2. Lord Horror
I hate it. I absolutely hate it! The programme was late-nineties BBC TV series CLIVE BARKERS A-Z OF HORROR. The interviewee was sometime TV presenter and latter-day producer Muriel Gray, who at one time was also an aspiring horror novelist. Its the kind of thing a kid who shoots down his school reads while hes polishing his guns... The target of her antipathy was a connected series of literary novels and comic books by an independent Manchester publisher, and her response was near-hysterical. But then LORD HORROR tended to attract those kinds of reactions. (The Clive Barker series ultimately declined to show the segment. Some forms of horror, it seems, were more taboo than others.) Id become very aware of it as a young researcher in the early 1990s, after which I attended a magistrates court hearing in Manchester that determined whether Savoy Books had broken the obscenity laws. For LORD HORROR was taken that seriously: in effectively the first UK literary obscenity trial since 1967, it was argued by the Greater Manchester Police (who, under Gods cop, James Anderton, regularly raided Savoys premises) that the 1990 novel by David Britton and Michael Butterworth, from which the comics series also originated, was an anti-Semitic work that extolled Nazism. These were serious charges indeed, so its worth taking the following into account: LORD HORROR (in both its novelistic and graphic novel forms) is a work of dystopian science fiction, set in an alternate reality close to the end of World War II. The character of Lord Horror is derived from Lord Haw-Haw, the Irish Nazi propagandist William Joyce who was hanged for treason (rather dubiously, as he wasnt a British citizen) at the end of the war. He exists in a warped historical version of the era, in which he is the lover of British actress Jessie Matthews. The narrative contains appearances by imaginary creatures from the works of William Burroughs (author of THE NAKED LUNCH) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the TARZAN novels). In this its self-consciously tying together extreme art and pulp fiction, and using the nightmare of the Nazi Holocaust as the (natural?) territory for their mating. Lord Horror himself is a virulently anti-Semitic character and is described lovingly razoring the flesh from an orthodox Jews cheek; he also denies the full extent of Nazi crimes, claiming less than a million Jews died. But in graphic artist John Coultharts brilliant reimagining of the horrors of Auschwitz, the grotesque denier is seen averting his eyes and shedding a tear. LORD HORROR, the novel and the comic book, was defended in court on appeal by human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, academic researcher Dr Guy Cumberbatch and veteran SF author Michael Moorcock. The obscenity verdict was overturned in the case of the novel, but upheld for the comics. Perhaps it was a sign of the times that the written word could be defended, while the images which visualised the narrative were condemned. Since the end of the 1990s, however, the UK has been subject to far less censorship. By the turn of the last decade, the previously unthinkable seemed to have occurred: LORD HORROR (who continued in Savoy comics like Coultharts mind-warping REVERBSTORM and Kris Guidios gross knockabout MENG & ECKER) became the subject of a film in production. LORD HORROR: THE DARK & SILVER AGE (2010) was planned by director Gareth Jackson as a full-length surrealist underground feature that drew on Savoys controversial content with their approval. In fact they were involved in raising the finance, which effectively left the film as a 51-minute show-reel when the money failed to materialise. But the saga didnt end there. For a while the embryonic film (which Jackson had to abandon) was available to view free online until 2014 when Julian Bleach, the TV actor who played Davros in DOCTOR WHO and Machiavelli in THE BORGIAS, threatened legal action regarding his own role as Horror and distaste at the insertion of cut-up Holocaust footage. Apparently his scenes were shot during a nineties theatrical workshop and, he claims, never intended for viewing: Since the advent of social media, a growing number of websites has emerged which cater to the sort of audience who would view Gareths film simply as entertainment... to know that I might have inadvertently become a part of that culture is nothing less than sickening. The footage has now been pulled from its site. Whatever the rationale, it seems that LORD HORROR remains the most unfilmable of texts.