Plasmid (1980, various artists)

 
Plasmid began life as an intended movie, meant to have been produced and directed by sexploitation filmmaker Stanley Long, who was fresh off the success of his 'Adventures of a...' movie series. Both Plasmid and Brainstorm were announced to the press in January 1979 as upcoming Long projects. Neither materialised in movie form, but while nothing was heard of Brainstorm "a hypnotism thriller" again, Long managed to salvage something from the aborted Plasmid movie by having the screenplay turned into a horror paperback, published by Star Books in 1980.

Plasmid is set in the seaside town of Oakhaven 'the sunniest spot on the south coast' that as well as a holiday destination is also home to the Fairfield Institute of Genetic Research. It is there where experiments on convicted criminals go awry when one of the guinea pigs, called Barker, goes on a rampage at the Institute then escapes into the sewers. Transformed into an albino like creature with red eyes and pale skin, Barker sets about abducting other residents of Oakhaven, dragging them into the sewers and passing on his condition, thus creating an army of albino mutants. Hip, local radio sensation Paula Scott attempts to lift the lid on the story, only to come up against a cover up that reaches high up in the government.

The official line about the book is that its a novel by Robert Knight 'based on a screenplay by Jo Gannon', although the book's cover would give the false impression that Gannon rather than Knight was the author. Over the years however, a more complex picture of this book's authorship has emerged. In the early 1990s, David McGillivray, best known for writing movies for Pete Walker and Norman J Warren, revealed that he had a hand in writing the Plasmid screenplay, and cited it as the one screenplay of his that he wished had been filmed. McGillivray also told me that the Plasmid book sticks pretty close to his screenplay, indicating that Robert Knight's contributions to the novel were fairly minimal. I remember mentioning this to a close associate of Long, who flat out refused to believe that Long and McGillivray had ever worked together, due to the fact that Long apparently did not hold McGillivray in high regard. When word got back to Long that McGillivray's claims to have been involved in Plasmid was public knowledge, well... the shit done hit the fan. Within 48 hours, Plasmid had been removed from McGillivray's writing credits on Wikipedia, while Long's own Wiki page changed 'Long was due to film a David McGillivray script entitled Plasmid' to 'Long was due to film a Jo Gannon script entitled Plasmid'. Long's autobiography also erased McGillivray from the history of Plasmid, and attributes the screenplay entirely to Gannon, who had been the editor of Long's 'Adventures of...' movies. A second draft of the Plasmid script, credited to Gannon, still exists in the archives of The University of Liverpool. This is due to the fact that Long's first choice for turning the screenplay into a book was none other than Ramsey Campbell, who was sent a copy of the script but ultimately turned down the assignment, and the script ended up with the University of Liverpool as part of its Ramsey Campbell archive. Personally, I'm inclined to believe that the screenplay originated with Gannon but at some point McGillivray was brought on board. I tend to buy into the McGillivray version of events, on account of there being no glory to be had in claiming to have written Plasmid, we're not exactly talking Easy Rider here, the film was never even made and the book was never a big hit. Plasmid is also such an obscure project that surely only someone who had a hand in it would even know about it.
The problem with trying to decipher where Jo Gannon ends and David McGillivray begins when it comes to the writing here, is that while I'm reasonably au fait with McGillivray's work, I'm allot less so with Gannon, whose writing career has mainly been played out on American Television. Still, Gannon has clearly led a full and interesting life, which has included running light shows for Pink Floyd, working as a BBC editor, his time with Stanley Long and a ten year stint as an ambulance crew chief. Gannon also directed the 1970 documentary 'Getting It Straight in Notting Hill Gate' a look at the counterculture scene in the pre-gentrified, pre-Richard Curtis Notting Hill area.

The more you read Plasmid, the more you feel like it's material that would have been better suited to Pete Walker than Stanley Long. Admittedly it's sci-fi elements would have been a little outside of Walker's usual remit, Walker's horror films exclusively dealing with mentally disturbed individuals rather than monsters or the supernatural. However in all other respects Plasmid does feel very Walker-esque in it's cynical, distrust of authority figures as well as it's gender roles. Paula Scott being a plucky young lady who isn't afraid to get in the faces of older, establishment figures. While her boyfriend is your typical Walker ineffectual wet lettuce male character who "was too weak, too retiring to provide her with the kind of emotional feedback which she needed from a man". The fact that there are comparisons between Plasmid and the Walker horror films, does of course add weight to the belief that the Plasmid script did at one point come under to what Time Out magazine once referred to as "the withered pen of David McGillivray".

Long was no fan of the horror genre, but was aware of its commercial appeal. His distribution company, Alpha Films, having released many horror movie hits like Alligator, Rabid, The Brood, Dawn of the Dead and Basket Case. In book form, Plasmid comes across as Long's attempt to muscle in on the Cronenberg movies that Long had been releasing, especially Rabid, and cut out the middle man by making a Cronenberg type movie of his own.
The short horror films that Long made during this period...Do You Believe In Fairies, Dreamhouse and That's The Way To Do It...(later compiled into the anthology movie 'Screamtime'), suggest Long might have had a decent horror movie in him, despite his lack of affection for the genre. What I've always found notable about the 'Screamtime' shorts is how divorced they are from the sex comedies Long been making during most of the previous decade. Not only are they an asexual bunch of short films, but any humour there is of the unintentional variety, demonstrating that Long was able to shed his sex comedy skin with relative ease. Judging by the book, Plasmid wouldn't have been quite as divorced from the sex and comedy elements as those. The book pokes fun at the music biz at the time with a cameo appearance from a Sid Vicious type punk singer called Big Willy, whose latest single 'Pull It' has gotten banned by the BBC. While the radio station that the heroine works for fills the airways with the likes of Phone Me by Hot Box, Backseat Love, and tracks from the album 'You Make Me Feel So Jung' by Dr. Freud & The Analysts. Someone involved in the writing of the screenplay turned book, for they are many, also appears to have had a thing for corporal punishment. The elderly commissionaire who works at the radio station gets all flustered after being offered sexual favours by Big Willy's female fans in return for access to their hero, leading him to think that 'someone ought to introduce a bill to make spanking compulsory'. While even heroine Paula harbours flagellation fantasies about her male boss, telling a colleague "I think he's going to play headmaster to my naughty pupil" who then replies "tell him he can cane you, if you can spank him afterwards".

If McGillivray's account is correct, the film was two weeks away from being shot before the plug was pulled, so I assume Long had a cast in place, and it would be fascinating to know just who he had in mind for these characters. There's a comic relief 'stout lady cleaner' who works at the Institute and is desperate to get a look at the bloody results of the creature's rampage "come on, dear, let's have a peep" who cried out to have been played by Rita Webb. While a luckless, aging prostitute, who decides to knock off for the night 'and go to bed with a hot-water bottle instead of her usual sweaty, panting male' only to fall victim to the mutant albino has Liz Fraser written all over her. We can, of course though, only speculate. After all the Screamtime shorts avoided any kind of British sex comedy related casting, so it's possible that with Plasmid too, Long might have gone with people who didn't draw attention to Long's background in sexploitation.

It's not a bad book, but does betray it's movie script origins at times, with lots of basic descriptions of characters and their actions. Presumably a failing of Knight to flesh out the screenplay into book form. The 'Liz Fraser' character for instance, isn't even described or given a name, and we learn nothing about her other than she is a prostitute and owns a hot water bottle. All of which would have been fine for a movie script, where we'd see this person depicted on film and they'd only be around for a brief, shock scene, but in book form just comes across as a writer not pulling his weight. It's only way into the book that it bothers to pull that trick, so beloved by authors like James Herbert and Guy N Smith of providing elaborate backstories for newly introduced characters in the hope of duping the reader into thinking they need to be emotionally investing in these new faces...only to then have them fall victim to a horrible fate. Knight is said to have been a pen name of Christopher Evans, an author and scientific consultant to the TV programme The Tomorrow People, who died of cancer in October 1979. Meaning that this would have pretty much been a deathbed assignment, so his lack of enthusiasm for writing it is therefore understandable. Since Plasmid was originally written as a movie that needed to be passed by the British censor, it's also a little restrained in the sex and violence departments. Especially compared to what the likes of Herbert, Smith and Shaun Hutson were getting up to at roughly the same time, whose work was never shackled by such considerations. Gore wise, Plasmid blows its load early on, with detailed descriptions of Barker's rampage at the Institute "both his eyes had been gouged out, and the flesh had been shredded from his cheeks. The hypodermic jutted from the jugular vein in his neck, and his right leg was missing". Thereafter though its a relatively bloodless affair, with Barker's next victim succumbing to a heart attack, and others being dragged into the sewers. Only towards the end does it deliver any potentially censor troubling moments, such a car accident resulting in a metal pole going 'straight through the woman's mouth and out of the back of her head...removing forever her need for dental treatment'. Given the tone of the book, and Long's distaste for graphic violence in movies, I tend to think the Plasmid movie would have gone stronger on jump scares and offscreen kills than over the top blood and guts action. Something that would have put it at odds with the Fangoria mentality of the horror genre of the time, or indeed the horror films that were earning Long the big money as a distributor. In his autobiography, Long insinuates that the popular 2004 British horror film 'Creep' ripped off plot elements from Plasmid. I'd also throw in the 1984 American horror movie C.H.U.D as another film with a Plasmid type plot that offers an idea of what the book would have looked like onscreen. However, given that Plasmid was never published in America, and was long forgotten and over twenty years old by the time of Creep, I'd wager that the makers of both movies have probably never crossed paths with the book.

Had the movie been made, I tend to think it's reputation would have been similar to that of Screamtime. Never likely to be held up as an all time classic of the horror genre, but a source of some amusement and nostalgia to the VHS era generation. Strangely one of the reasons Long cited for abandoning the movie was the impracticality of filming in the London sewers, yet barely any of the novel actually takes place down in the sewers, and the few scenes that do are hardly crucial to the plot and could have been easily filmed around.

While it never made the grade as a movie though, Plasmid must walk away with the prize for the most British line you'll ever read in a 1980s pulp horror novel "Old Max served a generous bacon sandwich and brewed a good strong cup of tea, but the bugger was too mean to install a decent bog". To whoever wrote that line, I salute you.