Gnosis in the Estuary
Sometimes, autumn/winter early morning, as the sun rose, we would watch from our bedroom window, high on the hill, the mist bank roll over the estuary past Sheppey towards the mainland shore, flowing onto the beach and into the lanes and streets, slowly up the slope towards the house. Sheppey in the distance. A faery mist land, a far land, sometimes shining. A strange moonstone flecked emerald set in a starlit sea. Is the estuary the sea? I don’t know.
The fog through Whitstable would summon atmospheres of horror, childhood Hammer forest with carriage winding through, along the barren road under overarching trees hung shifting with that manmade film mist from smoke machines placed among the undergrowth, hidden from the camera but revealed through the sparse coverage, occasional harsh puffs as the machines coughed out their invented atmosphere. The Saltmarshes out towards Seasalter, the wide land populated with impending pylons. The copse of trees high on the hill. Captain Kronos and Grost driving on and through up towards the standing stones. The ghost of Peter Cushing. All the Devils are here. Dew and vapour. A ring. A locus. Atmosphere.
This atmosphere is in Professor Quatermass’ veins, roiling out and away into the Oort Cloud, beyond, 5 million years to earth. Quatermass 2 and particularly Quatermass and the Pit have that ingrained sense of vastness, of threats cosmic and throughout all time, Lovecraftian, implied through investigation and conversation until, at the very last, a revelation of unknowable dread. Terror beyond imagining. As pulpy as it is disturbing. Race memory of hopping giant insects, culling their population in insane chaos. Nigel Kneale and the BBC (with the first Quatermass) taking advantage of the amount of TVs bought for Elizabeths coronation and the eerie broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment in the summer of 1953 a transmission entirely from the unknown, a mutating space monster ascending Westminster Abbey on those crackling screens from the ether.
The Gnostics held the belief that there is a hidden god, outside our reality, absent, unknowable, and a malignant subordinate entity, filled with spite, the creator of the material cosmos, an anti-god equivalent of the divine being of the old testament.
In the late 80’s, Martin Quatermass, apparently the brother of Professor Bernard, wrote a movie directed by John Carpenter. Prince of Darkness seems drawn from Martin’s brother’s experiences, a forgotten story perhaps, a collision of science and the supernatural and strange theology overarching human evolution (again), something buried now revealed, more race memory, apocalyptic implications, quantum physics, the anti-god rising.
A few years earlier, Nigel Kneale, Professor Quatermass’ biographer, arrived in Hollywood (somewhere around 1982) to bring back to life the gill-man, the old one from the black lagoon, with the lycanthrope John Landis. When that experiment failed, Kneale (did he recommend the Professor’s brother for later collaboration? No evidence exists but . . .) wrote Halloween 3 for John Carpenter, that story of kids masks embedded with silicon chips chiseled from Stonehenge to enable death and Samhain ritual paganism, activated by television broadcast crackling through the ether.
The transmission from the future that the protagonists of Prince of Darkness experience as a dream glitches as if a damaged VHS from the early 80s. “We are using your brain’s electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine.” The disturbing cloaked figure emerging from the church doorway arises as if mist from the interference, an impossible portent of a devastated future. Quantum physics entangled with dark magick.
In Whitstable, in 1936, there was a small electrical and radio shop. It was run by William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, the traitor executed in 1946 for aiding the Nazis with his propagandising radio broadcasts. “Germany calling . . .” panicking the population with intimations of future horror. The mist rises and flows from the past and future.
Sometime around the mid- late 90’s, John Carpenter attempted a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
It didn’t happen.
