Sad news today that Ingrid Pitt died. I saw her at the Festival of Fantastic Films a couple of years ago and, although she was clearly not in the best of health, she was still fascinating and funny. Reading the obituaries, she had a life that should itself be the subject of a film. I’ll have to invest in her autobiography.

I grew up loving the sort of cartoony, slightly over the top horror movies of which she was the queen. I was too young to see them in the cinema but for a while they were on the TV on a Friday night. Thanks to the family video recorder and my long lost ability to get up amazingly early on a Saturday, my weekend’s usually started with a film. Quite often this would be a Hammer film, or an Amicus film or some other lurid horror with a twist. I started to appreciate films that weren’t mainstream or cool and which went beyond the boy-meets-girl shlock that was all pervasive in the eighties. It’s a bit late in the evening for me to really go into my love of film (maybe another day) but the thought that a little bit of that glamorous world is no longer here is a sad thing to reflect on