The Demon in the House

Le Fanu’s tales of the strange and supernatural have been the subject of a number of adaptations for the small screen. Provocative versions have appeared on British television, notably Uncle Silas, which was broadcast in 1968, and Dark Angel, a heavily adapted version of the same material, in 1991. The most interesting treatments, however, are Leslie Megahey’s one-off ‘play’, Schalken the Painter (1979), and David Pirie’s and Alex Pillai’s serial re-telling of The Wyvern Mystery (2000).¹ Produced by the BBC, mounted on colour film and freed of the intrusions of advertisements, both programmes are examples of the high quality that home viewers have come to expect from a public provider.² Generally well received and often discussed on the internet, they represent a distinct contribution to the BBC’s on-going project to produce a version of ‘Gothic television’, visualizations of classic texts which are figured and re-figured for a non-specialist audience.

The programmes’ quality is partly vested in the richness of their interpretations, with each of them adopting a definite approach. Designed for the arts programme Omnibus, Megahey’s treatment of Schalken is slow-moving, erotically charged and overwhelmingly morbid; fundamentally serious, as befits a programme that occupies a slot normally associated with documentaries, it seems to bear no connection with Pirie and Pillai’s fast-paced, light-filled, Hitchcockian version of The Wyvern Mystery (Griffiths, 19). One invokes the high-brow appeal of Rembrandt and the interior scenes of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (Angelini, 2), while the other is a sort of pop-palette thriller in which the main emphasis, according to Helen Wheatley, is vested in the modernization of the Gothic heroine (103-4).

Yet the two films are more closely linked than this comparison would suggest. Separated by more than twenty years, they still have much in common, and can be read in terms of their similarities, rather than their contrasts. One way of seeing past the differences in style and treatment is by linking the programmes to Lord Reith’s founding statement, made in the twenties, of the BBC’s aims. Reith believed the Corporation’s broadcasts should always set out to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, ³ and these words can be used to conceptualize and explain the two versions of Le Fanu. Both films are clearly made to ‘entertain’ in the sense of setting out to represent Le Fanu’s fearfulness in the most powerful and stimulating way. As Gothic television, they create the pleasing frisson of uncertainty, the suspenseful predicting, surprising and disrupting of expectations which makes us afraid by taking us into new and unsettling domains of experience. Working within the discourse of television, Schalken and Wyvern present a series of visual equivalents to Le Fanu’s writing of fear, creating a cathartic experience for the viewing audience which parallels, but can never reproduce, the response of the original reader. They also try to ‘educate’ and ‘inform’, this time by finding new, submerged texts within the fabric of the writing. Both films stress the cruelty of Le Fanu’s fictional universe, and make a clear connection between physical suffering and mental discord. More importantly, they re-read their material in terms of feminist and Marxist methodologies, revealing a series of economic and gender-based sub-texts. Not only Gothic texts in the classic sense of setting out to frighten, the programmes suggest or discover a variety of other meanings, provoking the viewer to consider multiple interpretations while sustaining a pleasurable suspension of disbelief. In Reith’s terms, they evoke a response which ’instructs’ the mind, and entertains the emotions.

My aim in this essay is to explore the ways in which Megahey, Pirie and Pillai negotiate the twin aims of ‘entertaining’ and ‘informing’, of frightening the audience while offering it a series of revisionist readings of the source material. My prime focus is on a close textual reading of the two programmes, but I also show how the broadcast setting was an important factor in generating the desired effects.

The power of Le Fanu’s fiction was greatly enhanced during his own time by the publishing context in which it appeared. Working as a practitioner of Gothic, Le Fanu’s texts signified within an existing tradition; his audience was knowledgeable of the conventions of the genre, and the author intensified his effects by manipulating his readers’ expectations.

The same cannot be said of the television viewers who scrutinized the films by Megahey and Pirie. The name ‘Le Fanu’ carries no association for the British public at large, and identification of the author as the original writer would have had no affect in terms of audience preparation. Mention of the ‘classic’ names of ‘Dickens’, ’Eliot’, ‘Austen’ or ‘Hardy’ carries a huge surcharge of expectation; but ‘Le Fanu’, as a relatively obscure writer in the popular mind, does not. Few viewers would know what to expect from this type of writing, and the programmers placing the two films were not able to rely on existing understandings of his work to boost their impact. Faced with this problem, their solutions were ingenious. In the absence of public awareness, programming executives enhanced the films’ fearful effects by adopting a creative approach to scheduling and the ‘broadcast flow’ (Williams 1). This involved the manipulation of other expectations by predicting the type of programme the viewer was about to see; and its complete opposite, subverting the viewers’ expectation by incongruity, essentially placing the film in a calculatedly inappropriate slot.

In the case of Megahey’s film, schedulers set out to establish its Gothic credentials by showing it on BBC1 - the more populist of the two BBC channels - at 10.55 p.m., on the twenty fourth of December, 1979. This placement was significant because it invoked the long-standing tradition of the ‘ghost story for Christmas’, a series of adaptations, mainly of M. R. James, but also including Dickens’s The Signalman (1976), which had featured in or near this slot since the beginning of the seventies. The treatments of James and Dickens are small-scale, eerie, disconcerting works, and the expectation of Schalken, as adult material, was that it would work along the same lines. By linking it to an existing television tradition, the programmers ensured that its impact was magnified by association, and viewers would approach the film as if it were another unsettling exercise in the perverse. Schalken certainly bears comparison with A Warning to the Curious (1972), Lost Hearts (1973) and The Ash Tree (1975), and it could also be linked to another Omnibus programme in the same slot, Jonathan Miller’s 1968 treatment of M. R. James’s Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You. Framed by ghost stories, Schalken was set up as another exercise in the supernatural, a chill before Christmas which drew strength from its (informal) placing as one of an on-going series.

The programme’s fearful effect was also magnified by its placement with the broadcasting schedule. John Ellis has noted how the ‘real power in television’ lies with the programmers (130-47), and the placing of Schalken demonstrates that much thought was exercised not only in the decision to locate it within the traditional ‘ghost slot’, but also, and perhaps more tellingly, by placing it at the end of an evening of ‘family viewing’. Indeed, Schalken is positioned as inappropriately as possible, at the end of a timetable which included The Poseidon Adventure (7:15); a quiz, Mastermind (9:10); the News (9:50); and a documentary, A Christmas Tree (10:05 to 10:55). Such anodyne fare provides a sharp contrast with the Schalken’s Gothic excess, and makes it seems decidedly outspoken. Its impact is especially heightened by its juxtaposition with A Christmas Tree. This documentary shows how ‘the festival’ of Christmas has changed and ‘remained the same, reflecting change and continuity in England itself’ (Radio Times, 23 December 1979, 28). The evening closes, in other words, on an apparently orthodox note, a bland celebration of Christmas which is then roundly contradicted by the grand guignol of Schalken’s disturbing imagery.

Megahey’s film is thus framed as piece of Gothic iconoclasm, an emotional jolt that could barely fail to disorientate a viewer who has just watched a documentary about the prim traditions of the English Christmas. Ellis has noted how perceptions can be manipulated through interference with ‘viewing patterns’ (130), and Schalken is a prime example of the use of creative framing as a means to foreground a specific television event. The incongruous juxtaposition of the film within a ‘wider broadcast flow’ (Wheatley, 7) is in this sense a calculated attempt not only to link it to existing traditions of Gothic broadcasting, but to add another, dangerous element by showing it at the very moment when aesthetic and cultural conservatism seems the dominant note. By manipulating the schedule imaginatively, the programmers managed to build expectation and simultaneously give it a dangerous edge of unpredictability. In both domains, Schalken figures as a challenge, a playful linking of tradition and anti-tradition which skews the pitch before its opening frame.

Such incongruity is used to parallel effect in building the impact of The Wyvern Mystery. The emphasis this time, however, is more explicitly on confounding expectation, on building the viewer’s experience of the text by making it surprising and unsettling. This is partly achieved, as with Schalken, by broadcasting it in an inappropriate slot. Shown over two Sunday evenings in May 2000, The Wyvern Mystery catches the viewer unawares: framed within a conservative menu that includes The Antiques Roadshow (in which experts assess viewers’ antiques), Open All Hours (a very British sit-com), and the ‘heritage drama’, Monarch of the Glen (Radio Times, 5 March 2000, 84), it injects a note of uncertainty. Traditionally associated with a calming schedule of rest and serenity before the working week restarts, Sunday evening becomes, on this occasion, a site for the broadcast of a Gothic horror, a story of a malign house and wicked characters that stands markedly at odds with the comfortable settings, patriotism and mild comedy of the earlier programmes.

Its incongruous impact is further enhanced by the programmers’ application of a misleading designation. The type of material usually occupying Wyvern’s slot (8:10-9:00 or thereabouts) is the ‘classic serial’, invariably an adaptation of nineteenth century writers such as Eliot, Dickens or Austen. These are highly traditional texts, combinations of costume drama, an idealized vision of the past, a sharp visualization of landscape, ‘classic’ actors and a distinct sense of ‘Britishness’ (or at least ‘Englishness’). Billed as ‘the latest period dramatisation’ (Griffiths, 19), The Wyvern Mystery contains many of these elements - notably the casting of Derek Jacobi, the lush photography, rural accents and Cotswold locations - but its representation of Heritage Britain is calculatedly subverted by its emphasis on the strange and sadistic. Masquerading as yet another classic serial, a tale of straightforward folk in an English idyll that bears comparison with Middlemarch (1994) or Pride and Prejudice (1992), The Wyvern Mystery’s Gothic horrors boldly contradict the television genre in which they appear.

The subversive programming of the two films parallels Le Fanu’s use of placement to heighten his stories’ impact. In the case of Schalken, especially, he intensified its psychological power by framing it with prosaic material, articles on domestic issues and political commentaries. Buried in The Dublin University Magazine (1839), the story provides a shock for the unwary which is recreated, or at least paralleled, by its television equivalent.

The framing is only the first step, however. Within the films themselves, both directors set out to frighten the audience by offering faithful, yet inventive visualizations of Le Fanu’s texts. The process of disorientation is partly achieved by adherence to narrative: Schalken recreates the appalling tale of Vanderhausen’s purchase of Rose (intensifying its horror by recreating its cold commentary); and Wyvern closely follows the story of Alice’s imprisonment and manipulation at Carwell. The plot-complications are observed in detail and key events - particularly Rose’s terrifying return and Schalken’s final discovery of his lost love and her husband in the marital bed - are recreated with an appropriately malign intensity.

This replication of Le Fanu’s disorientating narratives is matched by the directors’ visualizing of some of the author’s most characteristic motifs. Foremost among these is the recreation and interpretation of the classic Gothic trope, the ‘old dark house’. Charged with a huge weight of association, Le Fanu’s writing of terrifying spaces is carefully treated. In Schalken, Megahey recreates the story’s emphasis on chiaroscuro, lighting his set, which seems to be a version of Vermer’s interiors as if they were painted by Rembrandt, with bleary combinations of glittering ‘twilight’ and ‘obscure’ darkness (Bleiler, 31). Le Fanu’s light and dark is a symbolic exemplification of the uncertainties of reality, a frightening space where nothing is fixed, and Megahey creates a strong visual equivalent which preserves the story’s sense of ‘ill-defined’ (Bleiler 43) menace and strangeness. The unsettling effect of darkness is exemplified in the moment after Vanderhausen’s departure, when Schalken tries to find where he has gone. The text specifies a ‘lobby of considerable extent’ (32) through which he must have walked; and the film recreates the space as a dense black void, a menacing nothing that the painter fearfully negotiates. This is a moment of real horror: a mis-en-scene of silence and blackness penetrated by a smooth tracking shot which only shows Schalken’s face, dimly wrapped in the shadows. Le Fanu speaks of his ‘vague uneasiness’ (32) as he steps through the dark, but Megahey intensifies the sense of disorientation by offering a suspended moment of terrifying suggestiveness.

In such a space, the director implies, anything could or might happen: its very blackness is ‘unnatural, inhuman’ (39), a blank domain of fear and moral nullity. Indeed, darkness is developed throughout the film as a standing metaphor, a sign of weird uncertainties at the very margins of perception. Special emphasis is placed on the equation of blackness and deadness. Using shadow as a unifying motif, the director engulfs his scenes in a dense, funereal, absorbing darkness. The street scenes are nocturnes; so are Schalken’s (added) visits to the brothel; and so is the final scene with Rose and Vanderhausen. In all of these sequences, inert shadow visualizes the idea of death. More than this, the absence of light creates a series of suggestive connections. Darkness principally links the house and tomb, an association which shows us that everyone in Douw’s house is effectively dead, stripped of the moral awareness that makes them into living people. Rose is handed over to a dead man, but Douw’s greed and Schalken’s ‘boorish’ ambition (30) makes them into creatures, the director seems to suggest, who are as lifeless as the young painter’s cadaverous rival.

He stresses this connection between the tomb and house by casting his set as a tomb-like space. Le Fanu speaks of large spaces, but in Megahey’s treatment the effect is cramped and claustrophobic; open vistas are nullified by elaborate props, painters’ devices, and the fanciful trappings of wealth; the camera pans and tracking shots are smooth but un-expansive; action is constantly impeded by movement through a door; and conversations are obstructed by heavy furniture. In this version of Schalken, the walls of the house press in as surely as the narrow sides of a grave. Rose declares that the ‘dead and the living cannot be one’ (43), but the director compels the viewer to contemplate their union within the rooms of a house which (like so many mansions in Gothic literature and its filmic interpretation) is already a tomb.

The oppressiveness of the set in Schalken is not matched by the interiors in The Wyvern Mystery. Instead, the director Alex Pillai focuses on the idea of the ‘old house’ as a place of unexpected menace, inscribing a weird fearfulness in the very fabric of its crumbling rooms. The discovery of secret spaces is charged with a high degree of dread and horror, and Pillai highlights Le Fanu’s play on the house as a sort of anthropomorphic space, where walls collapse or can be penetrated, and the inhabitants are compelled to hide or be hidden. In part rotten and in part curiously malleable, a material sign of uncertainty, the architecture is repeatedly visualized in terms of vertiginous camera movements and unexpected perspectives. Carwell catches Alice unawares, making her feel ‘oddly’ and a little ‘frightened’ (Wyvern Mystery, 46), and a parallel affect is created, through subtle visual distortions, in the mind of the television viewer. Le Fanu emphasises the way in which rooms contract so that ‘familiar things were unlike themselves’ and form a ‘new reality’ (WM, 155), and Pillai’s teleplay is just as unsettling. This emphasis on brooding horror is also expressed by figuring the house as a mental image. Working from Pirie’s dense script, itself informed by the author’s research into Gothic conventions, Pillai creates a space in which the viewer is confronted with the possibility that Carwell is a symbol of Alice’s state of mind. In his New Heritage of Horror (revised version, 2008), Pirie suggests the usefulness of psychoanalytical readings of Gothic, and in The Wyvern Mystery the director carefully adapts the Freudian merging of mind and house. The most unsettling moment is when Alice discovers the rooms of her malevolent Other. Making her way up a long corridor - an added detail that starkly represents a journey into the unconscious mind - she finds decaying clothes and imagines monstrous wood-lice, the occupants of a wardrobe of rotten clothes, crawling in her hair. Such enhancements stress the connection of psyche and place: occupying a position about one third into the two hour running time, the episode alerts the viewer to the fact that Alice’s home is partly an unsettling domain of ‘Secrets and Lies’ (Griffiths, 19), and partly an emblem of the heroine’s innermost fears, nightmares and anxieties. Such disconcerting messages are finally realized when ‘Dutch’ literally bursts through a wall, escaping, as it were, from the grotesque domains of the unconscious into the equally uncertain ‘realities’ of the everyday. Alice is possessed by doubts in the ‘corner of her mind’ (WM, 52), and the visualization of Carwell gives them a threatening material shape.

The menace of the material is further imaged in the form of the two monsters, Vanderhausen and Bertha. Figured as traditional representations of what Darryl Jones has described as the Gothic fascination with ‘body horror’ (165), both recreate Le Fanu’s emphasis on the fearfulness of the grotesque, on ugliness as an index of wickedness and the ‘unnatural’ (Bleiler, 39). In The Wyvern Mystery, Pillai intensifies Bertha’s demonic appearance, converting her from a figure with small-pox and a ‘large face’ (WM, 155) into a hideous creature, a demented gargoyle. Most troubling, however, is Megahey’s treatment of Vanderhausen, played by John Justin. Some of Vanderhausen’s menacing impact is realized by stressing his physical monstrosity; as in the text, so too in the film his deathly presence is registered in a diseased form, with make-up recreating the author’s description of his ‘leaden’ skin, black lips and ‘muddy white’ eyes (Bleiler, 38). His appearance is an apt equivalent to Le Fanu’s designation of the character as ‘odd, ‘frightful’ ‘horrible’ and ‘unhuman’ (39). But the horror of Vanderhausen’s character is given its deepest resonance by Justin’s delivery. Under Megahey’s direction he recreates the character’s ‘deathlike stillness’ (39), and, most tellingly of all, his unsettled diction. In the text, Vanderhausen speaks with absolute brevity, in short clauses divided by semi-colons (31, 36). The same terse tone informs Justin’s speaking of his lines, but the effect of strangeness is greatly intensified by the mechanical nature of his voice. Speaking in a highly clipped version of British received pronunciation, Justin effectively conveys the idea that Vanderhausen is indeed a corpse - his voice wearily resonating as if it were the voice of Poe’s Mr. Valdemar, spoken from ‘a vast distance’ (Galloway, 357), on the other side of the grave.

Justin’s nuanced performance materially adds to Schalken’s effects. Viewed more generally, we can say that both pieces deploy an effective range of Gothic techniques which set out to disturb the viewer and, by and large, succeed in doing so. The strategy of both programmes is one in which the directors recreate aspects of the texts, and highlight familiar Gothic conventions. This sometimes expands the information given in the source material; in the case of Wyvern, for instance, the emphasis on the threatening house owes as much to its treatment in British horror films, notably those made by Hammer, on which Pirie has written at length, as it does to literary Gothic and its representation in Le Fanu’s novel. Enriching the text by drawing on a filmic tradition, Pirie and Pillai make their television treatment a knowing paradigm, an encapsulation of the Gothic project and its psychological effects.

These can be explained in terms of the manipulation of conventions, but broader interpretations can also be made. Viewed generally, the programmes’ attack on complacency reads as a modern version of Le Fanu’s subversion of the domestic and secure. Adopting a technique that was also used by the Sensationalists, Le Fanu offers an unsettling version of the life of the fireside, and it is precisely this effect that the teleplays recreate. Writing in Temple Bar of the Sensationalism of Le Fanu, Collins, Braddon and Wood, one commentator noted that

It is on our domestic hearths that we are taught to look for the incredible. A mystery sleeps in our cradles; fearful errors in our nuptial beds; fiends sit down with us at table..(422).

The same judgment can be made of the two programmes: the fiends sit down with us and watch the screen, or burst out of it. Viewed more narrowly, in the terms theorized by Wheatley (7), television Gothic achieves its fearfulness by offering a media re-positioning of the Freudian uncanny. The uncanny postulates the intrusion of monsters in an ‘ordinary’ space, and so do the films, presenting a series of eerie distortions of family life. In Schalken and Wyvern, meals are eaten, visitors are received, social rituals are enacted, conversations are conducted: activities which rhyme and repeat the real lives of the viewers, only to show that the ordinary can be infected with the strange. In Freud’s terms, the ‘homely’ and ‘unhomely’ are drawn into an unsettling conjunction, revealing ‘something which ought to have remained hidden, but has come to light’ (Freud, 12). This perspective links the programmes to Le Fanu’s disruption of the everyday, showing how the strange is always present in the fabric of mundane reality. All we need to do, Le Fanu implies, and the teleplays confirm, is look for it.

The uncanny effects created by both programmes are a central constituent in their attempt to entertain, reminding the viewer of the psychology of fear while retaining ultimate control over the process of watching. As in all visual treatments of Gothic and horror, the effect is cathartic, a matter of enjoyable fearfulness in which the threatening situation, mediated through the intimate technological medium of television, can be turned off at a moment’s notice. In the terms of Keith Reierstad, the ‘demon in the house’ can be enjoyed or put away.

This element of control, of half-tamed menace and fireside fear, is an important ingredient in the watching of Schalken and Wyvern. At the same time, both programmes have a sort of educational function, a duty, in the best traditions of the Reithian philosophy, to provoke debate and stimulate thought. Figured as provocative interpretations, visual re-readings which mine the complexities of Le Fanu’s texts, they stimulate viewer response by offering a detailed representation of some of the most troubled and suggestive aspects of his writing. Never allowed to be viewed as ‘only’ a purveyor of Gothic, Le Fanu is presented to the public as a rich and complicated interpreter of social and philosophical ideas. Working through the most populist of media, the film-makers construct Le Fanu as an entertainer and a ‘serious writer’.

In his treatment of Schalken, Megahey focuses on the key themes of ‘art, money, sexual politics and ambition’ (Angelini, 2). Such interests appear elsewhere in his work as a television auteur, notably in Cariani and the Courtesans, 1987, and his reading of Le Fanu’s short story is characterized by his sensitivity to specific subtexts. According to Megahey, Schalken is a tale of greed and ‘heartlessness’ (Bleiler, 40) which is focused around two main concerns: the love of money and the treatment of women. These interlocked themes are highlighted in his interpretation, a process achieved, in a sometimes radical re-working of the text, by foregrounding some of the minor scenes, adding others, modifying characters, and re-writing and simplifying some of the dialogue. Using these devices, the director constructs the story as a critique of capitalism and especially of its treatment of women.

Megahey intensifies the text’s concern with ’sordid’ (36) greed by emphasising Douw and Schalken’s obsession with money. The opening shot, one of the director’s inventions, is of Douw counting coins, and the character’s avarice is constantly stressed by his grumbling about lack of finances, his parsimony at the dinner table, and his pleasure at seeing Vanderhausen’s gold. Played by Maurice Denham as a short-sighted miser with limited movement and dry manners, this version of Douw is the embodiment of the artist-capitalist, the class of which Rembrandt was the exemplar, the businessman for whom all considerations are secondary to the acquisition of wealth. Schalken (Jeremy Clyde) is similarly modified; no longer allowed a period of idealism when he can be the lover of Rose and the ‘proudest painter in Christendom’ (30), Megahey’s Schalken is always ‘uncouth’ (30), a cynical and ambitious man whose priorities are nothing to do with ‘passion’ (30), but are motivated by the desire of gain. Such lack of feeling is subtly suggested by Clyde’s cold delivery, a combination of stilted diction and impatient movements. In the words of Angelini, he is ‘unremittingly chilly’, a ‘hard heart’ (3) who (tellingly) only become warmer and more animated when he takes Vanderhausen’s treasure to be valued, in a greatly extended and highlighted scene, by a money-lender. Indeed, Megahey converts Schalken into an emblematic figure whose career embodies a Marxist critique of the bourgeois obsession with wealth. The director ruthlessly shows how his money-fetish corrodes his idealism, especially in an added scene in which he declines a commission because it is below his ability, but immediately changes his mind when the patron places a box of coins before him. But the heart of Megahey’s interpretation lies in his imaginative re-telling of Schalken’s treatment of Rose. His fetish with money ruins his career - reducing him to the level of a craftsman painting unworthy subjects - and according to this version of the text it wrecks his relationship with Rose as well. Money goes before art, and commerce before love.

In Le Fanu’s text, Schalken is constrained from marrying Rose by his timid lack of ‘reputation and competence’ (30); in Megahey’s, by contrast, he is both complicit and responsible for what happens to her. Of course, he does not give her away: that act of ‘heartlessness’ (40) is Douw’s. But the film inserts an extra scene in which Rose encourages Schalken to elope with her, only to be met with a promise that he will ‘buy back the contract…at twice the price’. The director thus insists that Schalken’s love is by no means the honest passion suggested by Le Fanu, but simply another version of Douw’s and Vanderhausen’s bargaining. His master and rival regard her as a commodity, and so does her lover, who, in refusing to put his love before his money, necessarily condemns her to be bought and sold, as if she were another artefact to emerge from their workshop and be exchanged for the best price. This notion of ‘love’ as a financial transaction is similarly developed in a series of additional scenes that cast the painter as a purchaser not of affection, but of women’s bodies. His ‘wild passion’ (30) for Rose is redefined as a desire for sex, of possession rather than romance, commodity rather than emotional engagement. We see him posing nudes, possessing them as objects, subjects for his art; and we see him visiting prostitutes. In both cases the emphasis is on the payment, the recurring visual and aural motif of clinking coins speedily handed over in exchange for ‘love’. The implication, every time, is that Schalken regarded Rose as little more than a prostitute or an inert model, a thing to be paid for. This connection between the treatment of women as commodities and the treatment of his true love is brilliantly expressed in two key scenes.

In the first of these, Schalken visits the brothel and is presented with a new prostitute, named Rose, from Rotterdam, the home of Vanderhausen. The actress resembles Schalken’s Rose, and is dressed in the same clothes. Presented to him as a thing to be paid for, possessed or rejected because he is unable to afford her rates, this Rose provides an ironic symbol of his ‘love’ for Douw’s ‘sweet ward’ (30). The horror of this moment - which focuses the connections made throughout the second part of the film - is clinched, moreover, in the famous climactic scene. Megahey recreates Le Fanu’s description of Schalken’s imagined descent into the crypt, but characteristically modifies its effect. In the film treatment, he re-discovers his ‘first love’ (46), but responds - thinking she is a prostitute - by offering her money. She then leads him to a bedroom, undresses, sits astride and makes love to her husband, who is lying in what is subsequently shown to be a tomb. Acted with disconcerting strangeness by Cheryl Kennedy, the scene is one of genuine horror, but the patterns of imagery make its meaning clear. Schalken’s offering of money is rejected by the laughing Kennedy, compelling her to make love not to the painter, but to the bidder who paid the highest price for her. The money-nexus, the power of wealth over love is thus expressed in a single scene, reducing Schalken to the status of a client who failed to pay enough, or, perhaps, a pimp who sold his ‘love’ for the greatest profit. At this moment, too, we realize that Vanderhausen, Schalken’s ‘monstrous rival’, is really his doppleganger. The only difference between them is their relative level of wealth; Vanderhausen is literally a corpse, but his deadness is an image of the painter’s emotional nullity.

The ‘dead and the living cannot be one’ (43), Le Fanu tells us, and Megahey presents a distinct interpretation of those lines. According to him, the commodification of relationships converts the living into emotional corpses. This interpretation, which is only really apparent by reading the programme retrospectively, from the final scene to the opening shot, is consistent with the equation of house and tomb, refiguring all of the male characters as wraiths, stiff bodies possessed and animated by the spirit of avarice. Ironically, the only person who remains alive in terms of her continuing life as a person of sensibility, is Rose, a point graphically shown by her terror when she returns to the house after her marriage to Vanderhausen. Horrified by Douw’s treatment, her torments dramatize and condemn the confusion between love and money. Presented as a Marxist critique of greed, Megahey’s reading of Le Fanu’s central message, the film also reads as a commentary on the sufferings of women; at once economic tract, it simultaneously yields to a feminist interpretation.

A feminist analysis is equally applicable to Pirie and Pillai’s treatment of The Wyvern Mystery. Partly intended as piece of full-blooded Gothic which preserves the outlines and stock characters of Le Fanu’s flawed text, its main focus is the story of Alice Maybell, here played with great sensitivity by Naomi Watts. In the original tale, Alice is one of several characters; in Pirie’s adaptation, however, she becomes the heroine and central interest, a modern woman whose task, one might say, is to highlight Le Fanu’s contemporary significance. Recasting the text as another study of the female predicament, the writer highlights its exploration of her suffering and ultimate triumph; steeped in the conventions of the genre, he playfully constructs and deconstructs Le Fanu’s emphasis on the ‘helpless woman’ who finally finds selfhood, dignity and purpose. This process is realized, as a piece of knowing post-modern revisionism, by emphasising Alice’s physical situation, as well as the psychological changes that come about as she struggles to impose a sense of control.

Working from Pirie’s script, the director Pillai composes numerous scenes that reveal Alice’s physical limitations. Her status as a possession, to be imprisoned and manipulated by men, is highlighted in the opening sequence, a visual chart of her development from childhood to early adulthood. Le Fanu describes her arduous journeys, as a displaced person with no family, from Oulton to Carwell, but Pillai visualizes her status by compressing it into a montage of shots, each presenting a scene of incarceration. She is shown as a helpless infant, looking out through a barred window; then as a child willingly locked up; and finally as a young woman who has grown used to the heavy sound of a turning key. Her position as a prisoner, a female of no social standing, is also imaginatively conveyed, as Wheatley has pointed out, by her inspection of children’s illustrations, especially one of a homeless foundling (116). Such imagery prefigures her own wandering in search of her child, but the subtlety of the effect is the way in which it frames her as a character in a ‘Gothic fairy story’ (116), a female locked up as surely as Rapunzel in her tower. The prison-imagery continues throughout the two parts of the film, notably in the scenes at Carwell which, as noted earlier, contain many visualizations of enclosed spaces, unexpected corridors and sticking doors. As in literary Gothic, the physical settings become a metaphor for mental imprisonment. The body is locked up, and so is Alice’s mind, possessed firstly by the Squire, later by Harry, and finally by Charles.

Yet the television treatment of Alice’s situation does not allow her to be so easily manipulated as she is in the original text. Le Fanu stresses her passivity, endowing her with the conventionalized beauty, the ‘little teeth’ and ‘oval face’ (WM, 15) traditionally associated with doll-like weakness. Under Pillai’s direction, however, Naomi Watts plays her as relatively self-willed: she rejects the boorish love-making of the Squire; marries successfully; bears a child; and is never limited to the role of the ‘darling little woman’ (138) specified in the original text. Although she has been treated as a commodity, Pirie, Pillai and Watts’s reading of Alice is one which stresses a growing self-awareness and resistance to her situation. It is this developing strength that enables her to engage in a series of increasingly frightening situations. She is terrified of Bertha, but confronts her on two occasions; she survives the loss of her husband; and she survives her expulsion from society when she is made homeless. Such changes enhance and rewrite key elements in the text, translating her from mere responsiveness to forceful control, from passive participant into a female detective who aggressively pursues, finds and retrieves her lost son.

In this version of events, the female character is the one who acts, rather than being acted upon, an equation which reverses the tragic passivity of Schalken’s Rose. The process of individuation is not limited to the representation of changes in action, however. Alice demonstrates her mental growth by taking the lead in deciding her own destiny, but more interesting is the way in which the director conveys subtle psychological changes. The main viewpoint in Wyvern is an internal one: as Pirie remarks, he set out to manipulate the visual style ‘to get inside her head’ (Griffiths, 19). Using the ‘subjective camera’ as an expressive medium, the director distorts her viewpoint to suggest the workings of her mind, an approach which quotes some of the techniques deployed by Hitchcock. He cleverly exaggerates her perception of Bertha’s secret room, elongating the corridor in a moment of psychological crisis, and lighting it in an unsettling combination of shimmering blue shadows. Alice’s despair as she searches for her son is similarly evoked through the medium of the hand-held camera, an index of panic, as she runs dementedly though the wood. Her feelings of despair and dislocation are conveyed with greater subtlety, however, through the use of enamel-hard colours, most notably in the sequence which involves her return to Harry’s grave. Visualized with the shadow-less intensity of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, a nightmare by Holman Hunt, the scene powerfully suggests her sense of psychological strain, of ‘reality’ viewed with an unnatural distinctness, and almost too painful to view.

Placing the viewer inside Alice’s perceptions, the director insists on the validity of what we see. Speaking more generally, his charting of Alice’s mental life, viewed, as it were, from within, is a celebration of female ingenuity. It charts suffering, and how it can be transcended. Such revisionism uncovers a new aspect of Le Fanu’s otherwise over-complicated text, reading its source material not only in the terms of the modern viewer expectations - there being no taste whatever for ‘passive females’ in a programme broadcast in 2000 - but also in terms of its influence on Jane Eyre. In an earlier (1839) form, The Wyvern Mystery was a significant influence on Charlotte Bronte’s novel of 1847, and Pirie and Pillai’s reading of Le Fanu re-formulates his material as feminist tract. In their version, Alice is more like Jane than she is like the Alice of Le Fanu’s novel: completing a circle of influence, the writer and director re-figure his writing in the terms of another writer who (ironically) was herself influenced by Le Fanu’s prototype. Engaging with the discourses of broadcasting and Gothic, Wyvern is a sophisticated treatment of the primary tropes of feminism and should be viewed, finally, in the context of ‘feminist television’.

I am indebted to Mr Luke Fresle, producer at the BBC, for information relating to scheduling and broadcast policy.

1. Leslie Megahey, born 1944, is a British writer and director, best known for his film The Year of the Pig and his pioneering work as art-editor on the BBC’s Omnibus. In addition to writing and directing programmes for the series, Megahey is well-known as the interviewer of a number of important cultural figures, notably Orson Welles. David Pirie, born 1953, is a screenwriter for British television, film critic, novelist and author of a study of Hammer films, A New Heritage of Horror. Alex Pillai is a well-known television director whose work includes episodes of Silent Witness.

2. Le Fanu, J.S. Schalken the Painter, for Omnibus. Broadcast on BBC 1, 23 December, 1979, colour (35mm), 70 mins. Written & directed by Leslie Megahey; photography by John Hooper. Featuring Jeremy Clyde (Schalken); Mauric Denham (Douw); Cheryl Kennedy (Rose); John Justin (Vanderhausen).

Le Fanu, J. S. The Wyvern Mystery. Broadcast on BBC, Sunday evenings, 5 & 12 March 2000, colour (35 mm), 120 mins. Co-production, BBC & The Production Company. Screenplay by David Pirie; directed by Alex Pillai. Featuring Naomi Watts (Alice); Derek Jacobi (The Squire); Ian Glenn (Charles).

The Wyvern Mystery was also broadcast in the United States on PBS (WGBH, Channel 2) on 12 & 19 September, 2000.

Wyvern is currently available on DVD in the United States (30621-D). Schalken is more difficult to see. It has never been released on DVD or VHS in the United Kingdom, but there are many copies in circulation, probably taped from the television when it was last repeated in 1989. Segments can be viewed on the British Film Institute’s Screenonline, which is available in educational institutions. The immaculate master-copy, mounted on 35 mm film, can only be viewed at the BBC’s archives, London, England.

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