David Huckvale: 6 books

Hammer Film’s is justly famous for Gothic horror but the company also excelled in the psychological thriller. Influenced by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Alfred Hitchcock, Hammer created its own approach to this genre in some of the company’s very best films. This book takes a chronological, film-by-film...

Edward Bulwer-Lytton—who coined the terms “the great unwashed” and “the pen is mightier than the sword”—is best remembered for persuading Dickens to change the ending of Great Expectations; but Lord Lytton was a prolific and influential novelist in his own right, inspiring Edgar Allan...

Occult traditions have inspired musical ingenuity for centuries. From the Pythagorean concept of a music of the spheres to the occult subculture of 20th-century pop and rock, music has often attempted to express mystical states of mind, cosmic harmony, the demonic and the divine—nowhere more so,...

Edgar Allan Poe exerted a profound influence on many aspects of 20th century culture, and continues to inspire composers, filmmakers, writers and artists. Popularly thought of as a “horror” writer, Poe was also a philosophical aesthete, a satirist, a hoaxer, a psychologist and a prophet of the...

“Magick” as defined by Aleister Crowley is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This book explores expressions of movie magick in classic occult films like Hammer’s adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out and modern occult revival movies....

British literature often refers to pagan and classical themes through richly detailed landscapes that suggest more than a mere backdrop of physical features. The myth-inspired writings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon Blackwood, Aleister Crowley, Lord Dunsany and even Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind...