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Sunday 30 October 2011

Halloween Creepiness

It being All Hallow's Eve, I thought it would be fitting to add a few real chills. I also thought there might be a few of you out there who aren't spending the evening roaming about in the dark bothering strangers for sweets and might prefer to stay inside where it's safe (yeah, like that ever worked in any Freddie Kruger movies!) and the DVD has an 'off' button, should you need it.



Anyway, creepy though Freddie is, I'm not talking about horror movies or even vampire movies, but properly creepy movies. Those genuinely unsettling, creepy movies that really stay with you and give you the shivers when you turn off the lights, not the ones awash with blood – anyone can chuck fake blood!

When I was writing By Midnight and the new book in the Ravenwood series, Darkness Falls, I tried to fill the setting (Highgate Cemetery and the surrounding village) with long shadows and dark corners and that feeling that you don’t know what – or who – is going to jump out at you. So I thought I’d share a few of the films I watched to get me in the mood.  


First, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers - the 70s version with Kiefer Sutherland’s dad Donald in a bad perm. Everyone in a small American town seems to be changing overnight and Don has no idea who to trust; the last scene just before the credits still makes the hairs stand up on my neck.



Next, the Blair Witch Project. Yes, I know it’s been lampooned to death, but I watched this alone in a pitch black movie theatre in LA the week it was released, not knowing a thing about it and I’m not ashamed to say it completely scared the pants off me (still does, if I’m honest).



Rosemary’s Baby is next, a brilliant piece of creepiness where Mia Farrow (with fab hair, by the way) suspects her neighbours and husband have sold their souls to the devil – it has another deeply unsettling last scene too.


And finally, The Innocents. A super-dark 1961 version of Henry James’ novel ‘Turn of the Screw’ about a young nanny driven mad by some of the creepiest children in the history of the cinema. Is she insane? Are the children evil? You’ll have to watch it to find out. But don’t watch it alone…

The Covent Garden Vampire

Darkness Falls, the second of the Ravenwood books is mainly set in and around the very creepy Highgate Cemetery in North London and the series’ website (www.ravenwoodmysteries.com), features a virtual tour of all the sites featured in the books, from April’s house to the school itself, so I thought it might be good to do a tour of the other main setting in the books – Covent Garden.



The reason I chose WC1 in the first place is because Coventry street, which runs East from Trafalgar Square, is the only other place in London that real-life vampires have been reported. In 1922, a man walking along this street was bitten on the neck and taken to Charing Cross hospital. That same day, two more people were admitted to the hospital, bleeding from similar puncture marks. The vampire never reappeared, but it made me think ‘where did he – or she – go?’



It helped that Covent Garden is one of the most haunted parts of London: even the tube station has two ghosts, one called the Screaming Spectre’. If you’ve read By Midnight, you’ll know that April’s grandfather lives here (there’s a big house just east of the market I based it on) and that her favourite cafĂ© is Patisserie Valerie on Bedford Street, which is where the big chase scene in By Midnight begins, ending just south of there by Cleopatra’s Needle on Victoria Embankment. In Darkness Falls, an important location is Redfearne’s Bookshop, which was based on Treadwells Occult Bookshop on Tavistock Street. Sadly, it moved to Bloomsbury in February, so you can only stand outside, like April, imagining what was inside.



Oh, and the final reason I chose Covent Garden is that the shopping there is fabulous. There’s no reason research has to get in the way of retail therapy, is there?

Monday 10 October 2011

Just Who Is The Highgate Vampire?

Highgate is where it all began for me. My uncle is an eccentric artist who lives in a super modern house perched on the hillside overlooking the cemetery. It's an awesome, and quite beautiful place, but it's also exactly the kind of place that vampires could be – possibly are – hiding and that’s why I decided to set By Midnight and the new Ravenwood book Darkness Falls there.

The other reason is that Highgate is one of the few places in the British Isles (and possibly the whole world outside of Transylvania) with an actual documented sighting of a real-life vampire. Well, I say, a ‘real-life’ vampire, but the first sighting was of a ‘spectral presence’, which was seen in December 1969. That began a whole rush of sightings and one mass invasion after the story was featured on the Six O’Clock News – and people have been seeing them ever since, there was even a police investigation into the body of a woman found beheaded and burnt in the graveyard.


So it’s really not surprising that people see things through the iron railings as they walk up Swain’s Lane, especially after dark – in fact, it’s hard not to see something lurking between the gravestones. Whether it’s a ‘sucker’ or a ‘bleeder’ that’s for you to decide. I’d keep walking if I were you though – and personally I only go during the day! Although as the gorgeous Gabriel Swift says in Darkness Falls, ‘Vampires will kill you in the middle of the day if they have to.’