MOH #25 (Jan. 1969)

[demonik]

Magazine Of Horror #25 (Health Knowledge, Jan 1969)

Robert A. W. Lowdnes - The Editor's Page

James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness
Frederick Marryat - The Phantom Ship
Victor Rousseau - When Dead Gods Wake
Larry Eugene Meredith - The Writings Of Elwin Adams
Clark Ashton Smith - The Colossus Of Ylourgue

James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950):

"Perhaps God had decided that proper humans had made a muddle of running the world: had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night."

Fifty plus pages of pulp manna! There Shall Be No Darkness provided the basis for the slightly deranged Amicus shocker The Beast Must Die, though sadly you don't get the thirty second 'spot the werewolf' break until Subotsky got on the case: Loch Rannoch, Scotland. The Newcliffe's house party is enlivened considerably by the discovery that red eyed, hairy-palmed concert pianist Jan Jarmoskowski is a werewolf and must be destroyed. Round and round the estate they roam - Newcliffe, his wife Caroline, psychiatrist and werewolf expert Christian Lundgren, prying artist Paul Foote, Doris the fledgling witch, etc. - armed with their supply of DIY silver bullets. When one of the party is killed, Foote realises that there is a second werewolf among them. This may sound far-fetched but in this story lycanthrope is a highly contagious disease and all it takes is a mere scratch for the victim to become tainted. At the climax, Jarmoskowski gets to tell it from the man-wolf's point of view, and you have to concede they have a rotten time of it.

[Calenture]

admin said:

There Shall Be No Darkness provided the basis for the slightly deranged Amicus shocker The Beast Must Die, though sadly you don't get the thirty second 'spot the werewolf' break until Subotsky got on the case...

Paul Annette's film The Beast Must Die is one of those weirdly off-the-wall flicks, like Captain Cronos and The Avengers that only seem to happen in Britain - though they usually only attract cult followers (which makes them more interesting in the first place, I guess).

The film was one of the first that I put on tape from BBC when I rented a VCR in the '70s. There was so much good stuff on TV then - which was precisely what drove me to be one of the first with a VCR, which I'd imagined would happen in some unimaginable far-off future when I was a kid. It came sooner than I guessed.

Finding Blish's story in Michel Parry's 4th Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories was a surprise. Blish is usually better known in, let's just say other areas of genre fiction (although he also wrote Dr Mirabilis and Black Easter, I think); and anyway, I was well into the story before I realised what I was reading. I'd watched that tape often. I kept thinking "This is strange. Blish doesn't write horror." But yes, he wrote this one, and it was a great read.

Recently the film's had one or two more airings on terrestrial TV. Pity it was before I got a Freeview box! Both cast and script are excellent: Michael Gambon at bottom of the cast list! There's a review and photos here: Horror Talk Reviews.

And y'know I'd completely forgotten that it was an Amicus film. It seemed too damned good!