Shadowlocked

Dead sexy: the occult superheroes/heroines that went head to head in the naughty 1970s...

...and souls were sold.

The level of national fascination with the occult (at least in the UK) in the 1970s is hard to understand if you weren't there. Tarot cards fell out of Christmas crackers; young children were turned onto drugs early by the latex fumes from werewolf masks; we were all building those Mattel Draculas and Frankensteins (more glue-sniffing opportunities) with The Carpenters on in the background; Hammer films seemed to run on a loop at weekends...

A lot of men my age will remember suddenly being banned by their folks (let's be honest, by their mums) from watching those not-too-frightening Hammer flicks because they started showing the more sex-obsessed output from Hammer in its mid-70s death throes: Lust For A Vampire, Countess Dracula, Twins Of Evil - among many others. When Yutte Stensgard reincarnated naked, we were consigned to watching future Hammer showings in keyhole-vision.

Little sanctity from horror in after-school kids' TV either, as anyone will attest who remembers the often laxative effects of supernatural afternoon opuses such as Raven, Sky or Tarot. Even the opening credits for the children's' topical digest Magpie seemed to have been conceived 'sky-clad'.

But TV was too public a forum for a guilty pleasure. Horror was instead made for comics: a trashy, cheap medium for a disreputable genre.

Excellent.

In the panels of comic strips – as onscreen - there was a strand of fatalism and morality in horror output which precluded the possibility of 'running' characters (despite TV’s The Night Stalker - a US TV series so preposterous that few would have guessed its format would one day become the X-Files phenomenon, or that it would get a second bite at the cherry in 2005). Best you could get was Christopher Lee making more comebacks than Sinatra after Hammer decided that it was impossible to completely kill a character that might have another sequel in it.

The UK had set a high bar on horror's native form - the anthology - with Charles Crichton’s Dead of Night in 1948. EC comics raised that bar considerably with Tales From The Crypt (endlessly reprinted in the 70s and later to become the best of the Amicus cycle of film horror anthologies), Weird Science and Shock SuspenStories (sic), getting themselves banned in 1950s America for corrupting US youth with shocking and lurid tales of murder, mutilation, damnation and devilry. All that was behind us. For a while...

Suddenly, two things that were very popular in 1970s culture - sexploitation and horror - began to coincide in comics. The first I noticed of it was Marvel's 'Satana' character, a second outing for a female supernatural character who had previewed briefly (in a 4-pager) in issue #2 of Vampire Tales in 1973, written by Roy Thomas and drawn by John Romita. Vampire Tales was published by Curtis Magazines, an imprint of Marvel Comics, who were at that time testing the waters - often with great promise - for potential 'official' Marvel occult heroes and heroines.

Satana, whose goody-two-shoes alter-ego was then named Judith Camber, was finally given an impressive Marvel outing in Marvel Preview #7 in 1976. In this story, Camber reluctantly has to come to terms with the fact that she is the devil's daughter, a heritage she had been oblivious to her entire life into adulthood. The tale is appropriately Faustian and the attire predictably skimpy. In her more demonic guise, she wears a thong-like outfit no doubt suitable for the sultry climate in hell. With the devil on her side, Satana was hard to defeat.

Except for the very character whose tremendous success Satana had been summoned by Marvel from hades to challenge...

Marvel were banking on the sexy seventies to get in on the Vampirella cult-action over at Warren comics, but a character so erotic and dark ultimately threatened the domestic friendliness of the brand. This stuff just didn't look like it belonged on the lowest shelf in the newsagents with the other spandex crime-fighters. By the time that Marvel had committed to a full treatment of Satana, Vampi had already been an established comic-cult for six years, out of a publishing house that was the spiritual descendant of EC comics, and aiming with commitment at the adult and adolescent market.

"Marvel had neither the right profile nor the commitment to pursue material quite that sexy or dark"

Even Satana's original outfit was remarkably similar to Warren's cult anti-heroine, a scantily-clad, blood-sucking sex-bomb from Drakulon, who had burst onto the comics scene in 1969 and quickly gained a loyal following. In this period Marvel had neither the right profile nor the commitment to pursue material quite that sexy or dark; in the ensuing decades Camber (her name and back-story changed a number of times) and her worse half were to flit sporadically in and out of the marvel universe, suffering more reboots than an arse-kicking content, ultimately evolving to a more traditional superheroine look via a little 80s-style S&M...

...and at one point teaming up with Ghost Rider in The Supernaturals...

...which can only make me wish that they would put her in the Ghost Rider sequel. She'd be a lot more fun than Eva Mendes was in the 2007 outing and the set of inner conflicts she shares with Johnny Blaze would yield some of the sexiest sparks between two superheroes since the schizophrenic love-affair between the Caped Crusader and Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992). Since superhero sequels always turn into The Avengers one way or another, you know there's going to be some new female interest anyway, so surely this is the way to go...?

Let's face it, Ghost Rider is getting a sequel solely because The Dark Knight left Hollywood clamouring for dark heroes in 2008. Since I suspect that Catwoman and Black Cat are going to be busy with their own respective superhero franchises, who else can they pull out of the hat without inventing a new character. And what existing Marvel character could be more appropriate?

Failing that, in the quest to do some justice to the sexy and semi-evil superheroines of the seventies, someone could simply make a good Vampirella movie. Rather than the anemic 1996 straight-to-video effort that - after decades of endomorphic vampis adorning fan conventions - chose to cast waif-like Talisa Soto as the blood-sucking heroine and filmed the entire movie inside a shed (or so it seemed).

And to think that Caroline Munro turned down the role in the 1970s because of the nudity in the script Hammer was trying to interest her in...

What a waste - as it stands, pollute neither your Amazon/Netflix nor your bittorrent search history for the execrable $2 crapfest that is Vampirella (1996).

And while Batman Vs. Superman isn't entirely out of the frame for Hollywood's future after Christopher Nolan has tired of the franchise, I fear that the potential comics cross-over Vampirella Vs. Satana would never command the budget it deserves. But boy, would it have an audience.

---------------------------------------------------------
Copyright information about this feature
---------------------------------------------------------

If you'd like to write for Shadowlocked, do some disc reviews or interviews or attend preview screenings (in London, mind), This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Top 10 Mindf**k Movies	Top 10 images of distant horror in the movies	Top 20 lunatic cameos in movies	The movies that save our lives

FOLLOW SHADOWLOCKED ON TWITTER

FOLLOW SHADOWLOCKED ON FACEBOOK