Much Ado About Murder

THE HOUSE IN NIGHTMARE PARK (1973)
THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973)

"What a funny lot!" Frankie Howerd hold the key to 

THE HOUSE IN NIGHTMARE PARK.

SINISTER shenanigans are afoot in Peter Sykes' THE HOUSE IN NIGHTMARE PARK, an alleged horror comedy written by Clive Exton and Terry Nation. Described by George Melly as "as British as nailing a kipper to the underside of an unsympathetic seaside landlady's dining-room table," the film follows Edwardian thespian Foster Twelvetrees (Frankie Howerd) - "Greatest Master of the Spoken Word" - scraping a living by giving hammy performances to embarrassed audiences. Invited to give a reading - so he believes - at a spooky mansion owned by the Hendersons, the actor finds himself embroidered in a nefarious plot involving deadly snakes, hidden family secrets and a mad woman in the attic. For the turn of the 1970s, the sets here have a fittingly faded and tired look for the dilapidated gothic sub-genre, and direct references are plenty: THE CAT AND THE CANARY and PSYCHO are chiefly evoked, and the Henderson's heritage - like the protagonists of THE REPTILE and THE GHOUL - are Anglo-Indian.

Howerd looks uncomfortable in his starring role: with no asides to camera and his opportunity for innuendo cut to a minimum, the comedian seems subdued (apart from the classic line "Do I play the piano? Does Paganini play the trumpet?"). Aside from Howerd, the actors portraying the Henderson's are an arresting group: Ray Milland heads the clan as the blandly evil Strewart, Hugh Burden is abrasive retired major Reggie, Kenneth Griffith is homicidal vet Ernest and Elizabeth MacLennan is effective as unconventional heroine Verity. If the humour itself falls flat, the film works better as a straight horror, especially a veiled old crone in black with a meat clever and a truly bizarre dance sequence - akin to an episode of THE AVENGERS - where the family relive their time as "Henderson's Human Marionettes."

Vincent Price - in a tour-de-force performance - and
Robert Morley in Harbour's THEATRE OF BLOOD.

Douglas Hickox's THEATRE OF BLOOD tells of Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) who - with the aid of daughter Edwina (Diana Rigg) and a community of down-and-outs  - murders members of a self-absorbed 'Critics Circle' for failing to give him the recognition he feels he deserves. Apparently committing suicide, Lionheart returns to mastermind a series of Bard-inspired demises, including nods to Julius Caesar (stabbing), Cymbeline (beheading), The Merchant of Venice (an improvised pound of flesh) and in the most memorable scene Meredith Meridew (Robert Morley) is fed his own "children" in a pie (here, poodles) in a reference to Shakespeare's bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus. The most literate of all horrors, THEATRE OF BLOOD is also filled with sly visual Shakespearean motifs, down to the name of an outside broadcast unit ([Stratford-Upon-]Avon Television). Price was particularly enthused by the quality of cast around him - which included Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Dennnis Price, Diana Dors, Madeline Smith - and brings pathos to a role that gave him a an opportunity to exorcise his own critical demons.

Curse of Kah-to-Bey

THE MUMMY'S SHROUD (1967)

South African non-actress Maggie Kimberly escapes the clutches of Eddie Powell in Hammer's third Mummy picture. 

MEZZERA, Egypt, 1920: a British archaeological expedition financed by businessman Stanley Preston (John Phillips) - comprising of Sir Basil Walden (Andre Morrell), Preston's son Paul (a stilted David Buck), photographer Harry Newton (Tim Barrett) and psychic linguist Claire de Sangre (Maggie Kimberly) - discover the tomb of Kah-to-Bey, a child prince. Members of the find are soon being murdered by the Mummy of Prem (played by Hammer's regular stuntman and Christopher Lee double Eddie Powell), Kah-to-Bey's devoted servant, who can be revived by reading the words off the Prince's burial shroud.

Following Terence Fisher's magisterial THE MUMMY of 1959 and Michael Carreras' disposable 1964 THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, THE MUMMY'S SHROUD ("Beware the Beat of the Cloth-wrapped feet!") is a formulaic affair, and the last movie shot at Bray. Written and directed by John Gilling, and scripted by Anthony Hinds, the film starts with a painfully dull and micro-budgeted ancient Egyptian prologue - which includes Dickie Owen, the titular fiend from THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, as the living Prem - and viewers will also be disappointed by the lack of cleavage, especially as so much is on offer from Kimberly's promotional poses. Unusually for Hammer, the glamour girl role is a character with a narrative function (the somnambulist Claire has the ability to read the "words of death"), but unfortunately Kimberly - who had just appeared in Gilling's secret agent spoof WHERE THE BULLETS FLY - is the worst actress in the Classic Hammer canon.

Studio Canal's Blu-ray/DVD was released in October 2012, containing two standout documentaries: an informative making-of and a touching tribute by Madeline Smith for husband David Buck.

As Jonathan Rigby points out in English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, a telling sign of the relegated stature of Hammer's Mummy sequels is that stunt men were cast as the monster, following Christopher Lee's barnstorming performance in Fisher's original. The real monster of THE MUMMY'S SHROUD is Preston, expertly portrayed by Phillips as an arrogant coward: quick to enjoy the spoils, even quicker to escape when the curse starts to take hold. Elizabeth Sellars, as his wife Barbara, makes an excellent foil, and it is good to see Michael Ripper in a prolonged role as Preston's long-suffering valet, the myopic Longbarrow. Completing the cast are Catherine Lacey and Roger Delgado's scene-stealing turns as the mother-and-son team whose family have barred the entrance to Kah-to-Bey's tomb for centuries. In fact Lacey's role as fortune-teller Haiti, together with Barbara and Claire, form a trio of female characters with second sight, while the male protagonists are lambs to the slaughter. 

The Mummy itself has always been the slightest of movie monsters. Covered in bandages that barely conceal the decay beneath, and often reduced to stalk-and-slash with a mystical backdrop, the Mummy started life on film as a device for camera trickery; in both Melies' 1899 CLEOPATRA and Walter Booth's 1901 HAUNTED CURIOSITY SHOP, the creature was an object to illustrate the joys of celluloid illusion. Unlike the heralded literary origins of Dracula and Frankenstein, the springboard for the Mummy as a potential movie monster was enhanced by real life: the myths surrounding Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon's 1924 expedition to uncover the tomb of Tutankhamen. In Hammer's fourth and final excursion into this sub-genre - 1971's BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB - the studio side-stepped including the bandaged menace altogether. Yet unlike Universal's arthritic Mummy movies, at least Hammer's ancient terrors were brutal threats.

Twilight of the Dead

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974)

David Prowse is The Creature in Hammer’s last gasp for Gothic Horror.

WITH an absurdly low budget, Terence Fisher's asylum-set FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL - scripted by Anthony Hinds - is a grim epitaph for the Baron and Fisher himself, a Hammer Horror - unlike many of the period - which didn't rely on sex to try to elevate its fortunes. Hollywood had once stood in line to finance the studio's profitable output, yet the vogue for Gothique had passed; when Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is told that he’s mad, he laughs and in a line penned by the actor himself replies "oh possibly. I must admit I’ve never felt so elated in my life. Not since I first … but that was a long time ago."

As in TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, a franchise character is partnered with a younger equivalent - here surgeon Simon Helder (Shane Briant) - and the film benefits from remaining focused on the making of the monster, rather than cutting away to various asides (even the Baron's servant (Madeline Smith) is mute and inconsequential). Cushing - looking alarmingly gaunt and frail - is ill-served by a blonde curly wig and top hat, which only accentuates his thin frame and bony structure. Despite this, the actor remains as obsessive and athletic as always; a standout scene features Cushing's trademark leap, jumping onto - then off - a table, and wrapping a chloroformed coat around the Monster's head. Underneath the awkward, hulking and hairy creature suit, David Prowse gives perhaps his only performance in movies. None too pleased about his new skin, the abomination's dilemma is best conveyed when he caresses the violin possessed in his previous life, only to moments later smash it when realising the futility of the situation.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD made Hammer
seem outdated by comparison.

The decline of Hammer can be linked to its failure to understand the cultural shift that the end of 60s cinema represented. British filmmakers such as Michael Reeves and Pete Walker - together with American directors George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven - moved horror into a new phase of intense violence that made Hammer's output positively quaint. Even by the mid-60s trouble was looming, with rising production costs and increasing competition, but Hammer seemed uninterested in nurturing new talent as their output became increasingly formulaic and threadbare both intellectually and in physical production (a good example being the unconvincing exteriors of the miniature asylum here).

Romero's nihilistic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD did for the horror genre what Hammer achieved in 1957 with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN: it made everything before it seem dated and predictable. Romero's film looked like a newsreel, where economy was turned into an artistic value; Hammer, still largely stick in a Victorian world of vampires and mummies, lacked any connection to contemporary existence. This New Order created a change away from the tidiness of the British horror film and created a tableau where monsters and humans could no longer be easily distinguished. This loss of generic identity pulled British horror towards sexploitation, which was proving to be a formidable and cost-effective box-office attraction during a period of decline. But there was also an acute divergence and mutation in storylines: consider the Hammer and Shaw Brothers marriage for THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, and Amicus' werewolf whodunit THE BEAST MUST DIE.

Drink A Pint of Blood A Day

TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1969)

Anti-father and Anti-Christ: Christopher Lee and Linda Hayden on the cover of Little Shoppe of Horrors #4 (April 1978). Cast primarily as seductresses and nymphets, Hayden is one of a handful of British actresses who can look back on a genuinely dizzying career in film and television.

TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA - directed by Peter Sasdy - was one of Hammer’s most troubled productions. There were accusations of script plagiarism from Freddie Francis’ son Kevin - who had handed in a rejected treatment entitled DRACULA’S FEAST OF BLOOD - a drama which indirectly lead to Anthony Hinds relinquishing his directorship of the studio. When an already disillusioned Christopher Lee insisted on a percentage of the American gross to appear again in his signature role, Hammer took the unimaginable step of replacing him with Ralph Bates. But by the time Warner Bros-Seven Arts reminded the studio that co-finance was on the condition that Lee played the Count, the actor’s late u-turn caused Dracula to be a supporting character in his own movie.

Hargood (Geoffrey Keen), Paxton (Peter Sallis) and Secker (John Carson) are three Victorian gentlemen whose charitable work in the East End is, in reality, a front for illicit thrills. At a brothel run by the effeminate Felix (Russell Hunter), Hargood has his prostitute taken from him by the contemptuous Courtley (Bates), who is known to dabble in the black arts. Courtley takes the three men to visit Weller (Roy Kinnear), who sells them the clasp, signet ring, cloak and powdered blood of Dracula. In a deconsecrated church, Courtley mixes his own blood with the powder in a ceremony to summon the Prince of Darkness, but his new-found colleagues refuse to drink the concoction; as the Acolyte chokes on the blood, the three men panic and beat him to death. During the night, Dracula is reborn, vowing to destroy those who have killed his servant by the mesmeric manipulation of the men’s previously obedient children.

Christopher Lee’s fourth outing as The Count for Hammer followed on directly from the actor’s stint in Jess Franco’s EL CONDE DRACULA.

Enveloped by one of James Bernard’s strongest scores, TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA hints at the brutality and breasts to come in Hammer’s twilight years and, despite its troubles, is a film that skilfully unravels the hypocrisy of Victorian society as well as adhering to the progressive anti-establishment ethos of the times. Dracula may be pushed to the sidelines, but with the character acting as an omnipresent puppet master, his presence becomes no less imposing, acting as a Charles Manson-like catalyst for the “liberated” youths. In fact, the highlight of the film is the metamorphosis of Alice Hargood (Hayden) and Lucy Paxton (Isla Blair) from prissy little rich girls to vulpine harlots; in a particularly powerful sequence, the suitably loathsome Hargood - alluring to incestuous desires - drunkenly prepares to beat his daughter for her forbidden alliance with a male suitor. Confronting Alice in her bedroom and brandishing a riding crop, Alice’s escape into the arms of The Count is one of relief, and, having telepathically issued her instructions, recedes into the darkness as Alice hits her father with a shovel, twinkling with impish glee. Hayden uses her innocent face to ironic effect as Dracula’s main complicit in the ensuing retribution. And on a more trivial note, look out for Madeline Smith as a young prostitute.

Lust of Evil

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)
LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971)
TWINS OF EVIL (1972)

Hammer starlet Madeline Smith in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS.

WITH an absence of fresh avenues for their monsters to explore, and a relaxation of censorship, Hammer turned to J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. A curious mix of traditional vampirism and Irish folklore, the novella overtly uses lesbianism to heighten tension and to symbolise abnormality, and was a major influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. By adding this explicit frisson to their already luridly realised baronial halls, village taverns and moonlit woods, the studio’s Karnstein Trilogy - all scripted by Tudor Gates - suggests a more obvious deviance and desire, and a recognised stage in which the drama could be played out.

Roy Ward Baker's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS is historically remarkable for being the first (and only) co-production of Hammer Films and American International Pictures. While this combination looks promising on paper, the result is an uneven attempt to bring the studio into the late 1960s marketplace by revelling in lesbian couplings and graphic decapitations. In early 19th Century Styria, Carmilla Karnstein (Ingrid Pitt) is insinuated into the household of General Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing), and the death of his niece soon follows. When Emma Morton (Madeline Smith) begins to suffer from fatigue and anaemia, her fate rests in the hands of her young suitor (Jon Finch) and the vengeful fathers of Carmilla’s previous victims. While too mature and earthy to make an ideal Carmilla – Le Fanu wrote her as a young creature unaware of her destructive effects – Pitt nevertheless displays some memorable vampiric anger, including the panting seduction of a governess played by Kate O'Mara. The central theme of the film is the battle between Carmilla’s brood and the repressed, brutal vampire hunters – Cushing’s General and Douglas Wilmer’s Baron Hartog make suitably grim-faced avengers - reinforcing the question of who represents the greater threat; the uninhibited vampires, or the sadistic authority figures.

LUST FOR A VAMPIRE’s lesbian focus is blurred by its heterosexual romance between Mircalla and the writer turned schoolmaster LeStrange (Michael Johnson, the part a fictional representation of Le Fanu himself). This piece of narrative is appropriately centrepiece in this attractive promotional poster.

The hastily conceived LUST FOR A VAMPIRE never raises above a schoolboy level of eroticism, but this mongrel entry has earned a reputation as a Hammer fan’s guilty pleasure. Here, Carmilla Karnstein is reincarnated as Mircalla (Yutte Stensgaard), a luscious seductress who is enrolled at an exclusive girl’s school. The Danish actress is everything a traditional vampire is not: blonde, blue-eyed and with a cleft chin, but she is also enigmatic, mannequin-like and ethereal, with a forbiddingly cold core. The shot of Mircalla sitting upright in her coffin, her bare breasts drenched in the blood of a sacrificial victim, was the company’s most shocking image since Christopher Lee’s entrance in DRACULA. Stensgaard does not possess Pitt’s burning intensity, but her serene, blank-faced detachment is strangely effective.

The final film of the trilogy – TWINS OF EVIL – is, in fact, set 150 years before its predecessors, and is one of the most brutal and brilliant of Hammer’s latter-day oeuvre. Heavily influenced by WITCHFINDER GENERAL, the film substitutes the exploitation of flesh for an intensity and chilling sense of purpose rare in British horror. Madeleine and Mary Collinson, duly cast as titular Frieda and Maria Gelhorn, stay with their puritanical uncle Gustav Weil (Peter Cushing) in conservative middle Europe, where Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) is pitted against Weil’s witch-hunting sect. Cushing gives one of his finest screen characterisations – unwilling guardian to his wayward nieces by day, and ritually seeking out and burning young girls by night. Weil is blind in his devotion to duty, with his interpretation of good nothing more than an alternate evil to that being woven by Karnstein. His death scene – plunging from the Count’s balcony to the stone staircase below, surrounded by his black-clad brethren - provides one of the most memorable of all climactic tableaux.

Peter Cushing in TWINS OF EVIL. The film went into production nine weeks after the death of the actor’s wife, and his performance bears the unmistakable signs of this bereavement. Consequently, a character that easily could have been no more than a religious zealot is transformed into something much more resonant.

Horror is not an obvious genre for locating positive representatives of women, based as they are in the misogynist mythology of the female as either virgin or whore; in spite of the presence of numerous female vampires, the cinematic representation of predatory women is invariably a negative one. Victorian vampire literature reveals a belief in the vulnerability of young girls to the temptation of the flesh, and vampire cinema merely gives this notion a contemporary spin. A young woman, one bitten, will become shamelessly promiscuous and a threat to decent society. Patriarchal control in the form of fathers, husbands, vampire hunters or witchfinders, can reign in transgressional impulses but when all else fails, death is the only solution. Within the society of the undead, the usual rules apply.