Some months ago, STML attended a special screening of Asia Argento’s JT Leroy adaptation The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things at the ICA (fully reviewed here). In the Q&A after the movie, having mentioned her strong friendship with the Terminator, which apparently including much hugging and holding hands and was therefore clearly bollocks, Ms Argento was asked to explain why she had cast old whitey himself, Mr Marilyn Manson, in the role of the pot-bellied white trash who anally rapes, under questionably consensual circumstances, the young Jeremiah. “Because that’s who he really is” she replied.

Fans of Lewis Carroll will therefore be delighted to hear that Manson is currently at the Berlin Film Festival, drumming up finance for a self-directed and self-starring take on the much-loved British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer, known to his friends as Charles Dodgson. “Phantasmagoria – The Visions Of Lewis Carroll” is described as “arthouse horror” and the self-proclaimed Antichrist intends to release it in installments on his website before a full feature release. In interviews for the website, Manson has promised that the first installment will explore the origin of Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Through the Looking-Glass, played by two twin girls who “get to have real, genuine sex with each other.” Lovely. More promisingly, Manson makes mysterious reference to a visual style and a camera process unused before in cinema, and states that “It’s kind of a return to Hitchcock-style psychological horror about letting your mind do the damage and sometimes what you don’t see is scarier.”

Such excitements will undoubtedly serve to reawaken the old, and largely discredited, accusations of pedophilia which have surrounded Dodgson since his death. These are largely based on his well-documented friendship with and fondness for photographing young girls, most notably Alice Liddell (widely believed to be the model for the Alice in his books) – over 50% of his surviving archive consists of photographs of young girls, many of them nude. That Dodgson is considered by connoisseurs to be one of the Victorian era’s finest and most important photographers, that his activities were considered far less unusual by the society of the time and the girls’ parents were always present, and that he did in fact carry on a number of relationships with women of his own age but that these details were suppressed after his death by his well-meaning family, was all detailed in Karoline Leach’s 1999 demolition of the ‘Carroll Myth’, In The Shadow of The Dreamchild. Yet the myths persist, and we can but hope that association with the man once known as Brian Warner will only increase Dodgson’s readership rather than serving as a tawdry excuse to rehash old falsehoods.

It should be noted, however, that he was a massive stoner.