Studio of Screams

PROLOGUE

A COAT OF ARMS

STEPHEN R. BISSETTE

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MY FIRST MOVIE theater experience with Blythewood—a moniker I had no reason to associate with anything, really—was at a children’s matinee my stepmother had dumped me and my older stepbrother Ralph off to see back in the early 1980s. It was one of those mall cineplexes situated next to a gaming arcade, which is where we were to meet Mom after the show.

Having entrusted Ralph with money for movie popcorn, soda, and a couple of videogames after the show, but not trusting Ralph enough to purchase our tickets for the matinee herself, she confirmed with the spotty-faced teenager at the concessions counter what time the second feature concluded. Mom then set the time we were to be picked up, and we were not to be late. She then hustled away, leaving Ralph somewhat forlornly in charge of little old me.

After staring longingly at the lobby poster for the movie he wished we were seeing—a Clint Eastwood outing called FIREFOX—and making sure no one he knew was in eyeshot, Ralph grudgingly saw to our purchase of two jumbo popcorns, two oversized sodas, and a couple boxes of Juicyfruits before ushering the pair of us into our designated destination: a double-bill of MOLLY & ME and DIGBY, THE BIGGEST DOG IN THE WORLD. Both were older movies from the 1970s, trotted back out as cheapjack kiddy matinee fodder as schools were closing that June of ’82. The talking cat movie, MOLLY & ME, was shown first.

Like the Hercules and Sons of Hercules movies I’d seen on TV, the words being spoken didn’t quite match the characters’ lip movements: the film had been redubbed with American voices (apparently the US distributor considered the original cast’s British accents an offense or obstacle for potential American audiences). Though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, my recall now is that both movies looked more than a bit washed-out and tattered: the soundtrack crackled and popped unexpectedly, the action was interrupted at times by odd leaps forward (indicative of clumsy splicing of, and missing footage from, the well-traveled prints), and the giant-sheepdog fun of DIGBY was marred by a dancing bright green line that wiggled about the picture for most of the beginning, returning for an annoying encore in time for the finale, in which the military (looking not at all like American soldiers: they were the British military, natch) try to destroy Digby with artillery firepower.

After the previews (including, much to Ralph’s continuing agony, one for FIREFOX, which indeed looked wwwaaaaaayyyyy more exciting than what we were about to suffer) and the And Now Our Feature Presentation onscreen fanfare, a pair of crossed knives fell over one another against a bright red velvet backdrop, accompanied by the metallic sound of razors kissing and keening. I jumped in my seat, startled, and Ralph laughed. It was the first time I saw (and heard) the Blythewood Studios company logo blaze in full color across a movie theater screen, and it inexplicably sent my heart racing (I had seen this company imprimatur once before: in black-and-white, on television, before a World War I film my father watched one afternoon; more on that, shortly).

The film that followed—released as MOLLY & ME (a title pilfered from a 1945 Gracie Fields/Monty Wooley comedy) and THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE TALKING CAT in America, known as MOLLY’S MOGGY in its native release across the pond—was entertaining enough, chronicling the misadventures of a little girl about my age and the haunting of her family’s farm by a talking barn cat given to gossip about the neighbors. This leads to all manner of silly adult slapstick, from a running gag involving a mysterious ancient-looking miniature golden treasure chest that seemed to be the source of the talking cat’s speaking abilities, to borderline life-and-death setpieces, including a runaway tractor sent over a seaside cliff, and one harrowing sequence involving a slurry pit (a pit filled with brown soup that prompted Ralph to lean over to me and say, it’s a shit pit!, which got us both snickering, dissipating the suspense: Ralph was always good to me, in his way). The whole affair concluded with a lightning-and-rain-lashed midnight near-lynching of Molly’s kitty before the end titles. Walt Disney fare, this was not, despite the eventual obligatory happy ending (later in life, I recognized the elements in the film lifted from H. H. Munro a.k.a. Saki’s story Tobermory, but I didn’t back then, not as a kid—I hasten to add, Molly’s cat didn’t suffer the fate of Saki’s Tobermory).

I mentioned earlier my having seen the Blythewood Studios company logo once before the MOLLY & ME matinee. I’d seen it on television one Sunday afternoon, in black-and-white, not in color, heralding the beginning of a WWI movie my father seemed quite eager to see.

Except for the peculiar opening quote the film kicks off with (on a dinner plate, of all things, posted in a position of honor on a restaurant wall, fading from the Latin text to an English translation, a prayer to St. George), ARROWS OF LIGHT (1960, original British title: MIRACLE OF THE BOWMEN) started like a number of war movies I’d caught on TV with Dad. Once the first few minutes established that the war story we were about to endure was being told by an aging veteran—moved to tell his tale by the Latin prayer on the fancy plate—the movie flashed back to the muddy trenches of WWI and the plight of the flat-helmeted Tommies. These British soldiers were enough to keep me watching, a novelty compared to the American grunts I was more familiar with from WWII and Korean War movies my father more often inflicted upon me. What kept my interest was the mounting intrusion of supernatural elements: a frail shell-shocked Tommy haunted by ominous premonitions of death (lots of muddy skull imagery); a sequence in which bayonet-wielding Germans crawling beneath expanses of barbed wire appear in a waking vision as vermin (literally, shots of live rats and a scorpion or two wearing tiny German helmets and uniforms, some with little bayonet-spiked toy rifles affixed to their bellies, slinking over a miniature battlefield); and a violent rainstorm capped by a climactic vision of medieval archers firing a hail of arrows into the German ranks, as if Robin Hood and his Merry Men had suddenly usurped the climax.¹

My confusion over all this prompted a lengthy sit-down with my father who patiently explained this was a true story, which only elevated the experience out of the realm of what a weird war movie to something like a confounding, blessed event.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just savored my first dose of Blythewood Studios blood-and-thunder. MOLLY & ME was my second experience, and I was inexplicably hungry for more.

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MIRACLE OF THE BOWMEN was one of a trio of low-budget war films Blythewood had completed in the early 1960s. All were incredibly cheapjack affairs, constructed around as much vintage newsreel footage and purchased war footage from better-funded older movies, but they had a morbid conviction to them and some startlingly bizarre imagery.

MOLLY’S MOGGY was one of Blythewood’s stabs at family fare dating from the early 1970s. Filmed in 1970 on the Isle of Man and released in the UK about a year before DIGBY, MOLLY’S MOGGY was the sort of fare Blythewood depended upon for their bread-and-butter, much as the now-revered Hammer Films coffers were utterly dependent upon their ON THE BUSES comedies, spin-offs from the popular ITV comedy TV series set on and about the famed double-decker buses, chronicling the hijinks of their drivers and conductors. The ON THE BUSES films were boxoffice smash-hits in the UK, but they were never shown in the United States. Blythewood was similarly dependent on feature film TV spinoffs and comedies—movies that simply didn’t translate into American markets—that were moneymakers in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, sometimes in Canada, but remained largely unknown and unshown in America. MOLLY’S MOGGY a.k.a. MOLLY & ME had somehow slipped in under the cover of pre-E.T. matinee fodder, scoring sporadic playdates across the country from 1974 well into the 1980s. Theaters glommed onto such titles as flat-fee rentals, dirt-cheap, counting on popcorn and concession sales to boost revenues on otherwise lazy weekend afternoons.

Don’t let all that distract you, however. For over a decade, Blythewood were far better known for something else. To a select group of fans here in the States, the crossed-blade Blythewood logo primarily meant one thing: Blythewood Bloodshed.

After the late 1950s/1960 war trilogy, a couple of pirate movies, a spate of cloak-and-dagger adventure thrillers, and one miserly Arthurian opus, and just before their easing into non-controversial 1970s family fare, Blythewood spilled gallons upon gallons of stage blood in a procession of provocative horror and borderline-horror exploitation films. Beginning with the comparatively tame (compared, that is, to Blythewood’s subsequent films) ASHES TO ASHES (1963, released stateside three years later as BLACK OF NIGHT), Blythewood became one of the most extreme providers of imported horrors, willing to indulge more adult themes and imagery in ways only Italian filmmakers seemed equally eager to exploit. For attentive genre fanatics like myself, the crossed knives against the red backdrop meant we were in for something heavier than Hammer Films or their competitors seemed to offer: more buxom women in period garb than in other British imports, more intricately sadistic twists and turns in the stories, more inventive use of medieval weaponry and implements of torture, and much more savage explosions of horror—the gorier, the better.

Beginning with their production of war films, Blythewood evidenced another distinctive attribute. A pronounced and at times very unusual attention to historical accuracy set Blythewood apart: press releases promoting their films claimed that a sibling of Blythewood’s founder-producer was an archeologist, often consulted, suggesting and approving locations, and even providing ancient artefacts (for recreation by the prop department, or for actual onscreen appearances and action) to lend more authenticity to Blythewood’s period horrors. Certain props were almost fetishized onscreen, lingered over in closeups, often commented upon in the film dialogue (including the repeated use of the archaic miniature treasure-chest that played a part in MOLLY’S MOGGY).

By upping the implicit and explicit mayhem and overt perversities onscreen, Blythewood competed for a time with the likes of Hammer Films and Amicus Studios, as well as the British studios and non-studios whose names didn’t register at the time as brand-names: Anglo-Amalgamated, Tigon, the short-lived Tyburn, producers like Richard Gordon, the occasional horror from production outfits like the Danziger Brothers, Robert Baker and Monty Berman, and so on. Quite unlike the cozy familiarity bases like Bray Studios gave the classical Hammer outings, Blythewood thrived upon its rootlessness as much as its narrative ruthlessness: the always-changing locations and atmospheric environs lent each individual Blythewood movie its own distinctive regional flair and flavor, and one rarely saw a repeat performer in the casts.

Seen over time, the Blythewood films provided an impromptu snapshot of places all over the United Kingdom, framing the far corners and depths of the UK amid their always-exploitation-savvy titles and tales. The faces in the crowds seen in Blythewood films were the faces of locals (usually sporting ill-fitting wigs and costumes), the voices and accents varied and largely unfamiliar to American ears, and this, too, set their films apart. In more ways than one can easily summarize, Blythewood proved to be more of a chameleon than any other transatlantic studio of its era, shifting with the mercurial cultural and pop-cultural winds of the 1960s and early 1970s with more ease and accuracy than their more renowned competitors.

Why, then, are the films of Blythewood so impossible to see today?

Rumors abound that the mysterious head of Blythewood Studios pulled the films out of circulation in the 1980s and destroyed all prints after relocating to Canada.

If true, Blythewood isn’t particularly unique in this regard. Horror fans still gnash their teeth and tear their clothing over the fate of the vital elements (including the original negative and interpositives) of as prominent a cinematic landmark as THE WICKER MAN (1973), reportedly buried beneath the M4 motorway by vindictive EMI and British Lion executives who personally reviled the film. There are less celebrated, less visible examples: British producer-director Robert Hartford-Davis was so despondent over the backlash against his 1972 NOBODY ORDERED LOVE that he eventually withdrew from the industry, moved to America, and ordered all the elements and prints of his body of work destroyed upon his death, which came in 1977. While elements of Davis’s genre features—THE BLACK TORMENT (1964), CORRUPTION (1968), INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED (1971), THE FIEND (1972)—thankfully have survived, NOBODY ORDERED LOVE is indeed now a lost film, apparently irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed, leaving only the promotional materials as evidence of its release.

Such was the case with Blythewood—but not with one film: the whole of Blythewood’s output vanished completely.

In terms of British cinema, the published histories have long shunned the exploitation fare that sustained the various incarnations of the British film industry, prominent among them Hammer Films. David Pirie’s seminal 1973 A Heritage of Horror was the rehabilitative text that wedged Hammer and certain critically reviled filmmakers (Terence Fisher, Michael Reeves, etc.) into any future critical texts. Since that time, even the likes of the obscure Danziger Studio have enjoyed DVD or Blu-ray studio resurrections for diehard fans.

But I cannot think of a single motion picture studio or company before Harvey Weinstein’s that has been so utterly wiped from any and all histories the way Blythewood has been. While there are many corporate-era orphans—cinematic bodies of work that have or would have lapsed into public domain long ago, studio productions abandoned and lost to neglect with no surviving heirs or owners to maintain (much less promote, repackage, and keep bringing to market) legacies—Blythewood is different. Blythewood seems to have been deliberately and aggressively obfuscated and obliterated.

Attempts to mount film festival retrospectives and various revivals have all been discouraged by the apparent inaccessibility of 35mm prints, with only the occasional random home video release in other international markets—murky pan-and-scan Beta, PAL, and VHS video transfers cut-and-dubbed for regional release, the original English soundtracks supplanted with foreign language tracks: Dutch, German, Malaysian, Greek—offering what little exposure the Blythewood product has had over the past few decades. Over time, bootlegs of Blythewood titles commanded high prices in the gray collectors market; the risks, dealers whispered, were considerable, the punishment more Draconian than those suffered by those trafficking in Video Nasty list titles in the UK back in the 1980s, or selling bootleg Disney SONG OF THE SOUTH and SNOW WHITE videocassettes in the US. Someone, somewhere, was prosecuting any leaks in the Blythewood self-banishment in North America and the UK. Police busted a video nasty dealer who advertised in the fanzine Samhain only after a Blythewood title popped up in their list; that was that, they were gone from the zine’s pages for good. Two video dealers were arrested at a Midwest US convention, and one of them soon disappeared from the convention scene altogether; the other opened a tobacco shop, avoiding the convention scene and refusing any and all overtures for interviews or information. A Canadian label proprietor who dared to list two Blythewood titles in his catalogues was prosecuted and did jail time—or so it was said.

More curious still, there are very few traces of Blythewood’s product even on the internet. There’s nothing on Youtube, not even preview trailers, and nothing on the various illegal streaming sites that thrive on providing illicit access to forbidden films. It’s as if the kind of censorship that constrains access to the world-wide web in countries like China and North Korea had extended their reach across all continents and targeted Blythewood as something to be blasted from memory, scorched out of existence, and even sowing salt over whatever vestige remained of its obscure but once-fertile legacy.

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It wasn’t just my own fan-flamed memories of the Blythewood Studio films I’d seen growing up, or my own curiosity, that prompted my tracking down any surviving participants in, or players for, Blythewood.

It was my work as a university professor, preparing a few years ago what would (by 2018 and after) become a controversial class on Cancel Culture or Sandblasting Pop—subtitled, in either case, Expunging & Expunged Pop Culture—that led to my research and the pilgrimage that eventually led me to an afternoon sit-down with the former head of Blythewood Studios in a remote corner of Quebec.

In terms of the class requirements, my meeting with Blythewood’s surviving co-founder was uneventful and inconsequential. Simply put, while the meeting more than satisfied my own curiosity about Blythewood—it did, in fact, put me off ever wanting to know more—I wasn’t permitted to bring any evidence of Blythewood’s legacy into the classroom.

I wouldn’t have, either, even if there had been some way to...

But I am getting ahead of myself. Before I was done writing the initial syllabus, I’d poured over six years of work into preparations before the first class convened. In short, my class was to offer an overview of once-essential pop culture artefacts by creative individuals whose pop images and/or real-life politics, actions, and/or outrages/crimes resulted in their work being expunged and rendered unpalatable. The new 20th and 21st century blacklists, in other words. I began by formulating an A list in infamy—Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Ingrid Bergman, the infamous HUAC blacklists, Alan Freed, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland, Roman Polanski, Pee Wee Herman, Woody Allen, Victor Salva, The Dixie Chicks (with mention of the 1960s Beatles record burnings), Don Imus, Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter (Operation Yewtree investigations, Oct. 2012), Charlie Rose, Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., Roseanne Barr, Harvey Weinstein (Miramax/Weinstein Company), John Kricfalusi, R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, etc.—the list goes on and on. I persevered, building upon that initial list to create a curriculum and concoct a syllabus.

In compiling the list, it’s interesting what material I found myself compelled to include, from movies, TV, print, all media: Robert Mitchum’s marijuana arrests leaving him essentially unscathed, only boosting his badass outlaw stature; Henry Lewis Gates and his defense of performers like Mantan Moreland and Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, better known by his stage and screen name Stepin Fetchit. Was I to subject my students to excerpts from Bill Cosby’s once-beloved best-selling comedy LPs, excerpts from his game-changing co-starring role in television’s I Spy? Was I to show the class racist Warner Bros. animated cartoons of the past, like Bob Clampett’s COAL BLACK & DE SEBBEN DWARVES? An episode of the Amos & Andy TV series? Of course, I’d have to.

Woody Allen and Roman Polanski were essential viewing, but what about filmmakers like Bryan Singer? James Gunn? The women in previous classes I’d taught were already outspoken about Quentin Tarantino, with blistering attacks concerning his treatment of Uma Thurman on the KILL BILL set. But on the other hand, what about Leslie Jones, suffering social media abuse for her role in the GHOSTBUSTERS remake, which—through no fault or crime of her own—had career-damaging consequences? What about Milo Yiannopoulos? Kathy Griffin? Underground cartoonist Robert Crumb? Do I include or exclude the whole of National Lampoon (e.g. Tony Hendra’s The Joys of Wife-Tasting and Doug Kenney’s First Blowjob)? What about generational shifts resulting in once-revered work being consigned to oblivion, as with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s long-popular Playboy comic strip Little Annie Fanny? It’s not as if Kurtzman and Elder were like Hustler’s Chester the Molester creator, Dwaine B. Tinsley, who was arrested and charged for raping his own daughter—but I’ve found 21st century students reacted to Little Annie Fanny the way they did to Polanski, or Woody Allen, as if it shouldn’t ever have been part of the pop culture (Michael Jackson seemed to still be getting a pass from some, but that, too, would change in time, I was certain). Times and cultural norms change, but these case histories all seem relevant, the assessments and reassessments critical.

For multiple reasons, I struggled to include and keep Blythewood Studios in this list.

My decision wasn’t because of anything or anyone associated with Blythewood having been accused or found guilty of any of the sins (for want of a better word) associated with some of the more infamous members of the Cancel Culture Rogue’s Gallery I’ve already mentioned. To the best of my current knowledge, there are no particular crimes or infamy attached to anyone who was part of Blythewood’s operations.

Nor is it only because Blythewood shared the fate of so many other British filmmaking firms of the 1970s (which they did): closing up shop as British tax laws were revised, production opportunities evaporated, and once-dependable genre staples ceased to draw audiences. Blythewood’s fortunes didn’t dwindle. Blythewood rigorously removed itself completely with breathtaking haste from the marketplace as soon as the winds changed—and then covered its own tracks. Why? What could have happened?

Blythewood’s absence from the historical record begs a procession of unanswerable questions. Perhaps the critics who called for Blythewood’s films to be barred from exhibition altogether for the good of the nation—as one uncredited review in the Glasgow Herald suggested in 1972—at long last got their wish?

But how would I expose 21st century students to their product?

Perhaps, I told myself, I might track down someone associated with Blythewood, perhaps producer and studio founder Lawrence P. Blythewood himself, and persuade them (or him) to Skype into the classroom for an in-class conversation, and from there...well, who knows, unless one tries, yes?

Tries, and trying: I was distracted, derailed, misled, and simply lied to along the way. Most of the Blythewood production and player personnel were long dead and gone; contemporary newspaper accounts from the 1960s and ’70s proved to be unreliable at best, and my online investigations were fruitless, all blind alleys and bald-faced fraudsters. There were contradictory sketchy biographies: were the founders of Blythewood from Wales? Ireland? Scotland? That they weren’t Brits seemed to be the only consensus, though that, too, seemed unfounded, undocumented. The founders were brothers; the founders weren’t brothers; no, Lawrence P. Blythewood was his own man, a solitary entrepreneur. He was originally in insurance; no, the brothers were in real estate, and filmmaking was a side endeavor; no, Lawrence had worked as a movie theater projectionist, working his way into production from those humble beginnings, and his brother was an archeologist, their parents apparently killed when a coal spoil (a.k.a. slurry a.k.a. waste) inundated their retirement home.

Eventually my search led me to a pair of fanzine editors from the 1970s who claimed to have once visited Blythewood’s offices in London, and the only ultimately helpful individual in the zine circles proved to be Richard Klemensen, longtime editor/publisher of the Hammer and British horror film fanzine Little Shoppe of Horrors. Richard entrusted me with the only name he’d ever found in his own research that seemed to be forthcoming with any information on Blythewood. A tentative exchange of emails and two phone calls, and lo and behold, a breakthrough.

And this, eventually, led me to a tiny township in northern Quebec on a Sunday morning in late June of 2016, sitting across from a well-dressed, silver-haired bearded gent whose last name was Blythewood.

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He introduced himself as Lawrence Blythewood—never did achieve Lord stature, he chuckled, "though one could grow to like the sound of it: Lord Blythewood"—and seemed content to meet me.

He’d selected our meeting date, time, and place, at a bed-and-breakfast in one of the pleasantly rural eastern townships of Quebec, a location I was instructed to never disclose under any circumstances. Blythewood was listening to and watching BBC news on a laptop when I arrived, but he promptly removed his ear buds and closed the computer, handing it over to the gentleman he then introduced me to, a much younger and taller gent named Randall Mayer. Retaining and patting a scuffed attaché case that he kept on his seat, a sort of worn leather rucksack he kept close by his left hip, Blythewood dismissed Mayer rather curtly before insisting upon our sitting across from one another at a small oak table in the dining area, turning his full attention to myself, and breakfast.

The food is quite good here, as are the rooms, Blythewood noted, and they manage to be both quite attentive and quite discreet, which I value above all. See to my needs when I need, otherwise leave me alone: that’s how I’ve always preferred things to be.

We exchange brief greetings and pleasantries. He spoke with a slight accent I couldn’t place or identify. Blythewood seemed to have already satisfied himself as to the seriousness of my intent—don’t waste my time, and I shan’t waste yours—and promptly cut to the chase.

So, what was first in the queue?

He laughed aloud as I admitted to the first Blythewood title I’d seen.

Ah, yes, MIRACLE OF THE BOWMEN. We lifted that wholesale from that famous story ‘The Bowman,’ you know, Blythewood chuckled. An old story, that, 1914 or 1915, during the Great War, as it were.

Clearing my throat, I reiterated my father’s claim that the film was based on an actual event. Blythewood laughed heartily.

"We’d already made that one: THE ANGEL OF MONS! ANGEL never played over here, Americans weren’t familiar with that legend the way we were on our side of the pond. Couldn’t get any American distributors to look at it, even Richard Gordon couldn’t place it. Still, same story, precisely the same story—same actors, same sets, in fact—but that one involved an angel and a sword cutting down the Krauts, instead of the ghost bowmen and the fiery rain of arrows. No, no, BOWMEN was from a story, a fabrication, a fantasy, complete nonsense, with some input from my brother, who loves and understands matters of war and antiquity far more than I ever have or will. We optioned the story from Arthur Machen’s estate for a song.² Mind you, Machen hated his own story, but he was long dead and gone. We paid his estate what they’d asked, so no complaints from his corner about what we did with it. Made a few quid off that one, we did."

Blythewood took a sip, looking me over with even more rigorous intensity.

But you’re still a rather young fellow, surely you didn’t see BOWMEN in a theater? You couldn’t have.

Tensing up, I admitted to MOLLY & ME being my first Blythewood experience on the big screen.

MOLLY’S MOGGY? he shook his head. Really? Out of everything, MOLLY’S MOGGY? Not one of our pirate movies? The MOGGY, then. That was to have been the Dalby Spook, Gef the talking mongoose, you know, from the 1930s, but as a kiddie’s fantasy, hoping Rank³ would play it. We even shot it around where it all happened, Dalby, off the track on Isle of Man, what was left of the farmhouse, which they knocked down for good a year or so after we’d left. Again, my brother helped track all that down and set it up. Always thought the girl’d done it, I did, throwing her voice, but who knows. Figured making her the heroine would let us play it either way. Silly me, I tried to arrange for an actual mongoose, but my brother talked me into making it about a mouthy moggy instead, since Disney had scored with their cat movies all through the decade.

Right: THREE LIVES OF THOMASINA, THAT DARN CAT!, CAT FROM OUTER SPACE—

Bloody nuisances on set, never do what you want, particularly on a shoot. But you didn’t come all this way, motor here, corral me, to talk about moggies, did you? Bigger fish to fry, haven’t you?

May I ask, where were you born, raised?

Blythewood simply narrowed his eyes and remained mum.

So, then, when and how did you get into film production?

Blythewood leaned back and scowled. Then he spoke.

Oh, come off it. You’ve better opening lines than that, haven’t you? Surely, you know what you most want to ask. Out with it.

I could feel my face flush, my throat clog; clearing my throat, I stammered, why are you even willing to talk to me?

For the first time, Blythewood truly smiled. It was an unnerving grin, far more so than his scowl.

Ah, there’s a lad. I’ve my reasons. In good time, I promise, I’ll tell you.

At this he chuckled, locked his fingers together, and leaned in toward me, still smiling.

What did the crossed knives represent? I ventured, referring to the Blythewood logo.

Oh, Trevelyan didn’t like that. Blythewood smiled. "Didn’t like that in the least. ‘You’re trading on our X-cert,’ he complained. It was an ‘X’ you see. That meant adult fare in England, which Hammer had made quite exploitable: they used it in some of their titles, you understand. Put it right in their titles. So I thought, ‘I’ll make it my company brand!’ Our coat of arms. Brought the punters in, kept the kids away, which made them want to see the movies all the more. Good business, all around. Trevelyan took me to court, he did. I had to reposition the angle on the knives on our trademark to settle everything, you understand. Silly, really."

John Trevelyan, head of the British Board of Film Classification? I asked, and Blythewood grinned, only a little less disturbing a grin than his prior one.

BBFC Secretary, he was, head of the policing what we could and couldn’t do. Had to run all our scripts by him, we did. Tiresome, really. I found workarounds. Still, they’d nip and tuck, insist upon cuts. T’was all a game for me, except when it wasn’t. But look, let’s tip-toe into this, shall we? I don’t know you from Adam.

The B&B host interrupted with breakfast, setting our plates before us without saying a word. Blythewood took this as his opportunity to regain control of the conversation.

You have a day. Today. Let’s see—yes, it’s the 23rd June. We’ll start after breakfast, wrap up before midnight, he said, leaning in over his eggs. "You’ll screen the first two in daylight hours, we talk after each, you have a snack between, with time for a break, a walk, whatever suits you. Then, a proper dinner, and you then screen the last two features tonight. As I say, we’ll be done well before midnight, if all goes as it should.

First, you’ll have to spend some time getting acquainted with what we’ll be talking about, he added, pushing aside his plate, pulling a paper-wrapped package from the leather bag tucked alongside his hip, and placing the package on the table dead-center, before me. The grown-up stuff, not the magpie moggy.

Fair enough, I said, doing all I could do to contain my enthusiasm. The package was the size of a disc, or discs, and I hoped above all hope what it might contain.

I’ve rented a room for you here in this B&B, apart from your own. It’s yours, while you’re here, your home-away-from-home for a bit.

Blythewood gestured toward the window across from where we were sitting.

There’s an old theater space in the adjoining building. I refurbished it fifteen years ago, it’s my private screening room. I watch movies there all the time. Strictly controlled situation, state-of-the-art, all digital now, you understand. My man Mayer will see to everything for you. Can’t have you copying or taping what you’re to see, you understand. You’ll be inspected before and after, just as if you’re serving on a jury or Grand Jury or somesuch.

And then, that smile—that distressing smile.

"No handheld or laptop devices, no paper, no pens. No recording, no note taking, you’re just to sit and watch what’s onscreen. Just enjoy the show. Not that I don’t trust you. It’s just that I don’t know you."

Fair enough, you’ve no reason to, but you did get my—

Your résumé, yes. Very nice, very tidy. Impressive enough, though I don’t move in academic circles. No use for it. Might impress my brother, all that academia, but I’ve no interest whatsoever. Checked your credentials, you understand. I’ve got people, like Mayer. Do that sort of thing for me.

Blythewood slid his plate back into easy reach, tucked into his eggs, pausing between discreet chewing to spell out the rules of engagement.

So, the room is all set up for you.

My room? I asked.

The theater. You’ll be comfortable, there’s a spot of food and beverage there for you. There will be appointed times this afternoon, and two more for this evening’s; Mayer will bring you in and out, over and back, up and down. We’ll sit down and talk between the screenings, yes? We’ll convene here, this table. Convene, and converse. Those conversations you can take notes, if you wish, but only the conversations. Not the screenings.

He patted his lips with his napkin, sipped tea, then folded his hands, fingers tightly interlocked.

So. Four.

Blythewood winked.

Four movies. Four screenings, in all. Chose them for you myself, I did. It’s the favorite of what we accomplished. My favorites, that is. Most important to me, they are. I’d prefer you see them back-to-back, just like we used to program the films, but for your purposes—he patted the table at this point—we’ll chat in between. As I say. You begin whenever you’re ready. Then again, why wait? Right now, if you wish; no need to lollygag. Mayer is ready for you next door.

Blythewood’s cheeks went ruddy, but his lips closed tight, as if whatever might have wedged between his teeth over breakfast should remain invisible until he’d had a chance to see to his dental hygiene.

Well, yes, I’d like that.

"Thought you might. Oh, and these, you will be permitted to take these home with you—"

He winked.

—one title per title, as it were.

My puzzlement at his odd phrasing was met with another of Blythewood’s unsavory smiles. Blythewood extracted something new from his attaché case: a small paper bag. He opened the end of the bag, and I could see the spines of four thin paperbacks.

Novelizations, specially commissioned back in the day. We did a batch of them. I had friends at Badger, Cobra, Corgi, but I liked working with Ace Books, Four Square, after they became NEL⁴ in ’61. Knew an agent in Bloomsbury on Great Russell Street, and an editor at NEL, never worked with the same author twice, liked to keep it fresh. They’d have me lunch with a writer, bring them a copy of the script. Quick and easy £150, £200 they’d make from the job. Two weeks and a nice photo cover or use our poster art, and Bob’s your uncle, you know? Made a bit off them, enough to keep NEL happy to see me, but I mainly used them for promotions.

I checked my eagerness to reach over and touch the paperbacks, but the urge was obvious.

They’re not precisely true to what you’ll see, but they were written from the early-draft screenplays, you understand. You’ll have a butcher’s—as a pal of mine used to say—at some of what we weren’t allowed to keep in the final cuts, livelier than anything Trevelyan or his successor Stephen Murphy permitted. Oh, I’ve personalized them to you, no need to thank me.

May I—

Mayer will deliver these to you, one at a time, after you’ve enjoyed each course.

Rolling the end of the bag up, Blythewood set it down on the table, tapping it with his fingers.

I think you’ll enjoy what’s first in store. First one, my brother really rode me on. First one to make me a small fortune in its day, it was. Kicked up a bit of a storm, it did. Always good for business, except when it wasn’t, but we’ll get to that.

Blythewood leaned across the table then, as if taking me into his confidence.

But about the crossed knives: means something, it did. It does. It will.

After hiding with both hands his opening of the disc-sized paper package on the table, Blythewood pulled the suddenly empty paper sheath away with his right as he slid something across the table to me with his left, his fingers cupped over it.

Wear this. Gift to you, from my brother and myself.

He lifted his hand. It was an enamel pin: the Blythewood coat of arms, the logo, the crossed knives, in a scarlet setting. His smile widened.

Here, he whispered, patting his right hand over his left breast. Always here. Now and after, you’ll keep it and be kept well.

He watched and waited as I pinned the coat of arms onto my shirt, then he winked.

Right.

With that, Blythewood pushed himself away from the table, setting his napkin atop the table tucked into a pup-tent fold. He popped the bag of paperbacks and package of discs into his attaché case which he then slid under his arm, and stood.

Hope you’re ready to tuck in. Mayer has the screening set—I’ll give these over to Mayer—

—lightly tapping the attaché case pinched under his arm—

—you can pop upstairs, leave your bag and such in your own room, or just pop next door and hand it all over to Mayer—then, to it.

¹It was the English archers at Agincourt that were referenced in the film itself (and the source story by Arthur Machen), but being a kid at the time, I thought only of Robin Hood.

²Arthur Machen’s works did not enter the public domain in the UK and Europe until January 1, 2018.

³ J. Arthur Rank, owner of the Odeon and Gaumont movie theater chains and Pinewood and Denham studios, among three other studios, many production companies, and over 600 theaters in the UK; a millionaire Yorkshireman, Rank was a religious conservative who had actively supported, produced, and exhibited faith-and-morality-based children’s films since the 1940s.

⁴ New English Library.

SWORD OF THE DEMON

MARK MORRIS

PART ONE:

TIAN SHAN MOUNTAINS, CHINA, JULY 1890

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ONCE THEY HAD SET up camp, Shen led Sir Winston, Richard, and Arthur up a winding path between the spruce trees and onto a rocky plateau, which provided a breath-taking view of the lush green valley and the mountains beyond.

Is there, he said, pointing.

The mountain village, a densely packed cluster of ramshackle dwellings that clung to the rock as barnacles will cling to the prow of a ship, was indistinguishable from the dozens of other mountain villages that Sir Winston Tremayne’s party had passed through in the ten weeks since the Lady Empress had docked in the southern Chinese port of Zhanjiang. Since then, the expedition had struggled through a wildly varying terrain, comprising deserts, thick forests, and rocky valleys flanked by jagged, ice-capped peaks. In general, the native peoples they had met en route, consisting primarily of small pastoral tribes scattered throughout the Tian Shan Mountains, had been both wary and curious but peaceable. Some had even provided the party with simple but nourishing meals of steamed rice and spiced vegetables, or had presented them with gifts of wild apples and walnuts to sustain them on their journey.

Now that their seemingly