephen King’s It. Perhaps most interesting is that fact that science itself has been influenced by Mary’s thinking: the technology she envisioned became an inspiration for real innovations.

There are as many reasons for the novel’s perpetual success as there are readers, but the truth is that everyone who comes to Mary’s masterpiece now brings with them certain expectations. The image of Frankenstein’s Monster is burned into our cultural memory thanks to nearly two hundred years of adaptation for stage and screen and even modern music: think of Metallica’s ‘Some Kind of Monster’ or Alice Cooper’s ‘Feed My Frankenstein’. The name has entered everyday use, and we all have our own idea of what it means.

In fact, it’s often surprising to encounter the novel for the first time and notice how it differs from the image we’ve inherited. The ‘monster’ isn’t green. There are no bolts through his neck. There are no hysterical screams of “It’s alive!” and, most importantly, Frankenstein is the name of the scientist and not his creation. Still, that the creature and his maker are identified with each other would have pleased Mary: it supports her argument that corrupt political systems make victims of the empowered and disempowered alike.

It’s the politics that are often overlooked by Shelley readers, mostly thanks to the Victorian habit of domesticating women’s writing and relegating Mary’s work to the status of ‘romance’. In many ways, though, the political element is what holds the rest together: questions of responsibility, control and the abuse of power remain at Frankenstein’s core. Over the intervening years, it has continued to strike a chord in the wake of scientific as well as political progress – whether it’s the governing class or the scientist in the laboratory, in the end, Frankenstein explores the consequences of men playing God with the lives of others, and that theme never dies.

The Bubble Film: The Rise of Motion Capture

Originally published in The Bubble Film, February 17th 2012, available here.

This article nearly began as a standard complaint about Oscar nominations. Michael Fassbender overlooked for Shame, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ignored despite an exceptional score for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo... Then I realised that some of the snubs about which I felt most strongly shared a common thread. The Adventures of Tintin – a film I’ve mentioned before on The Bubble – received just one nomination, though admittedly for a well-deserving score by the legendary John Williams; Rise of the Planet of the Apes, last year’s ‘intelligent blockbuster it’s acceptable to like’, is nominated only in the Visual Effects category. Now, while it may be obvious that these are both special-effects heavy multiplex pieces, it’s perhaps less apparent that each of them uses a particular technique which the Academy – and the film industry in general – is proving reluctant to accept. Though it’s been in use for years, performance capture (or motion capture) is still struggling for the recognition it deserves.

Even those who haven’t heard the term before will probably be familiar with some of the products of the technique: they include Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong in the remake, The Polar Express, the young Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy and, of course, Avatar. They also include Tintin and Caesar, the principal ape in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to pretend Beowulf never happened). An actor wears specialised markers at key points on their body and face, allowing their movements to be sampled multiple times per second. This data is then mapped onto a 3D model, meaning that the actions of the performer are carried out by the digital figure. As a result, filmmakers can benefit from all of the subtleties of an actor’s contribution, inevitably lacking in a purely computer-generated character, without sacrificing that character’s visual appearance to the demands of costume and makeup.  

The big question is ultimately how to categorise performance capture. The film industry seems undecided as to whether it’s just a visual effect or a manner of representing a performance – and there really is a big difference. Just look at the difference in the two names given to the technique: ‘performance capture’ puts the emphasis on the whole contribution of an actor; ‘motion capture’ implies nothing more than a collection of actions converted into data. The latter is a huge underestimation of the performer’s significance – Andy Serkis, for example, researched primate behaviour extensively to play Kong, even further to prepare as Caesar, and every move those characters make belongs to him. He is directly responsible for the audience’s response to his character, just as he would be in a live action film. The same can be said of his work on Gollum, or Zoe Saldana’s performance in Avatar (easily the best thing in that film that wasn’t the visuals); they are characters who must be approached like any live action role. Given the added difficulty of acting in such a manner – without full costume or other accoutrements which help actors to get a sense of character, place and period, often without a complete set – considering performance capture simply as a form of animation seems insulting.

The other side of the coin is an entirely purist view of acting as a craft. Prejudice remains about the idea of a technical team mediating a performance, leaving an impure form of acting. Still, given the advances made in recent years, especially in facial performance capture, it’s becoming harder and harder to see where subtle gestures and movements could be lost, and when appearances have to be altered, it is to enhance the character without losing what the performer has given. Saldana would never have been able to play a 9’ tall, strangely shaped blue cat-person in a pure live action film owing to the fact that, while there are plenty of tricks to give the illusion of height, she isn’t blue and isn’t strangely-shaped. At the very least, she would have needed extensive makeup, and doesn’t that work on the same principle – altering an actor’s appearance to aid their performance? 

This brings me back to the Academy question. Tintin won the Animated Feature Golden Globe, but wasn’t even nominated for the Oscar, despite the fact that it beautifully blended performance capture and CGI to make a visually impressive and irresistibly fun adventure, which karate chops the inexplicably nominated Kung-Fu Panda 2 to pieces. Still, this can perhaps be put down to the timing of an autumn release and the success of Spielberg’s other piece of award-bait War Horse. More significant is the snubbing of Caesar – while there might be a case for saying that Serkis is let down by the film itself, the same has been said of Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady as well as many previous nominees, and it’s all too tempting to suspect that Hollywood’s uncertainty about performance capture explains why Rise was only deemed worthy of a Visual Effects nod.

I strongly suspect – indeed, genuinely hope – that Andy Serkis will win an Oscar one day for a performance capture role. He probably deserved one for Gollum. I fear, however, that like Alfred Hitchcock, he will be ignored by the Academy until the latest possible moment, when an honorary statue will be thrust into his hands. Here’s hoping that, as studios and filmmakers have increasingly embraced the storytelling possibilities offered by the technique, the opportunities it affords actors will be equally appreciated.

The Bubble Film: In Praise of Steven Spielberg

Originally published in The Bubble Film on October 28th 2011, available here.

On May 31^st 2002, a mature student graduated from California State University Long Beach. Dressed in cap and gown, he proceeded with his fellow graduates to receive a degree in film and electronic arts. As he walked onstage, the orchestra played the theme from an old-school adventure movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’d like to think that the student allowed himself a little smile at that moment: after dropping out of this course the first time, he’d gone on to make that film.

Indiana Jones is just one of the icons Steven Spielberg has given the world. There are others you’ll recognise too: an alien in the basket of a flying bicycle, unable to phone home; lower strings playing two bass notes as a dorsal fin breaks the surface of the sea; ripples in a glass of water while an ominous thud approaches. Popular culture is flooded with images, characters, and classic lines that have spilled over from Spielberg’s massively successful productions. That success, however, has contributed to a fashion among some critics asserting that box office success and artistic integrity can’t coexist, as if films that make money are automatically ‘bad’. The problem is that this notion crumbles under scrutiny. It’s been thirty-six years since Spielberg single-handedly cleared a beach with Jaws, but his career has repeatedly disproven the myth that commercially successful films can’t be ‘good’.

It’s possible that you’ve forgotten the extent of Spielberg’s oeuvre. A brief survey would include: Jaws, the four films in the Indiana Jones franchise, E.T: The Extra Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Hook, Schindler’s List, The Colour Purple, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Catch me if you Can and Jurassic Park. Most directors would be proud to have two or three of these on their filmography – even accepting that they sit uncomfortably alongside the likes of 1941 and Amistad. It’s nevertheless a remarkably high hit rate across a huge range of genres.

Significantly, however, there’s an even broader range of tone. There’s no denying that the Indiana Jones films are straight-up, old fashioned B-movie style adventures, and there is nothing wrong with that. Cinema as an art form was born out of the need for escapism and entertainment, and when the execution is as flawless as Raiders of the Lost Ark then that’s difficult to argue against. Saving Private Ryan is a far less comfortable watch by comparison, as anyone traumatised by the first act can testify. Jaws alternatively works like a slasher film at sea: given how water becomes frightening in the absence of a visible shark, I wonder how much Ridley Scott drew on Spielberg for his slasher in space, Alien.

Even within individual films, the combination of light and dark notes in the most family-orientated of tales is admirable. See the wrath of God as the Ark is opened in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the Frankenstein-esque undertones of genetic experimentation in Jurassic Park, and the terror of ageing and death which makes Neverland so appealing. Then think of “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” after the shark finally appears in Jaws, or of E.T., being drawn to a child dressed as an alien from the Star Wars trilogy. Those different elements are melded together seamlessly into powerfully affective cinema that stays with audiences of all ages long after they’ve left the multiplex.

I could write an entire article on the deeper aspects of Spielberg’s work – leave a comment below about the significance of childhood, light the blue touch paper and run – but any fan will say that what really make his films special are the details, the stand-out moments that everyone remembers. A crony targets Indiana with complicated sword gymnastics in Raiders of the Lost Ark: sighing, he pulls out a gun and shoots him. Empire of the Sun’s Jim, having lost everything he has ever loved, touches the Japanese Zero of which he has always dreamed and sparks fly in the background. Near the end of Jurassic Park, a real tyrannosaurus supplants a skeleton and roars: the banner that falls around it reads “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth”. These are the grace notes, the dramatic moments which don’t need to be there but have the effect of lifting an entire film. In short, they’re the moments of cinematic magic for which this medium was designed, and Spielberg understands them better than most of his contemporaries. No wonder he’s still one of the most influential creative forces in Hollywood.

Spielberg’s impact is almost as great when it comes to the films that he didn’t direct: he was an uncredited supervising editor on Taxi Driver; executive producer on the Back to the Future series, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Poltergeist, and The Goonies. His producing credits are even more extensive, from Memoirs of a Geisha to Letters from Iwo Jima. He spent five months working on the script for Rain Man. He personally offered a debutant by the name of Sam Mendes a promising script called American Beauty. IMDB counts over two hundred technical credits on a vast array of film and television (who can forget Band of Brothers?), as well as eighty-eight thanks credits, and three hundred and eleven appearances as himself. Cast your eye around the entire entertainment industry: he’s everywhere. Our cultural landscape would look very different without his astonishing contribution.

When he finally finished his degree, Spielberg’s faculty accepted Schindler’s List in place of one of his assignments. That fact sums up his whole career – for nearly forty years, everything he has done has had to be bigger and better than anything else. The critical elite love to accuse him of allowing box office returns to take precedence over cinematic artistry; in truth, it’s too easy to assume that mainstream success nullifies talent. Sometimes it proves founded (I’m looking at you, Michael Bay), but it often amounts to nothing more than snobbery, and Spielberg’s popularity inevitably makes him a prime target.

Spielberg has been quoted as saying that “I believe in showmanship”, and that’s certainly borne out by his career. Asked in an interview if he was ever torn between making commercial and artistic films, he said “All the time, but when you have a story that is very commercial and simple, you have to find the art. You have to take the other elements of the film and make them as good as possible, and doing that will uplift the film.” Admittedly, his resume is not flawless, but his ability to do exactly that – find the art in a crowd-pleasing story, providing those magical moments for which audiences have been going to the movies since they began – is what I believe justifies his place among the world’s great directors.

The Bubble Film: The Death of the American Horror Film, or, Why the World Needs Scream

Originally published in a very edited form in The Bubble Film, May 6th 2011, available here.

I’m watching a teenage girl stand in an average American high school. Alone in a lengthy corridor, she looks down to see a broad trail of red streaking the floor. Her eyes follow it to its source, a large, leaking load being dragged by something unseen. I’m trying to tell her she shouldn’t, but she follows it anyway, and finally realises what it is – her best friend, sealed in a bleeding body bag.

I’m 14, and I’m watching A Nightmare on Elm Street. This is the moment when I vow that I too will never sleep again.

To this day, Elm Street remains the scariest film I’ve ever seen – Wes Craven delivered a suspenseful masterpiece which unapologetically swims in the blood of its victims (ask Johnny Depp), but which terrifies because of the psychological depths it plumbs. Freddy Krueger, like an unconscious desire or repressed memory, will never stop invading your dreams, violating your own mind to bring about your slaughter. That’s why it’s so unique and inspired: a truly original cinematic milestone.

Of course, it spawned a ridiculous number of sequels, as did many of the other seminal slasher flicks – Hallowe’en, Friday 13^th and the like – none of which came close to the standard of the originals, but then few films managed to attain those heights at all. Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, House of Wax… by the early 1990s endless, repetitive, clichéd mass murders of articulate, hopelessly pretty white teenagers were so much the norm that the genre was old, bloated and ripe for parody. And then Craven gave us Scream.

If you haven’t yet seen the seminal horror film of the 1990s, go and do it now. It’s genuinely frightening, with plenty of blood and guts to go around, but more importantly playing on the idea that your own home isn’t safe – the violation of the safe place which makes Elm Street and Hallowe’en so effective. What really makes it interesting, though, is the metafictional element. It’s a parody of all the films that came before it. Ghostface, the guy with the white mask your mate probably wore last Hallowe’en, is a horror fan obeying the rules of the genre, but his victims all know them too: girls with big breasts realise that they shouldn’t run upstairs to hide (Jamie Lee Curtis in Hallowe’en, why?), sex, drugs and alcohol always make you a target, and you should never, ever, say “I’ll be right back”. Combine this with a healthy dose of social commentary – if caught, the killer insists that they can blame everything on the corrosive influence of the movies – and you have a vital, brutal and wickedly funny shot in the arm for Hollywood’s horror industry.

But I don’t think it worked. If Scream and its two sequels were intended to revive American horror, it’s hard to see how they succeeded. Eleven years have passed since (the admittedly inferior) Scream 3, and in that time the genre has become dominated by ‘torture porn’ such as Saw and Hostel, finding new and even more twisted ways to make victims suffer. Once the idea is established, there’s always enough profit to justify a sequel – and another, and another, and another until the law of diminishing returns kills a series – and running out of ideas is never a problem, because every film recycles the one before it. That’s how we ended up with seven Saw films, each almost identical to the others but with different (usually more horrific) traps. Then, of course, once a franchise is dead and buried or a film is almost forgotten, you can resurrect it with the remake, or ‘reboot’ if you’re planning on changing things around. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, The Amityville Horror, Hallowe’en, Friday 13^th, Dawn of the Dead, Black Christmas… the list is endless, and none of them were either warranted or worth the effort required to drag the dead from their graves. Worse, most are just not scary.

Nearly six years after I discovered Elm Street, I found myself in a cinema watching it again with an even prettier and more suicidally stupid cast. By the time I’d realised that the true massacre was the one visited upon the plot, script and entire final act of the original, I understood why this was happening. There are no scripts in circulation which can match their antecedents, so executives are just using the same plots again. If there are similar genre films that will also make money and fill release dates, then they’re fair game as well, especially if like House of Wax they provide an excuse to kill off Paris Hilton. Although world and even British cinema still offers some innovative and intelligent output, Hollywood, movie capital of the Western world, has run out of ideas. In short, it sounds like we need another Scream.

As it happens, it’s just arrived in cinemas. Scream 4 may not be the most original of concepts itself, but that happens to be the first point it acknowledges. It targets all of the conventions and formats of recent horror – remakes, unnecessary sequels and even the influence of its predecessors. Characters discuss films within the film (the Stab series, based on the events of the original Scream) to a point where someone actually says “it’s so meta”, and this time Ghostface is filming every death. Torture porn comes under fire, too; as one articulate, pretty white teen points out, Jigsaw may kill “creatively” but there’s “something real about a guy with a knife who just… snaps.” The film bears this out: the comedy-horror balance may lean towards the former, but there are still real scares to be had and it hasn’t toned down the gore in the slightest, even though it’s the first in the series to bear a 15 certificate. After years of Saw and Hostel we must be desensitised to a good old fashioned stabbing.

It won’t have the same impact as the original, but for an unnecessary sequel it’s still a breath of fresh air to a disheartened horror fan like me. There’ll never be another Nightmare on Elm Street, but I don’t see any replacements either. While I’d like to think I’m wrong, unless something fresh and exciting appears soon, I suspect the future is bleak for the American horror industry. Meanwhile, we’ll have to look back to answer Ghostface’s infamous question. So, what’s your favourite scary movie?

The Bubble Columns: Cameraman

Originally published in The Bubble Columns, available here.

‘Art’. It’s a nebulous term at the best of times. Nobody can agree on what it actually means, never mind what it does – or, for that matter, if it does (or should do) anything at all. Sticking with visual art (in itself quite a slippery concept) and leaving literature, music, film and the rest aside, there’s no better example than that thing we call ‘contemporary art’ – the realm of unmade beds, formaldehyde-treated sharks and everything on the Turner Prize shortlist which makes older members of my family repeatedly shout “What is that!?!” In a sphere where a blank canvas can be considered a finished article rather than a resource, it’s harder than ever to agree exactly what constitutes ‘art’.

Well, consider this: Wafaa Bilal, a professor of photography at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, is taking one photo a minute for the space of a year to be relayed back to an exhibition in Doha, Qatar, with his position tracked by GPS. This week, however, the project has encountered problems – because his body rejected one of the metal posts keeping the camera bolted into the back of his skull.

Bolted. Into the back of his skull.

When interviewed about the thinking behind 3rdi at the end of last year, Iraqi-born Bilal recounts his escape from the war-torn country in 1991 (how times change). Fleeing his home in Najaf as bombs fell around, he had no way of recording what he was leaving and no connection to his former life: at least this is one year of which he has a full and permanent record. However, he also intends to make a quite serious comment on the “surveillance society” in which we live, forever followed and recorded by CCTV to the point where our lives can barely be considered private any longer.

After doctors refused to perform the procedure on the grounds of excessive risk, Bilal had the camera attached at a body-piercing studio in Los Angeles. Despite treatment with steroids and anti-biotics, he was still experiencing pain and, as the risk of infection grew, it became necessary to remove the device. Hoping that the wound heals quickly so that the camera can be restored, he is maintaining the flow of images by leaving the camera attached by a strap around his neck.

I don’t think I really need to state that I think this man is insane, but I just did. We’ve all heard of people who have done extreme things in the name of art, but this goes a long way beyond Method acting or, for that matter, everything else I can think of.

One of the many, many embarrassing anecdotes that my friends pull out on occasion was directly instigated by contemporary art. During my second year, my housemates and I visited Yoko Ono’s exhibition at the Baltic in Newcastle, and amongst the exhibits was a large, transparent plastic maze. Like many other visitors, I filed in through the narrow gap in the wall – but promptly got lost. This was not helped by the fact that, the maze being transparent, it had not occurred to me that there may actually be a wall in the place where I was about to walk. Needless to say, when the whole gallery resounded with a crash, I shouted “OW!” and the couple of hundred serious art fans in the building all turned to stare at me in outrage as I desperately tried to escape, I learned my lesson. Cringe as I might, and laugh as I know you will (it’s fine – my housemates are still giggling over a year later), this basically sums up my relationship with art: getting drawn in is easy, but I can’t negotiate it with any dignity whatsoever.

Bilal’s current work must be problematic even to people far more artistically aware than I. On the one hand, he does raise some serious questions about the world in which we live; the importance of memory as well as the ways in which Big Brother watches us every second of the day. The dominance of CCTV everywhere we go is a form of socially mandated stalking, to be used to our cost as well as our benefit, endemic to the point where we may as well carry our own camera around with us. Still, the extent to which Bilal has gone is quite disturbing – the extent of the danger and the pain he has put himself through may liken him to many great artists, but they were all somehow mad too. Moreover, it’s difficult to reconcile his ideas about privacy and observation with the fact that, though his girlfriend hasn’t yet imposed any limits, his institution has. To protect the rights of students at the Tisch School of Arts, while Bilal is at work he has agreed to keep the lens cap on. It may be art, but it would seem that it isn’t above compromise.

The Bubble Film: The Rise and Fall of John Landis and the 80s Cult Classic

Originally published (in an edited form!) on The Bubble Film, available here.

What do you think of when you think of film in the 1980s? Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Top Gun? They’re all classics, of course. But the truth is that some of the most definitive and influential 80s movies didn’t bust quite as many blocks. There are, in fact, two directors without whom the 80s would not have been what they were. One was John Hughes, the late auteur of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off among others, who perfectly summed up teenage life for a generation. The other, much less well-known today, was John Landis.

Landis might not be the most renowned compared to the Spielbergs and Burtons of Hollywood, but he comes with a pedigree of his own. After various minor jobs on films such as One Upon a Time in the West he was offered his first directing job for Universal, the supremely immature, bad taste and yet hilarious campus comedy National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978).  From there began an impressive run of Hollywood success.

The 1980s were easily the peak of Landis’ career. The Blues Brothers (1980), which he co-wrote with Dan Aykroyd, features classic soul artists including Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles in acting roles in which they perform their own hits. It’s endlessly quotable: "It's 200 miles to Chicago; we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's night time, and we're wearing sunglasses.” “Hit it.” Part road movie, part buddy movie, part musical, it boasts a mixture of seemingly disparate elements held together by flawed but endearing characters- and Carrie Fisher trying to kill James Belushi by some of the most ridiculous means you’ve ever seen.

More than this, however, he redefined a genre with arguably his best film, comedy-horror An American Werewolf in London (1981), which boasted groundbreaking special effects- makeup impresario Rick Baker created some of his finest work in the transformation of David Naughton’s hapless tourist into a terrifying hound of hell. What often marks out Landis’ films is music: Landis’ sense of humour shines through. This particular soundtrack includes ‘Moondance’, ‘Blue Moon’, and ‘Bad Moon Rising’, which may raise a laugh with their all-too-appropriate titles but also fit perfectly in their context in the film. Gloriously bad geography aside (apparently you can pass out in the Yorkshire Dales and wake up in a London hospital), there are few films that have better exemplified the term “cult classic”. Just try to forget the fact that anyone made a sequel set in Paris: that’s frightening for all the wrong reasons.

There may have been misfires in the same period- you can probably guess from the title of Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) - but his star remained in the ascendancy with numerous more popular comedies throughout the decade. His impressive résumé as a director of adverts and TV continued to grow, American Werewolf having inspired Michael Jackson to hire him to write and direct the most famous music video ever, Thriller, in 1983. The 80s zeitgeist, however, eventually faded away, and so did Landis’ film career. The same is true of the kind of film which defined him.

Landis’ greatest films belong to that unique category of the cult classic. In this instance ‘cult’ doesn’t have to mean ‘low budget’- The Blues Brothers was the most expensive film Universal had ever made at the time- or even ‘unpopular’- though it could be argued that American Werewolf fits that profile better. It’s ultimately a title reserved for those slightly quirky, unconventional films which don’t perfectly fit into the mainstream of the industry. ‘Classic’, of course, is a matter of taste and the test of time, but I would argue that neither of these films has dated badly: they are clearly of their time, but not to an alienating extent. In fact, for modern audiences that’s part of their appeal. Many films popular at the time have since fallen into this category, such as John Hughes’ oeuvre, as times and the industry have changed.

That change has been demonstrated in the type of films being produced for the same market. Hughes’ teen comedies have been replaced with the gross-out humour of American Pie and Superbad, films which borrow more from Landis’ Animal House; but it’s hard to think of another film which occupies similar territory to The Blues Brothers and American Werewolf on the margins of the cinematic canon.

It may be this unique but limited success that Landis will hope to build on with his return to the big screen in Burke & Hare. For inspiration it takes the true story of the eponymous grave robbers in Victorian Edinburgh whose business is booming - until they start running out of fresh bodies to sell to the medical profession. Then they turn their hands to murder to meet demand. The production has been taken on by the new incarnation of Ealing Studios: its earlier form was responsible for The Ladykillers (1955) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), which Landis has always claimed as major influences (and significantly, both of which are comic expositions of murderers). The tone of Burke and Hare is intended to recapture the none-more-black humour of these films which also comes through in American Werewolf: the shocking things the protagonists do are always offset by snappy dialogue and an abiding affection which wants them to get away with it.

The impressive cast list should help him perfect this affection- Burke and Hare are played by Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis respectively (Serkis stepped in after David Tennant had to pull out), who must be among the most lovable actors Britain has produced. Hardly the Anthony Hopkins school of serial killers. The interesting thing is that although the subject matter is more reminiscent of American Werewolf, the endearing, hapless double act at the plot’s core ensures that the film plays more like The Blues Brothers, with moments of genuine farce into the bargain. See, for example, a scene where they break the back of a dead body to force it into a barrel and then roll, drop and chase it down the street until it crashes into a shop window. Perhaps this hybrid’s lack of success (gross to date is less than £2 million) is proof that the appetite for new films of this nature has faded; or maybe that the public objected to Isla Fisher’s Scottish (?) accent. Still the enduring appeal of its ancestors shows that there will always be a lasting nostalgia for the great 1980s cult classic- just so long as it isn’t Amazon Women on the Moon.