Look what the postman just handed me.

A gift, and much appreciated. Peter Cushing by the brilliant Matt Soffe.

It’s based on a publicity still from Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman. Always one of my favourite Hammer films – I taped it on VHS from a Channel 4 late-night showing, probably sometime around 1990. I think I was around 12 or 13 years old. It was a Friday night, I remember that quite clearly because I got up really early on the Saturday morning to watch it. It’s a really great film, written by Nigel Kneale (based on his earlier BBC drama The Creature, also staring Cushing), and features one of Cushing’s finest performances. I wish I had kept a count of how many times I have watched the films that obsess me.

Matt and I have been discussing the possibility of working on a comic together – a joyously monstrous horror book. A love letter, of sorts, to Hammer and Universal monster movies. If schedules allow we might start working on it towards the end of this year/start of next.

I just watched Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb for the first time in maybe ten years. A great film, one of my favourites from Hammer, even if it does expect us to believe that a suburban semi has a basement large enough for full scale replicas of Egyptian tombs and an incinerator capable of disposing of a human body with plenty of legroom to spare. But what the hell, that’s not really the most far-fetched thing in the film. I’d only ever seen it on murky VHS, taped from a late night Channel 4 broadcast from around 1990, so it was nice to see it on a decent DVD transfer.

Through the extras I was reminded that Peter Cushing had originally been cast as Fuchs, but had to pull out after only one day of filming due to his wife becoming gravely ill. Andrew Keir replaced him.

So I thought I’d fire up google and see if I could find any further info. Autocomplete’s top result turned out to be much more frightening than the film itself.

More people are bleeding from their anuses than are searching for information on this fine film. What hope for the world? Anyway, here’s a nice picture of Peter Cushing and Valerie Leon taken on the first day of filming, and a trailer.