The Unholy

On The Trail Of
The Lonesome Shrine

The Unholy
2021 USA
Directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos
UK cinema release print.

I first read James Herbert’s novel Shrine when it was released in the UK in 1983. I would have been 15 so I don’t remember if it’s the first of his novels I’d read... but it’s one of the first. I found a common thing over here in the UK is that boys in their early teens devour a lot of horror novels. I remember Herbert was one of the ‘big two’ who pretty much everyone at school was reading. So you’d read all of Stephen King’s catalogue (which was obviously a lot less back in those days) and then you’d read all of Herberts, which weren’t necessarily quite as well written but, he had two things Stephen King didn’t have as a writer... one was that the were all set in England, in places we knew about (such as Epping Forest in The Rats, for example) and also they had loads of sex in them. And violence but, it was mostly the sex which kept the pages turning in those days. So the pattern would continue and you’d read everything that Herbert had written at that stage and it was only then that you’d branch out on other writers delivering similar horrific thrills such as Dean R. Koontz, Shaun Hutson, Guy N. Smith, John Farris, Tristan Travis and John Halkin etc. Eventually, within the space of about a year and a half, you’d read all the major horror writers and you were on to picking up horror books to feed your obsession in way out locations based purely on the covers. So if you were holidaying in Wales, say... and their local, quirky bookshop had a cheap copy of a book with a nude lady being attacked by a slime coated jelly fish, you knew you were still probably onto a winner.

Anyway, I remember Shrine coming out in its New English Library imprint, sporting a white cover with a little girl levitating on the front. It was much thicker than the average Herbert book, more like the kind of doorstop Mr. King would write but, I remember I didn’t think all that much of this one. For starters it had no sex, which was always a downer. Also, it had a truly horrific scene, from what I remember. Horror books never really freaked me out but, for some reason, there was a passage which haunted me for a long time. It was when a car crashed and became a blazing inferno. My memory is that one of the passengers was trying to push their way out of the back windscreen but it had already become molten glass so instead, when they tried to push their way out, the glass just coated their face and hands and filled their now eyeless sockets. It was a horrible death scene and it stayed with me for a while.

So, in all honesty, I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or disappointed in the fact that this new movie adaptation of Herbert’s Shrine, called The Unholy, has no such scene or incident taking place. In fact, there are a few differences I can think of which, although I barely remember the novel at all, tell me this isn’t exactly a faithful version of Herbert’s work. For instance, the village of Banfield where this is set has been relocated to America... so the unique ‘Englishness’ of Herbert’s work has been lost in translation to some extent. Also, the little deaf/mute girl called Alice (played here quite brilliantly by Cricket Brown, it has to be said) has suddenly become a lot older in this version, it seems. More of an advanced teenager here. So, yeah, I won’t harp on about the pitfalls of the craft of adaptation. Decisions have been made and I suspect, if you’re a big fan of Herbert’s original work, then you may be a little disappointed.

Here’s some good news though. If you take the source material out of the equation, you get quite a nice little horror movie which, although full of conventional horror tropes and clichés, is a really fun watch. It doesn’t get all its scares right... the jumps often don’t work but, you know, some of them (enough of them) do and, I have to admit that, though it doesn’t really offer anything new to the mix (most films don’t anyway, these days) its a nice kind of old fashioned horror film.

The plot is of an evil witch who manifests herself doing miracles by appearing to Alice and curing her of being deaf and mute and also allowing her to bring others to her death site to be cured. The trade off is that people have to believe in her and commit their souls to her before she starts killing them all off. As it is, she starts with the people who doubt that she’s the Virgin Mary and a 'down on his luck', trash journalist has to find his way to the truth and stop this ancient evil (well, not that ancient, to be fair), from gaining power in the village which now holds her shrine... to stop her from exacting a vengeful destruction on everyone. And that’s about it... it doesn’t outstay its welcome as an entertainment experience.

Although the style of shooting is more modern in tone, it almost feels like it comes from the 1970s and this would make an excellent companion piece to something like The Omen, I felt. There are the obvious set ups to various set pieces such as when you are confronted by a room full of sheet covered statues (no prizes for guessing how these are going to soon be used in the scare department) and, like a lot of horror movies but maybe a tad more irritating in this, nobody seems to want to do their research on what’s going on in a place with actual good lighting, preferring to stick to dark places so they can be easily surprised by any creature of Satan hanging around.

I have to add here that the opening, pre-title sequence really is a throwback to a true staple of early 1960s horror, Mario Bava’s ‘official’ debut feature, the oft discussed and much influential Black Sunday (aka The Mask Of Satan... reviewed by me here). You may recall that this film starts off with a particularly visceral moment where the witch played by none other than horror queen Barbara Steele has a spiked, iron mask hammered onto her face. Well, the opening of this movie is a direct steel from this although, surprisingly, it doesn’t match the severity, somehow, of Bava’s black and white opening but, it’s definitely a nod in his direction for sure.

And there’s the odd, really nice scene included in the movie such as when the reporter finds a visual anomaly in some video footage he’s shot when he’s playing the digital file back on his laptop... which is perhaps too quickly thrown away as an easy scare but it’s a nice moment. And the relationship between this character and this new, slightly older version of central figure Alice is well done here too.

Added to this, there are a terrific bunch of actors in the cast. I’ve already mentioned Cricket Brown as Alice but, as the ‘journalist’ Gerry Fenn, we have Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Morgan is someone who I’ve been championing for a while and, once again here, he knocks it out of the park. He’s one of those actors who seems to be able to inhabit any character he takes on and I can’t figure out why he’s not getting much bigger roles by this point in his career. He’s pretty cool in everything I’ve seen him in (even when the film itself may not be up to scratch). We also have William Sadler (Death from the Bill and Ted films) as the priest Father Hagan (Alice’s uncle) and Cary Elwes as Bishop Gyles. Not to mention the wonderful Katie Aselton as the local doctor, who is working with Fenn to confirm the miracles are taking place... before they realise the truth about Alice’s ‘visions’.

There’s also a nice score by someone who’s become a bit typecast with horror music in recent years, Joseph Bishara. I was surprised he was on this production, actually, because it feels a lot lower budget than films which are usually scored by him, such as the Insidious or Conjuring franchises and spin offs but, yeah, a top quality score which I’ll more than likely not get to listen to away from the movie because they’ve only released an electronic download rather than release it on a proper CD. What a shame.

All in all, though... and putting the film’s source novel aside... The Unholy is a nicely put together low budget shocker which I’d be happy to watch again. I can see straight away that this would go on my list of ‘comfort horror movies’ which are nice things to just stick on the Blu Ray player from time to time. Also, the film has a nice redemptive quality where the reporter lies and diminishes his own, recovered status and poses as what everybody else sees him as rather than let the horror continue... so that’s a nice theme for the ending which elevates this one a little more in terms of the way the story has been handled. And if you’re going to go for that kind of slightly more subtle shade to a main character, then Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the guy you’re going to want playing the role for sure. If you’re a fan of ‘old school’ horror movies then you should probably get yourself down to your local cinema (if you can do it safely given the present... ‘almost on our next Covid lockdown’ status) and give this one a go. I kinda had a good time with it.

Paperbacks From Hell

Page Burners

Paperbacks From Hell
by Grady Hendrix
Quirk Books
ISBN: 978-1-59474-981-0

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Paperbacks From Hell from a very good friend of mine this Christmas. It was a book I’d heard about and wanted to explore because the subject matter, as implied in the subtitle on the front of the book - ‘The twisted history of 70s and 80s Horror Fiction’ - was a phenomenon I well remember here in the UK and it was something which was timed just right for me to actively explore at the time.

To explain... on 7th September 1981, almost two years after it’s original US broadcast, the first installment of a two part US TV miniseries based on a book by horror writer Stephen King and called ‘Salem’s Lot, was broadcast in the UK. Now I would have been 13 years old when I saw this and was traumatised, like many young ‘uns at the time, by the cool ‘vampire kid' floating outside the bedroom window and the scene where the black shadow pops up from the bottom of the screen with an over the top musical stinger. So... yeah... all us kids loved it and it started me off acquiring Stephen King novels from my local W. H. Smith And Son Ltd.

And, of course, naturally, once you start buying this well written horror stuff, other writers in the same shelving sections come to your attention. How do you judge which ones you want to read next? By that very same thing you should never judge a book by, of course... it’s cover.

So it wasn’t long before I was also devouring the slightly less ‘up market’ but still very well written novels by James Herbert, the most popular of the UK horror writers at the time. So... King’s ‘Salem’s Lot... The Shining... The Stand and then sliding into Herbert’s The Rats... The Fog... The Jonah etc. However, at that age, horror isn’t the only thing your hormonally challenged mind is into and... there was a fair amount of sex included in the majority of the Herbert books. Those well read passages which soon became the first thing you kept an open eye and open fly out for when the latest purchase was brought home.

And then, of course, it’s a slippery slope and you find yourself reading the full banquet (or whatever you could afford on the small amount of pocket money which was somehow your true birth right) of horror novels which combined out and out gory mayhem coupled with extremely experimental and well thumbed sexploitation. Some of those novelists were still very much masters of the craft of writing... I might mention Dean R. Koontz or John Farris here... and others more than made up for in creative, over the top, gory sexiness what they may (or may not) have lacked in terms of their ability to turn a good sentence and write decent prose... so we had people like the beyond prolific Guy N. Smith with his crab books or John Halkin with his killer jellyfish or Shaun Hutson with his bloodthirsty slugs (see my review of the movie of that one here).

What I didn’t realise when I was given this grand tome, is that this particular love letter to the trashy, horror fiction paperback genre of the 70s and 80s was also written by the very same person who wrote a novel which I really liked when I read it last year... Horrorstör (reviewed here)... by Grady Hendrix. So you have him to blame for bringing to our shelves this extremely nicely designed and enormously entertaining volume.

The book starts off with his introduction where he talks about finding a used copy of a book of that era called The Little People by John Christopher. This is a book which features, amongst its many grotesque elements, a bunch of Nazi leprechauns called Gestapochauns who are heavily into S&M (as it was called before it was sanitised, somewhat, to BDSM) and who are created from the unborn foetuses of Jewish concentration camp victims. After hearing this absolutely bonkers concept, I did try to get hold of a decent copy of this book online at proper old school second hand prices (which seems to have gone up from the 30p standard these things used to be picked up for in musty, old book shops of the 1980s, for some reason) but, alas, the prices for this one on ebay etc are fairly high... presumably as a result of people reading Paperbacks From Hell, no doubt.

After the intro, Mr. Hendrix splits his exploration of this delightfully hellish landscape of well thumbed paperbacks by splitting his tome up into eight chapters. These are Hail Satan, Creepy Kids, When Animals Attack, Real Estate Nightmares, Weird Science, Gothic And Romance, Inhumanoids and a mouthful of a final chapter called Splatter Punks, Serial Killers & Super Creeps. He further explores each of his categories with different sections to highlight different types of sub genre and these mini sections, with titles such as Salad Of The Damned, Starry Starry Nightmare and The Vampire Strikes Back, should probably tell you pretty much the tone of the reading experience here than anything else I might add.

But... if it doesn’t... let me spell it out for you.

Hendrix’s take on the genre is fun and irreverent and reflects perfectly the writing style which made his earlier novel Horrorstör so great. It’s also pretty informative as he takes us from the point, starting with gothic romances, where the popular horror novel of the period was properly born to the point of its regrettable demise a couple of decades later. Now I obviously haven’t kept up with times because I didn’t realise the horror novel wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it was during this time. I honestly thought you could still buy really trashy literature like this from the shelves of your local book store but... I guess not so much.

I did, though, learn a fair amount from this book... such as where some of the trends which the author has chosen to bundle up into specific categories first started or were influenced by. The popularity of such things as the demonic possession horror tales or the blaxploitation terrors obviously coining it in after their cinematic counterparts found an audience for them. Various influences and trends are lovingly explored and it’s illustrated throughout with full colour reproductions of various covers.

There are also randomly placed sections for the works and mini biography of various specific cover artists. Usually it's only a page long but it’s a nice thing to add and it even, on occasions, includes unused versions of the cover in question or an original, pre-painting preparatory sketch for these.

Another nice thing was the inclusion of some books (sometimes by name drop only) which I didn’t think anyone else had even heard of or, indeed, had read these days... such as Satan - His Psychotherapy And Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S. (by Jeremy Leven), which was one of the best books I remember reading from that era... or Rona Jaffe’s book Mazes And Monsters which, to be fair, Hendrix seems to hold in far less regard than I.

Above all, though, the writing style is extraordinarily entertaining throughout and I loved little gems of passages about, for instance, how to best raise your possessed, homicidal or downright stabby evil kids. Or the warning about the dangers of keeping demonically possessed toys up in your attic. And a brilliant bit about the typical ‘horror man’ (who is immensely ‘chiselled’) and the typical ‘horror woman’. I especially loved this little bit about the ‘horror woman’...

“The most expressive parts of her body are her nipples. They noticeably harden when she is aroused, surprised, confused or meeting new people. They are practically prehensile tentacles, capable of lengthening, thickening, unfurling, budding, flaring and swelling.”

Yeah... I have to say, I’ve read a few books like that but it’s kinda funny, to be sure.

If I had one caveat with the book... and this is in no way a criticism... it’s that the writer is pretty much coming at this stuff from a mostly American angle when it comes to the cover art. Now a lot of the British cover art was often more sexually exploitative or photographic...or often a thrilling combination of the two... with the UK covers of books like John Halkin’s Slime and Dean R. Koontz Whispers and Night Chills, with their naked ladies in peril or at sleep, something which was often more memorable than the printed words between said covers. It might well be in the interests of Mr. Hendrix to maybe look at doing a sequel to his current tome where he can explore the UK landscape of the time... a Paperbacks From Hell In The UK, if you will.

Like I said, though... not a criticism, more an observation and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this writer's journey into a time I had almost forgotten. Much recommended to both the oldies like myself who will find themselves on a trip down memory lane and also to the younger audience who were maybe never exposed to this stuff before. The book is beautifully designed, well researched/written and is an absolute treasure trove of trash for anyone’s book shelf. Check it out when you can.