Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation by Harmes Marcus K.;

Author:Harmes, Marcus K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Gothic Precursors in Doctor Who

The “golden age” was not the first time that horror cinema provided the source of adaptations into Doctor Who. The 1971 story “The Dæmons,” a black magic thriller, was set in the sinister and isolated village of Devil’s End. “The Dæmons” was actually a very timely story for its broadcast in 1971. Its evocation of a world of rural diabolism comes hard on the heels of a modest but clearly discernible surge in films on these themes in British cinema. In 1968 Hammer made an adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s famous black magic novel The Devil Rides Out starring Christopher Lee. The film was a great commercial success, and people flocked to see Lee’s character, the Duc de Richlieu, fighting a coven of Satanists in the woods and stately homes of southern England. Smaller companies including Tigon and American International Pictures (often in co-funded productions) made critically derided but commercially successful horrors including Witchfinder General (1968), Cry of the Banshee (1970), and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).[7] They also indicate the influence of a broader set of cultural parameters. We should remember that in 1967 the Rolling Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request, and in the same year the Beatles put Aleister Crowley, the famed black magus, on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This was the period when occult and alternative religions began to flower in the newly permissive atmosphere of the “Swinging Sixties.”[8] “The Dæmons” is a useful example of the adaptation of the horror genre in Doctor Who. It is not an adaptation or transcription of any specific source, but rather is a synthesis of a number of harmonizing influences. Underlying much of the interest in the rural supernatural by filmmakers was the influence of Dennis Wheatley, whose black magic novels were bestsellers and whose character of the Satanist clerical apostate Canon Copely-Syle in his 1953 novel To the Devil a Daughter is a clear antecedent of the Master’s devilish masquerade as a clergyman in “The Dæmons,” although the Master’s magic is also taken from a wider body of folkloric and New Age ideas.[9] Even so, “The Dæmons” is not an adaptation of any particular Wheatley novel, but rather is a reflection of interest registering in black magic and the occult and finding its way into Doctor Who via the filter of novels and then cinema. The horror stories of the slightly later “golden age” by contrast testify to the more singular influence of Hammer as a particular source, not least as script editor Robert Holmes proved himself determined to rewrite scripts that were not like Hammer enough in order to create the type of story he was looking for.

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