What’s in a name? There’s more to the title of the next James Bond film than meets the eye, according to a film historian at the University of Leicester.

Writing in The Conversation, Professor of Film Studies James Chapman, of the Department of History of Art and Film, said the name of the 24^th in the film series reveals more than it lets on.

Professor Chapman said Spectre – or rather SPECTRE – has an important place in the history of the James Bond books and films. It first appeared in Bond author Ian Fleming’s ninth book, Thunderball (1961), as an international criminal organisation attempting to blackmail the NATO powers by hijacking nuclear bombs and threatening to blow up a major city unless a ransom was paid.

Professor Chapman said: “SPECTRE, as every Bond fan knows, stands for “Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion”. Fleming used this new villain to shift Bond away from the Cold War background and Soviet villains of the books of the 1950s.

“When the Bond film series began in 1962, the producers adopted the SPECTRE formula, rewriting non-SPECTRE stories such as Dr No and From Russia With Love. Again this was seen as a means of detaching the films from a specifically Cold War context. SPECTRE and its leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld were the villains in every Bond movie bar one from Dr No in 1962 to Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, the one exception being Goldfinger (1964).”

Following a legal dispute which included the use of SPECTRE, the title and organisation disappeared from Bond movies – until now.

“Eon Productions has now reacquired the legal rights to SPECTRE, and so the announcement of the name suggests that the next Bond will see the return of 007’s arch nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. We’ll have to wait and see,” says Professor Chapman.

He added: “But if Blofeld is to return, I doubt very much that it will be in the same guise as in the classic Bond movies. I don’t expect to see a bald man in a Chairman Mao tunic stroking a white cat and hijacking space rockets from his hidden base inside a hollowed-out volcano. That sort of villain was so brilliantly spoofed by Dr Evil (and his cat Mr Bigglesworth) in the Austin Powers films that it would be near impossible to play it straight now.

“In any event the recent Bond movies have seen a shift away from the megalomaniac criminal masterminds of the past to a more plausible form of villainy rooted in contemporary geopolitics. The three Daniel Craig Bond films so far have given us a banker to the world’s terrorists (Le Chiffre in Casino Royale), a multi-national corporation involved in destabilising governments for profit (Quantum of Solace) and a cyber-terrorist with a personal vendetta against the British Secret Service (Skyfall). None of these villains had a pool of piranhas or a giant henchman with steel teeth (and I, for one, have felt the lack!)”

You can read the full article in The Conversation: http://theconversation.com/new-bond-film-promises-to-raise-the-spectre-of-ian-fleming-35069

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