Audiences have always loved to be frightened. The feeling of hushed expectancy in a crowded cinema, punctuated by nervous laughter, until the tension is broken by horror (explicit or suggested) that jolts and shocks even thought everyone knew it was coming. Relief, mass exhalation, chatter, more laughter, then gradual quiet as the fear builds again.
Right from the earliest days of silent movies, the industry recognized the potential in scaring its customers. Two German productions astounded audiences the world over, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1919) with its acutely disorientating sets and painted backdrops that made real the mad workings of a schizophrenic personality, and Nosferatu (1922) the story of a pale, deathly being who ghosts through life drawing sustenance only from the blood of others.
Hollywood climbed onto the bandwagon with the coming the talkies. Bela Lugosi’s striking Dracula (1930) and the effecting performance of Boris Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein (1931) spawned a cycle of sequels and re‑makes that continue even in today’s more cynical cinema. A costly version of The Bride was released in 1985, fifty years after James Whale’s far superior black comedy Bride Of Frankenstein (1935), while Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound (1990) additionally included time travel and Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, followed up the Francis Ford Coppola version of Bram Soker’s Dracula (1991). In fact Dracula has seen more than 200 films based on the iconic character, with re-imaginings continuing o be made on almost annual basis.
The British film industry entered the horror world in the 1930s as well – though, characteristically, in a much more subdued fashion. Unable to reproduce the fantastic sets and Gothic tone of Hollywood, the British horror film of the time depended on a classic sense of introspection. These weren’t literal, physical monsters. Instead they tortured the mind.
Foretelling the future and predicting calamitous evens was the premise of one of Gainsborough’s earliest efforts, The Clairvoyant (1934), in which Claude Rains, a fraudulent psychic, earns a living from a rigged stage act. Inadvertently, and to his own growing horror and amazement, he discovers he really can predict the future. And what he sees isn’t good. It’s an underground disaster affecting the lives of many mineworkers. Problem is, how can he convince them it’s really going to happen? The Clairvoyant, dealing as it does with invasion of a mind by ‘supernatural’ events, is the first in a succession of British movies where one person is blessed or cursed with the problems of ‘second sight’.
The following decade brought A Place of One’s Own (1945) which took for its plotline a middle-aged couple moving to an elegant new home in the country. Disregarding reports that the old house is haunted, they settle in with their companion, a charming young woman called Annette (Margaret Lockwood), but it’s not long before Annette becomes susceptible to the spirit of another young woman who died in the house some years previously. This frightening theme is further developed in a classic British film made sixteen years later. Based on Henry James’ fine novel The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (1961) is a superb example of the genre. A governess (Deborah Kerr) is appointed to a country house to look after two young children, Miles and Flora. But it’s not long before she senses the children are under the supernatural control of the previous governess and the gardener, who both died in a mysterious ‘accident’ – which the children may have instigated.
What may have
befallen the dead couple is explored in the film’s own sequel (or more
accurately prequel) The Nightcomers
(1972), which was directed by Michael Winner. Although a pale reflection of its
predecessor, The Nightcomers does boast
a powerful performance from Marlon Brando as the evil gardener, Quint. The way
he draws the prim, young Miss Jessel (Stephanie Beacham) under his unhealthy
influence is effective. One of the most haunting scenes occurs when Miles and
Flora spy at night through Miss Jessel’s bedroom window and witness her being
roughly secured by rope to the bedposts.
Equally, it is an
explicit sex scene that lies at the heart of one of Britain’s best psychic
thriller, Don’t Look Now (1973). Directed
by Nicolas Roeg, who was perhaps the most enigmatic of British film-makers, it
is a powerful labyrinth of themes, reflections, neuroses and supernatural
fears. John and Laura (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), a married couple
in their thirties, live a comfortable life in the country only to be thrown
cruelly into psychological disarray by the accidental drowning of their
daughter. But what worries John more than anything is the fact he was ‘touched’
with a premonition. Don’t Look Now is
as polished and complex a horror film as one could wish for, a glittering
example of the very best of British. Daphne Du Maurier’s short story was turned
by the dazzling touch of Nicholas Roeg into a cautionary tale for the dissolute
1970s, rapidly collapsing after the false optimism of the Swinging Sixties.
Another of Ms. Du Maurier’s stories had been filmed as long before as 1940 - Rebecca, originally published in 1938. This was a full‑scale Hollywood production, albeit with an English director, the master of horror himself Alfred Hitchcock. Rebecca is worth mentioning, though, because of its thematic similarities to other films discussed in these notes. It concerns a young woman (Joan Fontaine) who meets, falls in love with and marries a man whilst travelling abroad as companion for an older lady. She returns with De Winter (Laurence Olivier) to his large country estate, only to discover he’s been married before and the house seems to be suffocatingly alive with the vengeful presence of the dead ex‑wife - who, it transpires, committed suicide in such a way as to frame her husband for murder. Hitchcock, who could legitimately lay claim to being the greatest purveyor of ‘shocks’ in the business, sadly left England in 1939 and made most of his films thereafter in the United States.
Charles Condomine
(Rex Harrison), a novelist, invites a medium to his home in Kent for a pleasant
little séance. Unfortunately the medium, Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford)
invokes the spirit of Condomine’s first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond), who much to
the chagrin of the second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings), stays around to make
everyone’s life a misery. With the help of Madame Arcati, Ruth manages to send
her back to the ‘other side’, but in a rage Elvira arranges for a car crash to
kill Condomine. Instead, the crash kills Ruth ‑ now there are two ghost wives
bickering and squabbling over the hapless Condomine. Finally, in exasperation
he leaves the house, only to fall victim to another ‘arranged’ crash and join
his wives on the ‘other side’.
The production itself did not proceed smoothly. Rank decided to make another of its Technicolor specials (at the time only a few films in England could afford the expensive and rare film stock) and this produced issues in how to represent the ghosts. They were eventually solved by a complex lighting system. David Lean explained in a magazine interview: ‘Kay Hammond’s clothes were all grey, and the ghostly effect is got by following her around with a couple of green lights. Because we have to keep them fixed firmly on Kay though, and yet avoid the rest of the cast, we had to build sets twice the normal size so as to have enough room to work in… technically, the movie was murder.’
Emotionally, too, there were difficulties. The atmosphere during the shoot was tense, tempers were frayed between the actors, and Rex Harrison in particular felt uneasy in his part. Thankfully, Lean marshals his players fluidly and Margaret Rutherford as the batty Madame Arcati managed to draw out one of the most memorable performances of her career. Blithe Spirit deserves its place in the horror genre, as Michael Anderegg observes in his excellent analysis of David Lean films: ‘…as frothy and inconsequential as Blithe Spirit may be on the surface, we can sense, not very far beneath the brittle dialogue and lovely drawing rooms and smart clothes, a dark and rather unpleasant world.’ An interesting aside is that when the BBC wanted to show it on television in 1974, the original prints had shrunk so badly they were unacceptable for presentation. So a painstaking job had to be done of putting together a brand new print frame by frame. It is sad to think that so many old British films deteriorated in this manner, despite the more recent efforts of the British Film Institute.
