Features

Several years ago, a young ‘expert’ (or so he seemed intent on telling everyone) on the British Horror genre, who shall remain nameless, held a lecture at an also-unnamed UK film festival, at which his opening gambit consisted rather bravely and foolishly of the assertion that British Horror had begun in 1956 with Hammer’s The Curse Of Frankenstein. The fact that he had overlooked the same company’s groundbreaking The Quatermass X-periment a year earlier, and had similarly glossed over the previous decade’s seminal Dead Of Night and The Queen Of Spades, was bad enough, but several informed personages, at least one of my own acquaintance, also gave the same resounding cry – “What about Tod Slaughter?”

I should point out that this is all second-hand information to me, as I was not actually at the aforementioned festival myself - but it comes as no surprise to hear of this occurrence, because, put simply, Tod Slaughter was the- accept no substitute, no, not even you, Marius Goring - undisputed master of horror, suspense and melodrama of the black and white age. At least in the UK, that is. Obviously the mighty Karloff remains the unchallenged king of the genre worldwide, but he, like fellow Sarf Landan boy Claude Rains, had long forsaken his homeland for the Hollywood sound stage and would remain there for nearly another three decades before the British arm of AIP flew him home to shoot the likes of Die, Monster, Die!! and Curse Of The Crimson Altar.

But for those who prioritised viewing home-grown productions (not that resentment had set in by that point of course), ‘the Slod’ as he was never known at the time, was, put simply, ‘the man’. A barrel-chested, often moustachioed, cackling, scenery-chewing (sometimes literally), cane-wielding hulk of an individual, who despite his own limited thespian abilities was often the only one in his films who could actually act, Slaughter was the kind of performer for whom the expression ‘once seen never forgotten’ was invented. Not so much a bad actor as a great over-actor, he will never be remembered as an all-time cinematic great, because, put up against the likes of Donat, Niven or Olivier, or indeed the aforementioned Karloff, he obviously wasn’t. Not only that, but he occupies a strange place in the chronology of British cinema, as he didn’t appear on the big screen until 1935, by which time he was almost 50 years old, meaning that he missed by eight years the silent era which would have seen him rival Novello for popularity, but was far too old to be a matinee idol like many of those who are regarded- often inaccurately- with hindsight as his contemporaries.

What Slaughter will be remembered for is the gusto, bravado, relish and sheer entertainment factor he put into every film he appeared in- even if the majority of them were cheaply produced rubbish by anyone else’s standards. Although, to be totally fair, part of this is due to his association with directors such as Milton Rosmer and George King, neither of who would ever rival a Hitchcock or even a Thorold Dickinson for creative talent. What these men - the Poverty Row exploitation filmmakers of their day - were good at was harnessing Slaughter’s presence, and making the most exciting fare quickly and cheaply out of the limited materials available. As a result, many of the films they directed and/or produced for Tod have the impression of being nothing more than filmed plays- and indeed, the opening scene of his first entry into the canon, Maria Marten Or The Murder In The Red Barn, takes place as if it were onstage, with an MC introducing the characters to the audience - which has led to the oft-quoted comment that had the Victorians had cameras and been able to transfer their melodramas to celluloid, this is what they would have looked like. For this reason if no other, Tod Slaughter is important - he provides a link between the stage and the screen, the 19th and the 20th century, and the fact that he died in February 1956, just as Terence Fisher was beginning to arrange casting and finance for what would become the aforementioned Curse Of Frankenstein, symbolises the end of one great era of English Gothic and the start of another. In short, Tod is a name that should be known and a tale that should be told.

Not that it was his real name of course. Well, not the Tod part anyway. The great man was actually born Norman Carter Slaughter on the 19th March 1885, to working class parents in Newcastle Upon Tyne, where surnames derived from the profession of one’s family were still commonplace. But whilst the blood and viscera of the abattoir and the knackers’ yard obviously fascinated him, the workaday world was obviously not for young Norman and very soon he was off to be that most dreaded of things - a ‘theatrical’. By the time he was 15, he was treading the boards of Northern England’s fleapits to an ecstatic audience reared on penny dreadfuls and pulp comics. By the time he was 20 he had formed his own theatrical company and was paying other people (although probably not too generously) to do it with him. Always the baddie, never the good guy, stalking both stage and stalls often armed with buckets of blood, liver and entrails and delighting in terrorising audiences who were not always aware of what was coming to them (not that it would have deterred those who did), the newly rechristened “Tod” Slaughter was every respectable theatregoer’s worst nightmare and every schlock-lover’s wet dream in glorious, flesh-crawling 3D. And don’t forget, this was real life theatre, not cinema, so it would have been in colour.

Shamelessly plundering all the classic terror tales of the preceding fifty years- Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Spring Heeled Jack, Burke and Hare. and of course his almost-namesake Sweeney Todd, and delivering them to packed houses with all the subtlety of a giant luminous steamroller - even during his service in World War I, which must have seemed at the time the ideal channel for his mixture of gung ho and gore - it was inevitable that at some point someone would come up with the idea of transferring the giant loon to the movies and seeing what would happen. And so it was that in 1935 he strode in front of the cameras for the first time to make Maria Marten a slice of celluloid history.

Anyone familiar with melodrama will know the story by now, as it’s been filmed umpteen times (several preceding this one, even) and has formed the basis for a squillion others. Squire Corder (Slaughter) fancies Maria, Maria fancies gypsy (Eric Portman, appearing for what would not be the only time alongside the great fiend), her father (DJ Williams, again setting a precedent) doesn’t approve. Being a bit daft, as women were often depicted back then, she accepts wicked Squire’s invitation round for drinkies, whereupon he rapes her (I believe the word used is in fact ‘bewitched’), swears he will marry her, and then promptly buggers off to marry someone else whose inheritance can cover his gambling debts, leaving her with child. Maria gets annoyed, threatens to expose Squire, he tells her to wait for him in the Red Barn where they will be married, promptly murders her and buries her underneath, blames the gypsy and sends for the law, whereupon his own dog spots a disturbance in the earth. Ordered to dig, the squire has no choice but to confess his crimes whilst going a little mad and threatening to kill everyone whilst cackling insanely, is promptly taken to prison to await execution and is hanged by-guess who? - Carlos the gypsy himself, who swore vengeance at the start of the film when the squire ordered his entire family off his land after the fortune-telling which prophesied his fate. And that’s it really.

Those who wish to enter into conjecture about such things may surmise that here, Tod is playing it down for the cameras - that may be the case, particularly as the censorship of the time would have prevented him from covering people in blood, guts and offal, but in terms of his actual delivery he sets here the tone for practically 95 percent of his forthcoming career. Grinning, leering, harrumphing, and shouting lots of oaths such as “Well? Well?!!” “Curse you all!!” “The devil fly away with you” (actually, I don’t know if he does actually say that on this occasion, but it’s as close as dammit) and most famously “I promised you will be a bride, and so you shall be- a bride of DEATH!!!!”- a line he would use again in Crimes At The Dark House- watching him is like taking lessons in advanced hamming from some kind of theatrical Second Dan. It packed ‘em in at the flicks, and so a year later he was back, only this time under the aegis of the slightly more respected George King, to tackle the inevitable Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, which went on general release in 1936. More of the same abounds here- except this time Tod terrorises children and old bearded men rather than simple village girls, and the movie begins and ends with a humorous little skit set in the present day. Within the same year, we were well and truly on the road to Terrorsville with The Crimes Of Stephen Hawke, also directed by King, which was actually quite graphic for its day (more in terms of what it describes, as you never actually see anything) and cast The Slod in what would become another regular staple of his metier - the double role. By day a respected moneylender with a doting daughter, by night “The Spine Breaker”, he was on top form in this one, and managed to outrage a few censors too. The opening scene, where a young child's spine is broken (off camera, of course) whilst being shown a 'paradoxical tarddidlum', has often been described as one of the most ghoulish in the Slod's oeuvre, although many would freely admit that the child was such an irritating brat he probably had it coming to him sooner or later. For trivia spotters, it should always be pointed out that yes, this IS the film which features a present-day beginning in which our man recounts the previous years' terrors (featuring the timeless double entendre "I murdered poor Maria by shooting her in the Red Barn") and the antics of a popular satirical music duo of the time, Flotsam and Jetsam- who, of course, bear absolutely no relation whatsoever to the Thrash Metal band of the same name from the 1980s, famous for losing bassist Jason Newsted to Metallica.