No Sleep October: The Amicus Briefs - Midwest Film Journal

For most of his life, Evan Dossey generally avoided horror films. The genre made him profoundly uncomfortable. This meant he had enormous gaps in his cinematic knowledge. Over the years, he has asked family and friends which essential horror movies he needs to see and spent the better part of October agonizing over them, tossing and turning over them … and writing about them. Once again, he’s sharing the month with those folks — letting them offer their own thoughts about the tales that terrify (or perhaps just titillate) them. This is our No Sleep October.

In case you haven’t heard, new folks have taken over the brand Amicus Productions and are crowd-fundraising for a new anthology horror film, In the Grip of Terror.

Will it actually happen? Who knows. But if you are a horror-movie buff with an interest in the company’s history and / or with some years under your belt, that’s still intriguing news and likely to yield some flashbacks.

That’s because, back in its day, Amicus was second to only Hammer Studios in synonymy with British screen scares, thanks primarily to seven such anthology films it sent to screens between 1965 and 1974.

Admittedly, I pretty much missed that wave.

Even though I was a horror-hooked kid in the mid-1970s, I knew of these films primarily through photos in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and references in the few books about horror flicks I could find. To be honest, in those publications, I was more interested in the photos of Hammer’s female vampires and barely contained barmaids. Prior to working on this piece, I wasn’t even sure which of the Amicus films I had actually seen since then.

So I binged all seven.

Unlike Hammer, whose bread and blood-er was adding color and sequels to classic horror characters such as Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein, Amicus took its influence from pulp comic books. Each of its anthology films used a different framing device to set up and attempt to tie together its series of supernatural tales. Earlier films, such as 1945’s classic Dead of Night and Roger Corman’s Poe-etic Tales of Terror in 1962 — and some later ones, such as 1982’s Creepshow and 1995’s Tales from the Hood — dabbled in the format, which now gets an annual jolt from the V/H/S franchise on the Shudder streaming service. But Amicus really ran with it.

It began with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), which more accurately (but more awkwardly) could have been called Dr. Schreck’s Train Compartment of Horrors. That’s where Dr. S. (Peter Cushing) pulls out a tarot deck that claims it will reveal the destinies of the strangers sharing the ride.

Hard to believe anyone would want to hear another destiny after the first two tales — an overly packed werewolf story and a silly one about a murderous creeping vine. The third, about a jazz musician who tries to steal the music of West Indies locals, has an ending that shows its heart is in the right place but uncomfortably derives much of its thrills from the Black-islander-as-boogeyman trope. Still, there’s the Tubby Hayes Quintet playing, adding musical energy.

The film gets an upgrade in the last two sequences, thanks to notch-better scripts and central roles for Christopher Lee as a haughty art critic plagued by a severed hand and Donald Sutherland falling into a vampire tale capped with a neat twist.

The train then stops, revealing the men’s final, unsurprising destination and the film’s minimal prop and set budget.

That film’s director, Freddie Francis, returned for Torture Garden (1967), this time armed with a script by Robert Bloch (1960’s Psycho). Here, Burgess Meredith leads a group of curious folks into the backroom of a carnival attraction to “look at the shears of fate.”

OK.

What they see in the cutlery is, by turns, a man-eating cat, actors replaced by androids, a killer piano and a visit from Edgar Allen Poe. It’s not exactly an upgrade over Dr. Terror’s ride, but Meredith and Jack Palance seem to be having fun.

The House That Dripped Blood (1971) opts to get to the Bloch-penned stories quickly, setting things up with two police officers who discuss the various horrors that happened in the title house as they investigate the disappearance of a movie actor.

The genuinely creepy first story features Denholm Elliott as a horror novelist who believes his character is alive and on the attack. Next, Cushing returns to the fray and wanders into a cheesy wax museum that appears populated by figures from a county-fair dark ride. One looks like someone from his past and he, like poor suckers before him, is lured back. We know where this is going and it goes there. Nothing in the segment is as scary as the floral necktie worn by Cushing’s friend. Except maybe the character’s wide, bright-blue one.

The next resident of the house is Lee (back again) and his Pollyanna-appearing daughter. The girl needs a nanny. Something happened to the mother. And now we’re getting somewhere since, at least for the first half, there’s genuine suspense about who is going to do what to whom.

Which brings us back to that movie star, whose story takes up most of the film’s final half-hour. The arrogant, cane-sporting cliché is played by future Doctor Who Jon Pertwee, who takes sly pride at one point in a dig at Hammer’s Dracula. Unhappy with his wardrobe for his latest horror film, the thespian goes searching for a replacement garment and finds one with transformational powers. This one’s played for laughs but, alas, doesn’t earn many.

The Amicus series of anthology horror gets an upgrade with Tales from the Crypt (1972), which opens in a cemetery soundtracked by Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Joan Collins, top-billed, drops her brooch during a catacombs tour, causing her and a quartet of guys to lose track of their guide. A heavy door creaks open, they enter a chamber, the door closes behind them and, voila, it’s storytelling time prompted by a cowled Sir Ralph Richardson.

Three (arguably four) of the five stories presented here have no supernatural element. Collins does a bad, bad thing while a fugitive in a Santa suit lingers outside. A cheating husband hits the road with his gal pal. Back once more, Cushing has a field day as a much-maligned elderly rubbish collector. A woman tries to bail her jerk husband out of debt by taking advantage of a three-wish offer. Then, badly treated residents at a home for the blind get creative revenge on their abusive director. While some rush to their conclusions, this set holds up the best of the Amicus output thanks to some genuinely perverse writing.

That same year, Asylum (1972) attracted not just Cushing yet again but also Herbert Lom, Britt Eklund, Charlotte Rampling and, in the framing device that encompasses the film’s final segment, Robert Powell. He shows up at the title facility thinking he’s there for a job. He soon learns his skill will be tested by being tasked with figuring out which inmate is the former director who has assumed a new personality.

So, who’s it gonna be? Is it the mistress of the guy who killed and dissected his wife? The down-on-his-luck tailor commissioned by a mysterious guy (Cushing) to make a special suit? Maybe it’s the woman convicted of a pair of murders that she claims were carried out by her friend Lucy? Or the dude who insists he can put a person’s consciousness into mechanical dolls with creepy faces?

That underlying mystery gives Asylum more of a unifying, driving force than its previous offerings. Also, its direction is more restrained and the acting more unified. At this point, Amicus seems to have hit its stride.

The setup for The Vault of Horror (1973) may be the series’ strangest. A group of men gets into an elevator. (OK, a lift. Are you happy now, British folks?) It takes them to a sub-basement where, once the door closes, they realize there are no buttons. But there are comfy chairs, so they sit and share some of their recurring nightmares.

The first offers a fun vampire twist. It’s followed by some wackiness about a neat freak who pushes his wife (Glynis Johns, always fun to watch) to her limit. Then there’s another guy-visits-a-foreign-country-only-to-misuse-its-magic tale, but this time it’s not the West Indies and voodoo but India and a charmed rope.

A quickie about an insurance fraud scheme involving a guy being buried alive is about the purest reincarnation of a Tales from the Crypt pulp-magazine story as you’ll find on screen. It’s capped with a you-get-what-you-give account of an artist who, thanks to some voodoo variation, can cause pain through his paintings.

Like the commuters of Dr. Terror when they get off the train, these guys have their slightly different fates revealed when the elevator doors finally open. In all, Vault is a respectable follow up to its two predecessors.

The final Amicus anthology (at least for now), From Beyond the Grave (1974) opens promisingly enough with graveyard visuals and a creepy music-plus-audio hint of horrors to come — leading to David Warner entering an antique shop presided over by, for one last time, Cushing. (Whether by design or not, it’s comforting to have Cushing host both the first and last in the unofficial Amicus anthology series.)

This time, the structure is a little different. Rather than a group of people each sharing stories, each tale in Grave is sparked by a different object acquired from Cushing’s shop. Warner’s is a mirror that inspires the guy’s friends to hold a seance that, in turn, leads him to encounter a ghost who, Audrey II-like, needs blood and utters “Feed me.” I don’t want to spoil things, but let’s just say those stains in Warner’s clothes are gonna be tough to get out.

In the second segment, probably the most convoluted of the entire series, a harried businessman befriends a veteran but lies about his own military record and steals a medal from Cushing’s shop to prove his credentials. He then has an affair with the vet’s creepy daughter, who has supernatural powers that lead to the death of the businessman’s wife and a marriage to the daughter, followed by an ending that I had to rewind to grasp. But OK.

Next in the shop is a customer who pulls a price-tag switcharoo and winds up in a plot that makes the previous episode seem logical by comparison. It involves a ditsy clairvoyant (Margaret Leighton, having a field day as she seemingly auditions for a Bedknobs and Broomsticks sequel) who insists the man has an elemental on his shoulder, a creature that “sucks the very juices of the soul.” What it actually does is physically abuse the man’s wife, creating a rift…and a nasty smell. It’s comic exorcism time as dishes fly, curtains blow and pillow innards are scattered. But, of course, there’s an unsatisfying twist.

The final customer purchases a door, which turns out to be a portal to a “ghost room” and a spirit who over-explains that the room is there to capture souls. It’s too much plotting for such a short segment. Add that to the overwriting of most of the segments, and a weak audience-confronting ending, and From Beyond the Grave feels like a letdown.

Some questions linger. Were these films scarier at the time of their release? Are they really any better than your average Night Gallery episode that ran at around the same time on TV? (OK, you may still be creeped out by the earwig episode, but how many others do you actually remember?) Perhaps most importantly: Did Peter Cushing take any vacations in the early 1970s when he averaged more than five films a year?