Dennis Wheatley

Right.

like a, I don't know, what can I call it, a cross between Dan Brown, Dennis Wheatley and the Lovejoy books.

Something like that.

And it was quite good and I got it to a point.

and just to

break in before we get to wicker man one of the other interesting ties of his hammer films is i believe these were two hammer filled films one is the devil rides out yes the other one it's also done by dennis wheatley who was that's the basis when ian fleming wrote james bond he said he was basing it on a dennis wheatley oh my god yeah so if you read my book children of the beast you'll see the part about dennis wheatley where he gets a copy of magic and theory practice signed to him from alistair crowley

that is so hilarious

you see this uh interspersing connections between wheatley fleming christopher lee and so this double rides out like some of these characters that are the first characterless shift that's in um casino royale is based on crowley so like you just see these guys are growing up in the same thing i wouldn't be surprised if christopher lee had a crowley story or just knew people around him but these guys all kind of they knew of each other like i mean crowley was a known figure crowley when they had uh when the whole story of the guy who flew to England, the third command of the Nazis, like Crowley sent a letter to Fleming's boss and offered his services.

They

were like the lead buddies, yeah.

yeah and it is it is fascinating to look into the personal history and and kind of the background of these individuals in the in the production because not only was dennis wheatley i mean christopher lee absolutely confesses the fact that essentially he was deeply involved as far as had a deep knowledge of the occult and he was introduced to the subject and he says this as much by his friend and author dennis wheatley which became uh apparently this this occult uh uh consideration and knowledge became an obsession after he read the works of alistair crowley being introduced by dennis wheatley which is so incredible knowing that i think it was actually uh Anthony Schaeffer was the screenwriter that he had collaborated with in this effort to, I believe it was Anthony Schaeffer who agreed to work with specifically Christopher Lee, trying to adapt a horror film based on old ancient pagan principles, what they called the old religion.

And he made a statement in regards to the – there's an amazing independent article where he makes a statement at the end of the article, and he addresses exactly what I believe the motivation and inspiration for this – really the plot in itself because it's not necessarily a direct adaptation of the novel ritual by David Penner.

Now my initial idea here for an October spooky episode was perhaps to do a spooky or an occult novel written by somebody who was better known, let's say, for lost world novels.

or my first idea was i was going to work with dennis wheatley because we're going to be covering all four of his lost race novels over the course of the show and of course a man who is better known uh for occult novels and i was going to go with the the the devil rides out so actually that's backwards from my initial idea but i thought it would have been fun however i do not want to do injustice to that novel and i didn't quite have the time this month to do the deep dive required to get into The Devil Rides Out.

It's such a dense novel and the sources from which Dennis Wheatley is pulling his information are so interesting and his own...

What influenced him when he was writing about the occult and then the influence that he and his book had on the occult ever since are absolutely gigantic and...

And I don't want to do that unless I have a proper amount of time to dig into it properly.

I happen to enjoy that stuff and I find it fun to imagine a world, an alternative 1970s where all that stuff is still going and people still believe in it and people are still debating it.

I find that absolutely fascinating, but it might have seemed a bit dated by the 70s.

one of the great novels of the occult is what it says on the front of the book on its kind of question mark imitation exorcist kind of cover and I think that that's actually not what this book is it's not this book doesn't fit into the occult revival because it's not in line with other novels of that time other films and books of that time that were bringing the occult back which really what was more popular was a kind of almost like a Dennis Wheatley type type version of the occult with with evil sorcerers and black magic and demons and possession and his kind of weird pseudo-scientifical version of things feels just like a slightly different tone than everything else that was going on but certainly makes it perhaps more interesting to me than a lot of those other books as well As for it being a horror novel, the older I get, the more difficult I find it to tell the difference between a horror novel or a horror movie that's actually good because it's doing its job and it's horrible and scary and unsettling or if it's just something that's kind of tasteless.