Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker

Making a bold claim for sex and horror director Peter Walker as one of Britain's great unsung film-makers, Steve Chibnall's Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Peter Walker follows the basic pattern established by David Pirie's seminal A Heritage of Horror in using a combination of auteur and social-historical context – the "mirror for England" argument, as it were – to make its case.

In the main it works. One can find little to argue with in Chibnall's assertion that Walker deserves to be seen as an auteur: His films are technically competent, if declining to indulge in grandstanding displays of technique for its own sake that might have won him more (temporary) recognition in the manner of, say, Ken Russell. They evince a distinctive personality and worldview regardless of whether his writer was Murray Smith, David McGillivray or Alfred Shaughnessy (though to be sure it could also be argued that often the writer would work a sense of what would suit the director's sensibilities). Specifically, there is a recurrent interest in theatricality and artifice; a healthy scepticism towards received and expert wisdom, and a near-obsessive return to the theme of the past haunting the future, with Chibnall relating these to Walker's personal biography as the illigitimate son of a stage performer whose experience of Catholic orphanages turned him against organised religion.

Nothing too surprising, perhaps, but nevertheless a core of inner meaning that seems to have slipped under the radar of the film-critical establishments of the time. Certainly no-one granted The Flesh and Blood Show – a film that Chibnall identifies as a cult classic waiting to be rediscovered and whose self-reflexive strategies he compares favourably to those of later work by Dennis Potter – the Brechtian honorific. Nor was Cool it Carol seen as a spiritual cousin to critical favourite Godard's My Life to Live, Contempt and Two or Three Things I Know About Her despite it's not dissimilar explorations of the commodification of sexuality and the omnipresence of prostitution as a metaphor/metonym for contemporary life.

The problem, one feels, is that the conservative businessman Walker was on a different wavelength from the critical radicals deciding what was hot and not, with the messages of his films too ambiguous, neither obviously for nor against the young beneficiaries of the 1960s social revolutions nor the old reactionary establishment that they were clearly responding to. Thus, for instance, Frightmare and Schizo question the value of psychiatric treatment in a manner reminiscent of R D Laing's anti-psychiatry but also play upon knee-jerk fears, as with the tag line for the latter: "It's when the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is killing." (It's maybe also commentworthy that the usual tendencies for left and right to be ascribed negative and positive characteristics – surely the greatest coup the political right ever produced was simply to be called such – are reversed in Walker's formulation here.)

So far, so good. Less successful is Chibnall's attempt to situate Walker in relation to arguably the most spectacular – as in Cultural Studies' "spectacular youth cultures" – manifestation of Britain's 1970s decline, punk. Here we must note that, like Russ Meyer, Walker's attempts to make a film with the Sex Pistols came to naught, the clash of personalities and cultures apparently too great. Thus, one wonders whether Walker might be better understood as the British equivalent of Meyer rather than an exemplar of a proto-punk sensibility. After all Walker like the American started his career in sexploitation then moved into more violent and outre territory. Nevertheless he too maintained a certain cautiousness in terms of how far he was willing to go – it is noticeable, for instance, that none of Walkers films were ever banned as "video nasties", in contradistinction to James Kenelm Clarke's Expose. (Kenelm Clarke got into the exploitation game after making a TV documentary about Walker among others.) Likewise, while Meyer got out of the film-making business when it became clear audience wanted hardcore porn rather than his cartoonish softcore, Walker quit film-making after 1983's House of Long Shadows – a surprisingly old-style entry for someone who had made their name with films like Frightmare, starring as it did Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price.

This criticism aside, Making Mischief is an engaging and informative study of Walker's work and the changing social and industrial contexts in which it was produced. Especially commendable is the sense of dialogue between the writer and his subject, with each chapter being concluded by interview excerpts from Walker to confirm – and in some cases graciously refute – the claims made for his work and its enduring values.

If I didn't quite come away from the book with a fresh perspective on the two Walker films I've seen – House of Whipcord and Schizo – I have nevertheless become more enthused to check out not only the other horrors, but also some of the sexploitation entries as well. And that, ultimately, is the proof for me that Chibnall's study, like its subject, succeeds.