Middle parts of trilogies are often the worst. They have to do so much bridging and they don’t get the satisfaction of story arc conclusions as they are too busy setting up what comes next instead.

The Two Towers does not fall prey to this. It is as exciting as the first film, while having the luxury of our investment. Everyone cares very deeply about what happens to what remains of the Fellowship. A host of new characters are introduced as the battle for Middle Earth continues, the most significant being the people of Rohan. And an extra woman, Éowyn (Miranda Otto), to boot.

The Two Towers is filled with lengthy battles, death and despair, and yet it still manages to be warm-hearted, full of humour and hopeful.

In this Movie List from The Film Magazine, we are counting down the most impactful, hilarious and memorable moments from Peter Jackson’s timeless epic, for this: the 10 Best The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Moments.

Follow @thefilmagazine on X (Twitter).

10. The Nazgûl

The Wraiths were scary enough in The Fellowship of the Ring, but in The Two Towers they’ve been promoted. Now referred to as Nazgûl, which feels more sinister, and on the backs of great dragons, these agents of Sauron really are a force to be reckoned with.

The screeching, sniffing presence of them over the Dead Marshes as Sam and Frodo cower is the taster, but as their giant wingspans cast a shadow over the city of Osgiliath they truly are a sight to behold.

Recommended for you: 10 Best The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Moments

9. The Uruk-hais March

The Two Towers is a film with many battles, and obviously we are rooting for the good guys, but the final march of the Uruk-hais as they approach Helm’s Deep is nothing short of majestic.

Thousands upon thousands of them marching in time, lit by flickering torches, metal clanging and roaring like lions. They have no morals and no fear. The juxtaposition between them and the rag-tag army Aragorn has managed to gather does an excellent job of building tension.  

Considering these other films, it becomes immediately obvious why The Wicker Man enjoys such continued high acclaim: because it’s unique. The Wicker Man is an innovation of the sub-genre of Folk Horror in which fear is derived from our shared past and humanity’s relationship with its surroundings. The Wicker Man is a trailblazer that has been blessed with the highest form of praise, mimicry. It has been subjected to being cheaply knocked off by the 2006 remake starring Nicolas Cage, imitated by the likes of The Village, and paid homage to by recent critically acclaimed horror Midsommar.

The story of devout Christian, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), investigating the reported disappearance of a young girl (Gerry Cowper) on the wildly liberal and pagan Summerisle off the West Coast of Scotland is not just unique but remains chilling. The Wicker Man‘s lack of jump scares and tense atmosphere indicate that the film was a genuine attempt at creating art and not just a quick cash grab, relying on crude methods to illicit shock and controversy. The production’s intellectual and artistic approach to the story of The Wicker Man means its themes not only remain compelling but prove to be relevant to the modern day.

In this Movie List by The Film Magazine, we are bringing attention to the moments in The Wicker Man that best highlight why Robin Hardy’s masterpiece remains the best of both folk horror and British horror.

Follow @thefilmagazine on X (Twitter).

10. The Landlord’s Daughter

As Sargent Howie walks through the door of The Green Man pub, he is clearly disappointed that a routine investigation has transformed into an overnight stay, but he is not yet too perturbed. So far he has found the residents of Summerisle aloof and evasive, particularly over the subject of the whereabouts of Rowan Morrison; but it is what is to be expected from an isolated community and from those involved in possible foul play. It is only after Howie’s introduction to Willow, the daughter of The Green Man’s landlord, that the bizarre nature of Summerisle’s community is revealed as the patrons at the bar all burst into song:

“Much has been said of the strumpets of yore,
Of wenches and bawdy house queens by the score,
But I sing of a baggage that we all adore,
The landlord’s daughter.”

This tribute to both Willow’s beauty and sexual prowess not only reveals the extraordinary sexual liberation of the island but also Howie’s own prudish nature, effectively establishing Howie’s antagonism towards Summerisle’s society. The folk element of the song differentiates The Wicker Man from other horror musicals, creating a tangible relationship with the past and with nature, akin to the storytelling of other world cultures. It is a hint of what is to come, a primordial stirring within our blood.

9. Crying by the Gravestone

Overwhelmed and disgusted by The Green Man’s saucy rendition of “The Landlord’s daughter”, Howie steps outside to take in the fresh air. In the shimmers of the pale moonlight the presence of dozens of couples on the Village Green is revealed, all in the throes of making love. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

It could be expected that this display of mass public indecency will have lost some of its shock value against contemporary progressive values, but the slow motion reveal with distorted audio is almost chilling (and sensual). The power of the scene can be summarised by the single shot of a naked weeping woman embracing a gravestone. The ultimate gothic aesthetic.

Similar to “Wuthering Heights”, in which Heathcliff desecrates the grave of Cathy to kiss her corpse, The Wicker Man combines horror with eroticism, humanity with the Earth. The Wicker Man was ahead of its time back in 1973 and is still pushing the envelope fifty years on.

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Descended from Italian aristocracy with a lineage that traces back to Charlemagne, even his childhood contained unbelievable encounters, including meeting the men who assassinated Rasputin. Early adulthood was mired by World War Two, in which he not only volunteered and enlisted to fight in both the Finnish and British armies, but even served as an Intelligence Officer in the British RAF – it goes without saying that some state secrets were taken to his grave and his real-life adventures served as an inspiration for a well-known literary character invented by his step-cousin Ian Fleming (James Bond).

Finally knighted in 2009, his life in itself would make a terrific plot for a movie regardless of his prolific acting career. However, like the rest of his life, this in itself is beyond remarkable.

With a career spanning across 8 decades and 286 acting roles, there isn’t another actor that could boast equal longevity and sustained popularity. He was in the game long enough to have made acquaintances with the authors whose creations he would go on to play, including Mervyn Peake and J. R. R. Tolkien, and would be a part of the major movie franchises of the 20th and 21st centuries from James Bond to Star Wars.

No other actor has had a comeback as comparably star-spangled and successful as his, hitting the big screen in the role of Saruman the White in Peter Jackson’s beloved Lord of the Rings Trilogy. He is arguably the face of British Horror and the archetypal villain. So, where can one possibly start with this truly ginormous and legendary filmography?

For those who dare tread forward, presented to you now is a guide to Christopher Lee’s most iconic roles, best performances and most beloved films, to help you truly immerse yourself in the cult of Lee. This is Where to Start with Christopher Lee.

1. Dracula / The Horror of Dracula (1958)

Christopher Lee’s film career and walk towards fame truly started off in the features produced at Bray Studios that would come to be known as Hammer Horrors. His first big break was playing The Creature in Hammer’s version of the Mary Shelley tale The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), a part he earned by his towering 6’4.5″ stature, and the fact that his agent asked for £2 less than his competitor, Bernard Bresslaw.

Lee wasn’t initially thrilled by this role, complaining to co-star (and soon to be best friend) Peter Cushing, that he had no lines; however The Curse of Frankenstein‘s box office success had single-handedly revived the horror franchise, making Hammer productions its powerhouse and Lee one of its stars.

It is not the Frankenstein franchise that rocketed Lee into stardom, however. Hammer soon tried their hand with adapting Bram Stoker’s famous novel, and it is in the role of Count Dracula that Lee earns the accolade as the undisputed face of British Horror.

For all those who ventured out at Halloween as children with white faces, glow in the dark fangs and smeared fake blood, it is an homage to Lee’s Dracula we had unwittingly made as he was the first actor to portray Dracula with red blood dripping down his chin. Of course Bela Lugosi’s turn as the Transylvanian Count is nothing short of iconic, but Lee’s performance is arguably more synonymous with the image of Dracula as he is the first one to truly bring the bloodlust and animalistic edge to the screen persona, matching that of the character described in the original novel.

Lee’s performance in his first movie of the Hammer Dracula franchise is nothing short of tremendous with regards to characterisation: the Count’s introduction is that of a unnervingly antiquated aristocrat, but of undeniable charm as he impresses an almost desperate courtesy onto his guest. All this is achieved in a mere handful of lines for after his welcoming of the ill-fated Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) to his house, his next scene is the now iconic image of the red-eyed snarling Dracula, berating one of his brides, blood still staining his teeth.

Lee is mute for the rest of the film, save a few growls and grunts, but it is this beast-like predatorial version of the Count that has remained so memorable in this history of horror. It is through Lee’s facial expressions that we are convinced that Dracula is an unforgivably malignant and vile creature, and that more importantly he delights in his depravity. His eyes shine with delight as a huge grin spreads over his face when he realises he has the chance to convert his foes to vampirism; such as when the sun finally sets before Harker can stake him, and when Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) succumbs to being strangled, giving Dracula a brief chance to sink his teeth into his arch nemesis’ neck.

Dracula’s paradoxical existence of charming Count and demonic monster is best represented by his interactions with his female victims. As Lucy (Carol Marsh) and Mina (Melissa Stribling) are preyed upon, they wait for his night-time attacks with literal bated breath upon their beds in a show of unmistakable and exquisite sexual anticipation. Lee’s Dracula approaches these women like a tiger, quietly prowling forward, his focus unwavering. His pounce upon them is like an act of foreplay; with Mina he deeply inhales her scent with obvious pleasure as he drags his parted lips over her face before sinking onto the bed with her. Lee’s passion in this performance risked this scene being cut from the film altogether.

The ferocity and lust of Lee’s Dracula is seen throughout most of the Hammer Dracula series, but the suggestion to start with the first one (the so-called Horror of Dracula in the US) is because it is the first collaboration of Christopher Lee with long-time friend and fellow star Peter Cushing, in the opposing roles of Dracula and Van Helsing, and their on-screen chemistry is electric.

The two distinct actors’ friendship often bled into their on-screen roles as they made a captivating pair: their shared screen time in The Horror of Dracula is very brief but is easily the highlight of the film, as naturally it contains a patented Cushing and Lee fight scene. Being from 1958, the fight lacks the choreography of modern movies, but what the pair lack in martial arts training they make up with dedication to their roles and sheer energy. Their near clumsy grapple with each other elicits a sense of anxiety as their desperation shows that both the Count and the Vampire Hunter know that to lose means certain death.

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2. The Devil Rides Out (1968)

Entering prominence and international stardom through his work in the Hammer Horror movies, type-casting was an issue Lee struggled with throughout his career; his intimidating stature and baritone voice alone would have him continually pegged as the villain or monster. Although this villainous reputation would lend itself to the revival of his stardom in his twilight years, it was a more legitimate frustration earlier in his career. Hence The Devil Rides Out represents an interesting point in Lee’s filmography and the history of Hammer Horrors itself.

By 1968, Lee was undisputedly one of Hammer’s biggest stars and was regularly being poached by alternative Horror productions such as Amicus; Lee was now able to wield far more influence upon the producers than what he could 10 years prior. The Devil Rides Out came about by Lee’s suggestion for Hammer to adapt the works of the author Dennis Wheatley, whose fantasy-adventure novels would often involve the occult and black magic. The result is a film often considered to be the pinnacle of Hammer’s output and Lee’s own personal favourite Hammer Horror. No wonder really, for Lee was able to break his type-casting by playing one of the heroes, the Duc de Richleau.

The so-called Duke arrives on the scene for a planned reunion with his close friends, but suspicion is aroused when only Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) turns up and not their young companion, Simon Aron (Patrick Mower). A curious investigation at Simon’s house (who seems to be having a party without his friends) reveals the bombshell that Simon has taken up black magic and is about to be initiated into a Satanic cult. Despite de Richleau’s abject horror and outrage, Rex is sceptical until he witnesses and rescues Simon (and fellow postulate Tanith played by Nike Arrighi, who he conveniently falls in love with) from a Black Sabbat. The group run for sanctuary from their fellow musketeers, Richard Eaton’s (Paul Eddington’s) house, but are pursued by the devil-worshippers’ leader, Mocata (Charles Gray), furious that his initiates have been stolen from his grasp. After a failed hypnotic attempt to retrieve them, Mocata resorts to powerful black magic to assault the group and claim their souls.

Through the years of terrifying devil-focused cinema including the like of The Exorcist and The Omen, to an extent the topic of Satanism has been trivialised for audiences, resulting in the likes of ‘The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ and ‘Ash vs The Evil Dead’, so its definitely a curiosity to see a film that so wholeheartedly believes in the rituals portrayed within.

Lee states that the occult-themed Wheatley novels would be prefaced with the warning that black magic was real and was in fact highly dangerous: “Don’t think it doesn’t exist. And, whatever you do, don’t get involved.” Indeed a warning that impressed upon the religious Lee so much that he took it into his own personal living philosophy. In fact, the whole production team were suitably spooked by the source material – Lee’s influence over the movie continued due to the crew’s fears of doing any serious research into the portrayed witchcraft, resulting in Lee himself conducting most of the research, trawling through material in libraries to compose the spells and incantations the Duc de Richleau uses.

Christopher Lee’s hands-on approach in The Devil Rides Out results in one of his more larger than life performances, easily as memorable as his turns as a villain. Despite indulging in some unmistakeable scenery chewing (“You fool! You damn fool!”) and dialogue shamelessly used as a vehicle for needed black magic exposition, le Duc de Richleau is definitely a man you’d have on your side: knowledgeable, resourceful and authoritative, with the wisdom to protect his friends from devilish trickery and the bravery to fight off a giant tarantula. Lee’s solemn performance, fuelled by a genuine wariness of the dark forces, takes easily the most ridiculous scenes and turns them into gripping moments of horror.

“Before me, Raphael; Behind me, Gabriel.”

Although our love for Lee’s villain roles comes from a place of genuine appreciation for his talents, The Devil Rides Out is a genuinely refreshing entry into his filmography as it finally proves his diversity as an actor, flourishing within the classic Hammer mentor role. Hopefully Lee relished in the success of this film and the influence he had over it, receiving the highest praise possible for any adaption: the author, Dennis Wheatley, was incredibly happy with the movie.

3. The Wicker Man (1973)

It is undeniable that Christopher Lee owes much of his fame and success to Hammer Productions, but this association was a double-edged sword as Lee did find himself on the receiving end of type-casting, leading to a dry spell of roles alongside the eventual decline of British Horror in the 1970s. However, it is thanks to this association that Lee got a role in a film that was part of Britain’s last horror hurrah within the genre considered “folk horror”. Oddly ironic, as The Wicker Man turned out to be an almost antithesis to the normal Hammer output.

Beloved as they are, classic Hammer Horrors have undeniably aged. There is no argument about their entertainment value, but any hardcore fan may struggle to convince casual viewers that these films are serious horrors with the capability to frighten modern audiences. For most, they will be seen as previous milestones in horror history, now fondly remembered and enjoyed for their camp quality. However, the same cannot be said for The Wicker Man. Nearly five decades on this film still holds the power to make the blood run cold through its creepiness alone, and continues to be an impactful watch.

The plot of The Wicker Man is focused on Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), a police officer from the Scottish mainland who has come to the far-off British island of Summerisle to investigate the anonymously submitted case of a missing child. It doesn’t take long for the unease to set in during the beginning of his investigation as the odd behaviour of the islanders strays upon the outright unnerving.

The islanders flat-out deny the existence of the missing girl Rowan Morrison even though it quickly becomes obvious the girl was a citizen of the community; her own mother seems to be in on the act and even after her lies are exposed, she remains completely unfazed at her daughter’s potential peril. When Howie finds a place to stay for the night (as the answers he needs are not forthcoming), this curious behaviour accumulates as the apparent moral corruption of the entire island. As the innkeeper (Lindsay Kemp) directs his daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland), to show our hero to his room, the entire pub bursts into song paying homage to the woman’s… easiness.

“But I sing of the baggage that we all adore, the Landlord’s daughter.”

The assault upon Howie’s strict Christian sensibilities doesn’t stop there. In an attempt to quell his disgust by taking in the night air, he is met with the sight of countless couples partaking in an orgy on the village green.

50 years on, you would expect the film to have lost some of its impact: after all the struggle of sexual liberation has made leaps and bounds since the film’s release and, likewise, within this globalised and multi-cultural society the doctrines of Christianity hold less importance to many potential audiences (or are completely irrelevant to them). However, the depicted paganism in The Wicker Man not only defies logic and scientific truth, it seems to be in total rejection of human decency. The most liberal of individuals would still struggle not to be shocked by the portrayal of children being taught the veneration of the image of the human penis. Even those of the post-truth persuasion would struggle to reconcile the medieval practices to their alternative worldview, particularly the heinous concept of human sacrifice.

It is Christopher Lee’s performance as Lord Summerisle, the ultimate authority on the island, that is integral to the outrage caused by The Wicker Man, the Lord being one of the most complex villains Lee ever portrayed. He is chilling but not maniacal, one of the British nobility but utterly left-field, a pagan but also a man of science.

Lord Summerisle explains his rule over the island to Howie via the story of his grandfather: the Victorian entrepreneur brought prosperity to the previously miserable sheep-farming community by persuading the islanders to grow and harvest his newly bred varieties of fruit that could withstand the harsh Scottish climate. The initial work before the harvest was difficult, so the islanders were placated by encouraging worship to the old Gods to ensure a good harvest. The hugely successful harvest led to an enthusiastic conversion of the entire community, causing the last Christian Ministers to flee from the island. Thus, the Summerilse family line continued in the practice of paganism, leading to the enigma that is Lee’s Lord Summerisle and his clouded motivations.

The nobleman is clearly very aware that the island’s previously bountiful harvests are the result of his Grandfather’s scientific research and development (whilst possibly the rest of the island are left in the dark) and so must suspect the solution to the current failed harvest would lie in further scientific endeavour. So, does he believe in the ancient doctrines of the old gods or is this all manipulation and deception for his own personal gain? The film’s devastating climax proves he is capable of enormous manipulation and even murder, but throughout the film he is seen to be personally delighting in the island’s religious practices whilst harbouring disgust towards Christianity, readily pointing out Howie’s religious hypocrisies:

“I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.”

Thus is the enigmatic nature of Lord Summerisle that leads to much of the film’s horror. Is he a dutiful community leader doing what he must do as dictated by his hugely misguided faith to save his island from disaster, regardless of the cost? Or is he a greedy tyrant that struggles to survive through manipulation, who would easily use children and innocent men as human shields to save himself from the violent and lustful mob of his own creation, furious over their destitution? Either conclusion is truly terrifying, and it is through the sheer talent of Christopher Lee and his masterful performance that the true nature of Lord Summerisle remains a mystery.

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To conclude, The Wicker Man’s Lord Summerisle is another Christopher Lee villain that will be immortalised by the eternal praises of movie fans long into the future. A blessing or a curse, Lee’s type-casting was bestowed upon him because no one else’s villains could so effectively steal a scene (or rather a whole film) in such unmissable performances.

Initially attempting to forge a career in Hollywood during its Golden Age with the likes of The Man in The Iron Mask (1939) and Laurel and Hardy’s A Chump at Oxford (1939), Cushing found himself returning to Britain and the War Effort through his work in the Entertainment National Services Association. His first big film role came as Osric in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and he inadvertently became the face of the new and exciting enterprise that was British Television in the 1950s, starring in numerous live Teleplays. His real breakthrough into stardom was his lead role in Hammer Productions’ Curse of Frankenstein (1957); it being the first of what would become known as the Hammer Horrors, films that rekindled and dominated the then dead horror genre in glorious Eastman Colour. Cushing became one of the principal stars of these Hammer Horrors, usually acting opposite his long-time friend Christopher Lee whilst also being poached by rival horror production companies such as Amicus.

Throughout his career, Cushing has played several beloved figures of British popular culture and literature including Winston Smith of ‘1984’, Mr Darcy, Sherlock Holmes and even Sherlock’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Not only did he take part in the Hollywood giant that is Star Wars, but he even played Dr. Who on the big screen. There is a certain je ne c’est quoi surrounding his performances: he embraced his work with a rare humility and with a full acceptance of his type-casting, thus he would treat every role like Shakespeare. He is nearly solely responsible for the entertainment value of the majority of mid 20th century British horror and sci-fi from the power of his screen presence alone, and thus to this day has an inexplicably strong following.

Dare you watch these following films and unwittingly be sucked into the Peter Cushing cult?

1. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Before the Grand Moff Tarkin marched through the Death Star with Darth Vader on a leash, mercilessly destroying innocent planets with a cool and eloquent “Fire when ready”, there was Baron Victor Frankenstein.

There is a quiet reverence surrounding The Curse of Frankenstein. As the first coloured film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, this modest British production is credited with the resurrection of the horror genre in cinema. Starting with an original concept of a black and white film with Boris Karloff, Universal Pictures lawyers snapping at the ankles of Hammer caused a major rewrite so as to stray as far away from Frankenstein (1931) as possible.

The most obvious changes are the creature’s make up and the special effects used in the creation scenes, but the most important changes are to the characters themselves. In both the book and James Whale’s film, Baron Frankenstein is a tragic figure and Colin Clive’s performance in the original Frankenstein movie is more like that of a misunderstood romantic hero. Cushing’s Frankenstein is a bastard. This new and startling characterisation, coupled with Cushing’s performance, represents the evolution of horror.

The fear factor of The Curse of Frankenstein‘s predecessors are based in the Supernatural: Frankenstein blinded by passion and a need to understand the unfathomable secrets of the universe perverts nature itself. The result is a melancholic affair, society’s rejection of the unnatural and the unknown; a pensive reflection on man’s pride and scientific folly.

In the case of The Curse of Frankenstein, the film’s horror stems entirely from the fact that Baron Victor Frankenstein is a psychopath. Even though Cushing’s Frankenstein is also misguided by scientific curiosity, the course of his creation is dominated by the total absence of a moral compass. He doesn’t hide away his creation but instead concocts his abomination in the very house he shares with his fiancée, unbothered by the concept of his creature escaping and wreaking havoc onto the nearby villagers. This version of Frankenstein also doesn’t hesitate to commit murder to further his own ends.

It is not merely the actions of the Baron that convince us of his villainy, it is of course the way he commits such acts. Whilst Colin Clive regarded the body parts and the corpse of his soon to be creation with an almost tenderness, Cushing plunders the bodies of the good and bad with a barely contained glee. The cocky self-assuredness of the Baron’s superior intelligence compared to others, coupled with a child-like petulance and an inability to accept blame for his own evil actions, makes for a truly deplorable yet lovable villain. Even though the first act of his creation once filled with life was to crush Victor Frankenstein’s throat and squeeze the very life out of him, Victor remains overjoyed that he has succeeded in creating life, be it one of pure evil. Truly, then, Frankenstein and his creation are a perfect match; surely this snarling creature filled with bloodlust is an extension of Victor’s own psychopathy – his cold disregard for other’s lives comes to fruition with the monster gobbling up the likes of an old blind man and his young grandson.

Cushing’s energetic performance fizzing with gleeful wickedness was key to reinventing horror as the gory, thrilling, action-packed genre it is known as today. Thus begins Peter Cushing’s long love affair with Shelley’s novel, the actor going on to play the Baron five more times.

2. The Brides of Dracula (1960)

Despite Peter Cushing being known for his wonderful turns as movie villains, his archetypal role stems from his part as Dr Van Helsing, originating in Hammer Films’ production Dracula (1958). Since its release, the whole filmography of British B Movies has been dominated by the universal truth that redemption will come in the shape of Peter Cushing, usually as some kind of doctor or scientist.

In the same way that Cushing is synonymous with Hammer Horror’s Frankenstein franchise, it is usually Christopher Lee that is associated with its Dracula series. Lee did, however, turn down the opportunity to reprise his role of Dracula in this, Hammer’s second vampire movie (he eventually returned to the role in Dracula: Prince of Darkness in 1966), and as such Brides of Dracula is very much the Peter Cushing show.

Often cited as a fan favourite, Brides of Dracula really is one of those perfect Hammer Horrors. A broad and talented cast, opulently dressed sets and gorgeous costumes mask Hammer’s modest budget. The time of its release in 1960 represented a point in Hammer Horror’s history in which the production company had managed to strike up the perfect thematic balance – a delicate concoction of revulsion and sex appeal.

The maintenance of Bride of Dracula‘s status as a campy horror can be almost completely attributed to Cushing’s performance. Many moments of the film are genuinely laughable: the vampire bat attacks were made with an inferior prop (as the proper one was stolen) and there is an overbearing use of Christian symbology, with probably at least fifty percent of the principle shooting involving crucifixes (not to mention constant and hilarious church organ movements throughout the film’s score).

Not for a moment is the film’s illusion shattered by unintentional comedy however, and this is all because of the sheer dedication of Cushing’s performance. Peter Cushing in all of his B movie career can never be accused of phoning it in, and Brides of Dracula is no exception. Through an absolutely straight performance in which Helsing brandishes his crucifix and holy water like the deadliest of weapons, we are able to put our full confidence behind this character and truly believe that he could hold back the forces of hell singlehandedly. Coupled with the intensity of the performance, Cushing’s Van Helsing makes for a beloved yet unexpected action hero.

With an almost shockingly gaunt appearance and most definitely in his late forties, Cushing’s Van Helsing is no Captain America. But, despite his mould as a mentor, Van Helsing is the one that gets his hands dirty as opposed to a younger protégée. With his secret weapon of a hidden sprightliness that is released in moments of antagonism, not only are his enemies bowled over but so are we – his release of this pent up energy tricks us into thinking we have watched a fight sequence comparable to that of current cinema, only far more interesting. Confrontations within Hammer Films, especially when Cushing is involved, have a swashbuckling quality rarely seen in the modern fight scenes of today’s motion pictures, which are rendered almost clinical in comparison.

What makes Cushing’s Van Helsing more captivating than modern action heroes is the portrayal of his human vulnerability. Many of the Hammer Horror movies have these fantastic moments of mortal peril at their climaxes, with Brides of Dracula boasting one of the most memorable. In the face of a possible conversion to vampirism, Helsing grips on to his humanity with the help of a hot iron and some holy water in a scene that solidifies him as one badass motherf*cker. Rarely do we see our modern heroes be put against such visceral and sumptuously gothic danger and not shrug it off mere seconds later, making the watching experience all the more satisfying. The infamy of this scene represents the startling originality of both Hammer and Cushing as well as their significance in horror evolution as they introduce gore and pain as necessities of the genre, perhaps the key elements that have had audiences returning to the these movies time and time again over the fifty years since they were released.

3. The Skull (1965)

The idea for the first true Hammer Horror originated from a script by Milton Subotsky, which was rejected and drastically rewritten for being too close to the Universal original. Not long afterwards, Subotsky would co-found his own Production Company to rival the horror output of Hammer itself – Amicus Productions. Throughout the 1960s, Hammer Films continued to dominate the British Horror scene and, consequentially, it was difficult for rival productions to shake off the studio’s influence. In comparison to Hammer’s gothic affairs, Amicus offered audiences Portmanteaus within a contemporary setting, illustrating how original ideas would always find their audience in the peak of British cinema’s boom.

This gave Cushing the opportunity to take a very different direction that wasn’t available to him from Hammer at that time, which maintained a very black and white approach to casting. It is through films such as The Skull that we are able to enjoy more ambiguous characters from Cushing; characters who are pushed to the limits of their sanity.

The Skull was adapted for the screen from a short story, “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade” by Robert Bloch (of “Psycho” fame). The Marquis de Sade, born in 1740, is the man whose name was used to create the term sadism: the film suggests that the Marquis’ depravity was caused by him being possessed by an evil force that still resides in his skull and is passed from one occult enthusiast to another. The skull finds itself in the lap of Christopher Maitland (Cushing), a man who researches into demonology to dispel the fear surrounding the objects associated with evil. His friend, Sir Matthew Phillips, warns him to get rid of the skull as many of its previous owners have met sticky ends, but alas his advice is ignored by his sceptical friend.

Fans of this particular era of British Horror can take themselves too seriously; usually as part of a defence mechanism when their love for essentially very camp and aged films is questioned. But there is no denying that The Skull is very silly. There was clearly a massive struggle in stretching the story to fit a feature length script, and as such there are lots of long sequences without any dialogue, usually involving a glowing skull flying around the house on unfortunately visible wires. Not every film produced needs to be a masterpiece however, and although The Skull is silly, it gives us all the more reason to watch it. Of course the entertainment value of all this silliness is hugely amplified by Cushing’s straight performance.

How does one take this film seriously? It shouldn’t be possible, but as we watch Cushing’s decent man be ensnared by the dark forces we find ourselves caught between wanting to laugh and being captivated. Cushing’s unhinged performance both thrills and fills us with glee as we are caught between the preposterous plot and our own investment into this character’s fate.

In a way, Peter Cushing in The Skull is comparable to Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse. There is no use in trying to hold on to the plot, just sit back and enjoy the show of the actors chewing scenery as their characters descend into lunacy. In ignoring the bare plot, The Skull becomes a psychedelic nightmare where we can enjoy watching Cushing’s Maitland lose his mind in every creative way Amicus can muster, with highlights including camera shots from the skull’s point of view and a mostly mute, terrifying Kafkaesque trial sequence in which Maitland is forced into a game of Russian Roulette.

The most likely reaction from watching The Skull is unabashed peels of raucous laughter: is it from terror or from hilarity? Who knows, but at this point who cares? It isn’t the most enlightening way to spend 88 minutes but it is certainly one of the most entertaining, and without Peter Cushing the fine balance between the movie’s own ridiculousness and captivating quality would have been lost. Not only would the film have been poor, it would also be cursed with the worst possible outcome in cinema: being forgetful.

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Thus lies the power behind Peter Cushing’s performances and why to this day he has such a strong following: not only does he shoulder so much of the entertainment value of countless movies, he has saved them from obscurity. Every single one of his performances through the years has been heartfelt and memorable and has thus instilled a magical quality into the films he has been featured in. He is well and truly the face of British horror and sci-fi, and we have him to thank for its survival so that we can enjoy these movies for many years to come.

In Adrian Hoven’s super-exploitative 1973 horror film Hexen geschändet und zu Tode gequält (Mark of the Devil, Part II; the German title translates into English as ‘Witches Violated and Tortured to Death’), the spiteful witchfinder Natas (played memorably by the facially disfigured Austrian actor Reggie Nalder) confronts a nun, Clementine (Astrid Killian), who is accused of witchcraft. Having been thrown into the cells and raped by the gaoler, who froths at the mouth grotesquely during the act itself, at the time of her trial Clementine is discovered to be pregnant. ‘Was it the devil who committed this act of fornication?’, Natas spits during the trial, ‘The Devil appeared in your cell and you kissed his arse! Admit it!’

The absurdity of this far-too-vivid accusation, no doubt amplified by the film’s admittedly clumsy English dub, clearly sidesteps the most likely reason for Clementine’s pregnant state (ie, human cruelty) whilst validating for Natas the fact that as a heretic, she has been marked for execution in an unmeasurably cruel manner – by being burnt alive on an elaborate scaffold. The sheer illogicality of Natas’ statement, intended to underscore how twisted the psychopathology of the witchfinders is – in other words, their need to avoid the most logical explanation for events in order to provide a supernatural reason that justifies their sadistic pursuit of alleged witches and sorcerers – was a key paradigm of the horror pictures focusing on witch-hunting made during the late 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere in the same film, a wedding is interrupted; the participants are accused by Natas and his cronies of drinking a love potion, and a man is arrested ‘for bringing in the Devil’s bastards with the magic aid of a witch’s brew’. In the original Mark of the Devil (Michael Armstrong, 1970; the German title of this is Hexen bis aufs Blut gequält, or ‘Witches Tortured Till they Bleed to Death’), the witchfinder Albino (also played by Nalder) arrests a puppeteer and his wife, accusing them of ‘practising magic using the intermediary of puppets with lifelike human voices’ and ‘consorting with the Devil to trap human souls in these dolls’. Elsewhere in the same film, a woman is accused of mixing a ground human foetus with frogspawn in order to cause a priest to limp.

Witchfinder General (1968)

The witch-hunting film, at least in the form by which it is recognisable today, essentially originated with Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General in 1968. Adapted from a well-researched but exploitative historical novel by Ronald Bassett, published in 1966 under the same title as its film version, Witchfinder General was directed by Michael Reeves. Reeves was a prodigious talent; Witchfinder General was Reeves’ third feature, following The She-Beast in 1966 and The Sorcerers in 1967, and there are numerous accounts of the on set conflict between Reeves and Witchfinder General’s chief star, Vincent Price, who plays Matthew Hopkins himself. (‘Take me to your goddamn young genius’, Price reputedly told producer Philip Waddilove when Waddilove collected Price from the airport.) Reeves had wanted Donald Pleasence for the part, but American International Pictures, who co-produced the film with Tigon British Film Productions, stipulated that Price be cast as Hopkins. By all accounts, Reeves showed little restraint in his apparent distaste for Price’s theatrical style of acting, though Price certainly brings a dandiness to the role that stands in stark contrast with the austerity of the Cromwellian ideology with which the film’s hero, Roundhead soldier Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), is associated.

Taking place during the English Civil War, Witchfinder General focuses on the activities of Matthew Hopkins, an East Anglian witch-hunter who proclaimed himself to be ‘witchfinder general’ and documented his activities in his 1647 book “A Discovery of Witches”. (The book was credited to ‘Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder for the Benefit of the Whole Kingdome’, and opened with a quote from Exodus 22:18, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’.) In this book, structured as a series of common queries about witch-hunting which Hopkins furnishes with answers, Hopkins outlined some of the methods for spotting witches: for example, pricking a mark upon the body of the suspect which is believed to be an extra teat used to nourish a ‘familiar’, who would drink the witch’s blood; if such an extra ‘Pap’ is pricked, it will not bleed and the witch will feel no pain. In the final part of the book, Hopkins tries (vainly) to respond to the common criticism of his practice, which was that ‘All the witch-finder doth is to fleece the country of their money and therefore rides and goes to townes to have imployment, and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it, and possesseth many men that they have so many wizzards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him’. Hopkins’ riposte to this was that he never went to any town that did not ask for his services, only claimed to identify witches ‘after her tryall by search, and their owne confessions’, and demanded ‘but 20.s a town, & doth sometimes ride 20. miles for that, & hath no more for all his charges thither and back again (& it may be stayes a weeke there) and finde there 3. or 4. witches, or if it be but one, cheap enough, and this is the great summe he takes to maintaine his Companie with 3. Horses’. Perhaps the witch-finder doth protest too much. Historical records seem to show that Hopkins was paid far more than the 20 shillings per town that he claimed to receive for his ‘services’. In Reeves’ Witchfinder General, Hopkins asserts that he is doing ‘the Lord’s work’; to this his associate John Stearne says, ‘And a profitable one, the good Lord paying in silver for every hanging’.

With his accomplice John Stearne, over a two year period Hopkins was responsible for around 100 executions of witches and sorcerers – approximately one-fifth of the entire number of executions for witchcraft that took place in Protestant England between the 15th and 18th Centuries. His activities focused on Parliamentarian counties that were heavily Puritan in their outlooks. The common interpretation is that Hopkins took advantage of the lawlessness and dissent engendered by the Civil War, in order to line his pockets. In Reeves’ film, the character of John Lowes (Rupert Davies), a priest persecuted by Hopkins for making an alleged covenant with the Devil, asserts pointedly that ‘The lack of order in the land encourages strange ideas’. This is certainly the thesis put forward by Bassett’s novel and Reeves’ film adaptation, an approach to, and interpretation of, witch-finding that dominates many of the subsequent films. The truth is perhaps more complex, however: Hopkins was the son of a Puritan clergyman, and during the Civil War was far younger than his depiction in Reeves’ film. (The real Hopkins is believed to have been somewhere between 25 and 28 years of age during his misadventures as England’s ‘witchfinder general’.) He apparently died of tuberculosis in 1647; though legend suggested he himself was ‘swum’ as a witch, there is no evidence of this.

In terms of his methods, Hopkins was influenced by the outcome of the Lancaster Witch Trials of 1612-34 which, investigated by Charles I’s physician William Harvey, set a benchmark that physical proof of making a covenant with the Devil was required for a successful prosecution. Hopkins also drew from some of the methods outlined in James I’s 1599 treatise “Daemonologie”, which suggested sleep deprivation (often through ‘walking’ – ie, keeping the alleged witch sorcerer active by making them walk around a room for days on end), pricking (as outlined above), and ‘swimming’ – which was based on the notion that witches, who had by making a covenant with the Devil renounced their baptism, would float when ‘swum’ in a body of water. (If they drowned, of course, they were innocent of witchcraft – but that didn’t bother a good capitalist like Hopkins.) Hopkins’ methods were employed overseas in the New England witch-hunts and the Salem witch trials of the mid/late 17th Century.

Reeves’ film places Hopkins at the dead centre of a fictional story involving Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), a trooper in Cromwell’s army, whose fiancee’s uncle, John Lowes, is executed for witchcraft by Hopkins and Stearne (Robert Russell). Like a number of other named victims of Hopkins in the film (such as Elizabeth Clarke, who is burned for witchcraft at Lavenham), the name of John Lowes is rooted in historical fact: in reality, Lowes was an 80 year old priest in Brandeston who was ‘walked’ by Hopkins for several days, ‘swum’ in the moat of Framlingham Castle and finally hanged for witchcraft. In Reeves’ film, the vicar Lowes is the uncle of pretty Sara (Hilary Dwyer), Marshall’s beloved. In the aftermath of John Lowes’ persecution, Sara is taken advantage of and raped by both Hopkins and Stearne, and Marshall vows his revenge, pursuing Hopkins and Stearne across the landscape of East England.

Reeves’ film highlights the opportunism of Hopkins whilst also underscoring the depths of violence to which Marshall must descend in order to dispatch the fiend. There is no doubt, within the film, that Hopkins is a cynical opportunist who takes advantage of the social dislocation caused by the Civil War – for his own financial gain. In the film’s opening sequence, a crowd assembles in a rural village to watch the hanging of a witch. A priest offers some partially-heard words as the woman screams in terror whilst being dragged to a hastily erected gallows. Her screams are cut short as the drop breaks her neck, and the crowd disperses – their cries of encouragement swiftly turning to a look of shame. It’s a scene bold enough to evoke sickness and shame in any number of those who watch it.

Reeves emphasises the seductive nature of violence – and the manner in which it is cyclical. Violence begets violence. To quell violence demands a greater display of violence. Ideologically speaking, for most people this is abhorrent… inhumane. But, sadly, it seems an interminable fact of life. In his approach to violence, there are many parallels between what Reeves essays in Witchfinder General and the work of Sam Peckinpah, whose most successful venture, The Wild Bunch, would be released in the US the following year (1969). In Witchfinder General, Reeves shows children in the crowd watching the burning of Elizabeth Clarke at Lavenham, and afterwards we see these children cooking potatoes in the embers. The staging is similar to the opening of The Wild Bunch, in which Peckinpah shows a group of children tormenting scorpions by forcing them into a makeshift arena with hundreds of red ants. Both filmmakers offer a quiet commentary on the notion that violence is both innate and learned. The connection with Sam Peckinpah would be consolidated by the work of John Coquillon, the director of photography on Witchfinder General and Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Cross of Iron (1977) and The Osterman Weekend (1983).

There were predecessors to Witchfinder General, of course: for example, Mario Bava’s Le maschera del demonio (Mask of Satan/Black Sunday, 1960) features a witch (Barbara Steele) who – in the film’s opening sequence, set in 1630 – is executed by having a nailed mask hammered into her face. Approximately two hundred years later, she is accidentally resurrected when the mask is removed from her corpse and blood is spilled on her mummified remains; this incident sparks her quest for supernatural revenge. However, what Witchfinder General did differently to its predecessors was to set its story predominantly by daylight, avoiding the Gothic trappings of most horror films, and also negating any sense of supernatural shenanigans. This is a story of human cruelty, pure and simple. The film is at its heart structured like a revenge Western, including many shots of its characters riding across the countryside on horseback. The similarities with the Westerns of American filmmakers like Budd Boetticher, for example, are underscored by Reeves’ emphasis on location shooting – taking the story out of the studio as much as possible. To this end, Reeves uses some incredibly evocative locations, including setting the climactic confrontation between Marshall and Hopkins in and around Orford Castle, near Ipswich. This, along with some of the richly observed dialogue (‘They’re burning witches there… or some such rigmaroll’), gives the film a strong sense of authenticity.

Witchfinder General establishes its historical credentials with an opening narration that sets the specific context for the film: ‘The year is 1645’, the narrator tells us, ‘England is in the grip of a bloody Civil War. The structure of law and order has collapsed’. Many of the subsequent witch-hunting films featured similar opening narrations or onscreen scrawls, as though adopting the familiar technique of Victorian pornography and horror fiction to present their lurid fictional(ised) narratives as ‘found’ material. The film is rough. Bloody rough. Unrelenting in its depiction of violence and exploitation, Witchfinder General is not graphic by modern standards (though John Trevelyan, chief examiner of the BBFC at the time of the film’s release, exerted his powers to trim many of the film’s more violent moments) but is nevertheless truly disturbing. The opening hanging, the treatment of Lowes, Stearne’s rape of Sara in a field in front of a gurning witness, the cheering of the crowd at the burning of Elizabeth Clarke in Lavenham… all of this adds up to a depiction of human cruelty which belies Reeves’ youth at the time of the film’s production: Reeves was 25 when he made the film, and only months after its release he would pass away, his death the consequence of an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescribed barbiturates.

Folk horror must, by definition, have some emphasis on folklore, usually witnessed from the perspective of outsiders who find themselves at the mercy of an isolated, tradition-led community. This needn’t always be the case, The VVitch (2015) being an example with no such cult to arbitrate between the predators and their victims, but community is no doubt a primary theme of our two films.

Both The Wicker Man and Midsommar set the scene with the sound of whistling wind, the former accompanied by the icon of a green man, the latter by a snowy Swedish landscape. These little prologues tell the audience that something is already brewing, something ancient and unstoppable. When we go on to meet our protagonists in their natural habitats, their fates have already been set, although herein the movies establish their key difference.

The Wicker Man shows us Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), a devoutly Christian copper with a stiff upper lip. His peers may chide him for his virginity, but he has the love and respect of his church community and beautiful fiancé. It’s his search for a missing girl on an isolated Scottish island that will throw his world off-kilter, whereas Midsommar’s Dani (Florence Pugh) is already in turmoil.

Dani’s sister has committed suicide and taken their parents with her, and Dani is half-heartedly consoled by her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), who resents their relationship but is too cowardly to break it off. It’s this exact cowardice, in fact, that leads him to invite Dani on a trip to a pagan commune in Sweden, organised for him and his friends by the suspiciously affable Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren).

The journeys are different in tone – The Wicker Man’s soundtrack by Paul Giovanni is gorgeously folky compared with Bobby Krlic’s horror-style drones for Midsommar, for example – but when destinations are reached the similarities resume. Robin Hardy shows us a paganic sun flag and a close-up of an eye painted on the dinghy on which Howie is rowed ashore, a shot repeated later in the film when he attempts to leave the island. We’re made to look at maypoles, ceremonial outfits, door knockers that look like monsters. Ari Aster does much the same thing; runic symbols are thrown our way at every opportunity, whether painted on the walls or shown from a bird’s-eye view in the layout of a huge table. The film is rich with tapestries, temples, and carvings.

Sometimes a character will explain to another what an object represents, such as when Howie is outraged at the school teacher telling her pupils of the maypole’s phallic connotations. Sometimes their meanings are brought to life in the plot, like when a series of paintings in Midsommar hints at later events in which a virgin seduces Christian, supposedly by putting her pubic hair under his bed and in his food.

Much of the time, however, these symbols are left to speak for themselves. They’re displayed as if they’ve an inherent power, as their attached religions would have us believe. They are integral to the world-building of these films, more so than the costumes or set pieces in your average horror; they hint at something that we do not understand, suggest to us that these tales are not self-contained but another chapter in an ancient saga. Displaying these icons in all their glory is in keeping with a folk tradition that appreciates the inherent power of imagery. Like a religious painting or stained-glass window, both films use the visual medium to its maximum symbolic potential.

And who’s to say there isn’t a little appreciation thrown in, too? There’s certainly a sympathy for the antagonists not present in many other folk horrors. The VVitch and Trollhunter (2010) are essentially monster films with not much emphasis on worship or power. The cults in The Black Death (2010) and Apostle (2018) are not viewed in flattering lights, and are in fact painted as delusional even when their beliefs are well-founded. The Blair Witch Project (1999), which it could be argued lies on the edge of the folk-horror genre, features iconography in the witch’s portentous twig-constructions, but these objects are to scare and scare only.

Meanwhile The Wicker Man’s Lord Summerisle, played by Christopher Lee in what he considered his best film, calmly explains his people’s fertility rituals to a dumbstruck Sergeant Howie. He lays out his philosophy and allows us to make up our own minds – unless one is as devoutly pagan-hating as Howie, it’s hard not to be a little taken in by this charming and level-headed leader. Midsommar offers similarly charismatic elders to explain their traditions, and Ari Aster goes to even further lengths to invite us in; unlike Howie avoiding every heathen tradition like the plague, the young people in Midsommar are at times largely receptive. And although Josh (William Jackson Harper) is studying the Hårga tribe closely for his dissertation, it is Dani who really opens up to their practices.

Midsommar has been described as a long-winded breakup movie. What’s uncertain is to what extent the tribe orchestrate this fate; it’s suggested that, with their respect for providence, the Hårga merely ease the dissolution of a relationship that’s already doomed. They meddle just the right amount – Christian is tempted into infidelity, but we know that a better man wouldn’t have succumbed. Dani’s new friend warns her away, and when she ignores them and catches Christian in the act, the tribe becomes a family for her to fall back on. This leads to a memorable scene in which her heaving sobs are replicated throughout the girls who empathise with her in ways her boyfriend never could.

It’s reminiscent of what Lord Summerisle says at the climax of The Wicker Man, addressing a trapped Howie in his fool’s outfit: “You have come of your own free will to the appointed place”. He does, however, go on to admit how much his people have controlled Howie’s every thought and action since he arrived. Much like the Hårga, they operate like an unstoppable hive-mind, leading Howie to the island and hindering his escape, always keeping each other updated as if they’re having meetings we’re not privy to. Yet to some extent, they may have allowed fate to take its course. Both films let us make our own minds up.

What is the price these people pay for such an unshakeable sense of community? The mother of the girl that Howie is searching for tells him bluntly: “You’ll simply never understand the true nature of sacrifice”. It seems a tad unfair when directed at a church-going virgin, but there’s no doubt that the islanders are authorities in the subject. The superiority of these films over many other folk horrors is their complexity; a tribe can be barbaric in our eyes whilst also displaying wisdom, functionality and beauty in abundance.

Midsommar presents to us a delectable grey area when its elders stoically commit ritual suicide. As a well-spoken and sensitive senior explains: “Instead of getting old and dying in pain and fear and shame, we give our life, as a gesture”. We’re invited to compare their barbarity with our own, and ask whether their horrifying acts, including the graphic human sacrifices by fire, are merely the necessary underbelly of a culture that, in many ways, functions very well.

After the movies’ effects wear off, we’re back in the real world, where we can safely view such communities as deranged and indoctrinated. But for a couple of hours, Robin Hardy and Ari Aster transport us to places where these acts accomplish something magical, strengthening a community or an individual at the small cost of a few lives. It’s from here that the true horror stems, and although Aster has achieved something monumental in its own right, Midsommar holds much of the same wisdom as The Wicker Man in this regard. In a way, the films compliment one another; our protagonists’ journeys may differ, but both end up being a part of the tribe’s ancient plan whether they like it or not.

Written by Louis B Scheuer

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‘Or if you want something visual that’s not too abysmal’, Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) sings to Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), ‘We could take in an old Steve Reeves movie’. With this, Frank-N-Furter references the ‘beefcake’ spectacle of bodybuilder-cum-actor Steve Reeves’ appearances in numerous Italian sword-and-sandal films, or pepla, of the 1950s and 1960s as an index of high camp – a subgenre of films predicated on the objectification of the muscle-bound male body.

The Italian peplum takes its name from the Greek word for ‘tunic’ and, though a retrospective label originally applied somewhat mockingly to the films by French critics during the 1960s, highlights the extent to which the Italian sword-and-sandal pictures of the 1950s and 1960s foregrounded a sense of visual spectacle and the combined texture of historical clothing, sets, bodies (male and female) in action – all given a sense of scale, regardless of how ludicrous the plotting (or the English dubbing in the export versions) was, via then-new widescreen processes. In other words, everything – sets, muscles, action, muscles, photography… and, did I mention, muscles? – was B-I-G!

Steve Reeves as Hercules in Le fatiche di Ercole.

Usually (though not always) starring a scantily-clad American or English bodybuilder (such as Steve Reeves, Reg Park and Paul Wynter) as a figure from historical myth and legend (Hercules, Maciste, Samson or Goliath), the peplum, or sword-and-sandal picture, was supremely popular with Italian audiences between 1958 – the year of the release of Pietro Francisci’s film Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules), starring Steve Reeves as Hercules – and the mid-1960s. In 1964, the international popularity of Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars) led Italian studios to focus on the production of westerns all’italiana (Italian-style Westerns) or ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ – a label that, like that of the peplum, was originally pejorative but which has since been adopted by fans of the genre. The western all’italiana and various other filoni assumed the mantle that had till that point been carried by the peplum.

On the subject of filoni, it’s worth reflecting on the extent to which Italian popular film production is dominated by the principle of the filone or ‘stream’/‘vein’/‘thread’. (Filone is the singular; filoni is the plural.) Roughly analogous to the concept of genre and the manner in which it is used to enable industry-like capitalisation on popular trends in English-language cinema, a filone is simply a strand of cinema whose popularity is exploited or mined ad infinitum, until the next filone takes hold. The concept of filoni led to Italian film production during the 1950s and beyond being dominated by specific, definable cycles/filoni – the peplum, the western all’italiana, Gothic horror films, mondo documentaries, the giallo all’italiana or thrilling all’italiana (Italian-style thriller), the commedia sexy all’italiana (sex comedies), the poliziesco all’italiana (Italian-style police picture), the jungle/cannibal adventure, and so on. The peplum was one of the first major, definable filoni of the Italian filmmaking boom that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. Like many of the subsequent filoni, such as the westerns all’italiana, the pepla were often co-productions featuring involvement – in terms of finance, crew, cast and sometimes locations – with production companies from other European countries: for example, France, West Germany, Spain.

As with later filoni, the pepla often featured cast and crew using adopted, Anglicised names in order to make the films seem more quintessentially ‘American’. (On A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone famously used the Americanised name ‘Bob Robertson’, and Gian Maria Volonte was billed as ‘Johnny Wels’.) The Italian actor Adriano Bellini, winner of the 1961 ‘Mr Italia’ bodybuilding contest, was credited as ‘Kirk Morris’ in the pepla in which he appeared – such as 1961’s Il trionfo di Maciste (Tanio Boccia, credited as ‘Amerigo Anton’) and Maciste contro Ercole nella valle dei guai (Hercules in the Valley of Woe; Mario Mattoli), and Riccardo Freda’s Maciste all’inferno (The Witch’s Curse, 1962), on which Freda was billed as ‘Robert Hampton’. Even the Italian-American actor Lorenzo Luis ‘Lou’ Degni, the second US bodybuilder to be recruited by Italian producers to star in pepla (after Steve Reeves, of course), adopted a more ‘American’ sounding name, ‘Mark Forest’, for his screen appearances in pictures such as La vendetta di Ercole (Goliath and the Dragon; Vittorio Cottafavi, 1960) and Maciste l’eroe più grande del mondo (Goliath and the Sins of Babylon; Michele Lupo, 1963).

The popularity of the peplum in Italian cinema coincided with American interest in historical adventures that contained an element of fantasy, and many of the pepla were picked up by US distributors (for example, American International Pictures), who dubbed, rescored and cut the films for English-speaking audiences. Some of the films were cut or re-edited quite substantially. The US release of one of the last key pepla, Giuseppe Vari’s 1964 film Roma contro Roma, for instance, lost around ten minutes of narrative footage when it was released in the US by American International as War of the Zombies. (The film was released in the UK as Rome Against Rome.) Likewise, the US release of Riccardo Freda’s Maciste all’inferno was shorn of around 15 minutes.

Le fatiche di Ercole (1958)

The film usually cited as kickstarting the boom in pepla was Pietro Francisci’s 1958 film Le fatiche di Ercole, whose narrative focuses in part on the Argonauts’ quest for the Golden Fleece – placing Hercules front-and-centre in its retelling of the myth of the Argo and its crew. Distributed in the US by the canny Joseph E Levine – who had previously made a success of Gojira in 1956 by dubbing the picture, re-editing it and titling it Godzilla, King of the Monsters – Francisci’s film anticipated the popular Don Chaffey picture Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and its spectacular and memorable stop-motion effects by Ray Harryhausen, by half a decade. However, a casual viewer who is unaware of the films’ respective dates of production might be forgiven for thinking that Francisci’s film was a knock-off of the Chaffey picture. (In relation to the Francisci picture, Chaffey’s film inverts the story somewhat, throwing focus onto the character of Jason and making Hercules, played by Nigel Green, into a secondary character who memorably provokes the ire of the huge statue of Talos by stealing an enormous golden brooch pin, leading to the death of his friend Hylas.)

Thanks to a shrewd saturation marketing campaign conducted by Levine, Hercules made a startling $5 million profit in the US. Not bad for a picture for which Levine had paid a paltry $120,000 for the US distribution rights. In Italy, the pepla tended to be particularly popular in seconda visione (second run) picturehouses, with their often rowdy provincial working class audiences who would interact with the screen and treat the films almost as pantomimes. The popularity of these pictures was such that some of them, such as Vittorio Cottafavi’s 1961 picture Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis, aka Hercules and the Captive Women), were exhibited in 70mm formats.

Hercules may have initiated the boom in Italian production of pepla (upwards of 150 pepla were made in the late 1950s and early 1960s), and the willingness of English-speaking distributors to gather and distribute these films in territories such as the US and the UK – hence how Frank-N-Furter’s semi-oblique reference to the filone could be comprehended by the primary English-speaking audience for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. However, the first film to be labelled a ‘peplum’ in print was Riccardo Freda’s I giganti della Tessaglia (gli argonauti) (The Giants of Thessaly) in 1960, which also tells the story of the quest for the Golden Fleece, expanding the palette of the narrative to encompass other aspects of ancient myth – including adding Orpheus, played by Massimo Girotti, to the crew and having the Argonauts battle the Cyclops. Freda was, of course, along with fellow pepla filmmakers Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti, one of the key figures in the popularity of Italian Gothic cinema of the 1960s, thanks to his work on films such as L’orrible segreto del Dr Hichcock (The Terror of Dr Hichcock, 1962) and Lo spettro (The Ghost, 1963).

Historical pictures had been made in Italy since the silent era: in the 1910s and 1920s, pictures about figures such as Maciste and Spartacus had been popular with Italian filmmakers and audiences. However, in the late 1950s the peplum experienced a surge in popularity that was most likely kickstarted by Hollywood’s decision to produce a number of historical epics in Italy, making use of the resources – both human and material – at studios like Cinecittà in Rome (‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, as it was nicknamed). Cinecittà had been founded by Mussolini in 1937, with the intention of reinvigorating domestic filmmaking. US studios made use of the expertise of Italian crew and resources during the 1950s and 1960s: a number of Hollywood epics were made at Cinecittà, including William Wyler’s Ben-Hur in 1959 and Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra in 1963. The less prestigious Italian-made pepla often made use of the resources and industry that had been built around the production of US historical epics in Italy, sometimes reusing the impressive sets built for Hollywood productions, using the historical settings of these pictures in Ancient Greece and Rome as a springboard for more fantasy-oriented scenarios.

Reg Park in Ursus, il terrore dei Kirghisi (Hercules, Prisoner of Evil – 1964).

The pepla are strikingly diverse. The films, beginning with Le fatiche di Ercole, originally began as stories tied to Ancient Greece but expanded to Ancient Rome and then other, later historical periods: the label was ultimately applied to any sort of costume drama with a historical focus and an emphasis on plentiful action. Anything, in fact, into which a hunky former Mr Universe or other bodybuilding star (including former Tarzan, Gordon Scott) could be inserted; thus in export versions, films set during the era of the Mongol Empire and amidst the high seas of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century piracy could and would be marketed as Hercules pictures. Italian filmmakers actually made 19 official Hercules pictures during the era of the peplum, though a number of other films featuring characters such as Maciste were rebranded as Hercules pictures for their release in English-speaking territories. So, for instance, Antonio Margheriti’s Ursus, il terrore dei Kirghisi (1964, most of which was reputedly directed by assistant director Ruggero Deodato, the future director of Cannibal Holocaust and House on the Edge of the Park), features Reg Park as Ursus and is set at some point during the high point of the Mongol Empire; in the English language export version, the character of Ursus was renamed Hercules and the film was retitled Hercules, Prisoner of Evil. Likewise, Luigi Capuano’s Sansone, contro il corsaro nero, released the same year, is essentially a swashbuckler that features former stuntman Sergio Ciani (most often known by his Anglicised name of ‘Alan Steel’), but was distributed in English as Hercules and the Black Pirate. (‘Sansone’, of course, became ‘Hercules’.)

As a general rule, any pepla distributed in English – either theatrically or via television screenings – that featured Maciste or Ursus as the protagonist and/or whose names appeared in the titles of the pictures, would be rebranded as a Hercules or, sometimes, Goliath picture. Names would be changed in the English dubbing, and the film’s title would be adjusted accordingly. For instance, Sergio Corbucci and Giacomo Gentilomo’s striking Maciste contro il vampiro (1961), which features Maciste (Gordon Scott) in a fantastical plot that sees the hero confronting a powerful vampire (Kobrak, played by Guido Celano), was rebranded in English as Goliath and the Vampires. Corbucci would go on to become one of the most distinctive and political directors of westerns all’italiana, with the brutal Django in 1966, and the striking snowbound Il grande silenzio/The Big Silence in 1969; there are touches of the unflinching sadism of Corbucci’s Westerns in Maciste contro il vampiro, notably in a sequence in which a village is ransacked and the camera shows a number of gruesome touches – memorably a corpse of a villager whose foot is tethered by a rope to the rafters of a burning building. The building collapses, and the corpse falls into the flames; Corbucci holds on the very realistic-looking limb long enough to imprint the scene into the viewer’s memory.

The majority of pepla feature a recurring, easily identifiable set of narrative motifs. In the majority of the films, the hero demonstrates his brute strength in the film’s opening sequence. In Le fatiche di Ercole, Hercules opens the film by ripping up a tree and using this to stop a tearaway horse and carriage carrying Princess Iole (Sylva Koscina). ‘I thank the gods for providing me with such a strong man when I needed him!’, Iole swoons. In Maciste contro il vampiro, Maciste is introduced moving an enormous boulder from the middle of a field that he is ploughing and then, hearing cries for help, rescues a young boy – the brother of his fiancée Guja (Leonora Ruffo) – from a giant underwater monster. In some of the films, Hercules/Maciste/Samson/Goliath is a wandering hero, like the ronin of Japanese samurai pictures (or like the anti-heroes of many later westerns all’italiana, including Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ in the Leone pictures), who comes across an oppressed and/or terrorised community, using his strength in servitude of liberation. (This no doubt spoke very profoundly to audiences for whom Mussolini’s dictatorship was within fairly recent memory.) Our hero usually encounters a plot which involves an evil, powerful woman – often assisting, or being assisted by, an equally powerful and evil male figure – whose self-interest contrasts with a good, pure-hearted female character. The evil woman invariably attempts to seduce the hero, but often falls in love with him – sometimes redeeming herself in the process. In Maciste contro il vampiro, for instance, Maciste encounters a sorceress, Astra (Gianna Maria Canale), who serves the film’s antagonist, the vampire Kobrak (Guido Celano). Astra tries to seduce Goliath in order to persuade him not to confront Kobrak.

Maciste contro il vampiro (Goliath and the Vampires, 1961)

From Le fatiche di Ercole onwards, the pepla emphasised mythology and featured inventive, though sometimes unconvincing, effects – from costumes, rubber suits and simple use of forced perspective to more complex stop-motion and compositing effects – in order to render fantastical creatures and scenarios. As the filone progressed, and filmmakers were presumably looking for ways of differentiating their pictures from other pepla, some of the pictures featured an increasing emphasis on fantastical elements. Some of the later pepla bordered on the absurd. Antonio Leonviola’s 1961 effort Maciste, l’uomo più forte del mondo (‘Maciste, the Strongest Man in the World’, distributed in the UK as The Strongest Man in the World and in the US as Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules) features a Robert E Howard-like plot in which Maciste (played by Mark Forest) witnesses a ritual sacrifice conducted by a strange group of men, the subterranean Mole Men, who are dressed entirely in white; their victim is Bango, played by the black Caribbean bodybuilder Paul Wynter. In the year of the Freedom Riders and their defiance of Jim Crow laws, provoking the ire of the Ku Klux Klan in the Southern States of the US, it’s hard to imagine that the staging of this sequence was not taken, if not intended, as a dry comment, on the part of the Italian filmmakers, on the activities of the Deep South’s Klansmen and the embedded, and increasingly exported, racism of so much mainstream US culture of the period. Maciste rescues Bango, and the pair team up to take on the Mole Men, who are terrorising the region, abducting locals and using them as slaves to power their huge underground machinery.

Giacomo Gentilomo’s 1964 picture Maciste e la regina di Samar (‘Maciste and the Queen of Samar’, released in the US as Hercules Against the Moon Men), the final film of its director, sees Maciste (played by Sergio Ciani/Alan Steel) arriving in the kingdom of Samar and discovering that Queen Samara (a pouting, sassy Jany Clair, who throughout the picture sports a distinctively mid-Sixties range of hairdos) has made a pact with a group of extraterrestrial beings who have taken residence in a nearby mountain: the community’s children and young people are regularly sacrificed to the ‘Moon Men’ in the mountain in order to maintain Queen Samara’s reign. ‘Only arrogance and limitless pride animate that woman’, one of the characters says, ‘along with unrestrained ambition’. The queen has a ‘good’ sister, Billis (Delia D’Alberti), whose selflessness contrasts with her sister’s commitment to her own self-interest. Eventually, Maciste takes on the Moon Men, whose shadowy netherworld is communicated via the use of low-light photography and green lighting gels. Hercules’ physical prowess impresses Queen Samara, who orders Maciste to be taken to her quarters, where she seduces him and presents him with a drink containing a love potion. Luckily, Maciste has been forewarned of the queen’s use of this potion, and disposes of it discretely, enabling him to eliminate the Moon Men, end the reign of the wicked Queen Samara and rescue Princess Billis and her lover, Prince Darix (Jean-Pierre Honoré). The film is a visually striking picture, especially as it moves into the subterranean lair of the Moon Men, but its narrative is little more than big screen panto.

With the late-period shift towards more fantasy-oriented scenarios in mind, it is worth considering in more detail two specific pepla made by directors who, for English-speaking cinephiles are more commonly associated with their work in the filoni of Gothic horror and thrilling/giallo all’italiana: Mario Bava, the director of La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday/Mask of Satan, 1959) and Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964), and Riccardo Freda, the director of the aforementioned L’orrible segreto del Dr Hichcock and gialli such as A doppia faccia (Double Face, 1969).

Directed by Freda in 1962, Maciste all’inferno (‘Maciste in Hell’) shares its title with a 1925 silent film directed by Guido Brignone. Brignone’s film was the last Maciste picture made during the silent era, and features Maciste, played by Mussolini favourite Bartolomeo Pagano, being enticed into the underworld by Barbariccia, an envoy of Pluto himself. In Hell, Maciste is seducted by Proserpina, Pluto’s wife, and Luciferana, Pluto’s stepdaughter. The title of Freda’s 1962 picture no doubt deliberately pays tribute to Brignone’s haunting, inventive film. However, Freda’s Maciste all’inferno was released in the US, where the Brignone film was largely unknown, as The Witch’s Curse, shorn of almost 20 minutes of footage. (The film seems not to have been released at all in the UK.) Interestingly, as the English dub for this picture was produced in Italy, this was one of the few Maciste films of the period in which the protagonist kept his name in the version of the film released in English-speaking territories: although Maciste was the most popular character in Italian pepla, the name was largely unknown to English-speaking audiences, this of course being owed to how many dubs had changed Maciste to Hercules, Samson or Goliath across previous releases.

Maciste all’inferno (The Witch’s Curse, 1962)

Freda’s Maciste all’inferno opens in Scotland in 1550, where a witch, Martha, is burnt at the stake. Unlike the alleged witches in, say, Michael Reeves’ Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General (1968), there is no doubt about Martha’s association with witchcraft. The Scottish setting is interesting, of course, given that the stated execution in the film is set prior to the 1563 Witchcraft Act – which made the practice of witchcraft a capital crime. (Documentation suggests that the first – failed – witchhunt in Scotland took place in 1568.) Martha places a curse on the town, and we are taken to a hundred years later, 1650. In the interim, in terms of the history of witch-hunting in Scotland, James VI wrote Daemonologie after visiting Denmark in 1589 to marry Princess Anne – and provoked in part by the North Berwick witch trials of 1590, after which a number of people were executed for allegedly attempting to murder the king by poison and casting spells to cause storms that would sink his ship.

In 1650, the townsfolk live under fear of Martha’s curse. Driven by this fear, the locals torment and execute any woman believed to be associated with witchcraft, hanging them from the charred tree that marks the spot at which Martha was burnt. When a woman named Martha (Vira Silenti) arrives in the town to marry a young squire, Charley (Angelo Zanolli), the townsfolk are convinced she is a reincarnation of the witch. They vow to execute her at the stake and imprison her. However, conjured out of nowhere, an amnesiac Maciste (Kirk Morris) arrives on horseback. Dressed in his loincloth, he is hugely incongruous in the 17th Century Scottish setting. Maciste bends the iron bars of the prison in which Martha is held and fights off the menfolk, picking them up like toys and hurling them. Maciste discovers that the only way to break the witch’s curse that hangs over the area is to venture into Hell – by ripping up the aforementioned charred tree, thus uncovering a cavern which leads to the underworld.

Maciste here has no memory, and part of the story involves his struggle to regain awareness of who he is. The film is part of a broader narrative which encompasses the Maciste films made by Panda Film: the previous film in the series was Mario Mattoli’s comedic Maciste contro Ercole nella valle dei guai (Hercules in the Valley of Woe), which features a plot involving two 20th Century characters – the comic duo of Franco (Franchi) and Ciccio (Ingrassia) – who are catapulted back in time via a time machine and encounter both Maciste and Hercules. (One wonders if this Franco and Ciccio comedy was somehow an inspiration for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.) Taking place immediately after this picture and its time travel plot, Maciste’s appearance in 17th Century Scotland perhaps makes a little more sense.

In the underworld, Maciste is able to regain his memories, leading to lengthy ‘greatest hits’ style flashbacks from various Maciste films – including one made by Freda, Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan (Samson and the 7 Miracles, 1961), in which Maciste was played by Gordon Scott, an actor predominantly known for his role as Tarzan. (Cue much confusion from the audience as they watch Kirk Morris’ Maciste recall his adventures as Gordon Scott.)

Maciste All’inferno (The Witches Curse, 1962)

Hell is dominated by the groans of the damned and scenes of torture ripped from the pages of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. In a chamber are dozens of souls, forced to hold up huge boulders; Maciste attempts to help one of these, an elderly man, but finds even his brute strength defeated by this endless task. Nevertheless, for most of the film, Maciste is able to confront the supernatural by the simple deployment of his sheer strength, highlighting the extent to which the Italian pepla suggested that problems could be solved with muscles, brute strength and an ironclad will. (This has led some commentators, such as Richard Dyer, to suggest that the peplum was Italian culture’s way of confronting its fascist past, with parallels sometimes drawn between the kind of virility and strength represented by Maciste and the public image projected by Mussolini.) On his first entrance into Hell, Maciste is confronted by a lion. He fights and defeats it. Watching this event via supernatural means, the witch and an accomplice observe, ‘That poor fool’s [Maciste] muscles and courage will never be sufficient. He can strangle a lion but there’s no man on Earth who can conquer the Devil!’ (This observation echoes a line in Le fatiche di Ercole, in which one of the characters notes of Hercules that, ‘You can tell from his eyes that he’s as pure as sunlight, and his strength is a challenge to all evil’.) In the English version of Maciste contro il vampiro, the sorceress Astra suggests, naively, that ‘Goliath [Maciste] is very strong, but his strength is to no avail against magic and witchcraft’. Similarly, Vittorio Cottafavi’s Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide sees Hercules’ ally Androcles (Ettore Manni), who has been brainwashed by Queen Antinea of Atlantis (Fay Spain), tell Hercules, ‘You are mad if you think you can combat the might of Atlantis with the pitiful strength of your muscles’. (Little does he know…)

In the underworld, Maciste encounters various characters who help him to regain his memories. ‘Do you see what you can accomplish when you have strength and courage tethered to your own free will?’, he is told. Maciste’s journey becomes increasingly surreal. He meets Prometheus (Remo De Angelis), who is tethered with chains to a huge boulder, eagles tearing out his entrails… forever. Following this, he encounters a stampede of bulls, and stops them by ripping up a huge stalagmite and using this to block their path.

Like many other pepla, Maciste all’inferno sees the ‘bad’ woman (the witch, Martha) falling for the musclebound hero and ultimately redeeming herself. ‘I thought that [love] was all finished’, the witch says, ‘I tried to corrupt him [Maciste] with my witchcraft and charm’. Of course, the curse is lifted, and Maciste exits Hell, rescuing Martha as the villagers demonstrate their gratitude.

In its depiction of Maciste’s journey into the underworld, Maciste all’inferno offers a vivid depiction of Hell that underscores Freda’s reputation as a director most commonly associated, at least for English-speaking cinephiles, with Italian horror pictures – actually a small part of Freda’s career, but certainly the genre in which he pursued his most distinctive work and which, in the 1960s and 1970s, he came to represent alongside contemporaries such as Antonio Margheriti. Likewise, Mario Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961) features a similar journey into Hell for its titular character, in a film by a director most often identified for his later work in the horror genre.

Reg Park as Hercules in Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961).

In Ercole al centro della terra, Reg Park plays Hercules, who travels with his friend Theseus (Giorgio Ardisson) to the Kingdom of Ecalia, where Hercules hopes to be reunited with his lover, Princess Deianira (Leonora Ruffo). At the palace, he is informed by Deianira’s uncle, Lyco (Christopher Lee), that his beloved has ‘a great illness’ and has lost touch with the world around her. In reality, Deianira is being held prisoner by Lyco, who practices necromancy; her father, King Uriteis, having recently passed away, Deianira is the heir to the throne of Ecalia, and Lyco plans to murder her and drink her blood – stealing the throne which is rightfully hers. In this, there is more than a touch of the story of Richard III (at least, the version of Richard III’s story which flattered the Tudor era), with Lee’s haircut and costume resembling that of the last Plantagenet king – particularly as represented in Olivier’s then-recent 1955 screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Like Richard III was alleged to have murdered his young nephews – the rightful heir to the throne, Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York – in order to seize the throne following the death of Edward IV, Lyco holds his niece Deianira captive and plots to murder her so that he may control the Kingdom of Ecalia.

Under the spell of Lyco, Deianira notes poetically that ‘We do not even know ourselves. Only he who commands us. He who is our master, who we must obey’. Again, one might think of Italy’s fascist past and the authoritarian rule of Mussolini. Wrapped in a sheen of fantasy, Bava’s Hercules picture is strikingly allegorical. The land, Lyco tells Hercules, was cursed when King Uriteis drove the evil that previously plagued Ecalia ‘to the land of the dead’. The curse will only be lifted when Uriteis last descendant, Deianira, is dead. ‘How can one fight against shadows?’, Lyco asks Hercules, ‘Fight against winds or lightning? Against the terrible storms that batter the earth?’

Hercules travels to speak with his oracle, who sits cross-legged in a dark chamber filled with water; she wears a mask and speaks in riddles whilst performing what can best be described as a series of conceptual dance moves using only her arms, as lights with primary coloured gels hit her body. ‘Though evil descends upon the earth like a darkening of the sun, it can disappear as quickly’, she tells him mysteriously. Hercules pleads with his father, the god Zeus, to help him combat this evil and release Deianira from the spell which binds her. Hercules offers his immortality in exchange for an opportunity to aid his beloved. ‘Dare you venture beyond the portals of Hades’, the oracle asks Hercules, ‘to the domain of the god Pluto?’

Christopher Lee and Leonora Ruffo in Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961).

Hercules enlists the help of his friend Theseus and a bumbling, comic sidekick, Telemachus (Franco Giacobini). To enter the underworld they must steal the magic ship of Sunis and sail to the kingdom of Hesperides, where they must eat the Golden Apple from the Sacred Tree. In Hesperides, Hercules and his companions are faced with a community consisting solely of women, led by Aretheuse (Marisa Belli). By collecting the Golden Apple, a task which Aretheuse believes is not possible, Hercules liberates the women of Hesperides from the controlling grasp of Pluto; however, this is not before the women, manipulated by Pluto’s will, have set a trap for Theseus and Telemachus, who are attacked by Procrustes, a creature made from stone. (Like the Procrustes of Greek myth, this Procrustes threatens to stretch the pair on a bed of rock.) Hercules interrupts and, picking up Procrustes, hurls the stone creature against a wall of the cavern, causing the wall to partially collapse and revealing an entrance to the underworld.

In entering, Hades, Hercules and Theseus discover that they are confronted by a series of illusions, including a sea of fire, designed to prevent them from moving forwards. Hacking at vines that block their path, they hear the screams of the damned and realise the vines are bleeding. In the centre of this labyrinth is a black stone that is surrounded by white hot flames and protected by lava. This stone will free Deianira. Hercules and Theseus use the vines to create a rope-crossing across the lava, but Theseus falls and is apparently killed. However, this is also an illusion, and when Theseus awakens he encounters a beautiful woman, Persephone (Evelyn Stewart), the daughter of Pluto. Hercules and Theseus are reunited, and with Persephone’s help, Hercules and his companions escape from Hades and return to Ecalia in time to rescue Deianira.

However, before Hercules can confront Lyco, he is forced to fight his way through hordes of the undead who are conjured to life by Lyco’s necromancy, clawing out of their graves and climbing from their tombs. This sequence is striking, especially for the manner in which these undead figures predate the ghouls and zombies of post-Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968) horror movies – especially those of Italian zombie pictures such as Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1979). Certainly, some of this imagery, including the undead wrapped in their shrouds and the masked appearance of Hercules’ oracle, seem to have worked its way into Lucio Fulci’s later sword and sorcery picture Conquest.

Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961)

Ercole al centro della terra emphasises the dualisms that are evident in a number of the major pepla: the sanctity of the world above ground versus a subterranean world populated by monsters and/or duplicitous figures of authority; good versus evil; light versus darkness; strength versus cunning. Luckily, the Bava film survives on digital home video in its original widescreen version, which enables the viewer to appreciate the superb photography and lighting, and Bava’s skill in telling a story visually – one of this filmmaker’s great strengths. The film features much staging in depth, with full use of the widescreen frame to create juxtapositions between foreground and background action. There are also some incredible visual effects involving matte work and impressive props and sets which are made even more impactful by the careful use of lighting – including the use of coloured gels that made so many of Bava’s colour pictures so distinctive – and negative space. Sadly, on the other hand, like many of Freda’s films, Freda’s equally interesting Maciste all’inferno has been badly served by digital home video releases in English-speaking territories, with the only DVD release being of a panned-and-scanned full screen print of the US release version, which is missing about a quarter of an hour’s worth of footage. Fortunately, the full-length cut of Masciste all’inferno has been released in widescreen on DVD in France – but in a release which, frustratingly, isn’t English-friendly.

One of the more notable late examples of the peplum, Giuseppe Vari’s Roma contro Roma was one of the final films of the peplum boom. Noticably absent from the film is the muscular hero of the majority of pepla. The film focuses on a centurion, Gaius (Ettore Manni), who is tasked with journeying to a region that is governed by the pretor Lutetius (Mino Doro), but in which a centuria has disappeared along with an amount of treasure. Gaius is warned that the region is dominated by a necromancer, Aderbad (John Drew Barrymore), who is secretly in league with Lutetius. (The pair have secreted the treasure, and Aderbad has taken the corpses of the slain Roman legionnaires, using them in his black magic – resurrecting them and then melding them with the stone walls of the cavern that he occupies, like Han Solo frozen in carbonite in the much later The Empire Strikes Back.) Though the Romans criticise the superstitions of the locals, prior to making his journey Gaius vows to sacrifice a lamb to Jupiter, so that the god will offer him protection during his quest. The irony of this moment is presented quietly for the alert viewer, Vari not drawing attention to it. (Later, Gaius fails to note the irony in his assertion that ‘A consul of Rome must not believe in magic. A consul of Rome must not believe in fantasy. He must believe in what he can see, or feel, or touch’.) This moment is the first major indication of this film’s critique of the hypocrisies of colonialism, which seems strikingly relevant in the era of the Second Indochina War and the proxy war in Vietnam that, only a year or two later, would lead to direct US military involvement in that part of the world. In fact, though made prior to the peak of the Vietnam War Roma contro Roma feels very much like an allegory for it – not dissimilar to some of the revisionist Westerns of a decade later, such as Michael Winner’s Chato’s Land (1972) and Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972) – though was likely just as much intended as a comment on any form of mid-Twentieth Century colonialism.

Gaius discovers that Lutetius rules the region with an iron fist; Gaius interrupts the whipping of an elderly peasant, ordered by Lutetius as a means of punishing the locals for the supposed theft of the treasure. ‘If Rome wants a tribute to her, it’s not through softness that you’ll get it from these people’, Lutetius tells Gaius, ‘They hate us!’ ‘They’ll hate us even more if we treat them like beasts’, Gaius responds – another dry comment on the imperialist mindset which would feel increasingly relevant in the years that followed the film’s original release, during the US battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people in defeating the North Vietnamese insurgency. In a later sequence, after Aderbad kills Lutetius and frames Gaius for the murder, in retaliation for the death of the pretor, Roman centurions tear through a settlement, burning the villagers’ homes and murdering men, women and children. In a shot that strikingly resembles a similar moment in Ralph Nelson’s Western Soldier Blue (1970), which used the 1864 Sand Creek massacre of Native Americans by the Third Colorado Cavalry as an allegory for the then-recent My Lai massacre, a woman carrying a baby is struck down by a sword-wielding centurion. The film climaxes with Aderbad resurrecting the slaughtered legionnaires, directing them to attack the living Roman soldiers, observing in reference to one of his zombies, ‘Look at him! He is alive but has no will. He is the perfect warrior, for he is immortal. No-one could kill him twice’.

John Drew Barrymore in Roma Contro Roma (War of the Zombies, 1964).

Roma contro Roma’s release came in the same year as the release of the picture which kickstarted the next big trend in Italian popular cinema, Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964). Achieving popularity with international audiences, Leone’s film would initiate the boom in production of westerns all’italiana. Leone had of course begun his career as a director working on pepla: his first work as a director was on the 1958 picture Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii), starring Steve Reeves, when the film’s original director, Mario Bonnard, fell ill. Leone’s ‘proper’ directorial debut was the memorably epic Il colosso di Rodi (The Colossus of Rhodes) in 1961. It’s easy to see in Per un pugno di dollari, and many of the subsequent Italian Westerns by Leone and other directors, a sense of myth and the folkloric qualities of the pepla being channeled into a Western setting.

The international popularity of pepla, particularly with US distributors, paved the way for other Italian products to be marketed to English-speaking audiences – from the westerns all’italiana of the 1960s to the gialli and poliziesco films of the 1970s. These films also acted as a reference point for the boom of production in sword and sorcery films during the 1980s – in Italy (Joe D’Amato’s Ator in 1982; Lucio Fulci’s Conquest in 1983; Ruggero Deodato’s The Barbarians in 1987) and the US (John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian and Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster, both in 1982). Nevertheless, the peplum is often overlooked in discussion of Italian popular cinema, in favour of later filoni – such as the western all’italiana and giallo all’italiana. However, what is notable about the pepla themselves is – aside from the formulaic nature of many of the narratives – just how allegorical the stronger (pun intended) pepla are. If the original pepla of the silent era – particularly Bartolomeo Pagano’s performance as Maciste – had been a model for Mussolini’s dictatorship, the pepla of the late 1950s and 1960s often seem like a way of exorcising Italy’s fascist past. No matter how many times the villains assert that the respective musclebound heroes of the films will not be able to defeat evil through strength alone, they are proven wrong. Many of the films take place in lands that are cursed; Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra, for example, is set in the Kingdom of Ecalia, which is overseen by the cruel Lyco – a vampire and necromancer willing to murder his own niece in order to maintain his authority. The land is cursed by the influence of a dark force angered by the late King Uriteis’ attempts to eradicate it. The parallels with post-fascist Italy seem quite direct, and of course these themes would work their way into many westerns all’italiana, which often take place in towns haunted by past traumas and dominated by authoritarian figures – for example, Giulio Questi’s offbeat Sei sei vivo spara (Django Kill!, 1967), whose depiction of a town dominated by a sadistic black clad hoodlum and his fascist henchmen was, Questi claimed, inspired by the director’s experiences as an anti-fascist partisan in the mountains of Italy during the Second World War.

On the other hand, it’s difficult not to find a much more simple, childish delight in the camp, pantomime nonsense of many pepla: this writer dares anyone to watch the English-dubbed version of Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide and not laugh at the repeated, po-faced discussion by characters of ‘the Rock of Uranus’. (Fnarr-Fnarr. The English dubbed version of this picture could quite easily have been released as a Carry On… picture. Carry on Beefcake, perhaps.) The pepla are often dismissed as pictures that live or die on the size of the muscles of the beefcake actors that star in them, or the provocative costumes of their female counterparts. In the pepla, bodies are pulled apart but also held together by pure physical strength and force of will; these are, of course, both the bodies of individuals but also, increasingly, the notion of the body politic – the body as metaphor for society. In the face of what is often supernatural, authoritarian cruelty, bonds are made that bridge superficial differences between individuals. Perhaps ultimately, what is so fascinating about these films is the manner in which the absurd and the profound, the concrete and the abstract, the historical and the fantastical, often coalesce within their narratives.

Written by Paul A J Lewis

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6. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Gross USA: $255,119,788
Cumulative Worldwide Gross: $956,019,788
1 Academy Award Nomination
1 BAFTA Award Nomination

The best part of this film was the battle with Smaug.

The previous film had concluded on quite the dramatic moment with the dragon about to wreak destruction on the defenceless Lake-town, and The Battle of the Five Armies brilliantly jumps straight back into the action. There’s fire, there’s destruction, people are dying and the audience is gripped with anxiety for Bard and his sickeningly sweet children.

Bard defeats Smaug, his children survive, and the rest of the villagers who avoided peril all go and meet on the nearby shore. It’s all down hill from there…

We are given a few dramatic moments that we are supposed to care about, but there aren’t strong enough foundations built for us to be particularly moved. Tauriel barely knew Kili, how can she claim to have loved him? Why did the Elves suddenly decide to help the Dwarves for no apparent reason? It is generally a film with poor storytelling and a dependence on expensive CGI to make up for it.

Other than the opening battle, the most popular moments were those that referenced the predeceasing trilogy, such as Galadriel’s encounter with Sauron and Thranduil telling Legolas to seek out Aragorn.

Legolas running up falling boulders was pretty sick too!

5. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Gross USA: $258,366,855
Cumulative Worldwide Gross: $960,366,855
3 Academy Award Nominations
2 BAFTA Award Nominations

For anyone who had read the book at a younger age, it was so exciting to see so many scenes taken directly from the book in this film – the Spiders were just as scary as when we’d read about them years ago and Beorn was just as mysterious and intimidating. This made the film so much more enjoyable for nostalgic reasons, especially comparing it to The Battle of the Five Armies which contains a lot of made up moments that didn’t take place in the book.

The accomplishment in animating Smaug blew away many who’d approached the CG-heavy prequels with a critical eye. Special effects progress so fast that it’s easy to forget how making Smaug talk was a major feat, especially since the dragon was what people were anticipating most about this film. In this respect, The Desolation of Smaug absolutely delivered! The mouth movements of the dragon matched up with what he was saying so perfectly without looking silly, which we all know is far more impressive than a CGI tiger.

4. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Gross USA: $303,003,568
Cumulative Worldwide Gross: $1,021,103,568
3 Academy Award Nominations
3 BAFTA Award Nominations

There were a lot of immediate reactions to this film which criticised it for being a little messy and full of unrelated content. Although many criticised The Battle of the Five Armies for similar reasons, An Unexpected Journey had a different purpose to the last film in the trilogy. After an almost ten year gap since The Lord Of The Rings ended, An Unexpected Journey is our first dip back into Middle Earth; it has to set the scene and starts the story.

The Hobbit Trilogy may have been about one film too long, but this is an opinion only forged in retrospect. In this first instalment, it was exciting to see things like the rock giants fighting in the mountains and Radagast with his woodland pals being intimidated by the Spiders. It felt like a promise for all the goodness that was yet to come, it’s just a shame that the promise was not fulfilled.

Ten years ago, on an almost forgotten site called MySpace, something happened. A web series was uploaded, comprising of a handful of twenty four minute episodes which, when combined, formed a feature-length film. Beyond the Rave presented a young man attending a rave in the country whilst trying to reconcile with his girlfriend. Unbeknownst to those attending, the rave is a trap by vampires to harvest their blood.

The story isn’t exactly fresh or new, and nothing in the series is incredibly gripping or frightening, mostly due to the episode length not allowing for significant suspense to be generated. What was interesting, however, was the name of the company who made it.

Hammer.

This was the first video production for decades from the legendary studio that had brought Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing into the spotlight in Technicolor castles of bright red blood. The British institution behind reviving Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, and dozens of others from the black and white dust of Universal, had been purchased the year before by Simon Oakes and Marc Schipper. They weren’t going to treat Hammer as an antique. Oh no. They found the most experimental medium, on the most modern platform, wrote a contemporary story, threw a load of blood at the screen, and put it up for the world to see.

This wasn’t just a web series. This wasn’t just a publicity stunt. This wasn’t an attempt to recapture a horror fan’s nostalgia. This was a bold statement that said: ‘We’re back, and we’ve evolved’.

Not wasting any time, Hammer plucked up Cloverfield’s director Matt Reeves and kept to their vampiric roots, grabbing the rights to re-adapt John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, (which had been adapted once in Lindqvist’s native Sweden already in 2008). Let Me In shifted the suburbs of Stockholm to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and traded Oskar and Eli for Owen and Abby. Performances by Kodi Smit-Mcphee and Chloë Grace-Moretz were highly praised, and whilst the film was incredibly unsuccessful at the box office (just about surpassing its production budget), critical opinions were generally high.

It seemed that Hammer had started to get the ball rolling. Quickly following up in 2011 was The Resident, a psychological thriller set in New York of Hilary Swank being stalked by Jeffery Dean Morgan. The film isn’t incredibly new, and if you’ve seen Sleeping with the Enemy or Fatal Attraction, or even Psycho, then you’re going to recognise similar beats. It also features Sir Christopher Lee in his last role for Hammer, the studio that had given him so much, and the first since To the Devil a Daughter in 1976.

The same year saw Hammer release Wake Wood, a full-on pagan horror film reminiscent of classic British 70’s films like The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw, with a little Pet Semetary thrown in for good measure. It’s a tale of grief and heartbreak, and an underappreciated performance by Timothy Spall makes it a memorable film of emotion and empathy, rather than straight-up terror. A family wanting to do anything to see their child beyond the veil of death is about as human a story as you get. It’s not perfect, but it’s a little gem of a film.

Hammer, in four films, had managed to snag some of the biggest stars in film, including those on the rise, and managed to produce films that had good budgets and production values, and were all contemporary with no cobwebs in sight. One final push would set them up for a full on, full-scale revival.

They found it in 2012 with The Woman in Black.

Adapted from the Susan Hill novel of the same name, Hammer returned to its gothic roots and put global superstar Daniel Radcliffe in the lead, the first film since the Harry Potter series. The beautiful visuals, chilling scares, great performances and commercial drawing-power of their star, meant that The Woman in Black was a massive success. Ciaran Hinds’ chemistry with Radcliffe (probably helped by their work on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2), helped boost the film’s earnings to roughly $127m worldwide, from a $17m budget.

Hammer had the horror world by the throat. They were back.

Were.

In 2014 they released The Quiet Ones. I don’t know what happened. Possibly inspired by films such as The Conjuring, Insidious and The Last Exorcist, it follows an Oxford experiment to rid a young woman of her mental illness, which inevitably turns out to be supernatural. This is a film which obviously seemed like a great idea at the time, keeping in the paranormal, gothic roots of The Woman in Black, but with fresh twists such as the inclusion of found-footage sections built into the narrative.

The problem is that the characters are flat, cardboard cut-outs, the tension switched for cheap jump-scares, and the threat never truly threatening. Combined with a final scene to forget, the film failed to make even $18m, not even a tenth of The Woman in Black’s intake. It was only made (reportedly) for $200K, but that isn’t the problem. It’s a profit, but people knew this was an inferior film. And what could have been the perfect way for Hammer to capitalise on their success and spiral upward into new heights, became a film very few remember.

Hammer’s most recent film was a sequel to The Woman in Black in 2015, The Woman in Black: Angel of Death. This wasn’t a surprise that a sequel would be made so quickly. And whilst the mist-drenched forests surrounding Eel Marsh house are cinematographically exquisite, there’s something missing. The genuine grief that embodied Jennet Humphreys in the first film is replaced by a shallow, stereotypical malevolence, a shadow of her former self. Whereas the first film felt personal, this one is a perfect example of a studio trying to up the stakes without consideration for the craft of storytelling. The final plot twist about summed it up, if it could be considered surprising enough to be a twist. There’s just no emotion in the film. It feels hollow.

The film made a tenth of its predecessor’s box office takings, and critical reception was overwhelmingly negative. Hammer needed to take a break, figure out what had gone wrong since 2012, and come back fresh.

The studio has since branched out into other mediums. “The Soulless Ones”, an interactive stage play, opened a year ago, and Hammer partnered with Titan Comics at roughly the same time to begin producing comic adaptations beginning with “The Mummy”. Mark Gattis also adapted an unproduced script for Radio 4 called “The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula”. Oakes, it seems, is trying different avenues into securing the company as a firmly established, current player in all things horror, and not simply a company playing with a movie camera again.
A year ago, Hammer announced they were putting The Lodge into production, a new film with Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, directors of Goodnight Mommy, at the helm. Though I’ve heard no news since, one can only hope it is done well, with the intention of good filmmaking, rather than cashing in on things that have come before. Due to the silence for nearly a year (as far as I’m aware), I can only hope that the company has sat their team down for the project and told them to take their time, make sure everything is done correctly and properly, to plan, to think it through.

The legendary studio is still in there somewhere, deep down, though currently it feels much like a vampire at a novel’s beginning; making an appearance every chapter or two, but not enough to be named one of the undead by the village folk. One can only hope, for the sake of the horror industry (and film industry as a whole), that Hammer will come back fighting, and along with companies such as Blumhouse and A24, remind the major Hollywood studios that proper horror simply relies on getting everything right, and not just budget. To paraphrase Mark Kermode, horror is the one genre where the independent filmmakers have as much chance of being noticed as the big studios. Hammer has the chance to straddle that line and take the best of both worlds, independent love of filmmaking and decent financial input.

I sincerely hope they come back properly again. I don’t want to have to bury Hammer Horror for a second time, because then it might be for good.

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Horror Reviews by the Collective

I had actually been wanting to watch this movie for a while: I have a soft spot for British Horror – I’m particularly fond of the campy Hammer Productions, and I find the original ‘Wicker Man’ to be one of the eeriest films to have graced our screens, so; when I switched this movie on I was all ears. Even so, I made sure I was prepared to be horrified by either bone-chilling tales or by abominable film-making, both of which seem likely results in watching most Horror movies these days, whether the movies are old or new.

To the filmmakers’ credit, I had the most splendid time. 

It was the first of a series of Portmanteaus – a movie comprised of short stories with an overarching plot. In this case the plot revolves around 5 ordinary passengers sharing a train compartment with the enigmatic Dr Schreck (which translates as ‘terror’ – something that Peter Cushing definitely invokes in this creepy performance despite the hilarious make-up). In turn he reads each of his fellow passengers’ fortunes with his tarot cards – his so called “House of Horrors” – thus, as each poor souls’ dreadful doom is slowly revealed, a short story is told to make up most of the film.

As the first of Amicus’s portmanteau’s, Dr Terror does an excellent job of ensuring a following series, as it impresses audiences with its display of spooky stories, which covers many fan favourite tropes and horror clichés. We start off with a rather frightening tale of an architect returning to his family home only to find himself fending off the curse of a werewolf destined to wreak revenge upon him. Not only does it boast some of the most genuinely frightening scares of the movie, but it’s all rather dashing with Neil McCallum running around in an open shirt as the persecuted architect. This is then followed by another straight-up horror that borders ever-so-slightly into the realm of sci-fi as, after returning from holiday, a lovely nuclear family find a rather pesky vine in the garden which is in danger of choking the hydrangea. It, of course, proves to be a hardy bugger which doesn’t take kindly to garden shears – dog lovers beware!

To my complete surprise, the movie then takes an outright comical turn in the third tale. Now taking suit of almost all 1960s British Horror Film, Dr Terror is overall a joyously camp romp and just a bit cheesy, but the fate of the third passenger is basically outright horror-comedy with pratfalls and all. A musician gets a gig in the West Indies, and upon discovering a Voodoo religious ceremony, makes notes on the frantic and amazing music. Despite several warnings regarding the jealous and quick-tempered nature of the Voodoo God, he arranges a performance in his London Club. On his tail is the said God, who doesn’t take kindly to his music being stolen. It’s probably the weakest in terms of actual horror, but it’s a great opportunity to see Roy Castle in his film debut, showing off his musical talents and being utterly silly.

Quickly we are shunned back into the darker stuff as Dr Terror this time reads the fortune of a thoroughly grumpy Christopher Lee, revealing the most shocking story of the bunch. The Horror Giant, Lee, plays an unbearably haughty and arrogant art critic who is taken down a peg or two by a practical joke delivered by Michael Gough – an artist whose work is often ripped to pieces by the critic. Being a man who prides himself on his keen intellect and the awe of his fans and underlings, Lee simply cannot take the humiliation and plans his revenge. The result is devastating: an artist who lives only for his work, is mutilated. At Gough’s demise, Lee is stalked and terrorised by a phantom disembodied hand until vengeance is wreaked upon him. Seriously, is there anything more you could ask for from a horror movie?

The final story features a baby-faced Donald Sutherland as a promising young doctor, bringing his lovely French bride back to his home in the States. This last one boasts mystery, romance and sensuality as the young doctor begins to have doubts about who his wife really is after an odd case of anaemia in the clinic (and an awkward finger-sucking scene).

At the end of all these predictions, the passengers find out why they are all destined for these terrible fortunes, and it all ends thoroughly miserably.

Dr Terror’s House of Horrors is such a modest little movie, but is an exquisite gem amongst the anthology of British Horror. Despite the fact that these stories are limited by them having such a short narrative, they still engage and captivate, and the cast is mostly to thank for that. It’s made up of a mixture of giants of British cinema, and promising newcomers, who all do a brilliant job of characterisation and emotion in such a small time-frame. Importantly, they don’t take themselves too seriously, with some very enjoyable tongue-in-cheek performances which don’t detract (well at least not too much) from the horror.

Amicus’ Portmanteaus were unique at the time when compared to its rivals. Obviously the narrative was like nothing else at the time, which of course has its pros and cons: some of the stories were inevitably duller than others, for example. Importantly however, as Hammer Horror (another pillar in British Horror) was slowly spiraling down into cheap gore and vulgarity, Amicus Productions were more sparing with their blood. This movie, for example, creates a terrible sense of dread by the subtlest touches in production; things that are all a source of terror in our subconscious. Odd noises, things moving in the shadows, something in the corner of your eye which can’t quite be explained, even uneasy conversations. The use of ominous sound, chaotic music, eerie visuals with spooky figures looming in the background all helps to keep you on edge, so when the actual few gory and shocking moments come along, you get a jolly good fright. I’ll admit it now, my Budgies having a sudden squabble gave me a little fright during the more tense moments.

Of course, it’s not going to hold a candle to modern slasher or even ghost movies in terms of scares, but Amicus’ debut in Portmanteau boasts greater character and charm. As I write this feature, I do feel tempted to give the movie another watch and I certainly want to check out its many successors. Dr Terror’s House of Horrors is a testament to the originality and quirkiness of British cinema and is as moreish as Trick or Treat sweeties.