Timelords of Terror! Part 3 or: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Racism!

Note: this is the third instalment of a series which began with this post and continued here. Also, as ought to be obvious from the title, this instalment deals with themes of racism and racist imagery pretty much from jump, so if that's likely to be a trigger for you, feel free to skip this bit.

7. The 1970s were A Very Different Time

We ended the last instalment of this series considering Jim Broadbent's debut as a mentally ill cricket player in Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout, a strange 1979 horror movie in which Alan Bates cucks John Hurt with magic, and how that portrayal of mental illness might seem a little insensitive by today's standards, but that's not the only part of the film that reads oddly today. Early on in the film, we see a scene in which a character who is - we assume from what we learn later - the Australian Aboriginal magician who taught Alan Bates the titular man-killing shout, advancing menacingly towards the camera with a pointing bone in hand. The shot is disturbing in itself: we are given no context for who this character is or what he is doing. He is simply a black man advancing in the direction of the viewer, silently. Even if we don't know about pointing bone magic, the thing in his hand reads as a weapon, and he points it in our direction. This dude is the only black character in the film - if you can call him a character and not just a symbol - and he is explicitly presented as an exoticised figure of menace and threat. 

I'm not saying The Shout is a racist movie - indeed, as the excellent folk horror blog We Don't Go Back has argued, the film can be read as a critique of colonialism, with Bates' self-satisfied pseudo-shaman standing in for the British Empire. What I am saying is that the handling of race in some of the older films I watched for this challenge is very jarring to our modern, more progressive sensibilities - and if that applies to a subtle and intelligent film like The Shout it gets even more pronounced when we find ourselves at the more cheap and cheerful end of 1970s horror - by which I mean, of course, the anthology pictures synonymous with Amicus studios, which would bundle a bunch of short horror stories into a buffet of bloodshed for value-conscious 70s punters. 

The first such film I watched for the challenge, The House that Dripped Blood, is pretty inoffensive in this regard: its tight focus on events in a single house in suburban England mean that it confines itself to depicting white-on-white violence. The second anthology flick, however - 1973's The Vault of Horror - is a different matter entirely. For a start, one of the stories, 'This Trick'll Kill You', features some pretty rank orientalism (though in the end it sides with its Indian characters against their exploiters), but I want to talk here about the depiction of Haitian Vodou in 'Drawn and Quartered', the story featuring Fourth Doctor Tom Baker as Moore,  an artist who learns he has been ripped off by a clique of gallerists and critics, and sets out to seek revenge. 

Tom was devastated when someone pointed out his self-portrait looked more like Rolf Harris

Moore intends to obtain revenge by 'buying voodoo' from the most bored-looking houngan in Port-au-Prince. I mean I say houngan: absolutely nothing in the guy's hut (oh yeah, you know this dude is in a hut) marks him out as any kind of Vodou practitioner. No veves, no Baron Samedi-esque top hat, none of the vast amount of sacred ornament that makes real Vodou ritual spaces so visually dense. I'm not expecting a 1973 portmanteau horror picture to have presented an anthropologically perfect depiction of such a space but you'd think they would have come up with something to make it look like more than just a generic witch doctor's shack. The Bond-does-blaxploitation caper Live and Let Die, which came out in the same year, has some moments of absolutely jaw-dropping racism but its producers understood the visual power of a big dude in a top hat with a skull painted on his face. The Amicus guys saw 'voodoo priest' in the script and just thought 'right, black dude with a loincloth, dirt floor, big bubbling cauldron' then knocked off for a pint of Watney's Red Barrel and a Ploughman's Lunch. 

Actually that's unfair on the producers because, as stonkingly racist as the juxtaposition of a black man in 'native' get-up and a bubbling cauldron might be, the cauldron is diegetic. To obtain voodoo powers, Moore must - after handing over a substantial sum of money - immerse his painting hand in the boiling mixture therein, which thereafter grants him the voodoo ability to make portraits of his enemies which, when damaged, cause their subjects to be injured in a similar way. Which is, as some of you will be aware, another bit of cultural insensitivity: the idea is obviously a variation on the popular notion of the 'voodoo doll', which is not actually an authentic Vodoun ritual practice but derives instead from European forms of sympathetic magic in which witches would manipulate a doll or 'poppet' of their target to wreak vengeance on or gain control of its human counterpart. 

Still, at least the makers of The Vault of Horror were trying to depict a cultural milieu which actually exists, however lazily and inaccurately. The lurid colonialist fantasia of 'Luau', the fourth story in non-Amicus anthology Tales That Witness Madness, is something else entirely. 

As the story's title suggests, the culture ostensibly being depicted in this frankly rather nasty little story is that of the indigenous people of Hawaii, who, if this film is to be believed, can only go to Heaven if their children consume the flesh of a virgin in an elaborate ritual, which must be a bit of a ball-ache.The tale's protagonist, Hawaiian author Kimo, played by the genuinely creepy Michael Petrovitch, finds himself with a dead mother as our tale begins, and thus the responsibility of carrying out the whole virgin-eating procedure. What is a boy to do?

Fortunately, help is at hand for Kimo in the form of Kim Novak as literary agent Auriol Pageant (yes, really) and her daughter Ginny, played by Mary Tamm, the first actress to play Fourth Doctor companion Romana. As part of Auriol's attempts to woo Kimo as a client, she throws a sumptuous luau for him, at which, unbeknown to her, the pig she, Kimo and her guests feast on is of the long variety - being the flesh of Ginny, murdered by Kimo earlier and prepared for the feast by Kimo's manservant Keoki. 

It shouldn't need saying, but as a depiction of indigenous Hawaiian culture this is bollocks. There is no evidence that cannibalism has ever been practiced in Hawaii, let alone the baroque combination of ritual murder and anthropophagy portrayed here. The luau itself is fairly accurate, but the portrayal of indigenous people as cannibals  - and indeed as a threat to young, virginal white women - is a racist trope which has been used to justify genuine violence on the part of those who would 'civilise' them. 

As a genre which is often rooted in our fear and anxiety about the Other, it is inevitable that horror fiction will be troubled with racist tropes. 'The Dunwich Horror' reflects Lovecraft's own racist fears of miscegenation; Dracula reflects British anxieties about sinister foreigners corrupting 'our' women; the original Candyman, while a more knowing take, still uses the iconography of the urban black male as predator. What distinguishes the racist depictions in the two anthology films we've looked at today is their lazy, dashed-off quality: the way the cultures of Haiti and Hawaii have been used simply as stock exotic frames on which to hang tales of violence and revenge. 

As it happens, though, Mary Tamm's unfortunate demise is not the only connection between Doctor Who and Tales that Witness Madness...

In our serial's exciting conclusion: Hugh Grant plays Lord Byron, and the Valeyard gets wood...