Skeletons in the Closet

NIGHT OF THE EAGLE (1962)
GHOST STORIES (2017)

"Don't see this picture unless you can withstand the emotional shock of a lifetime!;" fresh from THE INNOCENTS, Peter Wyngarde experiences the NIGHT OF THE EAGLE (or in America, BURN, WITCH, BURN!).

THESE two films focus on academics who have to question their sceptic beliefs towards the paranormal. Adapted from Fritz Leiber's 1943 novel Conjure Wife, Sidney Hayer's NIGHT OF THE EAGLE has sociology Professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde) discovering that his perfect wife Tansy (big-band singer Janet Blair) is actually a Witch, and has been practising her craft since their honeymoon. Tansy has manipulated Taylor's rising career at Hempnell Medical College, and discovering this, the Professor destroys all of her inventory of magical paraphernalia. Thereafter Taylor suffers a number of sinister situations, one of which is an accusation of "violating" one of his students. It transpires that his path is now being orchestrated by the hostile intent of another faculty wife, Flora Carr (Margaret Johnston), driven by both educational and sexual jealousy.

Fittingly shot in moody monochrome by Reginald Wyer, the movie is underplayed in the tradition of Val Lewton, and possesses a tangible chill. NIGHT OF THE EAGLE is comparable to NIGHT OF THE DEMON in its more adult approach to the uncanny, and Hayers cut large portions of occult and voodoo material from the original script - by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and George Baxt - to concentrate on the plight of the Taylors. The Eagle itself - a stone embodiment that rests at the entrance of the school - comes to life with risible results, but it can't take away the fact that Hayer's film is a beautifully played classic of British horror; Wyngarde and Blair convince at every level of their descent, but Johnston steals the show with her permanently off-kilter performance.

"Everything is exactly as it seems;" for GHOST STORIES, horror fans Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman liberally draw from the genre - especially Hideo Nataka's DARK WATER - and even had the set blessed by a Rabbi.

Based on their own Olivier Award-nominated stage show, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman's GHOST STORIES arrived on a wave of glowing reviews and hype that no film could fully justify. This three-part anthology mashes together Amicus and the BBC GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS strand for old school scares and J-Horror that builds to a hokey finale that undermines its own building premise. Professor Goodman (Nyman) is given a trio of unsolved mysteries by his assumed-deceased idol Charles Cameron: Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse) is a night watchman of a disused female correctional facility, haunted by the spirit of a young girl; jittery teenager Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther) encounters a Satyr in the woods; and country-based stockbroker Mike Preddle (Martin Freeman) is plagued by a poltergeist while awaiting his IVF-induced child.

The performances embrace its emotional tropes of family resentment, belief systems and childhood traumas. Simon's story is the most effective - underpinned by some wonderful black humour (Sooty and Sweep anyone?) - but these powerfully-played themes grate somewhat with its peripheral ghosts and jump scares, and the atmospherically barren landscapes of concrete halls, a daytime pub and an out-of-season caravan park. It's worth a second watch to pick up the easter eggs, but they are not so much Ghost stories as Ghost settings. In conclusion, it contains too odd a mix even for a horror movie, and reeks heavily of Nyman's misdirection and overblown showmanship evident in his association with Derren Brown.

Margaret Johnston in NIGHT OF THE EAGLE. Australia-born to English parentage, the stage and screen actress - also memorable in Amicus' THE PSYCHOPATH - latterly managed an agency with American director husband Albert Parker, whose clients included James Mason, Helen Mirren and Frank Finlay.

The most grounded argument from supernatural skeptics is not so much if ghosts exist, but why the human psyche actually needs them; ultimately it is a longing for comfort, away from the harsh and bleak reality of death. More specifically, the biggest difference in NIGHT OF THE EAGLE and GHOST STORIES handling of their respective Professor's is that Taylor's professional life is manipulated by the constant indignation of females, whether in the name of love - Tandy is even willing to die for him as he has much more to offer the world - or bitterness. Conversely, everything in Goodman's journey is devoid of women; partnerless and childless, he exists in a closed, work-dominated world. Though when Flora Carr sets fire to a pyramid of Tarot cards - the otherworldly equivalent of the character's beloved Bridge evenings - and spits "burn, Witch, burn," Goodman has certainly opted for a less suffocating existence. 

Sadist and Surgeon

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)
CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960)
KONGA (1961)

Together with PEEPING TOM, HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM and CIRCUS OF HORRORS complete Anglo Amalgamated's Sadian Trilogy. Here are the celebrated dispatches of Dorinda Stevens from the former, and Vanda Hudson from the latter.

WITH a background at Gainsborough, Arthur Crabtree turned to titillating gore with HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM, where cigar-smoking true crime writer Edmond Bancroft (Michael Gough) has a private shrine of torture devices. Bancroft provides gravitas to his work by instigating a number of ghastly murders, most of which are carried out by his young protégé Rick (Graham Curnow) after the injection of a drug that turns Rick green. Bancroft moulds the youngster in his own image, telling him that females are "...all a vicious, unreliable breed" in the hope of putting him off Angela (Shirley Anne Field), giving fatherly advice ("Someday you will go deep into the black soul of man, deeper than anyone else has gone, and you will remember it was I who sent you on that journey") and subsequently securing the Black Museum as their dirty little secret. Under the garish hues of 1950's Eastmancolor, the set pieces are too flat to be effective: Bancroft's doctor Ballan (Gerald Anderson) is disposed of in a flesh-removing vat, Gail (Dorinda Stevens) has her eyes punctured by concealed binocular skewers, and the writer's mistress Joan (June Cunningham) succumbs to a DIY guillotine.

In Sidney Hayers' CIRCUS OF HORRORS, disgraced plastic surgeon Dr Rossiter (cold as ice Anton Diffring) flees England and turns a makeshift French circus - run by drunk Vanet (Donald Pleasence) - into an international success. The performers are all criminals whose faces Rossiter has re-built, and if they get out of line "accidental" deaths are arranged. After a decade the surgeon risks bringing his famed troupe back to Blighty, but as the walls come down on his shenanigans, Rossiter survives a gorilla attack before being run over. Similar to the sadistic murders of BLACK MUSEUM, CIRCUS OF HORRORS illustrates a style of gaudy schlock that would come to the fore in British horrors of the 1970's (the most celebrated being Magda (Vanda Hudson)'s ECesque demise during a sabotaged knife-throwing act). Lambasted by the Catholic Legion of Decency for its "excessive brutality [and] suggestive costumes," Hayers' makes the most of a bevy of large-breasted beauties such as Yvonnes Monlaur and Romain; as the Catholic Legion suggests, its narrative is purely an excuse to murder females who wear revealing circus attire, and all the better for it.

Claire Gordon in the clutches of KONGA. Shot in the fictitious but grand sounding SpectraMation, the giant gorilla is a B-movie charmer.

Allegedly filmed as I WAS A TEENAGE GORILLA, John Lemont's KONGA is a preposterous man-in-a-monkey-suit horror, and a riot of abysmal miniatures and opticals. Gough basically reprises his overwrought performance as Bancroft from BLACK MUSEUM, complete with a hypnotised partner-in-crime; here he is crazed botanist Charles Decker ("in science, a human being is only a cypher"), who wills an enlarged ape to acts of violence. Presumed dead after crashing in the African jungle, Decker returns to London a year later with a rare form of plant life, plus a pet chimp named Konga. When extracts from the vegetation causes rapid growth the chimp grows to Gorilla size and the doctor uses him to murderous effect: the school Dean, a competitor and the boyfriend of the bustiest of his teenage students, Sandra (Claire Gordon), are all dispatched. Although Decker's assistant Margaret (Margo Johns) has kept his activities quiet in lieu of marriage, when she too discovers of her intended demise, she gives Konga an excessive dose of the super-serum. This results in Decker finding himself in the clutches of a now-gargantuan simian by Big Ben.

Hollywood low-rent mogel Herman Cohen co-produced and co-wrote both BLACK MUSEUM and KONGA. Famed for his queasy shock tactics and playing up to his target teen audience, there are seldom truly likable characters in any Cohen production; instead, inhabitants are usually borderline unhinged and sex-obsessed. Consequently Gough is the archetypal Cohen actor, more than at home with arrogant, lecherous over-achievers while barking out his sudden outlandish demands. With KONGA Gough is in tantrum heaven, at one point gunning down his cat after it drinks some of the formula ("We're not ready to have a cat the size of a leopard running through the streets!").

Satan's Playthings

AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970)
ASSAULT (1971)

AND SOON THE DARKNESS sees English nurse Pamela Franklin contend with a serial killer and the language barrier in rural France. The film was needlessly remade in 2010, where American girls go on a bike trip in a remote part of Argentina.

THESE thrillers both exploit rural settings as key plot devices, and play like a rebuttal to the sexual freedom of the Love Generation. Directed by Robert Fuest from a script by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, AND SOON THE DARKNESS tells the story of Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), two young student nurses from England on a cycling holiday through rural France. Jane intends to keep to a schedule, but Cathy wants to enjoy the surroundings at a slower pace, especially the local males. This conflict of interests leads to an argument where Jane leaves Cathy to lounge at an off-road spot. However, when Jane returns she can find no trace of her friend and, asking around, learns that a few years ago another blond woman was sexually assaulted and killed in the area. Joined by scooter-riding Paul (Sandor Eles), who claims to be a detective for the Sûreté, the evidence leaves Jane unsure as to whether he might be the killer.

The movie is set completely in broad daylight and unfolds almost real-time over a single afternoon. The bare openness of the fields and countryside brood with sinister effect, as the provincial landscape is a foreboding character in itself. The French language notably is not subtitled so the viewer feels the same alienation as Jane ("Meutre? That's French for "murder" isn't it?"), who is faced with a catalogue of unnerving locals all strangely lukewarm about the need to find Cathy; even the English schoolmistress Jane encounters is matter-of-fact ("loathsome business, sex.") AND SOON THE DARKNESS may be too slow-burning for some - especially as it shows restraint at a time when nudity and gore were beginning to characterise most output - but this British film prefigures the Backwoods Brutality cycle that would be defined by the classic slices of Americana THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE HILLS HAVE EYES.

An uninspired tale of killer-baiting, ASSAULT is also known under a dizzying amount of alternative titles, including THE CREEPERS, IN THE DEVIL'S GARDEN, TOWER OF TERROR and even SATAN'S PLAYTHINGS. This is a 1980 re-release ad mat for a Miami theatre.

Based on Kendal Young’s novel The Ravine, Sidney Hayer's ASSAULT begins in Devil’s End wood, where Heatherdene Arts School student Tessa Hurst (Lesley-Anne Down) is raped. When a second girl is attacked and murdered in the same location, detective Velyan (Frank Finlay) is struggling for clues, as Hurst is psychologically traumatised and unable to speak. Velyan seeks the help of Dr Greg Lomax (James Laurenson) in profiling the offender, and eyewitness art mistress Julie West (Suzy Kendall) offers herself as bait by using tabloid journalist Denny (Freddie Jones) to run a story announcing she is about to complete a photo fit painting of the killer. The investigation takes on a different angle when Lomax decides to use Pentothal on Tessa to bring her out of her comatose state, but when he arrives at the hospital dispensary to collect the drug, it transpires that a fellow doctor has taken the supply.

Although any number of Italian gialli were set in Britain and/or were UK co-productions, ASSAULT is unique in that it a completely British giallo, illustrating plot devices made famous by the genre. Sadly, unlike the Italian entries, the cinematography here is staid and unimaginative, and the execution linear and logical. The production uses that infamous British trait of casting twenty year old vixens as fifteen year schoolgirls, and dressing them in mini-skirts short enough to get any real schoolgirl expelled. The most lurid scene involves the headmistress's lecherous husband Leslie (Tony Beckley) and a student librarian on a ladder; the "student" is played by Janet Lynn, a British sex star of the period who had featured the year before in Pete Walker's COOL IT, CAROL. Finlay and Laurenson make turgid investigators, and it rests with honey-blond Kendall - who starred in Dario Argento's notable giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE - to bring some interest to the screen.