In short: And Soon the Darkness (1970)

Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), two young British nurses, are on a cycling trip through France. Not the big tourist spots, mind you, but the more desolate, or at least mostly tourist-free, parts of the countryside. It seems to be more Jane’s kind of trip, really, and the two eventually get into a big row about their itinerary, which feels like work rather than fun to Cathy, clearly to Jane’s complete surprise. The argument becomes so big, Jane cycles off in anger, leaving Cathy so sunbathe alone in some idyllic patch of woods.

That’s the last Jane sees of her, for, as we the audience know, Cathy is attacked and probably raped and murdered by someone. Once she has cooled off and Cathy simply doesn’t reappear, Jane starts to worry about her friend something fierce. Her various attempts to get someone to help her never quite reach their goal, what with her French being horrible, and she starts to fall into a state somewhere between paranoia and simple panicked worry. Which is no wonder, seeing as everyone in this part of France seems to be a proper creep, and those people actually offering their help may do this only to get rid of her too. Or worse.

Scripted by The Avengers’ Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, and produced by the same people as the show (of course again including Clemens), this intense thriller directed by Robert Fuest has very little to do with that much (and rightly so) beloved British TV show, but rather feels as if it were only one step away from descending into a proper, proto-Texas Chainsaw Massacre style piece of early backwoods horror.

While the plot never quite leaves relatively traditional thriller structures behind until the end (though it is also really good at using these structures), the cast of characters populating this part of the French countryside are just the right kind of weird to suggest a whole history of all the unpleasant stuff of movies to come. There’s certainly quite a lot of mental illness and poverty involved, suggesting a nasty underbelly below the closed rural communities here. Everyone seems to have some sort of terrible secret; everyone seems to be obsessed with something or someone.

To Jane, in her panicked state, these surroundings and the increasingly eccentric people around her can’t feel anything but threatening, particularly since her attempts at getting help only ever seem to point into directions that will endanger herself, or put her fate into the hands of suspicious strangers, instead of her finding Cathy.

The film is wonderfully paced and constructed, and manages to achieve its obvious goal of feeling somehow grubby and unpleasant as well as thrilling usually by showing something bordering on the threatening or the truly weird and only suggesting more to it. Until the climax, that is, when Jane finds herself in surroundings where things truly become concretely nasty.

Unlike many of the “tourist in danger by evil foreigners” films of later years, And Soon never feels xenophobic somehow. It seems more a film playing into other prejudices by looking askance at the countryside, France coming into the equation so Jane can be easier isolated from proper help, and because there’s little better than the contrast between a sunny countryside and the unpleasant things happening there.

Satan’s School for Girls (1973)

When her sister commits suicide under – as the audience witnesses in the prologue – very mysterious circumstances while on premises belonging to the private school for girls she goes to, Elizabeth Sayers (Pamela Franklin), travels to the school in Salem herself, enrolling under an assumed name for some undercover investigation. Liz’s new classmates seem friendly enough, if sometimes a bit high-strung, but that’s probably just college life.

Further investigation does suggest something sinister going on there, though. There are strange noises in the night, a secret room in the cellar, and the rate of death through misadventure or suicide among the girls becomes rather high for a place quite this small. Is the headmistress (Jo Van Fleet) – generally called “the Dragon” – somehow involved? And what about the clearly deranged psychology teacher (Lloyd Bochner) and his obsession with rats in mazes? Is perhaps the not at all suspiciously hip and (supposedly) hunky Mr Clampett (Roy Thinnes) quite a bit more sinister than he pretends to be? And where was Satan when the girls died?

Well, if you haven’t figured the answers to these questions out in about a third of the time Elizabeth does, I really don’t know what to say. Of course, the obviousness of its plot doesn’t actually detract from the virtues of David Lowell Rich’s Aaron Spelling-produced bit of 70s TV horror. And really, can we blame a sensible young woman for not figuring out one of her teachers is actually Satan trying to recruit a coven of eight late teenage witches by charming and cajoling them into collective suicide?

So, yes, the plot is really rather on the silly side but it’s the good kind of silly that sees a witch and/or Satan under every rock, distrusts all authority (because Satan is the ultimate seducer of headmistresses, it turns out), and would really have a cover of a girl in a white nightgown running away from an old mansion if it only could get away with it, and were a novel. Thusly, even if you’re like me and find Thinnes’s supposed charm here rather smarmy and obvious, and peg him as a clear creep, the film’s charm is always obvious as well. All of this places the film somewhere in the realm of the gothic romance revival and the least extreme stories in contemporary, code approved, horror comics. I’d probably live there if I could.

Of course, if you’re of a mind to, you can interpret certain elements of the film as a commentary on actual 70s cults but the film’s just too old-fashioned and cheesy to really be read that way unless one is an academic looking for something to over-interpret.

Rich turns out to be one among the extremely competent TV horror directors here, showing a certain flair for the use of limited light sources – resulting in some lovely atmospheric scenes of Elizabeth sneaking through the house at night – and adding a couple of scenes that hint at a darker underside to supernatural things than most of what we actually see. There’s the honestly creepy scene where Satan breaks the already pretty cracked headmistress completely, and about as menacing a murder scene as you can get when you can’t show blood involving a man, a body of water, and some wooden poles brandished by rather merciless teens. And, eventually, there are also the sweet, sweet tones of horrible betrayal. Even the ending’s pretty nasty for a TV movie.


All of which does certainly put Satan’s School for Girls into the highest tier of 70s US TV horror, as I’m sure our old buddy Satan will agree.

In short: The Witching (1972)

aka Necromancy

We who know Bert I. Gordon mostly adore or spurn him as the king of awkward giant monster movies. However, despite a clear preference for very large or very small things, Gordon was a true exploitation director, hopping on any trend that came his way if it suggested a possibility for turning a fast buck.

In 1972, that meant making an occult horror movie about Pamela Franklin getting unwillingly drawn into the influence sphere of an evil satanist cult (or witch cult, the film doesn't differentiate) led by Orson Welles(!) in his bloated and bored phase because Orson needs her secret witch super powers to reanimate his dead little son. Which is one of the better motives for what's going on than these films often prefer. Too bad neither Welles nor Gordon are doing much with that aspect of the movie.

Instead, The Witching is a rollercoaster ride between long, plainly boring scenes of actors who could act but won't mumbling or shouting through slightly loopy versions of early 70s occultism horror clichés and awkward yet strangely effective scenes of delightfully illogical trance states. I did rather expect the first part of the ride from Gordon, his giant monster movies do after all have a tendency to go about things in an awkward and slightly ramshackle manner that has always reminded me of how a middle-aged used car salesman would interpret the idea of giant monsters.

The film's dream-like parts on the other hand did hit me as a surprise. Sure, the adjective of "awkward" still applies to Gordon's direction here, but here, the awkwardness rubs against moments of ambitious camera work and visual ideas that remind me of nothing so much as of Italian gothic horror and giallos. That impression of encountering a bit of pleasant European loopiness where I least expected it, is - at least in the version I watched, which I think, is based on a 1983 version of the film that adds a bit of nudity and surely subtracts other things - still more enhanced by a synth soundtrack very much in the spirit of Goblin (but not as good, not surprisingly).

Consequently, The Witching is at its strongest (or at least at its most charming) when it gives up on real world logic altogether and becomes a free-floating entity made out of strange emotional peaks, sleaze, vague notions of Satanism, Pamela Franklin widening her eyes and a side-ways approach to narrative that emphasises counter-intuitive scenes while treating what should be actual dramatic climaxes with off-handed disinterest. If you're like me, and this sort of thing is exactly what you hope for in your occult 70s horror, the devil's rain will fall on you gently here, particularly in a final half hour that is as glorious an appropriation of the dream state as you'll find in movies.

I never would have thought Bert I. Gordon had it in him.

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The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Millionaire Mr. Deutsch (Roland Culver) hires physicist with interest in paranormal matters Dr. Barrett (Clive Revill) to examine "the Mount Everest of haunted houses", the Belasco house, a former place of controlled debauchery (yay) and murder (boo) that has cost the lives, limbs or sanity of most of its former investigators. Barrett - who smugly does believe in paranormal manifestations yet not in ghosts and is clearly obsessed with his work to the detriment of his marriage - takes his sexually repressed wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) with him. Deutsch has also reserved the help of two mediums - one the painfully optimistic believer in a very Christian interpretation of ghosts - of course also sexually repressed - Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), the other the only whole survivor of the last Belasco house investigation, Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), clearly a believer in repressing everything.

Of course, the house really is as dangerous as people think, and of course, it's going to play on the single character trait of everyone, so soon enough, Barrett will be even more obsessed with his work, Ann will want to have sex, Florence will try to save the ghost of Belasco's son even if it means implied ghost rape, and Fischer will mug as if he were played by Roddy McDowall.

While mostly ignored in the first decade or so of its existence, confusingly broad-minded director John Hough's The Legend of Hell House is now more often than not described as "highly underrated", " a forgotten masterpiece", or "nearly as good as The Haunting" (and I suspect anonymous internet commenter C doesn't mean the dreadful remake, even though that abomination is actually closer to Hell House in spirit). It's also often described as subtle, a statement that just leaves me puzzled, for subtlety is living in a completely different town than this film.

But before I go into what bothers me about the film, I shall not fail to mention some of its very clear surface charms. While I don't think John Hough's direction actually succeeds in achieving the creepy mood the director clearly sets out to build, I do appreciate how desperately he goes all out in trying to achieve it. There's a whole carnival of fisheye lenses, Dutch angles, uncomfortable close-ups, fog, and deep shadows, all so tirelessly working at playing haunted house they don't have any effect on me at all. The permanent piling on of directorial tics that would be subtle used in a controlled manner, or could create a mood of the weird if used in a more individual one, keeps the film teetering on the edge of the unintentionally funny for most of its running time, and it's only saved from permanently - and not just for half of the time like it does - going over the edge by some very decent performances by Franklin, Revill and Hunnicutt who make the best out of the flat roles they are given, excellent music by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of BBC Radiophonic Workshop fame, and fine art direction.

Unfortunately, the fourth of the film's four main actors is Roddy McDowall, whose performance is, as usual when he's not playing a monkey, problematic. He starts out slowly enough with the most showy attempts at "subtle acting" this side of Tom Cruise, but once his character "opens up", he seems to be caught in a scenery chewing contest with himself, which is at times pretty funny to watch but not helpful to keep up the po-faced serious mood of Richard Matheson's script (based on his own novel).

That script features most of the things I loathe about large parts of Matheson's work - the stiff dialogue, the insistence on Freudian bullshit (a problem he shares with Robert Bloch) instead of actual characterisation, all women being hysterics in the Freudian sense at heart - while lacking the things I love about large parts of Matheson's work - the ability to actually do interesting and sometimes even enlightening things with said Freudian bullshit, a deep interest in exploring the darker sides of the human spirit by way of supernatural horror, and a sense for keeping things weird with a capital W. In this version of Hell House, everyone is horribly one-dimensional. Florence is stuck up and trusting, Barrett a smug scientist, Ann sexually frustrated and Fischer played by Roddy McDowall, so the house's attempts at destroying them through their own character flaws are equally flat. If you've seen the character introductions, you know exactly how the place will influence them. It's as if Matheson had written the characters with crayon. Not even Belasco escapes that problem - let's just say that a haunting based on the inferiority complex of a guy who cut off his own legs so he could buy prostheses that make him look taller (that's the degree of "subtlety" you can expect from this movie) is not very frightening, no matter how often the film tells us how frightening it is supposed to be.

This dispiriting lack of nuance runs through the whole film and also infects many of its horror set-pieces: Franklin's ridiculous fight with a cat doll, a finale that consists of McDowall mugging into the wind, and (horror of horrors!) hot and bothered Ann Barrett's attempts at seducing McDowall (whose reaction shots do of course ruin every possibility of the scene working as intended). The list just goes on and on.

It's all so clichéd and cheesy in its attempts to be somewhat daring that my only reaction to The Legend of Hell House is a lot of rather embarrassed laughter, the kind of reaction I usually reserve for larger family meetings.

 

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