By the time I was growing up in the 1990s, the previous decades of the Post-War years had been heavily codified. The 1950s were very much the 1950s; the 1970s were very much the 1970s, and even the 1980s – the decade I was born in the last year of – were very much the 1980s. The BBC in particular milked this realisation for all … Continue reading The Kaleidoscopic Past of the Counter-Culture Years
TL;DR – I love rubbish First Doctor stories. I was on a car journey earlier this year heading to midlands with Mark Gatiss, Jon Dear and Chris Lincé. It was painfully early and we were on our way to hunt out some of the locations used in Lawrence Gordon Clark’s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas, The Signalman (1977). The conversation covered exactly what you’d have … Continue reading Hartnell Greys
Local Haunts was released at the end of March by Influx Press, and has been on sale for around two months at the time of writing. I’ve resisted talking more about it on here so far, largely because I wanted to see what the general reaction was rather than pre-empting it. Thankfully, after having done a number of events in which the response has been … Continue reading Local Haunts (Influx Press, 2025)
Welcome to this year’s End of Year review; my usual, long-winded run-down of my excessive viewing and reading habits. It’s been an exhausting but rewarding year of films, television and books, and the sheer length of this post should evidence that. One interesting thing to note is how much happier I feel having virtually ignored the majority of post-2010s culture. Such a decision was not … Continue reading 2024 Review
It’s that time of year once again when I look back on everything I’ve watched and read (and wonder whether I should really get out more). While my interests have become a kind of prison, I couldn’t hope for a more entertaining one. So, here’s my review of 2023. Thank you for reading my work throughout the year, wherever you may have seen it. Cinema … Continue reading 2023 Review
As typical when finishing a book that attempts to build a canon, as I have tried to do with Folk Horror, the signalling of its publishing means a whole host of new potential examples surface and come to light. Though there were things in the Folk Horror book that I simply left out by sheer chance – Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007) being a key … Continue reading Folk Horror Curios
At the time of writing this, my book on Folk Horror is a few weeks away from being printed. By the time you read this, however, it should be available to buy. I’ve written about the detail of the book earlier when it was due to be published late last year. However, I wanted to get a few words down again now that it is … Continue reading Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange
Having recently finished all of the remaining episodes of the early 1970s BBC series, Doomwatch, I had the strange feeling that I had slipped into a parallel world; one where the BBC had worked closely with the writer, J.G. Ballard, to make a series that addressed his themes. Though the series largely resembles Ballard’s earlier novels with their constant post-civilisation eco-disasters similar to The Drowned World … Continue reading Doomwatch, J.G. Ballard and High-Rise
“Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.” – Kurt Vonnegut. Rather like J.G. Ballard, Nigel Kneale had a certain knack of preempting future social, technological and cultural trends. Kneale’s work is perhaps less appreciated than Ballard’s because the medium he predominantly worked in, television, is far and … Continue reading Nigel Kneale and Fascism
As recently announced, I have a book being released in January all about Folk Horror and its many related areas of interest. The book has been in the works for the last year or so though many of the arguments within have been growing now for several years. Though I’ll undoubtedly being doing the usual interview-esque things to coincide with the release in December and … Continue reading Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (January, 2017)
Celluloid Wicker Man 