Tag Archives: classic horror

E Nesbit – Mother of the Dead

February 8, 2017 greydogtales Leave a comment

Do you remember those heady days of 1893, dear listener? We laughed, we shared brandy by the Seine, and you were sick in a gendarme’s hat. We snuggled close and read E Nesbit’s scary tales, and then we thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is a woman. Damned cheek, coming over here and writing supernatural fiction, putting struggling male writers out of a job.’

Later that year, the First Matabele War started in South Africa, so we went back to knitting socks for the missionaries. But today, in honour of Women in Horror month, we open E Nesbit once again…

There are some cracking female horror writers around at the moment. However, we’ve been meaning to write about E Nesbit since last September, so what better time to get our act together? Our main interest is her horror stories, but a little background would not go amiss.

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) was a typical British housewife of her time. Oh, apart from:

Her friendship with Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist dissident
The fact that she adopted two children fathered by her first husband, and let the mother live with them as secretary
Her Marxist-socialist beliefs and involvement in founding the Fabian Society
The seventy or eighty books she wrote or co-wrote
Her political lecture tours, which included the London School of Economics

Strange, then, that nowadays she is best known as a children’s author, the woman who wrote The Railway Children, The Five Children and It, the Bastable series and The Enchanted Castle.

Not that these have been without influence. Her children’s stories are referenced in C S Lewis’s Narnia series; Noel Coward and J B Priestley both admired her work.

Gore Vidal wrote in the New York Review of Books, in 1964:

“There are those who consider The Enchanted Castle Nesbit’s best book. J. B. Priestley has made a good case for it, and there is something strange about the book which sets it off from the bright world of the early stories. Four children encounter magic in the gardens of a great deserted house. The mood is midnight. Statues of dinosaurs come alive in the moonlight, the gods of Olympus hold a revel, Pan’s song is heard. Then things go inexplicably wrong. The children decide to give a play. Wanting an audience, they create a number of creatures out of old clothes, pillows, brooms, umbrellas. To their horror, as the curtain falls, there is a ghastly applause. The creatures have come alive, and they prove to be most disagreeable.”

(Yalding Towers, incidentally, from the Enchanted Castle, is a setting in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)

Her approach to writing children was less sentimental than many, making her legacy more important. Some call her the first of the modern children’s fantasists, escaping the twee or moral tales of earlier Victorian writers.

As a result, adaptations and derivations continued long after her death. The Psammead stories are well known. Jenny Agutter’s career (see also further down) was boosted by her performances in two adaptations of The Railway Children (1968 and 1970), which allowed her to have less clothes on in Walkabout (1971) and Logan’s Run (1976). These latter two films certainly influenced many teenagers. Ahem.

0010q — 1905 illo of the children and the psammead

And Michael Moorcock wrote a series of books with an adult Oswald Bastable (The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan, The Steel Tsar), drawing partially on Nesbit’s Fabian views of where the British Empire should be going.

The Scary Side

But to our point. E Nesbit wrote four collections of ghost or supernatural tales. Something Wrong (1893), Grim Tales (1893), Tales Told in the Twilight (1897) and Fear (1910). Naomi Alderman wrote, of Nesbit’s ghost stories

“There is darkness in the corners of these stories, like that gathering shadow – ordinary callousness turning into something more disturbing.”

Guardian Arts (2016)

We admit that her ghost stories are variable. Some contain musings which could have been left out, others evoke a worrying mood but don’t exactly scare. However, when she gets it right, she is excellent, with a less ‘period’ style than some of her contemporaries. She can be truly chilling.

She evokes images of the dead who are determined (or cursed) to keep going long after the grave has beckoned. And when we say images, we mean not only intangible revenants but corporeal forms. In fact, she has a penchant for all-too corporeal returns, which places her most definitely in the horror genre.

Many tales involve love and failed relationships, which is worth a note, given the author’s own experiences. Despite her political credentials, one of the curious aspects about E Nesbit is that she had mixed views about suffrage and women’s movements in real life. Her stories reflect this in part, and yet there are certainly issues of gender conflict within. Women occupy roles as both victims and active participants, which makes you wonder what effect her first marriage, to Hubert Bland, had on her.

“Bland was an atypical Fabian, since he combined socialism with strongly conservative opinions that reflected his social background and his military sympathies…. He was also strongly opposed to women’s suffrage. At the same time he advocated collectivist socialism, wrote Fabian tracts, and lectured extensively on socialism.”

Julia Briggs, E Nesbit’s biographer

Bland reputedly got at least two other women pregnant. The first was Maggie Doran, his mother’s companion. The second was Alice Hoatson, Nesbit’s friend, who ended up bearing two children by him and living with the Blands for some years.

Some time ago, the actress Jenny Agutter had plans for a film exploring this relationship and its consequences, but we can’t find any reference to the project having been completed.

Back to the fiction. As we can’t go into every E Nesbit story here (that’s your job, listener) we’re popping back to 1893 to recommend her volume Grim Tales, if you want a quick taste. This collection includes two of her most anthologised stories, John Charrington’s Wedding and Man-Size in Marble.

Grim Tales: Contents

The Ebony Frame
John Charrington’s Wedding
Uncle Abraham’s Romance
The Mystery Of The Semi-Detached
From The Dead
Man-Size In Marble
The Mass For The Dead

‘Uncle Abraham’s Romance’ is the most poignant, but not chilling; ‘From The Dead’ perhaps the most tragic, in that its events were entirely avoidable.

Within you will find questions of the nature of love and the determination of the dead to wreak corporeal damage. You will discover many unhappy endings, yet also sad visions of what might have been – and what might have been avoided.

And there are things which walk when they should not.

There are a number of relevant collections. Grim Tales is available free from Project Gutenberg, as is The Enchanted Castle (for children) mentioned above:

grim tales on gutenberg

For an audio fix, you might try Morgan Scorpion’s recording of Man-Size in Marble.

More tangible books include:

E Nesbit Horror Stories, edited by Naomi Alderman

does anyone else find the cover a bit odd?

http://amzn.eu/5DA13gC

The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

the power of darkness, amazon uk

And Matt Cowan (on his site Horror Delve) has a quick look at ten of her supernatural stories here, including a few of her later tales:

https://horrordelve.com/2016/06/05/10-eerie-tales-of-e-nesbit/

We have lots of books and projects to mention, so next time will probably be one of those “What’s New” posts, with some lurcher madness and Valentine’s Day scares to follow next week…

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M R James and his Friend in The Fens

December 19, 2016 greydogtales 4 Comments

Today, a dash of Fenland history, a gentle vicar and some ghost stories, as we follow in the footsteps of M R James – in a way. Join us, dear listener, for a ramble in East Anglia and some ghostly trivia in the company of E G Swain…

It’s easy enough to chart those authors who continued the M R James tradition in the early half of last century. Some became over-specific in their horrors; others grasped at James’ style but couldn’t quite achieve his ease. And a number broke one or more of his ‘rules’.

His friend and contemporary Edmund Gill Swain, often broke a cardinal rule and yet achieved stories which shine with that careful, detailed touch which makes James so readable. So today we stand on the edge of The Fens a while, and reflect on Swain’s Mr Batchel and his landscape.

M R James on Ghost Stories

There are no real rules, of course, but M R James set out a number of points as to what he himself considered to be the requisites of a ghost story. These can be found in the introduction to the collection Ghosts & Marvels (1924), and in the preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911):

“Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage…”

“For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. ‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘Not long before the war’, are very proper openings. If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it… On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique…”

Ghosts and Marvels

“Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

E G Swain (1861-1938) adhered closely to the first two points above, but pretty much ignored that last one. Swain was Chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1892 to 1905. His chaplaincy came after he had been a curate for some years in South London.

He and M R James had an amiable relationship, and shared a number of interests beyond college and religion. It’s known that he regularly attended M R James’ ghost story readings at Christmas, and his only collection of ghost stories, The Stoneground Tales, is dedicated:

TO MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES, FOR TWENTY PLEASANT YEARS MR BATCHEL’S FRIEND, AND THE INDULGENT PARENT OF SUCH TASTES AS THESE PAGES INDICATE

We gave a brief mention to this volume over a year ago ( gods and garden rollers), but felt it was time to do more justice to an unjustly forgotten writer and his geographical influences. Like James, he drew on antiquarian knowledge and folk-lore to bring a strong feeling of history, the church and the land to his tales.

The Stoneground Ghost Tales took form quite directly from Swain’s period as the vicar of the real Stanground, near Peterborough, on the edge of The Fens. He was in that position at the church of St John the Baptist from 1905 to 1916, and his collection was published in 1912. M R James had already featured parts of East Anglia in a few of his stories. Swain confined himself entirely to the area outside Peterborough, and to that part nearest to his living.

Unlike James, there are no un-named or varied narrators in Swain’s stories – only Mr Batchel, vicar and amateur antiquarian. And the wry, delightful bachelor Mr Batchel at Stoneground is, indeed, a certain version of E G Swain at Stanground.

As one of those ‘small’ heroes who seeks justice in whatever way they can, he is admirable. He brings God to the Fenland in that peculiar old-fashioned way which makes allowances for both the supernatural and the foibles of humanity. He doesn’t employ the degree of rational deduction of G K Chesterton’s more famous Father Brown, but he does share a certain mild determination with that figure. And having introduced the protagonist, we should say a little more about the backdrop to the stories.

The Drained Land

The geography of the area is of direct relevance. Although Stanground is situated south of the River Nene, on relatively high ground, most of the Fenland lies within a few metres of sea level.

map showing the results of a one or two metre rise in sea level on the area, courtesy of http://flood.firetree.net/

The area originally consisted of fresh- or salt-water wetlands. These were artificially drained and have to be protected continually from floods by drainage banks and pumps. Stanground itself was not immune to flooding, as happened in the August of the same year as Swain’s collection was published. Swain wrote, concerning these events:

“It may well be that Vermuyden and the Dutchmen who drained the fens did good, and that it was interred with their bones. It is quite certain that they did evil and that it lives after them. The rivers, which theses men robbed of their water, have at length silted up, and the drainage of one tract of country is proving to have been achieved by the undraining of another.

“Places like Stoneground, which lie on the banks of these defrauded rivers, are now become helpless victims of Dutch engineering. The water which has lost its natural outlet, invades their lands… and a summer flood not infrequently destroys the whole produce of (the) ground.

“Such a flood, during an early year in the twentieth century, had been unusually disastrous to Stoneground…”

The Eastern Window

In The Richpins, Swain gives a fine picture of the area at its best, with regard to an area called ‘Frenchman’s Meadow’:

“It was upon the edge of what is known locally as ‘high land’; and though its elevation was not great, one could stand in the meadow and look seawards over many miles of flat country, once a waste of brackish water, now a great chess-board of fertile fields bounded by straight dykes of glistening water.”

Only a few miles from Stanground (now a suburban neighbourhood of Peterborough) lies Wicken Fen, one of the only ‘wild’ fens in East Anglia, although it has long been under human management. The first recorded sedge harvest at Wicken was in 1414, and ever since then, sedge has been regularly cut for roofing. The area is also notable for the history of Spinney Abbey, more properly Spinney Priory.

Beatrice, the grand-daughter of the Steward of the Count of Brittany, founded the Priory of St Mary and the Holy Cross in the spinney by Wicken in the early 1300s. The priory was first endowed with three canons of the Augustinian order. In 1403 the Prior, William de Lode, was murdered by three of his own canons who stabbed him in the priory church. Only the priory cellar and few fragments of the original buildings remain.

It may be the murder of de Lode which started legends of monkish ghosts being seen in the area. Some would say that the area is a supernatural hotspot. The bank nearby called Spinney Bank, for example, is a location notorious for sightings of the mythical ‘Old Shuck’, the demonic black dog of East Anglia. For our Northern equivalents to the Shuck, see game of groans and clanking chains

The Church of St John

St John’s church itself in Stanground was constructed some time in the 1200s and is the oldest building in the parish. The Lampass Cross, a 12th-century scheduled monument, stands in the churchyard, and is thought to date from the 11th or 12th century. It was originally in the vicarage gardens, and would have been in the latter position during Swain’s time.

These gardens are a constant presence in the stories – Bone to His Bone, one of the best tale, concerns a genuine predecessor, Vicar William Whitehead, who donated his own close of ground to these gardens. The real-life church is key as well, and even its glasswork has a role.

“The focal point of the interior is the impressive stained glass window at the east end of the chancel. This features Christ in majesty at the top, holding globes with hand raised in blessing. To either side he is flanked by his disciples, eleven of them depicted, along with Mary Magdalene. Below, we have scenes from the life of Christ. From left to right the infant Jesus lying in a manger, Jesus baptised by John The Baptist, the crucifixion, the last supper and the ascension.”

Rob’s Churches

Here is Mr Batchel’s typically deprecating take on this, which plays a crucial part in The Eastern Window:

“It is a large painted window, of a somewhat unfortunate period of execution. The drawing and colouring leave everything to be desired… The five large lights in the lower part are assigned to five scenes in the life of Our Lord, and the second of these, counting from the north, contains a bold erect figure of St John the Baptists, to whom the church is dedicated. It is this figure alone, of all those contained in the window, that is concerned in what we have to relate.”

The interconnection between fact and fiction is a constant in Swain’s ghost stories. He doesn’t go in for exploitation of the more macabre Fenland legends such as the Black Shuck, although he does include two tonsured figures in cassocks in his story The Place of Safety. He tends to choose rather smaller human stories, and eschews the viler apparitions of M R James. In The Richpins, for example, he draws on another genuine piece of history – Norman Cross.

Napoleonic Remains

Norman Cross was the site of the world’s first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp or “depot” built during the Napoleonic Wars by the Navy. It was intended to provide humane confinement for prisoners of war, especially those who had limited means. The average prison population was about 5,500 men most of the men held in the prison were low-ranking soldiers and sailors, including midshipmen and junior officers, with a small number of privateers.

“Within five miles of Stoneground a large barracks had been erect for the custody of French prisoners during the war with Bonaparter. Many thousands were confined there during the years 1808-14. The prisoners were allowed to sell what articles they could make in the barracks; and many of them, upon their release, settled in the neighbourhood, where their descendants remain.”

The Richpins

Particularly pertinent to the tale is the fact that in Swain’s time, there were older folk still alive whose grandparents had witnessed the Napoleonic wars. The last British veteran of the Battle of Waterloo had died only 20 years before the publication of Stoneground Ghost Tales – Morris Shea (1795–1892), of the 73rd Foot Regiment.

The Richpins is a small reminder of that past, with a faint shiver included. As we said of Swain last year:

“His tales are not ones of loathsome horror, or doom to come. They include hauntings, but avoid being trite or overly romanticised. They… are of loss, longing and wistful souls, and all the better for it.”

Swain only ever wrote the nine tales. David G Rowlands did take up Mr Batchel’s cause and write another dozen or so stories of the vicar in the eighties and nineties. It’s a difficult task to capture quite the right tone of James and Swain, but some of them are certainly worth a read. Perhaps the best of these were included in Michael Cox’s Bone to His Bone collection for Equation in 1989. This is sadly long out of print, but old copies can still be found at a good price.

Anyway, there you have the Stoneground Ghost Tales – an essential read for enthusiasts of M R James, and of the gentler or more curious sort of ghost story. If you can’t find a second-hand copy, you can read all Swain’s stories at Project Gutenberg:

the stoneground ghost tales

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Come Freely, Go Safely: Dracula Returns, Scott Handcock Rules!

May 31, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

“Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.” Today The Voice of Horror is back with a shudder. Earlier this year we were bowled over by Big Finish’s version of William Hope Hodgson’s tales. Now they have expanded their classics again with a major three hour production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring none other than Mark Gatiss. And we have a brand new interview with ace audio producer Scott Handcock, who made it all happen.

Big Finish have been known for a while for their extensive range of cult audio, including of course Dr Who, but what interests us in particular is their growing range of adaptations based on classic supernatural and horror tales, such as Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, and the afore mentioned Carnacki (see the starkey stratagem).

Their Dracula was released on Thursday 26th May, 119 years to the day after the novel’s first publication. It’s a full-cast production, and we should rightly credit all the talent involved:

Mark Gatiss (Count Dracula), Joseph Kloska (Jonathan Harker), Deirdre Mullins (Mina Murray), Nigel Betts (Abraham Van Helsing), Rupert Young (John Seward), Alex Jordan (Arthur Holmwood), David Menkin (Quincey P. Morris), Rosanna Miles (Lucy Westenra), Elizabeth Morton (Mary Westenra), Ian Hallard (Renfield), Edward Petherbridge (Mr Swales), and Katy Manning (Sister Agatha).

Before we talk to Scott, we’ll share some of our own thoughts, something we tend only to do with audio productions. The audiobook provides three hours and fourteen minutes of drama, plus a bonus fifty minutes of background material – opinions, cast interviews, music and so on. And did we enjoy it? Indeed we did. It was notable because of three things:

It drew us away from the many re-interpretations and variants on the Dracula/vampire theme that have accumulated, particularly over the last couple of decades, and made us want to go back and read Stoker’s original for the first time in years. It was something akin to a purging of all the weird re-imaginings. At the end of the audio we thought: Gosh, that’s actually quite a good story. We’d almost forgotten.

Gatiss is excellent, as we’d hoped and as you might expect, and it’s a great cast in general. However, Deirdre Mullins is outstanding as Mina Harker. From beginning to end, her performance is so striking and engaging that we were rooting for her more than for anyone else in the story, and towards the end our main concern was that she, of all of them, would survive. This was a real surprise, and we can only hope that she does more work in this area.

We are admittedly becoming the strangest of creatures, Scott Handcock groupies, if such a thing is possible. Carnacki was terrifically well done (not forgetting Dan Starkey’s outstanding performance as Carnacki himself, of course). This adaptation of Dracula again asserts the value of a well-produced audio play as compared to film and TV. The atmosphere, and the immediacy of engagement with the characters through their voices, made it a pleasure.

Mark Gatiss, famed for his involvement in Sherlock, Dr Who, The League of Gentlemen and other series, has played a vampire before – Mr Snow, in TV’s Being Human. He has a long association with horror, including examinations of M R James’ work, and made a three-part BBC documentary series entitled A History of Horror, a personal exploration of the history of horror cinema.

(As a trivia aside, Gatiss met his League of Gentlemen co-writers and performers at Bretton Hall, a drama school not that far from the greydog kennels in Yorkshire.)

“(Dracula) is a part I’ve always wanted to play – and I’ve been rehearsing for 48 years,” says Gatiss.”You may be able to tell that in the relish and bloodied glee in which I approach this role!’

He also commented in a Dr Who-related interview for scifibulletin, when asked about his role in Dracula:

“…I had a wonderful time. It was all very close-mic work and I loved it all. I watched a few Hungarian language things – [Transylvania] was actually Hungary not Romania at the time – and they all sound just like Bela Lugosi but you’ve got to be careful, I think, because it has been mocked so much. You either go the urbane Christopher Lee route or do the Hungarian thing – I’ve settled for something in between.”

Gatiss delivers a subtle performance, full of quiet threat rather than mad cape-swirling, and all the better for it. And as he says, his accent is enough to give depth but not so much that it becomes a stereotype. You genuinely get the feeling that people have no choice except to do what he says. When he tells Jonathan Harker to start writing letters home, and you realise that Harker may be doomed, you get a real chill.

But let us move on to producer/director Scott Handcock, who makes a welcome return to greydogtales to give us a view from the inside…

greydog: Great to have you back with us, Scott, and with such a cool production – Dracula. We’d normally ask you how you’ve been and chat a bit, but we suspect our listeners are here to get the low-down on this new adaptation, so we’ll be business-like. Firstly, Mark Gatiss. How did you get him on-board (apart from paying him, of course)?

scott: I’ve known Mark for a good few years, ever since my days at BBC Wales. He’s one of those people who’s effortlessly pleasant. No matter what your role or status on a production, he likes to know who you are and what you do, so I’ve encountered him on and off since my days on Doctor Who Confidential.

I then heard on the grapevine, following my production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, that he’d rather liked to have played the part of Harry Wotton, so naturally I started forming ideas to get him on board for something else. Following my production of Frankenstein with Arthur Darvill, Dracula was the next logical step for the gothic trilogy, and obviously there was no better fit for the role than Mark! So I dropped him a quick note, sounded him out, and he instantly came back to me with a yes.

greydog: We can certainly see him in the role of the older, hedonistic aristocrat Wotton. So, for this production did you negotiate the take you wanted on the character between you, or did Mark already have his own ideas of how he wanted to portray Dracula?

scott: I think characterisation comes primarily from the script, and it was clear from Jonathan Barnes’ brilliant adaptation that this was a very straight take on the character. Mark came in with his own interpretation and ideas, but they pretty much matched my own. Neither of us wanted this to be a caricature, so although there is an accent, it isn’t too pronounced. Rather than make him a monster, he’s very much a man, which in a way makes him more frightening.

greydog: We’ve heard his performance, reminding us that he has that ability to convey a deep, disturbing menace. We imagine that this works particularly well in a sound studio.

scott: The advantage of the audio medium means you can really measure a performance and lend your performance an intimacy you might not otherwise have on screen. Mark’s Dracula is terrifying because he’s so contained. He knows how powerful he is, so he doesn’t need to rant or rave. It’s brilliantly judged!

greydog: The adaptation was written by Jonathan Barnes, who already has an eye for Victorian period detail. Not only did he write the period horror The Somnambulist, but are we right that he did the dramatisation for your production of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus?

scott: Absolutely! We had a blast working on Frankenstein, and it was out of the success of that production that we got the green light for this one. Jonathan really knows his stuff, and how to pace a potentially unwieldy novel over the space of three hours. And like his previous work, the joy of his script for Dracula is how identifiable the world and characters are. It’s a period story, yes, but by focusing on the characters and their relationships, it draws the listener in. You really care about the characters and the hold that Dracula has over every one of them.

greydog: Dracula has been adapted and re-interpreted many times. From the length of this offering (three hours) and the size of the cast, this seems to be a pretty faithful adaptation. Were there sections which you and Jonathan had to cut or re-interpret to fit the running time?

scott: By its very nature, any adaptation requires a degree of compromise. You can’t include absolutely everything from the original work – otherwise you’re just doing a reading – but Jonathan’s been very smart in including all the things people think they know about Dracula, whilst also working in a lot of the forgotten details and characters too. So we have Mr Swales, the wolf enclosure, and all manner of other sequences that are easily omitted from most modern interpretations. Plus we have all three of Lucy’s suitors. It really is a packed and faithful retelling – and one that really makes the most of its extended run time.

greydog: As far as the cast goes, we see that you’re back with Joseph Kloska (playing Jonathan Harker), who was Dodgson to Dan Starkey’s Carnacki in the Hope Hodgson stories you released earlier this year. Deirdre Mullins is playing Mina, Nigel Betts is van Helsing and even the smaller parts include some intriguing contributions – you have Edward Petherbridge, for example, who we remember for his stylish Lord Peter Wimsey at the BBC, and Katy Manning, immortalised as Jo during Jon Pertwee’s Dr Who.

scott: I’ve been hugely lucky with my cast on Dracula. With the exception of Nigel Betts and Edward Petherbridge, I’ve worked with most of the others a few times before, so it created a real sense of family. Everyone who comes in to work with Big Finish loves the company atmosphere. We work very hard, but we have a lot of fun doing so, and tackling something as well-known as Dracula really focussed everyone even before we entered the studio. Each of us has an idea of the story, and the weight of the characters and narrative, so it was remarkably easy to form the relationships between characters that guide the listener through. Deirdre Mullins as Mina is especially impressive, literally holding the story together from the very beginning. But everyone else is magnificent too! I couldn’t ask for a single line to have been played any differently…

greydog: Deirdre is a marvellous Mina Harker indeed. So, you’re both producer and director. Is it somewhat nerve-wracking doing a full cast production like this, as compared to readings or limited-cast dramatisations?

scott: Every project’s different, if I’m honest. Something like Dracula isn’t any more nerve-wracking than a more straightforward reading – you still have to pay the same attention to detail, so the process in studio is much the same whatever you’re recording. The difference comes beforehand. A project that spans three days usually means leaping around the narrative to make the most of different people’s availabilities (no point keeping people hanging around if they’re not needed), so as a director, you really need to know the script inside-out, so performances match from one scene to the next, even if they’re recorded days apart. But I love that aspect to the bigger productions. It makes it a bit more of a challenge…

greydog: And given that we have no experience in this area whatsoever, how much studio time do these longer productions need? Are we normally talking a couple of straight, one-take performances which are then edited, or weeks of calling people in, separate recordings and re-takes?

scott: We usually record an hour a day. Sometimes the studio days can be spread out over a few weeks, as with Frankenstein, but we were lucky on Dracula to have three consecutive days to really focus everyone. Rather than one big read through of the entire three hours, which would most likely wear everyone out, we tackle a scene at a time. Read it through, then record, with several takes to work with in the edit. It’s a brilliant way of working that really helps keep the energy up, and I honestly couldn’t tell you which sequences were recorded on which day any more! It’s just one long terrifying story…

greydog: We’d better let you get some rest. Many thanks for your time – you are, of course, now our favourite audio producer – and we thoroughly enjoyed immersing ourselves in Dracula. We also hope that you’ll keep in touch over anything you do on the dark and supernatural side.

You can buy Dracula here:

big finish – dracula

And Scott has since promised to come back and talk about the final series of his Confessions of Dorian Gray production in the autumn, so we might go Dorian-mad later in the year.

Back in a couple of days, and do subscribe if you want to know when we have a new feature out. Take care out there…

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The Scary Side

Grim Tales: Contents

M R James on Ghost Stories

The Drained Land

The Church of St John

Napoleonic Remains

Literature, lurchers and life