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The Ash Tree

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1975 Dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark Part of the BBC’s annual series A Ghost Story for Christmas , which ran from 1971 to 1978 and featured some of the small screen’s most chilling moments, The Ash Tree was the last of several MR James adaptations directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark. Written for television by David Rudkin, It stars Edward Petherbridge in the dual role of Sir Richard, an 18th century aristocrat who inherits the vast estate of his late uncle, and of Sir Matthew, his 17th century ancestor whose role in local witch trials, and the death of Ann Mothersole (Barbara Ewing), haunts Sir Richard.  With a slim running time (just over 30 minutes) The Ash Tree is one of the shortest entries in the series, but it is also one of the densest. The amount of detail and information packed in, without compromising or diluting the impact of the source material, is admirable. Clarke manages to convey events and flashbacks by utilising an interesting narrative structure and some ...
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Kensal Green Cemetery

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During a recent visit to London, a friend and I decided to explore Kensal Green Cemetery in the west of the city. Founded as the General Cemetery of All Souls by barrister George Frederick Carden in 1833, Kensal Green was inspired by the garden-style cemetery of Pere-Lachaises in Paris. Comprised of 72 acres of beautiful grounds, it was not only the first commercial cemetery in London, but also the first of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ garden-style cemeteries established to house the dead of an ever-increasing population. Campaigners for burial reform were in favour of “detached cemeteries for the metropolis” and in 1832 Parliament passed a bill that led to the formation of the General Cemetery Company to oversee appropriate measures and procedures concerning “the interment of the dead.” The company purchased land for the establishment of Kensal Green in 1831 and held a competition in order to select an appropriate designer. Among the prerequisites in the brief provided to entrants, we...
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A Brief History of the Necronomicon

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After my recent viewing of Evil Dead (2013), I found myself thinking about the subtle (and not so subtle) Lovecraftian elements, particularly the creepy arcane tome found in the cellar of the cabin. A prominent feature of the earlier Evil Dead films too, the Necronomicon is an ancient (fictional) grimoire containing summoning spells, incantations, the laws of the dead and various accounts of an unknowable pantheon of cosmic deities known as the Great Old Ones. The Necronomicon was created by HP Lovecraft and appeared in many of his stories. According to Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi, the author was likely inspired to create a fictional grimoire that could drive its reader insane and unleash incomprehensible cosmic horrors from the beyond, by a collection of short stories by Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895). In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), Lovecraft describes this collection as: “a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a m...
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