Learning on ScreenBritish Horror Rises
British Horror Rises from the Tomb: In the UK there has been a major resurgence in the production of horror movies in the last few years. Jonathan Rigby, author English Gothic – Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015, chronicles the recent developments of an undying genre.
About the Author: Jonathan Rigby is an English actor and film historian whose publications include: English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (2000), Christopher Lee: The Authorised Screen History (2001), Roxy Music: Both Ends Burning (2005), American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema (2007) and Studies in Terror: Landmarks of Horror Cinema (2011). He is also an Associate Research Fellow of the Cinema and Television History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, and has contributed commentaries to the DVD/Blu-ray releases of a number of horror films. In 2010 he was series consultant on the three-part BBC Four documentary A History of Horror and two years later was programme consultant on the feature-length follow-up, Horror Europa.
Something extraordinary happened in 2002. A corpse whose last really noticeable galvanic twitch occurred in 1987 sprang suddenly into a garish and adrenalin-fuelled afterlife. The corpse was that of the British horror film, the previous twitch had been the sadomasochist fever-dream Hellraiser, and the new blood flowed in copious quantities from such 2002 releases as Dog Soldiers and 28 Days Later.
This was an intriguing development on several levels, but especially so for someone who, just two years before, had published a history of British horror cinema and pronounced the form more or less dead. My book, English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, first came out in April 2000, a time when such a grim conclusion seemed inescapable. The halcyon period of British horror, a roughly twenty-year period that began in the mid-1950s, was long gone, and the flatlining of the genre throughout the 1990s had only been interrupted by such scattered, and to be honest not very exciting, blips as Darklands (1996) and The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998).
Of course, as all genre fans know there are few better ways of wishing something back to life than by pronouncing it dead. After all, in horror there’s always the strong possibility that something might return as an undead. And so it proved with British horror. Like the apparently defunct but remarkably persistent killer in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the home-grown horror film suddenly sat up in the rear of the frame, somewhat out of focus at this early stage but more than willing to give the viewer’s peripheral vision a frisson or two prior to embarking on a fully fledged murder spree. So by the time a second edition of English Gothic came around in February 2002, I was able to make a note of those initial frissons, incorporating quite a number of then-new titles. Later, with the full-on murder spree in full swing, a third edition, launched in July 2004, became the first book to chronicle what by then had coalesced into a full-scale revival.
