Return, Remembrance and Redemption: Hauntology and the Topography of Trauma in The Virtues and This Is England ’88

This article takes a hauntological approach to explore Shane Meadows's preoccupation with (post)traumatic return, focusing on the TV series The Virtues (Channel 4, 2019) and This Is England ’88 (Channel 4, 2011), which are correlatives in their sophisticated explication of hauntological trauma. Using Jacques Derrida's theoretical neologism ‘hauntology’, the haunting cycles which are signatures in Meadows's work are understood as spectres of an unresolved past and symptoms of repressed knowledge. As explored by Meadows, the psychological breakdowns of key characters Joseph and Lol are articulated as a ghostly resurfacing of unprocessed trauma from the past. By highlighting Meadows's use of return, remembrance and redemption as a triadic narrative pattern, the article will show how Meadows depicts the transformative efficacy of traumatic return through using the haunting as a potentially restorative device.

‘Of course it is idealised’: Lindsay Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas

This article examines Lindsay Anderson's 1957 documentary, Every Day Except Christmas, as a distinct product of British post-war culture that also contributed significantly to the development of Anderson's own film aesthetic. It also sets Every Day Except Christmas against the background of Anderson's influential documentary made a year earlier, O Dreamland. The article combines formal and contextual analysis of Christmas with a review of contemporary assessments of the film as well as Anderson's own comments on it.

The Vampire Lovers and Hammer's Post-1970 Production Strategy

This article firstly examines the artistic and commercial merits of The Vampire Lovers, which was adapted from the Sheridan Le Fanu novella Carmilla. The production of the film was subcontracted by James Carreras at Hammer to Fantale Films, a company established by Harry Fine, Michael Style and Tudor Gates. The article then proceeds by examining various different and competing artistic judgements that have been made about the film, and also the construction of its unusual dreamy atmosphere. It documents both its UK and US box-office performances and goes on to examine Hammer's post-1970 production strategy in more general terms and in relation to the overall financial performance of the company in the period 1967–72, just before and after The Vampire Lovers. Finally, it examines Hammer's receipt of the Queen's Award for Industry in 1968, the effect of its rolling production-line (or ‘pipeline’) model of film-making on the company's general level of profitability, and some of the consequences of Michael Carreras's assumption of managerial control at Hammer after 1970.