I spent October watching horror movies starring actors who played Timelords, and this is (some more of) what I learned

Note: this entry is part two of a series. You probably have read Part One first, but in case you haven't for any reason, it's here. Now, let's fade down the Tardis noises and pick up from yesterday's cliffhanger...

I don't want to do down Sylvester McCoy by giving alternate universe Doctor Jeremy Brett the Cartmel Masterplan stuff - indeed, given that in the parallel timeline I've concocted Brett is followed by Colin Baker, there's every possibility that the line of succession reverts to something like normal and an older McCoy takes over a couple of years after Baker stars in the live-action version of 'Jubilee', thus saving him from being dragged to New Zealand and forced to walk around with shit on his face by Peter Jackson. And I don't doubt that McCoy could have brought something different to the Doctor in those circumstances, because he is, as I say, probably my favourite actor to have played the Doctor besides Peter Capaldi. Not that that should be a surprise, of course: lots of people like Sylvester McCoy. Indeed,

3. The production team on John Badham's 1979 Dracula film liked Sylvester McCoy so much they invented a part for him

Look! By the horse! It's the Seventh Doctor!

Not every fact I uncovered about these movies was as sweet as this one, but it's true: Sylvester McCoy (then acting under the stage name Sylveste, primarily in things like Ken Campbell's epic theatrical adaptation of Roberts Shea and Anton Wilson's similarly epic Illuminatus! trilogy) tried out for the part of Renfield in Badham's 1979 adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel - a version forever known, due to Frank Langella's smouldering portrayal of the Count as 'the sexy one'. Although a different actor was chosen to play that role, the production team were so charmed by McCoy that they decided to add another character to Doctor Seward's household, a junior servant called Walter. Watching his performance in the film it's easy to see why: it's a small role, but one McCoy makes compelling through his performance, saying very little but using the knowledge of clowning he picked up working with Campbell's troupe to suggest a personality and interior life for Walter. It reminded me of buffon performances I've seen: it's not a comic role, per se, but Walter has an otherworldly, shy personality which is expressed in small and sometimes surprising gestures. The photo above is instructive: McCoy is not part of the main action but works with the horse in the background in ways which suggest that the often nervous Walter is one of those people who finds the company of animals more comforting than that of people - he's the guy at the party who spends most of his time playing with the cat or dog. It's also a good example of the thing which, in my Morbius review, I pointed out Jared Leto doesn't do in that film - McCoy is finding a small way to demonstrate that he is part of the world of the story: he isn't just there to be looked at. 

Doing that has benefits beyond just increasing the verisimilitude of the film: something else you notice about Badham's Dracula is that Donald Pleasence, as Seward, is also often finding little things to do - what actors call 'bits of business' - while he discusses the Dracula situation with the other characters. In Pleasence's case, however, there was an ulterior motive: by doing things like eating during scenes he created a continuity headache for the editors, thus ensuring that fewer of his scenes would be cut. Well, I did say not everything I learned about these films was as nice as McCoy charming the production team - though compared to what we've all learned about Frank Langella recently, a somewhat selfish approach to performance and screen time isn't exactly the worst thing. 

Hang on, though, I can hear you think - why is the only horror film you could find with Sylvester McCoy a 70s vampfest in which he plays a near-mute supporting role? Well...

4. Not all Timelords are that into Terror (at least cinematically)

One of the biggest surprises of doing this was finding out that there were some actors I simply wasn't going to be able to use, because despite (or perhaps because of) appearing in a series which is often at its best when it's being scary, some actors who have played Timelords have simply never been in many - or in some cases any -  horror flicks. Michelle Gomez, for example, was someone I felt sure would have some decent cinematic horror in her back catalogue, but nope - though in her case I think that's more a side-effect of her doing a lot more TV than movies: I haven't seen The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina so can't say if it makes good on its title, but Doom Patrol is a show which definitely leans towards the horrific at times. But there are some actors who simply seem not to have done much horror due to a personal dislike of the genre - William Hartnell, for example, never did anything that would qualify, and Peter Davison appears to have starred in only one horror movie, a 2021 effort called End of Term which seems to have sank without trace. Jon Pertwee, I suspect, considered the genre silly - the only entries in his CV which count are Carry On Screaming and his segment of Amicus anthology The House That Dripped Blood, which is extremely tongue-in-cheek. Neither of the actors who have played Omega have done any horror, nor has Crispy Master Peter Pratt. Ncuti Gatwa hasn't either, but give him time, he's still young, bless him. 

On the other hand, of course, some actors who have played the Doctor seem almost synonymous with horror, and I'm not talking about Peter Cushing here, because 

5. John Hurt is the MVP

'Well, fancy meeting you here!'

I decided fairly on in the month that I was probably going to have to double up on some actors - in the event, the only true example of this involved Patrick Troughton, and that was so I could watch a film suggested by a Facebook friend, but I came close a couple of times. The first film which I consciously watched as a double-up was Jerzy Skolimowksi's The Shout, a very odd and disturbing film based on a Robert Graves story, and I considered this a double-up because I'd already watched Alien. Of the lineal Doctors, Hurt has done more horror than any other, with a suitably sinister thirteen spooky stories to his name. There's also a real range to the types of horror Hurt has done- all the way from Hellboy to Only Lovers Left Alive, via Frankenstein Unbound or the BBC's recent remake of Whistle and I'll Come to You - and indeed the aforementioned Shout, which I retroactively classified under Jim Broadbent rather than John Hurt when it became clear towards the end of the challenge that I was going to have to smash the emergency button and consider the Curse of Fatal Death Doctors fair game. And really I think Broadbent deserves the credit for The Shout more, because...

6. Jim Broadbent stripped and stood in a cowpat in his debut movie role

Never say I give you nothing on this blog. Where else are you going to see naked Jim Broadbent?

The Shout is a very strange movie to say the least. The main dramatic action of the film concerns Alan Bates, who boasts to John Hurt's character (a church organist and electronic composer) that Australian Aborigines have taught him a 'killing shout', then uses his shamanic trickery to inveigle himself into Hurt's household and indeed his wife's bed. But the story is told in flashback, with a framing sequence in which Bates, while scoring a cricket match at a lunatic asylum, tells his tale to a young Tim Curry(!). Broadbent, in his first cinematic part, is one of the players in said cricket fixture, listed in the movie's credits as 'Fielder in Cowpat', and as tensions mount during Bates' retelling of his story Broadbent's fielder flips out, strips, smears himself in - well, I hope it's mud, but there is the small matter of that credit - and runs around as an apocalyptic thunderstorm begins to rain and then we get the real, and very final, climax of Bates' story. If anything, I'm underselling how weird this movie is, and I definitely recommend you see it, even if Broadbent's capering and cavorting isn't the most sensitive portrayal of mental illness in the history of cinema. But then, if we're talking about insensitivity...well, we'll leave that for next time.  

Next time: 1970s racism rears its culturally insensitive head!