Category: Writing

The Charm of Evil

by David L Rattiganin Film, Horror, WritingLeave a Comment on The Charm of Evil

[Originally published on diaboliquemagazine.com in 2011]

And it was at that age that poetry arrived in search of me.

Pablo Neruda

I was seven when horror came in search of me. I’d seen it from afar: Garish comic-strip representations of Dracula on Valentine picture postcards, glimpses of men standing around in misty graveyards in late-night films I wasn’t allowed to watch. But when I was seven, my father gave me a book, the Ladybird Horror Classic abridgment of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I devoured its words and handsome illustrations eagerly, and from that moment forward, horror had me firmly in its clutch. Those pocket-sized hardbacks of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy were my initiation into the realms of the genre.

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The Horror of It All: The Dynamics of Class and Power in the Hammer Gothics

by David L Rattiganin Film, Horror, WritingLeave a Comment on The Horror of It All: The Dynamics of Class and Power in the Hammer Gothics

This was originally published by Albion magazine (online) in 2005, and represents one of my earliest published pieces of writing, as well as my first on Hammer Films, if I recall rightly.

The Hammer House of Horror, the makers of quintessentially British gothic horror films, was dominated by two dashing aristocrats: Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula. Their terror was inflicted on lower-class rustic communities, but their heroic pursuers – as well as the particular pool of victims we care most about – were middle-class, treading a noble path midway between the ignorance and ignobility of the working classes and the unfettered craving for power of the upper class. These dynamics provided the general contours for Hammer time and again throughout the studio’s truly “classic” period, which I shall (to the infuriation of some aficionados, I am sure) place roughly from The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 to Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1969.

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Dickensian Gothic: A Christmas Carol (2011)

by David L Rattiganin Film, Horror, Writing1 Comment on Dickensian Gothic: A Christmas Carol (2011)

The year was 1843, and English literature had witnessed the zenith of early Gothic horror in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). On the other side of the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe was reimagining the genre in such tales as The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) and The Tell-Tale Heart (1843). And in Britain, Charles Dickens was appropriating the Gothic tradition for his own stories; the conventions of the Gothic were to loom particularly large in late works such as Bleak House (1852) and Great Expectations (1860), but it was in a series of Christmas stories that he first explored the genre fully. The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) are now forgotten by popular culture, but the first, A Christmas Carol (1843), continues to be read by millions and has been the subject of dozens of film adaptations.

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Interview with Jonathan Harvey, Author of Beautiful Thing

by David L Rattiganin Film, LGBT, Theatre, WritingLeave a Comment on Interview with Jonathan Harvey, Author of Beautiful Thing

I’m perched on the toilet, paperback in hand. I don’t have an audience – as far as I’m aware – but if I did, they would see the widest smile ever break across my face. I’ve just reached the end of Jonathan Harvey’s 1993 play Beautiful Thing, the Liverpool-born writer’s sweet tale of teenage love in inner-city London.

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