"Tops in Total Horror!"

THE CORPSE (1971)

The daughter of UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS actress Rachel Gurney, Sharon Gurney's brief screen career began on television, before graduating to memorable roles in WOMEN IN LOVE and DEATH LINE.

RELEASED in the United States under the nonsensical banner CRUCIBLE OF HORROR, this ambiguous, dreamlike melodrama takes its cue from Henri-Georges Clouzot's celebrated psychological thriller LES DIABOLIQUES. Walter Eastwood (Michael Gough) runs his upper middle class family with suffocating repression: wife Edith (Yvonne Mitchell) has retreated into painting from years of neglect, son Rupert (Simon Gough) is a facsimile of the patriarch working for the same insurance firm, and it is only rebellious daughter Jane (Sharon Gurney) who strives for a life beyond these watertight walls. When Walter discovers sixteen-year-old Jane has been sleeping with a friend from his golf club - and that she has also stolen money from the premises - he horse-whips her to sleep, while in an adjacent room Rupert turns up the volume in his headphones. Listening to her daughter's cries of pain, Edith is awakened from her trance-like state, and the following morning openly whispers to Jane "lets kill him."

Creepy and compelling, Michael Gough is perfect as the overbearing head, illustrating his unwholesome air early on when Jane returns home on her bicycle, only for him to instantly clasp the still-warm seat. One reading is that Edith imagines everything after the beating of her daughter, yet spliced frames of jagged close-ups, a possible rape and a bag full of masks adds to the disorientation. When Edith corners Walter at his grouse shooting weekend - explaining that "I recently bought a copy of the Marquis de Sade, it's full of the most unutterable filth, but it opened up a few windows for me, I thought it might help to understand you" - it begins a middle third which sets up much but delivers little. Walter may well have been poisoned by the females of the clan, but his body won't stay still, moving from its bed to a crate marked "Mrs E Eastwood, Velvet House, Richmond" and creating a floating mental state for the mother who fades altogether as Water retains his place at the breakfast table.

Similar to the filmography of Peter Cushing, Michael Gough never disappoints, even in a wooden crate. His underappreciated performances as a parade of slimy villains should rank higher with the icons of the genre.

Described by producer Gabrielle Beaumont as a political work, THE CORPSE was actually filmed in the Spring of 1969, a period when the feminist movement were questioning the persistence of gender stereotypes; here, the emotionally and physically-abusing male is always in control, with his understated British venom. Consequently, the project can be viewed as an allegory for the ineffectiveness of rebellion within the traditional family unit, to the point where the mother even longs for a fresh outlook she knows will never come ("I'd like to go back to school, start again") and that the father will always return even if he is dead. To add to the frisson, Gough stars with his real-life son and daughter-in-law.

Going Underground

DEATH LINE (1972)
CREEP (2004)

Franka Potente misses the last train in CREEP.

BY the early 1970s, Hammer was stumbling toward an open grave. This decline was illustrated by DRACULA A.D. 1972, a misguided attempt to lure back some patronage by locating the Prince of Darkness among the groovy Chelsea set. Placed alongside the burgeoning new wave of American horrors - socially relevant releases such as Wes Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT – Hammer perished because of this inability to adapt to a world beyond Home Counties Transylvania. But British horrors also typically endured disastrous relations with everybody from their distributors downward. Two important UK releases – PEEPING TOM and WITCHFINDER GENERAL – were both badly mishandled on release, and vilified in the national press. 

Although labelled repellent by British critics, DEATH LINE nevertheless tapped into the new-style unpleasantness being perfected by the US independents. Directed by Chicago-born Gary Sherman - who would go on to helm DEAD & BURIED and POLTERGEIST III - the film is the tale of a lone cannibal stalking Russell Square tube station, as Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence), Detective Rogers (Norman Rossington) and Inspector Richardson (Clive Swift) uncover a truth that the authorities would prefer remain buried. The Man (Hugh Armstrong, in a role for Marlon Brando before his son contracted pneumonia) – riven by septicaemic plague and given to biting the heads off rats - is a sorrowful survivor of a race who have incestuously bred and fed on each other and hapless Londoners. A dispossessed spectre from a Victorian past, the only vocabulary at his disposal – “mind the doors” – is typical of DEATH LINE’s uncomfortable blend of pathos and black humour. 

One of the partially consumed cadavers suspended from a wall in DEATH LINE (affectionately released as RAW MEAT in the United States).

DEATH LINE’s political themes - collapse of Empire, class exploitation and high level corruption - were particularly relevant in the early 1970s. The humanity of the film’s aboveground characters is questioned from the outset: backed with kitsch striptease music, bowler-hatted civil servant James Manfred OBE (James Cossins) tours Soho and propositions women on platforms; we later learn that his luxurious home has closed-circuit TV to view any bedroom action. Pleasence is typically superb as the teabag-hating Calhoun, who initially dismisses the input from students Alex (David Ladd) and girlfriend Patricia (Sharon Gurney), and Christopher Lee’s cameo as Stratton-Villiers MI5 - complete with furled umbrella and Old Etonian tie - sneers at the proletarians. Conditions belowground are explored in the virtuoso 360-degree long, leisurely malingering pan of The Man’s den, culminating in his moaning over a dying companion (June Turner); the skeletal sets and fetid atmosphere clearly acted as a key inspiration behind Robert Burns’ design for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Christopher Smith’s modestly budgeted CREEP also held its own against the US independent releases of the early noughties. The eponymous Creep (Sean Harris) has played an involuntary part in a programme within a covert surgical unit beneath Charing Cross station. The Creep becomes a surprisingly complex character: the absence of light, language, and love has turned this pale boy into a feral freak. More animal than man, his speech consists mostly of inhuman screeching as he hunts, snares and tortures anything in his path. But he also retains an unusual curiosity - at times almost sportive, as if playing hide and seek with his quarry. When Creep straps a homeless female (Kelly Scott) to an obstetrician’s chair, he prepares to operate as would a child playing doctor; donning a gown and surgical gloves, he pretends to anaesthetise before one of the most unmitigated acts of violence ever committed to celluloid. Regrettably there are plot holes large enough to drive a train through, but CREEP is fast-moving fare which benefits greatly from its haunting perspectives of the tube's otherworldly look, focusing on ominous low arches, ambiguous sewage tunnels and oppressive crawlspaces.

Beast and beauty: Hugh Armstrong and Sharon Gurney in DEATH LINE.

DEATH LINE and CREEP both successfully adapt a particular legend to the screen. The subterranean tunnels of London are rich in urban myths - ghosts searching platforms for loved-ones, killer rats of phenomenal size, and walled-up trains with cargoes of skeletons - but its most famous story remains that of a race of Troglodyte dwellers. Viewing these films, we can appreciate the sensitive process that eventually manifests as local legends. By means of these myths, we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are, a romantic response to our perception of the London Underground that manifests a certain fear in contrast to what we can see and touch. As cinematic experiences, they are cannibal films with a conscience. Analogies between man and monster – and how far a man can degenerate and remain human – are not difficult to draw. Yet society is the real villain, the kind of capitalist state that abandons its disenfranchised children, and denying them their essence.