'The Haunting of Borley Rectory'

A few days ago, I noticed an Indiegogo fundraising campaign for a film about Borley Rectory.  I was surprised because we have just had one by Ashley Thorpe called Borley Rectory, released by his Carrion Films (yes, very good) in June this year.  I haven’t seen it yet but I know it is receiving very positive publicity, and considerable acclamation at festivals. Thorpe also sought finance via Indiegogo and managed to raise 330% of his original requirement.

The Haunting of Borley Rectory on the other hand is being produced by Steven M Smith, an Essex lad who seems best known for cheaply-made films, mostly horror.  According to his Internet Movie Database (IMDB) page, “He grew up in Wickford, Essex attending Beauchamps Comprehensive school where is (sic) wrote, produced and directed his first film a media project entitled "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide". It was a cheap-looking horror flick and never (sic) been released. His first film debut (sic) was "Time Of Her Life" and was shown at the Cannes film festival in 2005. He is currently working on several new projects and his wife is expecting their first child. He still lives in Wickford, Essex today.”  This is not inspiring confidence.

Smith’s Indiegogo fundraising goal is a very modest $5,000, which at the time of writing had reached less than a tenth of the required total.  Amusingly, the headings for the explanation of the film’s aims are done in a style reminiscent of the wall writings at Borley.  Presumably he is unaware Thorpe has beaten him to the punch because the page claims:

“This infamous and chilling location in Essex, has fascinated me since childhood. I want to be the first to bring this story of mystery, intrigue and seduction to life on screen in my own unique storyline that will cross timelines … Located in a remote part of Victorian England and isolated from any nearby community [actually Borley is about a mile from Long Melford and less than four miles from Sudbury], Borley Rectory was a Gothic-style mansion with a long history of death, murder and the supernatural.  Though famed as the most haunted house in England, this is a tale that – incredibly – has never before been told on film in its true account.”

Too late to be first I’m afraid, though perhaps Smith considers Thorpe’s effort to be untruthful compared to his own attempts to achieve stringent accuracy as he sees it.  Perhaps he was writing before Thorpe’s effort appeared and just hasn’t got round to updating his pitch.  Despite the impression given on the Indiegogo page, this is not a new project.  Smith posted a call for unpaid actors on Stage 32 (a website for those working in film, television and theatre) job board in 2012, though at that point the title was a simple Borley.

Smith runs Greenway Entertainment, registered in Wickford, but the Borley film, while listed on the Greenway website among dire-sounding horror titles, is being made by Divinity Pictures,

“created to produce unique and powerful stories that have never been told before. The story of Borley is well known by many, and we are committed to telling it as accurately and truthfully as possible, but with a approach (sic) that is budget restrictive” (a euphemism for ultra-cheap).

I don’t think Divinity Pictures has any footprint apart from this reference, and strongly suspect this is not going to be a film on the scale of Thorpe’s labour of love.  The Indiegogo page claims that 80% of the required funding has already been achieved (and further that distribution deals are already in place), despite the small sum so far pledged; the appeal is more to “to support the film and give opportunities for fans to get involved”, a kind gesture by the filmmakers.  Naturally there are a number of perks on offer depending on the size of the donation, none of which at the time of writing had been taken up.

The list of items requiring extra funding makes startling reading, and makes one wonder what the 80% already raised is being spent on:

Locations.

Costumes.

Consumables.

Extra Lighting.

Props.

Stills Photographer.

Gore Effects.

Creature Design.

Creature Make Up.

Location Catering.

Contingency Cashflow.

Marketing.

Gore?  Creature design and make-up?  Other items are so basic you wonder what the film will look like if the Indiegogo fundraising fails.  Contingency cashflow for example doesn’t sound like an optional extra, however small your budget.  There may not be much money for locations and costumes but there is already a basic poster, a procedure of which Roger Corman would approve.

Also in exploitation movie fashion, Smith has taken advantage of two hooks, each attractive to punters but which together he might expect to achieve synergy and thereby do even better box office: as well as Borley, he refers to Ed and Lorraine Warren.  Here is what the Indiegogo page says:

“The Haunting Of Borley Rectory is one of the best known Ghost (random caps in original) stories of the United Kingdom. Ed and Lorraine Warren (The Conjuring) visited Borley on many occasions fascinated by the story. Our film will be a fresh and original take on the ghost story.”

The Warrens?  Ye gods.  The page includes part of an old interview the Warrens gave about Borley, which they claimed to have visited over two dozen times.  It’s a curious affair, with Lorraine doing most of the talking but not saying much of substance.  She refers to the church but not the rectory, so it is unclear how the Warrens will fit into a story which according to the film’s title involves the rectory.  The ghost hunting duo may well disappear from the script (assuming they are in it), partly because otherwise Smith will likely find himself involved in litigation with Lorraine, and partly because it will be hard to place them at the rectory when they visited Borley decades after its destruction, unless he intends to go in for some radical timeline crossing.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm by potential backers it’s full steam ahead on pre-production.  The Indiegogo page claims “We are currently in talks with an array of exciting, A-list talent to bring this story to life.”  So far the page lists Smith as writer/producer/director (the film’s Facebook page currently shows Anthony Hickox as director, but then it has a release date of 2016, so presumably is out of date); Jon-Paul Gates as actor/producer; Elizabeth Saint (in real life a paranormal investigator among other things) as actor; and Hans Hernke as actor/executive producer.  The film’s IMDB page has a busy Mark Behar as co-writer/contributing producer/actor/production manager/second unit director (they have a second unit?) and ‘deadly weapons props handler’; Smith himself as actor, and Matthew Fitzthomas Rogers as Lionel Foyster. The IMDB page has a different poster: a bloody hand sticking out of the ground in front of a burning Borley Rectory, and a note that filming begins in September, presumably 2017 as the page was last updated in May this year.

I can’t see any exciting A-list talent among that lot but I expect those so far involved will be supplemented by the A-listers when they have been signed up.  Intriguingly, a brochure published for the 2014 Cannes film festival by UK Film lists Smith’s Borley project with Julian Sands and Dan McSherry in the cast.  Presumably Sands, who if not an A-lister is at least someone you’ve heard of, jumped ship when Thorpe’s Borley film came along as he is not now associated with Smith’s version, having acted in Thorpe’s.  McSherry (a University of Cambridge graduate I see) seems to have left as well, and the film is not listed in his IMDB filmography, though he is credited as associate producer on Smith’s Haunted 2: Apparitions, scheduled for release next year.

As far as The Haunting of Borley Rectory is concerned, according to the Indiegogo page there will be filming next year, with a release date of November 2018.  I’ll be keeping an eye on developments, hoping it is better than it sounds, but will certainly be giving the opportunity to invest in the project a miss.  Whatever form it eventually takes, it is doubtful Ashley Thorpe will be losing sleep over the competition, and to be fair I suspect Smith couldn’t care less.

 

Update 13 March 2021:

Having finally seen the film, which was released in 2019, I can say my reservations were amply justified.  The pacing is incredibly slow to the point of tedium, there is little atmosphere, editing is amateurishly haphazard, props are often clearly modern (a duvet?), and while the actors keep a straight face, albeit with a tendency to woodenness in delivery, they are let down by a chaotic script which attempts to be enigmatic but is confusing.  On the bright side, there is no reference to Ed and Lorraine Warren.  We are also spared Fitzthomas Rogers’s portrayal of Rev. Lionel Foyster.  So what is it actually about?

In 1944, Lieutenant Robert O’Neill, an American serviceman injured at Monte Cassino who has become an alcoholic to deaden the effects of shell shock, is sent to an isolated cottage in Liston, Essex, down the road from Borley.  Fortunately being an excellent German speaker, his orders are to listen to carelessly unencrypted German comms traffic.  He then radios his reports to HQ, this apparently being a much more reliable system – even though anyone can walk in and see his radio, especially when he is comatose – than sitting in a secure central site like, say, Bletchley.

But before we get to that we have a peculiar meeting at the ruin of Borley Rectory as it awaits demolition in the summer of 1944.  Harry Price is standing gazing at the structure when Marianne Foyster walks up.  Price asks her about her unwell husband (the ailing Lionel) and promises to visit him.  Marianne talks about love at first sight and seeing a mysterious man in visions ten year before who disappears when they are about to touch each other.  She has returned to Borley because she sensed he was close by.  We learn the identity of the mysterious man later (no prizes) but we never discover why she had experienced visions of him a full decade earlier.

Robert settles in and fights a losing battle with the bottle.  After visiting the rectory ruins he is haunted by a terrifying nun with glowing eyes who is able to materialise a bloody hand to attract poor old Robert’s attention by touching him and leaving streaks, repeated PTSD flashbacks from battle, and visions of a strange woman screaming, whom we know is Marianne, though when they are about to touch he always wakes up in odd places, often out in the open.  There is clearly a psychic link between Marianne and Robert for some unspecified reason.  Naturally the isolation and the weird events cause Robert to unravel, a little embarrassing when a British army officer badly in need of a shave turns up and finds him passed out on the sofa.

Robert learns his delivery girl has seen the horrible nun too, which makes her terrified of the cottage he is living in.  She gives Robert some publications about the Borley haunting, including Harry Price’s 1940 The Most Haunted House in England, and Robert calls in Price to help.  Price waves his pipe a lot and pontificates but isn’t able to offer much practical advice, though he does bring along Austrian medium Rudi Schneider who did not seem to have had much of a problem entering England despite being an enemy alien.  Rudi must have forgiven Price over his damaging accusation of fraud back in 1932.

When Marianne and Robert eventually meet they somehow realise the nun became pregnant and was murdered.  Fortunately, she drops the horror trappings and turns into a much more attractive non-special effects nun just as Robert and Marianne, putting their heads together, realise her intention is not to terrify anyone but to appeal for help to find peace.  She leads Marianne and Robert to the spot in a wood where she is buried.  They are able to accommodate her wish by banging in a wooden cross, when one might have thought she would prefer a proper Christian burial in consecrated soil.

An end title states Marianne and Robert married in 1945, so she didn’t hang about after Lionel’s death (though from what we know of the real Marianne she may not have waited).  Another title notes that human remains, possibly of the nun Marie Lairre, were discovered in 1975, which is odd if Robert and Marianne had already pinpointed them, and they never learned her name.  I think that about covers the plot, but it is less coherently presented than this synopsis suggests.

The production’s bright spots are the Essex and Devon locations, attractively photographed by Peter Panoa, though he must have been frustrated at seeing what was done with his work in the cutting room, and some decent hair styling (though Marianne is sporting most un-1940s multiple earring holes down her lobes).  The amusing end credits are worth sitting through as well.  The film’s title is a misnomer because while the plot is loosely linked to the Borley phenomena (and we have a nun), the rectory is certainly not the focus, and is only in there because The Haunting of a Cottage at Liston would not sell nearly as well; I wouldn’t be discussing it certainly.

The downside to the wheeze is that it is going to attract Borley and Harry Price aficionados who will feel very short-changed on discovering the famous paranormal case has been used as a shameless marketing peg on which to hang an unoriginal and poorly executed ghost story.  Falling loosely into the afficionado category myself, fortunately for me I was given a copy of the DVD so I didn’t have to shell out to see the film.  The most remarkable thing about it is to discover it lasts 90 minutes: it feels much longer, so languid is the pace.  It has also been released as The Haunting of Borley Manor, but giving it a slightly different name is not going to improve the viewing experience.

The Tenth Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film, November 2017

Dr Rory Finin, director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, a centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, organised an interestingly diverse programme for the tenth Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film on 17-18 November.  The venue was once again the Winstanley lecture theatre at Trinity College where the audience was treated to films old and new.

As Dr Finin said, Friday’s two films were intended, in their different ways, to reflect on the hundredth anniversary of the ‘Russian Revolution’, which he pointed out was not solely Russian nor a single event.  The upheaval in Ukraine added a desire for independence to a mix containing a range of views across the spectrum about what type of political form should emerge from the chaos, creating a complex, shifting situation.

The evening kicked off with the first of two films in the festival directed by Svitlana Shymko:  The Fall of Lenin (2017), a short film dealing with the destruction of Lenin monuments across most of Ukraine – the occupied territories being of course a notable exception.   Shymko made The Medic Leaves Last (2014), shown in the festival two years ago.  The Fall of Lenin was made with financial support from Docudays UA, a distributor specialising in Ukrainian documentaries, the Guardian newspaper and the British Council.

Surprisingly, it opens with a group of serious-looking middle-aged individuals in a library with pictures of Lenin and Marx behind them holding a séance to contact the spirit of Lenin.  They actually do allegedly get through to Vladimir Ilyich (the spectre of communism?), who must have been surprised to find that there is an afterlife, something a reading of Engels’ ‘Natural Science and the Spirit World’ would have suggested to him was most unlikely.  Possessing more of a sense of humour than one suspects he displayed when alive, he claims to have been an angel in life, though not a good one.  When asked, his prognosis for the future of Ukraine is not positive.  The Ouija session gives way to documentary footage of the erection of various Lenin statues in front of restrained crowds, and a montage of destruction of such statues, of varying degrees of aesthetic merit and often already badly defaced, in front of, and sometimes by, jubilant ones.

Particularly striking is a deposed Lenin hanging humiliatingly upside down, perhaps evoking in some thoughts of Mussolini and Clara Petacci hanging from a girder in Milan.  Another with ropes around its neck invites comparisons with Lenin’s comment about Arthur Henderson in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.  There is also footage of the destruction of religious symbols by the Bolsheviks, making a link between their iconoclasm and the Ukrainians ridding their country in turn of ‘religious’ symbols in the form of the statues.  Scenes in a foundry show bronze being melted down, a shot lingering on Lenin’s face slowly dissolving.  The result is a bell, and when it is tested it rings beautifully.  The message could not be clearer.

In the final section a hand holds up old postcards of the monuments over the locations, and then takes away the cards to show what replaced them.  The variety of statuary, focusing on Ukrainian history or substituting a fountain, is a contrast to the Lenin monoculture of Soviet times.  What is missing from the film though is a sense of the range of opinions the mass removals must have generated: euphoria certainly for many, but surely regret for others.  The enthusiastic crowd is not representative of the people.  Is there now perhaps an element of ‘buyer’s remorse’ for some who feel the destruction was carried out too quickly, and an important aspect of the country's cultural heritage (not to mention its secular values) lost?  It’s a subject with profound implications for national identity, one that cannot be done justice to in 11 minutes – but then in its way, despite its brevity The Fall of Lenin’s richness does generate much to think about.

Arsenal (1929), directed by Alexander Dovzhenko is a different, sprawling, beast entirely, and Rory spent much of his introduction, as well as most of the festival programme, providing the background to this remarkable film.  I had last seen it at the 2003 Cambridge Film Festival, at the Arts Picturehouse, where there had been a Dovzhenko strand, and my verdict then had been that ‘Arsenal is the product of a filmmaker not in charge of his material’.  I had in mind the difficulty in discerning the narrative and with a visual style that was ‘bolted on, influenced by Eisenstein and Vertov [Arsenal was released the same year as Man with a Movie Camera], rather than an organic expression of the story’, and considered it was ‘trying to cram in too much’.

It was a naive view for which I apologise belatedly to Dovzhenko.  A second viewing shows he was fully in charge of his material.  The film is a suitably monumental treatment of a vast subject, and the programme correctly recommends treating it as a poem in three parts: elegy, ode and epic, noting in support of this approach that Dovzhenko was the ‘progenitor’ of Ukrainian poetic cinema.  At this remove, temporal and geographic, the episodic structure is hard to read for those more used to flowing narrative continuity, hence the need now for signposts, but the artistry is assured.

That is not to say Arsenal is sui generis.  There is a use of types, characters who represent social groupings, which we are familiar with from Eisenstein.  They often verge on, or crash into, caricature, for example the fat gap-toothed German soldier laughing hysterically under the influence of gas.  The only individual with a rounded character, and who stands in for Dovzhenko himself, is battered Tymish, late of the imperial Russian army, who is trying to make sense of the currents sweeping across his native Ukraine.  The crash of the train on which he is travelling – the engineer left behind and the passengers clueless how to operate it – symbolises the state.  Climbing from the wreckage, back in Kiev Tymish has to navigate the tensions between Bolshevism and Ukrainian nationalism.  The ambiguities in the film echo Dovzhenko’s own as a nationalist whose country is as much dominated by Russia as it was in Tsarist times.

How to break the tension between nationalism and socialism firmly controlled from Moscow?  This is where I think I had my biggest problem when I first saw the film.  At the end, Tymish, who has identified with the Bolsheviks, is confronted by nationalist soldiers.  Proclaiming himself a Ukrainian worker, thereby eliding the gap between the two identities, he urges his attackers to shoot, and tears open his shirt in an act of defiant martyrdom.  They fire, but he is impervious to bullets.  The 2017 programme argues of this scene: ‘By the end of Arsenal, Tymish rejects the zero-sum game placing his national identity and social/class identity at odds with one another’, which is spot on: in a sense, by his heroic act Tymish has transcended the difference and can hold both identities simultaneously.  That struck me as a cop-out when I first saw the film: to the Bolsheviks here is a comrade who cannot be killed by nationalists, but represents the inevitability of the revolution; to the nationalists he is a Ukrainian, who will prevail whatever may transpire.

In retrospect it feels like having your cake and eating it, but perhaps a position one could be more confident of in 1929 than in the following decade as the Stalinist grip tightened; even so, it feels as if Dovzhenko is sailing close to the wind.  After the screening I asked Rory about its reception in Moscow, thinking about the political situation and possible disfavour towards showing an alternative view of the standard narrative of the Revolution, as indicated in Eisenstein’s October a year earlier, and highlighting the failure of the Bolshevik Arsenal uprising.  However, Rory pointed out that, despite the failure of the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the nationalist Rada, Arsenal ultimately indicates the failure of Ukrainian nationalism (and the film’s reception in Ukraine itself was generally critical).  One wonders what Dovzhenko would have made of the politics of Euromaidan in his artistic practice.

Saurday’s films dealt with more contemporary, and more intimate, themes.  After another welcome viewing of The Fall of Lenin, we saw an earlier short by Svitlana Shymko, Here Together (2013).  This looks at a mother and daughter living in Portugal, where apparently there are a significant number of Ukrainians.  The mother works as a domestic, but she conducts a rather good church choir.  Her initial idea was to work in Portugal for a year, sending money home, before returning to Ukraine, but she missed her daughter Olesya, who only visited for holidays, and when Olesya decided to study in Portugal, she made the decision to settle there despite feeling the pull of home.  Her daughter is also talented musically, playing the piano to concert standard.  The pair highlight the pros and cons of living abroad: it can bring opportunities not available, or at least harder to find, in one’s home country, but it can also mean only finding work below the level of one’s qualifications and abilities.  The mass migration of workers entails loss of potential, both for the individuals and at a national level in the home country.

The final film of the festival was Dixieland (2015), directed by Roman Bondarchuk, and it was an absolute delight.  It focuses on a children’s jazz band in Kherson, about 280 miles south of Kiev.  The children begin playing at an early age and are very accomplished.  The film follows them as they practice, in a very dilapidated building, and perform in public.  These are children with talent and ambition, led by their mentor, Semen Nikolayevich Ryvkin, a gruff elderly man who is devoted to the project and his charges, and who in turn is clearly adored by them.  You sense that for some, music is a way out of a restricted life with limited prospects, and one lad goes off to boarding school where he can study music.   Even for those less fortunate, playing as a group builds confidence, and the children are shown to be outgoing and well adjusted.  Shots of kites in the sky at the beach symbolise their aspirations.  Young Polina is the star of the show, playing sax and trombone, not afraid to busk on tour and doing very well at it.

The result could have been saccharine, but it is not all about the music, and there is sadness along with the joy.  The children grow, they lose their director.  They play for him outside his hospital room and he waves down to them.  Polina visits him in his room, and it is shocking to see how thin he has become.  After Ryvkin’s death a young man steps in to carry on the work, and practice continues.  When he talks about studying in Kiev the young girls are clearly upset at the prospect of losing him.  He points out that everything changes, and this applies not least to the children themselves, who must inevitably leave the group and forge their own direction.  In Dixieland Bondarchuk has created a subtle film of great poignancy and humanity.

Arthur Brown and Jesus at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse

Thinking recently about my most influential teacher reminded me of the best music act I ever saw, which was while I was at the same school.  This was Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come (strictly speaking ‘Kingdom Come with Arthur Brown’) at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse, which thanks to a partial listing of Arthur Brown’s gigs I find happened on 11 February 1973.  The concert was a benefit for Nicaragua, though whether this was to provide relief for the devastation caused by the December 1972 earthquake, or to assist the Sandinistas’ fight against the Somoza dictatorship, I don’t know – probably the former, but possibly the latter, as there was a strong movement in this country at the time protesting against the reactionary government in Nicaragua.

It was one of a number of gigs I attended at the Roundhouse during the early- and mid-1970s.  These were on Sundays, from 2-10 pm, and each featured a number of acts.  So what made Arthur Brown’s set so memorable?  It was thanks to someone who was generally referred to as Jesus.  He attended all these events and wandered round in the intervals wearing a Kaftan and weirdly with what was essentially a mullet, handing out nuts to the audience.  He looked vaguely biblical, and was clearly a good egg, hence the nickname.  It was also amusing to say ‘thank you Jesus’ when he handed you a snack.  During performances he would often jump up on stage to dance, and as it was Jesus, and everybody knew who he was, this was tolerated and bands took little notice.  The general atmosphere at the Roundhouse was very laid back.

On this occasion Brown was giving a sterling performance when Jesus climbed up in his kaftan and began dancing at the edge of the stage.  Instead of ignoring him though, Brown began dancing with him.  They were very close together, then Brown pulled Jesus’s kaftan off him.  That could have been awkward, but mercifully Jesus was wearing underpants.  Brown got him down, face up, and was lying on top.  Then Brown shouted (and this is what made the day so memorable) ‘I’m going to fuck you, Jesus’, whereupon he simulated having sex.  This went on for probably only a few seconds though it seems longer in memory because I was gobsmacked, then Jesus got up, put his robe back on and the set continued.  I’m sure this was not pre-planned, but Jesus was relaxed about the whole thing.

Brown was on a roll because he refused to finish and the band just kept playing.  It is possible artificial stimulants were involved.  After a massive overrun the management turned the electricity off, whereupon Brown stood there defiantly shouting ‘give me power’, echoed by an enthusiastic audience oblivious to the impact Brown was having on the day’s schedule.  Eventually he gave up and the band exited the stage, leaving my sensitive teenage soul scarred by the sight of a man pretending to rut another, underpant-clad, man.  Astonishingly Arthur Brown, in his mid-70s, is still performing; one of rock’s great survivors.  Jesus’s fate is unknown.