The Holmes-Hellraiser Crossover

 I read this book some years ago, but forgot to post about it.

I also lost total track of it for a while, but it recently turned up in a travel bag I norally don't use, along with a two-year late library copy of the M. R. James' ghost stories. 

So it's been a while, but here goes. 

Clive Barker first concieved of the Hellraiser series with the publication of his novella The Hellbbound Heart, which introduced the Cenobites, a race of inter-dimensional torturers who could be summoned by working a cubical puzzle-box known as the Lament Configuration. The story and world of the Cenobites was expanded in the series of movies that started off good, but got increasingly terrible with each sequal. 

As the anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, (among other works since) had Holmes and Watson confront horrors spawned and inspired by the Lovecraft mythos, Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell brings the duo face to face with Barker's Cenobites. 

It all starts with an unknown man feverishly and obsessively working out the Lament Configuration. Just as the poor fellow figures it out, and the Cenobites show up, we discover that the man is none other than Sherlock Holmes himself!

Then we flash back to when the actual story begins, when Holmes and Watson are summoned to investigate a series of baffling disapearences around London. In each case, a person vanishes from a locked room with no discernable means of entry. Our heroes are soon forced to confront a cult whose goal is to summon the Cenobites into our world. Holmes does, indeed become immersed, not only in the cult machinations, but in the netherworld of Barker's hellish creations as well. 

I won't give away the ultimate outcome, but it's a a decent homage to both Barker and Holmes as Doyle created him. 

The Spiritualism Hoax

 

It is long been the subject of speculation how Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the famously rational detective Sherlock Holmes, (whose famous quote "no ghosts need apply" has become a ground rule for deductive reasoning) not only believed in ghosts, spooks, and all manner of paranormal stuff, but was a passionate advocate for the spiritualism craze, even going so far as to write a famous article prophesizing that fairies were soon to be scientifically varified. 

The well-known Cottingly Fairie Hoax is infamous for having completely taken in the famous author. In case you haven't heard of it, two or three little girls presented pictures of themselves in the nearby woods, surrounded by dancing fairies. In one, a winged sprite looks about to land on a girl's face. Experts were unable to decupher how they were faked, so many people concluded they must be real. They weren't of course. They were merely cut-outs from a Victorian children's book of fairies. Conan Doyle, sadly, became a laughing stock over this. All the girls eventually confessed to the hoax, but one, at least maintained that one picture showing a small gnome-like figures was in fact real. The gnome, though, looks just as much a cut out as the fairies do. No surprise there.

There was another incident in which the famous author was infamously fooled by young children that I was mostly unaware of. This was the incident which is beleived to have kicked off the entire spiritualist craze in the first place. Two young sisters (different ones) had a mother who was dreadfully afraid of spooks. They played a prank involving dropping a stone (or something) on the floor to scare her. What I only found out recently was what followed; the children, having discovered they could fool grownups, claimed that they could communicate with a spirit-being called "split-foot" (a traditional name for the devil, refering to his cloven hooves). They'd ask "Splitfoot" a question, and depending on the answer, the "spriit" would produce a knocking sound a requested number of times. Adults were amazed at the girls' uncanny abilities. These adults again included Arthur Conan Doyle, who completely fell for the ruse, apparently applying none of the Holmesian logic made famous by his own stories.

Others, however, did. A group of doctors claimed that such a sound could be produced by the human's knee joints. They asked the girls to contact the spirit while in such a postion where they could not produce the sound through the knees. "Slewfoot" made no reply this time, but many of the other adults continued to beleive. 

Eventually, however, soemtime during her late adulthood, one of the sisters confessed that that was indeed how they made the sounds. 

It's all the more strange when one considers that Doyle himself showed a test reel of the stop-motion dinosaurs for the 20s adaptation of his own Lost World novel to the Society of American Magicians, and managed to confound them.

Doyle was also known to have a fondness for practical jokes. In one famous photo he posed as Edward Challenger his character from The Lost World, with his friends impersonating Lord Roxton and the others. Doyle has even been implicated by some to have been involved in the infamous Piltdown Man hoax, though evidenece points to only Charles Dawson, the famous fossil fraud and his cronies. 

Why was Doyle, omf all people so taken in? Simple: we tend to believe what we want. 

Lost World Iguanodon

 This bronze iguanodon sculpture I purchased in Las Vegas this summer. It goes perfectly with John Lavas' special anniversary edition of Conan Doyle's Lost World!

Update to the Dark Continent Post

 

I just found a couple of videos that shed some light on the two Sherlock Holmes adventures by Jim Danforth. One shows some stop motion scenes of the snow-ape from "West of Kashmir" that actually got filmed. The other is a long panel discussions, but it shows shome shots of the "Dark Cotinennt" spinosaurus at the beginning and end, and also a few stills from an animated sequence. It also shows the articulated armature of a suaropod dinosaur, possibly a brachiosaurus, judging from the proportions. Apparently this dinosaur is intended to be included as well. It would have been an awesome film!

Look up, "Jim Danforth Collection" and "West of Kashmir" on youtube. My cut and paste isn't wroking right now. Try the link below if it works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg1HSk2wg_l

Dark Continent 2

Finally some information! 

Issue 5 of SPFX contains a wealth of information on rare stop motion films, including several prehistoric films that never got made. 

Among these are brand new info plus stills from the mysterious Sherlock Holmes in Africa movie "Dark Continent," featuring a surviving arsinotherium, about which I could find literally nothing about online. 

In an article by Jin Danforth, one of the pioneers of stop-motion animation, he discusses a number of his proposed film projects, including a film version of "Jongor of Lost Land." A series of pulp novels about the hero, Jongor, abandoned in a lost world in Australia, that was once an Atlantean colony. The movie was supposed to have included an arsinothere, which is slightly patterned on the living Indian rhinoceras, as you can see by the folds of skin: 

He then goes on to describe "West of Kashmir" a proposed script for a Sherlock Holmes film involving Holmes antagonist Col. Sebastian Moran, who discovered a giant snow-ape high in the Himalayas, and somehow disgraced himself. The story was about Holmes and Watson teaming up with a beautiful Anglo-Indian woman who was a former lover of Col. Moran, traveling to the the Himalayas and encountering the creatures while attempting to bring Moran to justice. 

"Dark Continent" was supposed to be a sequel to "West of Kashmir." It is a most intriguing tale. The story has Holmes and Watson traveling to Africa where they meet up with Ayesha, the ageless beauty from H. Rider Haggard's She. That's right, it was to be a cross over between the writings of Conan Doyle and Haggard! How does the Arsinotherium fit in? Well, in Haggard's original, there were no prehistoric fauna (if there were, I would have known about it). But there are in Danforth's version, and he doesn't just "cheat" by inserting them in. Just as Asheya herself is kept ageless by the Eternel Flame of Kor, so are certain survivors of the prehistoric ages kept alive. There are two others besides the aforementioned arsinothere. And here is where things really get really interesting. Years ago, in some documentary about dinosaur stop-motion--it seems like it was hosted by Donald F. Glut, but I might have been wrong--there was a briefly shown glimpse of an animated clip of a strange theropod dinosaur which resembled a cross between a spinosaurus and ceratosaurus. It had the fin-back of the former and the horned snout of the latter. This was back when spinosaurus was assumed to be a kind of generic theropod, like an allosaurus or megalosaurus, only with a fin. Where this clip originated, I had no idea, and never found out--until now. It was the spinosaurus already animated for its appearance in "Dark Continent." The one other prehistoric beast was a giant serpent (titanoboa?) which was to battle the spino:

Of course, it is such shame that these movies never saw the light of day, save in these stills, and that one clip of the spino, wherever it was I saw it. I leave you with one last (aforeseen) shot of the arsinothere, which may well be the same model for the Jongor film, given the rhino-like patterning.