Gregory S. Buzwell

Nightmare in Green, 27 Jan 2014

Films like The Reptile encapsulate everything I love about Hammer. I only have to see the heightened-colours, the gorgeous interiors and the cranky day-for-night filming (did they ever get that right?) to be transported back to youthful days of horror double-bills on late-night TV. They don't, more's the pity, make them like this any more. All Hammer films are worth watching, even the bad ones have a charm and quirky beauty all their own, but The Reptile has long been one of my favourites. In The Reptile Hammer attempted something a bit different, just as they did with the film they made in parallel and using many of the same locations and actors - The Plague of the Zombies - and the result… Read more

Strange and Addictive, 12 Jan 2014

Shirley Jackson always had the ability to portray a dark sense of unease in her work. In Hangsaman, that sense of the odd, the baffling and the out of kilter is turned up a notch, becoming if anything even more apparent than in her later, better-known novels such as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The other quality Jackson always possessed in spades was the ability to write beautifully balanced prose and Hangsaman shows the elegance of her writing-style to full effect. In places the book positively purrs like a well-fed cat curled by the fireside, or a well-tuned Rolls on an open road.

Natalie Waite, the central character, is the daughter of a… Read more

Poets and Monsters, 25 Dec 2013

The events at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 read, appropriately enough perhaps, like something from a Gothic novel: a mad tale of brilliant poets, ghost stories, violent storms, sublime mountainous landscapes and heated sexual intrigue. The focal point for the events, somewhat inevitably given his fame and reputation, was Lord Byron who had rented the villa after fleeing certain marital difficulties at home. Travelling with him was his physician, John Polidori and in hot pursuit was a former lover, Claire Clairmont, travelling together with her step-sister Mary Godwin and Mary's lover Percy Shelley. It was all unavoidably, as they finally met up on the banks of Lake Geneva in… Read more