B-movie

My new pamphlet, ‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is now available from Equipage. It follows up my previous Equipage pamphlet, 'Alien Skies', from 1992.
‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is an attempt to recapture the feverish and irrational mythology of the B-movie, initially based on the classic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and on the neglected pre-1921 serials which realised the “roulette principle” that coherence reduces the shock value of any plot event. It reacts to that key line from Cobra Woman: it’s a wild dream of her decaying brain. Less credibly, it enters the world of manga and kaiju eiga to describe a monster, liberated from beneath Arctic ice, developing a craving for human males as impossibly cute and moe subjects of reptile fetishism, in a lunatic exaggeration of bishonen style, in a fervour of idealism and romantic craving. More broadly, a cast of methodologically suspect occult scholars pursue seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, said to contain matter which had leaked through from another universe, detected by subtle and eerie distortions of geology and building fabrics. This quest re-enacts the Storage Wars series, in which junk dealers bid on sealed, abandoned storage lockers. A role is also played by the author’s autobiographical experiences of interviewing ruined horror directors for the Journal of Pulp Critique.” The project aims to restore the lost innocence of film serials circa 1915.

** Notes
‘Lud’s Gateway’ began as a poem for Iain Sinclair's birthday, based on themes from ‘Suicide Bridge’, and a tribute to Storage Wars. It was published in the Sinclair tribute volume. Later, I added twelve more poems. The Wars franchise involves junk dealers bidding on sealed, abandoned, storage lockers, and sealed lockers recur in the poem. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was a 1972 film based on The Jewel of Seven Stars, a novel by Bram Stoker. Other themes come from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Cobra Woman, La ragazza che sapeva troppo, All the colours of darkness, Zero for tomorrow, Ultus, the Avenger, Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse, Here’s Las Vegas, Kiss Me Deadly, A Walk through H, Muzzle flash in the glass labyrinth, The Tidal Field of the Dark Star, A First-Year Library of Corrosion, and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.
As well as the B-Movie sequence, there are two other poems, "Homage to Kathleen Byron" and "Locked Up", which is about the outsider artist Madge Gill.
In Seven Stars, a sorceress from Ancient Egypt is entombed but uses magic to bring about reincarnation. When the stars have rotated back to the position they were in at the moment of her death, she will be reborn into a human form who is also the daughter of the archaeologist who brought the sarcophagus back to London. The daughter has seven fingers on each hand, matching the Seven Stars of Tera's star group. In the film, the event requires the re-assembly of parts of her magic equipment, now scattered. In the poem, the parts are seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, and finding them requires a search based on Storage Wars.