Notes from the Peninsula
On writing, films and living a creative life
The Phantom of the Opera
A baby is put in a basket and released into the sewer where rats pull it to safety and raise it as one of their own. Argento’s Phantom is the king of the rats, but also a hunky blonde stud in Julian Sands, beautiful, charming, with no mask in sight.
Gothic
I love Ken Russell. He’s not afraid to be weird, sexual, gloopy and violent. Byron, Godwin, Shelley and Polidori whip each other into a fervour as a metaphor for the artists creative process and the courage required in the face of all the imagery and emotions that can fly around while making art.
Dracula
Christopher Lee’s Dracula is iconic. He’s tall, his face carries an animalistic quality when in vampire mode, he’s sometimes slow and imposing, but then he strides up castle stairs three at a time. Beneath his civility is a barely held in check hunger. It’s wonderful to watch.
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The Eternal Daughter
Julie, an artist and photographer, takes her mother to a luxurious country hotel for her birthday, but is unsettled by strange noises and half-seen figures. The hotel was once her mother’s family home, and the visit unearths unexpected memories.
The Car
Deputy Wade Parent is raising two daughters alone after the death of his wife and policing the usually peaceful small town of Santa Ynez—until a black car with darkened windows drives out of the Utah desert and runs two cyclists off a bridge into a ravine.
Enys Men
A woman in a bright red coat walks the barren landscape of an island somewhere off the coast of Cornwall. She’s a volunteer monitoring wildlife, in particular a clutch of white flowers of which she records the soil temperature at their roots every day.
Australia
October was a blur of holiday preparations, work dramas, and then boom, we were on the plane, digitally clutching almost forgotten eVisas, trying to use ridiculous neck pillows, and making ill-advised small talk with customs officers.
Spirals
Returning from holiday, I went into an overwhelm spiral, and I'm only just getting out of it. Nothing too serious, but frustrating nonetheless. Lots of loops are closing, but it’s taken me a while to acknowledge that, and they’re not yet completely closed
Gluteal tendinopathy (and me)
The pain was in my groin, or the front of my hip, or deep in my buttock, but it was a debacle with a Pilates machine that finally led me to Physio One.
The Stendhal Syndrome
Imaginative and clichéd, intriguing and brutal, this film is primarily about rape, torture, and insanity. Asia Argento goes insane in Florence on the trail of a serial killer and rapist.
The Black Cat/Trauma
These two odd kittens are making me wonder if the Dario Argento project is reaching its end. The Black Cat sees a deranged, beret-clad Harvey Keitel play a photographer obsessed with taking pictures of mutilated bodies.
Early summer books
All Fours, by Miranda July. I haven’t laughed out loud so much at a book since Bridget Jones’s Diary. The unnamed artist makes terrible, hilarious decisions over and over, but she’s also just trying to have the horny creative life she wants.
Opera
Opera is the last of what’s regarded as Argento’s unimpeachable run of giallo-horror-thrillers through the seventies and eighties. For me, there are hits and misses, but Opera is one of his best.
Phenomena
Like in Suspiria, a young woman arrives at a female-run school where students are being murdered by an unseen killer, but there are no witches in Zürich, just a girl who has an unconscious connection with insects.
Tenebre
You see different things in a good piece of art as you get older. I wrote about Tenebre back in October 2020 for the #31DaysofHorror challenge. I loved it then, and I love it now, but the protagonist is far less likeable than I remember, and the twists more surprising.
Inferno
If Suspiria was a step away from the narrative rigours of a whodunnit, Inferno is a giant leap, with four (four!) protagonists in two cities — but it starts with a woman, Rose, being sold a rare occult book called The Three Mothers and coming to believe her apartment block was built for a witch.
Suspiria
Suspiria is a vivid, colourful dream where death stalks us, out of sight but ever-present. Characters die in complicated and fantastical ways to Goblin’s driving mix of Moog synths, bells, whispered vocals and a drum beat for the ages. And it’s a film filled with strong women. The men are all ineffectual side characters.
Deep Red
After making a couple of thrillers for television and a hard-to-find historical comedy that was a commercial flop, Argento returned to Giallo with a twisty, colourful, Goblin-scored mystery.
Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Roberto, an American drummer in a band recording in Milan, chases a man who has been following him and accidentally kills him. A masked figure takes photographs and begins to torment Roberto, but what is their motive?
The Cat O’ Nine Tails
A blind ex-journalist overhears a conversation about blackmail outside his apartment. A newspaper reporter investigates a burglary in a nearby laboratory. As people at the lab start to die, the two men join forces to uncover the story.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
In Panico, Dario Argento describes himself as being of two halves — the contented person at home, and the person who is compelled to investigate the darkness inside himself through making films.
Changing
I’m six months into a new job. My father’s house is for sale. My son is living in Australia. My daughter is gearing up for GCSEs next year. My wife and I are looking at each other and thinking, this is the time we’ve been waiting for, and yet neither of us have clear plans.
Darling buds
Four days off work! My plan was to not have a plan and trust I would do what I needed to do. It’s day two and I’m excited because things are changing — my glute tendons are healing (YES), my meditation habit has bedded in (now I miss it when I can’t do it), I’ve...
Gathering ideas
The heart of this project is writing new material. I also want a mechanism to let me easily share my work as I go, including selling it (shock horror!), without getting hung up on finding an agent and getting published.
Cornish horrors
I took my time with Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End, a collection of short stories I bought in Swansea Waterstones on one of my visits to see my father. Research can quickly become procrastination.
Impatience
Making art means making a mess. It means tidying up, organising, and discovering something in doing it. There are unexpected emotions. There are doubts and dead ends. There are technical problems.
Ligeia
Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, is a six-thousand-word hallucinatory tale about an intense marriage that survives beyond death. The narrator is looking back, remembering his wife, Ligeia, who he idolised.
Physical media
Continuing my interest in how fiction and films work together, I picked up Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, a collection I’ve owned for a few years and never read...
Evening classes
I’ve created a reading list my gut tells me is related to my work-in-progress. I went around the house scanning shelves and pulling out the books that tugged at my attention.
Losing myself
I finally sorted the two big bags of books I brought back from Dad’s last weekend. He loved Stephen King, and he bought lots of King’s books as first edition UK hardbacks. I don’t currently have shelf space for this many books.
Writing is simple
I complicate things unnecessarily. Writing is simple. You write and edit until the piece of work feels complete and there is nothing more to do.
The joy of making things up
It took optimism to enrol on a creative writing MA — I can be a writer! I can be published! — but as I get older, I've also developed a pragmatism, tipping into cynicism, which can easily become procrastination, or even complete avoidance.
Back to the path
I spent the weekend before my father’s funeral sorting through his books. He had them on shelves in different rooms, but they were also tucked in drawers, stacked at the bottom of wardrobes and piled behind old televisions.
My father died
Dad died last week. He was eighty-eight. Looking back, it was a miracle we got him home from hospital for one final Christmas. He had a long life, he was loved, and he left peacefully.
Nostalgia
I’m in Wales at short notice because Dad’s been admitted into hospital. The co-morbidities have gathered and decided to strike. He’s in bad shape. Around visiting times I’m looking for peaceful, distracting activities.
Fidelity
I’ve deleted my Patreon creator’s account, which was beginning to feel like I was cheating on my website (or the other way around, I’m not sure). Two places for almost the same words.
Best film discoveries and fiction of 2023
My favourite ten film discoveries (ranked) and ten favourite fiction books (not ranked). (Letterboxd is a hella sexy website. I wish GoodReads made more of an effort.)
Reflections
Somehow the year has tightened all the bolts on my rickety life, and I’m hitting the Christmas holidays in a good place.