Bad Dreams (56 page)

Phil was filling the pages of
Fangoria
by interviewing British filmmakers who specialised in horror. There wasn’t much actual British horror cinema produced in the 1980s, though Clive sold the screenplays that became
Underworld
and
Rawhead Rex
(which Neil and I nearly got to work on when Clive momentarily blanched at one more set of producers’ notes) and was persuaded by the experience to direct
Hellraiser
himself. One of Phil’s interviewees was the genial Norman J. Warren, director of
Satan’s Slave
,
Prey
and
Terror
. He had recently made
Inseminoid
for American-based producer Richard Gordon, a lively
Alien
knock-off shot in Chiselhurt Caves, which prompted Alan Jones to wonder whether ‘chainsaws would feature so heavily in future space programmes’. Phil reported back to the P&LCo folk that Norman was looking for original script ideas he could take to Richard… and so we set out to come up with a whole slate of them, in the hope that one would rise to the top. The four of us sat in that tiny room and hashed out four different stories in different sub-genres, trying (and probably failing) to think within the sort of budget available. Our brief was fairly loose, though I believe Norman said it would be helpful if one or two of the lead actors were American –
Inseminoid
had gone that route, probably because
Alien
had.

Each of us took away a set of notes to write up. Neil’s was
Remember Remember
, a holiday-themed slasher movie about Guy Fawkes Night. We must have heard of
V for Vendetta
, which had begun in the British comic
Warrior
but was curtailed mid-story with the title’s cancellation, but couldn’t have foreseen that the Guy Fawkes mask would ever catch on. Phil worked on
Hell Fire
, a scrambling of the plots of
The Maltese Falcon
and
Night of the Demon
which I eventually reworked as a short story ‘Mother Hen’ (reprinted in the appendix of the Titan Books edition of
The Quorum
) – though I didn’t have a copy of the outline to hand when I wrote it up, and only remembered the original concept. Stefan got
Bloody Students
, our shot at a ‘virus outbreak’ story along the lines of George Romero’s
The Crazies
or David Cronenberg’s
Rabid
. Stefan and I had been at university together, and enjoyed the idea of staging mutant attacks and battles on our old campus. Stefan came up with the tag-line ‘
Bloody Students
… first, they cut their grants, then they cut their throats!’ This was before student loans, when we literally didn’t know how well off we were.

Then there was
Bad Dreams
, which I was in charge of.

Our first thought for this was to revive a type of horror/crime film that hadn’t been done lately, in which the menace is a semi-supernatural crime boss like Dr Mabuse or Fu-Manchu. After talking that through, we came to think it might be a hard sell – though we had hit on the title, which we were rather pleased with since it was a commonplace expression that hadn’t been used as a horror film title before. Given the recent success of
A Nightmare on Elm Street
, we switched our master crook for an immortal vampire type who could manipulate reality (Neil and I were – and still are – great admirers of Philip K. Dick, which probably shows) to persecute our (American) journalist heroine. I suppose the Cenobites of
Hellraiser
have a similar m.o., but it should be obvious we were more influenced by Clive –
The Damnation Game
had come out – than he could have been by us, though Neil has suggested that the Cenobites were loosely based on the Peace & Love Corporation. The character of Clive Broome in
Bad Dreams
was called Clive Harker in the original outline; we played with the names of other friends too. The heroine is named Anne Nielsen in tribute to Anne Billson, who – in retrospect – we should have asked to join in as writer (I later worked with her on a play,
The Hallowe’en Sessions
). She later wrote the novelisation of
Dream Demon
, the British
Nightmare on Elm Street
ripoff which
did
get made. Norman and Richard quite liked our ideas, especially
Bad Dreams
and
Bloody Students
, but no development money was forthcoming and so the P&L Co film projects fizzled out. In 1987, Norman made
Bloody New Year
instead. I later learned that
Slimer
, a wonderfully lurid paperback co-written by our friends John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle under the pseudonym Harry Adam Knight, had also started out as a pitch for a Warren–Gordon film;
Slimer
had the distinction of eventually being turned into a movie, the direct-to-video quickie
Proteus
. It was the beginning of great things for Harry, who delivered a masterpiece in
The Fungus
(now reissued and an essential read) and founded a genetic dinosaur franchise in
Carnosaur
(adapted as a series of films by Roger Corman).

All the while, I was working on my own projects. I’d written a novella-length draft of my first novel
The Night Mayor
, the opening chapters of
Jago
(a stab at a big thick horror book along the lines of
Ghost Story
or
‘Salem’s Lot
) and pages of notes for a projected trilogy that (after a lot of changes) became the
Anno Dracula
series. Neil and I talked about co-writing a disgusting horror paperback (there were lots of those about) called
The Creeps
, about mutants in the tunnels under London (where Neil would later set the mostly mutant-free
Neverwhere
). We also pondered a killer badger book called
The Set
. With Eugene, we worked on a computer game scenario and an unrelated novel both called
Neutrino Junction
– both sadly uncompleted. A year or so after we had outlined our film ideas and nothing was happening with them, I was at a loose end and decided to write
Bad Dreams
as a novel. I hammered out a first draft on an IBM electric typewriter. This didn’t sell until after I’d placed
The Night Mayor
with Simon & Schuster in 1989; the final version benefited greatly from the input of my agent Antony Harwood and editor Maureen Waller. The ‘Entr’Acte’ section was written well after the bulk of the book, very close to its 1990 publication, in the middle of the night because I was jet-lagged after my first trip to America. It’s one of my favourite sequences in the novel. There are elements in the book that feel to me like they came from Neil, Stefan or Phil – a lot of Neil’s stories feature protagonists with remote or monstrous parents, for instance. Neil also did all the research (rather more than we needed, really – but he made a convincing case for it) into seamy Soho clubs, with full credit to Roz Kaveney for getting him past fearsome door security. Stefan went along one night, but couldn’t stop laughing which probably ruined the mood.

Other elements came from Norman’s briefing: making Anne an American in London wasn’t something I’d naturally have done – authentic American Lisa Tuttle kindly read the manuscript and gave feedback about this side of things.
Dream Demon
and
Hellraiser
have American heroines, so Norman might well have been on to something. While we were outlining, we talked a bit about who we’d like to see cast. I remember us thinking of Rosanna Arquette or Linda Hamilton, both doing interesting things in small-scale films like
Baby, It’s You
or
The Terminator
about then… though we also liked the idea of casting Sandra Bernhard and Amanda Plummer as the Nielsen sisters. One actor we wanted for the main villain roles in all our pitches was Richard Lynch, who had a very distinctive look – on an acid trip in 1967, he set fire to himself and his combination of scarred skin and handsome bone structure that got him a lot of sinister parts. He’s remarkable as the alien hermaphrodite messiah in Larry Cohen’s
God Told Me To
, but was most visible at the time we were working on these ideas as a Russian baddie in the Chuck Norris classic
Invasion USA
. Skinner, of
Bad Dreams
, and Lynch, of
Bloody Students
, are both tailor-made Richard Lynch parts. I think we wrote him into the other two stories as well. Ironically, in 1988, after I’d written the first draft of the novel, a film called
Bad Dreams
was produced in America… not only was it a
Nightmare on Elm Street
ripoff, but it cast Richard Lynch as the ghostly menace. It went straight to video in the UK, and didn’t have a high enough profile to persuade me to change the title. As a teenager, I had read
How to Write a Novel
, a very useful book of practical advice by John Braine which I mostly ignored… One thing that stuck in my mind was that Braine said he would reject out of hand any book that used a title which was a quote from
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
, prompting me to nod sagely and vow never to do that. Though it sounds like a commonplace, the phrase ‘bad dreams’ is actually a quote from
Hamlet
… ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ So, in a nutshell, two permanent additions to the English language in one throwaway line.

With some trepidation, I showed my first draft to Neil, Phil and Stefan – who were supportive and gave helpful advice. The whole ‘Broadway play’ sequence, which would have been difficult to do on film, was not in the outline and so was new to them; Neil made a key suggestion about the use of Martin Landau as a face for the monster, riffing on the way he would peel off masks each week in
Mission: Imposssible
. Phil and Lisa both made me go back over Anne’s character and work a bit harder on making her distinctive… which eventually led to her reappearing in my novel
The Quorum
, which grew out of this period in my life and the milieu the P&LCo were hanging about in.

Having done it once, I was sort of impelled to give it another go – turning the nugget of
Hell Fire
into ‘Mother Hen’, which Steve Jones published in
Fantasy Tales
. Then, at a point when I was blocked on other things, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t hurt to have another novel-length manuscript to show around. I set out to write
Bloody Students
inside a week, the way Roger Corman made
The Little Shop of Horrors
when he had a spare three days’ shooting. The downside was that I didn’t have a copy of the full outline, so I had to reconstruct it from memory and a few notes. I diverged greatly from the more controlled movie we had envisioned. My feeling was that doing a book this fast would mean tapping into the energy and verve of Corman’s B pictures. I was also hoping to write something in the wild spirit of Harry Adam Knight. If it didn’t sell, I’d only lost a week. As it happens, it sold twice – Malcolm Edwards at HarperCollins bought it, on a recommendation from Mike Dickinson, but the bottom dropped out of the pulp paperback horror market and they returned the book to me, though a nice, lurid cover had already been created. Eventually, after my early novels had found a place at Simon & Schuster, Martin Fletcher – my editor on
Anno Dracula
,
The Quorum
and
Life’s Lottery
– bought
Bloody Students
, though he asked for a new title. I chose
Orgy of the Blood Parasites
, working title for David Cronenberg’s 1974 breakthrough film
Shivers
. Having moved from IBM typewriter to Amstrad word processor, I put the book through a second draft, adding several more days to the schedule (and increasing the body count) but not really tidying it up much. By then, I had started a parallel career writing as Jack Yeovil for Games Workshop, in the Warhammer Fantasy and Dark Future series, and it made sense to issue
Orgy
as a Jack Yeovil joint.

I’m happy these two books are available again, especially in this double bill edition. Techincally, they were first published in the 1990s… but they were (mostly) written in the ’80s, before we got even slightly respectable. Reading them, I’m reminded of marathon video-watching, funny articles for porn mags, lively meals in cheap restaurants, the heights and lows of 1980s cinema, barbeques at Steve and Jo’s in Wembley, Sussex University in the 1970s and North London in the 1980s, long-gone magazines that didn’t die well, random introductions in pubs that changed the courses of lives, regular cinemas showing double bills like
My Bloody Valentine
and
The Funhouse
, gone-too-soon talents like Phil and Rob Holdstock and John Brosnan, the March for Jobs and Miners’ Strike fund-raisers, Neil and Clive with their original accents, sleeping on floors between sessions at the typewriter, watching reruns of
Bilko
and
The Avengers
when inspiration flagged, struggling with these computer things that would never catch on, writing a musical (the last great Sheep Worrying production) in two afternoons (break-out hit: ‘I’m Too Fat to Rock’), meetings with ripoff merchants, video nasties (frankly, that’s what these books would have been if filmed in 1986 – and proud of it), FantasyCons in Birmingham and Shock Around the Clock in King’s Cross, Margaret Thatcher going on and on and on, Captain Sensible singing ‘Happy Talk’,
Betty Blue
and
Blue Velvet
, and the thing that was said in the place where we went that time.

Kim Newman,
thirty years later…

K
im Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum and Life’s Lottery, all currently being reissued by Titan Books, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles published by Titan Books and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include the seminal Nightmare Movies (recently reissued by Bloomsbury in an updated edition), Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.