Spectre ghost symbol movie#

SPECTRE get a mention in the earlier Spy Who Loved Me and in the 1964 You Only Live Twice, but by this point Blofeld operates instead with another villainous super-group, the Black Dragon Society, based in Japan, and has assumed the alias Dr Guntram Shatterhand.

Following the foiling of his dastardly plot in the Thunderball novel-Spoiler Alert-Blofeld regroups his secret organisation in the 1963 novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond encounters SPECTRE and/ or its leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld in six subsequent films prior to the Daniel Craig era of the reimagined 007. The Spang brothers’ ghost town mobster hideout in Diamonds are Forever was named Spectreville, and the deciphering machine Bond acquires in From Russia with Love was called the Spektor.ģ) Cinema audiences and the screen Bond first hear about SPECTRE in 1962 in Dr No, the first film adaptation of Fleming’s novels. Fleming was evidently fond of the word ‘spectre’ and it appears at several points in the Bond novels published during the 1950s. As Fleming originally conceived it, SPECTRE would be ‘an immensely powerful, privately-owned organisation manned by ex-members of SMERSH, the Gestapo, the Mafia and the Black Tong of Peking’.Ģ) Fleming invented SPECTRE in 1959 during the drawn-out, though ultimately abortive and controversial process whereby he, producer Kevin McClory, and screenwriter Jack Whittingham first attempted to adapt James Bond for the screen. In an earlier formulation of his thinking about an organisation of super-criminals SPECTRE stands for the ‘Special Executive for Terrorism, Revolution, and Espionage’. Fleming first introduced SPECTRE in his 1961 novel Thunderball.

Spectre ghost symbol movie#

To coincide with the UK release today of the 24th movie in the James Bond über-franchise, Dr Matthew Woodcock of UEA's School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing has collated some useful intelligence, drawn from the original Ian Fleming books, about the secret organisation SPECTRE.ġ) SPECTRE is an acronym for the ‘Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion’. School of Education and Lifelong Learning School of Politics, Philosophy and Communication Studies

School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities