Death Line

By Sean Hogan

A cave-in during construction of the London Underground seals a group of workers in forever. Abandoned to their own devices they feed on each other to survive.
Transformed by plague, incest, and disease their descendents emerge as cannibalistic beings with a language 
of only three words: "MIND THE DOORS!"
As the last of the underground men loses his mate to a wasting disease he is compelled to seek food, and a new bride, from the platforms above.
With his debut feature, Gary Sherman —like George Romero, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper—channels his despair and anger at the cultural and political zeitgeist to create a confront-ational low-budget genre movie that lashes out at the conservative establishment. 
In every possible way DEATH LINE is an 'underground' classic.

Despite an increasing amount of critical support and high profile fans Gary Sherman's  DEATH LINE remains something of an anomaly in British Horror Cinema, an ugly duckling; its face doesn't quite fit. Made on a shoestring budget in early 1972, its initial reviews were divided, the Daily Mail called it 'a sick and sick-making film'. Despite a successful London run, the film seemed destined to be an eccentric but mostly forgotten genre footnote (it was recut and retitled as RAW MEAT in America). And yet, it has survived and, in recent years, thrived; rediscovered and embraced by new generations of genre fans who recognise that this satirically angry critique of the English class system feels far more like a spiritual cousin to the '70s American New Wave of Horror than the traditional Hammer gothics and cosy Amicus chills that were the norm in Britain at the time. 

And the ace up it's ragged, dirty sleeve? It's funny too, with a performance by Donald Pleasence unlike anything else in the genre. Perhaps only THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE attempts anything similar in its mix of black comedy and visceral cannibal slaughter, and even then, DEATH LINE is both funnier and more overtly gory than Tobe Hooper's subsequent film. Join Sean Hogan as he leads you deep into the tunnels under London to examine a genre classic.

"One of my truest and fondest memories in film . . .DEATH LINE is permeated by the kind of grim poetry exclusive to the horror genre."  

—Guillermo Del Toro

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362919

Book preview

MIDNIGHT MOVIE MONOGRAPHS

DEATHLINE

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MIND THE DOORS

SEAN HOGAN

SERIES EDITOR

NEIL SNOWDON

FOREWORD

DEATH LINE (1972)—A FILM BY GARY SHERMAN—is all about looking underneath. The Establishment, handily represented by six foot five Christopher Lee in a bowler hat, has been looking down on us all since the dawn of time. The ancestors of Lee’s Stratton-Villiers made a purely financial decision to leave navvies buried in a cave-in to rot, forcing them to turn to cannibalism. Now, an incident on the London Underground (the tube), insists that we look beneath the streets, even below the usual tunnels, to pay attention to human creatures who have become both monstrous and invisible. What a way to live, concludes the appalled Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence). The Man (Hugh Armstrong) is the most pathetic of monsters—a throwback to caveman savagery, like his contemporaries, the WWI draft-dodger of THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR (1970) and the castaway lighthouse-keepers of TOWER OF EVIL (1972)...but also the sort of filthy, matted vagrant Londoners walk past every day, like the immortal tramp of THE ASPHYX (1972) or the Pinterian derelict Pleasence plays in THE CARETAKER (1963).

If the exuberant burst of ‘swinging London’ cinema found in Richard Lester’s films and the pop-art musicals of the 1960s showed a surface, then DEATH LINE joins a group of horror, crime and sex films picking away at the scabs of the city...going back to the Soho stranglers, stabbers and electrocutioners of COVER GIRL KILLER (1959), PEEPING TOM (1960) and STRIP TEASE MURDER (1961)...extending to the disco Frankenstein conspiracy of SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1967)—also with Christopher Lee as the civil servant behind it all—and the psychopathic men-children of HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1968), TWISTED NERVE (1968) and STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING (1972); the provincial girls drawn to unglamorous vice in PERMISSIVE (1970) and COOL IT CAROL (1970); the geriatric monsters preying on jaded with-it youth in THE SORCERERS (1967) and NIGHT AFTER NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1969); the necktie murderer set loose on one last Hitchcock ripper hunt in FRENZY (1971), and the psychic psychopath (Richard Burton) seething to bring the cathedral down on the Royal Family from a hospital bed in THE MEDUSA TOUCH (1978). These are all London films—you could stage a depressing walking tour of what’s left of their locations: not the red-bus tourist spots, but the alleys, clipjoints, tube stations, nicks, markets, riverbanks and walk-up flats. Any one of these films would make a fine co-feature with the classic ‘disappearing city’ documentary THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS (1969).

DEATH LINE—this book by Sean Hogan—looks underneath too, but not in the way you might expect. By now, you probably know the drill for these film monographs...but Sean takes another approach. Way back when the BFI started their series of Film Classics (very much the go-to model for this format), Salman Rushdie appended a short story at the end of his essay on THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). I remember Philip French remarking—while we were on a jury debating film book awards—that sometimes the best response to a painting or a poem or any work of art is another painting, poem or work of art, a propos of Geoff Ryman’s novel WAS, which also grappled with Dorothy, Garland and Oz. David Thomson’s SUSPECTS and SILVER LIGHT have approached film noir and the Western through fiction, metafiction and the drawing of strands between familiar, near-myth figures. Sean delves into DEATH LINE, into the horrors beneath Russell Square tube station¹, but the route he takes is through Inspector Calhoun, one of Pleasence’s great film characterisations and—as is still not quite realised—one of the great horror movie characters of a decade packed with standouts. Pleasence is good as Dr Loomis in HALLOWEEN (1978)...but he is great as Inspector Calhoun.

The policeman’s lot in horror is not a happy one.

For a start, look at the reviews...or the audience appreciation graphs. It’s generally felt that even a stone classic like Franju’s LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (1959) slows to a halt when it cuts away from the shocking mad science and the surreal masked waif to the conventional Paris flics mulling over the disappearance. How many horror movies are stuck with plodders in trenchcoats laboriously putting together clues to catch up with mysteries the audience has long since solved? Think of Inspector Murray (Michael Coles) in DRACULA AD 1972 (1972), who needs Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) to work out what Alucard spelled backwards means. Or the useless Sheriffs of PSYCHO (1960) and HALLOWEEN? Even Superintendant Bellever (Alfred Marks), whose general disposition in SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN prefigures Calhoun in many ways (though his handy bowling arm is his own) is unceremoniously throttled by a composite superman (Marshall Jones) before he can catch the velvet-shirted nightclub-stalking vampire (Michael Gothard).

The hard-drinking, rude-to-everybody, tea-obsessed Calhoun—who appeared before John Thaw’s Inspector Regan seemed to claim the archetype on THE SWEENEY (1975-1978)—ought to have had a series after DEATH LINE, and Hogan ties him in to several other major cases which exist in the twilight between horror myth and tabloid legend. He remembers Mark Lewis...might he also be the British copper swapped for a Frenchman by a European exchange initiative which brings Inspector Brunel (Lino Ventura) to Scotland Yard in THE MEDUSA TOUCH? Or will he go the route of DS Johnson (Sean Connery) in THE OFFENCE (1972) or ex-copper Jim Naboth (Stacy Keach) in THE SQUEEZE (1977), brutalising suspects out of his own self-hatred or demonstrating his willpower through a commitment to alcoholism (what do you think it takes to drink two bottles of fucking Cypriot sherry?). Or will Calhoun just scribble in his notebook until the Man—not the Man, in the underground man sense, but the Man, who is the American version of the Establishment—decide he’s too much of a pest to stay in business?

Let us see...

—Kim Newman

¹Twice I have seen Sherman’s film on the big-ish screens, at the Gothique Film Society in Holborn Library and for a Miskatonic Institute lecture at the Horse Hospital, and audiences have found that their nearest tube home is the site from which James Manfred OBE (James Cossins) was snatched by the Man.

PART ONE

Mind the Doors

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Excerpted from the private journals of Inspector Calhoun

Sunday February 6th, 1972

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9.37am.

Day of the Sun, my arse. Didn’t the bloody Anglo-Saxons know it always rains on Sunday?

Woke up to the rain hammering on the roof. Thought I was back in Stalag Luft I with Blinker Butler and the boys for a minute. We were imprisoned out on the German coast and it always rained there too. The roof used to leak on my head, like Chinese bloody water torture. For a minute I half expected some Kraut to start yelling in my ear.

Then I heard the bells from St Pancras and realised where I was. Not in a POW compound but a dingy little bachelor drum just off the Euston Road. Freezing my cobblers off in a poky little single bed. At least the roof here doesn’t leak. Although that patch of black mould in the corner looks highly dubious.

Got up and made a pot of tea, then crawled back into bed and waited for the place to warm up. Thought about Marjorie. Wonder what she’s doing this morning. Probably bringing her new geezer a nice plate of fry in bed. My bed. Cooked in my kitchen. When I think about that greasy little merchant banker lying in my bed, eating my food, cooked by my wife...

She could cook a cracking bacon and eggs, my Marge. Always looked forward to my Sunday fry-up. With lots of hot buttered toast and a big pot of tea. Tried to make one myself last week and burned the pan so badly I had to toss it out. Ended up with bread and dripping and cold tea.

Still, I suppose it beats Stalag Luft I. We cooked a cat there once. Blinker coaxed it into the compound with a bit of spam, then throttled it and fried it up with some gravy. I can remember it lying there in the pan with its four legs sticking up in the air. Not bad. Tasted a bit like chicken. People always look at me funny when I tell that story, but a bloke will eat just about anything if he’s hungry enough.

Christ, my mouth is watering just thinking about it.

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11.52pm

I’ve caught a rotten stinking cold and it’s all Engelbert Humperdinck’s fault. Him and his ‘Young Generation’.

I was sitting there minding my own business eating beans on toast when he came on the box, prancing around like a horse’s hoof in his big frilly blouse. Well, it was enough to make a goldfish choke. When I think of what I pay for the license fee so that him and those kids can mince around like