House of Darkness (1948)

House of Darkness is a 1948 British movie that is sometimes labeled as a horror movie. In fact it’s a melodrama with gothic overtones. It does however have some claims to be a ghost movie so it’s at least understandable that it’s been given the horror label.

There’s a framing story which is, as unfortunately framing stories often are, quite unnecessary. The music is provided by George Melachrino, a popular orchestra leader of the time, and the framing story is an excuse to bring Melachrino into the film. Admittedly music does play a fairly important role in the story.

The actual story takes place in 1901 (we know this because the events of the film take place shortly before the coronation of King Edward VII). A rather gothic-looking house is inhabited by a very troubled family. The middle-aged, querulous and ailing John Merryman (Alexander Archdale) inherited the house from his stepmother. The much younger Francis Merryman (Laurence Harvey) is extremely resentful that his mother did not leave the house to him. Francis is irresponsible and willful, and financially extravagant, and being dependent on John for money inflames his resentment even further. John’s timid and nervous brother Noel (John Teed) worries a good deal and conspires with his brother.

Things seem to be about to come to a head over the matter of a forged cheque which offers John the chance he has wanted for years  to force Francis out of the house. John’s steadily declining health (he has a very weak heart) means that his policy of forcing a confrontation with Francis is perhaps a little unwise.

Francis has a beautiful and devoted wife, Elaine (Lesley Osmond) who does her best to keep the peace. Noel is engaged to Lucy (Lesley Brook) but this seems likely to cause more problems - Noel wants Lucy to come and live in the house and Francis is not at all happy about having to share what he considers should rightfully be his house.

It’s an ideal setup for a murder thriller but this isn’t a murder story. What it is is a delightfully overheated melodrama. It does have murderous hatreds and hatred can kill in various ways. It has guilt and it has envy and in fact all the prime ingredients for fine gothic melodrama.

Such fame as director Oswald Mitchell has rests on his prolific output of comedies but in the same year as House of Darkness he also directed another full-blooded melodrama, The Greed of William Hart, which starred Tod Slaughter (probably the greatest melodrama star of them all). Mitchell does a perfectly competent job.

John Gilling wrote the screenplay. Gilling did some good work in crime films in the 50s but his most notable achievements were as a writer-director of gothic horror films for Hammer in the mid-60s.

This was Laurence Harvey’s film debut. He looks absurdly young, because he was absurdly young - he was 19 when he was cast in this film. His extreme youth works in his favour since many of Francis’s character flaws are due to the combination of immaturity, irresponsibility and simmering adolescent resentment and jealousy. Laurence Harvey is not everyone’s cup of tea as an actor. He had a very narrow range and usually came across as emotionally disconnected and cold. In the wrong roles these flaws were fatal, but on the rare occasions when he landed just the right role he could be remarkably effective (an example being the very underrated 1968 spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic. Fortunately he’s perfectly cast in House of Darkness and his performance is odd but compelling.

This is one of those movies which is deliberately ambiguous about the supernatural elements. Are there ghostly forces at work in the house? Or are the ghosts merely a product of over-stressed imaginations twisted by guilt, envy and hate?

Network’s DVD release offers a very good transfer with no extras.

House of Darkness probably has just enough ghostliness to qualify as a low-key gothic horror movie in the style of the 40s. It’s melodrama that is the predominant ingredient though, and as melodramas go it’s fun in its deliriously overheated way. Plus Laurence Harvey’s strange but intriguing performance is a bonus. Recommended.

The Night Has Eyes (1942)

The Night Has Eyes is a 1942 British thriller with a very strong admixture of the gothic. It’s notable for offering James Mason an early starring role, and it’s the type of role he would come to do very well.

Marian Ives (Joyce Howard) and Doris (Tucker McGuire), two young schoolteachers from an exclusive girls’ school, decide to spend their holiday on the Yorkshire moors. An odd choice for a holiday but Marian Ives (Joyce Howard) has her reasons. Her friend Evelyn died on the moors a year earlier, in mysterious circumstances. All very Wuthering Heights. Marian has the idea that she may be able to discover how Evelyn died. 

The village police constable warns the two not to go wandering on the moors - the weather is threatening and they could easily get lost and possibly fall into a bog and never be found. Of course they disregard his advice and of course they get lost and Doris does indeed fall into a bog, fortunately without fatal consequences. They come across the kind of isolated house you expect to find on the Yorkshire moors. Living in the house is a handsome but morose young composer, Stephen Deremid (James Mason). Stephen fought on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War and it’s left him bitter and self-pitying and he’s given up composing. He’s not exactly thrilled by the idea of having company but he can’t very well turn the two girls away in the middle of a storm.

The Wuthering Heights atmosphere becomes more and more pronounced and the gothic elements are very much in evidence.

Stephen denies having ever heard of Evelyn but it soon becomes apparent that he most certainly did met her. In fact she had stayed in his house. Stephen is a troubled man but is there more to it than that? Why does he fear the full moon? Why does he seem at times to be attracted to Marian and then he pushes her away? Does the house in fact contain a secret room? Are there other secrets hidden here? 

It might be a good idea for Marian and Doris to leave as soon as possible but the rains have caused the river to break its banks and the house is now cut off from the outside world.

Writer-director Leslie Arliss showed considerable promise in the 1940s, including major box-office hits like The Wicked Lady and The Man in Grey (both starring James Mason), but by the 50s his career was in decline. Melodrama mixed with gothic was his clearly his forte and he does a fine job here.

The plot is contrived and melodramatic but that’s the sort of movie this is. It’s supposed to be melodrama.

Joyce Howard is pleasant but just a little insipid. Marian is an annoyingly brainless heroine who behaves like a lovestruck schoolgirl. Tucker McGuire’s task as Doris is to add some comic relief which she does without being excessively irritating. Just to make sure we get enough comic relief we also have Wilfred Lawson as the lecherous odd-job man and a pet monkey as well. Mary Clare is OK as the good-hearted housekeeper who knows a lot more about Stephen than she lets on.

It’s James Mason who is largely left to carry the picture. His star quality is already clearly evident. Stephen Deremid feels too sorry for himself to be entirely sympathetic but Mason makes him suitably ambiguous, tortured and tragic.

The scenes on the moors have a very obvious shot-on-a-soundstage look to them but that works to the film’s advantage, giving it more of a subtly other-worldly feel. The gothic atmosphere is laid on very thickly indeed. The isolated house with its solitary inhabitant sunk in melancholy and self-pity is obviously very Brontë-esque. There are also hints of the Old Dark House genre especially when Stephen reveals that the house contains at least one secret room. Günther Krampf’s cinematography is effective. 

Network’s DVD presentation is standard for this company - it’s barebones but the transfer is excellent.

The Night Has Eyes is not an out-and-out horror movie by any means but it has a few real scares and enough hints of the gothic (and even a very faint of the supernatural) to make it of interest to horror fans. It certainly will have plenty of appeal to melodrama fans and it has a decent enough mystery plot. It also has James Mason going somewhat over-the-top but demonstrating the charisma that would quickly make him a major star. Recommended.

Asylum (1972)

Hammer’s great rival in the British horror movie market in the 60s and 70s was Amicus Productions. Amicus specialised in horror anthology films, all of which are worth seeing, but in my view the best of all their films was their 1972 release Asylum.

Asylum was written by Robert Bloch, best known as the author of Psycho but an excellent and versatile writer of fiction in various genres. The director was Roy Ward Baker, one of the top British directors of the period (and a man who did some notable horror movies for Hammer as well).

Asylum benefits from a particularly strong framing story. Young psychiatrist Dr Martin (Robert Powell) has applied for a position as a houseman at an insane asylum. On arrival he discovers that the director of the hospital is now a patient. The assistant director sets Dr Martin a challenge. He has to interview four patients, one of whom is the asylum’s former director. If Dr Martin can correctly identify which patient is the former director he gets the job. Each of the four patients then tells his or her story, these stories being the movie’s four segments.

In the first of these, Frozen Fear, Bonnie (Barbara Parkins) is a young American having an affair with a middle-aged Englishman, Walter (Richard Todd). Since Walter’s wife (Sylvia Sims) controls the money and refuses to give him a divorce they plot to kill her. This proves to be more difficult than they expected, which may or may not be because the wife is a student of voodoo. It’s a nicely macabre story, very much what you expect from Robert Bloch. Parkins was a competent actress. Richard Todd’s career may have been on the downslide but he was an excellent actor and he does well here.

In the second part, The Weird Tailor, Barry Morse plays a tailor name Bruno desperate for money who is delighted when the mysterious Smith (Peter Cushing) offers him a huge fee for a rather unusual suit. The suit is in fact very unusual indeed. Cushing is delightfully creepy and, as he so often did, he makes Smith a figure who is both terrifying and tragic. Barry Morse (a fine and underrated actor) is able to make Bruno almost pathetic but not quite and he does a fine job in emphasising Bruno’s desperation for money which warps his judgment.

The third segment, Lucy Comes to Stay, involves a young woman named Barbara (Charlotte Rampling). Barbara has been released from a mental hospital after a breakdown but her brother George (the delightfully smooth and urbane James Villiers) is not convinced that she has fully recovered. He employs a nurse to keep an eye on her. He had hoped that they had heard the last of Lucy (Britt Eckland) but his hopes are to be sadly disappointed. Rampling was not yet a star but she already has that slightly odd quality that always made her so interesting. Britt Eckland has rarely received much respect as an actress and that’s a trifle unfair. Her performance is more than competent.

The fourth segment (Mannikins of Horror) features the inimitable Herbert Lom as Byron, a man who believes he can transfer his mind into a toy robot. 

One of this film’s major asset is the stellar cast. Apart from those already mentioned there’s Geoffrey Bayldon as the hospital’s unctuous porter and Patrick Magee as the assistant director, Dr Rutherford. This is a movie in which everyone is so perfectly cast that it’s hard to pick a single standout performance. They’re all so good.

Asylum is an example of just how good a modestly budgeted movie can be with the right people involved. Director Roy Ward Baker, cinematographer Denys N. Coop, editor Peter Tanner and art director Tony Curtis were all professionals and the results are very good indeed. 

Camera tricks like Dutch angles generally need to be used judiciously but in this case, given the subject matter and the asylum setting, they’re entirely appropriate and are used to good effect. While much of the movie was made as Shepperton Studios there’s a considerable amount of location shooting as well. Amicus, like Hammer, were able to make cheap movies that looked more expensive than they were.

Amicus, very wisely, did not try to copy the Hammer style directly. Hammer were the masters of gothic horror so Amicus concentrated on contemporary chillers. This gives Amicus’s movies their own distinctive flavour.

Robert Bloch’s screenplay adapted four of his own earlier short stories. Lucy Comes to Stay was a story that he considered to be a kind of dry run for Psycho.

Dark Sky’s DVD presentation includes a brief but quite informative featurette on the history of Amicus Productions and an audio commentary with Roy Ward Baker and camera operator Neil Binney. Their recollections of the making of the film are still vivid and they are clearly (and with reason) quite proud of it. The transfer is good although not outstanding.

There’s no gore but there’s plenty of suspense and a nicely creepy atmosphere of crazed weirdness. You just don’t need gore in a horror movie if you know what you’re doing. Asylum is one of the most enjoyable of all British horror movies of this era. Very highly recommended.