Requiem for Aimee

As my transient association with the film industry began to draw to a close, prior to leaving that world behind to concentrate on other commitments, Aimee Stephenson emerged whom I shall always remember with affection and fondness. She read The Highgate Vampire and wanted to make a film dramatisation of the book. Initially inviting me to participate in a film documentary about the dangers of the occult, our working together revealed a bond and shared vision from an artistic perspective. We formed a production company for the purpose of making the definitive film, and became co-directors of Highgate Vampire Productions before setting about casting, choosing locations, deciding the practical elements of what could be filmed, and producing a pre-production treatment.

It was unbearably hot on that spring day when I made the occult documentary with Aimee  ― always cool, collected and beautiful ― but there was snow on the ground when we went into pre-production for the Highgate Vampire cinematic film treatment. I was the only character cast who was actually playing himself. I was happy to do this at the pre-production stage, but it was not our intention to continue with me playing myself. Aimee felt that mine might be a challenging rôle for an actor. Even so, the French had managed it with their television film version of my book where actors were used. They employed a quintessentially English actor to play me, plus much dramatic licence for Sur les Traces du Vampire, which was first transmitted in France on 11 March 1994 by Sygma. I narrated this adaptation, briefly appearing on screen from time to time as myself. The barely audible English narrative issuing from me was obviously over-dubbed into the French language.

Following the first week’s intensive filming, Aimee organised a lavish dinner party at her London home in my honour. It was a wonderful surprise, and one that I shall not forget. When I later entered the priesthood (she is situated on the left above) she took some exceptional photographs at the ordination ceremony. She could always find a dramatic angle from where to catch the moment on film. This was probably because Aimee had started out as a model and actress before turning to directing and producing films. The more I worked with her, the more I would discover her kindness — she was beautiful on the inside as well as the outside. The 1980 Roxy Music album Flesh and Blood has her of the sleeve. She is the nearest of the two girls on the album cover (below).

She spent considerable time in America to benefit from the techniques used by the Roger Corman Studios and to prepare her for work on our project. My work was done, having written the book and advised on the screenplay. It was now for Aimee to do her work. Sadly, this would be cut short by circumstances that ended all hope of the definitive screen adaptation being made under her direction; circumstances that would leave the project seemingly frozen in time.

Aimee travelled to Peru for yet another project. She was seated on a bus when a box of smuggled fireworks exploded under the seat directly in front of her. She suffered third-degree burns to her arms, legs, face and trunk, requiring urgent hospital medication, but was forced to wait more than a day for specialist treatment because paramedics claimed they could only take Peruvians with private medical insurance to hospital. A local doctor drove the couple one hundred miles on a desert track the following morning. Aimee was flown back to England a week later due to her deteriorating condition, but died following a skin graft in a specialist burns unit at Salisbury District Hospital. At the inquest, it was recalled by another person how flames were seen “leaping up” under a seat. It was thought that the first explosion might have ignited more fireworks and gunpowder hidden in the luggage hold. David Masters, the Wiltshire coroner, recorded a verdict of unlawful killing. He said: “Aimee did not die as a result of an accident. If this had happened in Britain there would have been a prosecution for manslaughter. It was a most dangerous and illegal act to transport these sort of manufactured fireworks in this way.” She was forty-five ― yet appeared considerably younger. We were all deeply shocked by her death, and our memories of Aimee now belong to a world removed from the one in which we find ourselves. Indeed, they dwell in another century when hope still had a place to dream.

One of the last places we visited during the preparation for the filming of my book was the eerie scene of the exorcism of the primary source in the Highgate Vampire case. The original neo-gothic mansion had been demolished in the wake of the disturbing incidents that led to it being dubbed a house of evil, and in its place twelve flats were built for active elderly people. Yet a ruin façade from that earlier haunted dwelling still stands as some terrible reminder of the final chapter to those events in the early 1970s. I remember Aimee feeling a chill as we stood atop the steps and peered through the wrought iron portal once filled by an oak door. We all felt cold as soon as we passed over its threshold ― even though the sun shone brightly that day ...