Oliver Crocker interviews the film collector who has collaborated with Film is Fabulous! to retrieve a long-lost BBC classic from the shadows.

For the first time in decades, horror fans will have the chance to devour No Such Thing As A Vampire, the groundbreaking opening edition of the BBC’s controversial, and mostly missing, 1968 series Late Night Horror. The film was not exhumed from a crypt, but a small storage area of The Regent, a 1930s art deco cinema and theatre buried in the heart of Christchurch, Dorset.

Believed to have been destroyed over half a century ago, the vintage film has risen from the dead thanks to Darren Payne, a cinema projectionist and engineer who enjoyed a 30-year career prior to launching Dirt in the Gate Movies, a group showcasing 35mm at The Regent for over a decade. “Film is in my DNA…” explains Darren. “My earliest memory is lacing up Bride of Frankenstein on my dad’s Eumig P8 projector when I was five years old. Watching that movie in a darkened room on a six-foot screen planted a seed early on, which led to my interest in film collecting and ultimately a career in cinema.”

“The recovery of No Such Thing As A Vampire was purely by chance. One of the board members at The Regent found a very small collection of reels; we’re not too sure of the background of these films, but they have certainly been there for several years and were on the verge of being thrown away. I was asked to check one of the rather nondescript silver cans, which had the words Late Night Horror handwritten on the label. I’m a passionate horror aficionado and the title rang a distant bell with me…”

What happened next took Darren’s breath away. “I took the film home, where my projection equipment is the best available on the market. I’m fastidious with making sure it is clean, as I didn’t want to risk damaging this film in any way. I could see it was a black and white film recording print and when I screened it, lo and behold it turned out to be the long-lost first episode of the Late Night Horror series. I had to pinch myself; it was an astonishing and quite emotional moment. I wouldn’t underestimate that experience of being the first to watch a production for the first time in nearly 60 years.”

The BBC’s six-part Late Night Horror series was a passion project for producer Harry Moore, a former story editor who had overseen the creation of the corporation’s prestigious Thirty-Minute Theatre series, followed by their celebrated 1967 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adaptations, before sinking his teeth into a genre he felt had been neglected on British television. “I read recently that in America, horror series are being made especially for housewives to watch while they are doing their ironing in the afternoon…” Moore explained to the Lincolnshire Echo’s Diane Roberts in April 1968. “Personally, I think horror is more effective late at night.”

The “appetisingly entitled” series had first been previewed in The Stage and Television Today in October 1967, when Michael Billington interviewed Moore, who stated “I think horror is more frightening on television… If you hear a horror story on the radio, you make your own pictures, but I think you tend to censor them in terms of your own experience. You cut out what you don’t like. With television, I think, you become much more involved.” And by harnessing the 25-minute format, Moore felt it would be easier to “screw up the audience’s tension…”