Most of these players had been in the business a long time, and they all found my way of making pictures odd, to say the least. Not a one of them could believe I’d landed Ollie his own pub, for instance. Honestly, I don’t know of any other producers working the estate agent access to properties the way I did. There were other estate developers who were in the filmmaking business, some who really went big-time, like Stevie and Gustave with Harbour Productions.41 I was the fellow who put Milton in touch with them when he was trying to bankroll one of his and Max’s films, when things were getting tight and banks and distributors were getting harder to line up. I never fretted about that end of things, since our estate dealings were profitable enough to bank on and provided so many resources without studio costs or all kinds of overhead.

  We still had the warehouse with standing interior sets we’d constructed for FEAR NONE NUN, and plenty of leftover footage from the exterior location filming for CASTLE OF THE LOST to work with, so fabricating the movie-within-a-movie Carpathian nunnery was easily done. We were going for the sort of bogus-Bavarian look and feel of the Hammers, of course, so making it look a bit threadbare was the idea. Three of my regular contractors happily took on refurbishing those interior warehouse constructs, and Louis supervised the final look of the sets with all manner of window-and-wall dressings and medieval torture devices, some of which were quite genuine.

  So, THE MORTAL SINS OF DRACULA sequences, and the “filming of” scenes leading into or out of those, didn’t cost us much of anything, really. Have to admit it was fun to be making a Dracula film, trying to outdo Carreras and Hinds, even if it was a movie-inside-a-movie, and not a real Dracula. We even tried to match the look and feeling of Hammer’s usual exteriors, using parks that resembled Black Park, and even a botanical garden, for the horses-and-carriage-and-undertakers chase, with the hearse, sledgehammers, stakes, and all that. We went completely over-the-top with the gore, of course. No cleanup necessary if done outdoors.

  We also constructed a screening room and a hallway and faux-office setup in one corner of the warehouse, and that became the BBFC and Geraldine’s office. I knew what those looked like inside-and-out, having dealt with Trevelyan and the BBFC for over a decade, and we had ample materials to match what I’d seen over the years there, keeping it all “in period,” the late-1960s. One side of Geraldine’s office had a breakaway wall, which we used to set up special effects to stage her hallucinations, including a rear projection screen and variation on that arms-through-stretchy-wall illusion we lifted from REPULSION, as well as an ongoing means of dealing with lights setups and camera placement for Geraldine’s workspace.

  As to the Soho locations, I had a few still in my estate agent folio, and two fellow agents were happy to sign on as co-investors by providing nighttime access to locations, without putting so much as a pound out-of-pocket into the budget. We shot all the exterior street stuff on the sly, never even tried for permits, but staged most of them in front of either properties one of the estate agents handled, or establishments where we knew the landlords. We only got caught once, with nothing of consequence hindering our just carrying on.

  Marcus Rand’s flat was actually two flats, one that I had listed and another I’d borrowed from a relative while he was on holiday, which I’d financed, much to his delight. We kept it all very much within the circles of families and friends, very frugal but effective. Except for the Dracula and nuns, all the costuming was provided by three second-hand clothing shops who were happy to provide what they did in exchange for a couple months rent-free and an onscreen credit. You could dress everyone in “swinging sixties” fashions without spending, since everything that was out-of-fashion in those second-hand shops was what had been in-fashion five years prior—and most likely purchased out of the same sort of shops back in the 1960s, as well. What goes ’round comes around.

  Our director Robert Alquist revelled in all this, he loved it. He liked the hands-on, “get yourself dirty” pragmatism of our approach. Found it really invigorating. Alquist went to town with the mayhem, laying the sauce on particularly thick, the blood gushing from the vagina, the double-impalings of Dracula. It was Alquist who came up with that gash in Marcus’s side becoming Natasha’s lips. I remember he said he hoped even Ken Russell would get a charge out of that one, but he was pleased when some pretentious cinéaste later compared it to Jean Cocteau or some such. Anyway, at the time, he was more into STRAW DOGS and all that. Peckinpah, Alquist kept talking about Sam Peckinpah. There was a conviction, an energy to Alquist’s staging of the horrors that almost got us into trouble. He made Geraldine’s epic battle with Marcus-as-Dracula in the nunnery, the whole “film within a film” thing, really visceral, which almost prompted a round of cuts when we submitted the film, but luckily they passed it “as is.”

  And that was almost it for the horrors. Louis announced to me at the end of production that he was done, he’d accomplished his goals as best he could. I’d mentioned that little ritual of his, the burial of artefacts with the coffin and the planting of a tree over the site by night: that all meant something significant to Louis, and he let me know he was done with the moviemaking. Louis dedicated himself wholly to his digs and archeology, still kept in close touch with me. But we’d had our fun, he said, making it clear we had one major task to see through, come the time, but that no longer involved the films or real estate. Our last big production was planning Louis’s and my funerals, it turned out.

  THE SQUEAMISH never found much footing. It was neither fish nor fowl, an odd fit with everything that seemed to be on the one hand exploding that decade, and on the other hand collapsing, like the wind going out of some massive balloon. It was gruesome enough and original enough to score some traction, and it made back its money, so I was happy enough. Besides, as I said, it was personal, one of the few movies I made that meant something to me. Over about a four year period, I sold it to a few markets, though not a one of them liked the title. The Americans changed it to CRINGE, and when that didn’t get asses into seats, another subdistributor hustled it as DAYMARE and as DRACULA’S REVENGE, making it look in the ads like Ollie was Dracula. I liked the Canadian title, ANGST.

  After that, had some other successes, so I kept going. As a firm, Blythewood had a variety of production proposals out there, including a couple of TV adaptations, The Adventures of Don Quick and one I was particularly partial to, The Monsters, a variation on the Loch Ness Monster and such, disappearances and lake creatures in the north, but we couldn’t spark any real pre-sales on those. Nobody even seemed to recall The Monsters, though it was from the BBC.42 We ended up doing a Softly Softly Task Force feature—a series you don’t know over here, that spun off from Z-Cars—and that did very well for us in the UK, but sold and played nowhere else. Limited revenue streams, there.

  The two enterprises in tandem—properties, films—kept me financially well enough off to make more feature films for a time, even after brother Louis stepped away from it all. Became less fun for me after Louis elected to forego involvement, truth to tell. By the end of the 1970s, I happily walked away from the filmmaking and all that, didn’t even bother to try and keep the films in circulation. Quite the contrary, I spent some years reeling it all back in, and packing it all away.

  I only tried one more horror, really. It was much, much later, late 1980s. CASTLE OF THE LOST and FEAR NONE NUN had pushed the envelope with sex and gore, and THE SQUEAMISH had taken that further, and some money men remembered that, recalled making money on those titles, and remembered I was somehow responsible. So I was approached by outside investors, foreign blokes, who wanted me to go further. I’d always resisted working with other countries on the production end of things, seeing how difficult that had been for Carreras and Towers and Amicus—lucrative, sometimes, but more cooks in the kitchen, and I hate that, muddies up who’s in charge, doesn’t it? But a trio of outside interests approached me with cash in hand, and with German-Spanish financing, I gave it one more go.

  These geniuses thought Blythewood should re-establish itself in the international marketplace. The result turned out to be Anton Diffring’s last movie, a remake of CIRCUS OF HORRORS entitled ZIRKUS VON BLUTES, which means CIRCUS OF BLOOD. I wanted that blond lead from that curious 1970s space-age telly production Sky, pretty-boy Marc Harrison, and we got him, all grown up and not as pretty, but the big fish was landing Anton Diffring, who had been on my wish list for some time. They were quite good together, we shot it all in ’87. What can I say? We misread the tea leaves. Anton had starred in CIRCUS OF HORRORS, which had made a bundle in its day and played everywhere that was anywhere, and Anton was available and up for one last Romeo fling. It seemed a sure thing to me. I should have listened to Louis, he told me to steer clear.

  Remember I told you earlier that we went too far in later years? Well, CIRCUS OF BLOOD was the “too far.” The German/Spanish producers convinced me early on nasty nippers and grizzles were big boxoffice, so OK, I went with that. What did I know? Big, big international stars, really gorgeous superstars who’d won all kinds of awards were up the duff in movie after movie, shrieking and birthing bogey bairns. Seriously, stars like Julie Christie, Samantha Eggar, Joan Collins, Isabel Adjani. Hammer had that teen Kinski with a rubber devil fetus grubbing about her crotch, Harry Davenport had Top of the Pops Susie Silvey pop her bottom birthing a full-grown man on her flat’s floor in his barking-mad movie.43 All those yummy mummies and monster sprogs sloshing about on the big beautiful screen. Who knew any more? Blindsided me, it all did. We should have realized everyone had changed nappies and moved on.

  Allow me to pause from my conversation with Blythewood at this point, and interject information I only sorted out later, after my conversations with Blythewood and my return home, to the creature comforts and illusory security of the university and my house in America.

  For a few minutes, as we were talking, I simply couldn’t make coherent sense of what Blythewood was saying to me, hence the failure of my notes and note-taking as we reached the final few minutes of our conversation about his films and filmmaking career. It was only a year or more after my Blythewood meeting and screenings that I pieced together what I could find in various vintage industry trade journals concerning CIRCUS OF BLOOD.

  The film seems to have been purged from the filmographies of everyone involved. That the film even exists at all seems to have been seared from the record; those few sources acknowledging the film’s existence offer vague references written by those who have never seen the movie, and it has yet to surface in any authorized revival or home video release.

  Via Spanish and German language industry journal reviews, it appears that CIRCUS OF BLOOD was a modernized revamp of CIRCUS OF HORRORS which adhered closely to original in its essentials, updated to make the returning mad plastic surgeon/ringmaster Rossiter (Anton Diffring) a partner-in-crime with a disgraced former-genetic-research husband-and-wife team (Marc Harrison and German actress Christel Bodenstein). Having had their medical licenses revoked and the pair of them struck off the register, the duo pioneer a form of crude stem-cell research applied to plastic surgery. They require a steady flow of fetuses (provided by Rossiter’s “fertilizing” his circus female performers) to provide the necessary fetal tissues for the procession of plastic surgeries, in which new flesh is molded on the faces of fugitive outlaws. Using techniques that render fetal tissue morphologically neutral and malleable, Rossiter molds new faces and bodies for all his performers, who are (as in the original CIRCUS OF HORRORS) all fugitive criminals. Accessing a steady flow of fetal tissues “required” a procession of Rossiter-seduction and near-rape sequences, fulfilling the sex-and-nudity quotient punctuated with a procession of messy abortion sequences (one review quotes the risible line of dialogue, “we can’t keep losing our trapeze artists this way!”). If the reviews are accurate, it would appear that the graphic facial surgery sequences invert the gory face removal surgeries of films like Georges Franju’s LES YEUX SANS VISAGE—making faces instead of surgically removing them—saving the “best” for last, when the performers’ faces, limbs, chests, torsos begin to shudder, shiver, and slither from their skulls and/or skeletons in a horrific display of tissue rejection amid the chaotic finale.

  The resulting feature film proved to not be the sort of horror film anyone gravitated to at Milan’s MIFED that year (the International Film, TV film and Documentary Market, active from 1960 until 2004). By 1988-89 the film was considered too much even for the gore-saturated genre marketplace of the post-slasher era. The plot, if you will, was the problem: in hindsight, the toxic combo of the hideous circus “baby farm” angle, the gory onscreen abortions and manhandling of writhing fetuses, the horrific “baby soup,” and the abortionist couple’s sympathetic characterization (they are the nominal “heroes” of the film) deep-sixed the planned international release. The film ultimately found buyers in Asia and its co-financers secured a fleeting release in Germany, under a plethora of titles (CIRCO DE LOS NINOS MONSTRUO a.k.a. THE THIRD RING IS FEAR a.k.a. SHUDDERING FLESH a.k.a. BABY FACE PARADE a.k.a. CARNIVAL OF BROKEN FACES). But that wasn’t the end of it. In 1990, the primary German financer’s infuriated (soon-to-be ex) wife orchestrated the theft and destruction of the negative and interpositives, rumored to be buried beneath a repaved section of the Autobahn.

  Thus ended any hopes for a Blythewood relaunch. Blythewood himself truly retired from filmmaking in 1990, never to return.

  It was only after finding all this out that I could comprehend something he had said to me at the end of that part of our conversation.

  If I am transcribing my notes correctly, Blythewood said, “at the time, the baby soup angle didn’t seem to me the problem it became. We were idiots with too much money and too little taste. We’d convinced ourselves we knew our onions and it were money in the bank. It wasn’t. It was a cot death. We’d lost the plot, and we paid the price.”

  But that isn’t the end of this story—nor the worst of what Blythewood had accomplished.

  36Feature film and BBC TV director Ken Russell.

  37Blythewood was referring to screenwriter Christopher Wicking, directors Michael Reeves, Stephen Weeks, Michael Armstrong.

  38Cinematographer/director Freddie Francis and his producer son Kevin, and Kevin’s studio Tyburn Films.

  39Blythewood was referring to writer/director Jimmy Sangster, who had scripted most of the Hammer psycho-thrillers of the 1960s. Blythewood is specifically referencing CRESCENDO (1970), SEE NO EVIL (1971, not a Hammer Film), FEAR IN THE NIGHT (written and directed by Sangster, 1972), STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING (1972), and actresses Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Mia Farrow, and Rita Tushingham.

  40Peter Quint was the spectral sexual sadist that haunted the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw and its two film adaptations to date circa 1973, THE INNOCENTS (1961, played by Peter Wyngarde) and THE NIGHTCOMERS (1971, played by Marlon Brando).

  41Steven Bach and Gustave Berne were real estate developer magnates and millionaires who owned Harbour Productions, which financed Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg’s ASYLUM (1972), among other films. Steven Bach went on to become the head honcho of United Artists.

  42It was indeed: four episodes, debuted November 8, 1962, and apparently now lost forever.

  43Julie Christie in DEMON SEED, Samantha Eggar in THE BROOD, Joan Collins in THE DEVIL WITHIN HER aka I DON’T WANT TO BE BORN, Isabel Adjani in POSSESSION, Judy Geeson in INSEMINOID aka HORROR PLANET, Natasha Kinski in TO THE DEVIL, A DAUGHTER, and Susie Silvey in XTRO.

  EPILOGUE:

  BLACK SUNDAY

  AT THIS POINT, I’D FELT ADRIFT, having lost the thread of our conversation. Blythewood could see I was floundering with my note-taking and questions. I no longer had any idea what we were talking about, or where to go amid my confusion.

  “Ah, I’ve lost you,” he sighed. “See, it was too much, even for a learned professor like yourself.”

  Blythewood glanced over at his laptop, and said, “you see, it’s nearly time to go. It’s half-past eleven, we’ve only a few more minutes. I promised you we’d wrap up before midnight. It’s been a long day, too long, perhaps.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess I’ve run out of questions.”

  “That can’t be,” Blythewood said. “You haven’t even asked me your first question as yet. We’ve got to wrap around to that before we’re done. Come on, lad, there’s a dance in the old dame yet.”

  Blythewood motioned towards the doorway behind me, and I heard the soft sounds of footsteps and sharp ceramic comforts of cups on saucers, and a fresh serving of coffee was placed on the table between us. The young woman poured us each a cup, and Blythewood took a sip of his before pushing me with “carry on.”

  “So, what happened to your brother?”

  “Ah, Louis. Yes, well, he was done with me and my film projects in 1974, but he wasn’t done with our lifelong venture. Louis’s part in all that ended in 2012, when he passed on. But that project—well, I think it ends tonight, or a major part of it does.”

  The coffee alone wasn’t doing it for me. I was still lost.

  “I—I’m afraid I—I don’t understand you, still. You’ve lost me, I am sorry.”

  “At the appropriate time,” Blythewood nodded towards his laptop, “I’ll turn the volume up on that, but I should have time to clear away the smoke and mirrors for you. But first, I shall answer your first question, the first of the day, when we initially laid eyes on one another.”