EXORCISING GHOSTS
Hounds Of Love’s healthy obsession with the supernatural.
IN OCTOBER 1956 THE AMERICAN ACTOR DANA Andrews met the young Queen Elizabeth II at a Royal Command Performance in London. She asked him about the movie he was making. “Well, it’s about witchcraft in England,” he replied. Her Majesty wrinkled her nose. “Good heavens! Don’t bring that back again!” The movie was Night Of The Demon, in which Andrews plays Dr John Holden, a sceptical psychologist who investigates Aleister Crowley-esque cult leader Professor Karswell. Based on Casting The Runes by M.R. James, the Edwardian maestro of the supernatural story, it was a tonal bridge between the chillers that director Jacques Tourneur had made for RKO’s Val Lewton in the 1940s and the lurid new wave of Hammer Horror. Tourneur and screenwriter Charles Bennett wanted to respect James’s taste for ancient forces that insinuate themselves into sleepy old England, unseen and unexplained, but the brash American producer Hal Chester was adamant: “You cannot cheat the audience. They expect to see a demon, so give them one.” A rather shonky fire demon duly appears.
Though a flop at the time, the film has since become a cult favourite and, thanks to a single line of dialogue, a lively footnote in the Kate Bush story. At one point Holden reluctantly attends a séance where the medium channels the spirit of the fire demon’s first victim, jerking his head back and crying, “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” The voice we hear sampled on the song Hounds Of Love belongs to a dead man. In the song, Bush takes from the movie the themes of fear and pursuit. Love itself is “coming for me through the trees”, although, as
Bush said, “perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly” and fear itself is the enemy.
Bush has always been drawn to the supernatural, from personifying a ghost in Wuthering Heights all the way through to the various eerie encounters on 50 Words For Snow. Get Out Of My House, a kind of inverse Wuthering Heights in which the house itself is possessed, was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but more often Bush tapped into the creeping strangeness of the English uncanny. Growing up, she seems to have had similar tastes to the actor/ writer Mark Gatiss: the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham, the country-house horror of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, the pastoral mysticism of Powell and Pressburger, and Nigel Kneale’s hybrids of sci-fi and folklore. Even Get Out Of My House is anglicised – more James than Kubrick; more fear than violence. “It’s just the idea of someone being in this place and there’s something else there,” Bush said. “You don’t know what it is.” So, too, with Hounds Of Love.
On the album’s flipside, The Ninth Wave teems with ghosts (Watching You Without Me), nightmares (Under The Ice) and echoes of the 1968 Vincent Price freakout The Witchfinder General (Waking The Witch). There’s a touch of European gothic, too, in Hello Earth’s choral debt to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre. On this record reality is constantly being bent and blurred.
Bush revisited Night Of The Demon in her derided and disowned 1993 film The Line, The Cross And The Curve. While an obvious homage to Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, it also takes from Tourneur’s movie the idea of a curse transmitted by runes on paper and a rather camp pair of fire demons. Unfortunately this was the Hal Chester version of Kate Bush, making too much explicit. It pales next to the unseen menace of Hounds Of Love because Bush is much more at home with ghosts, shadows, dreams and the ungraspable mysteries of life. As Dana Andrews says at the end of Night Of The Demon, “Maybe it’s better not to know.”
“ON THIS RECORD REALITY IS CONSTANTLY BEING BENT AND BLURRED.”