Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day One — “Minuke”

Happy Silver Shamrock Day, Blog-o-weeners!

That’s right, it is finally that special day of the month of October — the twenty-third. What makes this date so special? Why, it’s the date when Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch opens. It’s on the twenty-third of October that we find poor old Harry Grimbridge running for his life from a couple of three-piece suit-wearing creeps who seem intent on finding the shop owner and getting back the Halloween mask in his possession.

And it’s on the twenty-third of October that I thought we would begin a condensed, tightly focused mini-Blog-o-ween of sorts. So welcome to what I am calling...The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale!

Now, if you recall from my post on 1 October, I was having a teensy, wee bit o’ trouble finding my raison d'être for this year’s frightening festivities. No matter how much I tried to brainstorm a theme for Blog-o-ween 2025, I just couldn’t muster anything more than a dreary drizzle. It seemed that Blog-o-ween was destined to be...

...which would make me Judd Hirsch, I think. Or Henry Gibson at the very least.

Anywho.

It was after my blog post on 1 October — whereby I promised to be back in time for Silver Shamrock Day — that I remembered la raison de la saison: Nigel Kneale.

Though his name does not appear in the credits of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, British writer Nigel Kneale wrote the first draft of the picture. Kneale may not be a household name these days, but to folks like John Carpenter and Joe Dante, Nigel Kneale was the cream of the crop when it came to writing that special heady blend of horror and science fiction that only British writers seem capable of delivering (see also: John Wyndham and John Brunner).

It was Joe Dante (originally assigned H3:SOTW’s directorial duties) who enlisted Kneale to write the picture’s screenplay. This was due mainly to his and Carpenter’s admiration for Kneale’s landmark work in televised terror: the Quatermass series for BBC (more on that later!) Dante said that Kneale’s draft was not “horror for horror's sake,” and that the “main story had to do with deception, psychological shocks rather than physical ones.” Unfortunately, the 1980s were not a time in motion picture history when the psychological took precedence over the physical. For filmmakers and filmgoers, the 1980s were all about pushing the envelope when it came to blood and gore on the screen.

I mean...we had a magazine called GOREZONE, for the love of Mike!

Nigel Kneale later claimed that it was Dino De Laurentiis, head of production company Dino De Laurentiis Corporation (natch!), who demanded changes be made to the script. Said changes included more graphic violence and gore. Not wanting to be associated with such work, Kneale asked to have his name removed from the screenplay altogether. So it was left to Tommy Lee Wallace (H3:SOTW’s new director) to rewrite Kneale’s efforts. Even though it is Wallace’s name in the credits, he has always credited Kneale’s original story and first draft in interviews.

Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England, in 1922. In 1928, his family returned to the Isle of Man, and it was there that Kneale was raised. In the 1940s, unable to enlist in the army due to photophobia (a sensitivity to light), Kneale moved to London and worked for BBC Radio. He acted in radio plays and wrote stories for magazines such as Argosy and The Strand. In 1949, he published a collection of his tales. In 1950, that book won the Somerset Maugham Award.

For the first day of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, I’ve chosen a story from Tomato Cain and Other Stories. It is a short story steeped in the fears and anxieties of home ownership. Let’s take a trip to post-war Britain and hear the story of a house that is on the market for a song. It has a strange past and an even stranger name. Let’s take a open-house tour through...“Minuke"...

“The estate agent kept an uncomfortable silence until we reached his car. ‘Frankly, I wish you hadn’t got wind of that,’ he said. ‘Don’t know how you did: I thought I had the whole thing carefully disposed of...’”

It is after the Second World War in England, and an estate agent is driving the unnamed narrator to see a house. At first glance, the narrator seems to be someone who is in the market for a home, but as the estate agent’s story of the house unfolds, the reader quickly gets the sense that the narrator is simply a curiosity-seeker. No one could possibly want the home that the estate agent is describing. What’s wrong with the house? Well, for starters, the name is off-putting.

“It was taken by a man named Pritchard. Cinema projectionist, I think he was. Wife, a boy of ten or so, and a rather younger daughter. Oh — and dog, one of those black, lop-eared animals. They christened the place ‘Minuke’, M-I-N-U-K-E. My nook. Yes, that’s what I said too. And not even the miserable excuse of its being phonetically correct.”

The house was built in a hurry along a coast-road overlooking the sea during the interwar period, and that’s when the estate agent says he sold the house to the Pritchards. Everything started out fine until little things began to go wrong. First, the plumbing seemed to go haywire. Then, the plaster on the walls in the bedroom crack from floor to ceiling. Next, Mrs. Pritchard is injured when a hatch door between the kitchen and dining room comes down on her wrists. The funny thing about that, said Mr. Pritchard to the estate agent, is when he tried to lift it off of his wife’s arms

“...it wouldn’t come! I got my finger under it and heaved, but it might have weighed two hundredweight. Once it gave an inch or so, and then pressed harder. That was it — it was pressing down!”

And that’s just the start of the Pritchards’ troubles with Minuke.

What is the cause behind these problems? What does one of the men who helped build the house have to say about the enormous flat stones that were found on the site and used as the foundation of Minuke? And what of the old Norse — or older! — burial mound?

Tomato Cain and Other Stories had long been out of print before Comma Press released a new edition in 2023. It comes with a new forward by Mark Gatiss. Your local library might have a copy.

You can also find “Minuke” in many horror anthologies. The Internet Archive has a copy of Ghosts: A Haunting Treasury of Forty Chilling Tales edited by Marvin Kaye that includes Kneale’s excellent haunted house story.

If you need to know what happened to the Pritchards and Minuke right this very instant, well you are in luck there, too. Here is a reading of the story from Tony Walker’s excellent Classic Ghost Stories Podcast:

That’s all for today, Blog-o-weeners. Come back tomorrow and we will continue this year’s celebration of all things Nigel Kneale. Be sure to wear something nice and comb your hair, because it's Picture Day here at LARPing Real Life. We will have to sit still...quite, quite, quite still for..."The Photograph."

In the meantime, take care of yourselves and each other, and please don’t forget to live by these words from a great American patriot...