A couple of weeks ago I watched the 1977 Doctor Who story Image of the Fendahl. It’s not the best example of the series, not by a long shot, but it’s lingered in my mind. Because despite the things that don’t work – the wonky pacing, the stilted performances, the fact that the monster doesn’t really do anything – there’s so much there that does. It’s bubbling with great ideas. The atmosphere is wonderfully spooky, the monsters look great when they’re not moving, even if they have nothing to do, there are some sparkling lines of dialogue. There’s an anthropologists’ dog called Leakey. I keep thinking about how you might rejig the story to really work.
What really appeals about Image of the Fendahl is its use of palaeoanthropology. Many of the non-regulars are anthropologists, bringing novel scientific techniques to bear on extremely early human remains (or are they…) The idea of a human skull from too old a stratum that reveals a pentagram in the bone sutures when X-rayed is genuinely creepy, as is its concern with the deep time of human existence – all those long aeons before we organised ourselves into settled urban communities and started writing history. Anything could lurk in that vast span of years. What if there was something fundamentally off with humanity’s whole evolutionary process?
Thinking about these ideas led me to wondering about ‘anthropological horror’ as a subgenre, and whether it’s really a thing. Whether it could be. Google doesn’t turn up much. I should say now, I’m not the world’s biggest expert on horror fiction, and nor am I an anthropologist, except in the sense that any archaeologist has to dabble in the discipline to some extent. I do know Doctor Who, though, so that seems like a good place to begin looking for other examples of anthropological horror and to start to define what it is. Continue reading
Ancient Worlds 