My journey through the annals of the British horror film continues Horrors of the Black Museum, a 1959 shocker starring Michael Gough as a misogynistic crime writer with a murderous streak. It was interesting to watch from the point-of-view of someone interested in the history of horror, but it is not a great film. It's a string of cheap thrills that relies on maximum gore and sadism for effect: A woman gets stabbed in the eyes with spikes attached to the lenses of a pair of binoculars; a prostitute gets guillotined in her bed; a psychiatrist gets disolved in a vat of acid. It's all pretty poorly scripted and acted, although Michael Gough is enjoyable in a Vincent Price sort of way -- a not-particularly-great actor at his best when he's exploiting his own hamminess. Talking of Price, the film, with its museum of horrors, giant vats, teenage assistants and homicidal cripples, has more than a hint of House of Wax about it, the 1953 film that was itself a remake of Michael Curtiz's brilliant The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).
Horrors of the Black Museum was the first of three 'Sadian' movies (critic David Pirie's phrase) produced at the time by Anglo-Amalgamated; the third, Michael Powell's controversial Peeping Tom, was the most significant. Perhaps its biggest achievement was in showing so clearly just how superior the work of Hammer Studios was during the same era.
I also watched The Vampire Lovers (1970) this week, the Hammer film based on the works of 19th-century gothic novelist Sheridan le Fanu. It was far better than Lust for a Vampire, its awful sequel following in 1972. Although director Roy Ward Baker made some real clangers in his time (the appalling Scars of Dracula in 1971, for example), he shows himself a capable craftsman here, generating real atmosphere and capturing something of the spirit of Hammer's earliest gothic entries.
Writing assignment...
I'm writing a piece on film for a magazine about English culture. I have two or three thousand words to play with, and the theme for the issue is 'the English and abroad'. I've been toying with
a) an analysis of how British films have portrayed the English when abroad;
b) a partly biographical, partly critical essay about an English actor or director working abroad, e.g. James Whale, Boris Karloff, John Schlesinger;
c) a look at how the films of the British 'New Wave' of the '50s and '60s used actresses imported from abroad, e.g. Simone Signoret in Room at the Top, Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room.
Any other ideas?
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