Judith Paris | Through the Shattered Lens

The TARDIS materializes in a quarry and, for once, it’s an actual Earth quarry and not just an alien plant that looks like a quarry. An explosion both knocks Sarah Jane Smith out and also exposes a fossilized hand that has been hidden away under the rocks for centuries. The hand belongs to an executed alien was criminal named Kastrian Eldrad (Stephen Thorne, playing yet another Doctor Who baddie). When the hand is found, it starts to search for sources of radiation so that it can fully regenerate back into its original form and then seek revenge on its home planet.

The Hand of Fear would have been a standard Doctor Who adventure, except that it ended with Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) announcing that she can no longer handle the death, violence, and occasional mind control that goes along with being the Doctor’s companion. She asks the Doctor (Tom Baker) to return her to South Croydon. The Doctor reluctantly agrees. While Sarah is packing her things, The Doctor suddenly gets a telepathic message telling him to come to his home planet of Gallifrey and he realizes that, even if Sarah wasn’t leaving, he would not be able to take her with him. When The Doctor tells Sarah this, it upsets Sarah. Even though she impulsively decided to go home, it’s obvious that it’s not really what she wants. When The Doctor drops her off on Earth, she tells him not to forget her and we know that he never will. As the Doctor dematerializes, Sarah looks around and sees that she’s on Earth and probably in England but nowhere close to South Croydon.Plenty of companions had come and gone before this episode but none of them had quite the impact of Sarah Janes Smith. Sarah was one of the few companions to actually be viewed as being an equal of the Doctor. Even though she spent a lot of time doing typical companion things like being menaced by aliens and asking the Doctor to explain things, Sarah Jane still always projected a determination and inner strength that made her more than worthy to be traveling through time and space. Even dressing like Andy Pandy during her final appearance couldn’t diminish Sarah Janes Smith as a character.

Elisabeth Sladen had the perfect rapport with both Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. Sladen and Baker were apparently close enough that they improvised their final goodbye and the emotions in that scene feel very real. For viewers like me, who were introduced to Doctor Who by PBS airing the Fourth Doctor’s adventures, Sarah Jane was the first companion that we met and her suddenly leaving came as a shock. She just seemed as if she was meant to be a part of the TARDIS crew forever.

Sarah Jane Smith would return, of course. There was K-9 and Company in 1981. There were the Sarah Jane Adventures, which ran from 2007 to 2011. Sadly, the wonderful Elisabeth Sladen passed away in 2011. For many of us, it felt like losing a valued a childhood friend.

With Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General having found some notoriety for it’s graphic depictions of the witchfinding and inquisition of suspected witches and sorcerers in ravaged England during it’s English Civil War during the 17th-century the world of film, especially the grindhouse and exploitation cinema of the day, founded a new subgenre of horror (folk horror) and also one in the niche world of exploitation. Nunsploitation would be ushered in during the late 60’s and right through the 1970’s of grindhouse cinema with films like Reeves and another which many thought was influenced heavily by the Vincent Price-starred production.

Ken Russell’s The Devils has had a recent rethinking as a film that was less exploitation and more of an arthouse film of the early 70’s which many called one of the more influential films of it’s era. No matter what recent thought on the film might have labeled Russell’s film I always thought it was one of the finer examples of nunsploitation cinema which has of late become more in tune with fetishic pornography than straight-out exploitation horror.

The film starred Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave and was set in 17th-century France during the reign of King Louis XIII and the rise of his Catholic advisor in Cardinal Richelieu. Just like Reeves’ film, The Devils was based on the true historical account of the French priest Urbain Grandier of Loudon who was accused of witchcraft and subsequently executed because of these accusations.

Russell, who has mentioned that he got nothing from Reeves’ film as inspiration and actually hated the Witchfinder General, would take the graphic scenes of torture and sadism of Reeves’ film and ramp it up to the next level. He wouldn’t just include even more graphic scenes of sadistic violence in his own film, but add scenes of sex and perversion (even for the type of film it was The Devils pushed the boundaries of decency of the era) which would see Russell’s film banned from many areas in the UK. The film even split the critics of the day with some calling the film awful and debased while some would nominate the film and it’s director for prestigious film circle and festival awards.

The Devils would be heavily censored in its native UK and even in the US upon it’s release. As time went by the film began to garner new accolades as more open-minded critics began to look at Russell’s film under a new light. While more and more critics of todaycontinue to heap artistic and creative accolades upon this film that it’s begun to shed it’s exploitation roots I still believe that at it’s heart The Devils was and is still nunsploitation at it’s best.